Category: Non-Fiction

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...

Most all the boys my age watched Big Time Wrestling on Saturday afternoons, the Sheik and Bobo Brazil, their oiled, sweaty bodies colliding in the ring. I feigned an interest but couldn’t see the point – one person demolishing...

On October 26, 2025, 19 Vietnamese Buddhist monks from the Huong Dao Vipassana Bhavana Center in Ft. Worth, Texas, began a peace pilgrimage on foot, to Washington, D.C., a trek of approximately 2,300 miles. I caught up with them...

While addressing a classroom full of parents on back-to-school night, a woman obviously drunk, informs everyone that her daughter doesn’t have to do the homework. Talking on the phone with Mrs. Smith, she tells me it’s my job to...

Heavy metal for breakfast with a side of banging plates. A 50-ish brassy blonde blurts out orders with the ire of a marine drill sergeant. Cooking oil creates it’s 70th pair of “over easy.”  “Mother” and “Grateful” inked on the...