Sitting in a periodontist’s office watching patients arrive, fill out forms, read old magazines, and disappear into the back of the office as staff hurry along shuffling papers and tapping tablets. Everyone is smiling. Patients leave the office with little bags of toothpaste, floss, and a toothbrush – a canon of oral hygiene that they’ll toss into a cluttered drawer in their bathroom at home. Every time a nurse calls a man’s name they look at me like an unmarked square on a…
I started driving at 16 down in Houston. Learning to drive in Houston is akin to learning to drive on a video game. Lots of traffic. Lots of exit hoppers. You learn how to juke driving in Houston. As a result, I’ve gone my whole life without ever hitting a car, a person, or an animal while driving. And there have been plenty of opportunities. Kids chasing balls. Dogs. Even alligators when we lived in Florida. Here in Charlotte we…
Last night during the second-half of her team’s tough match against a strong school, I approached one of Agatha’s coaches on the sideline – something I had not done at any level in the 8 years of watching her play. Until that point I hadn’t so much as introduced myself to her Middle School coaches and here I was walking up to one of them. During a tight match. Sure, he knew who I was because I’d been present during…
I was raised a Christian, but have always had issues with John 3:16. Because, like Jesus, I too am a child of God. As are you. The difference is that all men sin. And because we all sin, we all fall short of the glory of God. That’s basically the difference between us and Jesus. Because when we are born we are as pure as we will ever be. All we have to do is avoid sin – our whole…
At 13, I feel like I’m losing her. It rips my heart in two. We are too similar. And there are too many hormones flying around. I can’t back down because I’m the parent. She can’t back down because she’s my daughter – and she’s caught in the grips of a revolution inside her own heart. So I lay down the law and walk away. Eyes burning holes in my back. I think about my own family, and how they…
We only get one first kiss. Mine was inadvertent. Sort of. It was seventh grade. The object of my affection was a black-haired, golden-skinned beauty named Stacie Shrine. She was a petit girl with a smile like a Close Up toothpaste commercial. We’d been friends since sixth grade when we both entered middle school. Everyone knew we liked each other, but we never took it anywhere. We were twelve. We were ok with being ‘just friends.’ With end-of-year tests out of…
