Writer | Journalist | Storyteller
It’s Saturday morning and I’ve come downstairs to find my wife Jane sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading a magazine. I’ve been upstairs showering, dressing, and generally trying to decide how I want to waste my time today. That’s what Jane calls it. Wasting time. I’m okay with that. I don’t have a problem wasting time. In fact, a large part of my days off are spent contemplating how to waste as much of it as possible. I’m good at it. Jane does...
Up until quite recently, my entire tool collection consisted of a few mismatched screwdrivers, a circular saw my mother gave me, a power drill my wife bought me, and various tools we had given Ricky, my seven year-old step-son, for Christmas. Ricky’s tools weren’t even toys, they were real and I had actually chosen them with the idea that I might someday need to borrow them. The old bowling-ball-bag-gift theory. They included a hammer, a tape measure, and a little patch of...
“We’re going to the dump,” Jane announced. I was lying on the sofa of a cabin in the Adirondacks. We were on vacation and I had purposely traveled thousands of miles away from home just so I wouldn’t have to do anything remotely like work. This sounded like work. I looked up at her and asked, “Why are we going to the dump?” “To see the bears,” she said. They called it “the Camp.” After seeing it for the first time, I had visions of Merryl Streep and Robert Redford in East Africa...
Originally published in New Jersey Monthly Along the shores of Tuscany grow wild, salty shrubs that sailors, long ago, claimed to be able to smell long before they could actually see land. It was this distant scent that alerted them that home was near. Although I have never spent time at sea, I can appreciate the sailors’ reaction. I too live on the shores of the ocean and associate home with its scent. I live along the tidal marshes of southern New Jersey in the village of Goshen...
Jane wanted chickens. Live ones. “Four of them,” she told me matter-of-factly. She thought about it some more then said, “No six. Yes, six. And red.” “Six red chickens,” I repeated, not looking up. We were having lunch outside, as it was an unseasonably warm day. I was trying to decide what I wanted to eat knowing full well that I would order the same thing I always did. I like to think that I want something new; that...
They found him there the next morning, passed out cold. It was clear what had happened, as the evidence lay strewn all about him on the front lawn of the Baker Lake Resort. So when Lisa Broxson, bookkeeper for the Baker Lake, Washington resort arrived in the morning for work, she did what you’d expect any normal person to do, she called Sgt. Bill Heinck, the local Fish and Wildlife Agent. It seems the culprit, a brown bear, had gotten into a camper’s cooler and had used its teeth and claws to...
In a stunning new development, in what has been a month of developments, a third elf has come forward to accuse Santa Claus of sexual harassment and retaliatory behavior. The yet unidentified elf has come forward with claims that Mr. Claus made unwanted sexual advances while they were flying over the Horn of Africa sometime on Christmas Eve in 2011. It was not clear whether the elf involved was male or female, or really whether or not there is such a thing. The elf went public this week, after...
Dear Men: We have recently concluded an exhaustive study, including numerous discussions with persons of the female gender, and have determined that the once hopeful program, “Digital Genitalia Distribution in Order to Influence and Entice Women” through the act of sending pictures of your penis via digital means, has not only been unsuccessful, it has actually been a determent to our goal of attracting women in general. Among the top respondents of the survey were the following:...
I’ve been a lot of thinking lately about a certain corned beef sandwich, preferably grilled with butter, on a nice sturdy rye, with mustard and melted swiss. There’s a perfect pickle there as well. It’s a fantasy that is currently knocking about in my head. I’m on day six of what is a planned two week fast. I say planned because with these kind of things, it’s like the people in the rooms say, “You have to take it one day at a time.” I recognize the truth in this statement. I can’t think about...
When my stepson was very small, he liked to talk about things that he had experienced, sometimes as recently as a week before or even a few days. It’s not like he could remember very far back. He didn’t have years worth of memories. It was more like weeks or months. A few weeks was a lifetime to him. He would say, “Remember that time when we went to the beach, with you and mommy?” “Yes,” I’d say. It had been just the previous weekend. “That was fun,” he would say and smile. He just wanted to...
Writer | Journalist | Storyteller
