Talking 'Walking Dead' With Artist Tony Moore, aka 'Count Dorkula'

When you see the name Tony Moore roll by in the credits for "The Walking Dead" on AMC this Sunday night (and you know you want to watch zombies on Halloween!), that below-ground rumbling you'll hear is his granddaddy - my father - doing handstands in the grave. Tony, a kick-butt artist, co-created "The Walking Dead" with writer Robert Kirkman when they were in their early 20s and just a few years and much blood and guts later, the zombies they brought to the pages of comics is a big old cable show directed by Frank Darabon t("The Shawshank Redemption") and co-produced by Gale Hurd of "Terminator" fame. Yeah, deal with it, I'm bragging 'cause that's what childless-by-choice aunts do to bore everyone who ever tortured them with pictures of their kids playing T-ball or princess.

Some background now that you're mired in this edition of Britt's Kentucky Roots: Tony, who lives in Aurora, Ind. (near Cincinnati, Ohio), with his wife and baby, is the oldest son of my older sister, Linda. He was born in Lexington, Ky., and raised in Cynthiana, Ky. - for fans of the original "Walking Dead" story, that's where Rick Grimes, the show's lead character, was a police officer before zombies ensued. Anyhoo, Cynthiana didn't make it into the AMC show - Rick's now from a small town outside Atlanta. But while I'm sorry about that because I wrote a book about Cynthiana last year and the shameless self-promoter in me wanted "Dead" fans to be so enamored of the place they'd pay $20 to read a book that has nothing to do with the undead, I'm thrilled for my nephew, who was sculpting inch-high clay Draculas when other kids were drawing crap even their parents wouldn't hang on a frig.

Speaking of parents: Pipe down, Daddy. We get it.

Still with me? I talked with Tony just before he flew to L.A. for the premiere of "The Walking Dead." Dig it:



You've seen the first couple of episodes. How true are they to your original vision for the comic - anything you particularly loved, hated or could have done without?
It's pretty uncanny how true to the comics the first couple of episodes are, especially visually. There are a few new characters and a couple of deeper explorations of situations that veer off the comics' path a bit, but overall, it's really close. Fans who are intimately familiar with the book are going to find all the things they loved and were looking for, but there will be enough new things twisting and turning in the mix that they'll still be thoroughly engaged. There were a few exchanges and musical bits I wasn't in love with, but overall, I thought it was really, really strong. A worthy addition to the other great programs on AMC, to say the least. The zombie effects are by Greg Nicotero and KNB EFX, who are the name of the game when it comes to this stuff. On that front, it's got some top-notch movie quality stuff going on, and doesn't shy away from anything ... and I mean anything.


Along those lines, what about the casting? Good stuff?
Yeah, I was really surprised. Both visually and acting-wise, these guys do a great job bringing the characters to life. A few of the guys look like they walked right off my drafting table. It's really pretty surreal.

You and Robert Kirkman teamed up as friends in junior high. Tell us a little about your early projects together, how "The Walking Dead" came to life and what you expected from it.
Yeah, Kirkman and I met in seventh-grade history class, and being the biggest two comics nerds and budding artists in our class, we hit it off pretty quickly. Fast forward to my freshman year of college, and we were collaborating on our first self-published venture, "Battle Pope," which we put out through our own company, Funk-O-Tron. From there, we climbed on board with Image to do a book called "Brit," which we followed with "The Walking Dead." Honestly, after years of flying under the radar, I expected more of the same. At the time, horror was a genre pretty much proven to be commercially nonviable. A few books were starting to pry that door open, and Hollywood was about to burst with a deluge of zombie flicks. We were really lucky, in the right place at the right time. I couldn't believe how it caught like wildfire. Probably couldn't do it again if we tried ... which we both have.


So this is what came from it: a show on AMC, with your name in the credits. Damn. Has to feel good.
Oh, you better believe it. I got goosebumps seeing it.

Are these characters still important to you?
The ones from the first few issues of the books, I am definitely still partial to. Any time you bring a character to life on a page for the first time, they kind of become your babies, even the marginal ones.

