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About John B. Marek
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Blog postIs your faith-based organization interested in learning more about how community agriculture outreach can enhance your mission? I am currently booking speaking engagements for the summer and early fall in which I share my experiences starting and growing a faith-based community garden that provides fresh produce for our local soup kitchen. The 30-minute program is a general introduction that includes the reasons, methods, costs, and next steps for launching a community agriculture minis
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Blog postMy new book, Such Is Life in Vacationland, is now available as a paperback or an ebook from Amazon. It is a collection of selected "Field Notes" columns and new content related to my formative years growing up on the Lake Erie coast of Ohio. The book is FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers and priced at $12 for the paperback and $6 for the ebook. A preview of the first three chapters is also available.
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Blog postOur first-ever Moravian Barn Raising was a big success! It was probably never realistic to get it finished on Saturday, so we took a more experiential approach teaching the kids some fundamentals of construction and safety. A smaller group came out later in the week and finished the primary construction. There’s still some finish work to do and it needs to be stained and roofed, but I am pretty happy with how everything ultimately turned out.
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Blog postYesterday evening, I spoke to a group of community volunteers at the Holla Center in Morven about launching a community garden. In addition to serving as the county’s economic developer, I am a certified gardening instructor and volunteer manager of the New Beginnings Moravian Garden in Huntersville. I will be helping the Morven volunteers get their project off the ground, starting with a load of compost next week.
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Blog postIt is common to see semi-trailers emblazoned with "Atlantic Packaging" chugging down U.S. 74 through Wadesboro. But I was under a misconception about these trucks until just last week. In 1994, as my wife and I were beginning to seriously consider moving to North Carolina, I acquired a list of Charlotte-area businesses from the Chamber of Commerce and sent out a couple of dozen letters along with my resume to gauge potential employment opportunities. The companies I solicited
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Blog postOn February 15, 1978, Leon Spinks shocked the sports world, beating defending heavyweight boxing champion Mohammed Ali in a nationally-televised fight. Although Ali was entering the twilight of his career and Spinks had won the gold medal at the 1976 Olympics, no one gave the young fighter much of a chance against the man considered "The Greatest." Most saw it as a warm-up fight for Ali as he prepared to take on the top-ranked contender, Ken Norton. So, it was perhaps a little surprisi
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Blog postOn Sunday, the Yale Bulldogs defeated the Princeton Tigers to win the Ivy League basketball tournament and secure their berth in the “Big Dance.” The team proudly donned their brand new Ivy League Champions T-shirts, cut down the nets and posed for media photos. There was only one teensy problem; the shirts were misprinted, badly misprinted. Instead of Yale Bulldogs, they touted the champion Yale Bulldgods. You might say it’s a little bit of an embarrassment for one of the most prestigious acade
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Blog postIf you have never heard the name Anna Delvey, congratulations. Save yourself the trouble and stop reading now. Walk the dog. Clean the house. Wash the car. Do something productive. But under no circumstances allow yourself to get caught up in the tangled knot of lies, deceit, and narcissism I am about to lay down. Until a week ago, I had no idea who Anna Delvey was or what her story was about. Then I saw the banner advertising a new series on Netflix, “Inventing Anna.” The synopsi
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Blog postFord Motor Company recently announced they are suspending orders for their Maverick (A) compact truck because they have outsold the company's capacity to manufacture them. The Maverick is an anomaly in today's pickup truck market, where bigger is better, and even bigger is even better. My "midsize" Toyota Tacoma is as large as many full-size pickups from the early 2000s. A new full-size F-150 or Silverado wouldn't have looked out of place at a monster truck show in the '70s. T
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Blog postIf you watched the "big game" on Sunday, you know that the Los Angeles Rams scored a touchdown with less than two minutes to play to earn a come-from-behind win over the Cincinnati Bengals. It was a fitting end to arguably the most exciting NFL playoffs ever. It was undoubtedly a better finish than most of the Super Bowls of my youth, which were almost always blowouts. There was a stretch of games in the '80s and '90s where the only drama was whether the absurd margin of victory would
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Blog postIn his song “Too Soon To Tell,” Todd Snyder sings, “I can still take rejection, but it does get harder to do.” Whether it’s a job interview, choosing sides for kickball, or that cute girl at the school dance, we’ve all experienced rejection, but I have to agree with Todd; it seems like it digs a little deeper and is a little more challenging as we collect miles on the odometer. I suspect that has to do with opportunity cost. As mentioned in my “Hall of Fame” column a couple of wee
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Blog postThis Monday, February 7, 2022, at 11:15 AM, John will be the featured guest on the Hampton B. Allen Library Author Talks series. He will be discussing his new book, his career as a writer, and his life in rural North Carolina. This will be an online-only event on Facebook Live.
