Day: June 3, 2026

I was up again before the sun — though “up” implies I ever really went down. I spent most of the night horizontal, watching the clock do its slow work. These night shift hours are a particular kind of misery that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived them. Your body loses the thread entirely. It doesn’t know whether it’s supposed to be at a workbench or in a bed, whether the darkness outside means go or rest. I’ll need a nap later today just to function, which will of course make tonight worse. Round and round it goes.

But I have a job. That’s not nothing. Every month brings fresh numbers — unemployment climbing, the dollar sliding, the housing market somewhere at the bottom of a hole looking up. We’re borrowing from China to fund a war, the gas prices are being yanked up and down like a yo-yo by people who don’t lose sleep over it, and the interest rates have been cut so low that anyone on a fixed income trying to live off their savings is quietly being eaten alive. Strong economy, though. Very strong, according to the people in charge — the same people who have their oil money and exit packages already waiting and will never spend a single night wondering how the bills get paid.

I’ll tell you what I’d like. I’d like to see both of them pull a twelve-hour night shift for a month. Better yet, hand them a uniform and a rifle and put them on the streets of Baghdad after dark. Let them explain the strategy from that angle.

And then there’s the election coming. I look at the choices laid out before us and I’m not sure whether to laugh or lie back down. We’ve got the Manchurian Candidate, a young senator who seems to have outsourced his theology to Reverend Wright, and Hillary Dillary — who, I’ll give her credit, has fought hard, but right now looks like a shoo-in to lose the thing she’s spent her whole career waiting for. You just know she’s furious. This was supposed to be her year. Barack Obama could have waited — he’s young enough that the moment would have come around again. Now he’s got the Clinton machine watching him with long memories and longer patience. That’s a weight to carry.

It being Good Friday yesterday, I found myself thinking about another man whose politics got him killed. The crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem thought he’d come to run the Romans out of town — a liberator, a general, a solution to an occupation. When it became clear he hadn’t come to fight that particular battle, they turned on him. Funny thing is, he knew exactly what he was doing. The plan was just bigger than anyone around him could see at the time.

Politics hasn’t changed much.

My mind drifted further, the way it does in the small hours, to forty or fifty years out. What does the world look like then? I’ll be honest — I’m glad I’m fifty-seven. Not because I feel fifty-seven; most mornings the arthritis has a few words to say about that. But I think my generation may have lived through the best years this world is going to offer for a long while, and I hope with everything in me that I’m wrong about that.

What worries me most isn’t the things everyone argues about. It’s water.

We had a drought here in the South last year that should have frightened people more than it did. We’ve been treating fresh water like it’ll always be there — wasting it, fouling it, assuming nature will quietly clean up whatever mess we leave behind. I see it every night at work, the sheer volume of water my industry burns through and dirties without a second thought, and it appalls me. Young people need to understand this clearly: in fifty years, clean fresh water is going to be worth more than gold. Not as a metaphor. As a fact.

Fuel is just mathematics. More people means more demand. China, India, Vietnam — enormous populations building and manufacturing and moving, and right now doing it with very little concern for what gets poured into the air and water in the process. Have you seen photographs of the Ganges lately? Or the smog hanging over Chinese cities like a permanent bruise? I wouldn’t want to be running a marathon there this summer without a personal oxygen supply. The problems building up in the atmosphere and watersheds of those countries aren’t going to stay in those countries. There are no borders on air.

I’ll leave Tibet alone, except to say I genuinely don’t understand why you’d want to kill monks. It seems like a lot of effort to solve a problem that didn’t exist.

Anyway. That’s enough rambling for one early morning.

I keep saying I’ll stay in better touch, write more, be more present — and then life does what life does and the hours disappear into the work of keeping things together. I’m trying to simplify. Went through a pile of belongings yesterday, and there’s more to go. I found forty-seven shirts in my closet. Forty-seven. I’m fairly certain I’ll go to my grave without wearing at least a third of them again. I’m half-tempted to go the Simon Cowell route — just pick a color, buy ten of the same thing, and never make that decision again.

There’s something clarifying about letting go of things you’ve been hauling around out of habit. I recommend it. Especially at three in the morning, when clarity is hard to come by and everything feels heavier than it should.

Our brains are extraordinary things — staggeringly complex, still largely mysterious, and doing half their most interesting work while we’re not even conscious enough to notice. The part that intrigues me most is what happens when we sleep. That whole other country the mind slips off to when the lights go down.

