“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.

Like most Americans, I remember exactly where I was on the morning of April 19, 1995. I couldn’t, if I wanted to, forget. This past weekend Oklahoma honored, as it has done annually since the horror in the heartland, the lives lost and the lives changed forever on that tragic day. On Saturday from the memorial grounds, a 91-year old man who had lost his wife in the blast and had returned for the ceremony of commemoration said, “It was 30 years ago, but when I return to this spot, it feels as if it was 30 seconds ago.” 

 Time. We cannot pin it down.

The following essay is an excerpt from my latest book The Compost File: Stories for the Striver in Us All.

Scottie Scheffler leads the world in birdies after bogeys. For those who might not be familiar with golf’s scoring ways and words, that means that, most times, when he finishes one hole one stroke over par, he finishes the next hole one stroke under par.  One step back, followed by an immediate step back forward. Trip, stand-up and walk. Trip, stand-up and walk. Trip, stand-up and walk. This is how you keep from ever falling far behind. It’s also how you end up way ahead.  

The best of the best don’t land with a splat on a bed of concrete when they fall, they bounce.

I remember when (I suddenly sound like my Granny) we used to have to be at home on Thursday nights at 9:00 PM if we wanted to watch Grey’s Anatomy. We couldn’t consume Meredith and Derek with all their accompanying angst on a Sunday afternoon when our hearts had enough bandwidth for absorption of their twisty lives -- it was Thursday night or bust. And if it was “bust,” we’d arrive the next Thursday night at 9:00 PM painfully in the dark. Now, we can watch a whole season on a dawn-to-dusk Saturday, if we’re so inclined. Or we can catch the latest episode at halftime of the Super Bowl, if we choose. 

Our world is built like Furr’s cafeteria. We can order up exactly what we want.

On my inaugural jaunt into the world of publishing, the literary agent I contacted said she wasn’t sure what my collection of stories (that ultimately became “Rooted to Rise”) was, but she did believe it was something. While we were trying to get a handle on that, she said I needed to get some of my writing “out into the world” before she shopped a book. She implored, “I need for you to do two things: Get active on social media and start writing a weekly blog.” 

One outta two ain’t bad.

In the front of the auditorium where our church family gathers on Sunday mornings, a sign hangs high and bold summarizing Ephesians 4:11-16. It says very simply, “Do Your Part.” The flag flies at the top of the baptistery marking the symmetrical center between two ginormous screens, but I have to think it hangs there for reasons beyond balance.  The message that is clearly being sent is “get involved.”  Get involved with the activities the leaders of the congregation have planned, but probably—maybe even more so—get involved with leading others to Jesus Christ, via the baptistery below.  “Do Your Part” it says, echoing the gist of the Bible.

I wondered, “What’s my part?” And, “Whose job is it to decide?”

“What separates the ones who make it?” I am asked by a parent in a group of parents who really want to know.

“What does ‘make it’ mean?” I bounce pass back, in search of clarification. Success wears all different kinds of eclectic clothes.

“You know, not just the players that are good enough to go on to play in college, but the ones who, once they’re there, become like household names.”