Tag: life

Broken Tooth

August 24th, 2026

I woke up on the floor next to the side of the bed. The room was dark and I was spitting tiny pieces of enamel out of mouth on to the carpet. I felt disoriented, but there wasn’t any pain. That made my temporary confusion worse.

I stumbled up to my feet and walked into the bathroom. I closed the door before I turned on the light to make sure that I didn’t wake up Asher. He was still asleep in our bed. I tried to focus my eyes enough to see my face in the mirror. The image was a bit blurry, but I could tell that my top right incisor was just a little shorter than its partner on the left. Fuck.

I remembered having a vivid dream. I was sleeping on the edge of the bed (Asher likes to take up most of the bed by sleeping sideways on the mattress). I must have rolled to the right and fallen off the side. My mouth hit the corner of the nightstand on my way down to the floor. I recall feeling my head jerk sharply back as my body hit the carpet. Later in the day, I noticed a deep, inch-long gouge in the wood of the nightstand. That was where my front tooth and the furniture kissed.

The incisor now has a sharp, ragged edge. It still works. I can bite things with it. It doesn’t hurt at all. It just looks nasty. I told me daughter-in-law in Texas about the current appearance of my smile. She texted me,

“How redneck of you.”

The broken tooth makes me think about mortality. Do I even want to get the tooth fixed? I have an appointment for a dental cleaning two days from now. I expect that the dentist will have some guidance for me, and probably a cost estimate. The point is that I’m old (68 and 1/2 years). I seldom smile. Is there any pressing reason for me to spend money on repair if the tooth is still functional? I long ago gave up caring about my appearance. I already look like I have a lot of mileage on me.

No more broad, toothy grins.

Feral

August 24th, 2026

While we were in Texas visiting our son’s family, Karin, Asher, and I spent nearly all of our waking hours in their double wide home. The double wide stands on an acre of wooded land, mostly live oaks and cedars. However, since it was the early part of August, the kids were indoors most of the time. The outdoor temps hovered near 100 degrees, and even for children who are Texas natives, that is a little extreme. They might play in the yard for a while early in the morning, but then they get out of the intense heat and retreat to an air-conditioned environment.

During our visit, the air conditioning on the double wide went out. That was a bad thing. Gaby, the mother of our three grandkids, promptly called a HVAC guy to come to the house. Karin and I paid for the repair. I talked with the repairman before he started his troubleshooting. He was a busy man. He had many calls to make that day. Fortunately, the problem was just a bad switch, and it was a quick and easy fix. He hit me up for $300. I told him,

“That’s a bargain.”

The sweating repair guy smiled at me and drawled, “Well, I can charge y’all more if you like.”

“No. I’m good.”

The fact is that getting the air conditioning fixed was a non-negotiable item. It had to be done. It is like what happens in winter in Wisconsin, where we live. If the furnace at our house goes out in subzero temperatures, it gets fixed. It doesn’t matter how much it costs.

Asher’s three Texan cousins are all about his age. Weston, Maddy, and Wyatt are members of a restless crew. They have energy that would be best expended outside, but that would probably risk heat exhaustion. So, they played with Asher inside the house. There was a lot of yelling and laughing and crying and general mayhem. Gaby wisely chooses her battles. She could demand that her kids play quietly and keep the house in order. But at what cost? She lets them make a mess, and at certain points in the day allows them to watch Blippi, which gives her moments of relative calm. Asher engaged well with his three cousins. It didn’t take him long to become one of the Lost Boys (and Girl).

One day, I was sitting in their living room near the youngest boy, Wyatt. Wyatt is three years old, and he is generally a quiet lad. I did not interact much with him. He was shy, and as my wife said, “When he smiles, he does it with his whole body”. At home, both in the house and outside of it, Wyatt was usually only clad in a pull-up diaper and maybe oversized cowboy boots. On that particular day, Wyatt had multicolor streaks of washable marker all over his body, like a mischievous kind of warpaint. He made me think of the boys in the book, Lord of the Flies, although he’s much younger and more peaceful.

I mentioned to Gaby, “Wyatt looks kind of feral.”

She agreed with that. Being feral is not necessarily a bad thing. Innocence and wildness coexist in children. The two attributes complement each other. I’ve come to accept that both are essential qualities and should be seen as blessings. That’s just who they are.

