Ponderings by Dan Ponder
Rainbow of a lifetime
The severe thunderstorm warning came over my radio just as I was headed south from Dothan. A huge ominous cloud hung back to the east and was headed my way. The storm hit me north of Cottondale. It was a powerful, blinding rainstorm, with sheets of rain blowing across the four lane highway. Cars were…
Read MoreWide World of Sports
The words came from my father and grandfather. The circumstances were not great, but the result is a memory that I have carried with me for the past 50 years. Now history repeats itself. After elementary school, I attended the Dothan City Schools starting in the seventh grade. But I still played Summer baseball with…
Read MoreRecords are meant to be broken
The hottest June on record! Not the hottest in the past few years, or the hottest since I was working in the watermelon fields. No. June of 2019 was the hottest June since they started keeping records back in the 1800s. That would be enough for one year, but in the past nine months we…
Read MoreThe Eagle has landed
There are few dates so momentous that they plant themselves into our collective memories forever. Those events are so powerful that we remember exactly where we were and who we were with at the time. I was on the playground at Cottonwood Elementary School when we found out that President John F. Kennedy had…
Read MoreStill singing as the last sun sets
I was new to the choir at the First Presbyterian Church. Being taller than most, they looked for a robe that would fit me. I looked at the name tag of the robe that I was eventually given and it said “JB Clarke”. It was the first of many gifts that I would…
Read MoreAmericans, one and all
It has been 243 years since July 4, 1776. What an amazing journey it has been for our country! We have survived a civil war, two world wars, a great recession and depression. We have survived slavery and many other cultural and class struggles. For almost the first century of our country’s existence only white…
Read MoreThe ups and downs of the zipper business
I never thought about zippers one way or the other while I was growing up. You did not want to get anything caught in your zipper and you didn’t want to get embarrassed with your zipper down. A great college friend of mine joined a Japanese company, YKK, right out of college. Their primary business…
Read MoreTwo strangers and a blanket of green
Okay. I will go ahead and admit that today was not my best day. I drove 40 miles to pay a contractor for work at our cabin at Compass Lake and forgot my checkbook. It was a sign of things to come. After having to drive back to Donalsonville to get to my…
Read MoreBe careful with your words
It was the very first time I had ever done it. I actually “unfriended” someone on Facebook. Not because I disliked them. Actually I would consider them a personal friend. Rather, it was because of their continued comments about politics that I could no longer tolerate. In this incredibly divided world that we live in,…
Read MoreA voice lost but never forgotten
“Touchdown Auburn”. It was a call made famous by the legendary voice of the Auburn Tigers, Jim Fyffe. He found his voice just five years after my graduation from Auburn 1976. His tragic death following a brain aneurysm at the age of 58 left the Auburn Family devastated. Who could replace the legendary voice of…
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