hitwheelsnep My grandfather Walter Emmett Briggs was, to my understanding for the first thirty-four years of my life, three things: a veteran, a quiet man, and a biker. The order in which I understood these things was reversed from the order in which they actually mattered, which is something I think about now when I think … Read more
The Sunday my congregation left me was the second Sunday in April, which I remember because the dogwoods were flowering outside the windows of Calvary Road Community Church and I had taken that as a hopeful sign that morning, which teaches you something about the reliability of dogwoods as omens. I had been the pastor … Read more
I spent twenty-six years as a law enforcement officer in a county that had, during most of those years, a significant and complicated relationship with the Copper Saints Motorcycle Club. I made a lot of arrests in those twenty-six years. I made one arrest that I think about more than most. His name was Eddie … Read more
My son Caleb is small for his age. Always has been. At twelve, he was the height of an average nine-year-old, which was in his genes — I’m five-four, his father is five-seven — and which had been mostly fine in elementary school, where size differentials are manageable and the social cruelties are still relatively … Read more
I was seventeen years old and I had been driving for exactly eleven months when my front left tire blew out on Highway 12 at nine-thirty on a Friday night. The blow-out was so sudden and violent that I screamed before I’d processed what was happening — one second the car was moving normally and … Read more
I have run the Thursday Evening Reading Circle at the Harmon County Public Library for twenty-one years. In that time we have read one hundred and twelve books, lost seven members to death, gained twenty-three new members, had one romantic relationship develop between attendees that resulted in a marriage. I was honored to attend, and … Read more
I have been an emergency medicine physician for nineteen years. I’ve worked in level one trauma centers in two cities, I did a year of humanitarian medicine in West Africa, and I’ve spent the last eight years in a regional hospital that serves a three-county area with a population that includes farming communities, a mid-size … Read more
I am not, by nature, a fearful person. I grew up in a family of nurses — my mother was a nurse, my aunt was a nurse, my grandmother worked emergency triage for twenty-two years — and the professional inheritance of that is a fairly high threshold for panic and a tendency to assess situations … Read more
I took the job at the Black Notch Tavern because my thesis adviser told me I needed to stop living inside my own head, which is a thing academics say that usually means go outside but which in this case came with a specific address on Route 9 and a phone number and the explanation … Read more
The wind howled across the frozen cornfields of Willow Bend like a living thing with teeth. It was the kind of cold that sank past skin and muscle into bone, the kind that made grown men question how long they could keep moving before their bodies simply stopped obeying. For two full days the official … Read more