Tennesseans don’t trust Tennessee to take care of them any more than they trust Washington to take care of them. The same people are in charge in both places.

We have sure and certain knowledge of homemade mayonnaise. Yea and verily, shrimp mousse and tomato aspic jiggle. Behold the turnip greens and be glad in them. Take the fish pudding by faith.

Dan Swanson made a table from two Minnesota oak trees. Posey Hedges makes new wood look a century old. Gaines Conaway is reshaping a farmhouse that partly dates to 1872. In a time of fleeting texts and ceaseless emoji, look for things crafted over time, relationships built from deeper places.

My second date with Nora Ballenger was a college rush party in 1967 at the top of the King Cotton Hotel, where the Raymond James/TBD building stands today. Accompanying us was a bottle of Wolfschmidt Vodka. Nora drank Tab. I drank the Wolfschmidt. All of it.

“Memphis has always been racially-fractured, and I don’t know where we’d be without the greatest duct tape and Gorilla Glue in the world ... music.” 

It’s just flat mean of the Tennessee Legislature to continue to deny even basic health insurance to some 300,000 working Tennesseans just to make a political point.

You may not think you know Rob Norcross, but you do. He was the architect for the most acclaimed minor league ballpark in the country, and for the home of grit and grind.

On Saturday, there will be a memorial service for Norman Blackley – “Cap” to so many – at the Memphis Botanic Garden. The place will be chock-full of stories. And gratitude.

A University of Tennessee fraternity brother invited me to lunch the other day, he said, to share my experience writing a column with his son. Instead, he turned to me and opened with, “Tell him the toilet seat story.”

This is about respect for time-honored process in a short-cut world, about pride in completion, about creating something for others. As chef Hallie said, “Baking is hard.”

We contain multitudes. 

The zoo parking versus Overton Park Greensward debate has come full circle in four years. Now the bulldozers and chainsaws – along with the fate of 200 trees – are on hold.

In a small town outside of London, in a pub known only to locals, I found myself standing next to someone I was in the third grade with at Memphis State Training School.

This is and always has been a city of promise, and a city that fails to live up to it time and time again.

A tribute to one of the great guys: The ones who knew you – not just your political beliefs or your fandom or your kids’ names or your tells in a poker game – you. 

Here are a handful of Memphians who've altered our music, our food, our landscape and the game of golf.

What these people have in common is Memphis – a place from which seemingly ordinary people send extraordinary things to the world.

On Oct. 3, we voted in a half percent sales tax increase, raising our sales tax to nearly 10%. The police and fire unions campaigned to get the issue on the ballot, promising to restore benefits cut in 2014, but other city employees would be cut out of the tax increase windfall. 

When they were building FedExForum, they had to put up protective bollards around the plaza, and Andy Dolich came up with the idea of painted balls: basketballs, baseballs, tennis balls, soccer balls. 

Raymond James, headquartered in St. Petersburg, gets in a fight with their landlord Jacob Sofer, headquartered in New York, over elevators in their Downtown Memphis office building, and the next thing you know, EDGE has given Raymond James $3,238,440 of your and my money to move to East Memphis. 

A conversation on a library loading dock between two Memphians inspires thoughts on the 'different cities in the same city.'

Kroger serves as a good corporate citizen in its many communities, and its generous support of the Mid-South Food Bank here is one example. However, Kroger can be truly tone deaf about truly local connections.

How many of the people around me in waiting rooms at the driver’s center and the SSA office can find all the things they need to get their driver’s licenses, or their benefits, or the REAL ID required by October of 2020?

Now United Way requires the agencies it funds to connect with each other, and to guarantee that connection in their funding requests. In turn, United Way nurtures and facilitates those connections.

As people are being shot while shopping and praying and driving because of what they might or might not believe, or just because of what they look like, it serves us well to remember that we have plenty of homegrown terrorism in our history.