A Country Boy Can Surmise

I grew up surrounded by older people, and I stuck as close to them as I could.  I hid beneath kitchen tables, porches, and quilting racks so I could eavesdrop on their juiciest stories.  But I also piled into cars with them when they went to town and told stories about each house we passed, sat in John boats with them while they fished and gave tips on the best way to reel in a bluegill, walked the hills with them while they announced the names of trees and plants and tuned their ears to birdcalls so they could identify their songs.  Most of all, I listened to their stories.  Stories about hard times, old times.  Stories about ways of life that were gone with the wind.  But within those tales there was always something to apply to the right here and now.  There was always wisdom weaving itself in and out and around their words. We don't mix generationally enough any more.  The young stay with the young, the old with the old.  And something ...

A couple of years ago, I was asked to give the homily for Evensong at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Paris, Kentucky. I count it among my greatest honors to have been invited by my friend, The Reverend Donavan Cain to give this talk and am glad to share it with you here today. Drawing In the Dirt In one of my favorite novels, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, her lead character, Ames, writes the following: “For me writing has always felt like praying…you feel you are with someone.” I have never identified more with a line in a piece of literature, for writing has always been my strongest connection to God. Art has been my salvation. Truly, writing saved me. I had a profound relationship with God from a very early age. On more than one occasion I was convinced that God was speaking to me. One time I remember very clearly: I was in my back yard, playing on my metal swing-set by myself. I spent lots of time alone, by choice, and ...

Good dogs are everything that humans hope to be, but never have quite achieved yet.   When I think back on all my good dogs I had when I was a boy, I can't help getting a little bit sad. There was Arky, a little obese weiner dog my aunt in Arkansas gave me.  He thought he was a big, ferocious dog, and would bare his teeth to anyone who threatened me.  He sat right beside me when I propped my back against a tree to read a summer afternoon away.  There was Fala, a white spitz I named after FDR and Eleanor's trusty dog.  Every day Fala trotted out to Hoskins' Grocery where my bus let me off. Everyone on the school bus crowded to one side so they could see him sitting there patiently awaiting my arrival.  When the bus screeched to a halt there he'd wag his tail--three thumps on the ground behind him--then jump up to walk home with me.   Those were the two I had the longest, although there were others along the way.  I miss them every single one.   And now I have other dogs,...

I love books.   I love reading them, but there is even more than that.             Touch. I love how cool the pages are when you first open them in the mornings.   Or how warm the pages are if you’ve left it out in the car for awhile in the summer, like something baked the exact right length of time.   The endpapers and the spine and the little letters that are sometimes imbedded in the cloth, a kind of Braille for book-lovers.               Smell.   The new ones: people talk about a new-car scent all the time, but what I love even more is a new-book scent.   They should make little deodorizers of that aroma to go under one’s car seats.   And the old ones:   they smell like history, and rain, and the skin of all the people who loved them before, and every room wherein they lived.               See.    Yes, of course we see them when we read them, but I love seeing them on the bookshelves, too.   Or lying about, covering every available surface, stacked on the stairs, on the night...

Holiness shows itself when you are not watching for it. Sunday, the Sabbath, the holiest day of seven holy days, I was in a car with several of my closest friends and my two daughters. Members of my given and chosen family. We had been to the top of the mountain to look out at three states. There, there, and there, we said. “Look at Kentucky, it’s the prettiest,” one of us said, laughing. “No, Virginia is,” said another. “On a clear day you can see North Carolina,” somebody else said, “and none of them can beat it.” Each state was completely the same from up there. Each state was completely different from up there. Each endless and green and lush with more mountains, rolling on and on and on, for ages. We spent a long while up at the pinnacle, talking, climbing rocks, studying trees. There were long bouts of silence. Family—especially the chosen kind—allows that between one another. Then, coming down the mountain, there was a box turtle in the road. We had all been laughing...

                                       Beauty survives, no matter what.             My grandmother has Alzheimer’s.   This evening, she didn’t recognize anyone but me, and then, five minutes after she knew me completely and totally, she was looking at me as if I were a stranger.   She was studying me and she wouldn’t admit it, but she had forgotten who I was, too.   She didn’t remember anything.               At one point she asked her age.   My aunt, Sis, told her she was eighty-two.             “What month was I born?”               “March, honey,” Sis said.               “Yeah, I was.  It was March,”   Mamaw laughed.   She closed her eyes and laughed like music, like a tinking piano.   “They used to call me Windy Wanda, because I was born in March and I never hushed talking.”             “Yeah, they did,” Sis said.   “I had plumb forgot that.”               Mamaw was lying in bed with the covers pulled up to her neck even though the pulsating heat of a late evening in...

When describing a particularly beautiful green eye we are tempted to come up with some kind of smooth simile, like "green as river water" or "green as a redbud leaf" (both of which I've used in my novels to describe green eyes).  But the fact is that there is nothing to compare to the beauty of a green eye because it is the perfection of green, a kind of green that transcends even the most brilliant things in the world such as rivers and leaves.   

What makes summertime the most magical and sets it apart the most from the other seasons is that every single day we are somehow aware of its passing.   Every blessed day we have knowledge of the summer slipping away and whether we know it or not our bodies are filled with some strange mix of hope and dread for what lies ahead.   As much as I love all the seasons there's something about summer that moves me to the core.   I think it’s the way the mist slithers over the mountains like breath, as it did this morning.   Or maybe it's having the company of cicadas—I am comforted by them every night as they remind me that someone else, something else, is there.   Or fried green tomatoes.  Or the freedom of swimming.  It's hearing the nostalgic bounce of the basketball where the boys are playing down the road.  The beauty of seeing people tap their fingers on the steering wheel to a loud radio while their arms are propped up on their open car windows.    P erhaps it’s the way the...

This is a story I've told many times before: Writer James Still , the author of classics like River of Earth and The Wolfpen Poems , was in his early 90s when I, a boy in my mid-twenties who didn't know anything about anything, asked him a naive and earnest question:  "How can I become a better writer?"  Mr. Still thought about it for a long time, then looked just past me with his haunting eyes.  "Discover something new everyday," he said.   I've made a conscious effort to try and do that ever since, and it's an exercise that has changed my life.   So, with that in mind, I'm going to try my best to post a new discovering here everyday for the next month.  If I'm able to do it, I might try for another month, and another.  I'm not always near a computer so if that's the case then I might miss a day or two.  I'm not going to devote myself to it so much that it kills my own writing day, and I'm not going to let it take over my li...

I never understand people who say “There’s just no good music these days.” Obviously they’re not looking in the right place, because there is a wealth of great music. The thing is that the vast majority of it is not being played on the radio, and certainly not on any of the cable music channels like MTV, VH1, or CMT. My college roommate, with whom I have stayed in touch although we hardly ever see each other any more, was telling me the other day that he still listens to Nirvana, U2, and Pearl Jam all the time mainly because he hasn’t grown—musically, at least—since we left college way back in the Gulf War era. Now there’s not a thing wrong with any of those groups, but I quickly went about the business of educating him that there was another way, that there was too much great music out there, just waiting for a listen. In my job as a writer, I travel all over the country, and everywhere I go people ask me things like who my favorite author is (too many to pick, but right now I’d have ...