Biking is something I both love and hate. The conflicting emotions arise from the undeniable physical effort it demands. However, this exertion is precisely what makes it an excellent form of exercise. Most days, I dedicate over an hour to my cycling routine, and in doing so, I’ve discovered a unique opportunity to enjoy a good book or podcast. The rhythmic pedaling and the wind against my face create a calming backdrop that allows me to fully immerse myself in the content. In these moments, the time spent on the bike seems worthwhile, as I can’t help but appreciate the mental and physical rewards it offers.
I especially like having ridden. The post-biking feeling is one of pure satisfaction. The endorphin rush, coupled with a sense of accomplishment, makes the initial struggle and fatigue worthwhile. As I dismount and catch my breath, I relish the sensation of having conquered the challenge, both physically and mentally. It’s a reminder that the things we sometimes love to hate can often be the ones that bring us the most fulfillment. In the end, the love-hate relationship with biking only deepens my appreciation for the sport, as it continually pushes me to overcome my own limitations and embrace the rewards that follow the effort.
My bike
A Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike. The ‘old’ man seat was salvaged from an old Walmart bike (update: seat replaced, new photo to follow, someday).
Something to consider if you’re not already cycling.
I encourage you to start riding a bike, no matter your age. Check out these groups:
Don’t miss the #1 New York Times bestselling blockbuster and Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick that’s sold over 2 million copies–now an Apple TV+ limited series starring Jennifer Garner!
The “page-turning, exhilarating” (PopSugar) and “heartfelt thriller” (Real Simple) about a woman who thinks she’s found the love of her life—until he disappears.
Before Owen Michaels disappears, he smuggles a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers—Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.
As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss, as a US marshal and federal agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared.
Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they’re also building a new future—one neither of them could have anticipated.
With its breakneck pacing, dizzying plot twists, and evocative family drama, The Last Thing He Told Me is a “page-turning, exhilarating, and unforgettable” (PopSugar) suspense novel.
We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope.
A generation after Maya Angelou held up a cosmic mirror to humanity with “A Brave and Startling Truth,”Pattiann Rogers — who writes with uncommon virtuosity about the intersection of the cosmic and the human, and whose poems have therefore been a frequentpresence in The Universe in Verse — offers a poignant cosmogony of our self-creation in the stunning final poem of her book Flickering (public library).
HOMO SAPIENS: CREATING THEMSELVES by Pattiann Rogers
I.
Formed in the black-light center of a star-circling galaxy; formed in whirlpool images of froth and flume and fulcrum; in the center image of herring circling like pieces of silver swirling fast, a shoaling circle of deception; in the whirlpool perfume of sex in the deepest curve of a lily’s soft corolla. Created within the images of the creator’s creation.
Born with the same grimacing wrench of a tree-covered cliff split wide suddenly by lightning and opened to thundering clouds of hail and rain.
Cured in the summer sun as if in a potter’s oven, polished like a stone rolled by a river, emboldened by the image of the expanse beyond earth’s horizon, inside and outside a circumference in the image of freedom.
Given the image of starlight clusters steadily silent above a hillside-silence of fallen snow… let there be sleep.
II.
Inheriting from the earth’s scrambling minions, images of thorn and bur, fang and claw, stealth, deceit, poison, camouflage, blade, and blood… let there be suffering, let there be survival.
Shaped by the image of the onset and unstoppable devouring eclipse of the sun, the tempestuous, ecliptic eating of the moon, the volcanic explosions of burning rocks and fiery hail of ashes to death… let there be terror and tears. Let there be pity.
Created in the image of fear inside a crawfish skittering backward through a freshwater stream with all eight appendages in perfect coordination, both pincers held high, backing into safety beneath a fallen leaf refuge… let there be home.
III.
Made in the image of the moon, where else would the name of ivory rock craters shine except in our eyes… let there be language.
Displayed in the image of the rotting seed on the same stem with the swelling blossom… let there be hope.
Homo sapiens creating themselves after the manner and image of the creator’s ongoing creation — slowly, eventual, alert and imagined, composing, dissembling, until the right chord sounds from one brave strum of the right strings reverberating, fading away like evening… let there be pathos, let there be compassion, forbearance, forgiveness. Let there be weightless beauty.
Of earth and sky, Homo sapiens creating themselves, following the mode and model of the creator’s creation, particle by particle, quest by quest, witness by witness, even though the unknown far away and the unknown nearby be seen and not seen… let there be goodwill and accounting, let there be praise resounding.
