LikeTheDew.com

Daddy was a traveling salesman. He was one of the old school salesmen who travelled by train. Some of my earliest memories were going to train tracks with him. He carried a roll of newspaper and as the train approached, Daddy lit the paper and waved it in the air. The train would stop and Daddy would board for his sales trip. When I got older Daddy took me with him and we rode in the engine, the mail car, boxcars. Occasionally we got to ride in a passenger car. Daddy was usually gone for a week at a time with ...

We tell our tales and hold our secrets. Our stories come out on paper, in spoken words, even in the things we choose not to say. And then, with little fanfare, some stories are told in ink on skin, walking with us as we share both secrets and dares indelibly marked onto our bodies. Over the past few years more and more people, particularly but not necessarily, young, are finding or creating images to be sewn into their skin with needles and ink. Once the province of sailors and gangs, these images now proudly shout out from the arms, backs, torsos and ...

My friend Andrew has embarked on a noble mission, to write a haiku every day for a year, chronicling the foibles of life in seventeen poignant syllables. In this age of overwhelming bloviating, his zen-like approach to the news of the day is a quaint, reflective and usually quite humorous way to absorb the culture crashing down upon us. Like putting prose into twitter, the snippets of wisdom, often twisting at the end, encapsulate ideas into neat packages of words. Visit his site, HaikuLounge and contribute your own take on life. I have found it quite cathartic to distill thoughts into this lovely ...

The pre-eminent Faulkner scholar Dr. Noel Polk is likely more familiar with the great Mississippi writer's work than anyone. He has edited corrected versions of all of Faulkner's books. As explained below, Noel consulted Faulkner's original typescripts to correct editorial changes made when the books were first published. Because of Noel's painstaking work, readers now have Faulkner's masterful novels close to how he originally wrote them. I briefly met Noel at the recent Faulkner & Film Conference at Ole Miss, where he and other Faulkner scholars swapped stories about the great man while enjoying drinks and the sultry evening  at a ...

Southerners love to stand around a fire.  This evidenced by the fact that we are probably the only breed of modern era people to purposefully fashion a metal drum into an upright vessel and call it a “fire barrel”.  We are so serious about it, we actually take great lengths to cut out holes near the bottom to feed rebar through to support the burning wood (and whatever else deemed safe enough to be fed into said fire barrel – note: consumption of canned beer expands this criteria) and a portal in the bottom so coals can be removed. I like ...

During the past week, two stories in Like The Dew collided smack into me and dredged up family history that I could never forget, would not want to forget, but had compartmentalized to take advantage of life's forward motion. Alex Kearns shared wrenching heartbreak about her sister's unexpected death (My Sister, My Self). Her personal loss triggered for me feelings about the loss of my own sister, Trisha, who also died unexpectedly and who, like Ms Kearns' sister, was also was a person with schizophrenia. Lots of feelings arise in me when the subject is schizophrenia, my personal shame chief among them. The other story was ...

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, one fear that surfaced was whether Obama would implement restitution for racial minorities if he were elected. Part of that fear was based on restitution we provided to the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. On the other hand, that fear was mitigated by knowing that we never provided restitution for Native-Americans that were placed on reservations located where no one else wanted to live. Our history of dealing with non-whites has not been a pretty one and flies in the face of democratic principles that we hold to so dearly, such as equality for ...

I was getting desperate. For two long years I had been waiting, hoping, and praying for a kidney donor. My kidneys were failing because of various medications that I take due to a heart transplant in 1997. Dialysis had not yet been necessary, but each month it came closer and closer. Twenty-one people had volunteered to donate a kidney, but each was rejected. Some had high blood pressure, some took the wrong kind of medication, and some had other problems that prevented their donation. There was a mixed blessing in this because while I did not have a donor, each volunteer ...

Normal English: Main Entry: re·pu·di·ate Pronunciation: ri-ˈpyü-dē-ˌāt Function: transitive verb / Inflected Form(s): re·pu·di·at·ed; re·pu·di·at·ing Etymology: Latin from repudium rejection of a prospective spouse, divorce 1: to divorce or separate formally from (a woman) 2: to refuse to have anything to do with : disown 3 a: to refuse to accept; especially : to reject as unauthorized or as having no binding force 4: to refuse to acknowledge or pay <repudiate a debt Sarahisan Speak: Main Entry: re·fu·di·ate Pronunciation: ri-ˈfyü-dē-ˌāt Function: unknown verb / Inflected Form(s): re·fu·di·a·fied; re·fu·di·at·ion; re·fud·a·licious Etymology: Latin refudiageous, an outrageous form of rejectifying and discomformulating the English language, the inability to gradumacate from high school. 1: to divorce or separate ...

The bald-headed, naked truth is that I am about to lose it. I am really good---maybe even extraordinary -- at what one might term "the art of loss." Coats, gloves, hats, golf clubs, car keys, eyeglasses, and wallets have slipped through my watery grip and 'butter'  fingers with more regularity than I care to admit. 'Bumbershoots' are a particular specialty. I have misplaced enough of these to keep a small town bone dry during a monsoon, especially if that small town was, say, the size of Chicago. (The umbrella that you found in your office recently, was more likely than not, ...

I worked at The Miami Herald in the mid 1970s, the newspaper that was my introduction to big-time journalism, Miami was my first foray into big-city life. The Herald then was fat with pages and news and ambition.  Besides several metro-Miami editions, there were a half-dozen aimed at different sections of the state, plus two for Latin America that were flown each night to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Caracas. New York City journalism had recently experienced a major upheaval with many of the dailies closing, sending dozens of staffers heading south for jobs ...

Robert Frost was clearly in tune with his country’s sentiments when he wrote in his poem, Mending Wall ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ and had his neighbor mindlessly repeat it yet again, to contradict the poet’s own perception: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, Americans love walls. Indeed, segregating populations, enterprises and anything that’s unpleasant or unwanted seems to be the universally approved solution. Unless, as in the case of toxic chemicals and waste, the solution to pollution is dilution — still another form of separation, on the molecular level. So, it should not have surprised the plaintiffs in ...

Yesterday I was informed that my two-year-older sister, Kerry Lynne Scott, had died suddenly. Now all that I can do is try to write my way through the numb pain of this latest blow (in the past four years I have lost my father, mother, sister… how many tears does the human body hold?). When heartache brings me to my knees I reach for words -- a life-long habit that has been my salvation – and so I will now. Then I will send it out into the ether to go where it will: hopefully, somehow, to my sister. Kerry was, from ...