Rushing's Ramblings

When I lived in South Florida, my friend Richard and I loved to sail on the weekends. Anchored at Coconut Grove Sailing Club was his 40-foot sailboat, which gave us easy access to Biscayne Bay. After sailing all day in Biscayne National Park, our favorite place to anchor for a couple of days was Elliot Key, the northernmost part of the Florida Keys. Many years ago, it was a thriving pineapple farming and sponging community. Elliot Key is now uninhabited. There's nothing quite as sublime as the warm, clear, turquoise waters of Biscayne National Park. Sailing and swimming are perfect antidotes after a stressful week at work. The direction of the wind always determined our arrival time at Elliot Key. We could sail there within a few hours if the wind was advantageous. If not, it would take until after sundown. Even if it was dark when we arrived, I didn't wait for dinner and jumped in the water as soon as we lowered the anchor. Richard was okay with waiting to start dinner ...

When Paddy and I met Linda several years ago, she could only move a knuckle in the first digit of her right hand. She was utterly helpless and lay in bed 24 hours a day. Paddy had been assigned as her hospice therapy dog. We had already made weekly visits to other patients in hospice, but unlike the other patients, Linda was my age. I was at the other end of the leash, as Paddy did all the work. I learned from all the hospice patients we visited to appreciate each day. Linda taught me not only how to live but how to die. Linda had multiple sclerosis, which caused her to rapidly declined in the last few years. Her daughter admitted her to a nursing home when Linda's husband died. Before we met, she had been in the facility for a couple of years. Linda's daughter worked full-time, had two young children, and could not care for her. Linda shared that she didn't want to burden her daughter and felt living in a nursing home was best for everyone. Linda's primary i...

Many of us go back to where we were raised after some years—we might go back physically, but we return mentally, too. I recently attended a Sunday school class at the Church of Horseshoe Bay. When I heard a recording of an old familiar gospel song by Alan Jackson, tears began creeping down my cheeks. I couldn't stop it, hard as I tried. Reagan Lambert was the teacher for that particular Sunday. His lesson was about prayers and praying. Reagan made a statement that resonated with me: "I had a drug problem growing up. My parents drug me to church every time the doors were open." Well, Reagan, I had the same "drug" problem. Only, I deeply resented going to church all the time--Sunday school, Sunday morning church service with Bible classes on Sunday night followed by another church service. That wasn't all--we had Wednesday night church service, too! If there was a revival, we were there every night. The preachers usually spoke from a position of "Hell,...

As a trained psychotherapist, I was once reasonably accurate in detecting less-than-factual statements. I learned to read body language and immediately discern when the verbiage did not match the behavior. I was married to an attorney while working on a doctorate at the University of North Texas in organizational psychology. We had quite a few discussions about applying what I had learned to jury selection. One of my classmates, Phil McGraw, would later specialize in jury selection, meet Oprah Winfrey, and become rich and famous. He now drives a Bentley. I don’t.  I’m a bit rusty now and maybe overconfident in skills learned long ago. It sometimes comes as a huge surprise when I discover I’ve been deceived. I usually react with anger when I have been “played” rather than being hurt or disappointed; I typically respond with anger…mostly because I was fooled. I pride myself in being authentic, sometimes too direct and honest, which I realize is probably not to many people’s ta...

There’s nothing like walking outside in the middle of the day and not seeing your hand in front of your face. People might be nearby and are heard, but they can’t be seen. I was a young child when I experienced a black dust storm in the Texas Panhandle. My mother soaked towels and sheets to place around the doors and windows of our house. We stayed inside until the dirt blizzard passed, but she allowed us to go outside for a brief moment. She knew that dust could kill you if you inhaled it for too long, as she had lived through the Oklahoma dust bowl of the ’30s, with the major one occurring in 1935. Many of her neighbors would die from “dust pneumonia.” People surviving the disaster called it the massive “Black Sunday” storm. In the 1910s through the 1920s, when war raged in Europe, the Southern Plains experienced an unusually wet period. The government created a land boom in the Plains to grow more wheat, especially since grain prices were escalating. 5.2 million acres of native ...

Mike Lucksinger had worked all day on his ranch, removing brush and mending fences. The day’s work had been exhausting, but he wasn’t quite finished. Even though it was in May, the temperature had risen to a sweltering 90 degrees. Mike entered his house at dusk and removed his hat before going to the kitchen for more water. After doffing his boots and donning his loafers, Mike headed out the door to pick up a limb that had fallen from the big Oak tree in his well-manicured yard. As he stepped out, he thought about how he would soon be able to relax in his family room with the huge window and watch the birds swarming around the bird feeder hanging from his favorite tree. Mike was reaching for a limb when he suddenly felt a sharp pain in the upper part of his foot. Mike was horrified to see a rattlesnake slither away. Mike is an analytic type and has a quiet demeanor, but at this particular moment, he was panic-stricken and did a lot of self-talking to remain calm. As a founding me...

I don't know exactly when I started my love affair with Texas, but maybe it was when I was born on a cold November day in the Texas Panhandle over seven decades ago. I'm confident I associated snuggling tightly against my mother with everything good about the world, particularly the place where I was born. My father took us on many trips by automobile when I was growing up. We traveled all over Texas, camped in most state parks, and swam in its pristine lakes. Additionally, we ventured out to many states in the western part of the United States. Anything east of us, other than my relatives in Oklahoma, was never given a thought. We were provincial in our thinking, but I would later make up for that in spades when I grew up and wandered around the planet. When Texans brag about our home state, we  don't include the big cities for the most part, although I'd give them a slight nod. Instead, we're referring to the vastness, beauty, and uniqueness found in ...