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The practice Sunday morning went well and my wife Jody said that I had “nailed” the playing of my alto sax part of The Black Cat Rag, a snappy and quick-paced piece of music by Frank Wooster and Ethyl B. Smith written in 1905. It has been a tough piece, however, for me to get my fingers around in order to dance fast enough to keep up with the light-hearted but sprightly pace. When the time came later in the afternoon…

Back in a simpler, better time… In my case, five scars bring back memories of Dr. Weems Pennington Sr., a doctor who epitomized what a family physician should be. He was smart, kind, funny, and kept many of us rolling despite an excess of maladies, ills, and accidents. He had a way of teaching you to be courageous no matter what bedeviled you. He’s been gone for seven years but he lives on in the hearts and minds of many, and he always will.

Times Are Changin’… Give a little thought to this conjured scenario. Bob Dylan and Bernie Taupin are both private, reclusive types who have managed to share many of their thoughts, visions and talents with the world. Such endeavors require the proper introspection. Therefore a logical spot to take in and digress on the world is the window booth at Manuel’s Tavern, located at the corner of North and North Highland Avenues in Atlanta, Georgia.

It’s a memory that refuses to die and it took place on the front steps of the old brick high school that overlooks Buddy Bufford Field back home. Angry classmates swarm around Skipper Hardin and me, furious because we had the gall to read Charles Darwin’s books on the theory of evolution. Even worse we were so bold as to talk about Darwin’s theory in class. Blasphemy! They thought Darwin’s books should be not just banned, but burned.

One of our coastal Georgia environmentalists has got a bug about Sea Island Equestrians letting their mounts leave turds in the marsh and on trails through the dunes. Which, of course, is not how the new owners, Sea Island Acquisitions, or the contracted equestrian service provider would describe the “experience.”

From the time I was ten running and biking were part of my life and that led to football quite naturally. Like many Lincoln County boys, I played for the Red Devils. Ran track too.

Not long after graduating from Georgia youth-induced laziness set in. Why exercise when you are young and weight gain is no big deal? I went through a stretch of seven years where I did nothing as exercise goes. Then one afternoon a couple of guys asked me to run with them.

“When fascism comes to America it will be carrying a cross and wrapped in the flag.” — attributed to Sinclair Lewis

Dr. Danny Pruett, my dad, passed away peacefully on January 4, his three grown children by his side. He was 90 and had willed himself back from the brink so many times that we began to think him invincible: heart attacks, bypass surgery, hips replacements, ruptured diverticulum and esophagus, multiple abdominal and back surgeries, atrial fibrillation, and more.

Such was life in Atlanta during the run-up to the ’96 Summer Olympics. The Centennial Olympic Games would, so thought entrepreneurs, promoters and cheats, provide hundreds, maybe thousands of ways to make money. And there seemed to be tens of thousands who thought they’d make the money. It was a sad sight. John Prine’s song of hucksters came to mind often, as did, quite a few times, the Bob Dylan line from “Tombstone Blues”: Is there a hole for me to get sick in?”

Few animals arouse primal fear like snakes and yet as citified as we are we seldom see ’em. Other than a green snake scooting through the lawn few people encounter snakes, and even fewer cross paths with industrial-strength venomous snakes. The kind that can send you to the next world.

At 76 I find my brain getting foggy at times (along with most of my peers) during tasks which I once saw clearly. My main concern is to avert dementia which debilitates and aggravates us and them. So I was interested when a brain training product on the internet introduced itself to me. I read the blurb, played a couple of simple but stimulating games and recognized that this could help keep me mentally limber; then I hesitated about the expense.

The Hawk has come South and Hell has frozen over.

I can’t prove these two events scientifically but I am very sure both happened in the last few days. Suddenly, the area to the south of the Mason-Dixon line is the freeze-framed Land of Petrified Cold. Mother Nature has turned into a frigid, heartless, cold-blooded shrew.

It hasn’t been this cold since…

I suspect there is often a child in a family who is able to escape the confines of the worst kind of restrictive life. Perhaps just getting away from people who have squeezed the vision of possibilities into a speck is beyond our power to appreciate, especially at the moment when we leave their world behind. It is a moment when the air rushes into the lungs and the body can fully breathe. We must shed them and slough off our old skins if we are to become more ourselves.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the hospice and urban garden, did not rudely elbow its way to a tight squeeze between Atlanta Braves Stadium (Turner Field) and the Crew Street police precinct. The free cancer home at 760 Pollard Blvd was there first, when the address still went by the name of Washington St., and occupied an undeveloped, open field. Our Lady of Perpetual Help will remain after the Atlanta/Milwaukee/Boston Braves have abandoned another city and become the Cobb Crackers/Smyrna Suburbanites.

With his Christmas email to me, my friend Richard attached a Cox family Christmas morning picture from the mid Fifties. I have an electronic copy somewhere, as does my brother Rick, who posted it on Facebook. That’s where Richard saw it. He knew my brother and I had lost touch since Obama turned the country into a Socialist haven, so he included a copy in his Christmas greeting.

