More shocking video. More calloused teenagers acting like sociopaths. More excuses. More questions about our society’s future.

“How many?”

“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.

He walked toward the barn with a bulky knapsack on his back and a hiking staff in his hand.  Golden daffodils lit his path.  They contrasted the grayish sky that sent down cold pellets of raindrops.  The hiker seemed not to notice.

As a high school sophomore, a young lady sat in her English class waiting to learn the story of Julius Caesar from her instructor.  Within moments, John Caldwell entered the room dressed in a white sheet and a crown made from a bent coat hanger attached with laurel leaves.  Standing on his desk, he delivered the famous funeral oration as Mark Antony from the Shakespeare play.  It was that moment mixed with many others spent with the eccentric professor that convinced Rhonda Simmerman to pursue a teaching career.  When she achieved the necessary credentials, she knew that English was the only subject for her. 

Carolyn Malin of Max Meadows sent me the quotation by Kierkegaard. This Danish philosopher had exhorted Christians to take an interior leap of faith, rather than passively practice the outer religion encouraged by social custom of his day.

My husband declared that he screamed like an adolescent girl, and being a middle-school teacher he knows something about their vocal range, so I believed him. He’d encountered a snake, not outside mind you, but on the second floor of our home. The long reptile was stretched out across the old plank floor warming itself. Apparently, the snake was equally frightened and disappeared into the cluttered recesses of our attic. 

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. 

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.