What are you good at?
Do you have a green thumb and grow beautiful plants? Are you a whiz in the workshop, building lovely pieces of furniture? Are you a talented public speaker or a great cook? An expert teacher in your discipline?
How did you become good at what it is you’re good at?
Whatever it is [...]

It’s Friday afternoon around 5:00 PM. “We’ll be back tomorrow. I’m going to wear my purple dress.” In her good-bye to the nurses at Vista Care, Emma informs Annie and me of her plans for our Saturday morning.
Way back when, it was Emma’s idea to come here for the first time. We were replacing the [...]

It was around Halloween when I noticed it. Near my kids’ elementary school on the corner of 17th and Toledo Streets someone had put a pumpkin on top of a stop sign.
Even if you’re not normally aware of your surroundings, your brain takes note of things like a pumpkin on a stop sign.
It stayed there longer than I [...]

Last Saturday I took Annie and Emma to their school’s Fall Festival. A fund raising event by the local PTA, it was a fun four hours of games, candy, hot dogs and Sno Cones. The students’ favorite booth was, “Pie In The Eye”. For just a few tickets they could throw a whipped cream pie in their [...]

Out of the elevator and rounding the corner on the 2nd floor of Carillon House, Emma spots her first.
“Daddy, look! There’s Hazel!” Annie and Emma take off running to give her a hi and a hug.
At the other end of the long hall, sitting in her wheelchair, is Hazel. She came here a couple months [...]

Smile.
Crack a joke.
Help the carry out person wrangle a couple stray carts. Write a real paper and pen note to a former teacher telling them what you learned from them. Call your parents and tell them you noticed how much smarter they got after you went to college.
Hold the door for someone.
Let the person behind you [...]

Some time ago during one of my kids’ elementary school events I was walking the halls observing the latest student created art and literary projects displayed on the walls. One was by some third graders who were given the assignment to write about what they thought their future would look like. All were entertaining to [...]

Last Tuesday I spent the day in Annie and Emma’s classroom. It had been a long time since I’d done any cutting, gluing or coloring. Emma said I did pretty good at coloring. But my gluing needs work. 
And what I wouldn’t give to have a mandatory nap time again. How great would it be to stretch out on [...]

“Anyone sitting here?”, I asked the lady.
“No.” She pulled her arms in a bit and gathered her purse closer to her.
Thanks to the “print your boarding pass the day before” option at Southwest Airlines I was in the “A” group. Which means I was at the front of the cattle call free for all in finding [...]

What’s on your refrigerator doors?
Ours is covered with photographs and the obligatory magnets to hold them all in place. It’s a hodgepodge of themes. An Andy Griffith Show magnet holding a photo of Allison, Shelby and Shaun; our nieces and nephew. A Chicago skyline magnet securing a winter photo of my Uncle Ev’s farm in [...]

When I was in high school my sister Joleen had a horse. I’d ridden him at a gallop many times and thought I’d gone as fast as that horse could go. Until one day my cousin Becky came over on her horse. Then her horse and my sister’s horse decided between themselves they’d show each [...]

It was 25 years ago this month that my Grandpa Thompson passed away. I just realized that today. On the calendar, 25 years is a long time. Yet in my mind not all that long ago. When I look in the mirror, it’s easy to see I’m not the 18 year-old kid who preached his [...]

 
It’s 8:40 PM. I smell water in the air.
The palm trees are swaying in a breeze that is more than a breeze but not yet a wind. It feels like the atmosphere is getting ready to take a really deep breath before exhaling.
The rain starts falling on my drive home from downtown Phoenix. There are [...]

About a month ago I noticed my lawn beginning to wake up. Understand, my patch of backyard grass takes all of five minutes to cut. I had five minutes so I rolled out the mower. It never takes more than two pulls for the Briggs & Stratton to fire up. Yet on this day, it [...]

Years ago my friend Glen, a cowboy who’d rather be horseback riding and team roping than doing anything else, summarized the inherent problem of not taking life one day at a time as only he could do.
“When ya’ got one foot in yesterday and the other foot in tomorrow, yer’ pissin’ all over today.”
Cowboy vernacular [...]

“Daddy, can we make a pile of leaves and jump in them?” Annie and Emma are helping me clean up the backyard. After a week of low overnight temperatures my fig tree had dropped it’s leaves and I was raking them up to throw in the dumpster.
Growing up in Iowa, fall was my favorite season. [...]

You heard the phrase more than once during the Christmas season. “Let’s wait till after the first of the year.” You may have heard it from me. I said it quite a bit.
“After the first of the year.” During the frenetic Christmas holiday we speak of early January as though it were a wide open, [...]

“So I’m not four anymore?”
“No, Annie. You’re five now. Happy Birthday!”
For weeks Annie and Emma have been talking about how they would soon be five years old. Now that the day is here, they seem a tiny bit wistful pondering that being five means they are no longer four. I understand that. We look forward [...]

12 seconds left in the game. The Phoenix Suns have the ball. They’re down by a point.
Steve Nash, Shawn Marion and Amare Stoudemire have been a three-headed scoring monster in the second half, breathing 3-point fire from the perimeter and pounding down earthshaking slam dunks underneath. The clock ticks toward double zeros.
Marion, aka “The Matrix”, [...]

My roses are blooming. Wanna come see?
I remember my Grandfather saying these words. “My roses are blooming. Wanna come see?” He’d want me to follow and I would. Not because I had a passion for roses. More out of respect for Grandpa. Oh, I liked them ok. But he loved them. He even painted pictures [...]

They sat side by side in the passenger area of Gate 25, Terminal 3 at Sky Harbor. If it’s true that people married to one another for a long time eventually begin to look alike, then this seventy something couple have flown together for many years.
Surrounded by appropriately noisy young families juggling kid packs, baby [...]

Stop. Look. Listen.
Sound advice for drivers approaching railroad tracks.
It’s also good advice for parents.
At 11:30 this night I stopped, looked and listened in the doorway of my babies’ nursery. Opening the door slowly, I peeked in. Maybe it was fatigue from a long day at work or maybe it was a reflective moment. But I [...]

It was relatively quiet for a late afternoon at the Omaha airport. I was waiting out a two hour layover, pondering the price of a Diet Coke and cookie I had just purchased. “$5.80? Pardon me, miss, but is there a major league baseball game going on behind this counter?” She gave me an “I [...]

Immediately after graduating from college in 1985 I lived with four of my friends on Central Ave in Orange City, IA. Occupying a corner lot, the gray two-story affectionately known as “The House” was over the years a home to some, temporary quarters for others and even a half-way house for one foreign national on [...]

Go north on Hayden and you’ll see the sign on your right, just past McKellips. Announcing your entrance into the city limits of Scottsdale, it reads,
Scottsdale – Welcome – “Most Livable City.”
The sign stands twelve inches away from a brown block wall marking the west edge of Green Acres Mortuary and Cemetery.
I laugh every time [...]