Lonny Cain

5 days ago | shawlocal.com | Lonny Cain

I had my moment. I kept telling myself that when we drove away from the hospital Sunday afternoon. I had seen the hard truth on Saturday. Sarah’s tiny frame on the hospital bed. Her face covered with a mask feeding her oxygen. She looked so young. Maybe it was the haircut her daughter had given her. No one’s hair looks good in a hospital bed, but strangely, her hair looked beautiful. Clearly, every breath was a strain. And a victory. She had told us she was going to fight the lung cancer.

1 week ago | shawlocal.com | Lonny Cain

Elburn, Illinois. Third grade. If I’m getting sentimental about libraries, I must start there, when I borrowed my first book. I have few surviving memories of grade school, most of them involving the fenced-in playground area with a pole I climbed, my friend Ray and the tree stump he carved into a small engineering project, and a neighboring house where we were pretty sure a witch lived. But I do remember one part of my classroom.

2 weeks ago | shawlocal.com | Lonny Cain

I’ve added something to my morning coffee wake-up. A daily ritual. I open up two books to kickstart my brain – and my mood. I seek inspiration to put my butt in the chair in my den and write. (Anyone who writes knows this is a daily challenge.)The first book is “A Reader’s Book of Days, True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year” by Tom Nissley. Perfect. Each page is dedicated to a calendar date. This morning, I read today’s entry for April 1.

3 weeks ago | shawlocal.com | Lonny Cain

I should have noted the day, date, location ... even the weather that day. It was a lightning moment, sparked by a few words. A simple sentence. I cannot recall all those specifics, but I remember the words, who said them, and the overwhelming feeling that washed over me. A simple sentence. And it’s the first one that came to mind last week when I scrolled into this little posting: “Human to human ...

1 month ago | shawlocal.com | Lonny Cain

Right now I’m fighting an urge to pull out some old LPs or maybe my 45s. But I will put that off for now ... so I can tell you why. The why comes from the music lesson I just finished. A quick 19 minutes that was more about adding harmony to life than learning to strum a guitar. “Songs are the soundtrack of our lives.” So began the TED talk by Scarlet Keys, a professor at Berklee College of Music.