The town of Marion announced earlier this week that it will host the “official musical ambassador for the Tennessee National Guard,” the Air Guard National Band, as the town’s event in celebration of the Song of the Mountains Festival and Smyth County Celebration. 

The annual American Cancer Society Relay for Life fund-raising and awareness event will take place in Marion this weekend. 

The bottle on my desk is blue and white with bold red print. It contains 8 oz. of a mysterious liquid, the ingredients of which I can hardly pronounce much less reprint here. I have never seen a product label exactly like this one. It reads “Wash Away Your Sins Hand Cleanser.”

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.”
--Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), American author, humorist, newsman and raconteur.

At 18, I would never have agreed with Brother Twain. Now that I am far closer to 80 than 18, I agree with him wholeheartedly. Ordinarily, this would be my favorite time of year, late spring, early summer, the time when a young man was just tuning up for a summer full of fun.

Don’t feed the bears.
Sounds easy enough, but apparently not everyone’s getting the message.

When the minister arrived at the nursing home, he found his parishioner sitting alone in her room. “I am worried sick,” the 95-year-old woman explained. Trying to pinpoint the source of her anxiety, her minister began to question the woman.

In the last two weeks, Terry and I had friends pass away. Both were elderly, hers was 82, mine 94. The contrast between the final services for the two was striking. It was also saddening.

Piney and She were amused at a news program on CBS and also on BBC that remodeling was to be done at Trinity Church at Stratford Upon Avon, the church where Shakespeare was buried.

“He’s got the whole world in his hands…” Laurie London first recorded this popular spiritual in 1958; it eventually went all the way to # 1. Simple lyrics coupled with a melodious tune have sustained the music’s popularity through the years. Most of us find it comforting to think that the world and our very lives do not simply spin unfettered in space, but rest firmly in the grasp of the almighty. However, I wonder what the song sounds like in Cantonese. I wonder if they have ever sung it in China. If so, do they still?

I was born in Bristol, Tenn., and spent most of my youth in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia and Western North Carolina. I also lived in several places in the Deep South growing up and, after college, spent five years with my Wytheville-born wife in New York City.