This weekend, I watched a four-year old ride my old rocking horse on springs and I thought what every old person does in these situations, "They don't make 'em like they used it." I was referring, for course, to the toy. They make four-year olds exactly like they used to, which is why I'm shocked [...]
Somewhere in my house, buried deep in a bin, is a picture I thought of immediately when I read that Caroll Spinney was hanging up his Big Bird beak and retiring from Sesame Street. The picture I pretty much tore the house apart looking for was of my then three-year old son Vinnie dressed as [...]
I'm no luddite, but I do enjoy some simple pleasures -- long walks, good books, sidewalk chalk, porch swings, and climbing branches that hang thick and low. Earlier this week, we bought a rubber ball, an impulse purchase we scooped up along with a tomato and some sliced cheese. We spent $4.95 for the ball [...]
I want to be a charging station, a place where the risk-takers and dreamers I've raised can come to fill up when their admirable efforts to forge their way in this old world drain them.
I'll fight the urge to tether them here and I'll even offer a fast charging option, though I'd prefer a nice, slow power up based on pure love and belly laughs. We'll sit around a table thick with memories, push aside Grandma's well-used dinner plates, and talk the way we did when they were young and squeaky voiced, but still so very sincere.
From her stoop in the center of a sophisticated city, my niece Erin has carved out a delightful little corner of Mayberry. She and her neighborhood gang enjoy a living-room-forts, frontyard-warter-balloon-fight, Saturday-sleepover, come-home-when-the-streetlights-turn-on kind of childhood, while all around them Chicago hums. They each have the necessary kind of scheduled activities that keep their parents [...]