Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
Thank You, Bewildering Stories
The nice people at BewilderingStories.com have included my story “One Last Chance” in their 2015 Third Quarterly Review. It’s included in the “Order of the Hot Potato” which I consider an honor and means discussions are welcome. http://www.bewilderingstories.com/anthol…/625-636_antho.html
How I Started Running
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
A Poem About Aging
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
From the Teaching Front Lines
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
Happy Birthday to Airmail
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
My Super Bowl
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!
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.)
Happy Labor Day!
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
The Origin of Honeymoons
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
Feed the Birds — A Poem
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