The Wife and I went to a party the other night with some friends. Now I know that may surprise you that after almost five years of writing a weekly newspaper article we still have a few friends who wouldn’t mind being seen out in public with us, but have no fear. The good friends were hers – I just went along for the ride.

The other day I was in a phone conversation with a friend, who also happens to be a legendary sports figure. I will not use his name for reasons you will quickly see.

Talk about déjà vu all over again.

For the first time in many, many years we had dinner at Flat Creek Club in Peachtree City. We were there twice in the past month, actually.

Last night I watched our country’s State of the Union Address on TV, where our president spoke for about an hour. It is no secret to anyone who knows me, as to where I stand on George Washington Bush Jr. It is also no secret where I stood on President Clinton and on Hillary running for president, should she get the nod.

The University of West Georgia in Carrollton has, after a ten-month study, changed the school mascot from the Braves to the Wolves. I like the idea of a wolf as a mascot. Wolves are large, powerful, dangerous, aggressive, carnivorous creatures that hunt in packs and seem to fear very little. That’s the kind of mascot you want for the sports teams—one that conveys power, danger, and strength. It’s the reason the mascot was changed that I take issue with.

As far back as I can remember – no pun intended – I’ve had trouble remembering things. Take, for instance, Colonel Baker’s tenth-grade chemistry class. He spent an entire school year teaching us about the periodic table, electrons, neutrons, and atoms. Don’t remember learning much chemistry back then, but thanks to my selective memories they are a few things from that year and his class that I’ll never be able to forget.

Dixie Divas #97

People sometimes ask me what’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten. There are lots of strong candidates.

Ever a reader of local journalism when we travel, I clipped a small op-ed piece I found in the Washington Post last month. The headline read, “It’s a Life, Not a Feel-Good Moment.”

The Peachtree City Police Department announced last week that officers had arrested a man in his 40s for allegedly, among other charges, attempting to meet a girl he believed to be 13 years old, for immoral purposes. It was the 14th such arrest by the department in 18 months.

I’ve tried to save money all of my life, and to date I’m ashamed to say I’ve utterly and completely failed. Not that I haven’t tried, though. Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve clipped coupons, which I forget about, leave on the kitchen table, and go grocery shopping without. The coupons finally end up in the trashcan long after they expire. I’ll go behind The Boy and cut off light switches in an effort to save energy – only to leave the hall light on at night because, well, some big fireman in our house is a little afraid of the dark. But now with The Boy off at school, it’s more important than ever for us to save money.

Dear Mary and Rainer,

Where has the time gone? I was going to write you a nice long letter at Christmas, then again at New Year’s, and here January is almost gone. Sometimes I worry whether you feel neglected, but I do know how busy you are, especially during the holidays. Time just got away from us too.

Several years ago, in the early days of my adult life, I was home visiting from Indianapolis, where I had a sports marketing job.

You Democrats in the Alito hearings remind me of the O.J. Simpson trial. Day after grueling day, all of America was glued to the TV to witness the mounds of incriminating evidence against O.J. Simpson. Everyone in the court room knew without a doubt that he was 100 percent guilty, but the total disrespect of law and evidence made no difference.

Please allow me the privilege of bragging for a few moments. I know that it is often considered unseemly and crass to brag but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m not bragging about myself or my church or members of my immediate family this time, but I am going to express my extreme pride in a 19-year-old young man that I have known for well over 10 years.

It’s not fair, I tell you, it’s just not fair. No matter what we do, we can’t change it. Oh, I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried. But no amount of ranting or raving has worked. When I found out, I stomped around the house for days — didn’t change a darn thing, just scared the cats. Despite all my efforts to stop it, they went ahead and did it anyway. Why didn’t they just leave things alone? Right when we were getting use to the old ones, they go and change, messing everything up.

Well, maybe I’m not the best example. I don’t have much patience for ceremony or parades, and political posturing triggers my gag reflex.

Mama doesn’t want anyone to call me sexy.

Not that anyone wants to call me “sexy” but just in case.

“I think it would degrade you,” she declared suddenly. I could tell by her tone that she had put a great deal of thought into the matter. It seems to me that she would have more important things to worry about like how much food she can possibly get Dixie Dew to eat in one day.

Take the traditional sitcom approach to baby-birthing.

Please.

Daughter delightedly announces to her mom that she is going to make her a grandmother.

I feel like my body has gotten totally out of shape, so after I got my doctor's permission to join a fitness club and start exercising I decided to take an aerobics class for seniors. I bent, twisted, gyrated, jumped up and down, and perspired for an hour. But, by the time I got my leotards on, the class was over.

A number of churches have been going through what some are calling the “worship wars,” which is a conflict between those who favor hymns and those who lean more toward the praise choruses. Churches even have split over the issue while others have traditional services alongside contemporay services. Some have blended their worship using both hymns and choruses. All this reminds me of a couple of stories sent to me by Father Rick Hatfield of Florida:

Like most kids, growing up we had to do a lot of listening. Some of us did it better than the others. Mom used to say we needed to listen twice as much as we talked. “That’s why God gave you two ears and one mouth. You can’t learn anything if you’re talking.”

If you thought 2006 might give us a break from columns about my never-ending searches for lost objects, you thought wrong.

The U.S. House version of an immigration bill is mean-spirited, according to the editors of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, because it makes being in the U.S. illegally a felony. Well, wait until they hear my idea.

A friend of mine, who is a successful television writer, called one day about a writing project we were working on together.

My wonderful son Robbie is a student at Gordon College in Barnesville. Five days a week he gets into his car and drives the 50 minutes each way to and from his college classes. Those of you who say, “It’s only a piece of paper on the wall,” don’t have a clue of the days of utter drudgery and sacrifice a degree takes. It’s like Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown series in the Sunday comic section who always had a storm cloud over his head.

There’s been a good deal of controversy this past Christmas season regarding the season itself. John Gibson wrote a best-seller whose subject matter is the “war on Christmas.” Some businesses forbade their employees to wish customers “Merry Christmas,” and public schools have secularized the words to religious Christmas carols.

Lately I’ve been told that I live in my own little world. That the way I view stuff is totally different than the way most people do. For instance, some see the glass of water and say it’s half full; others see the glass of water and say it’s half empty. I see the glass of water and wonder why it’s not chocolate milk. Strange, I know, but then again so am I.

Somewhere along the line, in addition to all my other responsibilities, I have gained a new one — that of being Dixie Dew’s agent.

When I hear the first words of a comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, I brace myself for nonsense.

It isn’t that there aren’t any similarities. The problem is conventional wisdom about Vietnam is usually wrong because the truth has been hidden for decades by a shroud of myths, half-truths and feel-good baloney. In the words of 19th century humorist Samuel Clemmons, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble . . . it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so!”

When I was little, my mom had a proverb for every occasion. Looking back, I can’t help but feel as though someone played on her repression that if you “Sing before breakfast, [you’ll] cry before supper.”