Her First Day of School

August 12th, 2026

Our granddaughter, Maddy, started kindergarten today. Karin, Asher, and I came over to her house at 6:30 to see her to the bus stop. We were early and the sun wasn’t quite up yet. It was hot already, the temps in the upper 80’s.

Maddy was not doing well. Her mama, Gaby, was holding her and trying to comfort the girl. Maddy was crying and didn’t want to get dressed for school. Gaby gently nudged her along. Finally, Maddy was wearing in her fancy pink dress with the strawberry pattern. She had calmed down enough to walk to the bus top with her older brother. At least she wasn’t going on the school bus alone.

Starting something new is often scary. Our grandson, Asher, began his school career last fall when he went to kindergarten. He was good on the first day when my wife, his mama, and I were there with him. Things went downhill after that. Asher is a smart kid and quickly figured out that going to class was not a one-off. He suddenly realized that he had to go to that school every day. One day, I drove to school and almost had to use a crowbar to extract him from his child seat in the car. He cried constantly as I carried him to the schoolhouse. Fortunately, Miss Martha, a seasoned faculty member, came over and pulled Asher out of my arms. He quieted down as she soothed him. Then Martha smiled at me and made it clear that I should go away, like right now. After a week or two, Asher grew accustomed to going to school. I think that might have been after he noticed a cute, blonde girl in his class who stole his heart away.

I think back to when I went to West Point fifty years ago. I arrived at a place where I didn’t know anybody, didn’t understand the rules or the culture, and didn’t even understand some of the language used. The environment was utterly alien to me, and it took probably a year for me to adjust. I sympathize with a five-year-old doing something similar to that.

We walked to the bus stop as a group: Maddy’s mama, my wife, her older brother, her younger brother, Asher and me. The bus travels down a dirt road. The road was being fixed when we got there in the early morning twilight. I am not sure what the maintenance crew was doing besides shoving the dirt around. The bus showed up like a stagecoach in those old western movies. It stopped in a cloud of dust.

Maddys’ older brother got in the bus. Then Gaby held onto Maddy’s hand while she got in. The younger brother, who only clad in a pullup diaper and sandals, started to walk up the steps too. He was almost inside the school bus before his mama snagged him and pulled him out again. That is one impatient little boy.

His turn will come.

Old Vet

August 7th, 2026

Breakfast at the Best Western isn’t bad, but it’s nothing to brag about either. The scrambled eggs remind me of those served in any Army mess hall. The only interesting thing about breakfast is the waffle iron. It bakes waffles in the shape of the state of Texas. I made one of those for our grandson, Asher. He asked me to fill every divot in the waffle with syrup, and then he asked me where on this edible map of Texas we were staying.

After I finished serving Asher his waffle, an old man shuffled past me to make his own breakfast. I’m an old man, but this guy was much further along in years than me. He wore a tie-dyed t-shirt and shorts. He had cloth coverings over parts of his arms and legs. He had some dark bruises on the backs of his hands. He wore his hair in a ponytail, and he had wire rim glasses. He had a beard that had long ago gone white. He wore a baseball cap that had said “3rd Infantry Division” on it. That intrigued me.

I was tempted to tell him, “Thank you for your service”, but I hate that expression. It means almost nothing. It is one of those phrases that a person says when they don’t know what else to say.

Instead, I asked him, “Where were you stationed?”

He didn’t understand me at first, but then he told me that he had been deployed to Germany. He worked in the armory at Kitzingen in Bavaria. He had been in the Army in Europe from 1965 to 68. He never went to Vietnam. I tried to get a word in edgewise, but the man wanted to tell his story, so I listened. He told me in his slow Texan drawl more than I ever wanted to know, but it gave him pleasure to do so. I have to admit that I sometimes I do the same thing.

The old guy emphasized that being stationed in Germany gave him the opportunity to go places he would not have otherwise ever been able to see: France, Spain, England. He told me about arriving by train in some Austrian town during winter and getting a sleigh ride from the Bahnhof over snow-covered roads to wherever he was staying.

As I ate breakfast with Asher and my wife, I thought about the old guy at the next table. Why does a person wear a cap that broadcasts that they served in the military? The answer is probably because they want to talk about it. They want somebody to notice them and then maybe, just maybe, listen to their story. Here is an 83-year-old man who apparently considers his three years in the Army to be a crucial period of his life. That’s interesting. Obviously, this old Texan did many other things in his long life, but he wanted the world to know that he was a veteran. His time in the service must have been a peak experience in an otherwise flat and humdrum life.

