My bleary eyes gazed through a plate-glass mirage as the runway of Las Vegas’s airport drew a literal line in the sand. Sometimes the line between life-changing dreams and nightmares runs thin as the queen of hearts.
From my 24th-floor office in northeast Beijing, each day I survey the startling expansion and transformation of the city. Every morning brings either a new high-rise or a vacant lot where an old high-rise once stood, a situation accelerated by the $40 billion Beijing is spending in preparation for the upcoming Olympics. But the changes China is experiencing are far more profound than a few new skyscrapers, and the consequences of those changes reach around the globe.
I gave my first reading of my children’s novel, Gentle’s Holler, in Sylva, North Carolina, in the spring of 2005. I noticed a woman in the front row, Dot Connor, in her sixties with a shy smile and eyes bright and alive with curiosity. I wondered why she was there, because it was mostly children gathered. I learned she was the daughter of Mary Jane Queen, a mountain ballad singer, and my book reminded her of her own large family.
Erin Moore graduated from the University of Tennessee last spring with an A+ in perseverance. Two years ago, in August 2005, Moore was starting her sophomore year at the University of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina aimed for the Gulf Coast. The university shut down, and Moore fled the Crescent City with a backpack containing two bottles of water, some saltine crackers, and two changes of clothing.
SENATE LAWYER BECOMES UNPAID SMOKIES MEDICAL RECEPTIONIST! I fully expected to see this newspaper headline. Most of the things I worked on made national news. But maybe not this time.
They say a moUThful with a single word. I’m talking, of course, aboUT those new billboards, newspaper ads, and that cool TV commercial toUTing the University of Tennessee, using a variety of words with “UT” in them.
When did coffee become a fashion statement? If you brew plain old Folger’s in a bottom-of-the-line Procter Silex, you might as well admit your favorite dessert is Jell-O. Just plain coffee is soooo yesterday.
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