Tag
hands
7 entries
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Tuesday, January 1, 1980 · Don Krumpos
The Pedestal Board
For a man who had once been president of a college chess club, my father did not actually play chess with me very often. Maybe a dozen times in all. Memory makes it feel like more. Perhaps because each game…
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Sunday, June 1, 1980 · Don Krumpos
Donny, Going On Your Own
I got my first bike for my birthday — a Huffy, blue and silver. It was a big deal. For the longest time, I could only ride on the driveway, which was slightly on an incline. I'd glide down the…
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Friday, January 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos
Chess-Club Farmer
I often return to an image of my father in the hayfield: plaid shirt darkened with sweat, straw hat pushed back, a stem of hay sometimes held loosely in the corner of his mouth like he belonged to an old…
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Saturday, January 1, 1983 · Don Krumpos
Harold and the Laying on of Hands
Some of my clearest childhood memories of church are not from Sunday worship itself but from the odd currents that swirled around it—potlucks, basement coffee, revival language drifting through fellowship halls, and certain visitors who seemed to arrive from a…
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Saturday, December 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos
Keep Playing Here
It was winter in Wisconsin, sometime in the mid-eighties, when snow came in deep drifts against the hedgerows and the cold had a blue cast by late afternoon. My sister and I had been outside for hours, tunneling through snowbanks,…
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Tuesday, March 17, 2015 · Don Krumpos
His Fantasy Land
The oxygen machine hums all day. It doesn't stop. The morphine pump beeps at intervals I've memorized by now. These are the sounds that fill Dad's house — not his whistling, not the clatter of tools, not the screen door…
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Thursday, April 9, 2015 · Don Krumpos
The Dash Between the Years
The last couple of days, Helen and I sat at Dad's house making a photo board. We spread everything out — shoeboxes, envelopes, loose prints — and just started sorting. That was the best kind of therapy. Not talking about…