There is a lot of drivel on social media and I own up to having contributed my share of it. Usually it’s best to just let stuff go because, really, it evaporates as an issue in hours. (Unless you enjoy some celebrity and some stupid thing you said years ago comes up—but that’s another story.) […]

It’s that time of the year when my working life eats me alive for a couple weeks and occupies the limited space in my head, which means I’m left with not-so-deep thoughts: Here in Chicago I’m happy that we might have a real race for mayor now that Rahm Emanuel has announced he will not […]

Last week I wrote while riding the Amtrak train home from Milwaukee, today it’s from row 15 on a Southwest Airlines flight, headed home from a wet but fun-packed weekend in Alexandria, Virginia. The flight to DC was a little trying—the turbulence was constant, and bad enough that the flight attendants couldn’t bring passengers the […]

Greetings from Milwaukee, where Beth, Whitney, and I have just boarded Amtrak’s Hiawatha, which will begin rolling toward Chicago any minute now. We had a good visit with our son Gus at his group home in Wisconsin in a town called Watertown. The home is operated by Bethesda Lutheran Services, and it houses eight  people, […]

After a rugged spring—or the absence of a spring, more accurately—we’ve had a wonderfully mild summer here by Lake Michigan. Until a couple days ago, anyway, when the steam bath arrived. But it’ll be gone in a day or two, and not long after, summer will be gone, too. How does this happen? Wasn’t it […]