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Sarah was about four months pregnant when she received news no mother ever wants to hear. She was told her baby had triploidy and would not survive. “She had an underdeveloped brain, underdeveloped kidneys, underdeveloped heart. I don’t think she had a spleen. It was pretty heart-wrenching when I found that out,” said Sarah, a Hinsdale resident who asked that I not use her last name. She had two choices: Wait for her baby to die and deliver her stillborn or terminate the p...
Writing an opinion column is often a challenging thing to do, especially when events leave you speechless. I was standing in front of the office Monday, just after the final entry of the village's parade had passed by, when I heard about a much different end to the parade in Highland Park from assistant village manager Brad Bloom. As the day passed, we learned more and more about the horrific events and its victims. Six killed. More than two dozen injured, either shot or hurt...
One of my favorite tasks at work is to read the submission from our contributing columnist each week. Our writers this past year were Bill Barre, John Bourjaily, Bret Conway, Kelly Abate Kallas, Mistie Lucht (until she moved out of town) Lisa Seplak, Lex Silberburg and student writer Isabella Terry. Perhaps you know one - or more -as a friend or neighbor. Perhaps you've been reading their columns all year thinking, "Hey, I'd like to do that!" Now is your chance. Every year a h...
While planning our July 1993 wedding, stressed by my full-time graduate studies and Dan's full-time job and living in two different cities and juggling family input, we briefly considered running off to Vegas and getting married by an Elvis impersonator. Both lifelong church-goers, we decided against it, agreeing that it wouldn't feel like we were really married. But we promised each other that we would go to Vegas for our 10th anniversary and renew our vows in front of an...
Maybe it's the final episodes of "This is Us" that has me thinking about the different landscapes, if you will, life offers us. Or it might be the fact that the things I thought would go "back to normal" after COVID changed in such a way during the pandemic that we can never go back. More on that later. I've been watching "This is Us" since the beginning. I knew I would be hooked from the second I saw a trailer showing Randall knocking on a door of the man he believes to be...
I'm often impressed by the young people I interview, whether they're elementary school students moderating a presentation by a NASA engineer or high school athletes recommended by their coaches for our weekly profile. I had the opportunity last week to witness the culmination of a semester's worth of work by local high school students in Community Memorial Foundation's Young Community Changemakers - or YC2 - program. Sixty teens were divided into two teams and given $15,000...
Little did I know when I was looking for a job in the spring of 1988 that one day I would write about an event that had thwarted those efforts. Thirty-four years ago last week, on May 8, 1988, the Illinois Bell switching station on Second and Lincoln streets caught fire, destroying phone lines to 35,000 homes in Hinsdale and nearby towns. The affected area included Willowbrook, where my parents had purchased a condo my senior year of college, eagerly anticipating the day I...
Around Mother’s Day, it seems reporters like to ask folks about the most important things they learned from their mothers. One day, maybe such a question will be posed to an adult Ainsley. And here’s what I hope she has to say. Read as much as you can. I will be delighted if Ainsley loves Shakespeare and Jane Austen. But I also hope she does a better job than I did of reading different authors in varied genres and discovering wonderful new voices and the amazing stories the...
May, the fifth month of the year, is named after Maia, the Greek goddess of fertility, spring and growth. Its attributes have been noted by a variety of poets over the years. Like Stephen Foster - "We roamed the fields and river sides, When we were young and gay; We chased the bees and plucked the flowers, In the merry, merry month of May." and John Burroughs - "When purple finches sing and soar ... With vernal gladness running o'er - When joys like these salute the sense ......
The first time I saw the film "Shakespeare in Love," I was fascinated by the inaugural performance of "Romeo and Juliet" at the fictional Rose Theatre. The audience knows Juliet has concocted a plan with the friar to fake her own death so she can avoid marrying Paris and reunite with Romeo. The friar will write to Romeo of the plan. The love story will have a happy ending. Instead, the message goes astray. Juliet wakes up to find Romeo has poisoned himself after finding her...
The alarm went off at 4 a.m. I hadn’t slept all that well in the AC Marriott in Fort Lauderdale, but I woke up quickly. We needed to get the 4:30 a.m. shuttle to the airport for our flight. But even before I had the chance to get out of bed, Dan delivered the bad news. “Our flight’s canceled,” he said. We were stunned. A day earlier it had seemed like a good idea to change our Saturday flight — originally scheduled for 4:30 p.m. but delayed to 8:30 p.m. — to a Sunday morn...
Almost four years ago I wrote a column detailing how a trip about Royal Caribbean's Symphony of the Seas - at that time the largest cruise ship ever built - was not my cup of tea. "The thought of spending my vacation on a floating skyscraper (OK, OK, it's only 18 decks) with 6,679 other passengers and a 2,200-person crew leaves me feeling a little jittery," I wrote. What an idiot. Last week over spring break I spent six nights on a cruise to Mexico and Honduras aboard Royal Ca...
