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Search Results for: Father's Day

EMPTY SEATS VANISH IN A BIGGER ROOM?

Empty seats in a big room have a story. There’s the name tag on a table, but no one in the chair. Something happened, and like a book on a shelf that’s never opened, who cares? Maybe you ought to figure it out before more seats turn up empty. (The ‘you’ includes me, but mostly […]

MARRIAGE EXPERIMENTS: DUCK FOOTBALL OR PORTLAND TRIP?

Marriage experiments are not for the non-scientist. I’m not a scientist, but my wife is. She’s the one who tries new things and keeps an eye out for my response. But that doesn’t make me the experiment. Or does it?

TENDER BAR, A PLACE EVERYONE NEEDS

The Tender Bar is a book, a memoir, and a movie. A book and a movie, for the deuce. But it’s more than a book or a movie, it’s a destination I stopped in for a drink yesterday, but it was the wrong bar.

SCRIPT WRITING: KNOW WHEN TO END, Part 3

A script writing master class produced an original piece of work that’s still in progress. I took the class after buying and reading books about script writing and beating the odds in Hollywood. Part 3 follows Part 2.

PARENTAL ADVICE FROM THE HISTORY OF ALL PARENTAL ADVICE

Parental advice is best served as a hand-me-down plate. That is, tell your kids what your parents told you so they’ll know what to tell their kids. Sound complicated? It’s not. Instead, it is listening, listening and understanding. It goes like this:

WORDPLAY POWER GOES WRONG? WATCH YOUR TONGUE

Wordplay power: the activity of joking about the meanings of words, especially in an intelligent way. Those are the funny people having fun with wordplay power. Intelligent funny people. They see things and hear things that make them laugh, and we laugh along. The meaning of words changes over time. So has what’s been considered funny. Oddly enough, we change over time, too. What about […]

DAD VALUE: THE MISSING INGREDIENT IN FAMILY RECIPE

Dad value fluctuates day to day, but one thing is certain: Father’s make a difference. Disagree? Then ask someone you know without a dad, or never knew their dad. I read an article about being raised with love and how it makes a difference when you love someone raised on survival. Had we known then […]

MISSING PARTS AND WHERE TO FIND REPLACEMENTS

When I was a kid I had a high school aged uncle who liked to build model cars with missing parts. He didn’t play any sports. I glued model cars together, too. The box of plastic pieces all linked together became a Buick Wildcat. No paint, nothing special, just following directions and putting it together. […]

DESPERATE MEASURES: BOOMER ADVICE LIFE STUDY

Online complainers went to desperate measures over education. The through line was how boomers pushed college on their kids, among other piercing whines. Boomers created student debt, boomers ruined the housing market, boomers killed the jobs. With that reputation, how are boomers supposed to take any comfort in living long lives? The underlying message, the […]

FAMILY TIES OVERCOME SOME THINGS, NOT OTHERS

    Everyday I wake up I see a little gold tree with small family portraits hanging from the bare branches. Maybe you’ve got one that looks like the top image? That’s not mine. Mine used to be on my childhood fireplace mantle beside my grandfather’s railroad watch. Now I’ve got them both, and they’ve […]