I appreciate graceful language where I find it, but for a people wielding history’s most acquisitive linguistic hegemony, we’ve hidden it well. English suffers from its economic superiority. Victors are precise, even eloquent in the description of conquests past, but the beautiful human anguish dries up and falls away from a people too well-heeled, too … [more]
Pit Stop
30-May-2012 by 15 Comments
This is who he was… He became a friend to me within a week after we moved into the decaying edifice across from his house. He was a journeyman carpenter; proud of his work, but humble about his life. He would tell me which tools I needed – then loan them to me. He didn’t … [more]
Dear Snotty Kid…
12-February-2012 by 2 Comments
I didn’t ask whether you opened the door. I told you to close it. I don’t care if they’re your favorite pants. I care whether they cover your butt. That’s what pants are for, actually. It doesn’t matter if your homework is stupid. It matters that you do it. If you’re not hungry enough to … [more]
Real Americans
17-January-2012 by 3 Comments
Real Americans don’t beat each other down. We help each other up. If someone else needs a beatdown, real Americans stand ready to administer it — and then offer the same hand up that we offer each other. Real Americans don’t break up American companies for a living and call ourselves “job creators.” We found … [more]
“G-D Was Busy”
13-January-2012 by 8 Comments
Here’s a parable that confuses me a bit. You can find it all over the place, not just on Christian web sites and socially conservative blogs but sprinkled around Facebook and MySpace and really, wherever glib ideations go to spawn. It goes like this: A United States Marine was attending some college courses between assignments. … [more]
Tea Toddler (a recipe)
22-November-2011 by 1 Comment
A recipe for overcoming your seasonal affective disorderly phlegmatism with winter warmth, far more efficacious than the poisonous blear of Nyquil et al: Boil water. If it works for childbirth, it damn well ought to work for the common cold. Drop in a clutch of teabags and let it steep while you assemble the active … [more]
The doggie loves me…
11-November-2011 by 5 Comments
… or he wouldn’t have gone. Tucker hates riding in the car. It takes him a mile or two just to stop shaking like a meth-sizzled Chihuahua, then he settles into whistling and drooling his discontent with motorized transport. Stands to reason, I suppose. His first experience of automobiles was getting stuffed into the back … [more]
A few of my personal veterans
11-November-2011 by 8 Comments
Thanks, Dad. Thank you for ferrying those air-sea rescue birds back from Da Nang, for rescuing that family in Alaska, and for letting me wear your retired F86 helmet — that rubber-faced sorting hat of dreams — when I was four years old. Thank you, Paul, my other dad. Thank you for exemplifying quiet professionalism, … [more]
"Jack Lewis takes the overall literary crown with his new book...there’s a lot more to Lewis’s work than what it feels like to ride motorcycles.” — Ultimate Motorcycling
"Insightful and from the heart ... a driven and much recommended look into the mind and conflict of the next generation of war veterans. " — Midwest Book Review (Reviewer's Choice)