The summer of 1980 was one of the hottest I recall.

The windows were down in my 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass. They were always down in the summer. I couldn’t afford to fix the air conditioner. But that summer was particularly brutal.

When I was young and broke, the summer heat was simply a fact life.

But, music? Music was life.

I was in college and had a pretty girl who allowed me to call her my girlfriend. The local radio station gave me the ...

It’s remarkable how much people will pay for food that sounds fancy.

Take scones for example. Please, take them. All of them.

If you go into one of those fancy coffee shops that charges the same price for a drink as I pay for an oil change, you often will be asked if you’d like a scone to go with your order.

Don’t do it. It’s a trick.

The first time I was offered a scone, I expected something that exploded when I tasted ...

There’s still a debate over whether we spelled it “TRAX,” or “TRAXX.” What’s not in doubt is that it was a high school rock band that five friends from the Texarkana area played in during the late 1970’s.

What’s also not debated is that after 40 years, those same friends rejoined for one night to play some of the same tunes they had last played when Jimmy Carter was president.

“So, I’ll be back in Texarkana in about six months for my ...

“Hello, my name is Clark Gable,” said the man sitting next to me in the airport.

I turned to greet him. His Master’s hat from Augusta was the second thing that caught my attention – the first, of course, was his name.

As we shook hands, I’m sure I had the same look on my face that he’d seen many times during his seven or eight decades on the planet.

I didn’t bring up Gone ...

There are certain items that remind me of my grandparents. Some items I see, others I inherited.

Formica Dinette sets and tabletop radios are on that list.

It takes just a glance at something in the background of a television show or something at a flea market, garage sale, or antique shop, to send me way back in my memory banks.

As a younger person, you associate specific items with previous generations. But, it would seem that now that I’m the grandfather, some ...

One of the biggest mistakes you could make when I was growing up was to tell your parents that you were bored.

The minute you uttered those words, you knew that the next several hours would be filled with manual labor.

Growing up in a world with just three TV channels, my sister, cousins, friends and I had to find ways to amuse ourselves. Oftentimes, we relied on the contents of a stack of boxes that sat inside a bookcase.

Those boxes contained ...

You forget how much energy a kitten has until you get another one.

Our last cat was 19 when she crossed the rainbow bridge, so it had been awhile since we’d experienced the exuberance that a kitten possesses.

We live in the country, so for the first several months after we got our new cat (who we named Cola because her color is the same as the beverage), she stayed in the house. Coyotes and other vermin are plentiful in our neck ...