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Do you remember the words to that old song?

As I write these words, it is Sept. 21, and yes, I remember. It’s when Earth, Wind & Fire sang, “Do you remember / The 21st night of September?” Straight forward enough. But by the time the group makes it to the chorus of their hit, “September,” they are singing nonsense words like ...

‘I had too much to dream last night’

I must have been dreaming. There I was, floating around in ethereal form, filling in family and coworkers about my unfinished to-do list, now that I no longer walked in the land of the living. They say that dead men tell no tales, but in my dream, I wouldn’t shut up. I hovered five feet ...

Patience in short supply these days

Remember waiting six to eight weeks for delivery? And the weeks you invested in eating enough cereal that you didn’t like to collect the required number of box tops? Now all a kid has to do is pop open Amazon or some other shopping link and the prize that used to come in the mail will be ...

Cows and people always return to their assigned seats

I ambled toward my usual pew, the one where everyone in church knows that I ALWAYS sit. If someone has a message for me, she leaves it on my seat. If a congregant returns a book he borrowed from me, he leaves it on my seat. It’s MY seat. But this morning, a lady — and a regular who knew ...

From rocks to rubber ducks, we love our collections

I do not count the dust bunnies hopping around under my bed as one of my official collections. Also gathering dust is what used to be my across her dashboard. “It’s what we Jeep people do. We collect rubber ducks.” Traffic came to a halt. She grabbed a duck from a bag of them behind her seat, ran to another Jeep three vehicles ahead of us, and passed a rubber duck through the window to that driver to add to his army of rubber ducks in formation on his dash. “It’s what we Jeep drivers do,” she told me when she got back behind the wheel. “We greet each other with ...

Eh, what’s up with talking animals, doc?

Woodland creatures, jungle beasts and other critters molded my childhood. I learned from the comics that rabbits are smart alecs, mice build Magic Kingdoms and ducks are obnoxious — except for Yakky Doodle, and he had his moments, too. My first superhero was a canine named Underdog, who ...