When you discount me asking you to buy my book, I never do this. But there’s a first time for everything. As you probably know, my wife and I have two daughters. One of them is a soccer player. She’s pretty good. I’ve written about her before on this blog. Here’s the first goal she ever scored when she was about 5. She’s 15 now and has become a strong player with age. A few weeks ago she tried out…
Ok, ok, yes, that was a total link bait headline. I didn’t fall from grace. I’m not lucifer. I fell off my roof on Wednesday and I wanted to blog about it so you don’t also fall off your roof. Or something. Our 75-year-old house sits directly under a sprawling live oak and a towering pecan. You can’t even see the top of our house on Google because of these glorious trees that keep us cool in the hot Carolina summers…
First of all why is it called America? It should be the United States of North America, right? Canada is America. Mexico too. Belize. Costa Rica. Columbia. Peru. Anyway. One of the biggest problems we face as people of the USA is that we’re so divided. It’s crazy ironic. We’re the great experiment for pluralism. What makes us us is our diversity. The best people and brightest minds from all over the globe converging on a continent where our ambition…
When you’re 15 you can’t wait to be an adult. To drive. Vote. Drink. Have sex. Take adventures. All the fun stuff. A few short years ago you were chasing make-believe boats along gutters in the rain. Now you want to be grown up. At 25 you feel caught in between. Sure, you’ve got all the stuff you wanted to get when you were 15, but somehow it’s not as great as you once thought. And it feels like no…
Thanksgiving night I had a dream about an Olan Mills photoshoot. Maybe it was some deep memory that bubbled to the surface, but I woke up on Black Friday thinking we’d create something like an Olan Mills photoshoot gone bad for our Christmas card this year. We hadn’t done a Christmas card in a few years, and the last one we did was just like all the others you see from Shutterfly–a grid with pictures of kids, a picture of the…
There once was a boy who wanted to be an astronaut. Or at least an astronomer. He lived in Florida and watched rockets take off from Cape Canaveral in his own backyard. He had big dreams, wild ideas, and routinely got lost in make-believe worlds far, far away. That boy was me. And in 1977, during the summer I turned 12, at the literal peak of my imagination, Star Wars hit theaters. It was early June. School had just let out. I was playing baseball in a…
