HAPPY B-DAY EARL

My brother Earl has a birthday today.I hope he is celebrating it in good health and with good friends. Earl is a christian, brother, husband, father, grandfather, hardware salesman,entrepreneur, good story teller, even better joke teller, and probably has a hundred other titles he humbly goes by. His comic attitude was the bases of so many of our family's good memories. I look forward to the day that I can hear one of his great grandchildren laughing over his tried and true antics.

As is the case with most truly likeable folks they collect an assortment of nicknames, Earl your no exception to this rule. So here is to Early Bird, Earl the Pearl,and Uncle Bossman....

WHERE PARADISE LAY......

When I was a child my family would travel back to western Kentucky where my parents were born."

I hear this song and I'm transported back to 1970 and my family is on vacation in western Kentucky outside of Bowling Green at Beech Bend park, which the Green River runs past


"And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered so many times that my memories are worn."


Its a mid-summer afternoon and my older brother Earl and I have rented bikes from the park and we are biking down a shady dirt path through the countryside along the rivers edge. We are free as birds. It is one of those perfect times in your life, when you are running on all cylinders, enjoying all your senses, feeling alive and joyous and knowing that if it all ended at that very moment you would leave this world having known what it was to be truly happy.


"When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am." song by John Prine.


Thank you Earl.