Category Family & Sacrifice

I’ve seen hunger walk through a front door like it owned the place. 1932. My youngest hadn’t eaten in two days, and I was staring at a war medal that couldn’t be traded for bread. I served in France in 1918. Dug trenches with frozen fingers, carried buddies with blown-out ...

I was eight the year the wheat turned to dust. My father said it was the worst of the bad years, though I didn’t understand how the sky could be that blue and still hold so much sorrow. We lived on the flat edge of Kansas, where wind came without ...

I write today with the weight of sorrow heavy on my heart. America—the country I loved, the country I believed in, the country that shaped me—has died. I was born in 1950 in Detroit, Michigan, the beating heart of American industry. My father was a welder for the local power company ...