The waist-high miniature students move as a unit in a line like a snake. From the classroom to the library . . . the cafeteria to the music room . . . the playground back to the classroom, they miraculously slither in single file, mostly not disturbing the temptations they pass along the way. They have been taught how to travel. 

“Assume the position . . .” announces the teacher in a sing-songy voice that floats through the air more like a lyrical invitation than an authoritative order. And in response, fifteen tiny humans interlock their fingers behind their backs in a “buckle” and “blow a bubble” with their cheeks. 

This is the sage’s way of getting four-year-olds from A to B without creating chaos. 

Brilliant, really. 

When summer starts to fade, it does so into the vibrant colors of college football.  Bands begin marching, cheerleaders start dancing, Lee Corso (for the past 38 years anyway) slips on some mascot’s head, and suddenly battle lines are re-defined in permanent marker from Florida to Oregon and all spots in between. Stadiums and the towns who house them percolate. The air feels different, even if the temperature hasn’t changed. 

Such is the enduring power of college football. Little has as much societal adhesive for a throng of people as the colors they are bound by in the fall.

“We have a big family,” he said more than once as he and his teenage son loaded the back of the truck. 

She stood watching, sobbing, though she had offered and was glad to see her dining table go. The eight-foot mahogany classic with beveled edges that gracefully curved at the corners had done all it could do. In her home anyway.  It and its eight matching chairs, tastefully upholstered in textured beige, were headed for new life. She needed the space, and hadn’t needed the table in a very, very long time. 

The father with a house full of children never dreamed he would receive such a gift. “We have a BIG family,” he kept repeating, as a point of pride and simultaneously a salve for her raw edges, the kind that don’t tear clean despite the timely intersection of want and need.

In my mind’s eye, I can see her. Mini-Morgan. My daughter-in-law’s firstborn with a golden splash of her grandmother’s curls. 

My three-in-the-morning brain imagines her inching down the echoey tiled hallway lined with colorful bulletin boards. She’s looking for Mrs. River’s room. I see inside the Pre-K den, “A-U-S-T-Y-N,” by a hook where she is to stow her belongings, and there again on a butterfly placemat at the table where she and her navy blue thermos, also bearing her name, will call home base for a while.

Almost nobody yields anymore. Vehicles merging from on-ramps into seventy mph traffic are not asking for permission. They are expecting to have a place.  It’s not their job to wait for a spot to slide into, it’s the cars’ jobs-- the ones spaced in succession rip-roaring like a  train-- to create room. 

“Yield” was once a consequence-carrying law. Then somewhere along the way (as we humans hurried up to hurry) it morphed from that into a suggestion. Now, it means nothing. Right-lane drivers innately know. They are the anointed absorbers charged with having a  scoot-over plan.

“What,” I wonder, “has made us so reluctant to give way?”

My Granny died worn-out. The last few years toward ninety-four she fought and fought, like Rocky Marciano with his gloves taped up. Then one day she just said, “I’m tired” and with independent grace untied the mitts. Then she laid down on the bed and went to sleep. A few days later as I sat in the recliner by her bedside sort of watching TV and mostly, out the side of my eye, counting the seconds between the rise and fall of her chest, she shed the body that had served her for so long so well. I watched her lungs fill and deflate. Fill and deflate. Fill and deflate and, just like that, not fill.

Slowly she went. Then suddenly she was gone. 

“You have to come see this,” said the wedding planner when the bride-to-be picked up the phone. 

“Right now?!” 

“Yes! It’s just indescribable.”

“But I thought you wouldn’t let us until tomorrow?” 

“It’s too good. You won’t be able to take it all in tomorrow. There will be too many people, too much going on. I want you to see the space—all it holds, how it feels. I have no words.”

One of my mentors once shared with me a metaphorical riff about a man trying to get out of a bar that was filling with smoke. He closed it with, “If there’s a back door that’s unlocked, the man who knows about it won’t have the same urgency to run away that the others who are climbing all over one another to get out of the front door do.” I was young and stumped when I’d asked him how to get my big-toe-dippers to decide to go all-in.  Speaking in riddles was coach’s preferred mode of communication, painting a picture ripe for interpretation was his jam. He had wanted to demonstrate a potential solution as much as I had yearned for direction. My question and his answer met in a field of never-forget.

Nobody writes much anymore. I’m not talking about novels or short stories or how-to-make-a-million-dollars-while-you’re-getting-your-nails-done books. I’m talking about writing –the physical act. WITH a pen or pencil (or crayon.)  ON a piece of paper. TO communicate. 

We have other, less cumbersome means.

Baked into the once translucent backboard in index finger printing, “GEORGE WAS HERE” lives loud and proud. The lonely hoop in the driveway is faded orange and rusting out. A raggedy net, two-toned by grime, hangs half attached, the whole thing looking tired and worn, but happy. Like it did what it came to do.

