Tag Archives: arkansas

Lunch in Bismarck, North Dakota

Posted on June 14, 2025 | 5 comments
Sitting on a cliffside bench on the Maah Daah Hey Trail overlooking the Little Missouri River and the North Dakota Badlands

I am never short on plans and ideas, so when my wife mentioned that our youngest daughter invited her to fly to Europe to hike the last seventy miles of the famed Camino de Santiago with her this summer, I considered various options for my own solo vacation. Several came to mind, and when I asked my wife which sounded least interesting to her, she chose the road trip through North Dakota and into Eastern Montana. So that became my summer vacation. Jody wasn’t sad to miss out.

If you wonder, a road trip across North Dakota and into Eastern Montana allowed me to cover states number forty-four and forty-five on my bingo card, and it also provided the opportunity to add a few epic runs (and photos) to my growing collection, which included the Lake Wobegon Trail (Minnesota), Maah Daah Hey Trail (North Dakota), and Makoshika State Park (Montana). Adding states and running trails were the reasons I had the trip in the hopper.

But it turned out to provide much more.

It also introduced me to the North Dakota Badlands, which is a giant miss for globetrotters unaware of such a breathtaking place. And I discovered the Medora Musical, an outdoor production that is both fun (e.g., wonderfully talented performers in a spectacular setting) and strange (e.g., cheesy mascots and regular voice-overs from the deceased creators of the show sixty years ago) and simply too much to truly put into words. And it led me through the Theodore Roosevelt National Park where I encountered majestic bison wandering down the highway, a zillion adorable (maybe?) little chirping prairie dogs, and stunning wild horses posing on hillside pedestals.

I crossed the Mississippi River, the Missouri River, and the Yellowstone River. And I stayed in sketchy hotels and dined in country restaurants and ate raspberry sorbet in front of a tiny new ice cream place that can never make enough money to survive even though I tipped well. It was my own version of a special two-thousand mile roundtrip.

It also provided a moment far less magnificent but much more meaningful.

On the first leg of my journey home, I stopped for lunch at a Chick-fil-A in Bismarck, North Dakota. Other than the chicken, of course, there is nothing very special about stopping for lunch at a Chick-fil-A in Bismarck, North Dakota. But as I sat there alone in a crowded restaurant, I had an unexpected personal moment. For some reason, I thought of little me growing up in Arkansas, who even with quite the imagination never pictured that I would someday be eating a fast food lunch in Bismarck, North Dakota. I’m not sure I can adequately describe how that realization struck me.

I get that you might find it sad, this man in his mid-fifties eating his grilled chicken tenders alone. Others there probably felt that way about it, too. I, on the other hand, found it deeply satisfying. Of all my own personal critiques of my life, one of my favorite parts is the large number of unexpected places that my journey has led. That was the sweet thought that occurred to me there: Who would have thought that I would ever be in that place at that moment? I know that I didn’t, and that is exactly what made it special.

I don’t know, maybe that’s just a definition of wanderlust. Regardless, that moment made the entire trip worthwhile.

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Oh the Weather Outside Is Frightful

Posted on December 12, 2024 | Leave a comment
Ripon, Wisconsin

Wisconsin old-timers speak of harsher winters in days gone by, but I’m telling you that it’s colder than penguin snot here today. Wind chills are twenty below zero, which I recently learned is an actual number, and I believe that I am now permitted to use the phrase “frigid conditions.”

I was born in 1970 and grew up in the northeastern corner of Arkansas where we would get several inches of snow each winter, sometimes more, sometimes less. I remember my mother making delicious snow ice cream when it arrived, and I recall sledding adventures and snowball fights, building snow people and making snow angels, listening for school closures on the radio and learning to drive on icy roads. I also remember terrifying my parents in a pre-cellphone era by driving home from college in a driving snowstorm, and I recall college days in the mountainous northwestern tip of Arkansas where one October I walked across campus marveling at such an early snow. And best of all, back in my hometown in the early days of my post-college professional career, I remember an unusual winter ice storm in 1994 that provided a couple of uninterrupted weeks to get to know Jody, which undoubtedly accelerated our relationship—the best thing that ever happened to me.

So it makes sense that the winter season produces a sweet sentimentality in my mind.

