Some updates on the people you read about this past summer here at the Safe & Sound blog: Let’s start with my husband Mike’s guest post about White Sox pitcher Chris Sale. Last night Mike and I took the El down and got cheap tickets at the last minute to see Sale face Detroit’s Cy […]

Hava Hegenbarth volunteers as a puppy-raiser for Leader Dogs, and she’s been following my Safe & Sound blog for years. Hava is retired after a career in the diplomatic service, and after reading a recent post here about a Holocaust survivor, she commented that she, too, had survived a genocide — it happened when she’d […]

After publishing that post about 1968 last week, I have to make a confession: I was a square in the 1960s. While the hippies and peaceniks of that generation were worshipping Jim Morrison and grooving to Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, I was busy at the piano figuring out the arpeggio in […]

With all the talk about political conventions in the news lately, I can’t help but think of what happened right here in 1968. Many of the writers in my memoir classes were young adults in Chicago then, but when I assigned “1968” as a topic, few of them chose to write about the Democratic convention […]

A few radio stories I’ve heard lately oughta give NPR listeners an idea of what a powerful – and positive — effect men who are blind can have on their offspring. Let’s start with Bob Ringwald. My brother Doug introduced me to Bob years ago — they’re both jazz musicians, and they play together from […]