And oh, what it has done.

Thirty years and sixty-six days separate our best and worst of times. April 19, 1995, and June 23, 2025, aren’t so much bookends for our state as they are markers. Evidence of capacity. Dotted lines where creases changed the way we see ourselves.

Sports. Some people can’t live with them. Some can’t live without them. Some don’t even know they’re going on. Regardless of how you feel about athletic competition, the sports field is fertile ground for finding things out.

These are my current top five sports books that are about so much more than sports.

Michael Greller, a former 7th grade math teacher, carries the bag for Jordan Spieth. This past weekend at the U.S. Open at Oakmont (a brutal course which forces golfers to zig and zag—and throw clubs . . . and hit backward . . . and curse the rough and kick the sand . . .), he averaged walking around seven miles per eighteen holes. That’s a 28-mile weekend by the time the sun set on Father’s Day.  And that’s just the steps Greller took in front of the galleries and cameras while lugging a 40-pound weight over his right shoulder. It doesn’t count the daily pre-round super sleuthing or the trips to the range and back or the post-round data collection for the upcoming day.  How many steps he trod, only his Fitbit knows. 

Such is the way of life for a caddie, the world’s most incognito athletes whose profession is a masterclass on how to make a difference while staying out of the way.

Doors that aren’t closed are open. Even though they might look like they’re not. But what do you do with a sliver so slight that it mocks you in real time? 

The answer is simple but not easy. Find a way to hang around.

Coach said simply, “These guys are uncommon.”  Multi-colored confetti was still floating as a sea of cameras clicked on the boys standing just behind the logo in the center of the floor. The sweaty, happy hoopers looked like a band of brothers who had just run the court on the asphalt at the corner of 13th and Shartel. That they were and that they weren’t. Therein lies the beautifully juxtaposed magic of the Oklahoma City Thunder, the NBA’s newly crowned Western Conference Champs.

Beginnings and endings are rolling around like the hands of a clock these days, each intermittently bopping me on the top of the head as it clunks. Friends to my right and left are exiting lifetime careers, leaving the lane that’s almost conformed to them to the care of others. I clap for them at farewell parties, then run home to write a letter of recommendation for another, freshly credentialed, who is vigorously venturing out. As graduates stand awash in pomp, their audience exuberantly twists and shouts while young parents deal with the circumstance of filling out pre-school pre-enrollment cards in the prickly privacy of their kitchens with a lump the size of Texas in their throats. 

There’s taking off and landing. A baby comes, a parent goes. I have funeral outfits and wedding get-ups with interchangeable parts.

Occasions of commemoration dot the days of the weeks of my months, and I wonder, “What gives the ones that take up the most space in me their girth?”

It all started at a 7-Eleven in west Texas.  This is the way goodness often goes. No elaborate intention is set. No detailed business plan is hatched. An instinct just makes it past the gate of the soul and BOOM! All kinds of lives get changed.

When athletic phenom, Serena Williams, decided to walk away from professional tennis at the age of 40, she couldn’t say the word “retire.”  “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution,” she told the press.

I like it. She had somewhere (that may or may not have been clearly defined at the time) to go.

Retirement is a sleepy word with implications of a hard stop. We “retire” at the end of a long day. We “retire” shoes that have a broken heel, clothes that no longer fit, hats that have gone out of style. A baseball team, once they acquire three outs, is said to “retire the side.” Inferring, of course, that the batters no longer get to bat. The word “retire,” per definition, means to leave, to cease or to withdraw. 

It seems odd to me, sometimes, that a single day is set aside to honor mothers. Or fathers, for that matter. Or Jesus (for Heaven’s sake!) though, technically, I guess he gets two. 

Mothers are given a deep-breath recognition on one day out of THREE-HUNDRED-SIXTY-FIVE. It hardly feels sufficient. 

And, yet, I have a plastic shoe box filled with homemade cards and trinkets that begs to differ.

I can say from experience, however, that the real prizes come randomly. Rarely wrapped. Sometimes not distinguishable until time has its way with them. But the crate full of “I Love You”s and “You’re the GREATESTEST”s  with intermittent backward letters mark time. Sentiments piled upon paper butterflies rolling around in a container full of flowers fashioned out of clay serve as a conduit to the days that birthed them. 

I’m grateful someone somewhere once decided we should pause to raise a glass.

In honor of Mother’s Day week, the following is an excerpt from “The Compost File: Stories for the Striver in Us All”—along with a photo and a song that wouldn’t fit in the book.😉

The final challenge of the high ropes course was to pair up and scale a 60-foot telephone pole, stand together on the tiny wooden platform on top, then jump. “Face your fears!” “Do what’s hard!” “Trust your buddy!” “Trust your body!”  “Find a way!” My team’s 6’6” center and I stared up at the pole’s metal stakes designed for use as handles and steps, doing our best to breathe, naturally, not as if the intake could well be our last one.