Ike Morgan

The Fourth of July is a Top 4 holiday, ranking behind only Christmas, Thanksgiving and maybe rival weekend of college football season. Like Thanksgiving, it employs food as an important element (only it's barbecue and burgers and dogs and watermelon instead of turkey and dressing and sweet tater casserole). Like Christmas, it recognizes a pivotal moment in world history. And, like football, it's heavy in war metaphor. What sets the Fourth apart from those other major holidays is that it's held during a time of year when, in the South, the weather might melt a sparkler before you can get it good and lit. Some years you get a break from the heat. For example, on the Fourth of July when Tom T. Hall played Sopchoppy, Florida, the rain cooled things off nicely. Tom T. Hall was a country singer/songwriter who was known as "The Storyteller" because his songs spun real-world anecdotes into wonderful stories. A lot of songwriters make their living off great hooks. Tom T. ...

We're moving into another house. And as we give away, throw away or box up everything we've collected over the past 15 years, it occurs to me that if we hadn't bought so much junk we'd be paying cash for the next house. It also amazes me that it was so easy to move when I was younger. Pack it up and go. No storage unit, no buy/sell closing-date tap dance. I could fit every important thing I owned into the truck and sleep down at the boat launch for a couple weeks if I had to. These days, I have roomfuls of homage to those days and all the days since. Things I collected at work. Books I read. Photos I took. Newspapers I edited. Tools I used exactly once. It's taking weeks to go through everything. Oh, how I long for those old days of barely having a pot to hoard stuff in. The only thing I remember from my first apartment -- a lovely flat that sat 0.00002 feet from a set of frequently traveled railroad tracks in Andalusia, Alabama -- was a stereo I'd had since I w...