My mother used to have a saying, “Don’t count it a day lost when you learn something new”  and she especially liked, “learn a new word.”  She was big on vocabulary.

I’ve modified this treasured maternal maxim to include any number of lesser, albeit, practical goals to further edify my life. For example, “don’t count it a day lost when you can talk a cop out of a speeding ticket” or “don’t count it a day lost when you can dodge every call from a bill collector.” And the most…

I hear the low rumble of trucks on the freeway from my porch, back home from my 8,600 mile odyssey. What just last night felt like a predator, the rattle and whirr of tractor trailer rigs, crowding me closer, closer and closer with each mile nearer home, now seems a seductress calling from a distance.

http://youtu.be/NIWM7L7moJI

It’s like a pack of cigarettes in the dresser drawer, a bottle of booze in the cupboard, it is…

Imagine you're in a low rent Royal Inn Motel in Waynesboro, Virginia, alone, having been on the road for two weeks on a once-in-lifetime, going-for-broke road trip with your 86-pound mutt, in which you're writing a book about your journey. You're hyperventilating, laying on the bed, worried sick that…

The sign in front of the Standard Artificial Limbs store always makes me think of my step-dad, Mike. On the day he died at the VA hospital in Albuquerque, after my mother and I summoned the rest of the family to tell them he’d passed, once everybody took turns patting him on his rapid cooling forehead, we all…