Growing up, movies weren’t just a Saturday night diversion. They were lessons, warnings, and often, thanks to amazing writers of the era, meant to make us think.

Hollywood was turning out stories that carried more weight than Flash Gordon and other serials of the 1930s. And for a boy like me, sitting in Williams Theater in Ashdown, Arkansas, those films shaped the way I thought about just about everything.

What I didn’t realize until years later was that these movies weren’t just ...

Outliving your hairstyle seems to happen to a lot of folks. Ducktail cuts, shellacked pompadours, bouffant hairdos that could hide an aircraft carrier, and especially mullets, should be shelved and forbidden. Punishment for wearing your hair in any of these forms should be home confinement for 90 days with nothing to watch but reruns of Dr. Phil.

The 60s and 70s in the South served as fashion laboratories. In Ashdown, Arkansas, where I was raised, one of the most common sights ...

There was always one room in every Southern home that was no man’s land – the parlor. Some called it the sitting room, while others called it the drawing room. It contained the nicest furniture, fresh flowers in the window. And it was the most boring room in the house.

I don’t know why it was called either. We weren’t allowed to sit in it, and drawing was definitely out of the question. If we’d gone near the room with crayons, ...

I grew up in the far southwest corner of Arkansas. Nature drove the speed of life, and the towns breathed at an unhurried pace. Even now when I return there, the clock seems to slow and things just don’t move as fast.

The countryside in between each community was stitched together by gravel roads and pasture land. You could drive for miles without seeing anyone, but when you did, they weren’t a stranger.

For all who grew up in a similar setting, ...

There’s a rhythm to the seasons that you can feel in your bones when you grow up in a place like southwest Arkansas.

Long before supermarkets swallowed up every bite of our food into cellophane and fluorescent lights, there was a time when what you ate came from the land, and you knew the taste of the seasons.

I grew up in the South in the 1960s and 70s, when a hot summer day might find us driving the winding roads around ...

English is a language full of leftovers. It’s like the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Filled with things we just can’t seem to toss out.

The difference of course is that at least with what we put on the bottom shelf of the fridge, we do throw that out. Eventually.

Conversation with my grandson:

Grandson: “Grandpa John, do you want me to scrape the rest of the food on my plate into the trash?”

Me: “Julian, in this house, we don’t throw out perfectly ...

“Bummer” was common slang when I was a teen—a simple, short word that referred to something we didn’t like.

A girl turning down your request to go to a movie was a bummer. So was her accepting—and then wanting more at the snack bar than you had money to buy.

Being short on cash for Milk Duds is always a bummer.

Like many of our slang terms, the meaning of “bummer” as it was used a half-century ago bears little resemblance to its ...

My friend runs a precious metals shop, selling mostly gold and silver. I was there to discuss those very things when a pocket watch caught my eye. An Elgin.

My buddy sells a few watches, mostly Rolex. That’s what made the Elgin stand out.

“Never seen a pocket watch in your store,” I told him.

“It’s just for looks,” he said. “I bought them to scrap for the gold.”

I was taken aback. My father collected pocket watches, and I inherited them when he ...