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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
I wanted to be Tarzan. In my youth, I studied all 24 Tarzan novels that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote. I practiced the language of the great apes (“mangani”). If I worked at it, I could yodel that Tarzan yell without it dissolving into fits of coughing. Only two things held me back from ...
It takes a tough old coot to leave modern conveniences behind and get out there and rough it. But that’s what I am — an old coot. And reasonably tough. It takes a little spirit of adventure, grit and muscle to do what I did, and I have nothing if I don’t have very little of those. Which ...
