Some Sunday reading brought me back to last week’s topic of immigration. This Sun-Times piece, about White Sox pitcher Lucas Giolito being outspoken about his opinions, illustrated how his personal experience shaped his views on immigration, legal and illegal. Giolito grew up in affluence—his mother a successful actress and his father an executive at a […]

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there […]

I was out with a friend last week who takes a healthy interest in exactly what makes people tick. She didn’t know me earlier in life, when I could see, and said she couldn’t help but wonder. “Do you think your personality changed when you went blind?” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t […]

One of the first ride-shares I ever used picked me up near the University of Illinois-Chicago Hospital west of the Loop. Destination: 401 N. Michigan. The driver slavishly adhered to the GPS directions. And he took us into hellacious traffic that I calculated to have been pretty easily avoidable, and lacking that, escapable. Finally, he […]

It seems like only yesterday: Beth’s Seeing Eye dog Harper saved them both from being run over at an intersection a couple blocks from home. Harper yanked Beth out of harm’s way—so hard that she fell to the pavement and that the sturdy metal harness snapped. It was a harrowing experience, but afterward Beth and Harper […]