You are a fifth-grade girl who comes home from school to find a doll on your front porch. The doll looks like you, is dressed like you, and there is something about the eyes. Who left it? Why is it here? And what makes this doll so special?
Jim Jenkins is an ace detective who solves the most difficult crimes. Yet he always works alone. Or does he?
Learning how to wiggle your ears is really hard. But you can do it if you keep trying. And if you learn to keep trying, no problem is too big. So if you can wiggle your ears, you can do anything!
I have written several times about the sport of running and my relationship to it. Today I ran the Air Force Half Marathon at Wright-Patterson AFB for the fourth time, so I decided to reprint a piece on how I started running that I wrote for the Disneyana Fan Club’s Disneyana Dispatch Newsletter. This
Here is a poem from my book Some Poems About Life. This is actually the first poem I wrote. It started out as a essay, but then I decided to put it into verse. My Greatest Enemy I am being chased, in a relentless way. There is no escape, despite what I say. I
I haven’t been substitute teaching as much this year, usually a day or two a week, but I still enjoy it. Of course, some days are more rewarding than others. Today, for example, I was working with special-needs students. These jobs are always interesting. I can remember when I was studying to be a teacher and
As an Air Force veteran, I always like to keep up on aviation milestones, and September 8, 1920, was when transcontinental airmail service began. From The Writer’s Almanac: The Wright Brothers had made their first flight in 1903, but it took a while for them to convince the U.S. government that airplanes were a technology worth
I have always been reasonably athletic, but in kind of an awkward way. I could make teams, and usually play, but I was never good enough to get any real recognition. Then I found a sport which seems to fit my personality — running. It’s honest — you get out exactly what you put in, and
LIGHTNING STRIKES AGAIN! The nice folks at Bewildering Stories have again published something I wrote. “One Last Chance” — A man falls in love with a woman, but she doesn’t return his affection. Then he learns she is desperately ill. http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue635/last_chance.html (I had to rewrite this three times before they’d accept it.)
Tomorrow we celebrate Labor Day. This is a holiday with a generic sound, unlike Memorial Day, or President’s Day, where the purpose is clearer from the title. So how did we get here? Labor Day was actually first celebrated on September 5th, 1882 in New York City. According to The Writer’s Almanac — “Organizers were
I was perusing my copy of An Uncommon History of Common Things and I stumbled upon the entry for honeymoons. As usual for these topics, it has quite a history. The term goes back to 1546, when “getting away from it all” had an entirely different connotation. In ancient Norse, a hjunottsmanathr was when a
Walt [Disney] assigned Robert and Richard Sherman to write the songs for Mary Poppins. They returned in two weeks with sketchy versions of five songs that could fit into the script, including “Feed the Birds” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Walt liked them, especially “Feed the Birds.” “That song’ll replace Brahams’ Lullaby,” he declared, and he cried every
What is that Chinese curse about “May you live in interesting times”? It does take time to establish yourself in a new field, especially something like writing. You think you have a good idea; the problem is getting the rest of the world to agree with you. It takes time and a lot of work.
