2022 – A Monumental Year

The year 2022 started out with the promise of the end of the COVID-19 global pandemic but quickly showed us the doorstep of World War III with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24th. As it comes to a close, I look back at all the events that took place this year. Some predictable, others not, like my diagnosis with stage-IV prostate cancer in July, and the shocking, though not too surprising tragic death of my son, Mitchell, in the Kansas City area only 2 weeks after my diagnosis.

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The Old Magnolia Tree

When our family lived in Durham, North Carolina, for the second time between the years of 1963 and 1971, we lived in an area that was a boyhood dream. In our back yard, less than 20 yards from the house, was an old log cabin with remnants of a linoleum floor and a covered hole in the wall that was once for a stovepipe. The cabin had been a dwelling at one time. Just across the street, was the eastern boundary of Duke Forest, in which my neighborhood friends and I had a network of paths and forts extending almost to Orange County to the east.

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Chicago, America’s Biggest Small Town

Being from Muncie, once labeled “Little Chicago” for the mobsters that would hang out there in the 1920s and 1830s due to it’s proximity to the “City of Big Shoulders” yet also because of its distance from it, I would visit the “Windy City” from time to time during the warmer months. It wasn’t until 1988, long after moving to Texas, that I experienced the winter months there.

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