There are dreams, and then there are Dreams. They’re not all the same animal.

I wish I could remember every one I’ve ever had. I imagine it like a little hard drive tucked somewhere behind my left ear, with a save button I could press each time I drift off. Better yet, I wish I could hand my brain a script at bedtime — give it the opening scene and let it run from there. If I could do that, I know exactly what I’d choose: running. Just running, the way Forrest Gump did, across the open country, seeing things I’ve never seen, taking the long unhurried time to appreciate things I’ve always rushed past. The chances of me actually running anywhere for any real distance these days are slim to none, what with a heart that requires careful management and a body that’s gotten comfortable with stillness. So I’ll take the dream version and be grateful for it.

I’m working a schedule right now that has me doing twelve-hour night shifts for half the month, then trying to sleep like a normal human being the other half. It creates a kind of internal confusion that’s hard to describe — part zombie, part insomniac, occasionally something stranger and more interesting than either. On my days off I’m half-asleep by early evening. On the days before a shift I’ll lie down and try to rest a few hours before going in, and most of the time I don’t fully get there — just hover in that strange country between waking and sleep.

That’s where the best dream I’ve had in years found me.

I was listening to music — Enya, I believe — drifting in and out, not quite here and not quite gone. And I began to see the music. Every note had color and shape. The chords bloomed like sunbursts and moonlight, silver and gold moving in patterns behind my eyes. The vocals — angelic, layered, unhurried — flowed through my mind like a wide blue river running toward the sea. I want to be clear that I was not on anything. This was simply what my half-sleeping brain decided to do with a piece of beautiful music on an afternoon when I’d let my guard down just enough to let it happen.

I didn’t want to come back. I lay there as still as I could, afraid that shifting position or thinking too directly about it would break the spell. It did eventually, the way all good things do. I haven’t been able to find my way back to that particular place since. But I keep the music on when I lie down, just in case.

On rare occasions I dream of people who are no longer here.

You’d think those dreams would come more often. But for me they’re infrequent — precious partly because they’re scarce. I think maybe they come more as you age, as the circle of people you’ve loved gradually grows quieter. I dream of my grandmother now and then, and almost always she’s in the kitchen. I can smell the biscuits. I can see her moving around that kitchen with the easy authority of someone who has made that exact motion ten thousand times and never once had to think about it.

I never asked her to teach me how to make those biscuits. I always thought I’d have more time.

She lived to be a hundred years old, and when she reached that birthday I asked her what she’d do differently if she had it all to go over again. She thought about it and said simply: “Worry less — because worry never did change nothing.”

It still doesn’t, Grandma. It still doesn’t.

What a thing, to have a hundred years of living distilled down to six words, and to have them be exactly right.

I wish I could step into those dreams on purpose — knock on the door of that kitchen, sit down at that table, and say the things I always assumed I’d have time to say out loud. That’s the real ache of it. Not just missing the people who are gone, but knowing that some of the people still with us now will one day only be reachable this way — in the odd, infrequent grace of a dream. That thought has a way of making you want to say what needs saying while you still can.

I haven’t had any bad dreams lately. No nightmares, nothing even close. My ten-year-old granddaughter has them, though. When she spends the night, there are occasions when my wife and I surface from sleep to find her standing quietly beside the bed in the dark.

“I had a bad dream,” she says, already half-climbing in.

“It’ll be okay,” I tell her, and move over to make room.

And it will be. By morning she won’t remember what frightened her. Most dreams dissolve that way — slipping back through whatever door they came from before the day can get a good look at them. The bad ones especially seem to know they’re not welcome in the daylight.

It’s two in the morning as I write this, six hours still to go on my shift, and reality is biting harder than I’d like to admit. But when I get home and the shift is done and I put on the music and lie down, maybe — just maybe — my brain will remember where it left off the other afternoon and find its way back to that river of blue sound and silver light.

I sure hope so.

I almost ran over a dog this morning on the way to work. The old boy came tearing out of nowhere and shot right across my path, and if my reflexes hadn’t still had a little of their younger-day quickness about them, that would’ve been the end of him. I’m awful glad I missed him.

