Funeral

He’s not wearing any shoes. This thought crosses my mind every once in a random while. It’s because at 18 years old, someone delegated selecting daddy’s last outfit to me. Someone asked me to find something for him to wear for eternity like I was […]

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Dad

What can you say about a 45-year-old dad who died? That he was handsome. And smart. That he loved Bob Seger and Otis Redding. And Sinatra. And me. OK, I stole that from the opening lines of Love Story, but ever since I watched that […]

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Nude

Daddy’s murder investigation continued to uncover new clues to the last moments of his life. Even as I tried to watch a VHS copy of Oliver Stone’s JFK, I couldn’t sit through it without my mind flashing to dad’s last minutes alive. Someone must have […]

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More

A Baldwin Interlude Organ with Fun Machine (Model 127W) dominated a corner of the formal living room in the house I grew up in on Bunker Hill Drive. The golden velvet curtains paired well with this wooden-veneered 1970s creation. The bench storing sheet music specially […]

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Limerick

“I used to track all of my first dates in a spreadsheet,” I said, pausing like I’d rehearsed. “Turns out, I put out 58% of the time.” The packed room erupted in laughter, which eased my anxiety just enough to continue with my second joke. […]

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Aftermath

Trauma hijacked my life in the little house on Oak Ridge Road. It wasn’t my first trauma and would not be my last, but we all became closer that day because of it. My mom, my brother Jason, dad’s assistant Beth, and others who worked […]

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News

Even though Arkansas experienced a 2.3% drop in the murder rate in 1992, the number of stolen lives and set-free souls exceeded 100 by July 1. By the end of the year, Arkansas logged 258 murders with 53.5% committed using a handgun. For perspective, Austin, Texas, […]

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Moving

In the summer of 1984, mom moved us in with her second husband, Neal, after her very quick, very spiteful wedding earlier in March. I watched her father, my Papaw, walk her down the Weyerhaeuser wooden steps off the back deck of her sister’s house […]

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Questions

“Are we having fun yet?” daddy used to ask his boat passengers as they raced across Lake Hamilton, balancing a mixed drink in one hand to avoid a spill as the boat hopped the wakes. I heard this question a lot growing up because it […]

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Hello

There was a time when you could call a person on their land line phone, and it would just ring and ring and ring all day as long as there wasn’t an answering machine or person to pick up the call on the other end. […]

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Drive

Lake Hamilton’s choppy waves slapped across the sides of the Act’n Up Ag’n as it hustled its way from Margarita Bay a little after 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, July 19, 1992. At 5:22 p.m., dad’s guest, Sandra Locke, borrowed his brick cell phone in a […]

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