Eldon Gantley stood on the street corner looking into a pocket mirror, observing himself as far up and down as the mirror’s size would allow in one glance. He moved the mirror up and down, behind his shoulder while craning his neck, returned it to his pocket, and stood erect and proud, as he licked…

“It’s not a tax,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about the ACA’s individual mandate. “It’s not a tax,” said President Obama. “It’s not a tax,” said Mitt Romney’s Senior Advisor Eric Fehrnstrom. “It’s not a tax,” echoed dozens of other pundits, op-ed articles, and political personalities from every spectrum of American politics. “It’s a…

My good friend, Larry Perkins, recently posted on FaceBook about a long, enjoyable walk on a Carolina beach with his dog, Banjo, when, from the dunes below, they encountered a rock jetty with a walkway on top jutting far out into the ocean with a sign at its entrance that read, “No Pets Beyond This…

My friend, the great Britt Gully, asked me a couple of weeks ago to play with him at Squealers Barbecue in Meridian for a gig he had lined up there on 6/23/12. I was all excited at first, but the closer and closer it came to being time for the gig, the less I was…

All of mankind has hopes and dreams. Sometimes these hopes and dreams are hijacked by circumstances beyond our control, or by bad choices we make for which we never paused to consider the outcomes, or by our own ignorance. This leads us to despair. I first became familiar with the phrase, ”Most men live lives…

Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women, who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, The Life of…