On the back of my daughter’s car is a sticker that proclaims:

I dream of a world where chickens
Can cross the road
Without having their motives questioned.

She has other amusing stickers on her car, including an image of an early hominoid that reads, “Proud of my ancestors.”

Dear Fate (aka Pure Dumb Luck): A few days back, out of what must have been millions upon millions of contest entrants, you choose to smile broadly on a lady living in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Statisticians tell us that ‘Ms. Stone Mountain Big Winner Lady’ (not her real name) has a better chance of being struck by lightning than winning the Powerball Lottery. Ms. Lady is extraordinarily lucky TWICE last week then. First, she doesn’t get struck by an electric bolt out of the blue yonder and second, she wins ONE HUNDRED TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS!

Vince Lombardi once said “the difference between a success and failure is not a lack KNOWLEDGE, but rather a LACK of WILL.” With the passing of Nelson Mandela, we lost an individual who was a model of knowledge and will. In America we know what to do but lack a Nelson Mandela. Does this absence signal not only a lack of knowledge but the will to rally around the cause of fighting for equity?

December has been a cold month. Perhaps when our time comes, it is best to go in winter with its short days and long and dark nights, amidst the bitterness of storms that take our remaining warmth. I think my time should be a moment when I have finished my work, tidied up my tools, kissed those I love goodnight, and not have to worry about what new change is afoot in the world. My exit will perhaps be best when rebirth is still months away from the first green of spring.

“Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!” And there Bob Dylan was: in the soft drink’s birthplace, Atlanta, Georgia. It was August 3, 1996. 110 years before, Coca-Cola was first served at the soda fountain of Jacobs Pharmacy at Five Points, in the heart of Atlanta’s downtown. But that was old history; Atlanta was intent on making new history — and being fast about it. The city was hosting the Centennial Olympic Games, and not receiving good reviews for its grace or efficiency. At the moment, Atlanta was trying to shake off the bad notices.

“There it is,” I said, easing our big motor home across the dip at the edge of the pavement and onto the dirt road, “won’t be long now.” My wife, Arlette, who is French, pushed in a CD, and soon A Canadian Brass Christmas boomed through our cozy home on wheels. It was Christmas Eve, and after the pre-Christmas frenzy and getting ready for sub-freezing camping, we were anxious to begin a week in the woods. I started to relax. Although the slope down to the left seemed steeper than I remembered…

Reading Richard Dawkins’s memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, which I’m finding a bit boring, I’m led to question how much less interesting would an autobiography by a non-celebrity be, like the one I’m working on for example. Well, there may be some redeeming quality, say if it were very well written, or something that caught the imagination of the reader, expressing the zeitgeist or whatever …

These are the ornaments I’m hanging on my tree
The stories and the memories are what’s precious to me
It’s a Christmas tradition to give of yourself
It’s the time we spend together now
That’s our greatest wealth

1974. It was a rich year for Atlanta’s cultural scene and its place in the national spotlight. In January, the same month Bob Dylan played two nights at the Omni, Maynard Jackson was sworn in as the city’s mayor. Jackson, a singular and formidable politician, was the first black man elected to the top office of Georgia’s capital city. On April 8, another black man, Hank Aaron, the left fielder for the Atlanta Braves, took a swing off an Al Downing slider and put it over the left field fence of Atlanta Stadium, and in doing so became Baseball’s All-Time Home Run Champion.

I’ve been doing the grocery shopping at my place for awhile now. An arrangement that came about when ‘the management’ (as I sometimes call her) grew weary of me carping about the monthly food bill.  So I take her’ double-dog dare’ to”… see if you can do any better, Buster” And of course, the way these kind of things always go,  I couldn’t. But I did learn a few things…

Roger’s Fine Foods (not it’s real name) is one of those bigger box national grocery stores located in close proximity to Atlanta’s Little Five Points area.

This morning, I sat at my kitchen table, enjoying a poached egg on toast, regretting that it took so few bites to eat, while savoring every one. I saved a good bit of the yolk until the last bite, intending to prolong the pleasure. As I lifted the small square of toast supporting it, the yolk fell to the floor. I was dismayed… so much for saving the best till last. This set me thinking of similar laments.

When in the life of a democratic nation it becomes clear that the government has parted ways with the governed and evinces no intention to reform, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that the governed, i.e. the People, should declare in terms both broad and narrow the causes that impel them toward a separation of their own.

We the People hold to be self-evident the same truths that were proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, chief among them an inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and we remind the nation’s leaders…

“If you ever get the chance to go to Dallas, take it from me, pass it by,” so sang Jimmy Buffett. “People do you wrong down in Dallas,” the song pointed out. “Dallas,” written by Roger Bartlett in 1974, had nothing to do with the pain we associate with “Big D.” Yet the tragedy and heartache still comes to mind whenever the song is played — at least ’round here.