Keeping a Course with Grand Surroundings
“May 28th [1929] The Grand Canyon. We arrived this morning after a pleasant run through national forest over paved highway. We made camp and had dinner before we set out to look at the canyon. There it was: beautiful, majestic, sublime – but somehow I missed the thrill of that first look 14 years ago.…
Magic Hat/Old Hat…
I visit in April 2012 with a couple of friends. All of us in our second year of AmeriCorps. We make the trip to this regional craft brewery. Like lots of Burlington, it is odd and kitschy, deliberately leaning into depicting edginess. I had been involved in the generation of post- Great Recession Craft Brewery…
The Mall of America & The Alamo
I visit the Mall of America in 2003, a side trip for my 17 year old self while attending the General Synod 24. The Mall of America opened in 1992, distinguished as the largest mall in the world. If this is any evidence of the crest of mall culture in the United States, I am…
A Knight-errant, The Dark Lord & The Indiana Dunes…
The Great Recession coincided with earning my Master’s degree and my teaching licenses. The market for teachers was not only flooded with new graduates but teachers taking early retirement packages who kept their established feet-in-the-doors and were first calls on substitute teaching lists. Disheartening to graduate, to feel so prepared, only to apply that knowledge to…
Multnomah Falls and Dive Bars
We went to Oregon together. Along our sweaty summer trip she wanted to visit Multnomah Falls, a site under the National Forest Service and part of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. A site of her young adulthood and college years. A location of sentimental sense of place and memory. We drive. The traffic…
Pittsburgh Sandwich, Squirrel Gravy and Sammich Spread Sammiches….
My maternal grandmother, “Grandma,” was an active part of my early childhood. A Depression Era member of The Greatest Generation, she’d take me to school parks in her tidy beige Honda that carried a faint, layered scent of cigarette smoke. At the house she’d offer choices for lunch: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a…
Stadiums as Monuments and Memory
Even at twelve, I didn’t carry any memories of MacArthur Stadium. I do remember my parents expressions of disappointment. P&C Stadium replaced MacArthur Stadium in 1997. Looking back, this was probably serendipitous connective synapses of my developmental awareness combined with the moment in time when I realized my parents could be disappointed in things. Even…
How sports have fit into my life…
There are plenty of better crafted, personal experiences of un-athleticism. This isn’t going to be a confession of a young sports-related trauma that changed my trajectory. I have such stories, but comics Marc Maron (Thinky Pain: ‘Little League Psychodrama’) and Kyle Kinane (This Is Not Happening: ‘When Baseball Turns Disastrous’) tell better ones. This isn’t…
How I learned to talk sports…
Somewhere there is a photograph of my ten year old self posing in a version of a Toronto Blue Jays uniform with my family at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Even my ten-year-old self had a reason for requesting that uniform… The marginal utility rate of sports fandom appeared early to me. The right doses…
Hooters still Exists.
While I’ve written about memories of uneduring art, the intricate inadequacies of artifacts to represent an amalgamation of experience, emotional investment required for a moment that may not endure… Hooters still exists. When I was a freshman in high school a defining memory of acceptance and camaraderie was being invited by the older guys on…
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Things and Stuff 