What the heck is it about zombies? Why do people care so much about those flesh-feastin', noggin-noshin' creatures?
I don't know, exactly, but I think part of it is because they're so completely unromantic. You can't really "sex up" a zombie. I mean Trash from "Return of the Living Dead," and Julie from "Return of the Living Dead III" managed to be pretty crush-worthy, but overall, when you turn, you don't get mystical powers or anything like werewolves or vampires, you just become a shambling, mindless, rotting, eating machine. And even if you survive their attacks and die from old age, you'll still get up and join their ranks when you go. And like birds, they're not so scary one at a time, but in a swarm, they can be pretty terrifying. The movies tend to showcase some great themes, too, most notably, Survivalism, Man's Inhumanity Toward Man, and Runaway Consumerism. You can couch a really poignant story in these horrible and gory situations, which is doubly fun.

Are you familiar with the song "Timothy," the first pop hit about cannibals? Joe and the singer ate Timothy, right?
I don't know that song. I'll have to look it up. Do you know why cannibals hate clowns? Because they taste funny.

Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is the father-in-law of Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick Grimes, and was on the "Walking Dead" set. "Bungle in the Jungle" is on my Top 10 list of Worst Songs Ever. Just thought I'd throw that in, in case you're ever hanging with Mr. Anderson and need an ice-breaker.
It is a real stinker, for sure. On my Top 10 Worst as well. That'd make a fine how-do-you-do, wouldn't it? Then he'd unsheath his flute and kabong me like Quick Draw McGraw.

Your favorite all-time zombie stories, in literature and film?
I haven't read much zombie stuff outside of comics, so I couldn't say. I love those old EC Comics spurned lover/crossed business partner stories. They always involve a murder and a haunting return of the victim to exact their revenge. There's a comfort in the formula, and the EC art stable was always filled with top notch guys. Modern comics, I enjoy the lighthearted stuff Eric Powell does in "The Goon," and Bob Fingerman's been doing some great stuff, from "Zombie World: Winter's Dregs" to "Recess Pieces."

As for movies, there are a lot of gems, but I'd say my favorites are Romero's original dead trilogy ("Night of the Living Dead," " Dawn of the Dead," and "Day of the Dead") and Lucio Fulci's "Zombie." Nowadays, I think the bar has been set by "Shaun of the Dead." It seems every new flick since claims it's the next "Shaun," but in my opinion, they've all fallen shy of the mark. It's a perfectly well-informed spoof but somehow also manages to be a really great zombie movie in the process.


Did you love Halloween as a kid? What was your favorite costume?
I live for Halloween. I always have. I was really partial to my Dracula getup as a kid. I think I must've done that one for at least five years in a row. I thought I was a regular Bela Lugosi. Looking back, my white high-tops made me look more like Count Dorkula, especially when I was running around wearing a Dracula cape in the middle of spring.

Would you let your little girl hang out with little boys who were like you were at, say, 12?
Sure! I was a good kid! Now when she gets to like 13 or 14, I'm going to lock her in her room like Rapunzel. Our life will become that song, "Wolverton Mountain."

If you'll be watching "The Walking Dead" live, pun intended, on Halloween this year, what will you be wearing?
My wife and I will be Seigfried and Roy, and the baby will be in a white tiger costume. I, of course, will be the mangled Roy.

What are you working on now when you're not being adored by the zombie-loving undead masses?
Well, I just finished a fun run on "Punisher," where we turned the vigilante into a stitched-up monster we titled FrankenCastle, which is a play on his name, Frank Castle. We got to romp around through Marvel's rich monster history, from Jack Kirby's pre-Marvel creations, to the gonzo horror of the '70s by guys like Steve Gerber and Marv Wolfman. Also, I'm working on the final bits of the sci-fi series "Fear Agent," which I co-created several years ago with my frequent partner in crime, Rick Remender. It's a genre-bending space opera about an alcoholic ex-hero, playing off the great campy aesthetics of '50s sci-fi from EC Comics and stuff like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. We really focus on ridiculous alien adventure over hard science hows and whys, which is a lot of fun for us. I'll be sad to see it go.

What's the first thing you want to buy with your "The Walking Dead" money?
Mmmm, maybe an AR-15 to play with, or a hot tub for the house? I'm assuming you mean purely celebratory purchases, because nobody wants to hear about mortgage payments, baby clothes, and back taxes. In actuality, it'll probably be an old beater of a pickup truck. We need a good utility vehicle/ second car around here.

