It had been a long, tiring day. All I wanted to do was to snuggle into comfy pajamas, flop in my chair with a good (comic) book, and relax. I pulled flannel pajama bottoms from my drawer. Perfect. Then I padded, sifted and slammed through every bedroom drawer, searching for the matching ...
Dried-up rubber bands and balls of single shoelaces. Nine-volt batteries and decks of cards without any aces. Brown paper from packages with snippets of strings… These are a few of my favorite (junk drawer) things. (If you sang the above lines, I offer my apologies to you, Rodgers, ...
Cousin Ollie tossed down his comic book and sighed. “I’m bored.” I was in the middle of a very important panel of my Little Lulu comic. I fumbled for the empty wrapping paper tube beside me and flung it at Ollie. “Here, look for something to do through your telescope.” Back in ...
I must have watched the old guy for 20 minutes, maybe more. All he did was sit at that table with his coffee and stare out the window. I couldn’t understand it. How can someone just sit for extended periods of time and do nothing but stare at something? Or nothing? I studied him for another 10 or 15 minutes. Every so often, he sipped the coffee, so I knew he was alive. He never looked at the coffee. He continued to stare out the window at… what? Not being an old man who simply sits and stares, I shifted my gaze out the window to see if I could figure out what so intrigued the ...
Gather ’round, kiddies, and your ol’ Uncle Burtie will tell you about how we survived in the ancient days before Amazon. Oh, yes, it’s true, there was a time before Prime and FedEx trucks roamed the land. I was there. I also remember when there was no such thing as the Super Bowl, Snoop Dogg or Google. Seriously. Back in those dark days — well, not really dark because we spent a lot more time playing outdoors in the sunshine — instead of scrolling through screens and screens of shopping options, we licked sheets and sheets of S&H Green Stamps. I swear that I am not ...
I was a twig-sized seventh-grader at Rowe Junior High School — the puniest of ranks in the strangest and most emotionally unstable three years of a human being’s “wonder years.” I sat at a table with my loud and obnoxious friends in an echo chamber of a lunchroom full of loud and obnoxious strange and emotionally unstable pre- and newly minted teens. As I lifted a hunk of Mom’s chocolate cake to my mouth — because, why waste time using a fork — one of the big kids, a blond-headed ninth-grader in a jean jacket, and his buddies passed our table. The big kid casually ...
