On August 16th we remembered both my sister Julia Ann Thompson’s and my mother’s Ruth Evelyn Johnston Thompson’s passing (hard to tease out one from the other sometimes). After we viewed mother’s newly placed grave marker at the cemetery, we retired to Jerseyville’s only Chinese restaurant to partake of its buffet. In general my father…
After dinner (that’s the mid-day meal in the country, folks) on the back eating porch, my father rested his eyes gazing outdoors to the garden and the hemlock tree. “I planted that tree 60 years ago,” Pop said, “It’s grown some. I can remember the day I planted it. We had some hemlocks for sale,…
In between the tour of the new Alton High School in the morning and the evening reunion event, Curt Madison and his mother Grace Madison came across the river from Portage des Sioux, Missouri, where Curt inspected a roof for his brother Paul. Curt, his wife, and Grace had come to visit us at my…
Getting Real Not so’s you notice it. or: Not so’s you know about it. That oughtta tell you someth’n. Shortcomings He doesn’t have enough energy to blow his nose. A day late and a dollar short. Not enough sense to pour p**s out of a boot. Good/Bad Out of this world! Communication •Sounds like somebody…
I’m a nut on regional accents and regional idioms and turns of phrase. My peregrinations around the globe have sharpened my ear. When I first left the USA in the 1970s, I didn’t know I talked funny. Coming home after long absence, I get a real kick out of the special way my father and…
As I settle into my new life I freely swing between my new place and my father’s place. Janet’s world and Daddy’s world. Janet’s world is tentative and emerging. Daddy’s world is in its own orbit, with its established rhythms, yet fewer rules than I’ve ever experienced before. Pop was raised on this homeplace founded…
There’s a new review of my father Erwin A. Thompson’s “Cattle Country and Back Trail: Two Tales from the Thompson Western Series” on Book Pleasures Among other comments, the reviewer Ernest Dempsey says: “Cattle Country and Back Trail is an exciting reading of the values that characterized the heroes of the not-so-remote past. Foremost, these…
Today on Riehlife I’m featuring two poems that came to me simultaneously from my father, Erwin A. Thompson, and my writing friend Arletta Dawdy. Both, curiously, sound similar chords, perhaps on different instruments, so I wanted to run them together. Artletta’s poem presents a coming of age story…a searching and a finding that goes beyond…
Erwin A. Thompson, my father, is the grandson of E. A. Riehl, who helped Sandy Freeman and his wife with the transition of moving from the bonds of slavery to the dignity of free people working for wages, bargaining for specified compensation for certain accomplishments, and becoming property owners. Pop wrote this poem after Jimmie…
In just a few days I’m making a huge move in my life and where I live. I’ll be moving from Lake County in Northern California to St. Louis, Missouri where I’ll just be an hour away from my father. Pop, 91, lives just across the river in SW Illinois, about 6 miles upriver from…