Category Reflecting

The Accent

The High School from where I graduated – one of 75 or so people so honored in 1990 – was literally in the middle of a cow pasture. Like, literally. The land for the school – 10 acres or so…

The Flag

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I can’t write about Oxford, or even Mississippi, without talking about the flag. You know. That one. Back in the winter, I found myself in the mountains of North Carolina,…

Oxford

I grew up 50 miles away from Oxford, MS – the home of William Faulkner and The University of MS, although not in that order. The university was there first. Oxford is the county seat of Lafayette County – named…

The Man in Gray

When I was five, we built a new house, just 20 yards in front of the house in which my father was raised. Eventually, it would get torn down – some family friends tore it down in exchange for the…

Closed For Maintenance

Like I do most days, today I rode my bike to the gym. I don’t ride for exercise – I ride to get places. But the four miles of riding round trip do me no harm and help both the…

The Arrival

My mother’s father lived in Cooke County Texas, 50 miles or so from Dallas. He had retired there after he left the Navy, and bought some land just up the road from his own parents. He lived in a doublewide…

All the Confidence in the World

It was sometime in the first week of August of 1990, and I was a guest of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, on a small island off the coast of South Carolina for what they euphemistically called “Recruit Training”,…

The Movies I Can’t Watch

The longer I am away from doing work on the streets, the more I realize how traumatic that work actually was, the ways it impacted me and my brain, and the very real ways it continues to show up. Here’s…