Is Britt Kennerly just about the best aunt a creepy little artist boy ever had?
She's all right, I guess. I definitely could do worse.

NEWS FLASH: 'Timothy' Still Missing, but Chilean Miner Confirms No Cannibalism In His Neck of the Woods!

Now that those buried miners are all safely out of that hole in Chile and their "pact of silence" is starting to crack and I feel froggy enough to poke fun at them because Miner No. 2 brought up cannibalism first in an interview with the Daily Mail, let's jump into the Wayback Machine and dig into "that" song ... you know ... 1971's "Timothy," by the Buoys, the only catchy song - perhaps the ONLY song - about cannibalism that ever charted.

It was written by Rupert Holmes, who had previously co-written and sang a ditty called "Jennifer Tomkins," about a you-know-what-outta-luck girl who was born on a Sunday and her daddy left on Monday and her mother died when Jenny was 7 and Jenny went to work at 11. Later, Holmes penned and warbled "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)," a dirty-dog deed for which he should have been shredded by marauding piranhas.

ANYhoo, I remember sitting in my bedroom on my purple velvet bedspread as an angst-addled teen, this tune about three trapped miners blaring through a poorly wired earphone as I scrawled lyrics in my notebook - yes, decades before I could just Google "Timothy, lyrics." Later, I shouted to my befuddled grandmother:

" ... Hungry as hell no food to eat
And Joe said that he would sell his soul
For just a piece of meat
Water enough to drink for two
And Joe said to me, "I'll take a swig
And then there's some for you."

Then, or at least the way I heard it and sang it just to see the fear on my grandma's face, Joe started looking at Timothy like he was the last Lit'l Smokie at a frat party.

And though we're never given a clue as to whether this tasty trio was down in that mine for two days or six months, everything went all downhill and Donner Party in a hurry from there. I don't want to give the story away if you've never heard or don't remember "Timothy," but the grammatically challenged singer, who woke up with a full stomach shouting, "God, why don't I know?" while nobody ever got around to finding Timothy, was lying through his muscle-masticatin', Timothy-tendon-tearin', flossin'-with-femurs teeth.

Jennifer Tomkins, if you care, grew up to be quite a lady, but then she met Tony, whose background was shady. As for the "Pina Colada" guy, he pissed me off from the start by comparing his boredom with his "lady" to "a worn-out recording of a favorite song" and then taking out a personal ad, only to get stuck with that lady again and finding out they didn't know a damn thing about each other before, but now, over pina coladas, it's all gonna be OK.

Yeah. Bet that's what Joe told Timothy, too.

Shootin' the breeze

Air conditioning was invented in 1911 by a very hot man named Willis Carrier. My parents didn't tell us kids about that invention as we grew up, probably because they knew we'd demand a piece of Mr. Carrier's action.

And they continued to let us think air came only from windows when they built a new house in 1966, 55 years after Mr. Carrier decided enough was enough and by all that was good and holy, he would sweat no longer.

It was a four-bedroom house, inhabited by six sweaty people who, by the end of a sultry Kentucky summer, could not speak to each other without screaming, at the end of most every sentence, "I'm SORRY! But I'm so HOT!"

We didn't perspire. That's what rich people do, right before they take off for cooler climes, "climes" being a word I didn't learn until my teens because I was busy trying to make friends whose parents would pop for air conditioning. Perspire? That's what quasi-athletic people do, the kind of people who pay money to go to saunas and come out saying, "Wow. I really worked up a sweat."

No, on White Oak Pike we leaked like sieves. We poured. Sweat rolled off us by the bucketload in that house of heat-induced horrors, pooling in our undies as we sat around the TV or played Scrabble, swilling 16-ounce Cokes from glass bottles.

The only relief was in the basement, where one could breathe, if one didn't mind sleeping on a couch that mildewed years before Willis Carrier invented cold air and his siblings all became hookers in hotels where one could pay to be fanned.

We children didn't know about such high-falutin' stuff as the heat index. We just knew we were stinkin' hot, and that when you sit on a vinyl chair when you're that hot, the backs of your sweaty little legs make great, rude sounds.

At bedtime, it got worse. It got ugly. It got me to thinking, when I was about 11, that my parents couldn't possibly be my parents because no one who gave birth to a such a good little girl could sit back and sing "Cry Me a River" while that little girl's head melted.