But in early 1999, just before the turn of the millennium, we embarked on a twenty-year journey that led us to live on two separate, beautiful coasts with abundant sunshine and insignificant winter—and it was as glorious as it sounds. When prompted, I often repeated a new friend’s response to the question of whether he missed the beauty of a snow-filled winter: “If you miss what it looks like, buy a picture.” I joked that I was getting spoiled, not really suspecting that a joke might still be true. 

We moved to Nashville in 2019, a snazzy Southern city that expects a few inches of snow each year, which reminded me of my Arkansas home, and I was caught off guard by my happy heart when the snow fell from the sky, discovering that I owned a special smile that I had not realized was missing.

We then moved to rural Illinois in 2021, a step up in winter world for us, where a foot or so of snow is expected every winter, and I noticed that the special smile moved with me.

And here we are in Wisconsin in 2024, a winter wonderland that expects at least three feet of snow each year, and I am trying to explain to those of you scratching your heads why I am particularly happy.

Physically, I am not built for the winter. I’m not built for winter at all. I am skinny (no insulation). I am bald (no protection). To overshare, I have a thyroid condition that leaves me susceptible to cold weather and is better suited for a desert. But emotionally, I still smile each time it snows, and I noticed not long ago that cold weather triggers a set of previously forgotten memories that awaken a child that was ironically hibernating inside of me.

It is colder than a polar bear’s pajamas outside today. Sheesh, it is brutal and even dangerous. As Dean Martin might describe it, the weather outside is absolutely frightful, and I don’t suppose I will ever adjust to twenty below. But I’m telling you that somehow and somewhere in the mysterious interior of my mind and heart burns a magical little fire that is positively delightful.

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I Was Here

Posted on November 17, 2024 | 1 comment

For years I was told that I would not recognize Northwest Arkansas should I visit again, and that was the truth. Funny, you take a thirty-year trip away from a place and things tend to change a bit. I felt sort of lost all the time. Well, not all the time. Definitely not all the time. 

My youngest had the idea to meet up in Fayetteville for a renewal of the old Southwest Conference football rivalry between the University of Arkansas, my college alma mater, and the University of Texas, her grad school alma mater, now conference foes again (but in the SEC). She and her boyfriend drove up from Austin, and I flew down from Wisconsin, and my heart is grateful for all the emotions and memories generated by the weekend together.

The actual football wasn’t the greatest, at least from my perspective, but the look on their faces the first time the entire stadium called the Hogs was worth the football. To be honest, it wasn’t the thumping I expected, so I was proud of that, and as I absorbed the loss I recalled that we beat Texas in Little Rock my senior year way back in 1992 just as we joined the SEC, so it isn’t like I have gone without. 

It was an early game, so we got to wander through campus a little on a sunny Saturday afternoon afterward, and I enjoyed the three of us being together on a quest to track down my name engraved on a campus sidewalk as part of the beautiful Senior Walk tradition at the University of Arkansas. Seeing my name meant more to me than I expected. After thirty years, my name is still etched on a sidewalk for generations of college students and campus visitors as if to say: You should be aware that I was here.

Yes, I really was here. I once spent three formative years of my life here, and it was good to remember.

It was extra special to visit with Hillary, whose life has been drastically different than mine from the start, and especially to consider that in very real ways her life experience is a direct result of my decision to go to the University of Arkansas in the first place. I have not forgotten walking across campus in awe as a first-generation college student, falling in love with the realization that the world contains wonders I had never imagined. It was there specifically that my horizons expanded, as well as my willingness to set sail from safe harbor on multiple occasions afterward. My wanderlust, which has characterized and now characterizes her life, emanated from that first act of curiosity and courage. I guess it even led her to the sworn enemy territory of the University of Texas!

It would be nice to go back for another visit someday, but it might not happen, and that is okay. This was enough for me. Yes, this was special enough for me. There is no need to be greedy.

Regardless, and forever, Go Hogs! 

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Front Porch Memories

Posted on May 25, 2020 | 3 comments

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Early 1970s

There was a cardboard box next to the exposed hot water heater on what we called the back porch in the tiny house I grew up in on West Mueller Street. That is where I kept my baseballs and glove, along with any other sports equipment I could get my hands on. I played outside a lot as a kid, and every day, multiple times a day when possible, I would grab something from the box on my way out the back door.