The man made me think about our oldest son. We are visiting him and his family in Texas. He also likes to wear a cap that indicates his time in the Army. He went to Iraq. My son’s experience was traumatic, but still essential to his identity. For my son and for this elderly gentleman, the time in the military was fundamentally different from everything else.

As we got ready to leave the dining room, my wife went up to the man to tell him that she was raised in Germany in a little town n ot too far from Kitzingen. The old guy looked up from his waffle and noticed Asher. He smiled at him and said,

“I wish I had even a bit of that boy’s energy. I can’t even remember being that young.”

Then he wished us all a good day. He was still wearing his cap.

When the Planets Align

June 25th, 2026

Years ago, when I was still working third shift at a trucking company, there was an unusual astronomical occurrence. Three planets (Venus, Mars, and Jupiter) lined up in the predawn sky. I remember taking a break from my work to go outside the building to gaze into the eastern sky and look at the light show. Venus was low near the horizon, a ruddy Mars was slightly higher, and Jupiter was shining just above the other two planets. I thought about what a rare and beautiful event is was. I had never seen anything like that before and might never see anything like again.

I am reminded of the alignment of the planets now because I now find that meeting with a friend has become a rare and beautiful event. It seems like it is getting increasingly difficult for me to get together with other people. Perhaps I am engaging in selective memory, but I recall back in my twenties being able to call somebody on the spur of the moment and then hanging out with that person. Sometimes my friends were busy with work or other commitments, but it was not unusual to hook up with somebody at a moment’s notice. People were more available then. I’m not sure why.

Part of my problem probably stems from the fact that I don’t fit neatly into any particular social group. I have been retired for a decade, but I seldom participate in senior activities. That is because my wife and I are busy raising Asher, our five-year-old grandson, and we don’t generally have time for the things that most old people do. Our schedules are not usually in synch with our contemporaries. On the flip side of that, I don’t necessarily fit in with the young parents of Asher’s classmates at the Waldorf school. I am, like these younger caregivers, focused on raising a child, but the members of their generation are also preoccupied with their careers, domestic relationships, and future plans. My schedule seldom matches with theirs. The planets don’t align.

There are other factors involved. I blame the Internet to some degree. We are able to connect electronically and instantaneously with people all over the globe, yet we are losing the ability to actually talk to another person face to face. Humans are social animals, but social media has paradoxically made us less so. It is far easier to doom scroll than it is to set up a time and date for having coffee with someone, and then actually getting up and going someplace to meet the person. We tend to avoid physical interaction with others. It is more convenient to sit around the house and stare at a screen, which of course is exactly what I am doing now. My wife and Asher are doing something similar in the living room while I am writing this sentence.

I have been trying to set up play dates for Asher with his kindergarten compadres. I have found this to be a frustrating process. Many of his classmates are almost constantly in some kind of summer camp. I understand why that is. Almost all of the parents are working fulltime to pay the bills, and they are not available to watch over their kids. My wife and I are unique in the fact that we are home with Asher. Once again, scheduling becomes difficult. Asher has managed to have a couple play dates since the school year ended, but they have been for only short periods of time. These meetings have often felt rushed, with the adults acutely aware that they need to be somewhere immediately after the play date ends. It is good for Asher to meet with his friends, and it is good for me to get to know the other parents better. However, it is sad that these gatherings seldom feel relaxed. That bothers me.

You might ask, “Why doesn’t Asher just play with the other kids in the neighborhood?” That’s a good question. The answer is that there aren’t any children his age on our street. That is not to say that the area is completely devoid of children, but there are not many of them. It is not like it was a generation ago when our kids could go a couple doors down the block and hang out with their buddies. There simply are not very many kids. Period. It also appears that whatever children are in the neighborhood spend much of their time indoors. The curse of the computer age. Why play outside when you can binge on video games for hours on end?

I am by nature an introvert. That is one reason I write. It requires real effort for me to reach out to others. For me, arranging a meeting with friends is work, but it is necessary work. These planets won’t align on their own.

