Stuff in the Basement

  Between warring sides on a campus rally against war in the Middle East, Shiao Chong, then a campus pastor, claimed he saw two--just two--d...

“He sends from heaven and saves me,  rebuking those who hotly pursue me. . .”   John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction , calls the error “fri...

I'm not at all sure why we didn't go "up north" when the kids were growing  up  Probably our missing real family vacations...

For the record, no one keeps it up. There it stands, strong and square, I might add, just off an ordinary almost unpaved road, amid a chorus...

It was never our intent to build a house. We talked often about some post-retirement cabin on a foggy north woods lake-- dreamed , I should ...

“I cry out to God Most High,  to God, who fulfills [his purpose] for me.”   The kid died.   That’s what happened—the kid died.   He was ...

  There we sat, totally silent over the last few lines of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's  Gulag Archipelago , a passage where that long-bearde...

  What seemed so clear to me is the cause/effect sequencing of the entire, awful story--how this led to that and that led to this and so for...

    It was the summer of 2006 when I first fell in love with the Missouri River, earlier, probably, when I was first blind enough to keep th...

  In the spring of 1972, Bob Boerigter (far left, above) was finishing his second year of teaching and coaching at Little Rock High School...

  “. . .in the shadow of your wings  until the disaster has passed.”   Psalm 57:2             The italics designate that the title is a bo...

Mollie Fast-Jong, who is part of the Atlantic crew and visits here and there on MSNBC shows at all hours of the day and night was a guest o...

I'm sure people here would say that it's not particularly hard to imagine I might be depressed. After all, I've lost a significa...

“. . .for in you my soul takes refuge.  I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings  until the disaster has passed.” Some  years ago, M...

  For some reason I remember really liking this picture. Away across the Alton pond, there's a dad and his son fishing. From the looks o...