Dried-up rubber bands and balls of single shoelaces. Nine-volt batteries and decks of cards without any aces. Brown paper from packages with snippets of strings… These are a few of my favorite (junk drawer) things. (If you sang the above lines, I offer my apologies to you, Rodgers, ...

Cousin Ollie tossed down his comic book and sighed. “I’m bored.” I was in the middle of a very important panel of my Little Lulu comic. I fumbled for the empty wrapping paper tube beside me and flung it at Ollie. “Here, look for something to do through your telescope.” Back in ...

I must have watched the old guy for 20 minutes, maybe more. All he did was sit at that table with his coffee and stare out the window. I couldn’t understand it. How can someone just sit for extended periods of time and do nothing but stare at something? Or nothing? I studied him for ...

Gather ’round, kiddies, and your ol’ Uncle Burtie will tell you about how we survived in the ancient days before Amazon. Oh, yes, it’s true, there was a time before Prime and FedEx trucks roamed the land. I was there. I also remember when there was no such thing as the Super Bowl, ...

I was a twig-sized seventh-grader at Rowe Junior High School — the puniest of ranks in the strangest and most emotionally unstable three years of a human being’s “wonder years.” I sat at a table with my loud and obnoxious friends in an echo chamber of a lunchroom full of loud and ...

I mopped my brow with the bottom of my T-shirt. “I am sweating like a pig.” “Nope.” Cousin Ollie shook his head. “Pigs don’t sweat.” “Then how come we say ‘sweating like a pig’?” “WE don’t. YOU do. Real farm kids know better.” I sighed. “My mom says my room ...