Thanks for all the kind wishes, the soups, the meals, and the cards after last week’s blog.  (It’s amazing how nice it is to get cards via snail mail.) I’d like to lighten it up this week. I’d like to. But. Beth’s mom Flo was famously resilient. Her husband died when he was only 47, […]

On September 28 last year, Beth and I were in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, thanks to the generosity of her nephew Ben—who owns a sweet little condo right off the lake, and who let us take a break from downtown Chicago. We got a call – our friend Brad had died after having seemingly survived lung […]

In news of the banal, our bathroom remodel is almost done. We’re finally back home, after four nights at a local hotel, five more with our friends in Urbana, and five at a friend’s here in Printers Row. It’s hardly been a hardship—I was fortunate to have enough air miles to be able to stay […]

Happy New Year from our friends’ place in Urbana, Illinois! Beth and I have been bathroom refugees since December 26. That is, we’re having our bathroom redone, and since we only have the one, we got outta Dodge while the work is being done. Our adventure started with a staycation of sorts—I used credit card […]

In 2002, our son Gus moved away from our home in Urbana to a group home in Wisconsin and Beth and I became empty nesters. In 2003 the weekly paper I edited folded and I was out of a job. That spring, Beth’s book, “Long Time No See,”  would be published. I got a gig […]