The first report of his death left out the crayons. On a gray Saturday morning in May, the man ran out of the CVS drug store in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood with a stolen tube of toothpaste and was killed by a store employee out back in the alley. The death was ruled a homicide. […]
“And you are? . . . . .” asked the first of what looked like many receptionists standing guard on the outer reaches of the Oval Office of President Barack Obama. It was raining hard in Washington DC. I didn’t have a power broker raincoat, so my only good suit was soaked in all the […]
When they circled the chain link fence around the old brown ramshackle house across the street, a preparation for the demolition to come, I could still hear Brother Bones whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and remember that mixture of laughter and awe watching the Harlem Globetrotters on the black and white Zenith in the basement when […]
Is God a guy on a little red motor scooter?
The new Toyota sign in Wrigley Field shuts a door, but the game goes on.
Insurance is best understood over an ice cream cone. My Dad taught me that when I was 17. And like all life lessons that last, there was no grand diatribe of advice. No lessons. No lectures. You learn best not from what a person says, but from what they do. You learn from who they […]
Finding clues to a unifying love as a painter fills a space with beauty.
Scripture from the book of John.
A homeless woman walks the Chicago streets.
What if stories were the key to fixing health care?
Years from now, the sad eyed young woman in an orange dress, wrapped up against the Chicago cold in a blue goose down coat steps outside the Haitian Community Center and begins to walk to the water. Every year the quiet ceremony remembering Earthquake Day, January 12, 2010, seems to get larger. 15,000 Haitians called […]