Kids often think they are way more clever than their parents. They think they are in the right and plot ways to get their way. Yet, parents do tend to have an upper hand. Kids may get away with some of their high jinks, but more often than not, mom or dad or both will see right through the ruse.

I welcome you back to you’re listening to radio revel, Season three: Four decades. This week I’m retelling a story I told back in Season one, called The winter coat. This time around I was able to add a bit more detail of that time that I thought I had the perfect plan to foil both my parents’ and school rules, but let my surety in that plan cloud an important step in that plan.

Do you have a story about something you thought you’d get away with, but in the end got caught and punished? Do share with me for the Everyman Biography Project! Send me an email with your story and I’ll slip it onto the list for future satellite episodes.

Hope you liked The winter coat. To help you remember that there is a new episode of Four decades every Monday morning, you need only subscribe, and on the way, share with your friends. The more listeners we have the more our everyday stories will weave a history of you and I, the real Everyman.

No one expects to live through the destruction brought on by a fire. Fires just happen, well, there’s always an ignition point, bad wiring, carelessness with an ember, but something burning to the ground can mark a person. What was is reduced to ash and twisted charcoal, something may rise from that ash, but the fire that brought the ash will remain.

This is you’re listening to radio revel, Season three: Four decades. In this week’s episode, Barn burning, I’m sharing a bit of family fire karma. You may have heard in Episode three that I was pretty fascinated by flames and things burning. Now you’ll get a chance to see how even those trying to teach me about fire were just as careless.

Have you had an experience with a major fire? A home, a car, maybe just a Christmas tree you forgot to leave water for? Share your story with me and I’ll slip it into the Everyman Biography Project and maybe even in a future satellite podcast episode.

And if you enjoyed Barn burning, do listen, like, subscribe and share. I appreciate the loyalty!

Hey there!

Update episode, a quick review of the HBO series Somebody Somewhere. I think you'll like it.

And remember:

Listen, like, subscribe and share.

What kinds of games did you play with your siblings? Did you have lots of toys as a kid, or did you let your imagination run wild? How did your play area encourage your play?

You’ve tuned in (again, I hope!) to you’re listening to radio revel, Season three: Four decades. In this episode, Children’s games, I flip through the photo album of how my brother, Bob, and my sister, Kate, made up our own games and played them. We were isolated as kids, we lived in the middle of corn fields, we only had each other to spend time with. These are some of those imaginative things we did to fill long summer days, outdoors, almost totally unsupervised.

If you played make-believe or made-up games, I’d love to add them to the Everyman Biography Project, where I’m trying to collect stories from regular old folks about their lives, stories that so often get lost in the passing of time and generations. Send me an email with your story and I’ll put it on the list for a future satellite episode.

And do subscribe if you liked Children’s games, and tell your friends about our Monday morning episodes. Thanks!

Hey all. Just a quick update, stuff that didn't make it into the prerecorded episodes. It's timely!

Three blue-tipped matches. A bag of trash. A burning barrel. Everything a kid needs to ignite the fire of pyro-interest. Will he end up burning down houses?

Welcome back to you’re listening to radio revel, Season three: Four decades. In this week’s episode, Playing with fire, you get some insight into how a boy turns a weekly chore into the life-long interest in having fire at his fingertips. How a father tries to curb both the dangerous fire play and the accompanying lies and breach of trust. No one is guilty, but no one is innocent either.

Do you have a story about earning or losing or earning and losing trust from one of your parents? I’d be happy to hear it and include it in the Everyman Biography Project for future satellite episodes on the podcast. Email me your story and I’ll put it on the list!

Remember to subscribe if you liked Playing with fire. Tell your friends that every Monday morning there is a new episode ready, with those little stories that would never make headlines, but which hang out in our memory banks well into adulthood.

Grandma Pearl raised four kids on a Midwestern farm, was widowed in her late 50s and dedicated the next 30 years of her life to being a grandma. With her curly gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, pearl clip-on earrings, big black grandma pocketbook, and false dentures, she stays with me in quick snap-shots, some actual photographs, others just random memories.

Thanks for tuning in again to you’re listening to radio revel, Season three: Four decades. This week’s episode, Remembering Grandma Pearl, is a photo-album experience, that rainy afternoon that you’re sitting at your Aunt’s house and she pulls out all those thick family albums and explains pictures to you of things that were captured before you were around.

Remember that I’m collecting your stories as well, for that budding Everyman Biography Project. If you’ve got a memory, or memories of one of your grandparents you’d like to share, do drop me an email! I hope to have enough to work up a satellite episode.

And, as is currently the fashion, I ask you to subscribe and share the podcast, if you liked Remembering Grandma Pearl. Every Monday morning there’s a new episode from my own personal biography.

What do you do when you wake up in the middle of the night and find your father standing at the foot of your bed, looking down at you in silence, then delivering a cryptic message only for your ears?

Welcome back to you’re listening to radio revel, Season three: Four decades.

My mom was a believer in ghosts and saw them all the time. This week’s episode, Her father’s ghost, describes the earliest ghost story my mom told me as a kid. It would not be the last.

And, I’m collecting your stories for a yet-to-be-defined project I’m calling the Everyman Biography Project. Today, as I write this, it’s a project meant to leave memories of people who won’t ever have their biographies written, studied, held up as an example for future generations. I invite anyone interested to send a story about themselves, with the objective being making satellite episodes that share your stories with the world.

Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you liked Her father’s ghost, do subscribe and tell others. There’s a new episode every Monday morning for you to listen to.

Is your family just a little odd? Did your mom see ghosts? Did you and your siblings make up silly games? Did you do things you wish you hadn’t?

Welcome back to you’re listening to radio revel. This is Season three: Four decades.

After years of sharing these stories with my younger brother, Bob, with my mate, with strangers I’ve met, I’ve decided to take the podcast into those first four decades of my life and highlight some of the stories that have stuck in my memory. At the time these things happened, they seemed just run-of-the-mill family legends. Now that I’ve taken a look at them, though, I can see that the first forty years of my life were actually full of little adventures.

Getting older, as we all do, we begin to realize that the only repositories for these stories are ourselves. I can’t ask the generation that came before me about these stories anymore, that generation has begun to exist only in those stories. So, this season I decided to get a couple of dozen recorded so that in that distant future, when digital archeologists sift through them, this slice of a life will contribute to their understanding of who we are, who we were, beyond the biographies of remarkable men and women.

Every Monday for the next several weeks, I’ll share one of those memories, like opening the photo album on the kitchen table and telling you what’s behind those fading pictures, who that was, where this was taken, what was happening.

So, thanks for keeping up with the podcast. I hope you enjoy these stories and, if you are so inclined, that you’ll share some of the so-called mundane stories that made you who you are. These are the seeds of the Everyman Biography Project….

Menoetes, weakened by his grief on learning his part in the tragedy, lies nearly unconscious, as Tiresius enters his dreams and explains the beginning of the end of Oedipus in Thebes.

This is the last chapter. But, I’ve already got the next project bumping around in my head. So, please subscribe so you’ll know when I’m back with Season three, with the working title: Midwestern mediocracy. (Oh, I’ll probably change that, but I like how it sounds for now!). Looking forward to seeing you all then.