I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and my favorite movies all had monsters in them.  The best of those wonderfully terrifying creatures were the brainchildren of a man named Ray Harryhausen.  He was the genius behind the Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.  He created an army of sword-wielding skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts.  The Ymir, his alien creature from Venus in Twenty Million Miles to Earth, made me believe in life on other planets—terrible life.  His dinosaurs that menaced James Franciscus in Valley of the Gwangi also menaced me in my nightmares.  Harryhausen was the best stop-action animator the film world ever knew.  With the advent of CGI and the demise of other, earlier, cruder forms of animation, he’s probably the best of his kind that we’re likely ever to know.  He died yesterday.

I’d just like say goodbye to a guy who made my Saturday afternoons at the movie theater something to look forward to.  So long, Ray.  Give the angels a thrill.

When I was a kid, every town had a bookstore.  An independent bookstore.  Some towns had several.  They were as ubiquitous as local drugstores with soda fountains and as important as any other element to the life of a community.  It’s not like that now.  Our local, independently owned bookstores are an endangered species. They’re the victims of big chains and of Amazon, yes.  But they’re also endangered because of our own lethargy and our insensitivity to both the necessity and the importance of these very valuable resources.

Borders has gone the way of the dodo bird.  If what we hear is true, Barnes and Noble is on the ropes.  And when that chain is gone, know who’s left?  Amazon.  The big faceless corporation for whom books are simply another commodity and each of us is simply a revenue source.

Buying from independents is in our own best interest.  It assures that no one large entity will control what’s available to us as readers.  Freedom—and it does come down to this—is all about choice.

Most of the signings I do are at independents.  I’ll be signing on Friday at a wonderful small bookstore in Hudson, Wisconsin, called Chapter2Books.  Like most independents, they walk a fine line between red ink and black.  If you live in the area, I would consider it a personal favor if you came and experienced this lovely shop and began to do your book buying there.  Here’s a link to a great blog about these folks and their plight.

Thanks for listening.  And remember: Think globally.  Shop locally.

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine years old, my brothers and I pooled our saved allowances and bought a really cool radio.  It stood about a foot high and was shaped like a rocket.  It rested on its tail fins, nose pointed skyward, and out of that nose we drew up the antenna to get a signal.  We had that radio for years.  For some of the time, we lived in very small towns or on farms, and that rocket radio was our connection with the greater world.  I remember lying awake at night listening to music broadcast from the AM super stations out of places like Omaha, Des Moines, Cincinnati, Denver, and Oklahoma City.

Over time, I also owned a bunch of portable transistor radios, and then there were, of course, the radios in the cars my parents owned.  As a result, I grew up on Rock and Roll and Rock-A-Billy and all the popular music piped ceaselessly across the AM airways in the 50s and 60s.  Better than a time machine, certain songs take me back immediately to a particular moment in the past: “Peggy Sue” and the summer of 1957 when I was in love with a girl named Nelda Griffin; Roy Orbison’s “Cryin” and me trying to hit those high notes just as my voice was beginning to change; Brylcreeming my hair so that I could look like the Everly Brothers, and singing “So Sad” to myself in the bathroom mirror.

When I began writing Ordinary Grace and trying to summon memories of the kind of summer I wanted to create for the story (in the end, the summer of 1961), I went back and listened to a bunch of the old songs that I grew up with.  Amazing how effective they were in helping me capture so much of the sense of being a kid back then—the innocence, the freedom, the unbounded possibility, the feel, for an adolescent in small town America, that there was this great world out there far beyond the corn fields, just waiting to be experienced.

The folks at Atria Books, my publisher, picked up on that sentiment and have put together a collection of some of my favorites from AM radio in the 50s and 60s.  They’ve created the playlist on Spotify.  If you have a free moment, check it out.

For those of us who grew up with AM radio, it’s a cool blast from the past.

If you’d to know how I was almost murdered on my way to Disneyland or how The Incredible Shrinking Man has affected my whole theological outlook,  follow these links to a couple of blogs I did as a guest for the terrific Criminal Element website:

How I Hitchhiked to Disneyland and Almost Died

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from The Incredible Shrinking Man

So, okay, here’s something way up there on the “Really Weird” scale.  It happened this way.

I went to Omaha to spend Memorial Day weekend with my wife’s family.  We left the Twin Cities Friday evening, drove to Des Moines, stayed the night, and arrived in Omaha on Saturday.  We visited cemeteries, placed flowers on family graves—a tradition I really dig—and that evening, my wife and I joined friends for drinks at a local brew pub.

Next thing I know, it’s 3:00 PM Sunday afternoon.  I wake up in the hospital with no recollection of the preceding 48 hours.  I’m kind of fuzzy, to say the least.  Diane, my wife, is the room, along with my brother-in-law.  As I come out of the haze, they’re laughing hysterically at everything I say.

“Where am I?” I ask.

They laugh, and my wife, good-naturedly says, “Lakeside Hospital.”

“How did I get here?”

They laugh.  “I brought you to the emergency room this morning,” she says.

“What’s wrong with me?”

This brings on a near hysterical bout of laughter.  “You have Transient Global Amnesia,” Diane finally manages to say.

I’m not sure if I should be upset, but her demeanor clearly indicates that I’m not in any real danger.  So I ask, “What’s so funny?”

“You’ve been asking the same questions for the last eight hours.”

So this is what, according to Diane, happened.  At 8:45 that Sunday morning, I suddenly began asking the same questions over and over again.  “Where are we?  How did we get here?  What day is it?”

Freaked, she drove me to the emergency room of a hospital two blocks from our hotel, where they did a CAT scan and an MRI, and determined that I hadn’t suffered a stroke or a seizure.  The neurologist came in on his day off because the situation intrigued him.  He finally diagnosed my condition as Transient Global Amnesia.  It’s a condition whose cause is unknown, but whose effect is temporary and with no lasting physiological or mental consequences.  I’ve just simply lost a couple of days out of my life, no memory at all of Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon.

Weird.  Really weird.  An incredible reminder of how fragile everything is in life.