Our visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum lasted a couple of hours at most. We wandered back into the postcard-worthy mountain village of Stockbridge, found a little general store that made the best homemade chicken salad sandwich north of Donya’s kitchen, ate our sandwiches in the car in the pouring rain, and planned our trip…
Tag: journey
PONDERING WHILE WANDERING – SUMMER VACATION 2018 | Part Two: Norman Rockwell, America! Lost and Found…
After a long and mostly sleepless night, Donya and I woke Sunday morning surprisingly refreshed and resolved to make the most of the next seven days. I had mapped out the places we wanted to visit. First up, Stockbridge, MA, and the Norman Rockwell Museum. America! Lost and Found… Norman Rockwell has always been a…
Pondering while Wandering – Summer Vacation 2018 | Part One: An Inauspicious Start
The wife and I just completed our Summer vacation. It was a fun-filled, whirlwind-yet-relaxing week that took us on an 800+ mile journey from Massachusetts to Vermont to New Hampshire to Maine and back to Massachusetts. We left the triple digits of Texas for milder weather. We vacated the North Texas prairie for soaring mountains,…
My Faithful Valentine: a story of love
Last night Donya asked if I remembered what I gave her on that first Valentine’s Day we spent together. I did, sort of. I remembered I gave her a blouse or a dress or some such. (I am sure the mountainous, volatile, protective Tommy Weir was thrilled that the big-eared kid with the silk shirts…
Dreamers Take it to the Limit (one more time)
“You know, I’ve always been a dreamer…” These lyrics have forever resonated with my soul. I have dreamed more than I have done and I have done more than I dared dream…and still, I dream of more. While others my age and in my station in life are setting the cruise control and coasting into…
A twist to the tale – or – the Journey, continued
I have come to embrace, appreciate, and even love the thing I once hated most about my personal journey. Uncertainty. It is an uncomfortable word and a difficult way to live. It is easy to look at the well-ordered, seeming predictable path others travel with envy. Those people who seem to know exactly who they…
The gospel according to Hank …and Holly
I grew up with a Bible in my hand and big chunks of it systematically planted in my heart and mind. For that, I am grateful. Every sermon I ever heard about the poor, wandering, lost sinner sounded eerily like this: I’m a rollin’ stone all alone and lost For a life of sin, I…
Where does the time go? ~Putting the Past and the Future into Perspective
“Where does the time go?” An old friend and I were reminiscing not long ago, talking about old times the places we had been and the things we had done together in days long gone. His was a rhetorical question – one that I have asked and heard others ask innumerable times. It is a…
A Father’s Day Remembrance: Little Granddad – the dad who almost wasn’t
I have honored the dads in my life just about every year around Father’s Day. My own father, William David Strother, died at age 51, when I was 30 and left a million memories of my childhood and a million more what-ifs behind. My wife’s father, Thomas Henry Weir, now 80 and still spry, still…
18…Again – A note to my firstborn on the 18th anniversary of her 18th birthday
A few days ago, my ever-so-curious and talented son-in-law Edward Frys discovered a long-forgotten and deeply buried treasure of floppy disks bearing assorted thing I had written and saved over the years. I had not seen them or anything on them in 15 years or so. Among the digital cobwebs on these vintage computer disks…