For most of my boyhood I lived with my family in a house built by my father out in the countryside of southwestern Michigan. It’s perched on the crest of a hill about five miles north of Buchanan and surrounded by farmland and virgin forest. Five miles may not seem like a lot these days, but when we first moved in one would have to navigate a two-lane country road and then two more gravel roads to reach it by car or tractor. Later, the county would pave Glendora Road, but Aalf’s Road, where we lived, remains a graveled one-laner to this day.

We did not have air conditioning, so any time the furnace was not needed for heat pretty much all the screened windows in the house would remain open all day and night. I shared a bedroom and one of two twin beds with my younger brother with mine on the side of the room adjacent to an east-facing window.

One of my fondest memories of living in that house was the smell of the sweet, country air that would drift silently through those open windows in the wee hours of a summer night. There was no car noise, or unnatural sounds of any kind out there. Just crickets and cicadas. A barking dog in the distance somewhere. And I recall sometimes lying at the foot of my bed with my hands and chin resting on the windowsill watching as the moon began to rise into the dark and star-studded sky. As it lifted fully above the tree line on the far side of the cornfield the lone tree that stood in that field would begin to throw a moon shadow across the waist-high corn stalks. And, if it was a full moon, it would be “…as bright as a readin’ light,” to borrow a line from songwriter, Mike Burton, and thus casting a soft, gray aura across an utterly peaceful and tranquil countryside. Sometimes I would fall asleep there.

Continue “Moonbeams”

(Start with Part I if you haven’t already read it.) Well, that didn’t take long – the tour of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, that is. And the reason it didn’t take long is because the place is only about the size of a three-car garage. Nevertheless, what a thrill to be standing on the same black, linoleum floor where, back in the seventies, music was made by the likes of the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle, Linda Rondstat, Sonny and Cher, Glen Frey, lynyrd Skynyrd, Boz Scaggs, Bob Seger, Bob Dylan and on and on and on (I wasn’t supposed to take any photos inside. I did, of course, but you’ll have to stop by the house to see them.) Continue “The Memphis road trip – Part 2”

Nothing like a long road trip to make a lad appreciate his home. Sweet home. Here’s the first of a two-part series on my excellent travel adventure from Florida, through Mississippi and on to Alabama, the “Heart of Dixie”, and back…

Sister Carol called me a few weeks ago and informed me that she and Bruce were contemplating a holiday excursion somewhere south of Michigan (that must have been an easy decision – pretty much everything is south of Michigan) and asked whether I would like to tag along. Continue “The Memphis road trip – Part 1”

Light travels at a rate of 186,000 miles per second, or about 670 million miles per hour. Thus, it doesn’t take very long for a photon to travel from, say, a light bulb to your retina – in the blink of an eye, if you will. This is also about how long it takes for Bank of America to reject my loan applications.

People sometimes do things too fast. They drive too fast. They eat too fast. You know what I mean. Sometimes they shoot off their mouths too fast. Sometimes people are too quick to judge, and end up hurting someone’s feelings. Continue “In the blink of an eye”