Whoever designed the string-pull on a bag of charcoal needs to know they failed.

And it isn’t just bags of charcoal. It’s also large bags of kitty litter and pet food. You pull the string and it either snaps off in your hand or removes one of your fingers, but it never ever pulls evenly and removes the paper to let you get at what you’re after.

Let me put it this way. If this design were also used to try and ...

Driving my new 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass, I steered its long front end into the carpet and tile store.

Actually, the Olds wasn’t new, but it was new to me. The person I was about to meet was also new to me. His name was Dennis.

He worked full time as an Ashdown, Arkansas, city cop. The carpet store was a part-time gig. At least then it was part-time.

I also worked multiple jobs. Disc jockey, grocery store employee, and photographer. On this day ...

Potatoes.

That’s what mom said got us through the hard times. Potatoes.

I honestly never knew we had hard times, but if she said we did, we did. And during those financial bumps in the road, we ate potatoes. Lots of them.

Like many families, my parents had a garden. I always thought they grew okra, tomatoes, and other itchy vegetation to make my life miserable. But the potatoes I never minded.

That’s because potatoes are the most versatile food on Mother Earth. The ...

It’s hard to beat pie. You can go to any fancy restaurant and order a $20 item from the dessert menu, but it won’t be as good as a slice of my momma’s chocolate pie. Or pie made by any respectable lady who grew up in the South – which is anywhere below Little Rock.

There’s magic that happens in the kitchen when grandmas pass on their secrets of how to make pie, cobbler, and pudding.

Southern women learn early in life ...

At Shur-Way, my parents always carried a ticket. Shur-Way was our local grocery store in Ashdown, Arkansas. On the front of the building, it proudly said, “Our Meats Are Better.”

This was a widely-known truth.

My dad always said they had the finest center-cut baloney you could buy.

The package always said, “bologna,” but baloney was what we all called it. Baloney was also the best term for lots of things my dad would say.

The Popes owned Shur-Way. The whole family ran the ...

My grandfather was driving us back from Broken Bow. It was late on a Saturday night. At least it was late for me. My bedtime was usually 8 o’clock. It was at least 8:30, and I was tired.

My grandfather was a blacksmith. He went to Oklahoma each Saturday for an auction a woman named Barbara held. It was unusual for a woman to be running a business at that time. It was also unusual that someone was still a blacksmith.

Blacksmith ...

The last few years of my dad’s life, he would often say, “I don’t want to learn anything new.”

He was serious.

I would show him something new on a cell phone, or the latest item that was all the rage, and he wasn’t impressed.

“That’s nice son, but I don’t want to learn anything new,” he would say.

How could you not want to learn anything new, regardless of your age? Well, I’m starting to see things his way.

I was dragged, kicking and ...

People used to drive over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house each holiday season to give thanks, eat, visit, and play games.

Playing games with family members you seldom see outside of Christmas gave you the opportunity to remember why you only see them during the holidays.

A marathon Monopoly game with your half-deaf uncle and your cousin who eats Cheetos and wants to be the banker, is a reminder of how good you’ve got it. Even if you ...

My first car cost $500. It was a 1966 Ford Mustang, white with red interior. Thanks to my father, I could work on it.

That’s no longer the case with automobiles. Unless you have three degrees from MIT and a trunk full of computers to plug in under the dash, it’s the rare individual who can fix his own car. And that’s regrettable.

After the automobile became affordable for the masses (thanks to Henry Ford), auto repair became a way for dads ...