Spent some time last night reading New Year resolutions from a newspaper column I wrote in 1999. Had prefaced my words with an admission: I don’t like NY resolutions because I seldom keep them. They just add to my guilt and I already have plenty of that. Wrote another New Year column in 2000 where […]
Char and I ate an early dinner at Olive Garden yesterday. Had begun to snow and we wanted to get home before the roads froze. When we walked in the door, a young waitress emerged from the bar area, smiled and called me Dr. Bellah. I did what I always do when I recognize a […]
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I like cold weather. Didn’t say I like being cold – you have to dress for it – but my adrenaline soars when the thermometer plunges, and, if there’s some snow along with it, that’s even better. When I was growing up, I liked nothing better than playing outside in the aftermath of a Panhandle […]
One advantage of age (and there are some advantages of age) is perspective. We are less than a week away from a new year and, more importantly, a new decade. And I’m thinking about other ends of decades. I was born at the end of a decade, in 1949 when Harry Truman was president and […]
How did Mary and Joseph feel the day after Christmas? Was there still a hint of angel dust in the air? Some visible reminder that they had stood on holy ground? A sign that the baby in the manger was indeed Emmanuel, God with Us? Or was Christmas plus one a reality check for them? […]
Slept in on Christmas Day for the first time, well, ever. Not like when I was a child. We’d get up way before sunup, sneak down the hall to see if Santa had come, notice the pile of presents and missing cookies and milk; then run to Mom’s and Dad’s bedroom to announce the news. […]
Talked to a lady yesterday who had lost three loved ones in two years; two of them died on Christmas day. Made me realize that what most of us experience as an exceptionally happy season is, for some, a painful time. Did a brief online search and found several articles about holiday depression. According to […]
Christmas gifts. The best ones are unexpected. Like Christmas 1998 when I had just completed grad school and most of the kids were still in college. All of us were broke so we decided to get creative. Which usually means cheap. Anyway, I’m sure we weren’t expecting much. Char and I gave family recipe books, […]
Coming in 2010 to fortispress.com: Videos, several of them. Talked with Tim Stevens yesterday, a young man barely out of high school who has been making his own films for some time now. Tim’s goal is to enroll at the University of Texas on the way to a career in his favorite pastime. But for […]