Grandpa’s Gooseberry Ice Cream

You could count on it. Every summer the Ambrose Call family would come for a visit with Grandpa and Grandma Call. In my recollection these visits always created excitement among my mother’s brothers and sisters who liked to talk about politics and then when the grandkids got old enough to offer their opinions the excitement…

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The Three-Year-Old Adventurer

The summer of 1974 was one of the most scary, traumatic, memorable, and miraculous times in my family history with Carol and Paul. Let me try to summarize that summer: while living in Knoxville, Tennessee Carol was diagnosed with ovarian cancer which led to a complete hysterectomy including the loss of her uterus, ovaries and…

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Will You Still Love Me If I Am Purple?

Several years ago, my wife and I were in a restaurant eating a sandwich with our 9- year-old granddaughter Alicia who has an eye for noticing little things that are going on around her. We had just finished our sandwiches, and we were sitting at the table visiting and enjoying a few minutes of time…

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Give Me Your Credit Card

Have you ever had one of those experiences which you can remember twenty plus years later as clearly as if it happened yesterday? I have and this story I am about to tell is an example of one of those experiences.​My dad and I lost our wives 17 days apart so during the recovery process…

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Oh No! They’re Choking to Death

Mrs. Bouck, my fifth-grade teacher, had a profound and positive impact on me, even though many of her teaching techniques would no doubt be unacceptable today. In fact, if she were one of my grandkids’ teachers, I am certain I would be leery if she were still using some of the same approaches she used…

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Operation Bread

In the spring of 2017, I traveled to Bamako, the capitol of Mali, Africa with my grandson, Calvert, to visit his dad and my son, Lt. Col. Paul Cazier. Paul was stationed in the US Embassy as the military attaché and was the highest-ranking US military officer in Mali. Mali is a land-locked country in west…

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