The phrase, “We were poor, but didn’t know it,” likely was based on the delicious and inexpensive food most Southerners ate growing up.

My father told me we only ate the finest, center-cut baloney. The reality was, we were so poor, our baloney didn’t have a first name.

There were two camps of baloney cooks: leave the baloney slice whole and let it turn into a bowl shape while frying, or cut slits on the outer rim so it would lay flatter ...

My dad hated holes in the walls. So, when mom wanted something hung up, he complained.

“This is just another way for bugs and critters to get in the house,” he’d say. And he wasn’t wrong. I woke up one morning in my bedroom in the house on Locust Street in Ashdown, Arkansas, and a small garter snake was in the middle of the floor.

That snake got in, but not because of any holes I had caused. But I did put ...

Early in life, I learned that adults had their own language. They spoke English, but it was interspersed with phrases that had been handed down for so long that for the most part, no one really knew their original or real meaning.

My parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and any other old person (over age 20) could say a great deal with a few words.

Sometimes it was advice. Sometimes it was a warning. Occasionally it was a warning disguised as advice, which ...

Scouting was once as common for kids as Cap’n Crunch and Post Toasties. Learning how to tie knots, set up a tent and campsite, and earning merit badges, consumed much of a Southern boy’s or girl’s time.

Often, your mom and dad were the den mother and trip advisor. Which meant you not only had to learn everything put in front of you, you always had to be on your best behavior.

Much like it was summarily announced to me that at ...

Moms used to be more versatile. If you were in the back seat of the Buick, they could discipline you from the driver’s seat and never swerve or knock the ashes off of their Marlboro Red.

My mom never smoked, so it’s possible that without a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, she was even more effective. At barely over five feet tall, she could reach over the front seat of her Electra 225 Limited and get to my ...

In the North, dads have basements. In the South, they have shops. Both accommodate man things, including woodworking, small engine repair, and isolation from the fairer sex.

As a kid in Ashdown, Arkansas, I saw basements on TV shows and wished we had one. My dad said the water table was too high where we lived, so a basement would flood. Instead, he used our garage to do man things. And he included me.

Whether it’s a basement, garage, shed, or shop, ...

Leaving Ashdown, Arkansas, was an event unto itself. When your family has one car, going anywhere was a treat.

Especially if the destination was a long one where there were lots of people.

So, to be told you’re going to see somewhere you’ve never heard of was the equivalent of going to England. Which at even the ripe old preschool age I was, I had heard of England. The Beatles made sure of it.

When I was quite young, my parents drove us ...

In 2014, I was contacted by a newspaper in Tyler, Texas. Unbeknownst to me, the publisher of said paper had been reading a blog I’d been writing for my family. The person who called me said the owner of the paper wanted to take my blog and make it a column.

You can imagine what a family blog contains. Who’s doing what, where they’re doing it, and how it ties into the rest of the family. Much like the Christmas letters ...

“Are we going out to eat?” was not a phrase my sister or I uttered often or lightly.

But if we came home from school and mom didn’t have supper started, then there was a good chance dad was taking us out for dinner.

My dad pulled his 1952 Chevy pickup into the gravel driveway at 5:30 each weekday. You could set your watch by it. At the red brick house on Beech Street in Ashdown, Arkansas, mom had the biscuits in ...

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 ...