People with disabilities face a lot—there’s the disability itself. But there’s also the boxes others can put disabled people in. I’ve seen it first-hand. A lot of what Beth does is extremely difficult and sometimes scary. But if she lets on to that, others will assume that she has limitations that she doesn’t have. And […]

My father and his three brothers served in the armed forces during WWII. I grew up with a simplistic reverie for them, and the armed forces, and had that simplistic, callow view that the good guys won. My dad and my uncles were good guys. The good guys did win. They were good guys, but […]

A few days ago, three bottles of wine arrived from Oregon. We haven’t sampled them yet—they deserve a special occasion, equal to the story of how we got them. It all started at a White Sox game a few weeks ago … no, that’s not true. It all started at Hackney’s, a local bar/restaurant that […]

My mom, Esther Knezovich, nee Latini, taught school for decades. Mostly first and second grade. And she never took her teacher hat off. If she heard something ungrammatical on a commercial, or if a news anchor used a bad sentence structure, or say, her son used the wrong word, well, she was never shy. She […]

When we moved into our condo in Chicago’s Printers Row neighborhood in 2004, there was a mangy little parking lot just to the south of our building, immediately below our window. But a mangy little parking lot was OK. Some of our neighbors bought a place with a view only to have it blocked by […]