Insane Earthlings

It was my second Christmas. I was not even two years old. I don’t remember it of course, but there is the photo . My father, a news photographer, took thousands of pictures of me and my siblings over the years. There are a lot of great photos of the four of us. But this photo taken of us posing with our gifts around the perfectly decorated Christmas tree is special. It’s iconic. It documents a defining moment in our lives as three brothers and one sister. It would be our only Christmas in a town that none of us were born in. The one year that my father sought the greener grass of the New York Times owned newspaper in Chattanooga. A year idealized in my mind by the recounted stories my parents and siblings shared about our year living atop a mountain. The year my older siblings would sit, barefoot, in the open windows of the local church on Sundays. The windows that they would hop out of when the sermon was finished. And then they would dash to our little homestead, carefree and ha...

Yesterday I opened Facebook to find awful news. Pilar’s 79-year-old mother had been killed in a crash caused by a drunk driver. Pilar has been a dear friend of my wife and I ever since she started dating a high school buddy of mine back in the late 1980’s. They later married, and though it became more difficult to stay in contact as we were raising our own families, we still count them as some of our closest friends. Over the last week I have been enjoying seeing photos of Pilar and her sisters beaming with happiness as they pose for pictures with their radiant and youthful looking mother. She was visiting her daughters, who all live here in North Carolina, from their home country of Colombia. My heart sank for my friends. The happy visit that I had been following through Facebook had turned tragic. I had just finished college and moved into a small rental house with a friend. We decided to have a keg party. My roommate and I had invited pretty much everyone we knew. It was turnin...

I was a Dad with a mission deep in the Hunan province of China. My six-year-old daughter needed some fruit to eat. When we arrived in the country, our guide had warned us not to eat fruit that might have been washed or cut. There were bacteria from the water on the fruit that our western tummies were not used to. It was fine for our new eighteen-month-old daughter to eat because she was acclimated to the water. She had spent those first months of her life in a local orphanage. But my fair-haired child wanted fruit. She was on the other side of the world with us, all normal routines were out the window. She had been a trooper, but she really wanted to have some fruit. My wife had suggested bananas since they would not have been washed or cut. I had seen a fruit stand earlier as we were taxied around the crowded city of Changsha. As the designated hunter/gatherer of our family, I set out to face the hazardous streets in search of a bunch of bananas. I filed into the herd of ...