Ponderings by Dan Ponder

I have often said that my next birthday is going to be the best.  Perhaps that is because it has largely been true during my life.  A person’s 59th birthday might not be a reason to broadcast it to the world.  In my case, it was one of the best. Almost six decades after I…

In the football-crazed South, you probably can’t schedule a worse time for an event than a Saturday afternoon in the Fall.  Weddings have to be scheduled around the bride and groom’s football allegiances.  I have played the organ at more than one wedding where a television or radio was discretely hidden somewhere in the church.…

It was Labor Day one year ago today that my mother suffered a compound fracture of her tibia and fibula.  As soon as I saw her in the hospital I knew that she had a long struggle ahead of her.   Following two operations, her leg was attached to some space-age type contraption designed to…

Another school year had just started and I was beginning the fourth grade.  My ninth birthday was just two weeks away.  I had no awareness that one of the greatest speeches in American history had been given that day from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a…

Most of the equipment was no longer used when I walked into the newspaper office for the first time.  The machines were big and black and looked, well, complicated.  Over thirty years later, when I finally had the opportunity to buy the Donalsonville News, none of that equipment was being used at all. Carolyn McLeod…

Monday of this week, August 12th, was a holiday that I wasn’t aware even existed.  It was Happy Middle Child Day.  There is probably a certain irony that the holiday was largely overlooked since many middle kids say that no one pays any attention to them anyway. My wife and my brother are both middle…

Lois Wyse once said that grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation.  Having studied my family tree for 30+ years, I believe that to be true.  Having adored my own grandparents, I know that to be true. William Sharp Faulk is the latest dot connecting my family.  He arrived Saturday,…

The dam, or spillway as some call it, was built as part of a road project many decades ago.  The engineers misfigured the height of the dam and as a result the water rose around Compass Lake to historic levels, wiping out almost every sandy beach along the shores. In the middle of the night…

Yesterday was the last first day of school for my wife, Mary Lou.  Through high school, college, graduate school, children and finally a long teaching career, she has been getting ready for a new school year for a long time.  We have both known for a while that this would be her last year before…