“How did it end? Make your own damn ending. I don’t remember. And if this picture fades to black, does the ending even matter?” Inside a no name neighborhood tavern of smoke and memories. An empty Chicago Street in a February wind. The old man whispers to last years calendar hung crooked behind the bar. […]
It was back when we all had plenty of time. A late night call. I was up. Scribbling something unmemorable in a spiral notebook under the circular pool of light cast by a metal gooseneck lamp. The caller ID said Los Angeles. I remembered the number. Even after two years of never seeing it at […]
Because when you smiled like spun golden daybreak, planted your palms on your hips and said “I play a bimbo on TV!” there had to be a place to tell the story. It was July. Blisteringly hot on the Chicago Lakefront. This was a couple of summers after “The Blues Brothers” was shot, reviving Chicago […]
Ernie Banks died tonight. And in the summer green fields of heaven, they are playing baseball. Later on, I’ll go listen to Steve Goodman sing “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” But not right now. Tonight I hear the crack of the bat and the rumbling roar of the crowd in the sunshine. Mr. Cub […]
Fritz died on Christmas Day . . . and I remember . . . Years ago. I’m stepping off the curb, about to cross Damen Avenue one spring Sunday when this car creeps up behind me slow and rolls on to the grass and sidewalk. Lumbering like some chrome and blue sheet metal monster, Fritz […]
Alone on an empty sidewalk in an arctic blast of Chicago winter wind that could easily crush a soul. He looks up from his phone. Normally there would be hundreds walking this slight rise in front of the Prudential Building, across the street from Millennium Park. But the cold is here now. So it’s just […]
That actually happened. . . At my neighborhood grocery store. Looking up at two skyscraper mountains of sweet potatoes when the woman walks up, stands right next to me and asks the exact same question rippling silently through my mind. “What’s the difference between a garnet and a jewel sweet potato?” “That,” I answer back […]
When the writers who are Chicago’s eternal gift to literature gather in the smoky dark spilled beer taverns of heaven to share their best work, Bill Granger will be bringing along Time For Frankie Coolin. Granger left us with a bunch of terrifically entertaining, solid stories. The November Man series — even with the marketing […]
Just before she snapped this picture, I had brushed some dirt off your gravestone. We were in Asheville, North Carolina. Breathing in that pure mountain air like it was a cool, cleansing tonic that really could clear tubercular lungs. I wondered if that air could make me write like you. As I knelt at your […]
Tonight. Chicago cold winds howl outside while Bonnie Raitt, Emmy Lou Harris and music royalty names too numerous to list start singing inside the golden light bulb warmth of the storied Auditorium Theater honoring Mavis Staples at 75. Inside the walls of Adler and Sullivan’s acoustical masterpiece of a building, fresh and alive as it […]