June weddings? Not in my family. But in January, our youngest son married in a splendid church wedding. His beautiful bride’s generous family included us every step of the way, and we are delightfully family-ized around the happy couple. (Adjectives on steroids just go with a wedding. Have you ever seen Katharine Hepburn gush at the end of The Philadelphia Story?) Question: What makes a wedding perfect? Answer: A few decades. My parents, Clarence and Dalma Morrow had a midnight wedding, May 19, 1940 with just two attendants, and the preacher and pianist. All this happened by candlelight at the…
Read moreI’ve been everywhere, man. In Texas.
Just when you think you can live the rest of your life without taking another road trip on Texas highways, you find out differently. I have been adventuring out on new roads—to me anyway—and I don’t mean metaphorically. Although, come to think of it, there’s some of that, too. My son is engaged to a perfectly wonderful young woman from College Station so the trek down there has become our newest well-traveled path. I’m way too familiar with Texas’s Interstate 35 corridor and could drive Interstates 20 or 10 or US 67/90 in my sleep, but put me on Interstate…
Read moreChristmas Cooks of Old
Edible DFW is a local food magazine I work for, and the winter issue features family farms and family recipes. Not much of a foodie myself, working on this magazine is a bit like copy editing in a foreign language. But typos are typos no matter where they lay lie, and I have learned to spell Aioli and pomegranate. Unlike me, my two grandmothers expressed themselves several times a day creating in kitchens that were in overdrive during holidays. The grandmother whose porch I write from never spent time sitting there. She was always ginning around the church, the chicken…
Read moreThanks for Thanksgiving
A line from the movie Bull Durham reminds me of Thanksgiving. Remember when the character Annie paraphrases the poet’s opinion of baseball: “Walt Whitman said, ‘I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.’” Just as Whitman, or the screenwriter quoting him, singled out baseball, Thanksgiving’s theme singles it from all other Days Off. It’s not directly associated with a battle or birthday. You can look it up. When you spend a day being thankful, that’s a day you haven’t spent wanting, needing, and feeling bad…
Read moreNot Positive about Negatives
Do you have negatives? And I don’t mean your personality. Does a closet or drawer in your house hide slides and faded photographs? Camcorder Tapes? I know you have VHS tapes. Film and negatives have gone the way of the typewriter, but we are as fixated as ever with taking pictures. Digital images are everything and everywhere. Easy to shoot, today’s photos pop with vibrancy unparalleled in photographic history. In a second, we can shoot a picture, edit, enhance, add special effects and share with a hundred friends. I am thankful technology has rendered film and negatives obsolete, but what…
Read moreWorld Interrupted: 22 Nov. ’63
I think I’m safe saying those of us in Dallas will welcome November 23, 2013. That’s the day our local culture, led by The Dallas Morning News, will finally have to move past the 50th year marking of the JFK assassination. While all the coverage is at the same time half hyperbole and half interesting, I contend the best memories are the personal and the best stories individual. I always lean in to hear the answer when regular folks are asked “What were you doing when…?” That fall was my first in high school—Reagan County High School. We freshmen were subject…
Read moreWhy the Bookshelf?
Why did I include a bookshelf on this blog? Before I learned to simply sit and watch the world go by, I never stepped onto the porch without a book. Summer afternoons after what we called dinner, Grandad slept in the hammock while I raced through escapades of Nancy Drew Girl Detective, or Cherry Ames Student Nurse. With mid-teens came gooey Janet Lambert books followed by the overwrought likes of GWTW and Root out of Dry Ground. I spent high school summers with books I wasn’t anxious for my grandparents to see: Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Group. …
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