Never Seem to Find the Time

June 13th, 2026

“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter, and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun”

From the song, Time, by Pink Floyd

I first listened to the song from Pink Floyd when I was twenty-three years old, and I was a student in the U.S. Army flight school at Fort Rucker, Alabama. I was busy learning how to fly Hueys, and for me the training was often stressful. Yet, there was also a lot of dead time. Southeastern Alabama did not have a lot going for it at the time. Unless I chose to drive a couple hours to a beach on the Florida’s gulf coast, I was stuck in the local area watching the kudzu grow.

So, the first two verses of the song rang true. It often happened that I concluded “there is time to kill today” and yes, I did “fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way”. I did that sort of thing a lot while I was in the Army. Being a soldier meant have long stretches of tedium interrupted by short bursts of intense activity. I was told once that a day wasted is not necessarily a wasted day. I probably goofed off more than I should have. On the other hand, if I had stayed busy all the time, I probably would never have met my wife, Karin, when I was stationed in Germany. The really crucial events in life sometimes occur in the gaps between the activities that the world tells you are important.

“And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say”

Now, these two verses resonate with me.

I have a friend who is in his nineties. He’s alert and in generally good health. He still has ambitions to do things, but he mourns the fact that he no longer has the time or energy to accomplish his objectives. His goals are simple. He just wants to work in his garden. He might like to go to the synagogue again. He wants to bake cookies. These are all ordinary tasks that now seem out of reach.

I am younger than my friend, yet sometimes I feel the same way. I feel tired quite often. I leave many things undone, or half-done. I used to do volunteer work with vets and with migrants. Now I don’t. I start a project only to drop my tools (physical or mental) to deal with an unexpected problem. It is depressing at times.

I am reading a semi-autobiographical novel by Michael Chabon. It’s called Moonglow. It is about a young man listening to the stories of his dying grandfather. In one section of the book, the elderly man laments,

“I’m disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried. I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That’s what they tell you to do. But when you’re old, you look back and see all that you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn’t finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn’t last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they’re all still around. I’m ashamed of myself.”

I can completely understand the old man’s regrets. Sometimes, late at night, when only I am awake, I have the same dark feelings. But the grandfather’s words in the novel are only partially true. I have failed in many respects, but success is not necessarily the meaning of life. As a Tibetan Buddhist, Chogyam Trungpa once said, “The path is to goal”. A person has to take risks and play the fool sometimes in order to truly live. A person has to give a damn about others. That’s what matters.

I cannot indulge in mourning the past. I don’t have time for that. I still have work to do. I have Asher, my five-year-old grandson, to raise. I have a wife who needs me. I have other people who depend on me to some extent.

Hang on a minute. I hear Asher calling me.

“Grandpa! Come here!”

“What do you need?”

“Grandpa, come read to me.”

I will end here. I have important things to do.

Absence

April 26th, 2026

A young man, who is a close relative, cut off all contact with me about ten months ago. I haven’t I heard anything at all from him since he broke the connection with me. I don’t expect to hear from him anytime soon, and maybe that is for the best. As I think back on our last conversation, this separation was probably necessary and inevitable.

I spoke to a neighbor about this young man, and he told me about his son, who had left without a word one day and never communicated with his parents for ten years. It was not clear to me from what my neighbor said if he and his son ever reconciled. He did tell me that his son died.

The discussion with my neighbor made me think about the long estrangement I had with my own family. I left home at the age of eighteen to go to school at West Point and pursue a career in the U.S. Army. I was gone for twelve years. I visited my family when I could, but that was at most maybe twice a year. When I was stationed in West Germany, I think I went a couple years without seeing them at all. We stayed in contact, although at that time it was mostly through snail mail. I believe I was on good terms with my family, but we were far apart and our lives were on very different trajectories. We missed big chunks of each other’s lives. I wasn’t there for my dad’s first heart attack. He wasn’t in Germany for my wedding. During those years, I became an Army officer and a helicopter pilot. I lived all over the United States and spent three years in Europe. I married a German woman and eventually left the military to work in the trucking industry. When I finally returned to my hometown, I was thirty years old with a wife and a baby boy. I also arrived with some trauma and a drinking problem. I was not my parents’ little boy anymore.

