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Forty years ago this month, Frances Scott’s fourth grade class in Jesup, Ga., started a little differently than in previous years. I’m there on the first row kneeling and hands folded in lap between 9-year-olds named Herbert and Virgil, one black, another white. On the back row at the side stands Mrs. Scott, also black, a somewhat stout figure in a simple navy dress and shiny black dress shoes. In the picture, I also see Joey Jackson, Douglas Shaw and Mark Wiggins, three childhood friends who I haven’t seen since our family moved from Jesup in 1974. Looking at the photo forces other names ...

My official marker of the summer heat is when you are wetter out of the pool than when you are in the pool. Such has been this summer, but I’m certain there have been other summers just as hot. Or at least that’s what I’ve heard the old-timers say. Pappa Joe Alford was one of the oldest old-timers I’ve ever met. He was here, in the Panhandle of Florida that is, before there were roads, bridges, and even before running water and electricity. I heard him say on more than one occasion that this is the hottest summer ever, and that ...

I'm kind of a space buff, and for some years, my sister and I have had a blog dedicated to Garrett Reisman, an astronaut that my sisters and I took an understandable (when you read this) shine to. So, when my friend, Todd Leopold, an entertainment editor at CNN Online, said he was doing a piece on the "Lost Romance of Space" and asked me who he should talk to, Garrett was the first person I thought of. And then I thought, "Hell, why don't I do an interview with Garrett," since he's posted occasionally on our blog and become ...

Note to the reader: What follows is a true story. Well… mostly true anyway. The names of the… er, combatants and locations have been changed.  The rest is all true.  Well, mostly… I swear. --Will. Is this old woman trying to start a fight with me? Our confrontation takes place in the ‘Beer and Wine’ Section at Serengeti’s Market. By virtue of missing a six-foot putt on the Eighteenth hole, me and my best friend since the third grade, Booger Wadsworth, have lost the two-man scramble to those two communists from the Xanadu Golf Club. Afterwards, Wadsworth says to me: “Well, since ...

Ever since I arrived on Saint Simons Island, off the coast of Georgia, I've been under the impression that the place is particularly hospitable towards women. Perhaps the number of women writers and artists who congregated here in the shadow of the popular Eugenia Price had something to do with it. And perhaps it was the contrarian in me that accounted for the preponderance of our tenants over the next fifteen years being men (some of whose women came and went). Or perhaps it was because, over time, men had always proved easier to get along with ...

Along about the time that big corporate agriculture started taking over the family farm, something nobody thinks much about started to happen. The corporate idea, you see, is to maximize production and profit and to control as much of the market as possible. Because it's only when you have a 20% market share that the major efficiencies kick in and let you ease on down the road to the real money. Trust me, they teach this stuff in marketing classes. Maximizing production and profit is corporate speak for getting the most out of the least at the lowest cost. ...

What do you do when a formerly “wiped out” pest returns to the scene of the crime many years later? Yeah, I agree. So it’s about time someone addresses this issue of “bedbugs”. These buggers are spreading their infestations faster than new weapons are being developed to combat them. No one is really sure why the resurgence of these critters is happening now, as they were eradicated and have not existed in the industrialized world for the past half century. We killed the little buggers. Not only are they back, they are congregating in the state of Ohio. They are so bad there ...

I enjoyed trout fishing in the North Georgia Mountains. In the sixties and seventies, the mountains were still pristine and there were a few trout streams with native brown trout. These streams were extremely difficult to find and even more difficult to get to. I had two trusted companions with whom I generally fished. One was a 1968 Chevrolet Malibu station wagon. That was undoubtedly the best car I ever owned. I went places in that car that had only seen jeeps before. We even took her to the top of Stone Mountain before the mountain was developed. When we ...

One of my daughters recently got married, and all I can say is, weddings are bigger deals than they used to be. Or at least, they are bigger deals for me. They are expensive and complicated, and they weren’t either back in the good old days when my wife and I had ours. That ceremony cost $168.42 including my necktie and the honeymoon, which consisted of a tank of gas, one night in a motel in Chattanooga, and a pancake breakfast the next morning. We were poor kids and couldn’t afford much. The best man was only a better man, and we ...

Grass, weed, call it what you will. Bag it or distribute it? Buy it or cultivate it? Bless it or curse it? What can we do? Clearly, we're addicted to it. Everywhere you go in the South –forget the nation– the subculture is clearly evident. So what should our attitude really be? Let's put the legal issues aside and think about it rationally. It's my belief that most of us adults have now tried it, and should be able to come to some ultimately sensible societal agreement. After all, even those who ...

What made airport security in Minneapolis search me last week when I was trying to fly back to Atlanta, I still can’t figure. Maybe they were picking passengers at random. Maybe they thought I was a particularly wily terrorist who had mastered the art of disguising himself as a sleep-deprived, middle-aged, white bozo in cargo shorts who’d partied too hard at his son’s wedding. Maybe  they thought the big red “C” on my Colbert Report baseball cap stood for Communist. Whatever the cause, it didn’t help that I am nearly deaf these days. They were on to me from the moment I showed ...

Twenty-six years ago I exhibited my first work of photography in a joint exhibition with Marilyn Suriani.  Our work was woven from the same patchwork cloth of people on the fringes of society. We leaned on each other and protected each other from the emotional entanglements necessary to enter into other people’s lives. The resulting exhibit, Living Our Real Lives, featured images of the homeless, exotic dancers, punks and people who, through faith or fate, were considered different. We followed each other into some of the same spaces to find the people that inhabited our images and mirrored each other in ...

One of the fun parts of summer and being out of school when I was a child in Arkansas was renewing an interest in the inhabitants of our backyard, an acquaintance that I abandoned each year when school began in September and when cold weather kept me contentedly inside with a good book. But summer time was outdoor time, and I shared that yard with all the insects familiar to anyone who grew up in the South: mosquitoes, bees, ticks, moths, hornets, wasps, chiggers, ladybugs, roly polies, stinkbugs, grasshoppers, butterflies, crickets, and cicadas--though all I ever saw of a cicada ...