It’s the day after Labor Day, and I’m not alone among my Chicago neighbors who fear that the date marks the beginning of a promised invasion by ICE agents, determined to step up the pace of arrests and deportations, as well as the deployment of National Guard troops to stamp out the supposed epidemic of rampant crime. By the time you read this next Monday, we will know the full extent of Trump’s...

Today is the Yahrzeit – the anniversary — of my sister Lorraine’s death. She died 24 years ago, just two weeks before the 9/11 disaster that she did not live to see, small compensation for the tragic loss for her husband, her two sons and me. She was five and a half years older than me, a large enough gap to preclude real closeness, despite the awkwardness of having shared a bedroom until...

The story I’m about to tell will have elements familiar to many of you, but it’s a tale worth telling if it might spare someone the pain that we barely skirted. On the day after we arrived in New Hampshire for our annual revisit – the subject of another blog to come – we received a troubling notification from Amazon that there were suspicious charges on our account that they are looking into for...

(Note: We are heading to New Hampshire this week for the 43rd consecutive summer, minus the Covid year, since we left New England for Houston. It’s inconvenient to post from there for technical reasons, so you won’t hear from me for a couple of weeks. Enjoy this precious summer month. We’ll see you on the other side.) First, unrelated to the subject of today’s posting, I want to report a random...

The two poles of what I loosely call my creativity these days are my garden and my blog. On rare occasions like today they come in conflict with each other. I was eager to start my blog for next week, but the brutal temperatures indicated that I had to first deal with watering while the conditions were still tolerable. Now I’m back at the computer and ready to roll. Rosellen and I were so moved...