Summer arrived this week with all the sticky humidity it’s famous for here in the Ohio River Valley. That’s what you call “air you can wear.” Paul Emmick, a former meteorologist with The Weather Channel, charmed the nation with that phrase. And that voice. I met Paul in 1982 or so, when he was a high-school intern at the radio and cable TV station where I worked in the news department. He was training to fill in on the weekends…
When I wrote about my godfather, Bob Caplinger, last year (“The West Virginia Hillbilly”), I had a feeling there was something more. There was something else my parents had saved and I just had to find it. There it was, in amongst our family archives. In 1991, Bob wrote an autobiographical short story, dedicated it to my parents and younger brother, and dropped it in the mail to them. Here it is: SATURDAY NIGHT IN CAPITALS A short story by…
Gary has told me more than once that the saddest place in the world is the section of a graveyard set aside for babies. Thankfully, improvements in healthcare and the development of vaccines have helped tremendously over the years. Far fewer infants die at birth. But still, some of the most precious and fragile among us do not survive those early hours. Gary and I went to the St. Ferdinand Cemetery yesterday evening to pay our respects to a little…
They were friends, Mom and Madeleine L’Engle. Dear friends. Sifting through the bulging folder of their correspondence, I can trace the history of their friendship. They met during the 1976 Midwest Writers Workshop, when Madeleine, author of A Wrinkle in Time, served on the conference faculty (Mom would go on to do the same a decade later). They became fast friends: She wrote, in part: I am very grateful that you were at the Writers’ Conference and that we spoke…
Thank you for your concern about my getting a new heart. I really am eager for them to call me up and tell me to get to the hospital right away. At the same time I am full of fear and anxiety. It is a hell of a way to live for an extended period of time. I find that the best way is to get busy reading, going to movies, or even coming down here to the fisheries and…
The year was 1987. It was late December, just a few days before Christmas. I was in a smallish airplane, circling over Louisville, Kentucky, on a return flight from Pittsburgh. Not sure I remember why we were circling, but it must have been a matter of scheduling a safe landing. It was spitting ice and snow. Shrug and wait, right? No. Some businessmen on the plane were downright put out by this. The grumbling turned to growling as their complaints…
“We’ll give you a call tomorrow as soon as the doctor is done fixing Mom’s plumbing.” Oh, Dad. He hid his nervousness about the surgery with goofy humor. Mom came through the operation and recovery with flying colors and never regretted taking the step. She wrote this during her wintertime recovery in early 1982: The Long Christmas Early February: I am home from the hospital – it is heaven! Days, I camp in the den with many quilts and pillows…
February 10, 1981: It was a dark and stormy night. George Stuteville and I were seated at the Press Table, half bored out of our skulls. He was the newspaper reporter; I was with the local radio station. We’d each been tasked with covering the regular school board meeting in Tell City, Indiana. There was nothing exciting on the agenda, just paying bills, accepting resignations, negotiating teacher contracts. As the meeting wound to a close, I whispered: “Hey George, are…
It was close to midnight the other evening when I heard it. A train whistle. In the far-off distance. I love the sound of a train, especially at night. It’s so comforting. I asked my musical brother Dave if he knew exactly what chord the whistle plays. Here’s his reply: I’ve heard a lot of different chords from train whistles, but my favorite (which I’ve heard quite a bit) is a major chord with an added 6th, like F-A-C-D. The add-6 chord…
Farmer Gary loves to read the newspaper. Always has. In fact, he’s declared Wednesday to be Newspaper Day each week, as that’s the day most of the weekly papers arrive in the mail. Each Wednesday, Gary dashes out to check the mailbox, then takes over our breakfast bar with his stack and works his way through the periodicals. Sadly, many of the dailies and almost-dailies he grew up reading are no longer … well, appealing. … but there are still…