James D. Hogan

This Sonnet of an Evening

On November 23, 2014

LIFE WITH KIDDOS

The boy didn’t want to go to sleep.

He wanted Kel to read him his book–The Very Hungry Caterpillar for those of you playing along at home–and when he realized it was my turn to read to him before bed, his eyes welled up with tears. He drug out his little beanbag chair into the hall, pulling it up to Kel’s feet as if it were an offering, a way of begging into her arms for a nighttime story.

We compromised. (Julia, in her own way, let it be known she expected Mommy to read to her. I was chopped liver at that point, I guess.) Kel read Caterpillar to them both, one tucked on each side on their beanbag chairs, and I relaxed in the rocker in Thomas’s room, listening to their voices, to the cold rain drumming the rooftop.

T came back into the room afterward, still not entirely sure about letting me read to him, but soon enough we were finishing our third book (Scat Cat), and he still wanted another one.

Looking for Jan O’Brien

By James D. Hogan

On August 15, 2014

In writing

IN MEMORIAM

UPDATE, DECEMBER 5, 2016: Western Carolina University announced today that Jan O’Brien had passed away. It’s important to note this story is about the summer of 2014, when Jan’s passing was erroneously reported.

Jan will always be a cherished part of my college years, and I am deeply saddened to hear she’s passed away. I will always be grateful, however, of the chance I got to tell her how important she was to so many of us before it was too late. –jdh

A journey to say goodbye to a campus legend–before it’s too late.

THIS STORY BEGINS SIXTEEN YEARS AGO, the fall of 1998, when I was a high school senior visiting my college sophomore girlfriend at Western Carolina. We were kids, so we were drawn like moths to the flame by the on-campus Chick-fil-a, where fried chicken sandwiches wrapped in foil bags sat under heat lamps, waiting for us to collect them and pay for them with a mysterious and seemingly inexhaustible supply of declining balance points.

We’d gathered our meals and headed for check-out, and that’s the first time I met Jan O’Brien, the infamous register attendant in the University Center food court. She was an older lady, short but strong stature, white, curly hair, and a vibrant smile, which she flashed warmly to me. “Hello, sweetheart!” she said.

“Hi, Jan!” Kelly said back to her.

I grinned. “What, no ‘sweetheart’ for me?”

She laughed, and then she called me sweetheart. We chatted, and then we checked out, and we ate, and the next year I came back to Western Carolina as a freshman. Jan was still there, and she called me sweetheart. She called me that for the next four years.

Pigeons Down on Market Square

By James D. Hogan

On June 13, 2014

In diary

DIARY

“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” was playing on the speakers, Tom Petty’s scratchy voice full of ache and regret. We were young. We felt dangerous.

There’s a good summer rain starting to fall, the kind where the sky gets fast-dark and the rain falls in grape-sized pellets, spread out at first, a couple of splatters here and there, separated by yards in distance, plopping down on the bread-oven asphalt outside. From there, it spreads into a little dollop and evaporates, and the smell of fresh rain coming up off the blacktop takes me back to an amusement park, back when I was in the eighth grade.

We were all there with our school, an end-of-year celebration trip of sorts that amounted to a funny sort of adolescent culmination, a dash of grown-up freedom to wander on our own in a theme park full of childhood conquests. It makes sense when you’re thirteen.

It rained. It was the summertime kind of rain, the kind I described above, and my friends and I were somewhere on the edge of the park, a small core of friends connected by the fast-evaporating bonds of middle school.