Apply what you’ve learned to invent your own creative ways of noticing.
***
The Art of Noticing
Simple and uncommon exercises to reveal what’s hidden in plain sight.
In The Art of Noticing, Rob Walker—a journalist, author, and educator—invites us to attend carefully and playfully to everyday curiosities that most of us tend to overlook.
“Fending off distraction isn’t quite the same thing as making the most of our attention.” By engaging the senses, Rob says, we can enrich our daily lives with meaning, boost creativity, and even “reframe the way we take in the world.”
***
Rob Walkeris a journalist and author. He is a longtime contributor to The New York Times, and a columnist for Fast Company. His recent books are The Art of Noticing, and Lost Objects, co-edited with Joshua Glenn. He is on the faculty of the Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts. You can find his newsletter at robwalker.substack.com.
Move over Mike Pence, Mike Johnson is in the big chair—and in a position to try to enact all of his Christian nationalist dreams.
Reading Time: 5 MINUTES
The challenge of Christian nationalism has resurfaced over the last week with a tale of two Mikes. The first concerns conservative Christian Mike Pence dropping out of the race for president. The charisma black hole that is the former vice president under Donald Trump never really stood a chance, even against the aging Joe Biden. Sometimes reality is unassailable.
But while Pence was debating with himself whether to continue his campaign, another Mike was throwing his hat into the political ring. It got to a point where congressional Republicans were keenly aware of the embarrassing situation of not having a majority leader in the House of Representatives. After a number of potential candidates failed to get enough support, including the controversial Jim Jordan, it appears that the GOP lawmakers ran out of patience. The first person to come along who appeared to be a safe pair of hands would command quite an advantage.
Appearances can be deceptive. Dangerously so.
It is amazing how much a calm voice, a pair of spectacles, and a nicely tailored suit can do for a politician. (I am reminded of the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work including the chapter, “The Case of Dave: Would a Snake Wear Such a Nice Suit?” Not to cast aspersions…) He seems such a sensible person, and his voice is so moderate!
That’s his physical voice, not his political voice. The tone of his speaking belies a now rather typical MAGA-style conservative Christian agenda. So much so that controversial MAGA frontman Matt Gaetz said of Mike Johnson in an interview given to Steve Bannon, “If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.”
Don’t be entranced by the slippery gyrations of “MAGA Mike.” This cobra has a very poisonous bite.
Former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki dropped her own mic on her MSNBC show: “Another deeply religious conservative Republican just ascended to the speakership… The problem with Johnson isn’t at all his faith. He is entitled to his personal beliefs as everyone is…even if they come from the 18th century.”
Ouch.
The problem, as she points out, is when those beliefs encroach on the rights of others. Christian nationalism in a pluralist society is something of a headache in a secular country. This might be Roe v. Wade, which Johnson believes “gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America. Period.” He believes that if women were able to bring more “able-bodied workers” into the world to foot the bill, then politicians wouldn’t need to slash Social Security and Medicare:
He even blames school shootings on abortion, as Irin Carmon sets out in the New York Magazine:
At the time, Johnson was a lawyer defending Louisiana’s abortion restrictions — purported safety regulations designed to shut down clinics — in court and had just been elected, unopposed, to the State House of Representatives. I remember thinking how anodyne the office was, like a small-town personal-injury firm, as he cheerfully told me that soon the pro-lifers would outnumber the pro-choicers who aborted all their babies. I no longer have a recording, just a 27-page transcript, but my memory is that he kept his voice smooth and pleasant as he said, “Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are. When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”
He has also supported legislation to limit the teaching of race-related topics in schools, and Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. His blend of Christian nationalism looks very much like a white one: He has also often repeated promotion of the “Great Replacement Theory.” Usefully, Politico have released a piece detailing where he stands on many political issues.
Beware the quiet man. When he addressed his colleagues on the first day of being the new Speaker in the US House of Representatives, Johnson shared the following: “I don’t believe there are any coincidences. I believe that scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority, he raised up each of you, all of us. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed us to be brought here to this specific moment and time.”
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following him. In 2016, he said, “You know, we don’t live in a democracy . . . It’s a constitutional republic. And the founders set that up because they followed the biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.” And very worrying to those of us who find the separation of church and state crucial to the political operation of the United States, he added: “Over the last 60 or 70 years our generation has been convinced that there is a separation of church and state . . . most people think that is part of the Constitution, but it’s not.”
