I’m going to share a person. My grandpa on my mom’s side was always really special to me. Every year that we would go out, he always did a lot of magic shows for us, and he made all his own magic boxes, so he had these full-scale, the box where, you know, it’s the swords going three places, and the other box where the person goes in and then you lift it up and there’s nobody there. Then he…
I had a very unusual experience after I got out of the Navy, and I went back to be with my mom. She and Dad had divorced, and we were cleaning out a furnace at Mom’s house to put a new one in, and Sears was going to come with the furnace. This was back in the day of the junkmen, and this junkman had backed up into the driveway next to Mom’s house. And I’m walking up the driveway,…
I like the fossil gorge over by the res, and I liked it especially when my kids were little. And to them, fossils meant dinosaurs, you know? So they were just convinced we were going to find dinosaur fossils even though I tried to tell them that, “No, it’s really sea life and other things that we’ll see over there.” But I don’t know. We would go back over and over, and it was always amazing to me how these…
When I was in 6th grade, my language arts teacher was just amazing, and we went out on a walk— So we had a field trip where we were hiking along, and it was kind of drizzling, and each person was sort of dropped off on this trail somewhere, like under a tree or whatever, and they had a book that they had to write something down in. I got dropped off in this sort of overhang where the rocks were,…
I love that area up in Minnesota, the Boundary Waters canoe area and Quiet Cove. Black flies. Yeah, mosquitos. Leeches. Poison ivy. Bears. Poison oak.
Well, since we’re sort of on this lake and metaphorical level, that just reminds me of a shattering moment in my life when I had gone out onto that lake. I had come to love it; my wife introduced me to it, and it became our lake, and I loved to go out on it with this old windsurfer I bought. I couldn’t ever really learn to windsurf in any sort of way except to sort of just climb up…
I have a strong personal relationship with a lake that my dad and I sort of discovered when I was about 10. We ended up buying some land there, and my dad built a cabin pretty much with his own hands on this lake. Small lake, but it’s crystal-clear. I was not an early-adopter of bicycles or vehicles, so when my dad got a little boat with a little motor, I was propelled, and I would spend hours just by…
My church is pretty much anywhere outside. And, you know, the woods is nice, particularly lakes, but just getting out under the sky. It can be downtown; it can be outside getting off of my bus. [I agree, I think that’s why winter is harder for me because it’s a lot easier in the summer to get out. Winter has its own beauty, I suppose.] I often find when I’m depressed or just down, going outside—even in my house, my…
Estes Park. That’s interesting—we just had our vacation at NewEstes Park—see her shirt? That’s where [my wife]’s brother lives. We stayed at—what was that place, that haunted place? The Stanley Hotel. My folks retired there, and actually, one of the other places on my list was a place called Endo Valley, which is in Rocky Mountain National Park, that we go every year. We make sure we go and do a campfire and an evening picnic and roast marshmallows and make…
Prairie Lights–that’s where I picked because every Saturday we go to the café there and we meet my parents’ friends and my friends, and we’ve gone there forever. I can’t remember when we—like, probably before I was born was when we started that, so now more recently, I like to go down to the kids’ room while my parents are talking, the kids’ basement part. And I have a favorite shelf, and I love to just stare at it forever,…