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Showing posts from February, 2010

The Roaring Waters of the Rend Lake Spillway and My Grandpa's Stories of World War II

With so much snow on the ground, my thoughts turn to summer sometimes. The fountain at the pond in the park where I do chin-ups in Mahwah , New Jersey constantly roars in the summer. It reminds me of the roar of the spillway dam overflow at Rend Lake in Southern Illinois where my grandfather used to take me to catch shad for bait and then fish a little farther down the river. We mostly fished in quiet waters where he could talk, but closer to the spillway the roar kept conversation at a minimum. My grandpa was a storyteller, but he could not tell stories above the roar of the spillway. Fishing by a waterfall is not able to support conversation. Fishing requires you to keep some distance from the next fisherman anyway and requires personal space to cast the line, to listen, to watch the movements of the line. This is at odds with storytelling, which requires intimacy. My grandpa loved to tell stories, so we mostly fished in the quiet of lakes or creeks. He could tell about the charac

Remembering Kurt Warner, My Mom, and the Winter of 2000

Kurt Warner retired last week—we think, unless he pulls a Brett Favre on us—and I thought back a year ago to how happy I was to see him successful again after several years of struggling to regain the greatness he had shown with the Rams. Last January, before the Cardinals played in the NFC championship, I jotted a few notes about what I remembered of the amazing run Warner had with the Rams in 2000 when my Mom was still alive for what would be her last January. They beat Tampa Bay 11-6 that year. My Mom, who had never been interested in sports and thought it more of a worldly distraction, had gotten interested in football because of Warner, who was a Pentecostal Christian like we were. We had talked about it a few times during the football season as Warner and the Rams were taking the Midwest by storm. She really liked him, the Christian who went from bagging groceries to leading the “Greatest Show on Turf.” So after the Rams’ NFC championship victory, I called to talk to her about