He has also expressed his belief that the founders wanted to protect the church from the state, not the other way around, and that the US is indeed a nation with Judeo-Christian roots under threat from secular forces.
In case anyone was in any doubt, Johnson confirmed his moral-political worldview in an interview with Fox News: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”
Same-sex marriage is also another talking-point issue where Johnson appears to be on the wrong side of history but the right side of the Republican Party. As Time reports in their piece “The Christian Nationalism of Speaker Mike Johnson“:
As an attorney working for the Alliance Defense Fund, now known as Alliance Defending Freedom (founded by leaders with similar Christian nationalist commitments, like James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Bill Bright), Speaker Johnson opposed the decriminalization of homosexual activity through Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 and in 2004 proposed banning same-sex marriage.
He argued how both will “de-emphasize the importance of traditional marriage to society, weaken it, and place our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation,” and that “experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic
As the same article points out, “Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are more likely to support anti-democratic tactics and approve of political violence if an election does not return favorable results.” It is wholly unsurprising, then, that Johnson was a pivotal figure in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential elections. He wasn’t shy of repeating debunked Dominion voting machine claims and even wrote an amicus brief for a case concerning Texas having results thrown out.
There is enough to worry about when surveying the world’s democratic backsliding—seeing institutions and mechanisms, checks and balances, being repealed and pulled down— without having to worry about the corridors of power in the US Capitol.
In a time of growing pluralism, the only sensible map to navigate this increasing diversity is secularism of the sort envisaged and enshrined by the founders. But pluralism and diversity, difference and understanding, are not the purview of Christian nationalists. And it appears very obvious indeed that Mike Johnson is a staunch Christian nationalist. This should be of grave concern. Time finishes their article as follows:
It is critical to recognize the influence of Christian nationalism on Mike Johnson’s vision for the US. “Christian nationalism” isn’t a political slur. It’s a term that accurately describes an ideology that is antithetical to a stable, multiracial, and liberal democracy—an ideology clearly guiding the now-ranking Republican in the US House of Representatives.
Political polarization and division are more pronounced than they ever have been. It appears that the Republicans have not changed tack after the 2020 elections or the fallout to Dobbs v. Jackson but instead have doubled down, piling into culture war issues and divisive policies.
It appears that now more than ever, the nonreligious and secular need to be on their guard. Now more than ever, constitutional foundations must be secured and supported. Now more than ever, the quiet man must be listened to. Every single word.
Don’t lean too close, though. That snake can bite.
The Boaz Scorekeeper, written in 2017, is my second novel. I'll post it, a chapter a day, over the next few weeks.
On March 21st, 1997, a human skull was found when a bulldozer was clearing a spot for Stan and Jessica Jennings new house in the Pebblebrook subdivision being developed by Ericson Real Estate. Matt called with the news and speculated this could be Wendi and Cindi Murray’s way of showing up to demand justice. I told him I hoped he was right but I doubted it was true. It simply appeared unbelievable especially after Matt learned that the bulldozer operator had been clearing the wrong lot. Matt heard that the Jennings had met with Wilcox Construction Company’s owner, Brad Vickers, a week earlier. They had discussed exactly what they wanted done: which trees to remove, which to leave, and the location and dimensions of a partial basement included in their house plans. Brad was sick the day he was supposed to start work and sent his son Bradley. Someway he confused Lot signs 31 and 13 and wound up on the wrong side of Pebble Lane, the most remote street in the 300-acre subdivision.
Lot 13 became an official crime scene when the State’s forensic team unearthed two complete skeletons. Two weeks later, the State Lab released the results of their testing. Finally, after almost 25 years, the Douglas High School twin sisters had been found. Their graves had opened and Wendi and Cindi had walked out demanding justice.
What gave me absolute clarity that it was time to return to Boaz was what happened next. After my trial and before I left Boaz for Atlanta in 1973, I had met with Wendi and Cindi’s parents. Someway over the years they began to trust me, that I had had no part in their daughter’s pain and suffering. We had formed a mutually sad but satisfying relationship. Even though we rarely talked we did exchange Christmas cards every year. But, I was still shocked when Matt called me three days later telling me that the Murray’s had hired him to file a lawsuit against Wade Tillman, James Adams, Randall Radford, Fred Billingsley, and John Ericson. He said that Alabama law allowed such a delayed lawsuit based on newly discovered evidence that the plaintiff could not have reasonably discovered earlier.
