I had been married twenty years before I turned to my wife and asked, “What do you mostly think about?” I decided to share with her that most of my reflection time was spent thinking about ethics, philosophy, and religion. Now I wanted to know what mostly occupied her mind.
I’ve known since a very young age that I wanted to write books. In fact, it was probably more than forty years ago that I decided I would like to do the thing that Donald J. Sobol did with Encyclopedia Brown, or what Franklin W. Dixon’s ghostwriters created with the Hardy Boys. It wasn’t just detective stories.
The little local TV station in the Alabama town where I grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s ran tape year-round from the previous Christmas season in which area children tentatively approached the throne of the station’s official Santa Claus.
The other day my son and I were riding our bikes along Lake Crabtree when we came across a sculpture of a goat looking down from the exquisite arc of a metal mountain. The name of the sculpture: “For No Apparent Reason.”