Parked in dappled morning sunlight, with Table Rock Mountain in the background, this is my 2000 Toyota Solara, bought brand-new 20 years ago in Charlotte, NC, but has spent almost all those years in SC. Since day one, I’ve always parked this car with the intent of avoiding dings on the doors, seeking out the end of parking aisles and going as close to the curb as possible, to give other cars plenty of room.
20 years, no door dings.
Read MoreWhen it is the 1950s and you are five years old, the son of a sharecropper, when you are an adventurous little kid, when the occasional whack of a hickory stick against your behind does not deter you from ignoring your mother’s instructions … sometimes you might take things a little too far.
I was that five-year-old kid.
Read MoreIt is a sad day at my house. As many of you know, I have been caring for Billy Cat, a gray tabby rescued by my brother-in-law many years ago. Billy Cat is old, has diabetes, has intestinal problems that have no cure, and has been steadily going downhill over the past few months. He has lost so much weight that he is not much more than a skeleton.
Read MoreSome things are hard to put behind you, put out of your mind, when your mind has stubbornly chosen to hold on to them, for reasons that may frustrate and bewilder you.
This story may be a little difficult for some of you to correlate with your own life experience. Be thankful for that. It is a burden, a heavy burden, to have some ambiguous feeling instructing your thoughts. If your life has included some trauma, you may know exactly what I am talking about. If the trauma was severe enough, and lasted long enough, you may have done what I did for 40 years: deny that the problem even existed, while painstakingly avoiding circumstances that might lead to a triggering event. Try to imagine how those two issues can exist at the same time in the same mind. That was me.
Read MoreWhen I was approaching 50 years of age, I had a bad chest cold. At that point, I had not been to a doctor in several years. I was 50 pounds overweight and in terrible physical condition. I felt so bad that I went to a doctor, scary as the thought of that was for me at the time. I had developed a fear of doctors (and medical staff, procedures, facilities) during my stay in Vietnam. When asking about my family history, my new doctor learned that both my father and his father died in their middle 50s of heart attacks. The doctor looked at me quite seriously and told me that history might well repeat itself, given my current condition.
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