by Mike Gaddis | Aug 21, 2024
Never underestimate the power of suggestion, especially from a crafty old codger with a bird dog.
by Mike Gaddis | Aug 19, 2024
Had a man once who said, “The older the boy, the younger the man.” Strikes me he was right. No matter how old you are, you got to hang on to him—the boy—never let him go. Hardly back from Chile and Patagonia, languishing in a chair before the fire—even as the...
by Mike Gaddis | Aug 5, 2024
I must tell you a story. A story of old Argentina. A story older than two centuries, but as young as yesterday. A story within a story, for one would be untold without the other. A story of many things, though at its core the strength and soul of a woman. Not of Evita...
by Mike Gaddis | Jul 10, 2024
Regrets are scratches on the furniture of our lives that can never be polished away. The scars of fate that shoved aside dreams, the wounds of choices ill-chosen, the lesions of opportunities lost or dreams abandoned. Some are shallow; some are deep. Some settle...
by Mike Gaddis | Jun 22, 2024
It was the day of his birth, the genesis of his sixty-third year, and it had been a good one. It could have been celebrated anywhere in the world, as so many times before it had. But not today. Not this time. Today, it had been spent on the small streams near home,...
by Mike Gaddis | Jun 14, 2024
Gaze into the eyes of a dog. When they are deep and clear, when they pulse for the hunt like bellowed coals and the reflections in them flash like lightning with the restless lights of life on fire. And where do you find tranquility? A restoration of spirit, a calming...
by Mike Gaddis | Mar 23, 2024
Those of us who spend lifetimes hunting and fishing learn in time that skills attained wild serve very efficiently in the struggles that eventuate in tamer, but trying, environs of modern living. Attributes of stoicism, self-discipline, perseverance, determination,...
by Mike Gaddis | Feb 28, 2024
It was black dark and there was the disarming gush of the swollen, little stream, and I could only sense the rise of the earth above me. But I had done battle here before. I could feel it in my bones, as in the ghostly lines of Mary Fahl’s “Going...
by Mike Gaddis | Oct 18, 2023
As we grow old together, I’ll be there to gather the joy from every moment of their lives.
by Mike Gaddis | Aug 28, 2023
Never said nothin’ to nobody,’ folks said of Clayton Flowers. But he’d talk to me, about livin’ and even about dyin’. I’ll tell this the way Clayton Flowers told it once to me. Clayton was an old man himself then, the deeper side of...