Remembering Tom Magliozzi

The Click of “Click and Clack” is gone.
Tom Magliozzi has passed on.
His cackling laugh and car advice
are but a memory.

Tom and his younger sibling Ray
brought color to a realm of gray.
The mundane world of car repair
became a sheer delight.

These NPR mechanics knew
that talking cars is fun when you
share stories, jokes and trivia
along with fix-it facts.

The Tappet Brothers were like kin
and every weekend we’d check in.
Like next door neighbors, Tom and Ray
were there to help us out.

We hoped both guys would always stay,
but then last week Tom moved away.
Quite sadly Clack has lost his Click
and we have lost a friend.

How the Kansas City Royals live what they believe

The Cinderella Royals
laced their cleats of glass and danced
in a ball game they’d sat out for thirty years.
And the Kansas City loyals
let their team know of their love
as they dressed them for the dance with non-stop cheers.

It’s a Royal celebration
for a team that proved they ‘could’
like that little engine chugging up the hill.
They believed they could achieve it
and then proved that their beliefs
weren’t just pipe dreams but the truth by how they played.

And that’s not just true in baseball.
It’s observable in life.
The faith we voice must be much more than words.
Beliefs espoused don’t matter
lest we practice what we preach
and provide the proof for what our fans have heard.

Recalling the Loma Prieta earthquake

Twenty-five short years ago
the Golden Gate rocked to and fro
as San Franciscans weighed their nerves
upon the Richter scale.

At 5:04 the clocks stood still
as cable cars crawled up Nob Hill,
their passengers quite unaware
of what had just transpired.

At Candlestick the wick went out.
The Bay Bridge Series was in doubt.
Whose fault it was could not be hid
and what a fault it was.

The San Andreas was to blame,
a fault whose power can’t be tamed.
A fault whose shadow lingers still
and will not go away.

The Big One’s waiting in the wings.
The day will come when sorrow sings
a mournful dirge in light of what
lies flattened on the ground.

Being stalked by the beast known as Ebola

Emerging out of Africa
a deadly plague has grown.
It’s a monster that’s now threatening the world.
Ebola’s killing thousands,
heartlessly destroying hope
in the lives of men and women, boys and girls.

And because of Thomas Duncan,
we can’t simply shrug it off
as a tragic epidemic “over there.”
This grim monster is among us
breathing fire and belching smoke
and we’d best not just ignore it but prepare.

As Ebola stalks our nation
taking hostages at will,
we must dig in and courageously take aim.
What it takes to slay this dragon
are precaution, meds and prayer.
On our knees we’ll find the means to douse its flame.