Matt asked me to make sure I was sitting down. He described how he had, on a hunch, investigated the ownership of the subdivision property. County records revealed that Franklin Ericson, John’s father, had purchased the property in 1970 and had pretty much ignored it other than using the front 25 acres to maintain a few head of cattle. Also, Matt said that Lot 13 had been purchased by Boaz Land Company, an LLC (Limited Liability Company) that had two members, John Ericson and Wade Tillman. Before I could say anything, Matt said, “these discoveries are the clearest reasons you will ever have to justify moving to Boaz.” Without hesitation, I agreed.
Three weeks later Karla, Lewis, and I left Atlanta for Boaz and an unimaginable life. I should have been happy but was overwhelmed with grief over an incident I had been unable, until now, to even mention. It was the third anniversary of the suspicious fire that had destroyed the home place built by my great-grandfather in 1899, and that had killed my dear Mom and Dad. All during the drive home all I could think was that Lewis would never know the joy of experiencing life at Tannerville with grandparents who were the most joyous and happy couple I had ever known.
Biking is something I both love and hate. The conflicting emotions arise from the undeniable physical effort it demands. However, this exertion is precisely what makes it an excellent form of exercise. Most days, I dedicate over an hour to my cycling routine, and in doing so, I’ve discovered a unique opportunity to enjoy a good book or podcast. The rhythmic pedaling and the wind against my face create a calming backdrop that allows me to fully immerse myself in the content. In these moments, the time spent on the bike seems worthwhile, as I can’t help but appreciate the mental and physical rewards it offers.
I especially like having ridden. The post-biking feeling is one of pure satisfaction. The endorphin rush, coupled with a sense of accomplishment, makes the initial struggle and fatigue worthwhile. As I dismount and catch my breath, I relish the sensation of having conquered the challenge, both physically and mentally. It’s a reminder that the things we sometimes love to hate can often be the ones that bring us the most fulfillment. In the end, the love-hate relationship with biking only deepens my appreciation for the sport, as it continually pushes me to overcome my own limitations and embrace the rewards that follow the effort.
My bike
A Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike. The ‘old’ man seat was salvaged from an old Walmart bike (update: seat replaced, new photo to follow, someday).
Something to consider if you’re not already cycling.
I encourage you to start riding a bike, no matter your age. Check out these groups:
Don’t miss the #1 New York Times bestselling blockbuster and Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick that’s sold over 2 million copies–now an Apple TV+ limited series starring Jennifer Garner!
The “page-turning, exhilarating” (PopSugar) and “heartfelt thriller” (Real Simple) about a woman who thinks she’s found the love of her life—until he disappears.
Before Owen Michaels disappears, he smuggles a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers—Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.
As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss, as a US marshal and federal agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared.
Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they’re also building a new future—one neither of them could have anticipated.
With its breakneck pacing, dizzying plot twists, and evocative family drama, The Last Thing He Told Me is a “page-turning, exhilarating, and unforgettable” (PopSugar) suspense novel.
“Commit to making the time to attend to what really matters to you.”
***
The Art of Noticing
Simple and uncommon exercises to reveal what’s hidden in plain sight.
In The Art of Noticing, Rob Walker—a journalist, author, and educator—invites us to attend carefully and playfully to everyday curiosities that most of us tend to overlook.
“Fending off distraction isn’t quite the same thing as making the most of our attention.” By engaging the senses, Rob says, we can enrich our daily lives with meaning, boost creativity, and even “reframe the way we take in the world.”
***
Rob Walkeris a journalist and author. He is a longtime contributor to The New York Times, and a columnist for Fast Company. His recent books are The Art of Noticing, and Lost Objects, co-edited with Joshua Glenn. He is on the faculty of the Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts. You can find his newsletter at robwalker.substack.com.
In her book, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not (2016), Abby Hafer gives a by turns amusing and horrifying account of numerous obvious goofs in the human body that any competent designer would fix. (Or be sued by the victims.) These are all elegantly explained by evolution, and count as evidence for it. Since evolution typically proceeds by small increments of genetic change, which are often as small as a change to a single nucleotide, the corresponding changes to the phenotype are also often small adjustments to what is already there. Evolution cannot “see” that a better solution may be far away in the design space, requiring large-scale modification of the genome at many positions simultaneously. What’s worse, these modifications would have to occur in multiple individuals at the same time, to maintain a breeding population! For more about the evolutionary design space, see Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995).
