Category: Non-Fiction

The leaves were changing along with the weather. There is only one thing that meant…school was starting. I was going into my sophomore year of high school; my brother was in seventh grade. From personal experience, seventh grade...

I’d send you out of this world into the gallery of night in jujube wood, sycamore and cedar like a pharaoh in a solar boat, but it was broad daylight as you embarked in your coffin, plain pine, marked simply with the star of...

Having recently turned 79, and as a survivor of 11 surgeries (including two kidney transplants, a brace of knee replacements, a cardiac bypass, and a spinal fusion procedure), this seems a propitious time to reflect on the...

Joe has a penchant for disappearing. This makes the employees at the places he frequents in Roscommon uneasy. He has no family and is nearing his mid-eighties. More paranoid people fear he’s tripped over his monstrously furry...

Before a softball game a coach instructs his team of six to nine-year old girls. He has gathered them at the field an hour and a half before the game hoping to solve one of the many problems he’s had the first two games of the...

October 8, 2011, was the coldest opening day of any Illinois Youth Deer Season I’ve hunted. And as a then sixty-five-year-old father of four and grandfather of nine, with all kith and kin living within forty miles of me, I’ve...

The stack of last year’s greeting cards shifted under the clutter of sales receipts and bank statements and slid toward the edge of Jane’s desk. Reflexively her right arm swept forward to catch the pile of papers as it had done...

When I went to fill out my very first profile on a dating app, I froze at the prompt: “I’m happiest when…” My mind went blank. I struggled for words to end the sentence, the way you struggle for a memory that’s just at the edge...

Art …is the means to recapture something entirely invisible, wholly interior, and possibly inconspicuous: a healthier and more integrated state at the center of one’s own being. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life. Prelude to a...

Over my seventy-nine years, I have survived eleven surgeries. Two of these were kidney transplants; and without these miracles, I would have died over two decades ago. To say I’m grateful is woefully inadequate, but my existence...