Autobiographical
A JIM BEAM CHRISTMAS – REVISITED
In the years that passed since that Christmas of 1965, I have entrusted this story to a select few. Some accuse me of embellishing it. Others listen in amazement and then interpret it as some bizarre religious experience. I dismiss such with a shrug and reply, “I simply consider it an incredible shot given the level of his intoxication.”
FROM CAMELOT TO KOKOMO – REDUX
“Faculty and students of Lafayette Park — the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, has been shot and killed by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas. You are dismissed for the remainder of the day.”
Less than a thousand miles away . . . Camelot had died.
We who lived through it are destined to remember. Here, in a long way around, is my memory of that day . . . and America of 1963.
Tragekitty
A classic case of trag-i-dip-i-ty: the occurrence and development of events by chance with tragic or CATastrophic consequences.
THE LAST WORD SOUTH OF AUSTIN By Don Kenton Henry
(“It was a symphony of nature and confirmation life around me would go on, unchecked by the coming and going of the likes of me, my dad, or any of us. Which got me thinking about the “going” part. Not mine. But his. I will call it the ‘Balcones Serenade’.”) It was the week of […]
IF WE ARE IN A DON’T LAUGH SITUATION (Don’t look over at me . . .) By Don Kenton Henry
It happened on the occasion of my grandpa’s funeral at Jackson’s funeral home in Rensselaer, Indiana, in 1984. Most of my family was in the front row directly in front of the casket. My youngest brother and I were on the end of the second row. We were all waiting for the preacher to take […]
Stand-Up Comedy, Civil Rights, and Corporal Punishment (in the second grade)
By Don Kenton Henry PREFACE: The first time I was ever paddled was in the 2nd grade. (In fact, what I did got me carried out of the classroom by my ear. The cartilage in my right ear was broken and still goes “snap, crackle, and pop” today.) It was joke day, and I got […]
The Night The Tigers Got Out Of Their Cage
“It would have taken a dinosaur to knock down those doors, but—unfortunately for ‘The Coach’—he was line-bred back only to the beginning of the Pleistocene Epoch!” by Don Kenton Henry It was a crisp “Indian Summer” evening, and a full moon hung over the playing field like a white china plate. It and an Indiana […]
I:8 TO YUMA
By Don Kenton Henry 8 May 2023 It was 1977 and I drove my 1973 Volkswagen camper van down Highway 1, from Seattle, along the coastline through Oregon. I refused to get on the straight and easily navigated Highway 101, just to the east, because the views over the cliffs and the Pacific Ocean below […]
The Midnight Farmboy
(Plagiarism―even regarding a title―is not my style. But when life imitates art to this degree . . . Well, hell . . . sometimes you just have to commit the crime.) By Don Kenton Henry The red, white and chrome Continental Trailways bus wound southbound down that ribbon of Highway 59 ensconced in the darkness of […]
THE BARD’S ROAD TO STURGIS 2015 . . .
By Don Kenton Henry I am on the road to South Dakota for the 75th Anniversary of the world’s most famous bike rally. Along the way I have met, and will meet, people from all over the world who have come to witness the spectacle that is “Sturgis”. Literally, it is a town that is […]
