Tag Archives: history
Americana
Recently, a good friend who lives in Kansas drove 30 miles to another town to judge the Sorghum Queen contest for the Stevens County Fair. This year, 19 young women competed for the honor, which I assume is thus named because sorghum — a cereal grain used in livestock feed, ethanol and certain human foods […]
Broken
We rose, I want to say, became who you dreamed we were. Realized our better nature, I long to say, because I want to see you whole again. But we have fallen farther than your deadest imagining, and your heads are always broken. Jack’s skull perpetually shatters in Dallas, shatters into Jackie’s lap. It […]
What we lost
National Public Radio’s excellent StoryCorps project aired a deeply touching segment on Friday, just ahead of the 50th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. The reflections of then 17-year-old busboy Juan Romeo, who attempted to comfort RFK seconds after he was shot, are a potent reminder of what we lost that night. Click on the […]
Provenance
My taste in library books tends toward the old and sometimes obscure, and I thereby experience a pleasure younger, hipper readers will never know: a circulation card, glued to the back cover of the book and demarking its check-out history. The content of these yellowing index cards depends on the era: All include typed title […]
Good night dear, love to you
Honey that cake you sent me surely is fine. I have been taking a hunk of it with me for lunch the last two days. The typing is faded and the paper stiff with age, though the simple signature looks as if it could have been scrawled yesterday, if people still used pencils. Roy Osee […]
Elvis and the birthday not celebrated
It’s been 83 years today, and I’m thinking of a sleepy-eyed, full-lipped boy born in East Tupelo to a ne’er-do-well daddy and a hard-working mama. Not the boy who wound up king of rock ‘n’ roll, but the one who wound up in a shoe box beneath unmarked earth. It was a couple of hours before […]
Peace
Her last moment in breathable air might have been a shudder, or a howl. A bearing down, a thrusting up. The snow driven like bullets by fierce wind, the fresh and frigid water ripped and roiled into 30-foot waves and worse, especially the last two: Monsters. Rogues. And then the great arc of tension — […]
The quick and the dead
In my little town, we prepare for Halloween in the usual ways: adorning our yards with scary decorations, buying candy (the good kind that makes you secretly hope no kids show up) and setting out pumpkins, which at my house quickly become squirrel food. But we also engage in the kind of communal mischief for […]
Kalaupapa
Sixteen hundred feet beneath the verdant sea cliffs of Molokai — the highest in North America — at the tip of a wildly beautiful cove pummeled by an aquamarine surf, lies a little piece of heaven that for a century doubled as a kind of hell. Its inhabitants were lepers, and beginning in 1866, this […]
Elvis and the birthday not celebrated
It’s been 82 years today, and I’m thinking of a sleepy-eyed, full-lipped boy born in East Tupelo to a ne’er-do-well daddy and a hard-working mama. Not the boy who wound up king of rock ‘n’ roll, but the one who wound up in a shoe box beneath unmarked earth. It was a couple of hours before […]
Meditatio Ephemera 