An Arkies Musings

My An Arkie's Faith column from the July 26, 2023, issue of The Polk County Pulse. A few raindrops began to fall as we pulled out of the parking lot. Off in the distance, the skies looked dark and foreboding, and the thunder rolled. We were headed back to Arvada, Colorado, after spending the afternoon at my great niece's wedding rehearsal and dinner in Campion. Before getting on the highway, we drove through our old neighborhood. We moved from our house on Hankins Lane to Mena, Arkansas, over forty years ago. As we drove through Berthoud and Longmont, the rain intensified, and the clouds were dark and angry to the south and east, with occasional lightning. But to the west, the sun was shining brightly on the mountains. I snapped a quick photo through the windshield while we were stopped at a traffic light in Longmont. With the dark grey skies to the south and the apartments on the east side of the road lit brilliantly by the low angle of the evening sun shining from the west, t...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the July 19, 2023, issue of The Polk County Pulse. The phone call came from Porter Memorial Hospital in Denver, Colorado. My wife and I were racing along Interstate 70 in Kansas, headed to Denver. My father-in-law was in the hospital, and the prognosis wasn’t good. On our way across Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, we made and received four phone calls to get updates on Dad’s condition. I still remember opening the cell phone bill the next month and being shocked at the additional charges of over one hundred dollars for those four calls. I recounted this story to my teenage granddaughters while we discussed the advances in technology. They had never heard of a bag phone. I told them how we upgraded from the bag phone to a handheld Nokia phone that was almost as big as a brick and seemed heavy. When we upgraded from the Nokia to a Motorola Razor flip phone, we thought we had achieved the pinnacle of phone technology. But the part of my cell phone histo...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the July 12, 2023, issue of The Polk County Pulse. Light filled my hotel room as I rolled over and looked out the window. I reached for my phone on the bedside table to see what time it was. The screen showed 4:30. “How can that be,” I thought. I rolled back over and tried to go back to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. It was my first morning in Germany, and I was excited to be there. A half-hour later, I was dressed and walking out of the hotel to explore Alexanderplatz, the largest public square in Germany. Today our tour group will be going to the Pergamon Museum, and I was looking forward to seeing its striking reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate. I knew from my research of the museum that the Ishtar Gate was a passageway to the inner city of Babylon, constructed by King Nebuchadnezzar II in about 575 BCE. The gate was a part of the city walls of Babylon and was considered one of the original Seven Wonders of the World. After walking three-quarters ...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the July 5, 2023, issue of The Polk County Pulse. A light drizzle began to fall as I pulled out of my driveway into the inky blackness of the early morning. The headlights of my S-10 pickup struggled to pierce through the veil of darkness. It was 4:30 A.M., and once again, I was driving to De Queen to pick up a load of windshields. For the last week, my early morning trips to pick up glass had been an almost daily occurrence.  As I headed south out of Mena, the light drizzle turned into heavy rain. Soon the rain was falling in sheets instead of drops. So much rain fell that the highway began to flood. The visibility was abysmal as wave after wave of rain seemed to crash to earth. The windshield wipers slapped at the rain in a vain attempt to keep the windshield clear, but it was a losing battle. The rain was relentless as I drove on into the night. Water rushed through the ditches like a mighty river, flowing over driveways as the culverts were overw...