It got me thinking about dogs. Of all the creatures on this earth, none has planted itself closer to the human heart. Now, I know the cat people are already hollering at their screens — and fair enough, cats have their charms. But a cat operates on its own terms. It doesn’t so much live with you as tolerate your presence in its house. A dog, though — with very few exceptions — is yours, body and soul, from the moment you meet.

The first dog I can remember was a Collie-German Shepherd mix I named Bullet. He was a faithful companion to me in the way only a childhood dog can be, though he had little patience for the neighbor kids who regularly helped themselves to my toys and pitched them under their house. When he caught them in our yard, he’d nip at their heels all the way to the property line — not an inch further — then turn around and trot back like a sheriff who’d just enforced the law. One afternoon he grabbed the seat of my pants and hauled me back from the road when I’d wandered too close to traffic. I spent many a happy hour on the back steps throwing sticks and balls for him to retrieve. Somebody poisoned old Bullet, and he died a hard death. He didn’t deserve that. No animal does.

We didn’t get another dog until we’d moved away from that neighborhood and those particular neighbors. The next one was a Cocker Spaniel and bird dog mix with long white curly hair. We called him Whitey — and yes, I realize that doesn’t reflect great imagination on our part, but we were young. Whitey loved our whole family with an enthusiasm that was almost embarrassing to witness. He’d run through leaf piles with us in the fall, wallowing around like he fully understood the concept of fun. The trouble was, he couldn’t stand to see my Dad drive away. Every time the car backed out, Whitey went after it. Dad hit him a couple of times, but it never discouraged him. Then one day Dad came back almost immediately after leaving, and there was Whitey in the back floorboard — bloody, whimpering, and broken. We carried him out next to the dog house. He licked my hand once, whimpered softly, and was gone. We buried him in the woods just past the old cemetery near our house.

After that, Dad got into hunting and came home with three Beagles — Lady, King, and Husky. These were working dogs, plain and simple, and affection wasn’t really in their job description. They stayed penned unless Dad took them up past the cemetery to run rabbits, at which point nothing on earth could stop them. One afternoon they got after a particularly fast buck rabbit. Lady and Husky eventually gave out and sat down next to Dad, but King ran that rabbit for three solid hours — finally pushing it back past us for a shot. Dad missed. King walked over, looked up at him with what I can only describe as profound disappointment, and collapsed in a heap. We thought he was dead. It took a full bucket of water, applied both externally and internally, to bring him around. King never showed much interest in rabbit-chasing after that, and Dad had grown tired of standing around in the woods listening to dogs bark. He sold all three, and I won’t pretend I was heartbroken.

In high school we got a couple of pups from a litter my Uncle Pinky had raised. I named mine Lobo, after the TV dog. By then I was a junior, interested in everything except my dog — but Lobo was a faithful sort who kept close to home. He was part Husky, with a warrior’s disposition toward any dog that crossed into his territory. Dad kept a bucket of water by the back steps for the regular pile of claws and teeth that erupted in our backyard. Lobo absorbed wounds that would have finished a lesser animal, healed up, added the scars to his collection, and kept right on living. He was still going strong after I’d left for college and gotten married. My new wife was amazed that I could pour hydrogen peroxide into wounds that looked nearly gangrenous and have him wagging his tail the next day.

He finally met his match at about ten years old — a young, strong dog with some Pit Bull in him. Lobo won the fight, ran the dog out of his yard, and then couldn’t recover. Age had finally caught up with him. He’d used up every one of his nine lives.

My wife and I moved to Athens for school and decided we needed a dog. We got a Border Collie named Lady and rented a little brick house in the country whose owner didn’t allow dogs inside, so we set her up in the well house. We also had fish, and a gerbil who escaped his cage, chewed his way out of the house, and took up permanent residence in the well house alongside Lady. Since the little monster had bitten me, I made no serious effort to retrieve him.

Lady ended up with a litter of puppies, as nature will arrange when you’re nineteen and don’t know what you’re doing. I believe we kept a couple of them for a while, though honestly the details have gone soft with time. When we moved again we gave Lady away, which I still feel a little bad about.

