So, here’s the set-up. It’s Friday Night in the small East Texas town of Kountze. And Friday Night means football. It’s fall, 2012. The Kountze Tigers suit up and when the time comes they charge through the opening in the back of a large inflatable football helmet. They are led by a player carrying a flag that reads: “I can do all things through CHRIST who strengthens me. Ph 4:13.” To the cheers of the crowd, of...

I love this picture of my dad at work in his study, hunched over, pounding out another story on his favorite manual, which was heavy enough to serve as a boat anchor for an ocean liner. The desk is too small, the chair is too small and too hard, the sunlight flooding the room is too bright. It’s too hot, but the air condition hasn’t been turned on. A cassette tape boom box is doubtless playing one of his recordings of music off the...

I’ve never been one for birthdays. I understand, of course, why adults make a commotion over marking the passage of time when children are involved. But I’m less clear on why all the bother continues into your twenties and beyond. Congratulations bub, you’re still here! You and seven billion others.  Even so, when I woke the other day on the morning of what would’ve been my mother’s eighty-first birthday, I found myself...

At some point during the aging process, it is said, each individual death becomes every death. You grow older, a relative dies, a friend dies, someone you work with dies, somebody somewhere dies. One way or another, Death is brought to your attention and then, by some alchemical process, confronting that specific instance of mortality triggers memories of every other death: your parents’, their parents’, your aunts’ and...