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It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a comic book education!

A kid can learn a lot about life from reading comic books. To this day, I avoid gamma rays and radioactive spiders. I know full well that the first would transform me into an angry, green guy, and ruin all my shirts. I would literally climb walls if bitten by the latter. These are good ...

Old man swings advice from porch

The great philosopher Terri Guillemets once said, “The swing on your porch is a better liver of life than the chair in front of your desk.” I’ve started my seventh decade and I get that. I craved the dizzying whir of the merry-go-round in my younger days. The faster the better. The ...

The day cousin Ollie turned church into a rodeo

“Ma, we’re leaving for Sunday school,” cousin Ollie yelled as the two of us 9-year-old boys bolted out the back door of the farmhouse. “I have a bad feeling about this grand plan of yours,” I puffed as we ran to the barn where we left the bicycles. “I ride to church all the time. ...

Procrastinators unite! — tomorrow

It was a lovely day and I was spending it productively, reading the big volume of Donald Duck comics I’d checked out of the library when — while turning a page on a very important storyline involving Uncle Scrooge — my eye caught sight of the calendar. “Wait, what day is it? Oh, no ...

Watch out for snakes in the grass

Never walk barefoot through a cow pasture. That’s one of life’s lessons that I learned growing up on a farm — but not for the reason you might think. One bright summer day as a kid, I gingerly combed my toes through the grass at my cousin Dale’s farm. Why I was barefoot, I can’t ...

Color TV, my own phone — oh, to be that rich

When I grew up, I wanted to be rich. Really rich. So rich that my house would have TWO TVs. Both color, of course (rich kids didn’t have to suffer with black-and-white sets), and both with those massive cabinets and 25-inch screens. That’s how rich I wanted to be. It was my goal. I ...