Remembering a Mom on Memorial Day
May 31st, 2010 by John Creighton in Dispatches
Tags: Atwood, Holidays, Neighbors
I’ve been looking at the Facebook posts imploring people to remember our veterans on Memorial Day. I must confess the first person I think of on Memorial Day is not a veteran. I think of a mother who served her community and country, too. I think of Mrs. Gladys Beamgard. C.W.’s wife. In my mind, she is standing on a platform in the middle of our local cemetery. The surrounding grave sites are adorned with a rainbow of flowers. Small [...]
Read more...A Mother’s Child
May 9th, 2010 by John Creighton in Dispatches
I enjoy my work with the Orange County Register, the Arizona Republic and now the St. Louis Post Dispatch. For the past three years, I spend two to three days a week training reporters on new approaches to frame stories, do interviews and source stories. It’s the travel that is getting me down. I’m on the road ten to twelve days per month. It wasn’t a big deal before Emma was born. But, It’s a lot harder to maintain marital [...]
Read more...Be Present on Christmas
December 24th, 2009 by John Creighton in Dispatches
Be present at our table Lord Be here and everywhere adored These mercies bless and grant that we May feast in fellowship with thee. Amen This is one of the prayers my family regularly said – or in this case sang – before our meals when I was a boy growing up. Prayers, perhaps especially for children, are sometimes no more than a set of ritualistic words. We don’t give a great deal of thought to their meaning. I have [...]
Read more...First Thanksgiving Lessons
November 25th, 2009 by John Creighton in Dispatches
Most American school children learn the story of the First Thanksgiving. School lessons, projects and pageants etch into our collective narrative images of Pilgrims and Native Americans celebrating survival and sharing the bounty of a successful harvest. My mother kept a diorama I made of First Thanksgiving scene in the first or second grade. She placed it on the dining room buffet each November along with other family decorations. We often think about the First Thanksgiving story only as tale [...]
Read more...