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.

This country has the best medical care in the world, and only money and insurance makes it readily available, with few and far-between exceptions like St. Jude.

Finches in a Memphis bird feeder conjure memories of a trip years ago to Alaska. 

A Memphian’s ninth annual list of his favorite local dishes.

The poet, farmer and environmental activist Wendell Berry understood that our hope is founded in our place.

A tour bus of folks from Toledo hits the highlights: from the site of the first Piggly Wiggly, to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, to The Peabody. A Memphian along for the ride finds fresh cause for wonder. 

We are just a president’s cruel tweet away from Baltimore, a look in the mirror at a majority-minority city reclaiming its historic buildings, its downtown swimming in development and promise while the city struggles with how to share that promise with so many drowning in poverty.

Nostalgia can be fun and comforting. It can’t be a destination. Don’t long to go where you can’t go, long to make where you’re going better.

This was Memphis in the early '60s. You could see Elvis at a stoplight, Jerry Lee in a restaurant, and listen to "Wooly Bully" on the radio waiting in line for auto inspection right in front of Sam the Sham’s club.

Parking, the issue that buried decades of goodwill in greensward mud, will once again be used to define and differentiate the Memphis Zoo experience. 

My doctors seem to have no idea who I am. I had back surgery in November and follow-up appointments since, but I’m still asked to fill out a complete online personal medical history, family medical history, and identity check including photos, front and back, of all requisite cards and documents in advance of my next appointment.

The fates of a Holiday Inn-turned-Hotel Indigo and the empty Sterick Building are a study in the contrasts that define the city.

There is no excusing the murderer who took Glenn Cofield’s life or Brandon Webber’s self-destruction. There is also no excuse in the richest nation on Earth for the poverty and despair our policies produce, and the pressure that puts on law enforcement and support systems.

Our grandchild, born June 10, is part of the flow of the Mississippi where my father's ashes are, and the stream in upstate New York where my brother Frank's ashes are. Just as every one of us is an individual, every one of us is part of something larger, connected in ways large and small, and always to place.

He was 13 years older, the blond guy in the living room reading books and blowing smoke rings, off to college when I was 5, married and off to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop when I was 12. 

Richard Halliburton wrote a steamer trunk of bestsellers and syndicated articles, but to call him merely an author would be like calling Indiana Jones merely an anthropologist. And while Indy’s unbelievable fictional adventures are just that, Halliburton’s unbelievable adventures were real.

Saunders' tale is a roller coaster ride from rock bottom to dizzying height and back again, a journey that left an indelible mark on the world.

We’re about to spend $50 million to fix something that’s not really broken, and throw chump change or nothing at all at opportunities for true transformation.

The NBC series "Bluff City Law" is about fighting for civil rights in Memphis, and there’s a very real chance it will be made somewhere else.

We must find a way to take the warmth around our tables, the generosity in our hearts, and what I believe to be the genuine decency of our nature, and carry it to the chambers of those elected to lead us.

Whether or not the voucher program becomes law, it’s bad law, and a self-inflicted wound to our new governor. He used his honeymoon period to shove school vouchers down the throats of just two districts already strangled for cash.

If reelected, Trump will be 74 starting his second term and even his combover will be somewhere around 40. The two leading Democrats will turn 80 in their first term if elected, an age closer to terry-cloth robes and sunrooms than mantles of power and situation rooms.