Anyhoo, because they owned the joint, I guess, my mom and dad got the best breeze in the house, from an appliance fan which blasted out frigid air. My grandma and brother got mildly effective box fans for their rooms. My sister and I got a rattly, rusty-bladed old fan attached to a shaky pole, one I'm pretty sure Willis Carrier used to impale his parents when they tossed him a funeral-home fan and told him to get over it.

"I'm dying in here," I'd call out, night after night. "Seriously. This time I mean it. I'm a goner. Goodbye."

"Don't die until morning," shouted my mother, who in my head was eating truffles and wearing flannel jammies because it was 47 degrees in her room. "And make up the bed first."

"If she's dead, I want her fan," my brother yelled.

"ZZZZZZ," my father answered from beneath his ice-encrusted blankets. "ZZZZZZ."

My grandmother, too, snoozed on. She was born before Willis Carrier invented air conditioning. What did that old woman care?

Since leaving my old Kentucky home faster than you can say "Arrid Extra Dry for me, please," I have lived in several houses, most of which had air conditioning. I live in Florida now, enjoying ocean breezes and eating hot food, without crying, in the comfort of my dining room. I also lived for several years in Phoenix, where we were hot, but where the humidity is low and even dog houses have air conditioning.

Once, I called a real estate agent about an interesting ad.

"Does it have air conditioning?" I asked.

"No, it doesn't," she said. "But it has lots of windows."

"Will I have to share the fan with my sister?" I asked.

Years after we kids moved out of the family home and my parents weren't saddled with comic book and dentist and new-shoe bills, the folks had central air installed.

And 40 years after I threw my sister across the room for hogging the best dusty gusts from our fan, my mother is still trying to make up to us for our scorching childhood.

When I visit, if it's warmer than 70 degrees, she turns the air down to arctic.

The house isn't quite the same, without the sound of rattling fans and my father's ZZZZZs and my brother's rude-leg noises on vinyl chairs.

Yet, it's comforting to go home.

And, like always, my mother can't sleep without calling out from her room.

"Are you cold enough?" she asks. "Are you OK?"

"I can't feel my face," I answer, fumbling for a blanket and wondering what it will be like in the great and cool beyond, where I plan to kiss Mr. Willis Carrier full on the lips.

"I can't feel my legs. I'm a goner. Goodbye."

Family, Yamily

I don't like yams. Never did. To my way of thinking, if you have to cover something with marshmallows to get people to ooh and aah over them once a year, something other than the pork isn't kosher. But come Thanksgiving, you gotta drag out those orange mutants, daub brown sugar on them and choke 'em down.

My dad could cook them just right -- boil them till the skin sorta slid off, then dress 'em up with brown sugar uand Kraft mini-mallows and slap them on the table. Thanksgiving of 1994, he gave me his yam secrets over the phone from Kentucky.

"Can't cook yams? What the hell's wrong with you?" he asked, before 10 minutes of tater talk. I boiled those babies and served them to my mother-in-law, a yam-snarfer from way back. That night, my dad called me in Arizona and said, "We do, too," when I said, "I love you." He asked about the yams. I told him I still hated those suckers.

A week before Christmas that year, he passed away. God, my daddy would never have died just before a holiday if he could have helped it. What the hell do I do when the brown sugar burns? Why the hell did I cry as I searched three stores for mini-marshmallows? Was my father a star in the sky above the interstate in Phoenix that night, shining on my Tercel and howling over my kitchen incompetence? Daddy, yams, racks full of big, jet-puffed pillows -- so many questions. Never, it turned out, enough time to ask all of them.

In The Sweet By and By, Bring Squirting Sunflowers

In a family, if we're lucky, everyone has at least one special role for which they're appreciated. I am my family's trivia master and clown, the one who points out the dark and light humor in most every situation and knows classic TV families' histories as well she knows her own. My younger brother, Mike, does free brake jobs on family members' cars and, now that our dad's dead, provides punishable-by-law, tasteless jokes at family functions.

My older sister, Linda, gave our parents their first grandchildren, saving me scads of money and, perhaps, a long stint in a padded room. And years ago, Linda took on the job of helping our mother place floral tributes in our family's cemetery plots on Decoration Day – funny, since it turns out she's the sibling most freaked about dying. It's not because she's oldest and likely to go first, I tell her, but because she's worried that once she's pushing up daisies, I'll place huge plastic sunflowers that squirt Pinot Grigio on her grave and shame her in front of generations of Harney teetotalers. I like the God's-gonna-get-ya look on her face when I tell her that, and the no-cremation speech I get when I tell her she'll have to find my poor little ashes before she can fling flowers at them.

