Spitball Army

In just a two-block area of Avondale, I spied most of these sights. The painted wall advertisement seems to have had a lively life in this small enclave of old brick buildings. Avondale “Center” had, until the past few years, been populated mainly by used car lots, rundown gas stations and crumbling buildings. Things have […]

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When I go to the Winn-Dixie, I like to go through the self-checkout line and choose Spanish instead of English.

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I came across an old post (written four-plus years ago, so only old in a relative sense) in which I had constructed a musical playlist to mirror a trip through the South. I couldn’t even recall writing it. Perhaps that’s why I used the word ‘old.’ It followed an imagined road trip out of the […]

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Half a block from where I work, a Ninja Fireworks stand sits in the corner of the Raceway filling station. Next door to the Raceway, in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart, a fireworks stand three times the size of the Ninja truck sits. They are called TNT. The fellow at the TNT stand told […]

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Here it is, late June in Alabama, and the forecast is for thunderstorms practically every afternoon, temperatures consistently in the 90s, and high humidity 24 hours a day. It is under these conditions that I find myself meeting my good friends A. & E. for lunch at a brand new Birmingham eatery named, ironically, Melt. […]

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I had several days off from work recently. Even though I had planned a road trip centered around stops at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water house in Pennsylvania and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, I stayed home. It is much less expensive to have a staycation, and the “stay” part of […]

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An asymptomatic condition of some concern to my primary physician found me sitting in a specialist’s examining room on a recent morning. Pushed up alongside one wall was the examination table: a well-worn piece of equipment with cracking leather corners, faded paint on its legs forcing a resemblance to an abandoned pommel horse base circa […]

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Rickwood Field was built in the west side of Birmingham in 1910 – in the area near what is now referred to as Ensley – to house the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro League. Its 104 years of age apparently makes it the oldest surviving pro baseball park in America. How lucky are we […]

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Irondale is the small city immediately east of the city of Birmingham’s Crestwood neighborhood, which is where I live. To call Irondale a city seems perhaps faulty, as it has as its center a sleepy little train-stop of a village. But, due to its acreage and the fact that it is indeed incorporated, it is […]

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Not long after I purchased my cozy little bungalow many years ago, I “hired” the younger sister of one of my employees to try her hand at landscaping the back yard. She was studying landscape design and needed experience. I was her guinea pig, as people used to say. Her subject. And my bare yard […]

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