Half the kids crammed into the back of the station wagon. The other half jammed inside the camper on the back of Dad’s truck.
Holy moly. While listening to my wife and daughters discuss upcoming Christmas plans, it struck me that I’m steaming rapidly toward my 56th Christmas holiday.
“Sir, I need you to step out of the water.”
I was Ralphie before anyone had ever heard of him.
Somewhere, I thought, Blackbeard the Pirate was laughing his eye-patch off at me. Jean Lafitte was having a la-fit. I wasn’t a modern-day Captain Kidd. I was “Captain with Kidds.”
Why is everyone picking on Dad?
Five grown men — all of us pretty big guys — piled into a tiny hospital room for days. My brothers and I, along with our stepdad, were there to say goodbye to my mother. The docs had already told us it was just a matter of time, and none of us wanted to leave her side.
There is possibly nothing more East Texan than purple hull peas. Indeed, the purple hull pea has many close relatives, including zipper creams, lady fingers and crowders.
As the cowboys in the chute helped strap me onto the bull’s back, I had a couple of flashbacks serving to remind me that what I was about to do was a bad, bad idea.
March means spring, and spring means cleaning.
Super Bowl Sunday, 1993.
More than 10 years ago, a local sports reporter attended a Lufkin High School football practice in hopes of interviewing head coach John Outlaw for a season preview. The Panthers were only a few short years removed from having won their first state title, and the reporter wanted to know if t…
Several years ago, I was on the sidelines for a Lufkin Panther football game when a player I’d been tutoring in English got smacked right in front of me. I’m talking a big hit: a slobber knocker, de-cleater, whatever you want to call it.
So, they ask a guy to write his perspective for a magazine issue devoted to bridal season?
Old age is ruining me, and I can’t do a thing about it. It’s even beginning to affect my holiday spirit — specifically, my love of Christmas carols.
Dad had his chance, and he blew it.
No one actually came right out and said it. There wasn’t an official decree, or anything like that.
“Mr. Stallard, is your wife out of town?”
I watched my wife disappearing around a boulder on the trail as I followed, thinking and worrying about coyotes, mountain lions and rattlesnakes.
Try Googling “Stages of Parenthood,” and you’ll get about as confused as a first-time dad trying to maneuver his way around a diaper. If you read all the selections offered, you’ll have people claiming anywhere from four to 10 stages of that particular time in one’s life.
If fish could talk, that one would have begged me: “Kill me, now. Please.”
Mom loved dancing.
It all resembled a scene out of one of the great courtroom dramas, only instead of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” my siblings and I were staging “To Kill a Rose Bush.”
High up on my right thigh, I have a scar measuring about a half-inch wide.
Got a joke for you: Why did the woman cross the road?
For my birthday this year, my wife got me a fishing kayak.
still don’t know why our daughter insisted on having me attend some of her various wedding-planning gatherings. I’m a guy, and have been all my life, so when it comes to stuff like that I’m pretty much worthless as boobs on a bull.
The standard depiction of a trophy wife is usually that of a younger woman married to a much older, wealthier man. This description suggests that the man has somehow won some sort of award just for getting old and rich, while the woman has traded sleeping with a wrinkled bag of bones for a l…