Zap! Boom!

My mom has an awesome superpower.  She can respond with clever comebacks at the speed of light. Seriously, it’s like a lightning bolt comes out of her mouth.  Zap! Boom!

She’s got you.

One time she had two Zap! Booms! in a row. 

We were at a nice restaurant with some friends. Mom ordered a side of coleslaw.  They served it to her in a scoop on top of a leaf of lettuce and in a small white bowl.

Soon after we started eating, my mom said, “Well…lookie here!”

About twenty years ago, I was the kitchen manager at the Hickory Star Restaurant on Norris Lake. Always looking for new recipes, I came across this one. With a little tweaking, it became my own. First, let me tell you about my time at Hickory Star.

Mindy Grimm took over as Union County's ICare Drug Coalition coordinator in July 2017, and while she's hosted monthly meetings and a couple of tailgates during football season, events haven't been her focus. Instead, she's hard at work gathering data on youth drug and alcohol abuse to build a program targeted at Union County's unique needs.

"We don't know what we don't know," she said. "We're reassessing the whole framework to try to build a foundation for the kind of change that we need."

Be the Good Lord willing and the creek [not the Indians] don’t rise, I’ll be signing books–including my new book More Tales from the Hills and Hollows of East Tennessee at the Red Gate Festival and Rodeo.

God willing and the creek don’t rise is a saying I remember from my childhood. However, most of the folks in my family replaced “God” with “The Good Lord.”

After hearing them blurt out this saying, I often asked my relatives what they meant. Most were so shocked that a child had listened to what they said an answer was not forthcoming. Others mumbled something about having a plan to do something but knowing that their plan could be interrupted by fate.

A new study examines what may cause chronic back pain in runners and the exercises to help prevent it. The study, published in the Journal of Biomechanics, suggests that runners with weak deep core muscles are at higher risk of developing low back pain. And, unfortunately, most people’s deep core muscles aren’t nearly as strong as they should be.

Lefty Frizzell sang a song about Saginaw, Michigan. He sang about the fancy houses the lumber barons of yesteryear built on Mansion Row. We didn't live in that part of town. We lived on the west side. Our house was the only one on a block in a working class neighborhood that never really took off. There was only one tree.

The tree wasn't a stately oak or a majestic elm. It was a young box elder tree growing near the driveway out near the street. No one planted it there. It just grew. That was a set up for trouble.

Don’t you love getting tickled in church? The worst times are those during an actual service when it would be most inappropriate to laugh; also, these are the times incidents seem funnier than they might otherwise.

But sometimes we get lucky and funny things happen in church when we can laugh and not be inappropriate. I hadn’t been driving long, and I still had my first car. It was a 1967 Chevrolet Impala that I inherited from my father. The car rode low on its springs, so roads with unexpected dips could be challenging. The car also seemed as long as a small bus, and I tried in those early days of driving to park it where it would be easiest to pull out for the ride home. My choice parking space at that time was at the edge of the parsonage driveway, directly under a cedar tree.

In the months leading up to the American Civil War, Isham Harris, the first West Tennessean elected to the governor's office, championed secession.

Mountains seem to be a universal attraction to people no matter where they come from. To we who were born and raised in them, they are especially endearing because they were the constant backdrop of our lives: their beauty, their challenges, and their molding of the culture of our ancestors that was passed on to us. Mountains are special, but what is it about them that everybody falls in love with? This will sound over-simplistic, but the answer is their 3-dimensional terrain. Let me explain.