Sunday Morning Essays

  The Devils Back Porch I am in the Devil's Back Porch, Texas. Photo: Cameron Ehring  For a lot of people, including myself, we can live in an area for a long time and never really know its unique history and people. Well, to be fair, we do know the names of some highways named after past politicians as if they paid for it.  It is not because the history is secret. It is because we don't see farther than our manicured lawn and our commute to work. For example, I lived in the Bay Area for decades. I love history and I thought I knew everything about San Francisco. One day, while Christmas shopping downtown, my travel companion and I decided by a whim to take one of those cheesy bus tours. I was grumbling because I really didn't want to do it. I grumbled louder as she led me to sit on the top in the freezing cold of December.  We froze our tails off while we listened to a very bright twenty something explain historical buildings, even...

Finding Noah My son packed his car, stepped over things that shouldn’t be on the sidewalk, avoided the homeless tents to protect himself from an airborne virus, and said goodbye. He got in his VW and drove one way from San Francisco to Dallas along highway 40. He is staying with us while he looks for something to rent.  A few months after he arrived it was Halloween, and we were talking about haunted places near Dallas. My travel companion and I knew a few.  For example there is a prestigious all-girls Catholic high school close by named Ursuline in which a nun looks down from an attic window. Long dead, she showed up in a class photo which is now on display in the entrance along with some trophies. There’s also a grande dame hotel built in 1912 downtown called the Adolphus with many ghost sightings hovering over visitors' beds. While talking around the kitchen table, we went to Google and looked up others. It turns out there’s a lot. One caught our eye as particularly gruesom...