“How many?”
If I heard that once Sunday night, I heard it 278 times.
We were coming home from Granny’s and Papaw’s, just the two of us, my eldest and I. It took me a few times, 50 or so, to catch on that he was pretending to lick the cars headed West Virginia way on Interstate 77.

Even though March 21 was a chilly overcast day in our neck of the woods, undoubtedly many die-hard gardeners had their gardens plowed and ready for planting their seed potatoes.

My eldest son required that I deliver the present, a mostly rotted orange that had somehow escaped the Christmas box and had been ravaged by the frozen and unfrozen days between then and now, last night. In fact, the orange would now be more aptly named a dishwater gray, except that no one would ever want to quarter and savor a dishwater gray. 

childhood song encouraged us to “make new friends but keep the old; some are silver, the other gold.” These words still ring true yet have become more challenging in today’s mobile society. People enter and exit our lives similar to moving slowly through a revolving door since the average American moves 11 times in his lifetime.

Piney had just had that most hated of experiences.  He woke up to a terrible jaw-ache in the environs of Tooth # 22 and had to get She Who Must Be Obeyed, who had a day off from her job grading papers, to go with him in search of a dentist, an unknown one, as Piney’s dentist, Dr. Wilson, was in far-off Wytheville as were Neal Hollyfield and other dental people of his friendship.

Whenever I think of a mentor, Rhonda Simmerman has always ranked at the top of my list.  She was my junior year English instructor at George Wythe High School, and I learned many things from her that I have considered to be key factors in my current skills as a writer.  Aside from other things she taught me scholastically, she was always a great source of support to me.  As a student and as a writer, I never felt more comfortable or free to express myself through my work than I did in her class.  All of the essays that she ever assigned were done so in a way that left the student with a practically free range of topics.  As a result, her writing assignments were usually refreshing for me to complete, as I was always someone who had plenty to say through writing. 

Attention all law-abiding Virginians. Stop it. The state needs you to commit yourself to committing crime, preferably violent crime. If you don’t, prison beds here and prison beds to come in 2010, might have to be filled by more imported lawbreakers, or, worse, in the mind of the Department of Corrections, the state might have to scale back plans for prisons and close some of the ones that were built in the binge that promised to put a house of incarceration in every Southwest Virginia boy’s and girl’s backyard.

In an uncertain changing world, death and taxes are supposedly the only two sure things. Even with rebates scheduled to arrive in the mail by early May, many of us still grumble about taxes and those complicated federal and state income tax forms. A definite value added benefit of our state tax payments is the Virginia Department of Health.

Front-row seats are prized and usually allotted according to higher prices at concerts and sporting events. Yet there’s one front row seat we dread and hope to never fill.

Editor’s Note: If you are a member of PETA, you will find numerous offenses in the following. Do us both a favor and refuse, with the usual righteous indignation, of course, to read one word more. If you don’t refuse and find those aforementioned numerous offenses, please DO NOT fill my e-mail box with messages explaining the errors of my ways. It will only make me dislike you on a very personal level as I can assure you that no amount of data, persuasive language or haranguing could ever make me see the many errors of my ways. Also, if you are married to me, you might want to stop reading now and wait for a column that doesn’t include you as a main character.