Every child is different. No matter how many offspring you have, it seems each one springs from the womb with a unique, heaven-crafted bent. For example, our middle daughter emerged with an innate impulse for adventure with a strong streak of self-sufficiency. As a toddler she preferred crawling around to cuddling on our laps. At four or five she revealed she’d […]
I attended a funeral service in the old hometown in Oklahoma yesterday. Dr. J. N. Baker was of one of the finest Christian men it has ever been my privilege to know. He was 96 when he passed into heaven last week and was buried with full military honors yesterday. At my house growing up he […]
It was a jarring moment. More than a week later, I’m still processing it. Allow me to back up and explain. In my previous post I mentioned that I have spent quite a bit of time on Ancestry dot com piecing together the various branches of our family tree. I’ve taken most lines back several […]
Well, five large examples of this have taken up temporary (I think) residence in a large deceased oak tree in our back yard. A little research reveals that I have a group (flock? gaggle? murder?) of Mississippi Kites. Additional research yields the factoid that their favorite food is dragonfly. And boy have we had a ton […]
About twenty years ago I saw a fascinating item in the magazine Scientific American. It was a little blurb about a detailed study of the facial features of infants. According to the study, most babies go through a phase of looking like their fathers early in their development. This is the case even if they grow up to […]
“But everything in life boils down to this riddle: Are you what you think you are?”—Bill Withers Came across an amazing interview with 76-year-old music legend Bill Withers in the most recent issue of Garden & Gun. (What? You don’t know about Garden & Gun? It’s only the greatest magazine on earth.) Withers is […]
Well, here at Pine Thicket Palace we’re pre-hunkering down for the brief wave of late-winter weather that the Weather Channel hype-machine has dubbed “Winter Storm Quantum.” The naming of winter storms was an inevitable development, I suppose. Television news and information ratings are driven by hype and hysteria-inducement. I await the Weather Channel’s dire warnings about […]
Have I mentioned that I’m going to Africa in a couple of days? No? Well, things have been a little crazy lately. Must have slipped my mind. I’ll get to that in a moment. Tomorrow’s big news is that Female Offspring Unit #3, a.k.a. “the baby” (because she’s our youngest) turns 18 tomorrow. That’s right, […]
Female Offspring Unit #3 and I drove down to Austin Friday night so she could participate in a thingy Saturday morning. By Saturday afternoon we were headed back up I-35 toward home. Now I have always endeavored to bring up children who are culturally literate and appreciators of fine art. That’s why I’ve insisted […]
