Stan Badgett

DEAR HEART. TINY YOUNG.  She pastored the Pentecostal Holiness Church right here in Carbondale. It was a simple concrete block structure painted white with an A-frame roof. No elegance or grandeur; nothing formidable about it. Actually, it was a welcoming place with an old-fashioned black-letter sign simply announcing the “Pentecostal Holiness Church.” Made you wonder […]

He took his own life in the year 2000. I knew him for 40 years. We were climbing buddies and best friends in the ‘60s, but our bond of respect extended over a lifetime. He wasn’t that easy to know: contrarian by nature, and belligerent. He bucked the tide for the sheer pleasure of it. Sometimes he angered […]

A reasonable person is able and willing to reason. Such a person is respectful of logic, not suspicious of it, and is willing to follow the argument wherever it leads. This requires a certain amount of humility, an acknowledgment that one could be wrong. Such a person is capable of listening to the other side […]

Bob Cook told me this story years ago, so hats off to him. He was working graveyard shift in the coal mine. It was Christmas Eve. The superintendent told the crew, “Look, you guys come in and work half a shift and then you can go home.” So they came in with their minds set […]

When the curtain rises, all is hushed. The conductor lifts his arms, signals to the orchestra, and the symphony begins. He is in control of the ebb and flow of tempo, of heightened tensions and frenzied crescendos, until audience and orchestra arrive safely at the denouement. With a gentle downward undulation of his hand, the […]

Back in the ‘60s, I lived on a cramped back porch on The Hill in Boulder. Two mattresses were jammed side by side — one for my high school buddy, Milo, and one for me. At the end of the mattresses was a hotplate to cook on, and that’s all the space there was. Milo […]

Ask my students — I’m a stickler when it comes to using the word “like.” Generally, it’s prohibited in my classroom. At least when it’s meant to stand for veritably — in other words, as an intensifier. If a person wants to intensify a statement, it doesn’t help to fuzzy it up. So my poor […]

I’m a columnist, not a communist. I believe it’s a good idea to divide a sheet of paper by a vertical line, creating two columns, a device making honest comparisons possible. By this simple means, one can tally shared characteristics as well as identify where differences lie. The tally can be rough or finely calibrated, […]