Tag: family
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More Than a Story
When I was a kid growing up, like any other kid, I had dreams about what I wanted to be when I grew up. A writer wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t even on the radar. Not even in the same universe. Yet here I am, telling stories. Like most kids, my list was the…
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Instructions Not Included
Parenting might be the only job on the planet where they hand you a freshly hatched human being and say, “Good luck,” and then just… leave. No orientation. No handbook. No laminated troubleshooting card tucked into the diaper bag. You don’t get a user guide that says: If child begins lying, press reset. If child…
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Like Therapy – No Appointment Required
Life is a journey—and what a messy, beautiful one it is. There are peaks that make you feel invincible, and valleys that make you question if you packed the right shoes. Triumphs feel like fireworks; failures feel like stepping on Legos in the dark. Each stumble, each victory, leaves a little mark, whether we notice…
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Just Like Hers
Funny how when you have a hankering for something, it doesn’t matter what else you have.If it’s not that one thing, you’re not satisfied.You’re left with just a little emptiness. You can have a fridge full of options, a pantry stocked like you’re prepping for winter, and still… none of it counts if it’s not…
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87 Octane, a Pull Cord, and Chlorophyll
Mowing the lawn. When I do it routinely — in season — it’s therapeutic. And yes, at my age, the body pays for it with soreness for a couple of days afterward. I can already hear my wife: “Why do you like it so much? Why not just hire someone?” Good question. I don’t have…
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A Day In The Life
A Casual, Day-Long Stroll in My Shoes The day starts like any other day.Which is to say: against my will. Weekends are exempt from this story. Those are mythical creatures. Monday through Friday, though? Any one of them will do. If God is feeling playful—and He often is—it will somehow be all five at once.…
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Where Baseball Loved Us Back: Memories Filtered Through a Child’s Eyes
There’s a certain magic to baseball that no other sport has ever quite managed to touch. Football thunders, basketball dazzles, soccer never stops moving—but baseball? Baseball breathes. It invites you in, lets you linger, gives you space to fall in love with it slowly, inning by inning, summer after summer. It’s the only sport where…
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Tinkering
Once upon a time, every kid was a tinkerer. We learned by unscrewing things, prying them open, poking around inside. Radios, bikes, door hinges, cassette decks — if it rattled, clicked, or hummed, we had to know why. There were no YouTube tutorials or step-by-step guides, just a screwdriver, a roll of tape, and an…
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The People in Our Lives
I got to thinking about friendships recently—not the surface kind, but the ones that quietly (and sometimes loudly) shape who we are. I’m not even sure what sparked it. Maybe it was the long road trips to gigs and the conversations that filled those miles. Maybe it was scrolling through friends’ posts, those little glimpses…
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Waking Up, (or Almost Sleeping)
Ahhh, sweet slumber. The kind where your body finally stops twitching from yesterday’s chores and the blanket has molded perfectly to your shape. I’m out cold, dreaming of nothing, floating in pure bliss. Then it begins. A faint sound. Far away. Growing louder. Louder. Until it crashes into my skull like a marching band on…
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Conversations With That Guy In The Mirror
A funny reflection about my reflection. We all have that voice in our heads—the one we consult when making decisions, psyching ourselves up, or talking ourselves out of regrettable choices. Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s nagging, and sometimes it’s downright mischievous. For me, that voice has a face. He’s there every morning—the guy in the…
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The Flavor of Family
Food has a way of doing what nothing else can: it gathers us, roots us, and reminds us who we are. In our family, meals were never just about eating. They were the soundtrack of our childhood, the punctuation marks on our days, the reason the house smelled like love and chaos all at once.…
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I Miss My Mom
It’s been almost a year since she left us, and some days it still feels like the world paused in that moment. I remember the quiet that filled the house afterward, a silence so deep it pressed against my chest. And yet, in that silence, her presence whispers back to me—in the smallest things, the…
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The Day Camp Diaries
When you hear “summer camp,” you might picture kids whisked away in vans, lugging haphazardly packed duffel bags, shipped off to some far-flung campground for a summer of “character building” and kumbaya bonding. Well… yeah—if you’ve watched enough movies, that’s exactly what you’ve seen. The reality? Not all camps are like that. Some are closer…
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