The Citizen Investigative Reporter: In the interests of public safety everywhere, this report from Leesburg, Va.
Samuel, 8: Once upon a time I was sleeping. Then my pet snake Bruno escaped.

And then I woke up and didn’t see my snake. I said “Curses! Foiled again!”

After that I gave everybody the bad news.

I told Isaac [Samuel’s elder bother, 18] that my snake escaped. And I said, “Aaarrrgghaerrr!”

Snakes are good for killing crickets. Not clickets.

Snakes eat spiders and then clickets. He was a very lost snake and a harmless snake. Mom picked him up by hand. Read More»

When grandparents don’t get to see their grands more than once or twice a year, the changes are perhaps more dramatic than those observed by parents and neighbors.

Maybe I’m over-simplifying but everything seems to come clear by comparison. Last time we were here, for instance, a year or so ago, the boys still had to be protected from themselves. Adult meds had to be hidden or locked up because if the boys found it, they might indeed open the container and taste these cute little pills to see if they will make them bigger and stronger and faster. Read More»

Funny how you can start out with all good intentions of going one way and then you find yourself somewhere else altogether and don’t have any idea where you are or how you got there. Hmmm.

Cruising the Internet recently I found myself brought up short by a face and name from my adolescent past. Jeff Chandler. There he was, in all his studly glory, pondering the future, which for him was not going to be very long. Read More»

All right, girls and boys, today we’ll take up the matter of Peachtree Corners, a community in the Atlanta suburb of Gwinnett County that thinks it would make a good city all by itself and rejects the notion that it will be swallowed whole by the ever-burgeoning metropolis, Norcross. Read More»

Seems to me I never had a boyfriend in grade school or high school. Crushes, yes indeed, but I was never flirty or cute, was never asked to “go steady” or even date. How could a country girl go out on a date anyhow? We couldn’t drive cars and, of course, couldn’t go out with boys old enough to drive. Read More»

The tribe lost another of its giants last Wednesday, and we are all diminished by his passing.

Roy Henson was 81 when he was felled apparently by a massive heart attack, at home in Peachtree City.

If you wonder why you’d never heard of him, it’s just that there are only so many hats a man can wear at one time. I don’t think that any two obituaries that have published since last Wednesday had exactly the same list. Read More»

Even though the sun blinded us if we sat on the wrong side of the line of tables scattered around the campfire, the conversations were low and lulling. Most of our group are (or were once, having moved) church friends, and many have air line or FAA or travel stories to recite in turn.

Conversations like these get spoken around a fire pit as the night-cooled breezes fill in the spaces between us and it’s so tempting to close the eyes and doze for a moment. Read More»

Here are a few more messages you have sent me in response to something you saw in this column, edited for space and anonymity. Sorry I have to pass by some good words, but there is so much I want to thank you for. Maybe later.

A local confessed gadget-lover empathized when I wrote of my love/hate relationship with electronic correspondence. “Four solid years of heartbreak ensued,” he/she commented.

“Three times I have lost everything…EVERYTHING…from my planner (but hey, I’m savin’ hundreds of dollars. Read More»

Searching for an archived column last week, I turned up a number of them with a comment attached. Most were friendly and/or informative, a few were negative, still fewer puzzled me – I couldn’t tell whether they were for or “agin.”

To all of you who have responded to the column, for or “agin,” thank you so much. Here are some of the comments I’ve received, edited for space, and I’m not using names. Read More»

There are so many interesting places to visit in the world, and life is so short, one wonders how to choose.

There are those who believe travel should begin and end in their native land, thus depriving selves and families of the rest of it. And there are those who travel only in faraway places on the assumption that they can always travel “locally” when their health or money runs out. Read More»