Download MP3 (right click to save)
For the first 16 years of my life you could pretty well guess what I would order in a restaurant. If it wasn't a hamburger, it was fried chicken. If it wasn't fried chicken, it was a hamburger. Now, people - especially my parents - tried to get me to try other foods, but eating out meant two things and only two. Did I mention it was hamburgers and fried chicken? Oh, yeah.
Download MP3 (right click to save)
There's this picture that hangs on the wall in our living room. It has meant a lot to me in recent years. Just like an identical picture did was I was four years old. That's when my baby brother died suddenly. My grieving dad, who was not a churchgoer, decided he should take his surviving son to church somewhere.
Download MP3 (right click to save)
Our kids gave it to my wife and me as a gift, and we had a great night together with dinner and a show. The show is in the same place as the dinner; there's this large, indoor arena with long tables that encircle the show floor down below. During and after dinner, we watched an impressive show of trick horse riding, dramatic spectacle, and rodeo style events. There's one part of the show I'm not going to forget. A rider actually stands atop two horses, one foot on each horse. They begin to gallop around the arena with the lights down, except for the torches in the middle and a giant ring of fire. Amazingly, the rider and his two horses leaped through that ring of fire together! I'll tell you, the emcee called it "a demonstration of three-way trust." Yeah, I guess!
Download MP3 (right click to save)
I guess it was inevitable. With our boys growing up in northern New Jersey, it was predestined that they, and I for that matter, would become New York Giants football fans. Big Giants fans. Even in the season when they won only three games, and even when they had a string of bad seasons. Even when the airplane flew over a game with the banner that said, "Fifteen years of lousy football." What used to really annoy my boys was when friends who claimed to be Giants fans kept "jumping ship" when they kept losing. Then came the playoff Giants, and then the Giants that won the Super Bowl. Suddenly, there were gazillions of Giants fans everywhere, jumping up and down, celebrating the champions. But they could never know the joy of fans like my two sons who never lost hope, and who never stopped rooting for their team.
Download MP3 (right click to save)
When a member of our family would "shirk" a chore they had at our house, we had a familiar line that we used jokingly. Somebody would say, "Oh, it's so hard to get good help these days." Actually, I first heard that from a friend of mine who said that about trying to find a housekeeper. Now, that wasn't a real heavy issue for us, hiring a good housekeeper. We had a family!
Download MP3 (right click to save)
Just another day on the subways of New York. That's what Wesley Autrey thought it was going to be as he waited for the next train with his two young daughters. There it was - the light of the approaching subway. Suddenly, a young man near him stumbled off the platform and fell onto the tracks below. Later, that 19-year-old's family said it was because of a recurring medical problem he had. With the subway approaching, Wesley Autrey made his choice. He literally dove on top of the fallen man and rolled him into the drainage trough between the tracks. Then he threw his body on top of the young man, forcing him to stay down. It was too late for the subway to stop. The train ran right over the spot where one man was literally laying his life on the line for another man. The subway missed them by two inches.
Download MP3 (right click to save)
We were in our seats waiting for the curtain to open on this great, family-oriented stage show. I knew it must be show time, the lights went down, and unobtrusively the live band quietly filed into the orchestra pit. Most people were focused on the stage, but I was fascinated by something I saw going on with the band. One woman in the band had the arm of a fellow band member on her arm. She was obviously leading him to his position at the keyboard. Then I realized with amazement that the keyboardist was blind. He put on his big headphones and, as the curtain opened, he started playing with all his heart. It was awesome!
Download MP3 (right click to save)
I thought I was going to gag on the smell. I was a little guy, my mother used to drag me with her to the beauty parlor where she got her hair done. I'm not sure what chemicals they used back then, but I obviously must have done something horrendous for my mother to subject her precious little boy to nasal torture. And I wasn't sure what was going on when they put this hood-like machine on my mother's head. For all I knew, it was some kind of mechanical brain-sucker. I didn't know what was going on. Well, Mom used to come away with what they called a "permanent." Now, today, the chemicals don't reek like they did back then, and they've abbreviated the name of all that curly hair to "perm" - short for permanent, which they're not. They weren't when it stunk getting it done; they're not today when the process is much nicer. Let's get real here, perms should be called temps. They don't last.
Download MP3 (right click to save)
Okay, so the glass says "Coke" on it. But the label would be wrong. See, the glass is filled with water; which of course, would be much healthier for me. Now there's no way I could put any Coke in that glass. No, you see, you can't put any other liquid in it because there's no room for anything but water because it's full. Aren't you glad you tuned in for that science lesson?
Download MP3 (right click to save)
Our grandson was on a very limited diet - just mother's milk or baby formula for his first six months. But something then happened in weeks that followed. He suddenly became fascinated with what the rest of us were eating. Fascinated, as in staring at the food on our plate, the fork going down to get that food, the fork coming up to put that food in our mouth, and our mouth as it was chewing that food. Then repeat the exercise as the fork goes down for another bite. You could tell by the longing look in his eyes, he wasn't content with that milk or formula anymore. No, he wanted some of that good stuff. If he could have talked, I think he might have said, "Hey! I've been made for more than what I've been getting!"
Download MP3 (right click to save)
OK, I'm not much of a cook, but when my wife was really busy and under the weather, we got to eat my cooking for dinner. Which meant a very limited menu which invariably included the grilled cheese option. Now, when I would prepare that gourmet specialty, I would reach for my trusty skillet - the one that's coated with Teflon. You don't have to be a headliner on the Food Channel to know that life is a lot easier when you have a pan that things don't stick to; they just sort of slide right off.
