There was a Bath & Body Works fragrance in the nineties called Flowering Herbs. My wife was given a bottle of it in 1994, four years before I met her. She was still wearing it in 1998, the summer we got together — we both turned twenty that year, she's two and a half months … Continue reading Flowering Herbs
My grandfather went to work for Mobil Oil in 1946, right out of the war, and stayed until he retired around 1988. Forty-some years, southwest Oklahoma, running routes as a pumper. He was a slender man. Five-eight, five-nine, not big. And he had some of the strongest hands of anyone I've ever known — grip … Continue reading His Hard Hat
Carrying Grandma — “The stretcher wouldn’t fit in the bedroom, so somebody had to carry her out. My mother-in-law asked me.”
New round started today, and I've spent most of it taking things apart instead of adding to them. Seven habits, same as they've been. Bible reading, calorie tracking, water, exercise, reading, gratitude, and this — the daily writing. Two of them changed shape, though, and the changes are the whole point. Bible reading and the … Continue reading One Thing At A Time
I've been interviewing myself. It's a memoir exercise — a long set of structured questions about my own life, answered out loud while I walk, cleaned up afterward. I talk into my phone in a neighborhood in Oklahoma City like a man having an argument with nobody. What I expected was to remember things. What's … Continue reading Ahead of the Room
