Opinions

The soft summer breeze swept my hair away from my face as I flew toward the ground and swirled it around my head as I flew backwards into the air. The smell of fish frying enticed me, but I stayed put. Mama would call soon enough from the back-screened door. The wooden seat of my swing anchored me. Daddy had seen to that. Above me the green spheres of growing pecans played hide and seek with the green leaves, peeking out as the swing flew ever higher. High summer enthralled me and freed me from math and essays and science, freed me from school tasks, but provided new responsibilities. Today with dust from the factory sprinkling his dark hair, Daddy would walk across the street and change hats from provider to chauffeur; we would then drive to Uncle Lonnie’s pea patch where the plants waited, loaded with Crowder peas long as black rulers waving in the shimmering heat and ready to be picked. We would fight the buzzing mosquitos and gnats around our eyes, noses, and ears as we worked. Mama wanted three washtubs filled and fill them we would no matter our level of fatigue, heat, or boredom. Winter would surely come again, and we prepared. Mama saw to that. However, my mind always wandered when my hands worked.

But Daddy still worked and Mama fried fish for our supper, and me, I flew through the air, all my troubles real or imagined gone on the warm breeze. Sometimes I flew so high that my bare...

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OK, the lazy days of summer are gone and school is back in session. Even before classes began, many of our high school kids were already busy practicing in the searing Georgia sun getting themselves in shape, working on their moves, practicing their formations, getting their uniforms issued and ready for Friday Night Lights across the state. Football? Nope. Marching bands.

Some will take issue with this, but I generally know what I am talking about when I opine on any and all subjects. Not marching bands. I can’t play a musical instrument (unless you count the ukulele, on which I do a mean rendition of “Sweet Betsy from Pike.”) Add walking five steps forward, two steps sideways and three steps back while playing the theme from “Star Wars” on a trombone and I could wreak havoc worse than a hard-charging linebacker. [Full Story »] 

“Lose 20 pounds in 6 weeks,” the magazine article proclaims, “while eating whatever you want and doing no strenuous exercise.” The key to the diet is grapefruit it seems. According to the esteemed doctor who wrote the article, there is a little-known miraculous ingredient in grapefruit that counteracts calories, but it is essential to eat one grapefruit every day before eating anything else. I’m no doctor, but I suspect that a grapefruit a day will not keep the calories at bay all by itself. Eat your grapefruit and conscientiously follow a low-calorie diet, and that probably will work, but to lose 20 pounds in a mere 6 weeks, you’d better eat just a grapefruit a day and nothing else. That’s not very long.

My daddy always told me that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Mama, on the other hand, was a little bit gullible. Once she saw an ad for six white towels for an inordinately low price. She ordered them immediately and eagerly checked the mailbox every day for her package. Finally, they came. The towels were beautiful and thick—paper, that is. When they came into contact with water, they dissolved. Mama was furious, especially when Daddy teased her about it.

“Don’t you dare tell me that if it...


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When privileged to overhear a discussion between two older gentlemen, Mr. Larry and Mr. John, seated in the waiting area of a tire service center, it began to “sink in” as to just how much the world has truly changed. They talked about the way things used to be back in the day when a man’s word was the only “surety” he required. Business, the men established, used to be conducted on a daily basis without issue and solidified by just a handshake between two individuals.

The idea that a family physician was viewed, more-or-less, as part of the family has long been lost. Amidst the hustle of corporation-owned medical offices trying to herd as many patients as possible through the doors in any given hour has resulted with doctors barely able to recognize their patients’ faces. And it would certainly be too much to ask that medical personnel should ever remember a name.

What has increasingly become the state of every service provider from medicine to automobile mechanics and virtually all industries across the board is the “art” of suggestive selling. The concept of customer service...


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Maybe I have worn them out (I hope so) or maybe they have chosen to ignore me (Bad idea. That only encourages me), but opponents of public education — including private school scholarship tax-giveaway advocates and for-profit charter school management shills — were strangely quiet after my recent Open Letter to Georgia’s public schoolteachers.