Download MP3 (right click to save)
Every once in a while the sun just decides to take a vacation for a few days. Not too long ago, we had one of those stretches of weather when we didn't see the old boy for the better part of a week. It was just like one rainy day after another. Everyone around here and everything around here was soaked. I was running into our headquarters one morning on a day like that, as one of my co-workers was, and we were both trying to avoid getting drenched in the process. I made some comment about the relentless rain, but he was looking at a little bigger picture than I was. Remembering last summer's withering drought, he said, "This is going to be good for us later on."
Download MP3 (right click to save)
She was only days old when she was abandoned by her parents. The lady who found her took her to an orphanage where she spent the first year of her life. It was a caring place, but of necessity, it was unheated. So she was too bundled up most of the time to fully develop her motor skills, and she was one of some twenty infants in tiny cribs in a small room. She got to play sometimes in their playroom, but it was pretty small, too. Small is the word, I guess, that would really describe her whole world. Then one day a couple from America came and her caregiver placed her in their arms. That day, she had her first ever ride in a motorized vehicle and her first view of the world beyond the orphanage. Since then, there's not a day that goes by that she doesn't have some new experiences that just keep blowing the walls off her world. She's not an orphan anymore. She's home!
Download MP3 (right click to save)
Gerbils are pretty funny and they're extremely predictable. At least, the one our kids had. He sure was fun. He was a pet. When I checked on him in his little cage upstairs, he was almost always doing the same thing - the wheel. There he was, chugging away, running on his gerbil wheel. If you went back a few hours later...the wheel. If I had spoken "Gerbilese," I would have pointed out that even though he was expending a lot of energy, he wasn't going anywhere. But I think I know what his response would be. He would just run faster on the wheel that was going nowhere!
Download MP3 (right click to save)
There are few TV series that have become more a part of the culture than the one that portrays the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Right! You got it, Star Trek. The original show has spawned like two or three other series and some major movies. So a lot of people know about the transporter which beams your molecules up and then down to another location or the weapon that the Trekkies call a phaser. And maybe you remember the command that one of the captains gives whenever the Enterprise is coming under fire. It's the directive that activates this invisible protection around their ship, "Shields up!"
Download MP3 (right click to save)
So many times, the latest technology becomes a great blessing and a great curse. For example, are cell phones a blessing or a curse? Yes. It's great that I can reach anyone or they can reach me basically anytime or anywhere. And it's terrible that people can reach me anytime, anywhere. How about e-mail? Fast, efficient communication from wherever you are to wherever they are. But then there's "spam" - the email equivalent of junk mail. You can wake up to dozens of new emails, including a bunch I really don't want. But there's this button on your computer that really comes in handy. It just says "delete." If you don't like what you're getting, delete. If you don't want to keep something, delete. If you write something you decide you don't want to send, delete. One key stroke and what you don't want is gone.
Download MP3 (right click to save)
Let me give you a little weather preference test (as if we get to vote). Why don't you rank these one, two, three from the best to the worst: rain, snow, ice. I just gave you my ranking. Rain is no problem. I grew up in the Midwest; and I lived in the Northeast so I can handle snow. Even when you have to walk or drive, there's at least something to dig into. But ice? Oh, man, ice storms can leave some very nice things behind. Every branch, limb, and home is glittering with this beautiful coating of ice. But it is a pain if you've got to go anywhere. Reminds me of an old song, "Freeze a Jolly Good Fellow."
Download MP3 (right click to save)
So how many diets have you been on in your life? Lost count? Yeah, me too. I think I must have gone on my first diet when I was about six months old. If you're one of those over-blessed people who can eat anything you want and never gain weight, oh fine! Just keep it to yourself and have some sympathy for the rest of us. But if you've been on a diet, then you know what it's like to blow a diet probably. You've been eating just celery and tofu for the past couple of weeks, and you're getting lighter. Then somebody offers you a French fry and you succumb. Then you say, "Oh well, I might as well eat all the French fries!" Then you feel so bad about it, you say, "Oh, what's the use, I might as well wash it down with a milkshake while I'm at it!" An hour later, you're thinking, "If I've blown it this bad, I might as well order pizza too...with extra cheese and extra pepperoni, of course!"
Download MP3 (right click to save)
Since Jim was a boy, it's always been a custom in his family to usher in the new year with fireworks. It's legal where they live. Recently, he told me about the New Year's Eve celebration he remembers more than any other. The church was having a traditional watch night service where everyone prayed in the new year. In fact, the pastor was praying right at the stroke of midnight. At the same time, not far from the church, Jim's dad was taking time out to bring in the new year a little differently. Not with fireworks - with dynamite! He had some dynamite left from a construction project. He thought it would be a great idea to set it off at the stroke of midnight - which he did! Suddenly, everybody in the church was startled by this thunderous explosion outside. The pastor never missed a beat in his prayer.
Download MP3 (right click to save)
A lot of us have it just about memorized - but it's still a Christmas classic - the Charlie Brown Christmas special on TV. You maybe hear that familiar piano theme in your mind even now. Huh? Can you hear it? Charlie's efforts to find the meaning of Christmas are, of course, repeatedly frustrated by Lucy's big mouth and Snoopy's garishly decorated doghouse. But then there's Linus on stage, in the spotlight, reciting the story of the first Christmas from the Bible. And Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, of course! It is, of course, the last tree on the lot: it's bedraggled, it's broken, and it's pitiful. But Charlie insists on giving that miserable little tree his tender loving care. And by the end, that tree, fully decorated, has become the beautiful center of the whole gang's Christmas celebration.
