"Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning." - Carl Sandburg We tasted Chicago this weekend and enjoyed 24 hours of wind-blown, gnocchi-flavored, irreverent fun. We celebrated life in all of its delicious, silly, competitive, tasty, warm, witty glory so that, by [...]
Category: Kathy Kostelnik
These are the women who raised us
My grandmother climbed mountains in her bare feet, raised hell and three hearty children on the edge of a small Pennsylvania mining town. Oldest child of the indomitable Baba Melnyk, who hitched a ride to America all by herself when she was just 13-years old, my grandmother earned her matriarch status with a sharp tongue, [...]
With this Super Bowl ring I thee…briefly panic
With an impressive combination of German precision, Irish luck and Catholic fertility, my parents managed to produce exactly four NFL championship rings and exactly four children. For most of my childhood, the rings rested unceremoniously on a plaque in our family room, just a few feet from an unlocked side door. Though he valued them [...]
We are family
Of the many definitions for family, we prefer the one requiring just four letters: l-o-v-e. That's the family with whom we spent this past weekend as we celebrated my sister's marriage to her longtime love, Keith. Ahead of her two flower girls, 10 junior bridesmaids preceded my sister down the aisle at her beautiful sunset-on-the-beach [...]
Another toast to Kathy Kostelnik
On Saturday we toasted my sister Kathy at a bridal shower for her June wedding. We've raised our glasses often to Kathy, who literally has scaled more mountains than any of us. To celebrate the centennial, Kathy climbed Mount Rainier, a daunting effort for anyone but particularly for Kathy, who rose above significant health challenges [...]