Somehow we ended up with a Black and Tan Dachshund named Fritzie — purchased from a woman who, in retrospect, was probably moving to Florida specifically to get away from him. That dog could have a bath on Tuesday and by Wednesday afternoon produce an odor that would clear a room. My wife and I quietly conspired and donated him to my parents, explaining that he was an “inside dog.” My Dad lasted about a week before he bricked off the back patio and made it Fritzie’s permanent residence. Every decent morning you could find Dad out there with a hose and soap, scrubbing that dog down like he was hosing out a livestock trailer. It never took. Dad eventually gave Fritzie to some elderly folks who adored him completely. I’ve always suspected their sense of smell had retired before Fritzie arrived.

Then came the Weimaraners — Misty and Abend — silver, slobbering, and enormous, originally belonging to my wife’s brother. They migrated to my parents’ house, as most of our animals eventually did, and I feel genuine retrospective guilt about that. Dad built them a pen with a chicken wire fence. They jumped over it. He made the fence taller. They jumped over that too. He tried discipline. They were either too dumb or too determined to care. He finally gave them to a man who lived way out in the country, who later reported with some delight that those two dogs ran deer to the ground. Of course they did. That’s what they’d been looking for all along.

The best pet my wife and I had during all those years was, I’ll admit, a cat. His name was Hector — a big black fellow with white feet, given to us as a wedding present. He moved through life at his own unhurried pace, an ambler who never rushed unless genuinely startled. On road trips to visit my folks he usually slept, but one memorable occasion I glanced in the rearview mirror and found him performing his business in the back window. The car behind us nearly drove off the road, the driver laughing so hard.

Another time, a tire went nearly flat and we pulled into a station to get it changed. My wife was holding Hector patiently when the mechanic disconnected two air hoses with a sound like a small explosion. Hector left four claw marks in her shoulders and vanished into a stand of pine trees. It took us two hours to coax him down.

He loved the outdoors — would stand motionless for long stretches in spring, just breathing in pine trees, then roll around in the needles like he owned the forest. He never had a flea in his life that I noticed. He was crossing a street in Toccoa one afternoon and didn’t make it in time past one of the drivers who used that road like a racetrack. When I found him, I knew I couldn’t bury him in the town where he’d been killed. I drove him as far out into Rabun County as a dirt road would take me and buried him in a grove of Mountain Laurel, the kind of place he would have spent all day sniffing around in if he’d had the chance.

Every now and again, his spirit ambles by and says thank ya’.

Children bring pets the way spring brings rain, and when ours arrived — a daughter in 1972, then two sons in 1975 and 1980 — the animals followed. There was a Siamese cat from the lower regions of the earth who ran from bed to bed and left chaos everywhere he went. There was a beautiful dark cat my daughter named Menudo, after the Latin singing group, who was so quiet you forgot he existed — until he started fainting. I was on the verge of a vet visit when I thought to check his collar. He’d been growing so fast it had nearly choked him. We fixed it immediately, but Menudo was never quite sharp after that. He’d be walking along and just walk into the wall for no particular reason. I have checked collars on every fast-growing animal I’ve owned since. We also had a cat come home one morning with his long, beautiful tail completely gone — just gone — acting perfectly normal about the whole thing. The vet sewed him up and said he’d likely be fine, and as best I can remember, he was.

We got a little brown Dachshund named Frisbee for the kids, which was a sweet idea that didn’t quite work out. She was an escape artist and a committed barker, and our neighbors on that side of the house had limited patience for both qualities. After a near-miss with a car on the busy street out front, we found her a home with a grandmother who loved her completely, and the feeling was mutual. That one had a happy ending.

The dog we had longest during the kids’ growing-up years found me, rather than the other way around. I was hauling trash to the local dump when a small white mound at the edge of the heap began to move in my direction. It was a dog — filthy, matted, impossible to identify as any particular breed. I couldn’t leave her there. “What is that?” my wife asked when I came through the door. “I think it’s a dog,” I said.

After what seemed like hours of bathing, she turned out to be a miniature Poodle. Once she was clean she pranced around the house like a decorated veteran at a parade. We named her Scruffy, which turned out to be permanently accurate — she was a dirt magnet of almost supernatural ability. You could wash her in the evening and by the next afternoon she looked like she’d been rolling through a feedlot. She never wandered, though. She stuck to the back porch like it was her post, leaving only for the bathroom or a brief tour of the backyard.

She hated the UPS truck and the mail carrier with a white-hot passion I never fully understood, though I always suspected one of the mailmen sprayed her out of spite early on. She’d work herself into such a frenzy over those trucks that in her later years I genuinely worried for her heart. She would have eaten them from the ankles up if she’d gotten the chance. For everyone else in the world — gentle as a lamb.

