Blogging Gossip

Creating a New Place from an Old Memory

There's something nobody tells you about Kansas until you've driven it yourself.

It's flat. Really flat. The kind of flat that stops being a joke and starts being something else entirely once you're actually out on the road with nothing between you and the horizon but wheat fields and sky. You can see for miles in every direction. You can see storms coming from an hour away. You can see the water tower of the next town long before you reach it.

And if...

The Best Mistake I Ever Made

I want to say it was intentional. I really do. It would make a much better story if I told you I looked at my appointment book, saw an opportunity, and decided to play a little providence.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that I double-booked a Tuesday afternoon in a way that should have been a disaster and somehow — through a combination of luck, chaos, and the fact that kids’ haircuts are mercifully short — became the best scheduling mistake of my...

The Origin Legend

If you’ve ever driven into Monet, Kansas for the first time, you already know the moment I’m talking about.

You’re out on the flat, the road stretching ahead of you like someone laid it down with a ruler, and then — there they are. Rising up out of the prairie like they have absolutely no business being there. Grain elevator towers painted in...

The Cat

I want to be clear that I have heard a lot of things in thirty years. I have heard confessions, declarations, overshares, and at least three separate instances of someone trying to describe their symptoms to me as though I went to medical school after cosmetology.

But Margaret was the first client who ever brought her cat.

Not a carrier. Not a bag. Just — the cat. In her arms. Like this was a thing people did.

“He gets anxious when I leave,” she explained, settling into the chair as...

The Secret That Wasn’t

Diane had been coming to me for eleven years when she sat down in my chair one Tuesday afternoon, looked both ways like she was crossing a highway, and announced in a stage whisper that she had a secret.

I set down my comb.

“Gary and I are separating,” she breathed. “I haven’t told a soul.”

I nodded slowly, with what I hoped was an expression of appropriate surprise.

What I did not tell Diane was that Gary had told his barber two weeks prior. His barber told his wife. His...