Maybe in the recesses of their shallow, special interest-driven hearts, they know I am correct. What is wrong with public education is not the fault of those trying to educate the next generation of Georgians. It is the fault of those of us who have let our society sink like a rock and then have decided the best solution is to run away from the problems and blame the schools. [Full Story »] 

I am truly thankful for the rain that fell on Pine Grove this afternoon. We sat and watched as giant drops fell to a thirsty earth, but rain fell faster than the ground could soak it up. It’s been a while since we saw puddles in the yard. Before it completely stopped, Larry and I went out to check out our gardens. Everything was beautiful, appearing fresh and cool and new. When we surveyed the watermelons, they seemed to have grown during the downpour. We could hardly believe our eyes. There’s no longer a need to push aside the leaves to look for them. They’ve gotten big enough to push aside the leaves themselves.

To understand our excitement, you must understand that we come from a long line of watermelon lovers. My father was one of the biggest and I mean that in both senses of the word. Daddy was a big man, about 6’2”, and often he’d bring in a big dark green watermelon when he came home from work. We stopped everything and cut it on the spot, practically drooling over the melon’s heart when Mama’s butcher knife revealed it. One half of the melon went to Daddy; the other half Mama and I shared. Mama and I always had leftovers, but not Daddy. He sat with his salt and fork until every single bite disappeared. My poor sister did not like watermelon, still doesn’t. I feel sorry for all she’s missed over the past sixty years. If we didn’t look so much alike, I’d swear she was adopted. There’s no better food out there than a ...

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The time approached 7:00 a.m. Monday morning when I actually sat at my computer for the purpose of scripting this week’s column. That presents a serious issue for two reasons: firstly, Jamie expects the column for the current week be e-mailed to him by four-thirty in the afternoon on the previous Friday. Second; at the time my fingers touched the keyboard at 6:48 a.m. Monday, I still had no idea of the subject matter.

Usually, the feat is completed as early as Wednesday or Thursday of the week prior. However, if I’m, caught up in a particular activity, adventure, or some other unscheduled undertaking the opinion is typically submitted via email by Sunday night at the latest.

Mr. Gardner (my apologies for the due reference Jamie) has been, to this point, very forgiving of any issues that may have “cropped up” in the past...

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Billy G. Howard

When one considers the concept of exercise, depending upon the circumstances or specific conditions, there is an activity known simply as running in place. A person basically undertakes the same process as he or she would if actually on a treadmill, track, or other exterior course but the action simply doesn’t propel them forward.

The significance of understanding the theory behind this act is more easily relatable when looking at one’s efforts to accomplish a specific task…to no avail. Such was the case this past weekend when I purposed to finally clean out the garage in hopes of being able to once again utilize the assigned space for the end to which it was designed.

One thing that had always been a priority since moving into a house with a two car garage was simply being able to park two cars where they were meant to go. When looking at the neighbors’ and first realizing the reason their new forty-five thousand dollar-plus vehicle was never parked in the garage, logic suggested it more feasible to simply not clutter the space intended for the car....

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Mary Ann Ellis

Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood we spent visiting relatives in the country—until my grandmother died that is. Funny how one person often holds a family together. Grandma and Grandpa lived in an old house of the shotgun style. In other words, one could stand at the front door and shoot straight down the wide hallway and out the back door of the kitchen. The front part of the house consisted of 4 bedrooms, but the front left room also served as a sitting room/parlor. This room held two beds, always neatly made with white chenille bedspreads with multicolored peacocks on them. In front of the fireplace waited two rocking chairs with cushions Grandma had made herself. The chairs awaited her leisure and that of a visitor. I don’t remember Grandpa ever sitting there. This was Grandma’s place of refuge.