Most of the time I played alone, not that I was a loner per se, but we lived in a neighborhood without other children, so there simply weren’t other options. There is this embarrassingly adorable picture of me as a little boy stage propped on our front porch between a couple of older neighborhood boys, Butch and Joe, who paid attention to me and made me feel important. I dreamed of being a big kid someday and was over the moon excited to have their attention. But by the time I was a big kid, they were long gone.

So I spent untold hours in the backyard, complemented by untold hours shooting hoops on our narrow driveway, but for some reason my mind drifted recently to the many afternoons spent in our tiny front yard as a change of pace. There wasn’t much room to maneuver there, but plenty of free time and childhood imagination could make do.

When it came to baseball, my dad taught me important skills like curving a bill on a baseball cap and breaking in a baseball glove, so I would suit up, and with that intoxicating smell of leather in the air, slip on that Rawlings baseball glove and arch my index finger out the opening and transform into my hero, Ozzie Smith. I would crouch in position and imagine the pitch, then fire a worn-out baseball against the concrete porch at an angle that would make me/Ozzie range from side to side while the crowd held its breath.  I would scoop up the ground ball and whirl to fire to first. Playing alone, however, firing to first meant another delivery toward the front porch angled to hit the grass just before thumping the hard concrete resulting in a line drive back to me where I was suddenly a first-baseman stretching to beat the runner as the crowd went berserk.

It was pretty spectacular stuff, and I did this over and over and over again, all the live long day, sweating and basking in imaginary baseball glory.

Every once in a while I would misfire, and the baseball would sail just above the front porch and slam into the siding outside my bedroom window. I would wince knowing that my dad winced when he heard the errant throw, but I never broke the window, and he mercifully never stopped my treasured ritual.

I don’t know what made me think of those countless afternoons in the front yard pounding baseballs against that concrete front porch. There is nothing particularly redeeming about the memory, but for some reason I discovered that I missed it—the innocence of a little boy playing heroic baseball in an imaginary world.

I would like to visit that innocent place again. Maybe that is heaven.

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Fast Away

Posted on February 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

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“You can’t be open to new opportunities if your life is full.” – Bob Goff

I grew up in Arkansas but moved away with my wife and daughters twenty-one years ago this month, and it was obvious that we entered a new world when our move coincided with “Mardi Gras break” in our new hometown.

Everyone has heard of Mardi Gras, French for “Fat Tuesday,” the colorful spectacle of parades and beads and general losing of minds associated with New Orleans, but it is a cultural phenomenon across the Gulf Coast in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle. And if you don’t live there, you might not realize that it is this week.

Everyone has heard of Mardi Gras, but having grown up in a small town with very little contact with the Christian calendar, I did not understand the point of the party until I moved in next door. Fat Tuesday, the day of indulgence, precedes Ash Wednesday, the day of fasting that marks the beginning of the season of Lent.

Although I grew up in a very religious environment with a strong emphasis on the Bible, the biblical practice of fasting was practically invisible to me. But I have grown to understand its great value.

We can talk food, of course, which anyone who has attempted any measure of self-control with food can appreciate, but fasting can refer to anything one chooses to do without. And we could all use some help learning how to give something—anything—up. In the workplace, I have heard it said that it is just as important (and possibly more so) to have a Stop Doing List next to your To Do List.

What do you need to stop doing?

Habit is powerful. Try breaking one, and you’ll see. But try flipping it on its head and develop a habit for stopping things. This is the week when the Christian calendar asks us to consider such a challenge.

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Withdrawals

Posted on February 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

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I recently canceled my subscription to Runner’s World and replaced it with a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly. For one thing that makes me feel smarter, but more importantly, I wanted to enhance my intellectual curiosity and the broad offerings of The Atlantic promised a more balanced diet.

The first issue in 2020 did not disappoint.

Specifically, I was intrigued by Emma Green’s article, “Retreat, Christian Soldiers.”  The article introduces the town of St. Marys, Kansas, and in so doing, the Society of St. Pius X that has come to define the town. The online version of the article (located HERE) uses the headline, “The Christian Withdrawal Experiment,” and describes it this way: “Feeling out of step with the mores of contemporary life, members of a conservative-Catholic group have built a thriving community in rural Kansas. Could their flight from mainstream society be a harbinger for the nation?”

