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Burton Cole

A basket full of sudsy quotes to fold on laundry day

My boxer shorts went on public display. “They did not,” my wife retorted. “It’s called a clothesline.” Oh, yeah, what I meant to say is that Terry uses advanced solar and wind technology to dry our laundry. Terry is a big proponent of finding environmentally conscious solutions to ...

All that glitters isn’t specially groomed whiskers

“Your beard looks so amazing,” one of the ladies at our table cooed. I flushed a little under my whiskers. “Thank y…” “It sparkles.” She turned to her companion. “Doesn’t it sparkle?” The second lady leaned in, chewed her lip, and nodded. “Yes. Yes, it does.” She ...

Playgrounds were real testing ground before safety was invented

The summit of the gleaming playground slide towered above me. The only reason I kept clomping up the 3,000 steps to the peak was the shouts and jeers of the crush of fellow kindergartners pushing me upward even as I wriggled for an escape. About a half-mile up, I stammered, “I... I changed ...

There’s no way to repair a lie as ridiculous as this DIY tale

I’d never heard such an outrageous lie. I was ashamed to be related to the man who told it to me. “JH,” as I’ll call him here, expected us to believe that he completed a repair project on his vehicle WITHOUT A SINGLE SNAG. Yeah, right. No man in the history of time ever finished a ...

‘Allow six to eight weeks for delivery’

Nothing so tried my young patience as the words, “Allow six to eight weeks for delivery.” Six to eight weeks took as long as three years to crawl along by a little boy’s hourglass. The only thing that took more time to arrive than “allow six to eight weeks for delivery” was ...

The story definitely isn’t fun

I still wonder what time it was when those two trains crossed. You know the ones. We met them in third-grade math class story problems: “A train leaves the station in Chicago at 3 p.m., headed to Cleveland, at an average speed of 47 mph. Another train leaves Cleveland at 4 p.m. for Chicago ...