There's a photograph of me from Christmas 2004. I'm twenty-six, grinning at the camera, holding a fifty-pound punching bag my wife had just given me. Two weeks before that picture I'd had surgery to remove a tumor. The doctor's instruction was that I was not to lift anything over ten pounds. I don't remember deciding … Continue reading Fifty Pounds
Tag: family
Halftime
I turned forty-eight today and spent almost all of it in my own house. My son made waffles. My family gave me cards, and the things written in them were better than the presents (and the presents were awesome too!), which is a thing you can say honestly at forty-eight and mean it. Then we … Continue reading Halftime
Flowering Herbs
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
His Hard Hat
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
Carrying Grandma — “The stretcher wouldn’t fit in the bedroom, so somebody had to carry her out. My mother-in-law asked me.”
