This story the day after Nanci Griffith’s death will always be incomplete, because how can I tell you about the 10-year-old friend I never had?
Read More...
A tweet and a song last night sent me down memory lane about writing on an unforgiving deadline, and the things our brains do to try to help.
Read More...
In which I recall being an insufferable know-it-all about one of my favorite singer-songwriters. A story with a plot twist you’ll no doubt figure out!
Read More...
There’s nothing like listening to “September Fifteenth” and remembering being on the road to becoming me — in the driver’s seat, not a passenger.
Read More...
What does Elton John’s “Sacrifice” have to do with driving on the hilly streets of San Francisco? Nothing, really, but in one vivid memory, everything.
Read More...
I was midway through a nearly three-hour drive after midnight. It was raining. At least one other person who was still awake noticed: the DJ at the radio station I picked up at some point after crossing into Texas.
Read More...For me, December can’t happen without my hearing certain music. One such piece is Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas.”
Read More...
A pause on my Monday morning to post a foreword of sorts to what I plan to be a series of blog posts celebrating and processing the first anniversary of my coming out as transgender.
Read More...
Published August 16, 2018
Danny had been on my mind lately. The reasons, like life, were a series of seemingly random events and circumstances that somehow worked together to point in a certain direction. Then, on Monday morning, I got the call telling me that he was gone.
Oof, as Danny often said. Oof, as if reacting to a body blow, a gut punch. That’s how it felt.
I’m writing this during my private candlelight vigil for Remy Daniel Miller II, whose funeral Mass is six hours (and two time zones) away as I begin this remembrance of the friend I met during our freshman year of high school. What would he think, I wonder, if he knew that my apartment building prohibits candles, forcing me to improvise with a battery-powered version and a Shutterstock image? My guess is he’d allow it.
Why had Danny been on my mind lately? For starters, two other high school friends — both of them one year my senior — visited me five weeks ago, stirring up memories that began flooding back a few weeks earlier when they told me they’d booked their flight. Flipping through yearbooks put a lot of names and faces back on my radar. And around that time, I reconnected with a classmate, the one who called me with the bad news Monday.
Published December 28, 2016
Gary Laney died without warning Friday, two days before Christmas. He was 47. The news was crushing. The shock hasn’t worn off, and I am flailing about in search of words.
His funeral is happening now in Baton Rouge. I wish he were here to talk about it with me. Gary’s presence here two years ago, the day before the funeral of our first editor in the daily newspaper business, was a gift to me from the cosmos. Now, he’s gone, and we are not having lunch together, not having beers, not telling Lake Charles stories, laughing and crying.
In a year of so much loss, Gary’s death is one of the hardest losses to bear.
We first met in the mid-1980s, when my journalism career was just getting started and he was a high school student with an interest in sports writing and newspaper work. He came up one day to the makeshift press box at Legion Field in Lake Charles where I was covering American Legion games, and on some level, he never left. Gary was like a friendly puppy, tagging along as I did my job. He was likable, smart, curious, full of questions, and eager to discuss sports, music, writing and many other subjects.