Anyhoo, decorating 30 graves – those of her husband, our cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and our father – is not a job Linda takes lightly, though, unlike our maternal grandma, she does not start worrying about tributes for the deceased members of our family around Valentine's Day.

“Helen, do we have all the flowers yet?” Grandma asked our mother several times a week in the days leading up to Decoration Day. “Yes,” my mother replied, running from the room before Grandma, whose caterwauling version of “In the Sweet By and By” was neither sweet nor gone bye-bye soon enough, started “singing” and whipping out her list of whose grave needed what. I cannot imagine that happening to my sister, because she does not sing and as far as I can tell, has never made a list in her life.



But today, as Linda and our mother traveled from one country cemetery to another, it hit me: My sister fills one of the most important roles in any family - that of the person who walks the walk when it comes to a sense of family responsibility. No matter where she is a week before Decoration Day, Linda always finds her way to those dusty back roads and easily overlooked cemeteries to make sure those who've “gone home” are not forgotten, calling me from the truck to tell me where she is and how everything looks.

While I make jokes about how only our father would want a flying fish on his tombstone, to complement our mother's praying hands, Linda's there at Daddy's side, worrying about whether she and my mom “got to everyone” this year. I hope that when she and all those Harneys and Moores and assorted relatives meet on that beautiful shore – where Grandma's still screeching, I bet – they shower her with more roses than Secretariat got on Derby Day. She'll deserve that, at the very least, after my squirting-sunflower sendoff.

No, I Will Not Take $1 For That, You Dickering Dolt

You were not at my yard sale last week. I watched for you, knowing you would want the things I have culled from my life, things that in some cases, I can't remember buying, needing, wanting or ever seeing. So today, I wound up carting the whole mess to a thrift store in need of donations. I am pretty sure I heard one worker snickering as one of his colleagues asked if I needed a receipt for my taxes. Right, mister. A woman in a 9-year-old Hyundai who's snatching one of the T-shirts from her donation as she hands it to you really needs a receipt for her taxes.

I am reminded of yard sales past in this piece:

I envisioned getting up early that Saturday morning, trucking my junk out to the yard and chatting with pleasant people who would scoop up my unwanted treasures and force money on me.

The way it turned out, it was Saturday. I did get up early. And except for a woman who muttered, "Whaddya got?" and dropped cigarette ashes on her chest as she pawed through freshly washed clothes, most of the people who stopped by were pleasant.

But the next time I say I want to have a yard sale, I hope someone binds me, gags me and stuffs me in a closet along with everything I didn't sell, including a perfectly good Bald-Headed Man Halloween disguise.

That's because in only four hours, I learned that many people should never go out in public, hagglers make me very tired -- and that in my case, anyway, one person's trash is often not only not a treasure, it's really and truly trash.

Sold by the yard

Planning a yard sale is fairly easy. Decide what's junk. Clean it. Place an ad, put price tags on stuff that is now not junk but eclectic collectibles and, after you can't sleep because you have to get up early, get up exhausted and drag everything outside.

Actually staging the event, and watching avid yard-salers, is a sociological hoedown, one that makes me want to lock 10 people with $4 each in a room full of used tools, furniture and mismatched dishes -- just to see what wackiness ensues.

At my sale, I had customers who offered $20 bills for 50-cent purchases. Dickerers (my daddy taught me that word. Isn't it great?) who wanted to haggle over $1 vintage platform shoes. A man, obviously a used-furniture dealer, who swooped in, tried to dicker (but I wouldn't), bought chairs and swooped out. People who live down the street and now, sadly, know way too much about my belongings and feel sorry for me.

Don't forget the looky-loos. I, for one, tend to take it personally when folks -- who, face it, are spending Saturday morning looking at other people's crap -- pull up to the curb in their cars, roll down the window, look at my things with a critical eye and drive off laughing.

