Mildred Ann Bonnette Cullen, my mother, has been the subject of a few stories since I began talking to myself in the newspaper. Mildred was a comedian and a wild child. I knew her comedy act from daily observance. My grandmother, aunts and uncles had their favorite stories about my mother’s free spirit. She … Continue reading →

You have a few more hours in April, which is Poetry Month, to buy a poet a meal or a rhyming app or new sandals. The observance runs through Monday. All poets aren’t poor. Billy Collins’ collections sell, and he’s big on the poetry reading circuit. The former poet laureate of the United States … Continue reading →

As though responding to a cosmic Tweet, Baton Rouge put on its summer face the other day. It’s hard for newcomers to Baton Rouge to know when late winter has become spring and spring summer. People who rely on seasons to tell them where they are in a year trust calendars printed in Wisconsin. Continue reading →

The water oak stood in the corner of the yard the day we bought our house almost 40 years ago. We had the tree removed the other afternoon. I got home from work to find a stump the size and shape of a kitchen table. The water oak, Quercas nigra, is the most … Continue reading →

After a week on the vacation couch reading the short stories of Charles Baxter, I discover that I can’t stop turning the mundane into short fiction. Because I am under the influence of Baxter, my short stories of the mind end in just-so, nicely crafted denouement. “Where’s the passion, Baxter?” I say, rising from the … Continue reading →

Fourth grade was the year we got our Esterbrook fountain pens. There were other highlights in a primary and high school education, but getting your Esterbrook was a coming-of-age event. What I really wanted to do was take the pen apart to see how it worked, but that was discouraged. Receipt of our … Continue reading →

Tuesday is the first day of spring. We may relax our vigil against pipe-bursting cold. The other afternoon, after not putting away the sweaters that didn’t get worn, I paused to reflect on snowy lawns that happened elsewhere, mornings of not seeing children huddled at bus stops or letter carriers weighed down by catalogs for winter … Continue reading →

Peering through the bedroom window as winter rain pelted leaves in the front yard, I thought, “Soon I can mow.” Mowing the grass makes me happy. I’m careful to say mowing “the grass.” To call the green spaces around my house “lawn” would be a stretch. … Continue reading →

I am at that time in life when funerals come in bunches. Funerals are great reminders of what’s important and what is not. The occasion for the most recent church gathering was a memorial service for the mother of a friend. I’d met the mother once long ago. There was a small gathering … Continue reading →

To air pollution warnings, the heat index, wind chill factor and terrorism threat advisories, could we add the National Anger Gauge? We could allocate a few seconds to the NAG on the 6 o’clock news. “Dave, we had a really high NAG today which goes right along with the seven shootings city police reported. Can … Continue reading →

Tiny, green lettuce seedlings against dark earth greeted me one cold, dark morning. Early morning usually finds me at the garden, especially if I’ve put seed in the ground in recent days. There are no irritating headlines in a garden, just what morning finds. There’s dew on the leaves and a few more holes made by … Continue reading →

It is hard to explain the world to a friend and former neighbor who has Alzheimer’s. She’ll be with us for Christmas lunch so I made the lights on the tree stop blinking. Better that than trying to explain why lights blink. There was a time early in our friend’s illness that I would … Continue reading →

Our best Christmases are those few in which we have no idea what awaits us in the living room. Even before “clothes” replaced electric trains, Erector sets and English racer bicycles, I knew how big a part anticipation played in Christmas. The religious part of Christmas eluded me. It was too pat, too convenient, too … Continue reading →

The cardinal outside the kitchen window these cold, rainy mornings is too corny for a holiday card. The bird’s bright red feathers against the dark branches and green leaves of a sweet olive tree lift my spirits against the gray sky. A cup of coffee takes me the rest of the way. Our grandson, … Continue reading →

I awoke the morning after Thanksgiving to the parallel universe inside the radio beside the bed. It gets increasingly harder to recognize the world wrapped in darkness around the yew tree outside the bedroom window. That is to say the world that makes the news that leaks from the radio before daylight. Probably, I shouldn’t start … Continue reading →

Some wonderful friends let me drop in on their place north of St. Francisville whether they are at home or not. We don’t realize how noisy the city is until we get away. There is the sound of traffic, trains, the hum of electricity and the din of machinery that heats and cools our houses. There … Continue reading →

One of the greatest things we may do on faith is to plant a garden and leave it. A two-week vacation afforded the chance to sow seed far from home and see the seed germinate before I moved on. Sugar snaps are quick to germinate, but the ones I put in the ground at Toledo … Continue reading →

