In the spring of 1982, I was a 29-year-old wife and the mother of two young children, a boy and girl, living in Houston for the second time in my life. I call Houston my hometown, even though I wasn’t born here, and had moved here with my mother when I was nine. Houston was […]

Like most of my music-loving friends, over the past couple of weeks I watched Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, “Country Music.” And like most of those friends, I watched it in rapt adoration, as the history of country music in America unfolded before our eyes, with interviews and photos and videos of trailblazing musicians sharing their […]

I watched the Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper talk last night on CNN. It was good. It was about 50/50 political and personal. The personal discussion was so touching. I don’t think I had known that Stephen Colbert’s father and two of his brothers were killed in a plane crash when he was a boy. […]

I’m sitting in the central lobby of the VA hospital, waiting while my son gets an exam. Nothing bad – just a follow up on an ongoing issue. This is a busy place. Most of the folks here are a little older. I don’t see more than one or two that look younger than 40, […]

I read something in a book today. It was about giving money to homeless people. In the story, a woman slipped a homeless guy $20, even though she had been told so many times not to give money, but instead to direct the person to a shelter, because who knows how that money would be […]

When I was a kid, I used to stay up late every weekend to watch a couple of local Houston shows called “Weird” and “Late Weird.” These programs would air scary (for the 1960’s) movies such as “The Colossal Man,” “The Hypnotic Eye,” “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman,” “The Blob,” and “Tarantula.” I was […]

A vacant lot, a chain link fence                            I haven’t been back to Orange Street since       Mama spun our Chevy away                                Gravel flyin’ down the long driveway                 Tire swing twistin’ in the arms of a tree             White lace curtains wavin’ back at me              Two hands on the wheel, nails ragged and chewed Good-bye to the house […]

My father never owned a tackle box. Or, if he did, I never saw it. He was not an outdoorsman; he preferred reading, writing a little poetry, and drinking, not necessarily in that order. In fact, most decidedly not in that order. He and my mother instilled in me a deep love of books and […]