Humble Beginnings

My mother worked at a hamburger stand on the outskirts of an East Texas town that nobody ever heard of. Daddy owned the place. It was a small, white box of a building with a screen door imprinted with the words: “Rainbo is good bread.” Built in the days before drive-thru windows were commonplace, customers parked out front and went inside to place their orders at the counter where my mother would sweetly ask, “Can I ‘hep’ you?” The ‘L’ in help was always conspicuously absent.

I can still see my mother frying ground beef patties on the large, Read more

Stopping for Lunch

It was mid-morning on the first crisp cold day of October, the sort of fall day when one can feel the melancholy of winter suffocating the air, when I stood on an overlook of the Snake River Canyon, just a few hundred feet from the Perrine Bridge. I had walked to the end of the walking-trail to the last overlook, with the belief it was the most secluded and there would be less of a chance someone would stop me. I imagined that jumping would feel like flying until I hit the ground at which point would come the release Read more