A recent trip to Austin leaves me feeling that anyone who confuses Baton Rouge with Texas’ capital city has never been to Austin. There may have been a time in the early 1970s when the two cities might have been compared. Each is its state’s capital city. Each has the state’s university in or near … Continue reading →

Reading “Everyday Things — Garden Tools” (Abbeville Press) and lingering over the photographs, it’s easy to see how tool sheds were once little architectural marvels, structural reflections of the manor houses served by the gardeners and their tools. The out-of-print book was sent to me before the Southern Garden Symposium where one of the authors, … Continue reading →

My favorite political columnists are the ones whose essays surprise me. I read George Will because you can’t always tell where he’s going from the first paragraph. Most columnists, you read the first paragraph and the last, and you’ve got the gist. With Will, you never know. When George Bush was president, some of Will’s … Continue reading →

This time of year, I begin the bicycle journey I’ve yet to take. Driving to St. Francisville a couple of weeks ago, I paid careful attention to the shoulders along U.S. 61, one of those rare Louisiana roadways wide enough, smooth enough and free enough of broken glass, lumber and pieces of metal to ride … Continue reading →

Lying in bed the other morning listening to the first of many eulogies for Steve Jobs on the radio, I felt something I haven’t felt in a while. Proud to be an American. Like being proud of my country, pride in the accomplishments of my countrymen was once something that came so easily I didn’t give … Continue reading →

A terribly young Bob Edwards stands in front of a building in Washington, D.C., where he’d landed a job with a young radio network called National Public Radio. The photo of Edwards is in his new book, “A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio.” The other night, as a truly impressive … Continue reading →

The hot, wet summer broken by the Biblical rains of Labor Day weekend may have ushered in fall, but the change in weather hasn’t exactly energized me. Oh, I like the daytime temps in the 80s, dipping into the 50s at night. Even the fish in the fountain beside the front door have noticed the arrival of … Continue reading →

In the central and north Louisiana Septembers of my childhood and first college years, there was always the illusion of fall. Northwestern State College in Natchitoches, where I spent three semesters, was a lovely hilly campus. The leaves turned the colors of trees on calendars. We walked from dorms to classes through crisp, dry air. The … Continue reading →

Living in Louisiana keeps me humble. Brag about my native state and some blowhard’s bound to bring up the litter thing. Florida does a better job of marketing than we do, and their beaches are more inviting to people who MUST have pretty sand. I’ll take a darker beach if it means fewer people, as long … Continue reading →

Looking for two movies, I found two good books I might have otherwise never read. The movies, made from the books “Oil for the Lamps of China” and “The Riddle of the Sands,” have eluded me, but the books, same titles as the movies, are ones you might want to tuck into a knapsack as you head … Continue reading →

Minutes after my first cup of coffee, men on four-wheelers went zipping along the beach west of Gulf Shores, Ala. They were followed by other men on four-wheelers and a man on a John Deere tractor pulling one of those high-impact plastic outhouses on a trailer. Remember, pre-BP, when people took only blankets, ice chests, fishing rods … Continue reading →

My grandson had an agenda for our week at the beach, which explained why I was sitting in a bowling alley one weekday morning at 10:30. The day would include arcade games. Arcade games are high on my grandson’s list. The trick is to arrange bowling, pool, miniature golf, movies and go-karts around the … Continue reading →

Library patrons’ holds placed on the movie “Friday Night Lights” suggest the wrap-up of the television series interested a lot of people in the movie based on the book of the same name. Season Five, the final season of the television series, is already in the parish library on DVD. That’s because the series started on NBC, … Continue reading →

Most of us have grown so dependent on the Internet, cellphones and smart phones that their use borders on addiction. Americans do that. We don’t embrace anything with reservation. Any gathering of two or more people for lunch has its own IT department, someone with a smart phone ready to google should the conversation hang up … Continue reading →

She helped invent the modern woman Our daughter told my favorite story about her grandmother at the funeral last week for my 104-year-old mother-in-law. The story said a lot about Polly Colvin, a woman born in a small north Louisiana town before World War I, who remembered the first car and first airplane she … Continue reading →

As the dog star Sirius rises with the sun, we denizens of the Deep South settle into midsummer’s time of no time. Hikers circle University and City Park lakes with packs on their backs and new boots on their feet. With trekking poles in either hand, they look like mutant water bugs. The weather warms and … Continue reading →

A small boy carrying a skateboard under one arm gave me a summer salute of a wave and a smile. He said something, but his words were swallowed by the sound of traffic on Perkins Road and the thunder of interstate traffic overhead. The boy was heading for the pavement beneath the interstate near Perkins’ intersection … Continue reading →