James D. Hogan

This Land is Your Land

On May 29, 2016

We don’t forget whom we mourn on Memorial Day as much as we do why.

Yes, let’s all remind ourselves that this Memorial Day Weekend, while occasion for backyard barbecues and festivities, was wrought to mark the somber occasion of those heroes who charged into battle, who laid down their lives to ensure the light of liberty would endure.

This is the meme that surfaces for a breath every year, filling timelines with lines like “Our day at the beach is thanks to their day at the beach,” over top a photo from Normandy, or a little boy dressed in his father’s Marine uniform, lying prone against brilliant emerald grass, a tombstone in the blurry background.

Yes, people–men, women, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, some little more than children, others career-long servants–these and many more died for our country.

Where Two or Three Are Gathered

By James D. Hogan

On February 25, 2016

In writing

Matters of Faith

church dark

Throughout the season of Lent, our Episcopal church in Statesville offers Evening Prayer on weekdays. The service is a rather simple one: scripture, ordered prayer–for forgiveness, for each other, for safety and quietude. It takes about twenty minutes to go through.

I try to volunteer to lead prayer a few times–the offering relies upon lay folks in the church to lead the service. Most times, only a handful of people show up. There have been a couple of instances in which I said Evening Prayer by myself.

My first assigned reading date was this past Monday. It had been a full and hectic day at the office, the kind where unexpected interruptions derail the plans you’d made. Still, I was able to duck out a little bit early to make it up the road–only to drive straight into a heavy rainstorm, which slowed traffic down. I pulled into the parking lot a minute shy of the appointed start time.

Sundays | Those Snowbound Breakfasts

By James D. Hogan

On January 24, 2016

In writing

LIFE WITH KIDDOS

Stasis is a powerful thing. Breaking free is even better.

We eat well when there’s snow on the ground, especially at breakfast.

Before we had kids, Kelly and I had a habit of going to Cracker Barrel for brunch any time it snowed. Something there was about a big, hot breakfast served in the near vicinity of a wood fire. With two kids and a third on the way, the days of sleeping till ten are long gone, and aging into the mid-thirties has thickened our sense of caution and responsibility against driving on icy roads. That, and minivans.

But we did sleep in this morning–thank God for kids tuckered out from sledding the day before–and though last night’s fire was only cold embers, this morning I fired up the oven to fix a pan of biscuits, and got a pound of bacon cooking in the big skillet, and scrambled a bunch of eggs, and pulled out oranges and grapes and honey and preserves. (All the carbohydrates, for you fans of MZCL, were for me.)

Soon, the olfactory trinity of biscuits rising, bacon frying, and coffee steaming filled the kitchen.