Don’t cry over a ‘lost year’

At the end of my junior year in high school, my parents moved us from Elmwood Park to Franklin Park. And so, on a Monday afternoon in early May, I suddenly found myself sitting in a classroom in West Leyden High School, having started the day at Elmwood Park High School, clearing out my locker.

Because Leyden kids dressed differently than we did at EP, I endured taunts and jeers as I walked through the halls on that very first day.

Traveling back to normal with a vaccine passport

Thanks to the millions of vaccines being administered daily in the US, it appears we may actually be “rounding the corner” against this pandemic, to quote the words of the former Occupant in Chief.

Of course, when he said it eight or nine months ago, the words rang hollow, as all lies do. If you spend eight months rounding a corner, that’s known as going in a circle.

But now, with vaccines abundant and with sensible citizens rolling up their sleeves to get poked, and with infection and death rates falling, it seems we’re actually rounding the corner and seeing the light at the end of a tunnel.

The past is a foreign country

If you’ve done any traveling in your life, you see that folks do things differently in other lands. Some of the difference seems interesting and fun, but there are also differences that make you glad to skip back home, where folks do things “right” again. “What are those people thinking?” you think. “How can anybody behave like that and think it’s OK?”

That’s the beauty of traveling miles away to a foreign country. You can always come back home if you don’t like it.

The winning bid in a game of “thrones”

Who can say why some people do the things they do, and what value they place on worthless items that would be nothing but trash to any sane, sensible man?

Take a gander at my cluttered bookshelves sometime and you’ll wonder what possible value some of the items there could have to any sane, sensible man. The answer is “none,” but then we’re not talking about sane and sensible in this case, I guess.

Most of the items cluttered in front of the books are rocks.

Shaving away the lies with Occam’s Razor

I met a new friend a couple months ago, and after we had covered all the important topics of conversation — football, fishing, musicians we saw back when we lived a free-range pre-Covid life — he swung onto the topic of the Capitol insurrection.

“Yeah,” he said, “I hated seeing all those left-wingers posing as Trump fans smash up that building.”

“Wait…what?” I said, struggling to believe that my new friend could say something like that in anything but an ironic, joking tone.

Operation Hit the Beach — full mission log

December of 2019 — the last normal month any of us can remember — I spent in Naples, Florida, and when my son Dave flew down with the grandkids just after Christmas, I asked, “So what do you want to do tomorrow?”

“The beach!” they crowed in unison. Understandable, since Chicago beaches aren’t quite so tempting in December.

“OK,” I said, “but tomorrow is Saturday, so it’ll be crowded. If we don’t leave by 9 a.m. we won’t find a parking spot.

Oh joy oh joy oh joy, it’s a snow day!

Of all the heart-breaking endings that this pandemic has wreaked upon us, add one more — the probable death of the snow day.

Admit it, one of your best childhood memories is waking up on a cold winter morning to find that the world outside the window has been blanketed by snow, and sitting in the kitchen listening to the radio atop the fridge as the man reads off a list of school closings. And then, when you hear your school’s name, the squeals of joy up and down the block as you and all your friends urge Mom to hurry up with breakfast so you can tumble out the door to play the day away.

Breaking news: Louis L’Amour is still dead

The bad news is: Louis L’Amour is still dead.

The good news: I’ve made my peace with it — a necessary healing because, after all, I’m the guy who killed him.

It was a terrible burden to bear. But eventually the guilt became too much to handle and I had to confess, to lift the burden from my shoulders and tell all.

I killed Louis L’Amour.

If the name isn’t familiar to you, it should be. Louis L’Amour wrote more than a hundred novels.

A burning image of bucket-list American blues

One of the special pleasures in life is checking off item by item on your bucket list.

I’ve been lucky to live long enough and to travel extensively enough to wear my bucket-list pencil nub down quite a bit. Notre Dame Cathedral, The Louvre, Sydney Opera House, Brandenburg Gate—the list has narrowed quite a bit since I was a young, wonder-eyed boy.

Many items were closer to home, but no less important to me: Arlington National Cemetery, Gateway Arch, Mammoth Cave, Smithsonian Museums and more.

A comet is just a comet, right?

One clear night this summer in mid-July, I stood out among the corn fields at the western dead-end of Ernesti Road and finally knew what it must have felt like to live during the Middle Ages.

For the record, I have always felt a touch of envy for those long-ago folks because medieval art is filled with paintings showing blazing comets in the sky, and I have always wanted to see a comet blazing across the sky above me.

And one clear night this summer, my dream was fulfilled as Comet NEOWISE hung like a Christmas ornament just beneath the Big Dipper.

The Independence Day speech we never heard

On Independence Day this year, this is the speech I wish we had heard:

“My fellow Americans, today is Fourth of July, the day we celebrate our nation’s independence from tyranny and oppression centuries ago. That independence was won by the sacrifice of patriotic citizens, and sustained by the sacrifices of subsequent patriots we honor equally.

Those patriots made sacrifices not because they wanted to, but because they knew it was their duty as Americans. They were willing to forego their own comfort and security for the sake of their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers—even for neighbors and townspeople they had never met.

THE DOORWAY TO OUR COMMUNITY