As Beth wrote in her Sunday post, we spent a wonderful weekend with our friend Lydia, who moved to Cambridge to take a job with Harvard Magazine. Lydia’s a gifted writer and a solid reporter to boot—she just won an award for this article on the human biome that she wrote for the University of […]

Retired White Sox organist Nancy Faust donated her own personal Hammond organ to White Sox Charities for their holiday garage sale, which was held yesterday. Nancy and I have become friends over the years, and she told Mike and me about her “organ donation” a few weeks ago when we joined her along with her […]

The Thanksgiving break was welcome, but it just wasn’t in the cards for us to get out of town. But I did find an escape a few miles from home in the steam of a Turkish sauna, the desert heat of the dry Russian Sauna, and all-in-all a different world at the Chicago Sweat Lodge. […]

This is the time each year when Flo (my mom) would get out her ceramic Christmas bowl and fill it with ruby-red anise candy for the holidays. Smart woman, that Flo. The spicy taste of the hard candy was not terribly appealing to us kids,which meant we didn’t sneak it when she wasn’t looking, and […]

In honor of the 30th anniversary of the movie Back to the Future, I asked the writers in my memoir classes last week to think about their own family histories. “Write about where you’d like to travel back — or forward — to,” I told them. “And then, explain why.” Many, many writers wanted to […]