Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies

I grew up in a parsonage in Rochester NY.  When it snowed on a Saturday, my brother and I were scrambled to help clear the church sidewalks.  Other local men helped, but Steve and I were expected to remain on duty until the job was done. We knew that double desserts at dinner would likely…

My siblings would probably mention the two trips we took to Nazarene General Assembly, in 1964 and 1968.  Those were month-long odysseys, covering thousands of miles each, but I am going to take a different route, so to speak, with this.  “Big” has many meanings, and one of the things I am trying to do…

This is another hard question, again because I have few memories not washed out by church stuff.  But I don’t really mind that — there are lots of ways ordinary memories can be overborne by really bad experiences, and I don’t have that to recover from, as many do. So, I have the usual Brothers…

“Great” can have many meanings, among which are “memorable” or “threatening.” This trip below was not long, but I’m still talking about it 40 years later. My extended family went down on Christmas Eve 1982 to see the newly unveiled Viet Nam Memorial — me, my brother Stephen, my parents, my grandmother Fertile Myrtle, and…

2006. Scrupulously had I followed my doctor’s advice to get a lot of Vitamin C to ward off more kidney stones, since they first hit in 1982, so when the uncomfortable sensations started early that Thursday morning, I thought, oh boy, this can’t be kidney stones again, but it might be appendicitis. Within 10 minutes…

[This story got into the Washington Post, reader submissions, 2007.] Toys, well. Not for me a sappy reminiscence of a floppy-eared bunny. But I now realize I have not thought much about how many of our playthings were shadows of state-sponsored violence. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, it was hard to avoid that.…

[This story was submitted to and printed by the Washington Post for their “Summer Moments” feature in 2007.] 1964. World War II dominated the imaginations of us boys growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Many of us had fathers and uncles who were not long back from the war theaters, or who hadn’t come…

I If you are family and over the age of 10, you remember Roy Carnahan. I wish I could say I have felt the loss of him these five years more strongly. I see others post Facebook pictures of themselves with their dads on anniversaries, and others who can’t seem to detach when their fathers…

I and wife and child arrived in Mexico City that Thanksgiving afternoon in 1999, to pass an extended weekend with our other child April, who had been working in Puebla and the remote village of Tlancualpicán since that August. Saturday was our second full day there, and we arranged to take a day-long guided tour…

You will hear of my showdown at Georgetown Financial Aid, and I will describe how I once wiped out the math guys in an annual City College contest. Heady those triumphs were, to be sure, but nothing compares to Bible Quizzing. In those days, quizzing was a rage among certain Nazarene youth. Local churches would…