Musings

By Sean Dietrich DESTIN, Fla.—I’m in a traffic jam. Standstill. Cars are backed up to the horizon. I am stuck among them, trapped on Highway 98, suffocating within a cloud of blue exhaust and unspeakable misery. We are moving at 0.002 miles per hour. I look out my window and see...

By Sean Dietrich We had a major potato salad crisis at our Fourth-of-July barbecue. Someone forgot to designate a family member to be the official “bringer of potato salad.” So everyone took it upon themselves to bring potato salad. We had 2,927 varieties. There are few things more American than a...

By Sean Dietrich Today at the store I watched a young guy hold the door open for a mother of three. He trotted ahead and threw open the door with a grand flourish as if to say, “After you, mademoiselle.” The woman stopped cold in her steps. She had a baby on...

Book Review by Jack Smith In the summer of 1968, I was a beach lifeguard at Myrtle Beach and the only thing I worried about was girls. As Apollo 8 soared towards the moon and the Democratic Convention exploded in Chicago, nine men tried to accomplish the age-old sailor’s dream:...

By Kerry Knight, Emerald Beach Church of Christ A certain school, to avoid offending anyone, decided to drop any reference to religion. They instead started singing about the weather. They began to hold a winter festival in February. They developed a list of songs that included: “Winter Wonderland,” “Frosty the Snowman”...

By Peter Fischetti The old man thought he had heard the surf, but it probably was just the wind. Rarely were the waves from the Gulf strong enough to make a sound you could hear on Back Beach Road. That’s where the old man lived, in a nursing home. His...

By Ethan Jago I grew up in a culture where it was frowned upon to ask hard questions. As the son of a pastor, I knew all the right answers to the right questions, but every other response outside of that box was simply: just have faith. This mentality is...

By Sean Dietrich I am a dropout. I grew up pretty hard. I am an educational failure. I had few academic opportunities. As a result, I am a very slow reader, and an even wurse speler. This is because, after my father died, my family hit rock bottom. My mother cleaned houses...

By Sean Dietrich We were newlyweds, living in a grungy apartment. Each morning, I would wake before her. I would pass my morning hours writing poetry on a yellow legal pad, sipping coffee. Mostly, I’d write the kinds of god-awful things you’d expect newlyweds to write. I’m talking painfully corny stuff. I’d...

By Debbie Edmondson, Board Member, A New Day Without hope we will perish! I have heard this my whole life. Until we are faced with the perish part, it makes no sense. Loss is a loss, whether you are dealing with the loss of a roof from a hurricane, loss...