I’m not sure what fundraisers try to sell to grade school kids today, but when I was a kid, it was books. The school would hand out a pamphlet to each kid with a wide selection of books we could buy. Cheap.

Maybe these were books that didn’t sell somewhere else, or maybe they were just reprints of books that had sold before, but the other kids and I bought them. Lots of them.

They all were appealing to young people. Books ...

Transistor radios were a breakthrough in entertainment. Especially for young people. When they debuted in the 1950’s, they were expensive, but they condensed the ability to hear radio stations from across the country into a small device that ran on batteries. Transistor radios easily fit into someone’s pocket, purse, or under their pillow. This allowed listening late at night when we were supposed to be asleep.

My first transistor radio was a Sony that my grandparents gave me. I still have ...

When I was about 10, I wrote a letter to my aunt, who lived in Oklahoma. I’d never written a letter to anyone before.

For a kid in Ashdown, Arkansas, Oklahoma might as well have been China.

I just knew that I didn’t see her or my uncle much, and I told my grandmother I missed them. She suggested I write them a letter. So I did.

That is, I wrote a letter after my grandmother got out her good stationery, envelopes, and ...

As a kid, I was fairly certain I’d never get any couth. I wasn’t sure what couth was, but it seemed to be important to my grandparents. If you made a social error, you’d be asked, “Ain’t you got any couth?”

If you grew up between the 1940s and 1970s, it was a different world than today. Life moved at a slower pace, neighbors knew one another, kids went outside, and grandparents ruled their homes with authority. They didn’t hold family ...

I’m not much on soccer, but it seems the rest of the world is. As I write this, America is covered up with folks who like soccer so much; they’ve bought plane tickets and hotel rooms so they can be here to see it.

Many of the people who are here are from Europe. Specifically, Britain, even though most of the soccer is played back where they live.

I guess the first point of order is to highlight the fact that what ...

As a kid, I often heard the saying, “You probably wouldn’t eat the sausage if you saw how it was made.”

That literally applied to making sausage, but it was applicable to lots of things in life.

Both sides of my family lived in or near Ashdown, Arkansas, for many generations. The work they did on their homesteads sustained them. Any extra also brought in some of the money needed to buy the items they couldn’t create or manufacture themselves.

My generation was ...

In 868 A.D., according to Chinese historical records, a princess was said to have played a “leaf game.” One of the earliest known references to playing cards.

Since then, there have been just a few more sessions of folks gathering with a deck.

In the small, red brick house on Beech Street in Ashdown, Arkansas, many a game of spades, hearts, bridge, and canasta went well into the night.

Games were an inexpensive way for adults to gather at the Formica dinette table ...

In the early 90s, there was a self-help, relationship book called, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.” The goal of publishing this was for the author to show how differently men and women communicate.

Anyone who grew up in the South doesn’t need a book for this.

Now, technically, men and women are both speaking English. But if you’ve ever sat in a kitchen in East Texas or in Ashdown, Arkansas, and listened to a husband and wife discuss curtains, ...

Southern folks don’t need proper nouns. We have whatchamacallits and thingamajigs.

My grandfather had the only blacksmith shop in Ashdown, Arkansas. That’s where I learned the important terminology.

Papa’s shop, didn’t have labeled drawers. There were coffee cans. Each one held something useful, Bolts of every length, nuts that didn’t quite match anything, washers that had seen better days, and little pieces of metal whose original purpose had been forgotten somewhere around the Eisenhower Administration.

“Hand me that piece right there,” Papa would ...

There wasn’t anything accidental about blackberry season in our family. When harvest time came, dad had the harvest trip mapped out long before the berries ever ripened.

The same narrow country roads, year after year. Ditches, fence lines, and creek beds. None of them were the main roads in or around Ashdown, Arkansas. These were the back roads. Roads that originated as wagon paths in the 1800s, and wound their way through what just decades before had been thick, Little River ...