And for the record, I hate everyone who showed up more than an hour before my sale was set to start and shot me dirty looks when I said, "You're out early today, aren't you?" How would you like it if you had a store in your house and I showed up two hours before opening time -- about the time you dragged your behind out of bed --and banged on your front door, yelling, "Are you almost ready?" as you put your pants on?

Stop, thief!

I was arranging things in the yard when my first time-challenged customer, a sweet-faced, elderly con artist, arrived in a late-model truck.

Granny wanted to dicker over a $3 decorative bowl. I am not ready to deal at 6:45 a.m. -- especially when I haven't finished my cappuccino and the dickerer is driving a vehicle nicer than mine. I agreed to take $2 because she was old and I am unflaggingly polite to a woman who might die on my porch, her head striking the $2 bird cage just before she expires on a moldy "Family Feud" game.

I turned my back for 10 seconds to get my money box, only to return and see the penny-pinchin' pilferer climbing into her truck, bowl in hand. I got my cash, though I felt a little guilty about shouting "HEY! DID YOU FORGET TO PAY ME?" at the top of my lungs as Clara the Klepto tried to make her getaway. Overall, the sale was a stinker. A dud. I've had better luck selling aluminum cans. But at least by the time the last gawkers turned up their noses at my eclectic pile o'junk, I had $103 in my cash box, a few less mounds of clothes in my closet -- and a message for my sticky-fingered pal:

You've got my bowl. I've got your license plate number. And next time, Granny, we're gonna rumble.

Ten years ago, I wrote the following column for my then-67-year-old mom on Mother's Day. This morning, as most every day, we had a chat that ran the gamut from what's wrong with Republicans (we still haven't figured that one out) to why my garden won't grow to what we're reading and how big the rock she grew up under had to be to house her whole family. She loves David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, a good book, euchre, the outdoors, tearjerker movies and flowers. She doesn’t like whiners, indoor dogs, beer, the F-bomb or eye shadow. I have never called her "Helen." At 77, she tells me, it would be weird if I called her anything but "Mommy." "That's my name," she says with a smile. "Don't wear it out."


She makes the world's best chili and blackberry jam, encourages me to speak my mind and is the only person I know whose laughter really peals.

She taught me how to tell time, tie my shoes, use right-handed scissors on my left hand and later, how to change the oil in a 1969 Falcon.

She could work all day in a factory, come home, take a bath and entertain my friends and me as if she were a cross between Donna Reed and Paul Bunyan -- all before heading to the field to farm tobacco with my father.

I am not sure when I realized my mother was a flesh-and-blood woman, who along the way maybe had a dream or two that didn't involve her kids or husband, or her mother, who lived with us for 23 years.

To hear her tell it, you see, we children, and the grandchildren, are her dreams come true.

And I believe her, when I go home, and she runs out the door to stumble over her three crazy dogs and greet me with what I call the Mommy Smile. We hug. She swears she'll get rid of all of us one day. She doesn't, because she's, well, Mommy.

Life lessons

Before she became Mommy, my mother was a varsity cheerleader and valedictorian of the Class of 1950 at Renaker High School. In her senior photo, Helen -- that was her name then -- is a stunner with wavy brown hair and cheerful eyes. She is smiling, as she always does in my mind.

Instead of going to college, she married my father and had three children, with yours truly in the middle.



When I was 4, my brother was a blob in a bassinet, and my sister, five years my senior, was at school five days a week. So my mother, then 28, and I exercised to Jack LaLanne's TV show, read stories and had tea parties. And every day, not long after my sister got on the bus, I'd demand to play school.

Every hour or so, I'd ask my mom what Linda would be doing at that moment, and we'd do the same: Math. Spelling. Recess. "She's having a snack," my mom would say once a day.

I would carefully divide my candy into two pieces and ask my mother to put Linda's share in the refrigerator. She told me not to expect Linda to save half of her candy for me.

I am sitting here right now with a frosted honey bun. I am not saving any of it for anyone. My mother taught me well.

Friends forever

I'm not sure when my mother became my friend, because I can't remember when she wasn't.


Perhaps it was when we were baking cookies, and, so the story goes, I looked up and said, "You're a good mommy."

Perhaps it was when I was a 17-year-old senior, and she dropped me off on her way to work each day so that I could be on a school TV program. On special days, we stopped at a grocery store for breakfast and shared warm baked goods in the front seat of her station wagon, laughing at each other as we wiped cinnamon sugar off our chins and envisioned what might happen in the future. Perhaps it's then that we forged a bond that didn't shatter on the rare occasions that my actions broke her heart and my words cut it to ribbons.

