It's always a difficult time dealing with aging parents, particularly when strokes and dementia set it. Here's the case of one elderly lady who doesn't trust her son-in-law's intentions. So, she takes matters into her own hands. Meet Emma and hear her story.

Sleep can become a very tricky thing when we begin to dream. The line between dreams and reality start to blur until it's hard to tell what's real and what's imagined. The stories you will read here are just such stories. Are they accounts of reality - or are they just some rather elaborate dreams? I'll let the reader decide. The answers aren't easily determined. They're even more difficult to explain.

There are lazy summer days when we find it hard to entertain ourselves. Sometimes we feel life can get pretty boring. It's on days like that when the old saying "It's as boring as watching the dust settle" came about. One lazy summer day last year, I decided to see just how boring the settling dust could be. I found quite the opposite! There's a lot going on out there!

Everyone knows there's an explosive potential for disaster when young men are issued a challenge of any kind. To dare a young man to do something he'll likely later regret is a surefire recipe for consequences beyond the realm of imagination. It happened in much the same way the night I was sitting in the neighborhood bar on a snowy winter's night, enjoying a few frosty beverages with a couple of my friends. Our attention was eventually drawn to a poster on the wall behind the bar advertising an upcoming professional wrestling show at a nearby arena. An added opening attraction on the card would feature an exhibition match in which three "brave young men" from the crowd would square off against two pro wrestlers in a ten-minute tag team bout. The three upstarts would receive $500 each if they could last the full ten-minute time limit in the ring.

One of the cities where I lived during my earlier adult years was well-known for the many small "Mom & Pop" type bars and taverns that dotted the neighborhoods throughout the city's residential areas. These were typically clean little establishments like the one depicted in the old "Archie Bunker's Place" TV sitcom. Since these were some of my lonelier days, I was known to frequent one of these bars with a good deal of regularity. I remember it as the place where my love for Haggard & Jones songs was cultivated. The jukebox was loaded with the good old drinkin' & cheatin' songs made popular by so many classic country artists of the day. I wasn't above crying a tear in my beer at times, although the times were relatively good as I look back.

It had become a cold dark world. Crime ran wild, going largely unpunished. Not only were law enforcement agencies unable to stop it, but there was an alarming trend pointing toward their involvement. Not only was darkness a figurative description of the state of being, but it was fast becoming a literal state as well. Decades of pollution, waste, and indifference have taken their catastrophic toll on the world’s climate. Winters had become brutally cold with unimaginable amounts of snow in areas unaccustomed to such. The sun was little more than an occasional bright spot in the sky. Daylight had been diminished to a couple of murky hours a day.

The combined smell of sweat and perfume permeated the station's waiting area, as holiday travelers dealt with the anxieties of catching and switching trains on their way to various destinations where they hoped to share turkey and pumpkin pie with loved ones for the holidays.