The Grizzly Ate Your Baby
Several years back, my buddy and I made a wrong turn on the way to Virginia. Appalachia is the kind of place with towns called Tightsqueeze, so you’ll understand that any wrong turn is...
Category: Featured
Atlas mugged
I have to imagine what it’s like to live in a house with one bathtub and eight other people. I have to imagine a home that’s not even 30% of the size of the...
American Just Desserts
It was a duplex in a mid-1990s tract home neighborhood where all the siding was the same color and an old folks home sat 50 yards off the back porch. We had a concrete...
Charity Worley: Tragedy compounded
“Nothing was normal that morning.” That’s what Linda told me one spring day around lunch time as she thought back to the little details of the last time she saw her daughter Charity alive....
American sunrise
They called it Freedom Day, and I was skeptical. That’s what I’ve learned to become in my four decades on this planet. I was taught to feel pride. I was taught to feel exceptional....
Meals, Mugs, and me
Mr. John opened his door. I never know when he’s coming. Sometimes it takes a minute. Sometimes I have to call to make sure he heard me knock. Thursday, it was as if he...
Mirrors & Mountains
My phone was on the bathroom counter while I brushed my teeth in front of the mirror. I stood there studying myself in the most mundane and unattractive of moments. My phone lit up...
Giggling at hell
There’s a man who makes birdhouses. He’s a jolly guy, the kind you’d think would be good to suit up as Santa come December. He’s a craftsman who hits the southeastern arts festivals, sits...
This is our home
The kid’s shot to right field was the kind that made you gasp. It came off the bat like a laser, and it didn’t matter that little leaguer was barely 70 pounds. The ball...
Marriage and the power of luck
She nibbled, and I didn’t understand why. I came from a family of people who took fresh bites of their food before fully swallowing what they’d just chewed. Michelle, a petite girl who played...
Mistakes
This is a story of two mistakes with eternal consequences. They happened almost exactly three years ago, but I’ve never written about them publicly. There are a lot of things that happen when somebody...
Threadbare troubadour
Getting old is easy. It happens without your permission. It happens on its own. It’s literally effortless. The hard part is finding any good in it happening. Something happened last night, and it made...
My dog swallowed what?
I learned a new word this weekend: radiopaque. It’s not the kind of word you just throw out over coffee, or really, in most polite conversation, but it is the kind of word you’ll...
8 seconds
So, here’s a story. On January 8, 2003, my phone rang just as I was getting up for work. A plane had tried to take off from Charlotte, NC bound for my home airport,...
