James D. Hogan

And We Must Go

On November 21, 2021

On beginnings and endings, change, and staying un-stuck.

Something there is about the ends of things, the delicate parts where the golden light shines on everything about you before it fades to dusk. Something there is when you know that ahead, just across the horizon, lies the big, the unknown.

For the past nine years, our growing family has made its home in a quiet neighborhood dotted with brick ranches and mature trees. For nine years before that, we lived a few hundred yards away in the next neighborhood over in a cozy split-level on a cul-de-sac.

Kelly is a native of this town, born in the old downtown Davis hospital the college razed a few years ago. She grew up in another brick ranch and tall treed neighborhood not much more than a mile from where our house stands now. She attended school in the same building where she now works, the same place our children learn. Save for the four years she spent away at college, she’s never lived anywhere but within a handful of several square miles in Statesville.

Those college years were formative in many ways.

Battle Hymn for a Weary Republic

By James D. Hogan

On September 7, 2021

In writing

It is quite easy to forget that on the morning of September 11th, very few people thought that the twin towers would actually fall, that the audacious spires of steel and glass and concrete would betray the rescuers climbing heavenward inside their cramped stairwells, and give out, and vanish in enormous clouds of dust. Instead, we imagined the fires would be extinguished, that the buildings would be fixed, and our lives as we had known them until that point would simply continue.

We were wrong.

“Oh my God.”

You can go back and find full broadcast episodes of the major network morning shows from the morning of September 11th and see for yourself how naïve we all were. Five minutes after the first plane struck the north tower, Good Morning America‘s Diane Sawyer returned from an otherwise mundane commercial break to carefully attempt to describe what becomes the first of many horrific and unprecedented television images from that Tuesday.

The slow, deliberate pace with which Sawyer describes the scene–the tower, captured from a news chopper, a black scar high across its upper reaches, fatally engulfed–exemplifies the relative innocence we all woke up with that morning.

“We want to tell you what we know as we know it,” Sawyer says, a look of concern on her face. “One report said–and we can’t confirm any of this–is that a plane may have hit one of the two towers.”

40(ish) people who mean the world to me

By James D. Hogan

On August 20, 2021

In writing

I am turning forty this month and along with all the humorous trappings of reaching a milestone birthday, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about people in my life who give me incredible inspiration. How lucky am I to know so many amazing, wonderful folks! How lucky they put up with me!

This summer I started reading Sean Dietrich’s blog, “Sean of the South.” He’s a witty storyteller with a rich, southern voice. Sometimes he shares letters people write to him, and in one post, he shares a letter that began, “I sincerely love you.” And I thought, that’s something I ought to say more to people in my life.

So: I decided to start a list. Forty people (or groups of people) who mean the world to me. People I sincerely love. This list isn’t conclusive. Some are people I don’t know well. Some I’ve only recently met. Some I haven’t talked to in ages. For reasons that probably make sense, I specifically omitted family members near and distant.

Here we go.