When Normal Norman takes his seat in Room 220 in Dumbach Hall to hear the eminent Dr. Engelhard… recite Beowulf again, Norman knows that he can suck

If you arrive too early at the public library and stand on the steps with Mabel till the doors open

My wife’s amazed when I station myself at the computer writing this or that despite a hound dog

An hour a day, sometimes more, I chipped away with mallet and chisel on a block of marble

Harley turned 70 the other day and died riding his motorcycle through a pink dawn,

It’s one thing to work in an office because your skills say you must. It’s another to want to hang out with

Grandma Gretchen’s in her rocker and she has something to say. She tells a visitor, a young man from the city, if he plans to write a book about life on a farm in the Fifties, he likely...

In 1958 Elmer’s was the only high school in his county that had been integrated. Basketball was the big sport. People in the little town filled the gym every Tuesday and Friday. They ro...

I bring a milkshake every other we… to an old man in a nursing home, a refugee from Germany who paid me 50 cents to cut his grass when I w… a kid in Chicago after WWII.

The Sixties almost killed Will, a wasted man who sobered up long enough to vote for JFK. And he’d have voted for RFK if he hadn’t been killed as well.

Magnificent animal Harambe, the Silverback gorilla killed at t… Lovely child, the three-year-old w… jumped in Harambe’s den. The mother took her son to the zoo

It will be a while before Fred’s hometown has its annual food drive, he told me. That’s an important event because it helps stock the pantry at the small charity where he volunteers. Ri...

Inferno of a summer day Mother’s dozing Tommy, tiny, three, paring knife in hand tiptoes out, flops

You thought you knew her. She thought she knew you. Neither was true but this happens at times at Happy Hour on Fridays

From my stool in the diner I watc… the old woman with elm tree arms command the big booth in back and roar for a menu, take a half hour to read it