The Dancer is recovering. I’m hovering. Her apple-sized cyst, wound around a major nerve, arteries, neck muscles, pretty much everything on the road from the brain to the rest of the body; the cyst is gone. “We saved the nerve,” said Dr. Samant, still in his scrubs as he walked towards me in the waiting […]
Garrison Keillor does his last Prairie Home Companion tonight. And across the great American landscape, circled around the 3.5 million radios in homes and cars, you just might sense a fading of the light as Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, the town that time forgot, goes dark. Until, of course, the seasons change. That’s when Keillor, called […]
Look hard at Van Gogh’s painting of the boots and you begin to breathe in his weary leather sadness from across the centuries. Boots on a walk through time. The boots are pausing for a moment in the dimly lit gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago on a late Friday afternoon in spring. The […]
It’s in history books now. And my Mom was there. A young preacher from South Carolina named Jesse Jackson arrived in Chicago, to see blocks and blocks of brutally burned out buildings on the west and south sides of the city. You could still smell the smoke. It was the aftermath of the killings that […]
Streetlight spilling down through the basement window, splayed out on the polished wooden bar and framing the forearm stamped with the faded boxy lettering that marked the ancient man forever a 13-year-old boy out of Auschwitz Birkenau. He’d been dead for years. Uncle Sol. So why was I not surprised to see him here today? […]
My entire adult life, they’ve been “stealing” cars across Chicago and then ransoming them back to the owners. Legally. Or you could see it as “providing a towing service.” A few years back, they slipped into the lot behind the unemployment office as I was standing in line inside. While I waited in that endless […]
Did this really happen? Or is it just a moment in celebrating the Studs Terkel Archive opening its digital doors to all today. Celebrating 45 years of Studs Terkel in conversation with the world. Did this really happen? Alongside the rolled silver steel splash of a bandstand in Millennium Park Chicago at lunchtime today. Or […]
It’s been eight years now. But. . . around the time Brenda died, an entire section of a street collapsed just north of church. An underground water main burst, the concrete crumbled, the trees and cars and fire hydrants started sinking into the earth, water gushed out in torrents into the 10 below wind chill […]
“Hey, look! Something tiny and green is growing in the tar!” Popping my head through the open trap door to the roof. Pausing just for a moment before hoisting myself up. You, sprawled on your stomach in cutoffs and an old University of Wisconsin t-shirt of mine that you slept in a lot, peering over […]
Renee Fleming and Yo Yo Ma drop by a neighborhood high school in Chicago. Originally published in 2012 on “Open Salon.”