Dinner in the Field and other stories
I find you can discover your strengths at any age. For example, I find I’m a better writer than I am an editor. I have a full-length draft of a memoir that I’ve devoted countless hours to, and it’s finally finished. I’m anxious to move on to new material. But finishing the book is not the same as completing the project. Doing it right, I’m told, entails a less than...
Hallelujah! Robots Milk Cows!
Graniteville, Vt. (AP)- (Excerpt) Robots have taken up residence at some small and medium sized dairy farms across the country, providing reliable and more efficient labor and helping businesses remain viable. * All praise to technology and computer geeks. I take back every bad thing I’ve ever said about you. You’ve transformed the life of the dairy farmer, the most oppressed, confined, and tethered of all farmers in history bar...
Compromise is Not a Dirty Word
Good news drives out the bad easily when we let it. There are so many things we wish would go away that we crave distraction. And so the Cub’s post season play takes over our attention along with the Democratic Presidential Candidate debate and we in Illinois and Americans everywhere glide through the waning months of 2015 as if all were well. Just six days ago there were not one...
Writing Early in the Monring
There’s moonlight on the shack porch right now so bright. I followed bits of it, circles, irregular shapes, of such bright light it lit up my shoes when I stepped in them through the yard from the house. I thought it must be the streetlight but no, it was the moon high overhead shining through the trees. That same eclipsing moon we saw fading away Sunday night is now high...
Golf among the Idle
I think playing more golf when one quits working and getting better is a common fantasy. More play can only improve your game right? I know that was my fantasy. I kept a golf ball and tees on my desk and thought of smacking it long and hard, especially during bad phone calls. You know; complaints, descriptions of risky situations, predictions of calamity, calls about budget cuts, bureaucratic threat both...
Something Stinks
Something stinks in the ravine outside the shack. It’s the smell of something dead, which is one of those distinctive bad smells instantly recognized, like skunk. I smell it when I open the windows and the wind is right. I don’t want to look for the source. Besides, I’ve learned if you can stand it that dead smell fades fairly quickly, depending of course on the size of the carcass....
Marvin Lake
We left the water of Red Lake Ontario at 6:00 a.m. in a yellow 1956 high winged de Havilland Otter equipped with pontoons. “Is the engine from 1956?” In 1956 I was five. Now I’m 64. “No.” He yelled over the noise of the single engine. “It was replaced in 2010 with a new 750 horsepower Pratt & Whitney turbo. Plenty of horsepower. Lots of hours left. Runs like a...
A weem a weck, a weem a weck
After all this time I never put it together that Montreal’s name involved a mountain, Mont Real. America, and at least this American, is so caught up in itself. The extent of my knowledge of that city may have gone beyond this old John Prine lyric, but maybe not. “She was a level headed dancer, on the road to alcohol. And I was just a soldier, on the way to...
Illinois Agencies at the End of Their Rope
I’m going on vacation, the concept of which changes after you retire. Vacation used to be a break from the hectic; getting away from the schedule, the appointments, the being late, the looming deadline, the unexpected crisis. Now vacation is more like moving this leisurely existence to another location. Vacation for retirees means lolling around in a different environment. My wife and I are going to Quebec. It looks like...
The 2015 Cubs
I know the numbers now without looking, but I still check them out every morning when I get the Tribune off the driveway. I could view them online but I want to see them on paper, hold them in my hands, lay them on the counter by my coffee cup so I can pick them up and read the numbers again. It’s the Major League Baseball standings. The best baseball...
Illinois Today
I’m more aware than many of what a budget stalemate in Springfield means to real people. I’ve been through previous stalemates as the director of a not for profit that strived to provide programs that were largely state funded to people that needed them in a fairly rural part of Illinois. But none like this. Sometimes there are no other places families and kids can turn to for those services. I...