Scott Douglas Vaughan

Mr. Jingles is no more. Perhaps you follow me on Facebook and saw a post back in the winter about Mr. Jingles. One cool night - cause South Carolina nights never get cold - Vicki and I were enjoying dinner with Alex Trebek, hoping we could get smarter by watching Jeopardy.  Vicki gasped out loud, and I immediately looked at the television, thinking perhaps someone had answered a bizarre statement like, "Burt Reynolds was considered for this major movie role until the headliner refused to let him have it." Who is Michael Corleone in The Godfather? But Vicki was not gasping at the television. She was gasping at a brave little house mouse that ran back and forth across our family room floor before stopping in the middle of it. "It's Mr. Jingles!" I said out loud, remembering the name of the indestructible mouse from the movie, The Green Mile. "It's a mouse!" Vicki said, having never seen The Green Mile. Just like that, Mr. Jingles did a little jump an...

Take a look at the desk that is pictured here. It's a corner-style desk, largely made of simple metal tubes with some small wooden pieces and two very heavy pieces of thick, dark glass. Several years ago, I paid more than $200 for this desk. It has served me well. It's time for an upgrade. I offered this corner desk to several people, including my Vicki, and no one wanted it.  "I'm glad you liked it," Vicki said with some sarcasm mixed in there. What she meant was, 'I would never have bought that thing cause there are no drawers for storage. You really just bought a collection of metal tubing and two big slabs of glass.'   At least that's what I heard when she said, "I'm glad you liked it." With no takers - not even a bunch of Baptist preachers, who in my experience will grab anything free or maybe that's just food - I decided to take the desk to the local collection and recycling center. Don't get excited about that title - our c...

All who know me know that I love the church. Still, Vicki and I did not take our boys to Christmas Eve services. The Brotherhood - Once Upon A Time Here's why: The idea behind a Christmas Eve service is worship, right? At the time, our church did not offer childcare for smaller children, which meant - for us - four very excited little boys prevented everyone within a 50-foot radius from experiencing worship. We may have been agents of the devil. For an hour, Vicki and I experienced whispering, standing up and sitting down, pleas for the bathroom, and goofy excitement. At one point, Richard began crawling underneath the pew. William joined him. They wrestled. I left the Christmas Eve service mad at my boys, and that was a crappy attitude to have on Christmas Eve. So, we replaced Christmas Eve services with Hollywood. We went to the movies. Then we came home and made Philly Cheesesteaks, watched some Rankin-Bass Christmas cartoons, and everyone went to bed happy and with ...

If this were our last Christmas - and it could be. We would not care about gifts received. We would not make wish lists nor encourage others to do so. We would make a list of the people we love, and think of one thing to give each person - one thing that would forever remind them of our love for them. We would give ourselves - our treasures - away. Nothing would be "too much trouble." We would turn off mobile telephones, televisions, and computers. We would send Christmas cards. We would get out and about, we would go to parties, we would be the Christmas cheer in the middle of the chaos. We would jump at the chance to laugh with others rather than sit alone, comfortably, in the same old chair and in the same old room doing the same old things. We would be hospitable because the Bible tells us that we must. We must open the doors of our homes and invite people inside to laugh and love and sing and play games and tell stories. And, if invited to embrace someone else...

The Tika Namus and Big Boys have won 7 titles each In the fall of 1984, before there was the internet, online sports leagues, and when ESPN was only five years old, I joined my first fantasy football league among the newsroom brotherhood of The Statesboro Herald, in Statesboro, GA. Labor Day weekend, we gathered at Joel Ganger's house, paid a $20 entry fee and then in a snake draft, we chose teams among NFL players. Each team had a quarterback, a running back, two wide receivers, and a kicker. A schedule was built so that we each played one another several times. At the end of the weekend's games, you got the points that your offensive players scored and the tally was your team's score. You could change any player on your roster week-to-week, but it cost you $2 per move. Active players carried over year-to-year - just like real life. We followed the players through the newspaper box scores. The sports editor - a guy named Steve (I think) - was the commissioner and...

The Babe Ruth book that sparked a frenzy. For as long as I can remember, I have loved reading. It's out of that love, that my love for creative writing was born. In fact, I'll be just honest with you, I don't think you can be a good writer unless you are first a reader. You have to be in love with words. I don't have the great vocabulary of my friends Ed "Wordman" Lorenz or Chuck Toney, but I like to think all those years in the newspaper business taught me how to write so people can understand and enjoy what I put on paper. Let's get in the way-back machine. Let's go back to Mrs. Edith Wright's second-grade class at Cumming (GA) Elementary School on Elm Street, in Cumming. Like every other child in that class, I learned to read in first grade. (My teacher was Miss Johnson and she curiously disappeared from the face of the Earth after that one year. The born-from-hell heathen Van Piper was clearly too much for her.) Mrs. Wright introdu...

Me and Vicki Saturday, Aug. 16, 1986 Wedding Anniversaries are important. Don't take them lightly. Vicki and I celebrate our 32nd Anniversary this week on Thursday, Aug. 16. There's nothing particularly significant about No. 32, but we will still press the pause button of our lives and spend a couple of days together. Vicki is adamant that we celebrate our anniversary on Aug. 16 each year - our actual Wedding date. It doesn't matter if it's a Tuesday or a Wednesday or a Thursday. We celebrate the day - we even celebrate the time on the day (the service began at 7:30 p.m.). Here's why Wedding Anniversaries (even No. 32) are important and deserving of recognition. 1. There's something supernatural at work. For Jesus followers, like Vicki and me, marriage goes all the way back to the beginning of time. It was breathed into existence by God, who saw that man needed a partner (woman) and created her. This partner wasn't to walk in front of or behind ...