I’ve come down with spring fever. OK, given that it was 80+ degrees yesterday, muggy, and that we seem to be skipping the spring thing altogether so far here in Chicago, spring fever might be a stretch. But I’ve got the symptoms: Day dreaming, distracted, don’t much want to focus on anything. So today’s MwM will be a slumgullion of sorts. What’s a slumgullion? Well, growing up, I’d wander into the kitchen to bug my mom about dinner. “What’re you cooking?” I’d ask, (more…)

I refer to my mom by her first name, and if you follow this blog, you already know a lot about Flo. Over the years, you may have read:

• that she was only 45 years old when our dad died, and from then on she worked full time and raised us on her own
• a post called Flo on the Pot about her first-ever massage and her first-ever phone call from a hotel bathroom on her 92nd birthday
• that she has enough faith in her blind daughter to have me take care of her overnight by myself after she had out-patient surgery for a malignant melanoma
• about her dance with a young handsome stranger at a Louisville jazz club on her 93rd birthday
• how she partied at Hackney’s with bartender Billy Balducci, Mike, my sisters and me after my presentation at the 2009 Printer’s Row Book Fair
• how we celebrated her 95th birthday in 2011 on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Building in Chicago
• a post called Because the night belongs to Flo where she explains that she only wanted two kids, and how it is that she ended up with seven

Hmm. Maybe I’ll end the list with the link to that last provocative post. What can I say? The gal is game! (more…)

Back in the spring of 1975, I was co-editor of my high school newspaper. I would be heading to the University of Illinois in the fall, and though I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, I wanted to raise some hell in the service of the public good. Like Woodward and Bernstein, maybe. Or better yet, like Ralph Nader. (more…)

You might remember Bennett, the six-year-old boy who gave the Braille/print copy of my children’s book, Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound a thumbs up after reading it with his dad. “I like that book you got me, ” he told his mom. “It’s a true story, and no one ever writes true stories for kids about people who are blind like me.”

Bennett and his companion dog Journey.

I’ve kept up with Bennett ever since his mom emailed me with that stellar review, and in March I wrote a post about Bennett and his parents traveling from Wisconsin to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh to have Dr. Ken Nischal, one of the world’s foremost children’s eye specialists, try a cornea transplant in Bennett’s right eye. (more…)

This Saturday is Billy Balducci’s last official nightshift
bartending at Hackney’s.
Hackney’s is our local tavern, and Billy’s been tending bar there since the day it opened in November, 2001.

Longtime blog followers know Billy as the guy sitting next to me in a photo we originally published with a 2007 blog post called Cheers! — Mike and I are fortunate to know him as a dear friend. He and his wife Kathleen’s good-lookin’ boy Tommy will celebrate his first birthday next week, and Billy is leaving the bartending world for what he calls  “a big boy job.”  We wish him all the best, and in honor of this momentous occasion I am reblogging a post I published a few years ago, shortly after Billy and Kathleen got married.

Accompanied by Billy Balducci

Originally published March 4, 2010

When Billy heard Mike was working the night Hanni and I were scheduled to give a presentation at Prairie Trails Public Library, he offered to drive us. He doesn’t tend bar on Thursday nights, he reasoned (more…)