By: John Carlson— For my sixty-ninth birthday later this year, I considered asking Nancy for a $250,000 red Ferrari. Silly me. Now I just want to be enrolled in the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp, which is coming up sometime soon out in Las Vegas. Oh sure, my first thought was it sounded fun, but I should probably skip it. There wouldn’t be any other geezers my age there anyway. But then I thought, wait a minute, there’d probably be…
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By: John Carlson— Last week, Nancy and I went to the Delaware County Farm Festival. It’s an annual, two-day event that is near and dear to our hearts, because we actually met at the farm festival back 1880. No, wait. I mean 1980. Itjustseems like a hundred-and-thirty-nine years ago. I’m not going to tell you this year we had to fight countless numbers of fanatical farm festival fans to get in, because we didn’t. Still, for a city slicker born-and-raised,…
By: John Carlson— After two hundred hours of training, our daughter Katie recently earned her certification as a professional yoga instructor. She’s been the Public Information Officer with the Marion County Sheriff’s Department for a number of years. While she’s already teaching, her goals now include offering stress-relieving yoga sessions to deputies and other first-responders who, trust me, can undoubtedly use them. Another relative named Nancy has been practicing yoga at least twice a week, and occasionally seven days a…
By: John Carlson— 3/13/19 Story update from John Carlson is below. For anybody who read my column about the end of Bybee Pottery last Friday (see column below) and wished they had the opportunity to buy some, I have good news. I was wrong. Well, sort of wrong. Yes, the historic Bybee Pottery shop in Waco, Ky., that had opened in 1809 did close its doors to the public in 2011. What I hadn’t counted on, and didn’t know about,…
By: John Carlson— Not long ago, Nancy and I drove south to visit our son and daughter-in-law in one of our favorite places, Nashville, Tenn. This trip just served to highlight the wide range of attractions there. Yes, I like a whiskey-fueled romp through a Nashville honky-tonk as much as the next tourist, just so long as I don’t have to dance or otherwise move my feet. But this trip, we started off at the Frist Art Museum, where a…
By: John Carlson— In an attempt to fulfill our artistic destinies, Nancy and I have begun taking pottery lessons at Cornerstone Center for the Arts. Walking into class a couple Wednesdays ago, we were introduced to our teacher, Eugene Boyd, who is sort of a missionary for the joys of pottery-making. A friendly, effusive man, he told us how after retiring from his career as a General Motors toolmaker, he anticipated spending his golden years in a woodworking shop. Then…
By: John Carlson— Where we were, precisely, I forget. It may have been a hot fried-chicken joint where the burn in that crispy bird left me happily gasping. It may have been the sushi place, where you lifted your selections from the tiny flatcars that passed your booth on miniature railroad tracks. Or it may have been the traditional Mexican place, which answered my pressing question, “How does a grasshopper taco taste?” What I do remember is that it was…
By: John Carlson— Yielding to abject feelings of guilt and shame about my woeful physical condition, on New Year’s Day I began riding my stationary bike. This was pretty much a new experience, having only ridden my stationary bike twice since getting it for Christmas. By that, I mean Christmas of 1987. In the decades since then, the only exercise it had provided me was hauling it from the basement of whatever house we were moving out of to the…
By: John Carlson— Yeah, I am the kind of man who thrives on the danger inherent in adventurous expeditions, like on our twice-yearly trips to the Gulf of Mexico. True, the gulf is rife with blood-thirsty sharks. But I just laugh them off, pay them no mind. This is for two reasons: First, as already noted, I am the kind of man who thrives on the danger inherent in adventurous expeditions. Second, to reach me, those sharks will have to…
By: John Carlson— The other day while reading about the latest advancements in household technology, this came up. Smart toilets. It shouldn’t have surprised me, I guess. Everything else is smart these days. Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart whatever. If I wait long enough, maybe there will be smart golf balls that make their way unerringly into the cup, no matter how bad you suck at golf. As a person who has actually teed off on holes where my golf…