https://www.facebook.com/hbalibrary
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Blog postAlthough I grew up a huge football fan and lived most of my early life just two hours from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, I only managed to visit it once, and that was under "unconventional" circumstances. In February of 1989, I learned that the software company where I worked was being sold to Microsoft, and within a few weeks, I would be without a job. I did what any recent college grad with lots of bills to pay would do; replied to every newspaper help wanted ad for which I was e
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Blog postI spent much of the past week on the frozen tundra of northern Indiana, attending my father-in-law’s funeral. It was a sad occasion, made all the more so by the oppressive cold, wind, and snow. Whenever I travel north at this time of year, the provocative question that always pops into my head is, why don’t humans hibernate? Hibernation is an adaptation to cold weather that many animals native to colder climates use to survive the winter. When we hear hibernation, we tend to think
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Blog postIf you have ever tried Googling my writing, you are probably aware that the term “Field Notes” is not unique to my weekly column. It is, in fact, the name of a printing company in Chicago that produces a series of pocket-size notebooks with very cool cover graphics. Although I use that company’s products, and many of these columns originate as ideas, notations, and doodles in the pages of those notebooks, that’s not where the name of my column originated. In my short story “The Bug Jar”
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Blog postLast week, the CEO of online mortgage company Better.com made headlines, and not in a good way, by firing 900 employees on a Zoom call. My initial thought was, if that’s Better.com, I’d hate to work for Worse.com, but then I reflected upon the whole idea of hiring and firing during the holidays and realized my hands aren’t entirely spotless, either. Growing up in a distinctly blue-collar household, there was always a sense my family’s fortunes were tied to the whims of management
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Blog postI read an article over the weekend that suggested the fixins for a typical Thanksgiving dinner cost 15 percent more this year than last. For most of us, that meant an additional $15 to $20 out of our packets. While that extra Jackson, in and of itself, may not be a tremendous burden on most families, those same higher food costs, when extrapolated over a year of grocery buying, represent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Coincidentally, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are a gr
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Blog postThere's a good chance that when your family gathers (or gathered, depending on when you read this) around the table this Thanksgiving, one of the dishes set in front of you will be corn. Corn is arguably the most traditional Thanksgiving food, as it is one that we are sure was served at the original Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621. But the corn that the Wampanoag shared with the Pilgrims that day was very different from what you will put on your table. Corn was cultivated by the indige
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Blog postI was surprised by the raucous crowd in the theater last night for a showing of Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The original Ghostbusters was always a perfectly okay movie to me. I liked it, didn't love it. The tone didn't resonate with me. It wasn't quite funny enough to work as a comedy, and it definitely wasn't scary enough to work as a horror film. I first realized that other people had different ideas about it as a cultural touchstone when the 2016 remake, featuring an all-female cast, wa
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Blog postYesterday, Governor Roy Cooper signed the North Carolina budget into law. This was important for every resident of the state, as we have been operating without a budget since 2018. Teachers and government employees will receive much-needed raises, the personal income tax rate will drop, and a slew of necessary infrastructure projects will finally be funded. A strong argument can be made, however, that no county benefitted more, in relative terms, from the signing of this budget than Anson.
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Blog postA couple of weeks after my wife and I moved onto our first home, an old farmhouse midway between Bowling Green and Perrysburg, Ohio, I got up, went to the kitchen, poured myself a glass of juice, and put two pieces of white bread in the toaster. As I reached to depress the lever to begin toasting, a brown object the size of my thumb scurried from under the toaster, across the counter, and out of sight behind a cabinet. Fifteen minutes later, I was standing in the mousetrap aisle of the Bowlin
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Blog postThe summer of 1977 was the summer of "Star Wars." It was everywhere, from Top-40 hits to tee-shirts to catchphrases. I saw the movie at the Clinton Theater in my hometown of Port Clinton, just after school let out in early June. Like many other impressionable youths who saw it, "Star Wars" had a profound impact on me and how I perceived science fiction. When I returned to school in the fall, one of the first things I did was ask my English teacher, Mrs. Dunham, if she could r
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Blog postThe first James Bond movie, Dr. No, appeared in theaters two weeks after I was born, but my first recollection of 007 was hearing my older brother mention the character Pussy Galore from the movie "Goldfinger" sometime around 1968 or 1969. At that age, I didn't quite understand the joke, but I got that it was pretty hilarious and a little bit naughty. I am fairly certain I saw some of "From Russia with Love" on TV in the early '70s, but the first Bond film I saw all the way t
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Blog postLate night, a week ago Sunday, I watched game three of the American League Division series. The Boston Red Sox, a team I have been a fan of since Carlton Fisk's epic homer in game 6 of the 1975 World Series, played the Tampa Bay Rays. The teams split the first two games of the five-game series, and the team winning this game would be just one win away from advancing to the league championship. The Red Sox had gone out to an early 4-2 lead, but the Rays fought back and tied the game in the 8th, a
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Blog postI use an online tool called Grammarly to help me with my writing. It checks my work for grammatical, spelling, and usage errors as I type away. It's not perfect, but it catches many of my more egregious mistakes. The other thing it does is check my work for plagiarism. It does this by comparing what I write to its index of everything else on the Internet and offering a percentage assessment of how "common" my text is. Almost anything I write will score three or four percent since all w
Titles By John B. Marek