Or, maybe it was when I watched her care for her mother as Grandma was dying.

Perhaps it doesn't matter, because when we do our best, it's not necessary, Mommy always tells me, to worry about things we cannot change.

And I believe her, when she comes running out of the house, smiling that Mommy Smile and swearing she'll get rid of everything and move to Florida.

Because we have no regrets.

And no time to worry about such nonsense anyway.

We Become Whole When Forgiveness Replaces Rage

I covered the Timothy McVeigh execution from the yard of the penitentiary the night before and morning of his execution. On April 19, the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, I listened to coverage of his crimes -- the aftermath of the tragedy for victims' families and friends and for a city plunged into grief on that spring day. I cried for victims and their parents, some of whom I've interviewed. I cried for victims of senseless murders, senseless wars and their families around the world. I wrote this piece a couple of months after Tim McVeigh's execution, back in 2001. And, yes. I still cry every time I think of Bill McVeigh, a decent man who, wherever we stand on the death penalty, lost his son, too.


It was hard to think about Bill McVeigh on the day his son was executed.

It was excruciating to think about the Oklahoma City bomber's father over Father's Day weekend.

I hope he chose, as he did the day of his son's execution, to make it a quiet day with friends or family, perhaps working in the garden he reportedly takes pride in, away from the glare of media and an unforgiving world.



And I hope at some point he can begin to understand those who supported his son's death and those who didn't, those who lined up to hawk memorabilia carrying his son's name and those who claim they have no feelings one way or another on capital punishment.

A sign carried by a man across the road from the penitentiary the day before McVeigh died read, "Pray for Tim's dad on Father's Day. God forgive all of us."

God, I hope Bill McVeigh can do the same.

It must have been something in McVeigh's upbringing that caused him to snap, some said, those who had not met the older or younger McVeigh but are quick to spout junior-grade psychobabble.

Dirty for dirty, some said. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life and if we just tortured prisoners, as one pro-death penalty supporter proclaimed in Terre Haute, everything would be better.

But for all the inhumanity that surfaced from outsiders in the months and weeks and hours and moments before the first federal execution since 1963, glimmers of hope shone through, from those who have every right to rage at the world.

Bill McVeigh, father of perhaps the most-hated man on American soil, and Bud Welch, whose only daughter, Julie, died in the April 1995 blast orchestrated by Bill McVeigh's only son, continue to stay in touch, brought together by the most ungodly circumstances.

At their initial meeting, at Bill McVeigh's home, Bud Welch commented on how nice-looking Timothy McVeigh was in a photo displayed by the elder McVeigh.

Grace, in the midst of heartbreak. Forgiveness, in the face of unspeakable tragedy. Two fathers bound forever by the tragic intersection of their children's lives and now, even tighter by their children's deaths.

Or consider the story of Douglas Sloan, whom I met in the wee hours of Timothy McVeigh's execution day.

The Terre Haute man's son, Chad, was murdered on Jan. 22, 1997. Chad's hands were bound, and then he suffered 26 knife slashes and stab wounds, including seven stab wounds in the heart.

His murderers, Frank Dennis and Curtis Holsinger, are incarcerated at Michigan City -- both for life, without parole.

As he considers the fate some would have chosen for his son's murderers, Douglas Sloan's stooped posture stands in stark contrast to his soaring spirit.

"Would I be speaking today were it not for the murder of Chad? Where could I go and who would listen if I could not say that my son was murdered?" he asked death penalty foes gathered in Terre Haute.

"Without his death, all I would ever hear is, ‘If it happened to you, you would feel different.' It has happened to me, and I do not feel different -- the death penalty is wrong."

Almost three years after his son's death, Sloan's heart was giving out, and he had a pacemaker implanted in a body wracked by emotional damage. The terror, the helplessness, the grief? He did not let them win, he said.

"Imagine the damage I would have done to myself if I had harbored the hate and vengeance, rage and retribution necessary to advocate two executions," he said.

"The murderer does not have to die -- the hate and vengeance, rage and retribution have to die for the grief to subside and the healing to begin."

God forgive all of us. We can't seem to handle it ourselves.