Green draws attention to Rod Dreher’s 2017 bestseller, The Benedict Option, which advocates that particular posture—withdraw and circle the wagons. Both the article and book highlight the flight of those with conservative values, but the monastic approach has been used irrespective of political preference. All types of groups have been escaping the world in search of utopian community for time immemorial.

I surely understand the motivation. Hopeful to instill specific values in our children and attracted to surrounding ourselves with said values, it is logical to gather with like-minded people in community. I get it. I even desire it from time to time.

But it isn’t my cup of tea.

I love where I grew up, so don’t here this as criticism of my beloved hometown, but when I read about St. Marys, Kansas, in certain ways I thought of Paragould, Arkansas. I grew up in a peaceful homogeneous world where values were consistent at home, church, school, and town, and I felt safe and well. Who could argue with such a thing? On the other hand, I raised my children in non-insular environments, which is risky by nature. Diversity creates friction, and friction is, well, combustible.

So I do not write today to make judgments. I went to law school and can therefore make valid arguments for—and against—both.

But I do write from my particular experience. I understand the attraction to insularity, and I understand the attraction toward diversity. For some unexplained reason, I am drawn more to the latter.

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Finish the Race, Keep the Faith

Posted on January 27, 2020 | 4 comments

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Note: I wrote this post before the tragic helicopter crash in Calabasas near one of my old running trails, but the message still somehow applies. RIP to Kobe, his daughter, and all who died in such a terrible accident.

When I was fourteen, Shawn invited me to run a 15k in Memphis at Oktoberfest, and since there was little adventure in our small-town Arkansas life I quickly agreed. I was bright enough to know that fifteen kilometers equaled 9.3 miles but not yet bright enough to prepare by running more than three miles in advance. Coach Watson warned us, but we were invincible junior high schoolers, so we weren’t worried.

We rose in the early morning darkness and rode the hour and a half to Memphis in a custom van with Ethan and Everett. We thought both men were ancient, although I realize now that Ethan was only fifty-three (and Everett sixty-seven). Ethan was a legend in our hometown, completing over forty marathons, including three Bostons, and Everett was a legend in several ways—college football at LSU, one-time world record holder for sit-ups, pole vaulter in the Senior Olympics. We were unable to comprehend our great privilege.

The race was something else. I had only run a couple of local 5ks, so this was the first time I had experienced the exhilaration of a major race with a thousand runners—much less the distance. Filled with adrenaline we started way too fast, and at the second mile marker I could not breathe, where it occurred to me that I still had over seven miles to go. So I let Shawn, the far better runner, go on while I slowed the pace to focus on survival. I never stopped, in spite of the monster incline up Riverside Drive near the end. I may not be a natural runner, but I am naturally stubborn.

Last weekend, thirty-five years later, I remembered that race on a seven-mile run at Percy Warner Park, alone in nature with my memories. The trail is hilly, and the temperature was frigid, and as my aging body huffed and puffed up a small mountain I remembered Shawn’s impression of the whistling sound Ethan made as he inevitably caught and passed us at each race. I had to laugh. At an overlook at the top of a major hill I stopped to gaze at the Tennessee winter forest and realized that I love Ethan and Everett now more than ever. I was in California when each passed and could not pay respects in person, but they helped shape my life. And then I thought of Shawn, killed in that tragic automobile accident so long ago. My very first running buddy.

The cold and the hills and the memories combined to bring tears to my eyes. I realized that I am the only one left from that 1984 Oktoberfest quartet, the only one left even to remember.

I decided to dedicate the run to my old friends (may they be somewhere running in peace), so I turned from the overlook and hit the trail again—alone. Not sure why I am the only one still on the course, but as long as I can I’ll keep running.

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Respecting Time

Posted on December 30, 2019 | 2 comments

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“Time is an illusion.” – Albert Einstein

Tick, tock, the clock does its rhythmic work without fail, and without complaint, while we lament that it goes too slow or marvel that it goes too fast. But time never misses a beat. And as the 2010s approach their finish line and the 2020s prepare to take the baton, like everyone else, I stop to reflect on the mystery of it all.

A decade ago I was approaching forty, smack dab in the middle of law school, living in a university residence hall with my family in California. For obvious reasons I anticipated launching a new life as an attorney in my forties, but here I sit a decade later in Tennessee, approaching fifty as a university vice president. Life surely is unpredictable.

