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Burl Ives can sing his little heart out about having a merry-little Christmas this year but how merry can it be with Covid-19 dictating the way we live and what we do. Never been a Christmas like this one. After struggling through an awfully hard year, many Americans are just now discovering that this Pandemic is affecting them in another personal way. Tens of thousands of survivors have severely damaged lungs and will never recover to their old healthy ways. Sadder still are the thousands who had loved ones die. In many cases they died and were buried without funerals. Such is our state of fear.
Read moreThanksgiving is a kickoff date for the holiday season. So much to be thankful for. God and country and pure clean cold water as near as our tap. Back in 1964 I moved to Allen. I had checked the town out fairly good, I thought. I even asked about the town’s water. “Lots of it, and it is cheap,” came the Chamber of Commerce reply. However, right after we moved from Ada customers down at the Pharmacy started bringing us empty 1-gallon jugs. “To haul water from the springs,” they told us. “You’ll need these jugs.”
Read moreI was listening to a preacher recently and he spoke on what we perceive as news and what someone else sees as less important. He used as an example, a news date from September 5, 1997. Princess Diana Spencer had been killed in a car wreck in Paris, France a few days before. And now it was her funeral day and CNN was doing a real bang up job covering every little aspect of it. They showed the London skyline, the sound of famous bells tolling and snippets of her eulogies by all sorts of famous people. They showed little girls crying and in tears and explained to the viewing audience on that September day how griefstricken the whole world was over this tragic event.
Read moreAnd so there is. In the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes, a famous King and familiar Bible character, King Solomon, wrote a book on philosophy. You can read a lot of different ideas into this book in the Old Testament. But the most familiar thing is that word time. He basically reminds us early in this book that there is a time for all things. Dying and living and everything in between. Last week I wrote a little story about mine and Gerald’s quest as boys to look at where the Butterfield Stage’s Station on Wolf Mountain down in Leflore County, Oklahoma was located. Marshall’s Station was the first stage stop after the stage crossed into Oklahoma—an outlaw infested area.
Read moreMy knowledge of stagecoaches is from watching those old black and white movies of the 40’s. People like Roy Rogers and Hop-along Cassidy saved breathless passengers from the jillions of robbers that hid behind every rock waiting to remove the “strongbox” which nearly always contained a gold shipment. And sometimes they would rob and/or kill the passengers. That was over at The Main Theatre in Stonewall.
Read moreJust how much longer must we wait? And on who? Well, it is coming they tell us. And we might just add: “come soon.”
Read moreThe North wind was about as strong as you can imagine on a bright January day, long ago on a hilltop called Highland Cemetery South of Stonewall. My wife’s Uncle Jack had died the week before and he wanted to be buried there in Stonewall. So here we all were. I had never met or seen this uncle before, but I noted he looked very respectable in his casket dressed in a fine cowboy suit.
Read moreI did fairly good on memory stuff until I got to be about 80. Then I noticed it was hard for me to remember some people’s names. Names of some trees also come to mind. I have an ancient Box Elder tree in my back yard but alas, someone asked me one day what kind of tree it was and that was when I first noticed that its name had left me. Names of old friends—they came and went. But mostly I get by cause if I forget your name down at the post office, relax. It will come to me after I get home. Which brings me to another subject: Computers.
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