Collections
It’s been nearly one year since we moved into the new Mt. Willis, and I don’t think we’re fully unpacked. I mentioned this to a friend today who responded, “If a year has passed...
Category: Suburban warrior
Welcome to the neighborhood
The sirens from the fire department spooled up in the distance. The firehouse is barely more than a mile away. If we listened close enough, we would’ve heard the firefighters squeaking into their boots....
GoPro Hero 2: Experiments in fatherhood and beyond
My dad died the weekend before my 38th birthday. I didn’t learn until a few days later that one of the last things he did was buy me a birthday gift. It was a...
13.1 miles for Dad
I wanted to tell somebody, but there was nobody to tell. Though I was elbow-to-elbow with some 40,000 people, I was alone. There was no one to tell my story, no one who a...
Hunting
My son found a .30-06 rifle in my dad’s closet, similar to these Winchester rifles. It was unloaded, unclean, and unused for decades. Though mildly unnerving for all of us, my boy was in...
Christmas Eve 2011
My dad was born in Texas on Christmas Eve 1946. He was a child with no privilege, a post-war baby, the son of a decorated Navy man, the son of a boxer who would...
John H. Willis (1946-2011)
For those who knew my dad or our family, this will be published in our local paper Tuesday morning. I’m posting it here for family and friends around the country who may not be...
He smelled the flowers
A few years ago, I looked down a sidewalk at my local zoo to see my father leaning over to smell the blossoms in front of him. He was alone and not affecting any...
My blood runs cold…
The boy had just finished his homework in the playroom of our house. We were alone when he broke into song…a song a seven-year-old boy probably shouldn’t be singing. After I heard it, I...
Halloween story 2011
If you have been a reader of Rapid Eye Reality for a while, you know that once a year I release a story that doesn’t really fit in these pages. It’s my Halloween gift...
Saturday Night Lights
The backfield tackle was the kind in which the quarterback is hit, hit again, and finally collapses under the weight of blockers, tacklers, and the inevitability of yet another sack. Less than two minutes...
Rapid Eye Reality turns ten
Two weeks before nineteen men crashed airplanes into my country, I started a blog. This blog. It was an exercise, an outlet suggested to me by my friend, Susannah. We were eating shrimp and...
Promises
There is nothing uplifting about a downmarket Las Vegas hotel. It’s simple living, hours in a stiff bed comforted by a flickering laptop screen, whatever junk food I could liberate from the giftshop downstairs,...
Thank you to everyone but the guy in the middle of the road
There was a guy in the middle of Stone Avenue. My wife and I had just pulled out of The Handlebar and were on our way to visit with a bunch of old friends....