Monday night, I was sitting on the porch in a cloud of cigar smoke listening to spring’s greatest hits when suddenly and without ceremony the world, or at least all I could see of it, went dark. The ...

My uncle, Fain Pannell, spent the last 50 years standing in roughly the same spot. He was a barber, and for the last half-century, he stood all day, every day except Wednesdays and Sundays, from six ...

Poor old Phineas Gage. Long ago, in stony New England, a four-foot-long iron rod blew a hole in his skull, and he lived to tell it. He was 25 years old at the time. It was September of 1848. Gage was ...

A friend we’ll call Rick recently told me about one of the times his grandmother got struck by lightning. Yes, that’s right – one of the times. Over the course of her otherwise happy, low-voltage life ...

In an essay called “Atheism Is Wasted On The Nonbeliever,” author Richard Rodriguez made the following observation about belief in God, or the lack thereof: “Atheism seems to me a deeply persuasive ...

We raised our kids on a farm in Chickasaw County, with dogs and horses and a garden and a pig and a small herd of Black Angus cows. Below is a story, written during that time, about a June storm and a ...

I want to tell you a story about a wealthy planter in the pre-Civil War South. It’s about lies and pistols and the tawdry, timeless root of all evil. It was told to me as the truth, and I am inclined ...

Years ago, I think I may have been cryogenically frozen without knowing it. I finally thawed out, but I’ve never been so cold, and I’ve never forgotten it. It was in the early spring. The primordial ...

There’s nothing quite like packing for a trip. No exercise exposes the soul’s varied longings quite as transparently as placing your own things in a suitcase. Last weekend, my son graduated from ...