the words and worlds of John Robinson
Charlie Watts, drummer of the Rolling Stones since 1963, passed away, at age 80, on Tuesday, August 24th. I am still sad and in shock. I discovered the Rolling Stones when I was thirteen-years-old while packed in a minivan, with my family, driving through Memphis on our the way to Branson, Missouri, for a summer …
Over the next few weeks my posts are gonna be spottier and a little more sporadic than usual (not that I have any kind of set routine). Through my own machinations, I have become rather busy. I have a couple of larger projects in progress, one of which I, hopefully, will have finished by December. …
The title of this article is from Andrew Marvell's poem, To His Coy Mistress. It was published in 1681. I guess even in the 17th Century time seemed to rush by whether you were just living your life or waiting for your lady love to give you some attention. We still have the same amount …
While attending Harris Middle School, I didn't spend a lot of time in its library. It wasn't a strange phase or anything, I just rarely found much of anything I wanted to read on its shelves when I did visit. Everything felt lame and aimed at children. By the time of grades six through eight …
Continue reading "The View From the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts"
Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy.from Penrod Several years ago, several summers in fact, my brother and I (he a teenager, me near to being one) happened to see the midday movie on WZTV Channel 17, the premier local syndicated station in Nashville. The movie was On Moonlight Bay (1951). One of …
Officially, school ended for my son on May 21st. Much to the chagrin of his eight-year-old heart, I enrolled him in his school's summer learning camp (a four-week program, four days each week) to review material skimmed over, or omitted, due to Covid-19 closures and restrictions. He's had fun in the program, although he refuses …
Have you ever been struck by a completely random thought? Just in the middle of the day a thirty-odd-year-old memory pops in your head because you hear or see something? It happens all the time to each of us and it happened to me not so long ago. In one of the hallways where I …
The first novel of modern mainstream adult fiction I ever read was Stephen King's Cujo. I was eleven years old and my mother bought it for me on the last day of the fifth grade. It was a paperback and the cover was red. Everything before Cujo was comic books, Poe, Irving, Mary Shelley, Robert …
I knew I wanted to write in July of 1987. I didn’t know it consciously at the time-- it took a while for me to really catch on to what my brain was doing. I was ten-years-old and I was at the Capri Twin Theater to see RoboCop. It was probably too intense and graphically …
“Who wants a library full of books you've already read?”-- Harlan Ellison, Angry Candy Not so long ago, I bought a new bookcase. We needed one-- between my son and I (mainly me) our books were overflowing the available shelf space. I bought a nine-cube thing that more than suited our needs. With it, and …
