Thinking in Peaces

This is the town...  That wanders a river... That "boasts" a bridge...  That carried a movement... That changed a country... You likely know about Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettis bridge. March 7, 1965. The day 600 marchers left the Brown Chapel AME church in Selma, Alabama and walked, by twos, six blocks to the middle of the road bridge stretching across a wide swath of the Alabama River. You probably know a 25-year old John Lewis was at the front of the line of marchers who set out to walk 54-miles of rural highway to the steps of Alabama's capitol building where demonstrators hoped to meet with then-Governor George Wallace to talk about voting rights for Black Americans.  You surely know the group was met by a force of law enforcement that stopped the march in its tracks with billy clubs, dogs, and tear gas. 17 people were hospitalized that day. Almost 60 were injured - beaten back by police the entire 6 blocks from whence they came. Yep. The whole six blocks. ...

It's been a week of realizing our grief, hasn't it? Recounting the days before and after. Telling the stories that begin, "Last year at this time." We do this when we lose people we love. I call them the Walking-Through-Jello days of grieving that include the phrases, "Last week at this time..." and "Last month I was..." and "Remember their birthday last year?" These days are followed by the still-grieving conversations that gather around the words, "A year ago we..."  Many - so, so many - have lost people they love to COVID-19 over the last 12 months. 526,815 families in the United States have buried at least one person who was not supposed to be taken away by a virus. That's an average of 1,443 deaths a day for 365 days.  2.6 million families across the globe have done the same.  45,837 families here in my home state of Texas have said unexpected goodbyes - 124 of them today.  The rest of us have simply lost days and month...

We had dinner last night with our friend who devoted months of his life a decade and a half ago to balancing a career he was called to and a passion he could not resist. The first was a job with the State of Texas, the second - everything Alamo. The San Antonio native let his facial hair go wild, his boots go muddy, and his family go husbandless/fatherless during weekends and evenings, all to play the role of Extra #57 in the 2004 movie you've probably seen at least once - The Alamo . It was something from his bucket list.  Friends - you have now met a true Texan. He is not a crazy person. We have other people in our lives who used to send "Happy Early Texas Secession Day " greetings to everyone in their address book during the holidays instead of Christmas cards. You know - in case we forgot our streaks of We're-Biggest-and-Best Texan thinking. They are not stupid people. Our favorite native Texas singer-songwriter has a tattoo on his leg - an outline (nothing more ...

Hello new readers/old friends. Thanks for clicking 'round to this 12-year old blog. Take a breath. A good deep one. I was told by a lovely yogi years ago that Americans could turn their worlds upside down if they'd just stop 12 times a day and take a deep breath. Do it. At least take one.   See?  Stop hurrying for a sec. This won't take long. I only want to tell you what happened at my 12th breath today... I unpublished over 400 blog posts from this site. It was in the fidgety, wee, no-sleep hours of the morning. This was my rationale for archiving about 250,000 words at 3 AM (point of reference, the average adult novel is 70K-120K words long, so I ditched 2-3 novels - poof!):   1. It was time. I started writing here in September of 2008, with the express intent of directing people down a path of Hope - right behind Barack Obama. After that was done I was hooked, and found myself sitting at this blank Blogger page every day, believing people enjoyed my musings ...