By Wayne Allensworth When the sky opens the rain can come down in curtains of dense water, obscuring your view. The wind picks up and the tree limbs begin their dance. It’s November. I was taking my morning walk, hoping that the dark clouds that were gathering would hold onto the drops of water within them for just a few more minutes. I walked and felt the cool wind pick up. And I noticed that...
By Wayne Allensworth And at times you introduce me from within into a wholly unaccustomed state of feeling…were it made perfect in me, [it] would not be of this world…But [I] fall back again and I am swallowed up in the usual run of things. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions At mid-morning, the autumn sun was clearing the sky. White rays emanating from a new October sun, a pale, liquid...
By Wayne Allensworth Bill and Shirley Allensworth Houston, Texas 1953 I recall the time and circumstances in which I knew once and for all I couldn’t go home again. It was 1992. We were back in Houston for Christmas. My wife and I took walks in the morning and passed still remaining landmarks that had taken on the air of museum exhibits. Or ruins. The post office. The old grocery store, now a...
By Wayne Allensworth Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. John 12:27 On the day my father collapsed in my house, which led to a painful and long dreaded decision on my part, I talked to our pastor, and then to a cardiologist. Daddy had trouble breathing. The emergency room staff gave him something that stabilized...
By Wayne Allensworth Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference The Road Not Taken — Robert Frost It’s been a year and half since I retired. Friends warned that I would be bored or lack any direction or sense of purpose and that, in turn, might lead to bad consequences. It didn’t. I find plenty of purpose and direction in my...
By Wayne Allensworth I recently finished reading J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. The takeaways from that reading include: Vance’s rejection of fatalistic hopelessness. Hopelessness is pervasive among Vance’s people, and many have fallen into drug addiction, which has spurred on the collapse of the family. Encouraged by grandparents who expended so much of their lives and energy raising...
By Wayne Allensworth In the summertime of my boyhood memories, time moved slower and each day was a discovery. The shadows were gobbled up quickly in the hazy, humid mornings. In those days, houses were around us, but at a bit of distance. In many cases, the yards were big and lots of what you might call “natural areas” were within the view from our front porch, where we hand-cranked...
by Tom Piatak As a child of the 1970s, Saturday nights on CBS were a delight. Theyfeatured The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show.The first was the first prime time TV show I remember liking. The second I eventually came to like even more. I found Newhart, who played psychologist Robert Hartley—knownuniversally on the show as “Bob”—to be instantly likable. I also found the weekly...
By Wayne Allensworth Yes, it was just a speech, and Vance is a politician, but he went to the core of the problem we face in the political realm in his remarks at the Republican National Convention: Vance was heartfelt and, I believe, sincere in what he said last night. America is not an abstraction, we shouldn’t be asked to fight and strive and die for abstractions, but instead for a place and a...
By Wayne Allensworth That time is past,And all its aching joys are now no more — William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey Sometime in the 1990s I admitted to myself that a return to our golden age, however one might imagine it, could never happen. Not a golden age, not even a silver one. A baser metal would have to serve. In researching my book, The Russian Question: Nationalism...
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