EASTER MEDITATION. The mind-boggling thing about Easter is how, for Christians, it is the celebration of a historical event. It is not just a celebration of the tradition of being Christian, a celebration of shared feelings and attitudes about life, shared music and culinary traditions. Christians are celebrating the actual reanimation of a human whose … Continue reading Easter Meditation →

I was in my late fifties before I experienced general anesthesia. My broken wisdom tooth got infected. It took a week or so before I knew that my tooth was the problem. The pain was shooting all over my skull, so I thought I had another pinched occipital nerve like the one that incapacitated me … Continue reading Anesthesia →

I once lived in an old house in Starkville, Mississippi. It had a porch. My apartment was at the top of some stairs that went up the side of the house. A young woman who drove a beaten-up Maverick lived behind the front door that opened onto the porch. Coming home one evening, as I … Continue reading My Spider Friend →

This is just a description of how my father said something funny that I and others have repeated for 50 years. He told us all that he had been at the new Kmart. It is worth saying that, at this time in the 1970s, Kmart was still new and exotic for us. There was a … Continue reading Toys, Toys, Line One →

Recently, I spent a few hours on the internet trying to track down someone named Wyndham. I think that was his name. Being sure would have helped my search. 40 years ago, Wyndham played a trick on me. A hostile trick. Nothing extreme. But definitely hostile. 40 years later, however, I suddenly understood why he … Continue reading Callaway High School Blues →

Until my mother put her foot down, I got whitewalls at the barbershop as a kid, along with my two brothers. The barber shaved smooth the sides of my head around the ears with a straight razor. If I Google “whitewalls haircut” now, I find a literal explanation. On a light-skinned head, the shaving forms … Continue reading Whitewalls at Logan’s Barbershop, Maywood Mart →

When scientists describe the vastness of the universe, I think of a familiar “what if.” What if we’re just an atom in a grain of sand? Or something like that. What if our solar system is just an atom in a grain of sand? I think this idea comes from how diagrams of atoms look … Continue reading Does God Exist? →

Charles M. Nowell, 94, passed away in the early morning hours of May 27, 2025 at the Orchard, after a long and fruitful life raising a family, sculpting, whittling, carving, replacing shotgun stocks and otherwise indulging his ceaseless urge to create. He was born on November 2, 1930 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. His father said, “We … Continue reading Dad’s Obituary →

We all swam at the YMCA pool on Manhattan Road in my little neighborhood in Mississippi when we were kids. Just saying that conjures an entirely different world for me. I remember riding my red bike to the pool. That means that I could have been as young as 6 or 7. Over 50 years … Continue reading segregated pools in Jackson →