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Footprints or Buttprints

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I am a boomer, the second of four children, produced the impulsive New Year’s revelry of tipsy parents. My brother, two sisters, and I remain close. Our parents are long gone but childhood memories are warm. The teen years, well, they’re fodder for another column. I was an awestruck, seventh-grade towhead when I flew on […]

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Teenie-Weenie Pork Chops

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I left home at 17 and moved south a thousand miles to attend a small private college in northeast Florida. Needing to pay my way through school, I sought a full-time job. I was lucky to get one quickly, at a Winn-Dixie grocery store near campus. Roy Touchton, the regional manager, sized me up and […]

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Why Happiness is Math

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The mind’s accumulation of positive emotional experiences, minus its negative ones, determines a person’s happiness level. When happy thoughts outweigh brooding ones we will be happy. When the reverse is true—if we insist on seeing (and dwelling on) what’s wrong with things rather than what’s right—we’ll feel a bit down. Happiness Math hinges on two […]

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One Giant Hammer

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A tidal change takes six hours, the moon shoving seawater far ashore before changing its mind and pulling it back out. During my final semester of college I invested hundreds of hours studying waves from atop the weathered and warped floorboards of an old wooden pier that extended from Jacksonville Beach into the sea. Day […]

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Barriers to Performance

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Shelves are stuffed with quote books that recite page after page of clichés like, “Success is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.” In some cases that’s true. In others it isn’t, since success has one million fathers and two million variations. Failure, of course, is a lonesome leper no one wants to claim. Having bounced […]

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The 5-Minute Shortcut

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If I were to judge America’s most worrisome cities by the radio shows I’ve done, I’d pick New York and Seattle. Worriers are everywhere, so maybe it’s just that the radio jocks in those markets live in thinner career eggshells than constituents elsewhere. I have a good handle on the interlocking elements of an interesting […]

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Eric Clapton and the 3-Headed Man

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If you haven’t read Eric Clapton’s autobiography, treat yourself to a copy from the bookstore or library. His life covers a great arc: from a snake-eyed childhood and odds-against upbringing to drunken, drug-addled guitar hero to a sober genius inspiring and helping thousands who desperately need it. Much of the noise between our ears stems […]

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