Well, Chuy Garcia lost the Chicago mayoral runoff election, despite the endorsement of the prestigious Mondays with Mike blog. It wasn’t a bad showing considering Garcia got into the race very late, had no name recognition, and was widely considered the second or third best choice of possible opponents to the incumbent Rahm Emanuel. That […]

Losing my sight meant losing a lot of things I’d taken for granted. One of those was The ability to vote independently, without anyone knowing how I voted. I relied on Mike to help me with a ballot. One time Mike was out of town during elections, so a polling judge from the Republican party […]

A cab driver who picked my Seeing Eye dog and me up once had such a heavy accent that I couldn’t tell what he was saying. “Dog face on floor,” he demanded. “Saliva.” He repeated that word a few times to help me understand. “Saliva. Saliva. Saliva.” Was it his mantra? My face must have […]

Hello from Alexandria, Va., on the last day of our mini-vacation. It’s been, as always, a blast. And as always, it’s ending too soon but it was long enough to stir a big, bubbling pot of nostalgia. In the fall of 1977, my junior year at the University of Illinois, I enrolled in a political […]

Every week is a history lesson: Two writers in my memoir classes marched in Selma, a writer in one class was at Woodstock, and this one was at the 1963 MLK march in DC.