Reestablishing family relationships proved to be difficult. I wasn’t ready for all the changes in my family of origin. They definitely weren’t ready for me. At the risk of stating the obvious, things were not the same as before I left. I was a different man, and they were also different from what I remembered. My father and I had a number of bitter arguments, and I am convinced that some of the strife was due to the fact that we were fighting with someone who no longer existed. I couldn’t recognize that the person yelling at me was a stranger to me, and that person couldn’t understand it either.

In Buddhism there is the idea that all aspects of who we are as individuals are transitory. The physical changes in our bodies as time passes are obvious, but people change internally too. We evolve emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Fifty years ago, I went to West Point, and I am not much like that scared and idealistic young man anymore. The Buddhists talk about the Five Skandhas, the shifting sands of our being. They are defined as follows:

“The five skandhas are essentially a method for understanding that every aspect of our lives is a collection of constantly changing experiences. There is no one aspect that is truly solid, permanent or unique. Everything is in flux. Everything is dependent upon multiple causes and conditions.” from the Encyclopedia of Buddhism.

Even when living with somebody every day, there are those changes. Sometimes, they sneak up on a person. Our grandson, Asher, is five years old, and he seems to be with me almost constantly. Even so, some mornings I wake and look at him and wonder who this little man is. He literally grows up overnight. He changes as I gaze at him sleeping in bed. His skandhas are very active.

I may meet my young man again, or maybe I might not. If I do see him again, I will be meeting him again for the very first time, because he will be a different person, and so will I.

A Backhanded Blessing

March 25th, 2026

She’s in jail. A person who I care about very much was incarcerated two days ago. It sucks. It’s really hard to give that event a positive spin. The person is looking at more than just jail time. They are staring at potentially years of prison. In many ways it’s a grim future.

On the other hand, it could be worse. I guess things can always be worse. The person is an addict. Their drug of choice is alcohol, although I am not sure that the word “choice” is accurate or appropriate. I think that for this individual the ability to exercise free will is much diminished. They aren’t in control of their habit. It is in control of them.

For weeks now, actually for years already, I have agonized about what this person would do next. My wife and I have lived in fear, a fear that this young woman would die. The person we love was unstable and sick, and with her anything was possible. We never knew what would happen. As I was told once, “The pattern is that there is no pattern”. That is the truth. There has been nearly constant chaos for as long as I can remember.

Now this person is in a location with structure and routine. She is relatively safe, well, as safe as person can be in a jail. Jails can be scary places. I spent just a few hours in a jail, and I remember quite clearly moments of raw fear. The only advantages of her being in a jail are that she probably cannot harm herself or others. Jail is not a good answer to her problems, but it is the only answer currently available.

The truth is that since this person was incarcerated, I have been breathing a sigh of relief. I am not as scared as I was just a few days ago. That does not mean that all is well. It isn’t. This turn of events brings new challenges for the young person and for everyone who cares about her. We’ll get through it together, but it will be hard. I look at the bottom line in this situation: she is still alive. Everything else is secondary to that.

It bothers me that in our society the best we can usually do for a person with mental health issues is to lock them up. We have a decades-long War on Drugs that has never had any real successes. Our country frequently blows up boats that may or may not be bringing drugs into the U.S., but we don’t make nearly the same amount of effort to understand addiction and its treatment. We only care about people with mental health problems when they inconvenience or endanger us. If a person decides to use a drug to quietly commit a slow-motion suicide, we are okay with it. We don’t care about the harm that addiction causes because we don’t care about the common good. We only give a damn when it hits home, and hits hard.

I prayed, and still pray, every night for the person I love. I prayed that she would survive. God answers prayers, but often in odd ways. Sending this person to jail is a backhanded blessing, but I’ll take it.

Set Yourself on Fire

March 20th, 2026

I had never heard anything about self-care until after my wife and I became fulltime caregivers for our grandson, Asher. It initially felt like an alien concept to me, and it seemed a bit self-centered. It sounded like encouragement to take care of Number One above all things, and I had trouble with that. After all, Karin and I had to focus on Asher who was just a tiny baby when we started being his foster parents. Being there for Asher was, and often still is, an all-consuming activity.

The plan at first was for Karin and me to act as foster parents for only a limited period of time, maybe for a year or so. That scenario did not work out. That time frame dragged out to eighteen months and eventually our role as foster parents morphed into being Asher’s legal guardians. We came to the realization that our commitment to raising Asher was open-ended. We were his caregivers for the duration. We were in it for the long term.