An egregious example of bad evolutionary “design” is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which is a bad-enough mistake in humans, but reaches comical proportions in giraffes. As all tetrapod vertebrates have a similar arrangement, it would have been even more comical in the longer-necked sauropod dinosaurs. The nerve would have been as long as 28m (92 ft) in Supersaurus, almost all of which was an unnecessary detour.
But I’ll focus on whales today, specifically their superhuman resistance to choking and cancer, two serious killers of humans.
Hafer explains how whales have two completely separate tubes for breathing and swallowing, respectively. Humans, in contrast, breathe and swallow through a shared tube, the pharynx, and must correctly route air, food, and liquid to the proper branch (the trachea which sends air to the lungs, and the esophagus that sends food and drink to the stomach). A moveable flap of cartilage called the epiglottis stops food from entering the larynx. That is, when everything works. But it’s very easy for people to accidentally inhale food, causing them to choke. Without some prompt means of clearing the airway, the choking human can rapidly suffocate and die. Whales don’t have this problem; they can’t choke on anything entering through their mouth. They’d have to introduce foreign objects into their blowhole. That isn’t a typical risk for a whale, whereas humans court death with every meal. According to Bard, “an estimated 5,057 people died from choking in the United States in 2020. Of these deaths, 78% were adults aged 65 years or older. Food was the most common cause of choking deaths, followed by small objects such as toys and coins.”
Hafer mentions cancer in other contexts, but she doesn’t mention Peto’s paradox. (I first learned about that by reading Principles of Evolutionary Medicine (2016) during my book version of pandemic doomscrolling. Incidentally, emerging fields of science such as evolutionary medicine, evolutionary psychology, etc., show that science creates actual value – there are no creationist counterparts.) According to the English Wikipedia, Peto’s paradox is “the observation that, at the species level, the incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number of cells in an organism. For example, the incidence of cancer in humans is much higher than the incidence of cancer in whales, despite whales having more cells than humans. If the probability of carcinogenesis were constant across cells, one would expect whales to have a higher incidence of cancer than humans. Peto’s paradox is named after English statistician and epidemiologist Richard Peto, who first observed the connection.” Also see Bard’s take on cancer in humans and whales. Whales apparently have several different adaptations that make them far more resistant to cancer than humans are. Researchers are trying to figure out the whales’ advantage, with the goal of giving humans what God neglected to give them. Cancer is considered a disease of aging, in that cancer rates tend to increase rapidly with age, although cancer can strike humans of any age, including, cruelly, children. (Theodicy is a whole ‘nother challenge for folks who believe in an omni-God, addressed in other blog posts and in John W. Loftus’ books, but I’ll stick to whales here.) Some whale species have long lifespans, with the bowhead whale able to live for over 200 years. For a whale to live that long, it must have robust and durable systems for resisting cancer, far outclassing the human’s endowment.
Before modern science, human thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle flattered themselves with their scala naturae (“Ladder of Being”). The notion was further developed by medieval Christians as their great chain of being. That is “a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals.” Further, “the higher the being is in the chain, the more attributes it has, including all the attributes of the beings below it.”
Well, whales have some desirable attributes that humans clearly lack, such as their vastly superior resistance to choking and cancer. This is another example of how faith fails. Modern science began around 400 years ago, based on the radical idea that people should test their claims against evidence. It was radical then, and is still radical to a lot of people, although much of the educated class at least pays lip service to the idea. Before modern science, even educated people had some strange views of Man’s place in the universe. Jennifer Nagel explains how modern thinking is very different than medieval thinking. However, large chunks of medieval thinking persist in the faith community, which has become an odd chimera of the two. On the one hand, most persons of faith lead modern lives, consuming the benefits of technologies made possible by scientific thinking. At the same time, they function like cognitive fossils, bringing a medieval perspective where it suits them. It is both a strength and weakness of science that almost anyone can consume the benefits of science, including science deniers.
In any case, the next time you hear a person of faith claiming to have been “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14) and presenting their own rockin’ body as evidence of God’s love for us, you can point out that when it comes to choking and cancer, God apparently loves the whales more.
The Boaz Scorekeeper, written in 2017, is my second novel. I'll post it, a chapter a day, over the next few weeks.
