life Archives – James D. Hogan

Before the mountains were born

On December 31, 2024

Life continues to move pretty fast.

Yesterday I lit a fire under my own rear end and decided to put together the family video for the year (a tradition of sorts that started way back when I began making videos documenting each month of our kiddo’s first years), and if nothing else, I can say with confidence that the Hogan family has been on the move.

In the course of this past year: Atlanta, Miami, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Labadee (Haiti); Washington, D.C. with Thomas (the kiddo-trip-with-Dad experience); Cherry Grove (the annual Beach Week); out west–Denver, then Las Vegas, then Zion National Park, then Grand Canyon National Park, then Phoenix; then to Toronto for a Springsteen concert, then to New Jersey to visit family. Not to mention a bunch of trips around Cackalack.

It was the year a hurricane came and devastated so many towns and communities here in western NC, an occasion where I found myself sitting in for my boss while he was out of the country. (This, coincidentally, was roughly where my commitment to working out every week sort of fell apart. See more below.)

Advent 1: Point Nemo

By James D. Hogan

On December 2, 2024

In writing

When lighthouses go dark.

In the early dark of December, I recall walking down to St. David’s in Cullowhee. I was a college student, a junior I think, and it was Advent. My friend Brittany had been invited to read a meditation she’d composed, and we were both going.

These meditations were a weekly occurrence at St. David’s. We arrived in the cold, entering into the nave directly from the red door at the side. Inside was a narrow room with a vaulted ceiling. The Advent evening prayer services were candlelit; there was a podium in the aisle for reading. A chest organ at the back provided some music. Dr. Lillian Pearson–Kelly’s piano professor–usually supplied.

I cannot remember the subject of Brittany’s meditation. I can only guess it was something literary. (We were English majors.) But the reason I was there in the first place had more to do with the rector who led the parish.

Cars

By James D. Hogan

On August 8, 2024

In writing

Every car has a story. A list.

I have been reading The Autopian since it was founded. Really, I’ve been reading David Tracy for years, and he and his fellow wrenching enthusiasts have been sort of the gateway for me into caring for cars that Tony Bourdain was when it came to travel–a sort of acknowledgement that it’s a fine thing to do, wrenching, that normal, non-mechanical people can do it, that cars are machines, and every machine breaks now and again, and even if you can’t solve it, it’ll be okay.

Anyway, David Tracy put out an article this week about all of the cars he’s bought and sold, and it made me wonder if I could compile a list of the cars I’ve owned (including the ones Kelly and I have owned together). And here is just as good of a place as any to catalog them.

1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon. My first car, inherited from my stepmother, Mary. When I earned my driver’s license in 1997, the car was 18 years old, but to my teenaged self, it felt 118. It was, admittedly, a car from another era. Its small block V8 ought to have provided tremendous power, but because it came from a time of fuel efficiency, it barely coughed up more than 115 horsepower. Mine was gold with a beige fiberglass top. Actually, gold is an exaggeration. The car I drove was dull brown. It consumed oil as greedily as it did fuel, which I thankfully could purchase for $0.95/gallon in those days. When I worked and saved and had enough money for a replacement when I graduated high school, we put the Olds in the front yard with a “for sale” sign in the windshield and a price of $800. A couple came by to test drive it and stole it. Later, we found it in a pay-by-the-week motel in Statesville. Mary felt so bad for the couple (who had apparently lived in the Oldsmobile for a while with their kid) that she just let them have it.

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