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.

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.