Over the years, I had several times entertained the notion of returning to Boaz. In 1987 when Lewis was born, I realized that I had already practiced seven years in Atlanta, two more than the minimum I had agreed with Matt. But, at that time, I had two cases that chained my focus.
In late summer 1992, I had a weird cloud of nostalgia hover over me raining down feelings of revenge I had never experienced. The 20th anniversary of Wendi and Cindi’s death had occurred in May. Also, it didn’t help that Randall and Fred had been elected to the First Baptist Church of Christ’s deacon board. Nor, the fact James Adams was elected Mayor. An afternoon spent with Matt over the Labor Day weekend, disabused me of this strong pull. Although he still wanted us to practice law together, at some point he argued that revenge was an irrational reason to ground my decision. Once again, I listened to the wise Matt and followed his advice.
In January 1993, Mama El died. She was 92 and just went to sleep. The doctor said, “her heart finally gave out.” I think it finally gave up. After Gramp’s death in 1965, Mama El lost her way. To an outsider, she adjusted well. She continued her daily life pretty much as before: gardening and canning, and church and church and church. That was all pretty much a front. In her heart, she was the loneliest person I’ve ever known. Alone, late at night, even in the coldest weather, she would sit out on the back porch looking over the garden, across the pasture, and to the oak grove on the southeast corner of the pond where Gramp’s had died. I’ve often wondered whether Wendi and I would have had such a love affair if she had lived. There was no other romance like Gramp’s and Mama El’s. But, just like for Wendi and me, God or fate or something had other plans for Gramp’s and Mama El. After Mama El’s funeral and before Karla, Lewis, and I returned to Atlanta, I almost decided it was time to move home. I thought, I wanted to live in my own home, breathe the air Mama El breathed, and sit in her chair on the porch with her throw over my lap. She was, in a way, the architect of my inner life growing up. Like Gramp’s was for my outer life. But, we didn’t move back. Law and life in Atlanta kept getting in the way.
In 1995 Matt called and told me he had been diagnosed with brain cancer. Karla and I were in Orlando on a week’s vacation. The two of us spent the next several days walking around Disney World discussing what all we had to do before we could move. Karla loved her teaching job and although reluctant, she bravely agreed to once again resign her position and follow me. By the time we returned to Atlanta, Matt called with the good news that he had been misdiagnosed and only had a small non-cancerous tumor that doctors believed would not give him any problems and that hopefully would eventually dissolve. Again, I had no clear reason to return to Boaz.
Biking is something I both love and hate. The conflicting emotions arise from the undeniable physical effort it demands. However, this exertion is precisely what makes it an excellent form of exercise. Most days, I dedicate over an hour to my cycling routine, and in doing so, I’ve discovered a unique opportunity to enjoy a good book or podcast. The rhythmic pedaling and the wind against my face create a calming backdrop that allows me to fully immerse myself in the content. In these moments, the time spent on the bike seems worthwhile, as I can’t help but appreciate the mental and physical rewards it offers.
I especially like having ridden. The post-biking feeling is one of pure satisfaction. The endorphin rush, coupled with a sense of accomplishment, makes the initial struggle and fatigue worthwhile. As I dismount and catch my breath, I relish the sensation of having conquered the challenge, both physically and mentally. It’s a reminder that the things we sometimes love to hate can often be the ones that bring us the most fulfillment. In the end, the love-hate relationship with biking only deepens my appreciation for the sport, as it continually pushes me to overcome my own limitations and embrace the rewards that follow the effort.
My bike
A Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike. The ‘old’ man seat was salvaged from an old Walmart bike (update: seat replaced, new photo to follow, someday).
Something to consider if you’re not already cycling.
I encourage you to start riding a bike, no matter your age. Check out these groups:
Don’t miss the #1 New York Times bestselling blockbuster and Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick that’s sold over 2 million copies–now an Apple TV+ limited series starring Jennifer Garner!
The “page-turning, exhilarating” (PopSugar) and “heartfelt thriller” (Real Simple) about a woman who thinks she’s found the love of her life—until he disappears.
Before Owen Michaels disappears, he smuggles a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers—Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.
As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss, as a US marshal and federal agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared.
Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they’re also building a new future—one neither of them could have anticipated.
With its breakneck pacing, dizzying plot twists, and evocative family drama, The Last Thing He Told Me is a “page-turning, exhilarating, and unforgettable” (PopSugar) suspense novel.
by 
Richard L. Fricks 