Since the day Cain raised a rock to Abel’s head, men have been about the business of slaughtering one another. Oceans of blood spilled and still something pierces our innermost hearts when it is a child who does the killing, when his victims are other children, when his motive seems nothing other than to fill …
The thing about babies is they don’t care about your big plans. This past year I’ve had occasion to laugh at myself many times, a man like me, middle-aged and rooted in habit, suddenly a father again of newborns. Yes, that’s plural. Twins. Boys, of course, because for the rest of my life it seems …
My oldest son’s English teacher had this great idea, corresponding with the class reading Hamlet, for we parents to pen whatever wisdom we’ve tried to impart to our children and give it to them, so they have the option of sharing some of it when the class goes over Polonius’s advice to his own son …
I’ve not been what you would call a grateful person. The truth is, for most of my life I’ve been a surly, critical, stew-on-the-inside-when-things-don’t-go-precisely-my-way kind of person. In the movie Sling Blade, Dwight Yoakam’s character Doyle indicts himself as “assholish.” Yeah, that shoe fits. I probably don’t have to tell you ingratitude is like a …