I think for me that epiphany is what changed my mind about self-care. I finally knew that I was not involved in a sprint. I was running a marathon and so was my wife. We had to take care of ourselves in order to care for Asher. We had to learn how to pace ourselves, and how to share the burden. Karin and I became acutely aware of how much we needed each other. In a way caring for Asher makes our marriage stronger because we have to work together to raise Asher. Neither of us can do the job alone. We have a common goal.

This being the case, we have to avoid burnout. We have to keep tabs on each other’s health and wellbeing. The most often asked question in our home is, “Are you okay?” This is not a frivolous question. We really need to know. Likewise, Asher also ask us this same question, because he needs to know that we are able to be there for him. He depends on us for stability and safety.

Karin and I give each other permission to take breaks. She gets to go to her knitting groups. I get to meet with my friends for coffee or a beer. We take turns watching over Asher. We are able get support from our friends. We are concerned for each other out of love, and also from a sort of enlightened self-interest. We cannot afford to have either of us flame out. Both of us have to be functioning in order to provide for Asher. In in the end, it all revolves around Asher.

Self-care is not selfish. It is simply accepting the fact that we are mere mortals with limitations. As a friend told me,

“It does no good to set yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm.”

Reunion

February 8th, 2026

I received a letter a week or two ago from a couple high school classmates. They are busy organizing a 50th anniversary celebration for the Class of 1976. I find it almost impossible to wrap my head around this development. Based on the letter, there has already been a massive amount of planning and preparation involved with this event. They have arranged a tour of the old high school. The organizers have a dinner and party set up at a local hotel. There are detailed instructions in the letter about how to pay for reservations. Still, I have lingering questions:

“Why? Why do all this? Why bother?”

At the risk of stating the obvious, fifty years is a long time, and at least in my case, a lot has happened during those years. What do I have in common with these classmates from five decades ago? What do I even have in common with the person I was back then?

Probably not much.

I have kept in contact with a grand total of three of my high school classmates. I’ve only seen two of them during the last decade. If I went to this soiree, I doubt that I would recognize anyone. I expect that nametags will be necessary for any sort of socialization.

The letter asks people to “meet us in the Grand Ballroom at 4:30 for dinner, conversation, reminiscing, dancing, cocktails, meeting old friends, and making new ones.” Dancing? Seriously? How many cocktails will people need for that?

What about reminiscing? This implies that a person wants to talk about what it was like back in high school. I am hard pressed to recall much that is worth remembering, much less discussing. Do I really want to converse about the days when I was young and stupid? I once read an interview within which John Lennon was asked about getting the Beatles back together. He sarcastically replied to the interviewer that it would be like going back to high school. I can understand Lennon’s viewpoint.

When I look back half of a century, I don’t feel nostalgia. I recall most of all that burning desire to get the fuck out my hometown. I wanted to see the world and have adventures, and that I definitely did. When I really think about it, it is clear to me that almost everything I did while in high school was part of an effort to go somewhere else and to be somebody else. Paul Simon best described my feeling at the time in his song, “My Little Town”. The lyrics go like this:

“In my little town, I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all.
And he used to lean upon me as I pledged allegiance to the wall.
Lord, I recall, in my little town,
Comin’ home after school, flyin’ my bike past the gates of the factories,
My mom doin’ the laundry, hangin’ out shirts in the dirty breeze.
And after it rains there’s a rainbow and all of the colors are black.
It’s not that the colors aren’t there, it’s just imagination they lack.
Everything’s the same back in my little town,
My little town, my little town.

Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.

In my little town, I never meant nothin’,
I was just my father’s son. mmm.
Savin’ my money, dreamin’ of glory,
Twitchin’ like a ginger on the trigger of a gun.

Leavin’ nothin’ but the dead and dying back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.”

That song tells part of my story. Eventually, years later I returned from California to my place of birth. I came back a very different person. I came back mostly because my wife and I had a baby boy and he needed more family than just us. Was it a good decision? I have no idea, but that’s what we did.

We live within ten miles of my old school. We live within ten miles of the hotel where they want to have this shindig. I could easily attend. Sure, Karin and I would have to find a babysitter for our little grandson, Asher, but we could figure it out if we wanted to do so. I don’t want to.

Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. The past isn’t even past.”

He’s right. My past is an integral part of my identity.

I don’t need to go somewhere and wallow in it.