When Angels Come

When Angels Come In those hours and days of misery when hope cannot find its way to my pain, there comes an inscrutable stirring within that calms and brings me a modest peace. There was a time when I was driving from Decatur, Illinois to Springfield, Illinois. On a long stretch of two-lane highway, behind […]

Do You Know This Man?

Do you know this man? No? I knew him, not so well, some forty years ago…he was a habitue, a devotee, of the Phoenix neon night life, looking for parts of himself he had lost along the long road from Appalachia: lost in an abusive and disoriented childhood; lost in a flawed and impetuous marriage; […]

The Facade

The Façade Like a beautiful house or big city skyscraper each of us has a façade. In the house or skyscraper the façade can hide many defects – substandard or faulty electrical components, bad insulation, watered down or weakened concrete, and the like. I’m reminded of Hollywood’s major movie production, The Towering Inferno, about an […]

Quarter Moon And Venus

  Quarter-Moon and Venus From my new home on the Cumberland Plateau I sit in my Lazy Boy and look out the big great room windows across a canyon of trees to another plateau across the way. Except for a large leaning tree with high branches the sky occupies the biggest portion of the window […]

“It’s Always Up There”

How often do you look up there?  That big old sky that presents all its patterns? The clear lucent blue with old Sol hanging around? A few wisps of clouds that enhance the palette of your mind? A thick set of dark impending cumuli that carries lots of moisture, with perhaps a patch of blue […]