I dare not venture a guess at life a decade down the road. The past has at least taught me that much. Two decades ago I was a baby preacher in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Three decades ago I was a college student in Arkansas preparing to coach high school basketball. Four decades ago I was wearing a yellow ribbon to Mrs. Conley’s fourth grade class for the hostages in Iran, and fifty years ago? Well, I was born nine months later, so I’d rather not think of that too much.

Einstein said that time is an illusion. And that dude was pretty smart.

Last week we spent Christmas in Arkansas with extended family. It was a great visit. Most of our trip occurred in or driving by farmland, and it reminded me of what Stephen Covey referred to the “law of the farm”—his way of describing how certain things cannot be rushed. One might cram for a test, but you can’t cram on the farm. Planting, cultivation, and harvest must occur in order, and in due time, and the rhythm cannot be forced.

Life apparently subscribes to the law of the farm. Tick, tock, the clock does its rhythmic work without fail, and without complaint, while we lament that it goes too slow or marvel that it goes too fast. But time never misses a beat.

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Away from Home

Posted on October 7, 2019 | 2 comments

Freshman Year (Sturgeon)

It has been a long time since I was a college freshman, which my present work constantly reminds me. I barely remember it now and often wonder if that is a gracious gift of aging.

Although I did very well in high school and should have considered many options, I never went on a college visit and simply remember struggling with one question—do I “go away to college” at Harding University, or do I “stay home” to play basketball at Crowley’s Ridge College? I don’t remember the details of why, but I chose the former and traveled the daunting one-hundred miles to study physical education in Searcy, Arkansas.

It was a good year overall. Harding reminded me of my high school in many ways, which was positive. I knew several students already there and roomed with Christopher, a friend from high school and a track star.

When I try to remember those long ago days, an odd collection of scenes comes to mind: An unsuccessful attempt to walk on the basketball team. The terror of speech class. Daily chapel. Pledging a social club. Navigating a laundry room. Unlimited food in the cafeteria. New friends.

Although it was a fine year, it was only a year, and I transferred to the University of Arkansas for the rest of my undergraduate education. At this point of life my solitary year in Searcy seems like a blip on the radar screen, almost causing me to question if it even happened.

Today, I am back in Searcy for the first time in close to thirty years for a student affairs conference, and I am reminded that it did. In fact, that year and that place represents an extremely formative moment in my life—my first experience in actually being “away from home.”

I have subsequently lived in multiple zip codes and discovered quite a bit about the world and about myself. That all began with a mysterious decision to go away to college. That decision is not for everyone, but all in all, it was right for me.

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1982

Posted on September 30, 2019 | 5 comments

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“Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it.” – Whitey Herzog

The year was 1982, and I was adjusting to life in junior high school. I doubt I knew the word hazing, but I sure was nervous about going to the locker room, which was unfortunate since sports were my very favorite things.

But God smiled on me as a young baseball fan.

The combination of my dad and Paragould, Arkansas, made me a St. Louis Cardinal baseball fan, and 1982 was simply our year. Dale Murphy tore up the National League, and Robin Yount the American League, but destiny was with the Redbirds.

The previous winter the Cardinals added Joaquin Andujar and Lonnie Smith—and more importantly, Ozzie Smith—and during the season they called up young Willie McGee. In the summer they would draft future stars, Vince Coleman and Terry Pendleton, but it was Keith Hernandez and Bruce Sutter who were the beasts on the field in 1982. They led Whitey Herzog’s team into the playoffs for the first time since 1968 where they faced the Atlanta Braves.

It is a special memory. The Cardinals were my team, and I knew them so well from listening to Jack Buck on the radio. But Ted Turner’s young television “superstation” helped me know the Braves, too, and for a twelve-year-old boy enamored by all things sports, it was just special. That my team swept the series was icing on the cake.

It is disturbing how quickly thirty-seven years can pass, but here we are again. Times have changed, including baseball, and along the way I have watched the Redbirds go to the postseason fifteen more times, including six World Series appearances, but today I am remembering that first innocent memory: The Cardinals versus the Braves in the playoffs.

The Braves are loaded this year, and I would be surprised if my Redbirds survived the challenge. Honestly, I don’t really care that much anymore. Now, I simply like to watch and imagine Bob Forsch firing a fastball in to Darrell Porter on a fuzzy console television. Those two players aren’t with us anymore, at least in person, but they have never left my sweet childhood memories.

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