This past week was my birthday, another trip around the sun in trendy parlance. A good time to reflect, or at least put down on paper, some random thoughts that pop into my mind regarding my many trips in that orbit. While I was giving my approach to the subject some thought, I remembered an…
Category: Family stories
Snow Day
Snow day! What a glorious sound! Even now the words make me smile, fill me with a lift of excitement. Last week we had a beautiful snowfall in North Central West Virginia, enough to lead to cancelation of the local schools. It brought back great memories. It has been over 40 years since I last attended the schools in…
The Military Classic of the South (Thanksgivings Remembered)
Thanksgiving always brings back especially fond and warm memories of my early childhood. The time frame for these recollections is the period of my life from age five or six till the beginning of adolescence, when my parents apparently became either aliens or lepers, driving a need to distance myself from them. But from the…
Missing my Mate
(My wonderful wife and friend Joyce (subject to variations based on my various nicknames, “J” and “Sandy” and a few I can’t list) passed away on August, 23, 2018, after a long struggle with lewy body dementia. This is the obit I did then.) Joyce Bastin Fowler King passed away peacefully on August 23, 2018,…
Being Belgian (or at least being married to one)
When I was in college, ethnic jokes were still around but waning in acceptability. I believe that intelligent folk knew these jokes were not intended to be offensive, but my generation decided that some change was required. It was the punchline that was funny, not the ethnicity attached to it, but we all had lots…
The Alzheimer’s Whisperer
I previously wrote a column about the fact that my wife and best friend has Early Onset Alzheimer’s, a crippling disease which has rendered her essentially a quadriplegic over the course of a few, agonizing years. She has gone from a vibrant and athletic and witty lady to someone who cannot rise from bed or feed…
Serious
I have a hobby of trying to come up with a single word to capture the essence of people I know, usually an adjective. It is not that people are that easily pigeonholed, but rather certain people have a dominant characteristic that they exude, that is central to the core of who they are. The…
Bud-Hoo 