Melancholy Paradise: Anxiety, resilience and the spirit of our times

I think it was in the novel Theo of Golden – the book everybody seems to be reading these days – where Wife Ellen came across the word “zeitgeist.” It’s one of those words rarely used in normal, everyday conversation and she asked me if I know what it means. Turns out I do.

Melancholy Paradise: To live without regret

My father was an easy man to like and a hard man to know. The inner workings each person has, the inner workings that make each of us who we are; these he kept to himself. Had he been a watch, we would have, reliably, always known what time it was.

Melancholy Paradise: An attack on one is an attack on all

Round Rock turned out, in all its Norman Rockwell glory, for the July 4, 2013, Independence Day parade through downtown.Reporting for the Round Rock Leader – and just a sucker for all things Mayberry – the community cross-section unfolded in a feast for my eyes and ears.

Melancholy Paradise: What will your legacy be?

Pastor Dave Roberts, from Grace Bible Church, gave us a point to ponder during the recent memorial service for my friend Algie Pulley.For about three years, Algie was one of my Gift of Time Alzheimer’s buddies. There, at Algie’s going-away party, the pastor talked about legacies.

Melancholy Paradise: Children and the language of death

My father lived the last 24 years of his life stone-cold sober. But in his drinking days, with a couple under his belt, he sometimes talked about the night when a revolver tucked under the front seat of his car saved him from being robbed.

Melancholy Paradise: In life the truest friend

What I know about the 19th-century English poet, Lord Byron, you could put in a shot glass and have room left over. But I have committed to memory one of his poems and it goes like this:“Beauty without vanity. Courage without ferocity. Strength without insolence.

The gift is to the giver

The man walked into the grocery store, wearing his misfortune like the shy and crooked grin on his careworn face. The store clerk did not know where the man had come from. He just sort of appeared, there in front of the clerk, who looked up and saw this stranger standing before him.