(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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

I never expected to do most of the things I’ve done in my life. Radio announcer, public relations, healthcare, law enforcement, and working for charities.

You’re supposed to tell The Lord that if he’ll open a door for you, you’ll walk through it. He leads, you follow.

But I haven’t always done that. Most of the jobs I mentioned were ones I sought out.

When you’re young, you think you’re in control. Of everything.

By the time you figure out that you were never ...

He almost didn’t get it. It took him three years to wear the man down, but my dad finally talked him into selling the truck.

It wasn’t a common pickup. It was long and boxy. That likely made it even more desirable to my dad.

The truck was a small Toyota long bed with a four-cylinder engine and an automatic transmission. Many of those models had a stick shift and a six-cylinder.

Think Marty McFly’s tricked out truck in “Back To The Future.”

The ...

My mom turned off her landline.

For 50 years, my parents had the same number.

898-2446.

Now, it’s gone.

“Mom, did you get rid of the landline?” I asked.

“Yes, they wanted an extra $38 a month to keep it. I don’t need it since I have a cell phone,” she answered.

It was a business decision. A simple, not much thought, easy to make, logical business decision.

For me, it was a feeling of loss.

I would never again call the number that thousands of times I ...

I wasn’t sure whose idea Daylight savings time (DST) was, so I looked it up.

Most folks think it was Ben Franklin, but it wasn’t.

It was a New Zealand entomologist named George Hudson. He recommended it in his country long after Ben had left us.

I was hoping that I could hunt George down and ask him to call it off, but I waited too long. He died in 1946.

Good old Mr. Hudson came up with the concept in 1895. But we ...

It wasn’t until we took our seats in the auditorium in Shreveport that it hit me.

We were sitting in the home of the old Louisiana Hayride.

The Hayride was broadcast from the Municipal Auditorium on radio station KWKH from the 1940s until the early 1960s.

Many artists performed at the Hayride as a means of getting noticed by WSM Radio in Nashville – home of The Grand Ole Opry.

Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jim Reeves, Johnny Horton, and hundreds of others ...

I’m not sure when they started charging for air at gas stations, but I firmly believe that collusion was involved.

When the local filling station was owned by a local family, you were never charged to fill up a low tire, or for that matter, water for the radiator or most anything else besides the gasoline.

And you didn’t even have to buy gasoline to get free air and water. If the service station attendant saw that you were in trouble and ...