Mitchell Way
It was a curving section of the county road with a posted speed of 35 mph. Farms and homesteads lined both sides of the road as did overhanging maple and alder trees.
“Slow up in the curve. Almost to . . . yep, there he is.”
I am standing out on the Meridian High School infield next to the pole vault pit. It is a multi-school track meet. The weather is absolutely atrocious. Quite possibly, this is the end of the world as we know it. Roars of thunder, flashes of lightning, sheets of rain followed by hail the size of marbles which are trying to destroy my umbrella, and yet, the track meet goes on.
Light snowflakes were falling out of the evening sky as I crunched through the foot-deep snow covering the sidewalk in my hometown. This was something I looked forward to each year; walking the streets of homes in the historic part of town to look at Christmas decorations in their yards and the lights from their windows. Not only were the old homes elegant, but the trees lining the streets, the 100-year-old oaks which had long since lost their leaves, now shimmered with their white snowy coverings. Except for the occasional passing of a car, it was all very still and quiet.
Cow tipping is nothing about slipping a cow a $5.00 bill after a nice fresh glass of milk.
The term Cow Tipping is an urban legend thought to have been started sometime in the 1970s. It involved going out at night and searching the farmlands to find a cow that was sleeping standing up. (This was usually done by inebriated high school, or college age boys.) The legend has it that two or more boys snuck up to a slumbering cow and pushed it from the side causing the cow to topple over onto the ground.
Forty-five years. That is a long time to wait for a project to become reality.
“There are those who speak about you who say, ‘He lost an arm, he lost a leg, she lost her sight.’
I object!
You gave your arm, you gave your leg, you gave your sight, as gifts to your nation so that we might live in freedom.
Thank you. And to your families, families of the fallen and families of the wounded, you’ve sacrificed in ways that those of us who have not walked in your shoes, can only imagine.”
General Peter M. Pace
Great Men, the ones that are few and far between. The ones that inspire you to greatness. The ones you want to emulate. How can I best honor them when they are gone?
Elwood K. Wayson was the elderly gentleman who lived in a small white house behind ours on Marine Drive. He had been a widower since I was a boy and had only the surrounding neighbors as friends, so we claimed him as our adopted grandfather. He was called by us and those who knew him, Swede.
They called it the infamous Alumi-bob. It was an aluminum, steerable, seven-foot-long bobsled. It once slid the roads around Anacortes, Washington. Now it is hidden deep in the woods, laying low, far from passing eyes in the local patrol cars.
In 2009 my mother, Patty, decided she would like to take her family to the Big Island of Hawaii. She had time shares in a condo, so she acquired two waterfront rooms for seven days in Kona. There were four families in the group. Mom’s husband had recently experienced a heart attack and was in a rehabilitation center, so mom had a spare airline ticket. She asked her niece, Gae, to join her.
7th grade PE class in middle school was where I met Mike. We shared the same alcove where our lockers were located. It seems now that the class must have been the first period of the day because Mike would always seem to run into the locker room either late or not at all, depending upon when he got up.
My son-in-law’s mother, Vickie, recently told me a story which happened during her early childhood upbringing. It involves hobos.
I had a friend named Laura who I went through middle and high school with. She lived on a quiet street next to the city park. In her front yard grew a Japanese Akebono cherry tree whose soft pink flowers bloomed brightly every spring and caused passers-by to slow and gaze at its colorful wonder.
Cheryl and I were sitting in our favorite lounge chairs in the living room. I was busily scanning through Facebook and reading comments on my latest post. Cheryl set her book in her lap and said to me, “I’m making borscht in the crock pot for dinner.”
In 1973, while I was at Northwest Nazarene college in Nampa, Idaho, I had an opportunity to attend a concert which changed my impression of Christian music forever.