As milestone birthdays go, turning 38 scarcely qualifies. And yet, as I found myself approaching that signpost a few weeks ago, I began to find more significance than I had anticipated. Turning 38 means two decades since the spring I graduated high school, and the fall I started college. I was 18 all those years…
This summer, my wife and I took a once-in-a-lifetime vacation to a place of extraordinary beauty. I’m not a naturally observant person; I easily get adrift inside my own head, and I feared I would return with fuzzy, tunnel-vision memories of our trip. To avoid this, I set myself some guidelines for using my camera,…
April 19, 1906: “3000 Dead, $300,000,000 Lost, San Francisco is Obliterated” October 25, 1929: “Greatest Crash in Wall Street’s History” December 7, 1941: “War! Oahu Bombed By Japanese Planes” September 12, 2001: “U.S. Attacked: Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon in Day of Terror” …
In the interest of full disclosure, I should start by telling you that I have a complicated relationship with the “Peanuts” Comic Strip. I tend to cringe, resist, and pull back from all things related to Snoopy and Co. You see, back in high school, I played the role of Charlie Brown in a student…
This summer, I decided it was time to try reading a chapter book aloud to my oldest child. He is four-years-old…and he’s a boy. I knew that it would be a struggle to get through a few pages each night, but I thought it would be worth the effort in the end. We picked up…
My father once told me that life was a repeating cycle of wait… wait…… wait………. wait………….. HURRY! Last year we moved. It was a frantic, sweating hurry of a year. Now we’ve settled into a season when nothing much is going…
With our boys spending a week at a summer day camp, my wife and I recently dove into a substantial (for us) home project – installing a new laminate wood floor in our kitchen. Like the true DIY go-getters we are, we did every bit ourselves. And, like the absent-minded handyman that I am, the…
There are languages in the world in which the word for “hello” most closely translates as “I see you.” The ancient Hebrews in particular were a people who could not embrace anything so abstract as “Hi.” For them, a promise wasn’t something that existed only as sound waves, spoken and heard by two people. The…
When I was young, I’d spend hours in the attic, poring over the maps I found behind the yellow-framed covers of my dad’s old National Geographic magazine collection: The Amazon River basin and rainforest, the South Pacific Islands, the classical lands of the Mediterranean, the West Indies, the Far East. These faraway places (and, in…
Editor’s Note: This delightful article by Sally Lloyd-Jones appeared during Story Warren’s first year, and I think it’s high time we re-visited.– James The independence being celebrated today is, of course, independence from the likes of me (Brits). Excuse me but first of all, what is a Brit doing posting on Independence Day? I know….
My house felt like an absolute mess. Toys were scattered around the floors, doors to the outside stood open with flies coming in to forage, grass and dirt littered the floor, and random cups, plates and shoes were all strewn about. AAARRRGGGHHHHH!! It felt like chaos! For several hours we had enjoyed the fellowship of…
My wife stood at the kitchen table the other day separating coins for a lesson she was preparing for her kindergarten students. She divided the change into piles, separating the great silver discs of quarters from the dimes and nickels, finding a space in the corner for that midget of a copper afterthought, the penny….
