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Gators in the Swimming Hole
Children of parents with personality disorders are conditioned to a certain level of abuse.
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Westerns: The Stories That Formed Me
So I asked Mister Palmer if mentors had to be real people. After I pleaded my case for writing about how cowboys and gunslingers inspired be to be me.
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Happy Holidays!
I tuned in to 99.9 this weekend to find the non-stop stream of Christmas music. This song, sung by the lounge singing great, Frank Sinatra, came around. How many people know the song “Happy Holidays!” is the flagship song of a movie called Holiday Inn starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astair and Margorie Reynolds? It was…
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Social Survival
No one who sat back and simply waited for rescue got it.
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Recalling the Ranger
Sometimes, I feel like a has-been. At least I’m not a never-was.
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A 130hp GoCart
Sometimes I wonder if Buck likes my little car. He’s a straight-up, V8, American Muscle kind of guy, and he gives me a hard time about my Celica. It doesn’t help that I woefully miscalculated the horsepower to weight ratio for it when I agreed to drag race it against his 1969 Dodge Charger. I…
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Adventures in Mowing
I kick back in the seat of my mower and just cruise. I escape into another world for a few hours with half my brain lost somewhere in Owen Wister’s Wyoming and the other half harmonizing with the harnessed power of internal combustion, steel and the raw noise of a two cylinder engine.
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Graduation: Welcome to Adulthood
“You’ll take more from speech, debate and acting with you into adulthood than you will from sports,” I told her. “Trust me. I did both and the only thing I learned from sports is no matter how hard you work or how talented you are, if you aren’t from the right part of town or…
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Burning Fields
The scent of grass smoke mixed with tinges of hot ammonia from the tractors parked beside a small stack of haybales has my adrenaline pumping Firefighters never die. They just wait their turn to make entry.
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Short-Leash Marriage
His comment awakened my curiosity. By no means was I ready to feel sorry for him. A man should be able to make his own decisions and deal with the consequences, but something in his tone told me Bud’s story contained more than the usual, “My woman doesn’t like me drinking.”