My Life Between the Dimensions

  The Kitchen Table The little house on Meacham Lane was probably no more than about 700-800 square feet, a tiny kitchen with a metal bordered and Formica topped table and four chairs you could see in almost every kitchen of all the houses on the gravel road.  There was a living room with a small black and white T.V,  couch, chair and curio cabinet, and a single bathroom down a short hall  leading back from those two rooms.  Two small bedrooms of course, one for Mother and Dad, and one for Ken and I, were located across the hall from each other with the bathroom in between. Early on Ken and I shared a bed until better times financially led to bunk beds. Most mornings in the summer  I listened for the sounds in the kitchen before throwing off the sheet, a sheet that previously had been sprinkled with water by Mother to ward off the heat and now bone dry, I contemplated beginning the day.  If I heard the rattle of pans and Mother’s footsteps crisscrossin...

      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 Wayne Ragan Copyright 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...

 Jelly Donuts IF IT TAKES YOU THREE BITES AND YOU STILL HAVEN’T FOUND THE DOT OF JELLY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DANGED THING, IT AIN’T NO JELLY DONUT! I don’t like what’s happening in my world. Things are looking bad.  We have one crisis after another.  We focus too much on military arsenals, technologies, politics, whether we are wearing the right stuff, and what other people think of us on social media.  We have forgotten how to correctly do the simple stuff that makes life worth living. Like making a decent jelly donut. Or knowing a decent jelly donut when we see it. College isn’t for everyone.  Trade school isn’t either.  Apprenticeship is hard and bosses are annoying anyway.  So it seems many become entrepreneurs. They become bakers of donuts.  Or rather they become owners of places that employ people who don’t require sleep to bake donuts. How hard can that be?  You hire some people to show up just when the bars are closing, and I submit ma...

 REMEMBERING A KINDNESS I write this while remembering the sensitivity of a family member.  It is not about the artifact, though, in itself it is a remarkable collector piece.  It measures 4 ⅝” by 3” at its widest point.  Made of hematite, it is as heavy as lead.  This ax head was a valued commodity and a real prize in its day.  It was heavily used by its owner, a right-handed individual, and served as an instrument of war, as well as a utilitarian function. About 1954, for those who can recall the time, on the Poplar Bluff side of the Highway 67 bridge above Old Greenville in Wayne County, Missouri stood an old trading post.  The owner worked diligently collecting artifacts to sell, and on the sly, chipped arrowheads of his own to pass off to unwary tourists passing through.  His collection of the real stuff was impressive though.  Mother and Dad always stopped to let me look and on one occasion, allowed me to buy a couple of arrowheads....