For the entirety of my forty-year childhood I was obsessed with baseball. Never mind Christmas, Thanksgiving, or my birthday; the most eagerly-anticipated event of the year was Opening Day. Wide-eyed from start to finish, I witnessed my first live big league game more than a half-century ago at a sparkling, barely three-year-old 55,000-seat, state-of-the-art stadium […]

The 2016 presidential vote and Brexit have something in common.  In both cases, many voters found the result was much different than their expectations. In recent months, the British Parliament has been grappling with putting into effect the closely decided referendum vote to leave the European Union.  It proved easier to say “Leave” than finding […]

When old Joe Gilliam began digging that hole in his front yard, out there close to the street, neighbors watched and wondered.  When he got his grandson to help him carry the shade tree sapling from his pickup to the hole, people nodded. Mystery solved. Old Joe’s planting a tree. After removing the root mass […]

It began with a lunch at a place called Emil’s, not far from police headquarters in New York, and the trigger was a six-word sentence. “That Queens story,” the police commissioner said to A.M. Rosenthal, then the metropolitan editor of The New York Times, “is something else.” It was something else, though in the Times […]

“Did tonight’s meal kit get delivered yet?” I’m trying to recall how many times I heard my mother say those words. Oh, yeah, never. It’s hard to believe that there was a time not so long ago when you had to go to a restaurant or to a friend’s house to eat something you didn’t […]

Most think that the 2020 presidential election is almost two years away. Not so!! The first vote, the vote of the billionaires who choose our candidates, is happening right now. It happens every four years and Democrats and Republicans simply change places. This time it is the Democrats lining up with alms bowl in hand—not […]

March is the month of my 80th birthday.  I grew up in a hilly and woodsy section of semi-rural Ohio.  A neighbor’s car rolled down one of those hills and into a lake.  When retrieved by a wrecker, the car was full of fish.  A wag called out, “That’s a heck of a way to […]