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Staying awake

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Name the most difficult physical task you can imagine. Lifting a heavy object? Out running an angry bear? Jumping over a wide chasm? How about this one: staying awake when your mind and body want to sleep? You know the feeling. It’s been a long day and you’ve enjoyed a good evening meal. Now you’re at a meeting and the air conditioner just isn’t doing its job. As the speaker drones on and on, your eyelids begin to droop and your eyeballs roll back as if to examine their sockets. Your mind begins to shut down. Your head begins to nod. Suddenly, your head nods a bit too far ...

Anger management: Using soft words

Local Columns

As a twice-married man and a father I have been made fully aware of all my faults. One of those faults is my temper. Over the years I have learned to control that temper … until someone pushes all the right buttons. Back in Sunday school days we had to memorize a Bible verse every week. One that I’ve never forgotten is Proverbs 15:1 — “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.” That verse has been helpful over the years, because when I am angry soft words come with difficulty. I thought of these things one day when I stopped to pick up some dry ...

Coming home

Local Columns

A friend of mine once described coming home as “touching base.” I always took it to mean recharging. Resetting. Like unplugging the computer to get the thing to work the way you want. I thought of this when writing about the amazing Amelia Oliver, a smart performer who’s gracing the Webster City Community Theatre stage in its most recent production, “Little Shop of Horrors.” Like Amelia, I came home. The first time I came home, I had just graduated from Iowa State with a journalism degree and spent the months following working for the Daily Freeman-Journal until my computer ...

Love and marriage the second time around

Local Columns

On a quiet evening a short time before my first wife, Cindy, passed away, we engaged in a conversation about the future. We were looking ahead to retirement. Cindy had recently lost her parents. My father had died 20 years earlier. A few months earlier, I purchased larger life insurance policies for each of us. “If I go first,” I explained, “you’re free to remarry or not. I just don’t want you to have to marry someone for financial reasons.” I had seen that happen and it wasn’t pretty. Cindy explained that she wasn’t sure she would remarry if I was the first to go. ...

It all started with Pong

Local Columns

I’m going to make a safe assumption: most of the world’s population today cannot remember a time when there were no electronic games. This is based on two facts: (1) the world’s median population is approximately 30.9 years old (meaning half of the world’s population is older than 30.9); and, (2) the world’s first electronic games — Galaxy and Pong — were introduced in 1971 and 1972, respectively. This realization occurred when Julie and I watched three of her grandchildren for a week in June while their parents vacationed with friends in Minnesota. On Friday afternoon ...

Mrs. Miller was right.

Local Columns

It wasn’t smart to bet against Dorothy S. Miller, my fifth-grade teacher at Washington Grade School in Bloomington, Illinois. She said many memorable things, including one day in civics class: (sic) “It’s the duty of good citizens to read a daily newspaper.” Every day at 8.20 a.m. we ...