Ponderings by Dan Ponder

It could not be put off any longer.   The house was empty.  The only thing left was cleaning out the garage.  Not a big job I kept telling myself.  After all, you could still park two cars inside and most everything else was on shelves. I was clearly fooling myself.   The more I…

Family legend has it that the first steps my siblings and I ever took were in the shallow waters of Compass Lake.  The water helped steady us and made it easier to take the first step or two without parental assistance. We take a lot of first steps in our lives.   Some of them were…

There are dozens of ways to take a walk from our house in Auburn.  Occasionally my path will take me by the Ralph Brown Draughon Library.  That is when I will pass by the tree. This particular oak tree is not one of Toomer’s Oak fame.  It has nothing to do with school athletics or…

Surprises.  That is what I always put at the top of my list as a child.  I wanted everything to be a surprise, though perhaps there were plenty of things I secretly wanted. The typical Christmas gathering in my family included my parents, siblings, grandparents, and occasionally my uncle.   My aunt and her family lived…

He was one of the first people I met when I moved to Donalsonville.  Portions of the old Planters Products plant that Beall Peanut Company had bought was older than my father.  Some of the facility dated back to 1909.  That was what brought me to Georgia. Some of the plant was held together with…

I am not sure how many times my wife and I have had the opportunity to visit New York City, but this is the first time that we have ever been at Christmas.   The trip has not disappointed. Our first night we attended the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall in the…

I wrote about Thanksgiving last week so it would be in the papers for the Thanksgiving editions.   As a follow up, the days around the holiday were even better than I could have ever expected. We enjoyed Thanksgiving with our daughter Catherine and her family.  Elizabeth and her family came up on Friday and…

The scoreboard at Jordan-Hare Stadium showed the final score as 52-0.  Auburn had won decisively over Samford University located in Birmingham.  It was a miserable day with rain blowing sideways in the stadium. Across the country it was called “Cupcake Saturday” as the top college football teams paid significant dollars to play smaller schools in…

For the extended Ponder Family, the annual Auburn versus Georgia football game is a time of festive fun, food and frivolity.   Since the time that my brother and sister attended the University of Georgia after I had gone to Auburn, there has been a constant, mostly friendly rivalry. There has been a bit of…

I had to park a block away from the courthouse.  As I approached the front lawn, I was pleasantly surprised to see the size of the crowd.  Donalsonville and Seminole County had turned out in a big way to honor our finest on this Veterans Day. The crowd numbered in the hundreds and stretched from…