Because I’m a professional practitioner of the pedagogical arts (known in some parts as fancy book learnin’), I’m privileged to enjoy a Spring Break holiday that usually falls during the same week my semi-grown daughters are also out of school.

Back in the good old days when the girls still spoke to me with actual words, we would spend our Spring Breaks together– playing at the park, riding bikes, or sharing the trauma of a Disney character’s parental death scene.

This year, instead of bonding with me and giggling about my excessive ear hair, all three daughters struck out on their own to sigh dramatically and roll their eyes elsewhere.

My eldest and most expensive daughter took a trip with a friend and several of my credit cards to enjoy the urban vibrancy of Las Vegas. My middle daughter and her sorority sisters soaked up the sun and repelled the advances of countless pec-flexing goobers on the sugar-white sands of Orange Beach, Alabama. My youngest and quietest daughter communed with nature, her best friend, and a jumbo bag of snack cheese on an all-day picnic. I took the family doglets out to potty several times.

Amid these canine assaults on my lawn, I took the opportunity of a daughterless house to do some decluttering. Yes, we are those people who keep things that we might (but probably won’t) need some time in the next fifty years – because who knows when that free miniature tube of toothpaste I got from the dentist in 1997 might come in handy (along with the other 34 tubes in the same drawer).

I’m sad to say that after an entire week of decluttering, I only made it through our laundry room. The following is a catalog of the clutter I decluttered in there.

First, I got rid of two large Rubbermaid tubs full of cables, wires, cords, adapters, and about a hundred other electronic/ computery-type thingies I couldn’t identify. I did feel a slight twinge of fear that this stuff might be important, but since I hadn’t opened the tubs since it was still cool to wear a pager, I decided it was safe to let them go.

Next, I reduced the lifespan of my lumbar spine by lifting down a cardboard box with long-forgotten contents to discover about 60 pounds worth of seashells inside. Yes, seashells. After taking our girls on numerous trips to the beach over the years and allowing them to bring home every fragment, shard or sliver of what might once have been a seashell, I’m sure we thought we would get crafty someday and open a seashell décor emporium. Instead, I now have to perform the geezer shuffle when I walk.

Next to the seashell hoard was a second mystery box that revealed a complete set of what appeared to be old martini glasses. Neither my wife nor I have any idea where these came from or why they had been marinating in dust on a shelf above our dryer for the past twenty-odd years. We’ve never made a martini or even drunk a martini. And, as far as we know, neither have our parents–though mine probably should have done so regularly during my teen years.

This summer, I plan to have one of my famous garage sales and transfer ownership of these delightful objects to other folks who can find them boxed up in their laundry rooms years from now and wonder where in the heck they came from. So if you’re in the market for some old electronic waste or some seashell parts, come on by. Maybe I’ll even make you a martini, but probably not.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Jason Graves is an award-winning humor columnist from East Texas. Contact him at susanjase@


sbcglobal.net.)

I’ve thought more about what Jesus would do in the last five months than I have since those bracelets were all the rage in the late ‘90s.

Heading to an event this week, I realized I was going to be awkwardly early instead of fashionably late, so I took a detour to an area where homeless encampments had frustrated residents and restaurants nearby.

Near a highway exit, the chain hotels and chain restaurants caught travelers from the interstate. The loneliness of asphalt only held life by those pushing shopping carts under the midday heat, otherwise surrounded by massive vehicles that only went around those pushing their load in the middle of the side streets. The area was more recently developed, in the last 20 years. The overly wide streets, almost industrial-sized, were flanked by parking lots and strip malls that make up the stark, modern, sprawling urban design.

I noted the businesses: Applebee’s, Golden Corral, Mc-Donald’s, and, strangely, General Dynamics. Mixed in were two churches I hadn’t heard of before, spread between several previously separate and merged business spaces. Perhaps it was like CVS and Walgreens. Maybe one church wanted to rely on the market research of the other.

The undeveloped lots were empty of encampments, and what seemed like a new sign — No Trespass, No Loitering per Ordinance — towered in the stretch of dirt. The stone benches of one of the churches, in sight of the lot, were also empty.

It was the same area I had toured with a resident a few months back. We walked the land near his house, and he spoke about the problems he had had with people cutting the fence into the city land behind his house, a wide expanse that used to be a well-loved lake for recreation that had been part of a way to capture floodwater. There hadn’t been a flood in a very long time.

At the end of the tour, we walked by a small city water facility. The resident explained that the homeless had broken into the walled-off area — maybe the size of a large living room — to “charge their phones.” I nodded, seeing parts of the metal gate dented.

“I mean, they also go into it to try and find water,” he said. “But look at how they’ve creatively used the tumbleweeds to block the door and that great new concertina wire on top.”

Or, we could put a water faucet on the outside wall. And, another silent thought: what would be the most humane, the most human, and also, the most divine?

WWJD. I’m not sure he’d use concertina wire.

A few weeks later, I toured a private food bank. It was relatively new, on the opposite side of town, in a different stretch of the desert where local developers were building, building, building into the vastness where they only saw how tract homes would give life. Smooth new pavement was the oasis vision.

The food bank volunteers, all church-affiliated, spoke about how they also delivered food to different locations in the region. I was surprised by the distances they traveled; had they considered a more permanent location in the bigger city down the interstate as well?

“We had a location there before,” said the volunteer, framed by the larger-than-lifesize portrait of Jesus on the wall behind them. “But, there were too many homeless there.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Cassie McClure is a writer, wife, mother, daughter, fan of the Oxford comma, and drinker of tequila. Some of those things relate. Contact her at cassie@mcclurepublications.com.)