Knee Deep

Our surfing hero, Sumatra Sammy has miraculously returned from a perilous World Tour, where he battled an amputation, loneliness, and a lost spirit. His quirdy attitude has something to teach us here in this exclusive interview – that our best journeys are always the ones with a loose definition of destination...

Truth is truly stranger than fiction...except when it comes to fish in a pond, and then even the truth can become muddy, like a good fish story, and take a turn towards the eerie, the unnatural and, yes, the “orange.” 

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program…” is a sign that danger is lurking in the upper atmosphere, that conditions are right for uncertainty and instability. As some weathermen are want to say, “There is a fly in the ointment.” It is tornado season. We rediscover secluded parts of our basement again, watch our lights flicker off, wait by candlelight, and listen.

Yes, by now you know them by name. Our flighty yard guests, Maude and Claude, who come in every year and teach us something new about ducks, but also about how to live and love one another. As some of their habits began to get under my tail feathers, I wondered, was there enough love to go around? Hmmmm…

When the moon and the sun align for peculiar and stunning effects this coming week, we will observe a rare solar eclipse, but in the tiny town of NIbula, Nebraska the dramatic changes that occur in the sky throws an elementary school into a a crazy orbit and creates a most unlikely hero.

The organ resounds, the choir bellows, and my father held the final note way too long at church every Easter Sunday. By contrast, the years my parents invested in piano lessons for us kids culminated in a significant key note, that held the power to bring down our house and retire our piano to its rightful place in history, and possibly, in heaven.

At its heyday, when a thousand ancient Indians farmed at nearby Angel Mounds, they might have escaped the rising waters of the Ohio every Spring by climbing up the massive, rising hills they built. Or, they may have run up to the top just for the view. For my grandson and I, it was more of a pilgrimage than a hike, as we both crossed over the boundaries of an ancient time, one that brought us clos...

When my 101-year-old father was called up for jury duty, he had a thing or two to tell the court system, and about the last century in general.  Although the gavel hasn’t sounded yet, and the verdict is still out, his incredible life will most certainly be the closing arguments.  

Healthy food choices can be a nightmare. Labels on food items are long and full of complicated words. Print is small or even in other languages! What are we to eat?  ALAS! We are not alone in our grocery sojourns! Say hello to Mr. Tally Robot-O-Inventory Guy! While he may be mechanically creepy and artificial, deep down in his gut he loves our personal space.  

Want to eat healthy? Just cross your fingers, say an organic prayer and you’ll have taken the first nutritional step towards a new diet and a new, healthier you. There are a lot of great wholesome choices out there, and for at least one of my teenage students anyway, healthier choices in his diet would have begun with picking better finger food.

In the leading us besides still waters, God does not turnaround and lead us out on thin ice. How do we measure God’s goodness and mercy? We can look, as the young shepherd David told us in Psalm 23, to the enduring evidence of God’s stability in still waters and green pastures, and place us on more solid ground.

We tend to grow into the name we are given, even if it is not that flattering. It may sound endearing or cute at first when we are young. It may make us feel like we are more accepted or recognized. In our heart we are experiencing a kind of pressure though, a crushing of our spirit. Soon, we will celebrate a holiday where we become who we were meant to be.         

Have you read the latest issue of Dogue Magazine? Dogs are now capable of doing things like keeping pace with a Tesla, sniffing out milk products that have expired, and making bank transactions, to name only a few. Dogs will soon hold the key to an even higher calling and help us get to that transcendent existence where pet peeves will be a thing of the past.  

Normally, when the subject of doorknobs comes up, it is because someone has locked themselves in a gas station bathroom and can’t get out without screaming HELP! In my case, talking to doorknobs is a skill, that according to my daughter anyway, I have been fine tuning my entire lifetime. Now, it is determining my very legacy.  

There is absolutely no connection between pirates and cement contractors, but when you keep an address book like mine, logic goes right over the railing and into the raging sea. In fact, if you’re looking for anything between A and Z, you might as well be sailing the ocean without a rudder, which as it turns out, may not be such a bad idea…

There is no finding any extra degrees outdoors this last week but when you are in a crowd of people singing It Is Well With My Soul , things seem to be as warm as toast. Our souls may long for renewal in these frigid days of polar vortexes, but maybe we can find warmth and revival... even a touch of "relevance" ...singing in unison together as one beautiful, intentional voice.  

Sometimes we can get stuck on the simplest of resolution in a new year. In our case, what is stuck is in our oven amount to an embarrassing culinary disaster that may take the next twenty years, or a stint in prison, to remove. I'm calling 2024 The Year of the Oven.

The average person will speak some 5.8 million words in the coming year of 2024. No wonder they say your mouth is the strongest muscle in the human body! And, what if I told you that you could eliminate all but fifty-five of those words and gain an extra five months in the coming new year? Well, I assure you I’ve picked my words carefully in this podcast…

If you’re at a loss for what dishes to serve to all those relatives that are starving and blue, snuggle in with your kids and listen to how the uproarious Slap Family overcame their grumpies and made Big Slappy Stew. There's some wild Slap characters here and enough slap-soup stew for at least sixty-two, and if you aren't grumpy, possibly you!

Going back into the archives of Knee Deep to play an old favorite from a past Christmas... The holiday season is creeping up on us like the second hand in a scary movie. No one hears the ticking until the camera zeroes in on the gothic clock and the last few seconds tick off in slow motion. Will we make it out of the holiday Twilight Zone before that clock strikes twelve? We may, but it will take...

Start the countdown! It's twelve days til Christmas, and if you feel like you are on thin ice, I've come up with another Ten Tidings to help you skate smoothly through the season. Renegade apples? Moonwalking? Yep, they are all part of the package I've tied up for you with a bow in this episode for you and your kin!

We get attached to some of the most ridiculous things in life, and one of them is our parking spots. We like to think we are a generous lot, but our cars are sneaky as they slide nonchalantly into “their” space and claim it as their own. We might want to be a bit more cautious as we pull into that pole position because someone, someone special, may have our number…  

All of our hustle and bustle becomes a backstory during the holidays. That isn't exactly what Solomon had in mind when he used the word trust. In his wise proverb he is suggesting that we can do all the hurrying around we want, but if our heart is not in the right place, the path is going to have some rough going.

Zoysia, oh Zoysia, where has your blazing grass gone? It's gone to Hell in a handbasket, that is where it has gone, as our entire neighborhood appeared to be on the verge of burning to the ground amidst leaf fires, lawn fires, and blazing golf shots gone mad. Yet, a force greater than grass is bringing Heat of a different kind.  

In November, the street I grew up on turned into a corridor of fire as leaf fires lined the curbs and sirens could be heard across the city. Amidst the chaos of smoke and flames, my brother finds a new method for spreading our blackening zoysia grass to every lawn in our neighborhood.