The Man Across the Fence

I was never any good at football. I played because my dad had been a football star in high school. All-District and All-State, he was even offered a college scholarship.

Me? I weighed 135 and was 5’9”.

Tennis was my sport. I was pretty good. I started playing around age 12 and would later make the tennis team.

But in the early and mid-70s, tennis didn’t impress a football-obsessed Southern dad. Or few others.

I quit the football team in the 10th grade and ...

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The Return of Chocolate Gravy

(phone ringing)

Me: “Hello.”

Mom: “Did you know that your cousin Tina works at a restaurant that serves chocolate gravy?”

Me: “What? Where?”

Mom: “In Dierks. But it’s only on Saturday mornings.”

Me: “Please ask her to text me pictures. I need proof.”

I politely ended the call and then proceeded to use my phone to map out what time I’d have to leave in the middle of the night to be able to drive to Dierks, Arkansas, the following Saturday before they ran out of ...

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Sealing The Deal

When I mashed down on the lid, it didn’t snap, it cracked.

So I tried again. This time, no sound.

“How do you break a Tupperware lid?” I thought.

But I had. I didn’t mash any harder to seal it than I had for the last 50-something years, but this time, the lid gave up the ghost.

Now what? I had to find something else in which to place the rest of this pot roast, and its not like I could call the Tupperware ...

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To Bean Or Not To Bean

Gourmet coffee is now outselling real coffee.

In English, this means that what I call “Foo Foo” coffee is outselling Folgers and other normal coffee brands.

This is a travesty that begs the question – As a country, how did we let this happen?

According to a March 28 article in The Washington Post, a lot of the reason for the shift from Folgers to Foo Foo has to do with young people buying their coffee on the go, while us older folks ...

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The Little Table

I don’t exactly recall when I moved from the little table to the big table during the holidays. But I thought I had arrived.

Maybe you started out at the big table, but I didn’t. In my family, it was a right of passage. Usually, your promotion from a table full of kids to the place where the grownups ate occurred when you graduated high school, went to college, got married or all of the above.

Our family’s big table was wooden ...

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