Side II Stories

At 40, I thought I had life pretty well figured out. I was a successful graphic designer and Creative Director at a PR firm. I had a wife, two kids, a nice house, and two cars in the garage. I was doing work I loved, and life was good. Then my company laid off a...

We bought it for thirty five dollars several decades ago at a local flea market. My not-yet wife and I loved it the moment we saw it. Built when radios were meant to be looked at as much as listened to, she is a 1940’s Magnavox Model 140B console radio/record player. Originally the radio worked...

Some things stay with us because they still work. Others because they carry a story. A tool worn smooth in the hand, a recipe written in somebody else's handwriting, a record we've played a hundred times. We don't keep everything. Maybe that's what makes the things we do keep matter.

There was probably a time when I couldn't have sat on a porch for an hour without feeling like I should be doing something. And even if I did sit there, I don't know that I was really sitting there. Somewhere along the way, I stopped keeping score quite so much.