Doug Crandell
Doug Crandell does not play pickle-ball and manages to get poison ivy every summer. He doesn’t eat collard greens but does enjoy poached organic pears with a bit of blue cheese. He lives in Georgia.
Brother, Electric
He grabs my hand, and static electricity snaps between us, as though he is coursing with energy. He blows his hot breath on my frozen fingertips and tells me it’ll be OK.
August 2025A Knife at the Throat
We had never heard of a kid who had cancer. We knew of teenagers who’d been killed in farming accidents and at least a few who had been maimed riding ATVs with no helmets, their skulls coming into contact with country roads. But not cancer. It seemed like something that happened to aunts and uncles. Combined with the lack of rain and the impending foreclosure, 1983 was beginning to feel apocalyptic.
July 2024His Body Of Work
I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.
December 2023The Union Waltz
After work we would be headed to Smitty’s Bar, where the twangy music would kick up, and I’d try to find the courage to dance in public.
March 2021Show Day
The Crandells participated in 4-H the way we did everything: bargain hunting, doing odd jobs, and keeping costs and desires to a minimum.
June 2019Fever
I lie on the couch in the living room and feel a deep sense of shame, because I’ve increased our debt by getting sick.
November 2018What Little She Had
It is one thing to be bad with money when you have it, and quite another to be bad with it when you don’t. My mother gave away what little she had, mostly because she had been taught that every poor person she met was the Lord in disguise, testing her love.
October 2018The Twelve-Hour Shift
I was home on fall break in my final year at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and I needed money to pay tuition, so I was working a twelve-hour shift with my father at the ceiling-tile factory.
November 2017Activities Of Daily Living
I stood inside the entrance of Central State Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana, waiting to get patted down. It was my first visit to the institution, in 1992. I was twenty-four and had been working in the field of disability and mental health for two years.
November 2016Winter Wheat
That fall my brothers and I would be sowing the fields on our own for the first time. Dad was working extra shifts at the ceiling-tile factory with the threat of layoffs ever present. One night he sat us down and said, “Wheat’ll be yours to get in the ground. Work together.” That was it.
January 2015
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