Posts by John Blase

I sit here eating chicken and wild rice soup that my wife prepared last night from scratch. She didn’t have to do that. But she did. As I eat I eyeball the photographs magnetized to our refrigerator door, pictures of three cherished children that came about as a result of her agreeing to my amorous…

We must daily choose whom we will serve – wonder or rage. We can, and do, insist on other words as options. But those are, and will always be, only variations of those two nimble themes on which living hinges. Its not that our insistence is futile, for God is love and in him is…

His sole brother will be another year older this week. So my father will drive headlong into the north Texas wind to sit across from him and honor his face.   No doubt they will speak of pickups and children until those topics grow quiet. Then their talk will seep into the porous ground of…

I wake again to this chancy, jumbled affair wondering if today will simply be more of yesterday’s news or if something terrifying might happen, like being visited by an angel announcing “You will conceive and bear a song that will from this day forward be sung soft over each who dies, a necessary requiem to…

Christian. My what a magnificent word! I grew up believing in its regality and by God continue to believe it still for (contrary to popular opinion) such is one who sets his face as flint toward the yawing day and rides in with love ablazin’ unable to keep from squandering second chances upon both the…

I caught him reading Ephesians, in particular the verse that instructs all creatures AND BE YE KIND TO ONE ANOTHER, TENDERHEARTED, FORGIVING. The him I caught reading was my beagle, the very beagle I’d been harsh with earlier because he had simply followed his heart. I’d gone to bed cold with regret for my sin…

One of these days I guess the jig will be up once and for all then its up up and away. But until then my heart will go on singing down down and here, here where angels dress up daily as geese and foul football fields, here where every Friday the evening news picks a…

Terror and the beauty insoluble. As in the way the freshly cut apple smell spells the air just as your father sends the text that tells of his good friend who killed himself this morning after years of the awful cancer. You take of the apple and taste God’s fancy just as your father’s postscript…

I used to fret that I’ve passed the peak of my powers. You know, like the Times talks about a novelist   “writing at the peak of her powers.” But that’s usually the perspective of someone else, not the novelist.   Plus the peak is sometimes too much, like the autumn leaves too gold, too…

God forbid, but if it were ever to happen they predicted some virulent outbreak, some brutal interruption of their lives, some threshold beyond which everything was AFTER. But that’s not how their marriage found itself dystopic. It came about hardly noticed, the way nails grow, as he would say I LOVE YOU and she would…