Grandpa held sway on the front porch, even in the winter time. He’d don his old over coat and sit out there to talk manly topics with his male visitors. Rarely did the cold drive him inside. From the porch that stretched across the front of the house, he surveyed his kingdom. His dogs roamed the clean-swept yard and waited for whatever scraps the family threw out to them. These lean creatures hunted rabbits to supplement their diet. It never occurred to anyone that chicken or pork chop bones might be dangerous to them. Heartworms were unheard of. Dogs took their chances with health issues, but then so did humans. Such was life in the fifties. Doctor visits were rare for people and unheard of for dogs, at least my grandpa’s dogs.

The simple style of Grandpa’s house worked well for them and I loved the house. Sometimes when the cold weather allowed me to leave the fireplace, I’d roam about the house “plundering,” as my grandmother called it. I looked at and touched the deal knobs of the dresser, admiring the facets cut into each one. They shone like diamonds in the sunlight pouring through the windows. On overcast days they seemed to have an internal light all their own...

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Dick Yarbrough

Good grief, here we are slap-dab in the middle of the dog days of summer and you are already back in the classroom. I remember as a child that my family didn’t even take vacation until August because school didn’t start until after Labor Day.

When we started really didn’t seem to matter because before we wound things up around Memorial Day, I had gotten a head full of English, Math, History, Biology and Geography and a jolly good education — and all in a public school.

I don’t think public education has gotten worse since those days. It is society that has changed.

The problem is that society has gone to hell in a wheelbarrow and nobody seems to know how to make it right again. So, the easy solution is to blame you for something over which you have no control. Critics of public education think you can close the schoolhouse door on all of society’s problems and effectively teach multiplication tables to a hungry child who doesn’t know where his or her next meal is coming from.

You are dealing with entitled kids. You are dealing with children that can’t speak English. Gang members as young as 12. You are dealing with abject poverty, abuse, drugs and transiency. And as much as I hate to say it, the possibility of violence.

So, what do our intrepid public servants do? Rather than fix the problems that surround you and make your job so difficult, they propose to cut-and-run from public schools on the state’s dime and send kids to private schools that have a different set of rules and that can always send them back to public schools. It is a no-win situation for you. I cannot think of more egregious insult to you than the admission by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle that he engineered a bill to raise to $100 million the amount of money available for private school scholarships, while acknowledging it was “bad in a thousand ways” in order that his opponent in the Republican primary, former state Sen. Hunter Hill — a private school advocate — would not be the beneficiary of a dump of money from the Walmart Foundation which cares little for you or what you do.

Of course, the Kool-Aid drinking ideologues are busy defending this bad piece of legislation done badly. They can’t wait until public schools are the “schools of last resort,” meaning you will be left with only the dregs and they can applaud their self-fulfilling prophecy.

This bunch has just about sucked all the joy out of the profession with their criticisms (as if they care) and have tried to make it as unattractive as possible for those thinking of becoming teachers. The Georgia Professional Standard Commission says half of Georgia’s schoolteachers leave the profession within the first five years because of the way they are treated. Perhaps some need to go. Most do not.

Sometimes, the enemy is within. Education bureaucrats will change your jobs and your responsibilities without giving you an opportunity for input. You are told to Teach to the Test instead of being trusted to teach what you know. And how you are evaluated can be as different as the sun from the moon.

I had great hopes that Gov. Deal’s Education Reform Commission of which I was a member would address some of the issues that you face with the same effectiveness as his criminal justice reform efforts. Alas, it was not to be. Nothing came from our yearlong labor for reasons that have never been adequately explained. Very disappointing. While I sometimes feel like a voice in the wilderness, immodesty requires me to say I have a pretty good-sized wilderness in which to work. My opinions run from one end of the state to the other and reach a lot of eyeballs each week. I will continue to use my bully pulpit to support you and to remind your critics in the Legislature and their deep-pocketed, out-of-state special interest friends that they wouldn’t last a week in your classroom, given what you have to deal with. Call it a public service.

Despite all the aforementioned obstacles, frustrations and second-guessing, you soldier on, changing young lives for the better every day and in doing so, helping to make this a better world for us all. Yours is a noble calling and don’t let anyone tell you differently. Welcome back, schoolteachers, and thank you. I am glad you are there.