Quiet streets. Rush hour means three cars deep at a red light. My grandmother knows your grandmother. Going to the grocery and seeing 20 people you know.
This is life in a small town.
It’s often over-romanticized. But the small town life is still what I prefer. To me, Muncie, where I live now, is a big city. It’s not big enough to have bad traffic other than at all-you-can-eat buffets, but anywhere with a multi-screened movie theater and a mall is a big city in my book.
One of the small towns that I’ve called home over the years is Greenville, Ohio. It’s where we went for groceries, swim classes,…
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My brother, Kyle, and his wife, Jenn, just welcomed their first child into the world.
Max Timmerman weighed in at 6lbs 9oz and was born yesterday a few skips from Houston’s Space Center. The sky’s the limit for Max. He’s got two really smart parents one of who – my brother – is a bit of doofus, but he’ll be okay.
I’ve been a proud uncle to Annie’s sister’s kids, Jared and Cale, for six years now, but it’s different with your own bro’s kids, you know? I feel like I have a little more latitude to teach Max the important things in life: how to spit, how to cuss, how to sneak sips of beer when the adults aren’t looking.
I just…
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In honor of shark week, I’m dusting off an old piece from my column writing days. It’s from 2006 so the stats might be a bit out of whack.
Sharks Bite?
The waters don’t feel sharky, but I’ve been wrong before.
I’m 85 miles off the coast of Cuba, 40-feet beneath the ocean’s surface. The water is murky and I am tooling along a lengthy coral finger. People dive in these waters to see all of the bright colors and unique fish. All I can see are shadows.
The coral finger is the big unmoving shadow to my right. The small shadows floating around it vary in size and shape; they are fish such as parrot, squirrel, snapper, and angel fish. …
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Captain Scott Smiley
Leaving your family isn’t easy. I leave mine for a month or two at time. That’s a tough goodbye. Each time I’m faced with it, I think about the men and women of our military. They are gone for much longer and traveling to lands far less welcoming.
Returning home is always sweet. I return with my hair a bit longer, a few pounds missing, and some great stories. Annie usually cuts my hair within a few days, a couple weeks eating dessert puts the weight back on, and I stew over the stories making them readable. It takes next to no time for me to be back to normal.
But that’s not always the…
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