We had Scruffy for about ten years. By the end she was stiff with arthritis and could barely move. When the time came, I watched her eyes as she went, and it was one of the saddest moments I have known. My oldest son and I buried her in the far corner of the backyard, as far from the delivery routes as we could get her.

A couple of years ago, my wife Paula decided she wanted Dachshunds again. We went to look — and came home with three. There was a boy and two girls, and at the first feeding it became clear the boy had decided he was apex predator of the household. My daughter Kirsten, bless her, took him off our hands without too much persuading. He was named Puck, and by all accounts he’s a fine dog who found exactly the right home.

The two girls we kept. Fiona, and a little piebald runt — brown and white — who we named Hoosier. The woman selling her had initially told us we couldn’t afford her because her coloring was so rare in Dachshunds. But when it came to the paperwork, it turned out she couldn’t confirm who the father was. We got her at a discount. “Who’s Your Daddy” became Hoosier for short, which suits her perfectly.

We learned about crate training this time around. We got a bell, and taught Hoosier to ring it when she needs to go out — and I promise you, it works. She has her own chair between the two computers, her tummy rubs, her special treats, her regular baths. She knows she’s loved.

I suppose that’s the arc of the whole story, really. From Bullet running loose in a neighborhood that would poison him, to a little dog with her own chair and a bell she rings when she wants out — that’s sixty-some years of learning how to do right by an animal that trusts you completely.

Some people say wisdom doesn’t come with age.

Some of it does.

When I was in the second grade, we had the most wonderful music teacher. She was a real hoot — an older lady who wore her greying hair pulled back in a neat bun, always dressed in a skirt and cardigan like she’d stepped right out of a simpler time. She’d warm us up for glee club by running us through musical scales and those classic mi-mi-mi exercises, her eyes twinkling the whole while. I think I enjoyed that year of school more than just about any other I can remember.

But somewhere between then and now, the sound of music turned into the sound of me.

Over the past several years, I’ve met more people than I care to count who are so shallow I could nearly see through them if the light hit just right. Talk to them for five minutes and you realize there’s exactly one subject they find compelling — themselves. What can you do for them? How does this benefit them? The almighty ME has become the organizing principle of too many lives. Toby Keith practically wrote their anthem: I wanna talk about me, wanna talk about I, wanna talk about number one, oh my me my. He meant it as a joke. A lot of folks missed the punchline.

Now, I want to be fair. This isn’t a generational indictment — not entirely, anyway. I’ve known plenty of self-absorbed folks north of forty, and I’ve known some remarkable young people who’d give you the shirt off their backs without a second thought. Most young people, truth be told, are decent. But I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say I notice the tendency running a little stronger in those under forty. Something shifted somewhere. The question worth asking is: how much of that is our fault?

Probably some. Maybe more than some. Did my generation model, however unintentionally, that personal ambition was the highest virtue? That the bottom line mattered more than the person standing across from you? Maybe we did. I can’t say for certain. But wringing our hands about it doesn’t move the needle, so I’ve taken to doing something about it when I can.

My first approach is direct — some would say blunt. When I catch someone in a full-blown case of self-absorption, I’ll say something like, “Hey, how about thinking about something other than yourself for a minute?” It tends to break the spell. Once I’ve got their attention, I’ll ask whether they have a family at home. Whether they have a hobby. Whether they ever let their mind wander somewhere outside of work. Because here’s the thing — that bathroom rug you’re stressing over today? A hundred years from now, nobody will remember it existed. But the children you raise, the neighbors you look after, the way you treat a stranger having a hard day — that stuff echoes.

I remind them there’s a difference between talking to someone and talking at them. One builds something. The other just burns air.

Most people, when you put it that way, hear you. They soften a little. You can watch something loosen behind their eyes.

But some folks are wound so tight that common sense just bounces right off them. For those, I save what I think of as the ultimate appeal. I remind them that their mother was right when they were little: if you spend all your time and energy and mental firepower spinning around inside your own head, you will eventually go blind to the fact that there is a good and lovely world out there. A world full of worthwhile people, places, and things that deserve every bit of the attention being wasted on self-promotion and self-preservation.

And more importantly — there are children watching. Your children. And what they learn about how to move through this world, they’ll learn mostly from you.

That tends to land.