Every day, during my fifty-minute drive to work and my fifty-minute drive back home, I see the movement, the rumblings of what looks like a society stretching its arms and wanting to get back up again.
People are walking dogs. The same lady in the reflective yellow vest is running around the same corner each day. As the sun rises so does steam off the rooftops of small businesses who are warming up neighborhoods with their baked goods and coffee.
School parking lots look a little fuller. Lanyards with name tags bumping up and down on chests are seen as…
Each time I visit my great-grandfather’s grave, I think of the lesson taught in the animated movie Coco. The lesson of remembering and the tradition of respect to family.
I see his grave like it’s out on a forgotten island. It’s one of those simple graves with his name, Elias Villarreal, stenciled into a block of cement that frames the borders of the plot. There is no picture or fancy designs. No religious symbols or verses. It simply reads Elias Villarreal 1886–1939.
Most of the other plots in this older section of the cemetery are the same. Surrounding by dirt…
There is a popular YouTube series called Tribal People Eat. In each episode, villagers from Punjab, located in the north of India bordering Pakistan, try American-based food items they consider interesting and sometimes just plain weird.
The Punjab villagers, mostly men, wear traditional dress, often kurtas which are long, loose, collarless shirts made out of silk or cotton, as well as turban headpieces. Their colorful attire is only second to the entertaining ways that they describe their food-eating experiences.
I love watching Tribal People Eat because the modest and humble Punjab people are honest in their interpretations of what Americans…
Sometimes words get in the way. It happens when we want to describe something meaningful to us. Big and long words that make up big and long sentences make sense to us as we think of capturing exactly what we want to say about something important; and still, what we write or say ends up not making sense to most of everyone else.
I recently read a definition of what it means to be a community. It went on and on and as I read it I thought of an attorney’s office. Walls lined up with books that looks like…
Every Thursday at about 4:20pm, a group of four guys get together for Coffee Club. The four guys are former colleagues who have now gone on their separate ways and what used to be a get together in a small university office, is now done by Zoom. The Club has been meeting weekly for five years.
Most people consider themselves members of an unofficial group of friends, a circle of comrades that meet to catch up on the latest developments at work or in our personal lives. My group is the Coffee Club. …
Sometime in the future, I hope our children will be reading an article a lot like this:
From March of 2020 to March of 2021, Americans changed their growing habit of sitting and watching, and scrolling and liking, and threw in a little more listening and understanding.
From March of 2020 to March of 2021, instead of posting selfies, we started sharing moments that made others think about their own lives. Moments that showed neighbors and friends, families and loved ones.
From March of 2020 to March of 2021, we spent a little more money on things that mattered, instead…
Everyone remembers their first job. On the day I turned 16 years old, my mom told me to go out there and get a job. She said I was old enough to earn my own living. I should be making my own money, washing my own dishes, doing my own laundry — and that I should be doing everything on my own except living out on my own.
Like most teenagers, I didn’t get it. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the logic behind most of what my parents told me all my growing up years. …
A couple of times of week, a man shows up at my place of work. He’s a modest-looking person, and the only thing he has on him is a lunch pail. He walks from building to building on our campus and doesn’t bother anyone but most people know why he’s there — he’s selling a selection of mouth-watering lunch items.
Sometimes he has delicious homemade tamales made by his wife. Other times he has hot soups, or caldos, with crackers. He’s been visiting us for years and still, not everyone knows his name but most do love his food.
On…
“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them…” Matthew 6:26
Every Wednesday morning, at 6:00 a.m., come rain or shine, I open my laptop for a Bible Study with a couple of buddies via Zoom. Even Bible studies are done this way, during this time.
We get together to study scripture, but inevitably, we get to talking about life and share family updates. …
We all want to more about what people were thinking in black and white photos. The older the photo, the more mysterious. People standing in place for longer than we can imagine, waiting for flash of the bulb, often not smiling. Yet, they were saying something as they tried preserve their moments in history.
Each Saturday, I volunteer at a local museum and I rummage through old photos, deciding what is valuable to keep in the museum’s collection and what should be discarded. Often times it is a hard decision. What makes something like a photo of people valuable?
A…
