My Life Between the Dimensions

      COMMERCIAL FISHING IN THE KEY S A nice catch from the Florida Keys, rinsed and ready for market. When my wife Sandy and I moved to South Dade County, Florida in late fall of 1980 to accept another promotion with SEARS, we came with two young sons, Scott and Matthew, aged seven and four respectively, and a lot of excitement and expectations of what we would experience. Early spring of the next year our family grew larger with the birth of our third son, Kent. We relocated from one of the most Northern stores in Sears Southern Territory, Bowling Green, KY, to one of the largest and most deeply situated in the South of the territory, Cutler Ridge, Florida. Other than Key West, the most Southern of all the Sears stores, about 35 miles South of Miami. It did not take long to realize that our raise for the promotion could not cover the difference in our cost of living, and left no room for extravagances. Things were tight, really tight, for the first few years. The boys...

In the Darkness In the darkness, in the still, I go where others cannot go. I have been there before and the journeys are not sought.  I return less now, but the portent of it lingers, always in that quiet time. I am glad you cannot go.  I watch you sleep.  It calms me, and resets my mind to time and place. There are other battles, of flesh and spirit, ahead.  I cannot win any but spiritual victory, esoteric and primitive.  But that, at least, is something. No, it is everything. Everything.  And before I take my chances of foreboding journeys again in the darkness, I refocus on the paths I must follow now and try to leave those others, those in the darkness of another life, behind me. Your soft breathing lures me again to slumber.   And I summon my warrior heart. The battles are fierce in the darkness. Keith 11/30/23  

     Back to School at Sears 1980's   The year was 1980. I had not been in South Florida long.  I was working on my second checklist (salaried) job in the Cutler Ridge SEARS store, one of many in the Miami Zone, only a few miles North of Homestead, Florida and Key Largo.  It was a long way from my West Kentucky roots. Cutler was classified as a company “A” store, one of the largest in terms of assortment, square footage, and volume, and the culture both in the workplace and general population was a substantial departure from the laidback lifestyle and rural environment of West Kentucky.  Spanish, from a large population of Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants, was spoken as often as English.  Demographics for the marketplace also included a substantial mix of a Black and also South American customer base, along with a slim majority of White native Floridians  and the snowbird retirees of all ethnic backgrounds living their dream of spending thei...

  THE ROCK Photo by the author 2023 It’s just a rock.  Or is it?  When does an inanimate object breach the precise laws of nature and the universe and become something more? Perhaps some of the time it intersects with some life form--an animal--a bird--or a child-- in a way that elevates it to a vault of memories-- or alters the course of a life. I first came to sit on this rock--this limestone composite here beside the swirling waters below Kentucky Dam on the Tennessee River--at possibly no more than 12 years of age.  Anyone that has ever chanced a heart attack and made the descent to fish the periphery of the swift waters below Kentucky Dam on the Tennessee River knows the location of the pile of boulders at the bottom left of their journey down the steep stairway from the parking lot.  My mother, God bless her, drove to Grand Rivers from our Meacham Lane home in McCracken County, KY every couple of weeks in the summer beginning around 1958 to have her hair d...