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 ...

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 ...