(a valentine of sorts)
Robbers lives are filled with naught
living on what others bought
sneaking in your house at night
and taking everything in sight.
Bankers make their wealth in loans
of which you pay them back with moans
they keep their money stale and dry
and late at night they often cry
Bandits from the bankers steal
the bullets in their guns are real
but bandits usually leave a trail
and most of them wind up in jail
Kings have power over all
they keep their strength with Geritol
taxing rich and poor alike
and having gala balls at night
Robbers, bankers, bandits, kings
all these men hold earthly things
but I possess much more than ...
Honoring this year’s recession (last year’s rough patch) my wife and I set a limit on gifts for each other: Twenty Dollars. While in years past (when patriotism involved shopping), we became very patriotic, Christmas knew no bounds and packages were piled high.
This year required a bit less wallet and a bit more creativity.
My wife has always been good at this — me, not so much. Her skills at a computer keyboard scouring the internet for just the right thing at just the right price are prodigious. My skills with credit cards, also prodigious.
I started my shopping stumped. My favorite ...
The potential of a box is infinite. Though confined to the square of its walls, the possibility of its inventory is limited only by the imagination. Pandora had one she shouldn’t have opened, but who can blame her? On Christmas morning it is the box, wrapped in festive paper, that holds promise. The excitement comes from opening and discovering the contents. Somehow, the joy of the thing is all tied up into that first moment of revelation. It is that brief time before opening that holds the greatest satisfaction, the box itself offering the gift, the contents a metaphor for ...
If you have never tried to sell a house, you may as well stop reading right now. It will be impossible for you to accept what I am about to write as anything but fiction…..of the Stephen King variety. However, if you have sold a house, you will begin nodding your head, recognizing the horrors and giving thanks that you have passed through the valley of the shadow of real estate and reached the promised land.
Last week, we put our house on the market. The path we took to planting a for sale sign was worthy of a budget version ...
My career in photography started at the Neighbor Newspapers, suburban weekly newspapers owned by the Marietta Daily Journal (MDJ). I was hired as a writer. The editor never read a word I wrote before hiring me.
After a year of writing stories about local school board meetings, before which the editor of the competing newspaper (not coincidentally a co-founder of The Dew!) and I would drink a bottle of plum wine, I decided to switch to photography. The requirements were as rigorous as those for a writer.
The ultimate goal of a photographer for the Neighbor papers was to rise to the ...
Danny died.
Marquis, who said he wouldn’t, died.
Then John, Rod, Rayne and Greg died. I never saw a man face more pain with more grace than Greg.
Michael, whom I had grown to love, died.
Charles had a passion for life but accepted death.
Patrick died and I miss him.
Baby T. was born in a hospital that she never left.
Most of the people photographed for this story have died. Words are not my gift and I am afraid to use them to describe what these people meant to me and how their lives and deaths have changed me over the past twenty-years.
I talked with ...
There is only one child in the world
and the child's name is All Children.
—Carl Sandburg
Standing on the side of the road to Jericho a small child with his camel waits for tourists to stop and give him a few coins for a ride. In other parts of the world the camel is gone and a lemonade stand takes its place.
In Siaya, Kenya children kick a ball made of trash and tape, playing soccer with World Cup enthusiasm. Little girls dress as princesses in Africa and France and best friends walk down a dusty path in Bangladesh, proud of ...
I have the uncanny ability to mangle the language of any country I happen to be visiting. This trait is only slightly more pronounced than my ability to mangle English.
Late at night on the streets of Paris I was completely lost in a desolate part of the city. A car stopped, a man got out and, hoping to explain my paltry understanding of the language I said: “Je parles Francais,” accidentally leaving out the all important “n’ and pas.”
“You speak French!” He exclaimed in beautiful English, intuiting that indeed I did not.
Searching through Mexico City for a folk art shop ...
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