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 […]
So the odds of recovery are 94-99%. Pretty good, huh?” We were two middle-aged guys whose morning routine included a walk to the corner to buy a newspaper from a blue, metal stand. Sliding our quarters in the slot, pulling open the door and lifting the ever-thinning tabloid. Wondering if we were the last two […]
For these two spirits, it could be any year. They were the loves of some other life. But It was always, every year, in the sticky spattered rainy heat of late August that they’d both come back and take their places diagonally across on the intersection of Belmont and Sheffield streets in Chicago. Each of […]
In the dream on this early August morning of his birthday, Dad was standing next to the water. Smile beaming. He was younger than I am now and he was looking both straight at me and also off in the distance. I was astounded at how close he was. As if I could almost touch […]
Homeless, Steely Dan. “And every word we sang was true”
Jose left El Salvador in the jungle moon night after the Sandinistas killed his father defending a houseful of family. Because Jose was next on the list. So he followed a dark river into Guatemala, then a trail of every dime saved from any job available, To Washington D.C. and finally to Chicago where on […]
Trading for an overpriced ambulance ride
Wrigley Field in Chicago turns 100 years old tomorrow. It was built on the site of a former seminary. The taverns along Clark Street got too loud for the aspiring pastors trying to study, so the church sold the land and the baseball team left their original home on the west side of the […]
A tired grey morning rain, boarding the elevated train in Chicago, reaching up to grab the strap, standing shoulder to shoulder. She shoots a fast glance as the train lurches forward and our shoulders touch. Decides I’m safe. Leans down to keep scrolling her phone, shakes the red hair from her face. The train slows, […]