Thirty-one years ago on a Thursday afternoon in late March, I finished my English senior seminar essay (with about 30 seconds to spare before the 4 p.m. deadline), walked back to my sorority house and was greeted with four words: “Get in the car.” Seven of us were driving to Florida for spring break. My suitcase was already in the trunk, and I barely had time for a bathroom stop before we left. Some 18 hours of driving later, we reached our destination, Bonita Springs. The...
I celebrated my 55th birthday on Monday. I remember distinctly when my mom turned 55. At that time, drivers were not allowed to travel 65 mph on the highway, and we joked how she was turning the speed limit. That year — 1996 — I was a college graduate who had been working for eight years and married for three. This year, my daughter is in seventh grade and won’t graduate from college for another nine years. In some ways, having a kid late in life allows you to remain in denia...
We stood in the green room Saturday night before our final performance of "Hinsdale Unmasked" and talked about all that's happened since our last Community Revue in 2020. We've lost three longtime cast members - Dick Johnson, BJ Chimenti and Ly Hotchkin. We've dealt with individual losses and unwelcome diagnoses and other challenges. Oh, and there's been that other little thing: the global pandemic. It was the most emotional pre-show gathering I've experienced in the eight...
Tomorrow night is opening night. I am certain I can speak for all of the cast of "Hinsdale Unmasked" - the 2022 Community Revue - when I say we can't wait to perform for an audience. We've had our fill of applauding for each other and laughing at our own jokes and are ready to share this hilarious show with you, dear residents of Hinsdale. Before I proceed, I should let you know that all of us have been SWORN TO SECRECY about the show's contents. I wrote a column 18 years ago...
I first discovered Charles Mackesy in November 2020 when CBS Sunday Morning was doing a piece on him and his book, "The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse." We were enjoying our annual Thanksgiving weekend getaway in Saugatuck, so I had time to sit down with my coffee and enjoy the show. "In a quaint barn in the English countryside, there's a man, with a dog, documenting the human condition in its simplest form, through sketches about kindness and empathy, as we all...
I have been so inspired by the athletes competing in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Here are a few of my favorites: • Colby Stevenson, the silver medalist in the men's big air competition, who almost died in a 2016 car accident that left him with a broken skull in 30 places. He had been driving from Oregon to Utah to see a friend who broke his leg when Stevenson fell asleep at the wheel and rolled his car six times. Doctors weren't sure he'd walk again - or even live -...
On Valentine’s Day, most people are thinking about romantic love. I always think about Valentine’s Day my sophomore year in college. My boyfriend made me a homemade card and asked me to wear his lavaliere (a step before getting pinned). He was smart enough not to buy it in advance, as I had rejected this idea previously. But once I said yes, he walked a mile and a half in the snow to buy me one. He’s now my husband and has done many nice things for me on Valentine’s Days over...
Growing up, I didn't know a soul who was adopted. As an adult, I find the opposite is true. Adopted people are everywhere. At a 2020 Community Revue cast party, I learned that two of my castmates were also adopted and that all of us either had met or hoped to meet our birth parents. A fellow cast member came up and asked us what we were discussing so intently. "Finding our birth parents," one of us offered. She promptly turned around and headed back to the bar. One of the folk...
While editing Lisa Seplak's column (facing page) and checking whether "Gen Zers" requires any punctuation (it does not), I stumbled upon some interesting facts about Generation Z. They are more racially and ethnically diverse than any other generation and on track to be the most well-educated generation yet, according to the Pew Research Center. Gen Zers are more likely to have a college-educated parent than previous generations. Most Gen Zers live with married parents and,...
I've spent a lot of time thinking about 2021 lately. It's not because I'm stuck in the past. Like many of you, I was ready for a new year (and the hope that it would be our last with COVID as a pandemic!). I've been immersed in 2021 for two reasons. 1. We are preparing our "Year in Review" special section, which will be inserted in next week's paper. So we've been looking for quotes and photos to include on the pages of this annual retrospective. 2. We are selecting our entrie...
I blame my timing. I didn't finish my list of "21 for '21" nonresolutions until February of last year. Had I had the month of January to work on them ... Of course, when I wrote about the suggestion by Gretchen Rubin, author of "The Happiness Project," to consider writing such a list as an alternative to resolutions, I was impressed with her laissez faire approach to her own list. The things she did were marked "DONE." The things she did not do were marked "no." There were no...
In three days I will be the mother of a teenage girl. While I’ve had 13 years to prepare for this moment, I still find it taking me by surprise. Each December as Ainsley has gotten older, I’ve wondered whether I’ve reached the final year of what has been an annual tradition since she was little. On the issue before her birthday, I use this space to pen her a letter. I thank her for her patience in letting me write about her — and yours for your willingness to read about h...
My Christmas card this year is an homage to Christmases past, with a collage of my favorite shots of Ainsley visiting Santa over the years. I’ve been thinking a lot about Christmases past this year, from the little cuts my mom and I would get assembling our aluminum tree (remember the ’70s?) to our annual Christmas Eve celebration at my grandparents’ house in Dolton. My aunt, a mere 18 months older, and I would wait anxiously until it was time to go downstairs and open prese...
