“My Tennessee sister Nashville is becoming a Disney World of cities, the reality of it is the fantasy, the place of it is the imitation.”

We’re good at wild ideas around here, and both last week’s and this week’s are worth exploring. Sometimes the best discoveries are right in front of you. Sometimes the very things you’re looking for are already yours.

Three years ago, John Vergos had a straight-up world-class idea. He thought Memphis was worthy of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

“It tastes like the year we got married. Like our first apartment. Our first house. It tastes like becoming parents. Like promotions. Like graduations. It tastes like celebration, and like eating half of it on the way home from the bakery with your fingers.”

“Whatever your faith, whether you believe this is a time of anticipation and arrival, or of reflection or celebration, or of renewal or recognition — or all of those — I believe it’s a time to look inside to places only you can visit, to look at the paths traveled and at those who’ve shared the journey then and now, and to know, truly know, you are not alone.”

From the Big River Crossing one can stand above the middle of the churn of this nation’s main artery like nowhere else, for a view of the city like none other.

“There is a vaccine for COVID. There is none for what’s wrong with us.”

The boys from rural Tennessee are doing what naughty boys in rural communities have always done. They’re metaphorically climbing up to the top of the Memphis Regional Megasite water tower to paint out what they don’t like.

Gathered again for Thanksgiving, this time with four generations, I’m again reminded of, well, of everything. Most of all, I’m reminded of loss and of renewal, and I’m still surprised at the wonder of it.

Halloween was a couple of weeks ago as was Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

‘What they’re proposing and passing this time will kill people. Now and in the future. Men, women, and children will needlessly die at the hands of the super majority of the Tennessee General Assembly.’

Nora and I started walking together when our youngest child, our son Gaines, started driving himself to school. That was 24 years ago. 

The hint of political pressure and/or lack of political will hangs over North Parkway at McLean like the smell of elephant and donkey dung on a hot summer day.

Every year, Americans are swallowing about 45 gallons of water per capita from either plastic or glass bottles. That means folks around here, people literally sitting on top of famed Memphis water, are getting soaked. 

The new manufacturing site is named Blue Oval City after the iconic Ford logo and it will be three times larger than their current flagship Ford Rouge Factory in Dearborn, Michigan.

When the truth is being denied, when we are increasingly threatened by that denial, we as a society, we as responsible human beings, must stand for truth against any who knowingly trade falsehood for power.

Nora and I are no longer capable of the chase. And the chase is constant enough that the father no longer coaches the older kids but has returned to the sidelines to help the mother wrangle the 2-year-old.

Memphis is blessed by its food, the abundance of creativity, diversity and tradition mixed in the same bowls, seasoned with love, soul, and imagination – and still made and served by amazing people with a smile in these, their most trying of times. 

What are the odds that many birds could hit my car all at once while I was going down Walnut Grove? Precision daylight bombing.

If you have friends like that, you’re fortunate. If you have friends like that, especially in the time we’ve lived through and the people we’ve lost, let them know what they mean to you.

A lot of us forget that memory is selective and if we actually could go back to times we fondly remember, we would probably run from the reality we find.

In fact, Governor Lee’s stupidity could quite literally take your breath away and the breath of those you love.

Spouses and children and grandchildren and family histories — and genes — join us at table in spirit and stories and challenges. Just some guys ... talking about nothing and everything.

Only 24% of Americans identify as Republican... Only 30% identify as Democrat... Yet we allow ourselves to let those two parties label all of us as if we were one or the other.

‘You guys not only care about what I have to say, some of you have colorful suggestions about how I might spend my time and places I might go to spend it.’