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I never asked my dad, who's been gone 20 years, about the time he spent in the Army in Korea. He served there between 1958 and 1960, a good five years after the war ended. I found a photo album after my mom passed away filled with pictures of his time in the service. I wish I could look at it with him. I didn't want to make that same mistake with my birth father, Bob Short. He has shared some stories about his time in the Marines in Vietnam with me since we first got in...
I’ve been thinking a lot about the seasons of life. Perhaps it’s the sign of a mid-life crisis (arriving late!) or a symptom of the pandemic’s extended unwind. Maybe it’s my resistance to change, which surfaced early, according to the story my mom used to tell about how I would cry every time she put on sunglasses. On Monday, as I watched our 2-year-old next-door neighbor toddle over and try to decide whether she wanted to say “trick or treat,” I couldn’t help but think of...
I never saw Christina Aguilera's original "Beautiful" video when it came out 20 years ago. I'm not sure I would have appreciated it if I had. But as the mother of a soon-to-be 14-year-old who sees herself as anything but beautiful, I found the remake of the video - released in honor of World Mental Health Day and the 20th anniversary of her album "Stripped" - to be profound. The new video dramatically illustrates the pressures kids are under today, with images from...
"Don't worry, be happy." You can still hear it, can't you? "Ooh, ooh, ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh, don't worry Ooh, ooh, ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh, be happy." Ah, Bobby McFerrin, so much easier said - or sang - than done. Which is why authors like Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who penned "The Power of Positive Thinking," and Dale Carnegie, author of "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" have sold millions of copies. And why magazines like Real Simple publish special editions...
While reading Sarah Ban Breathnach’s best-seller “Simple Abundance” years ago, I first encountered the term “secret anniversaries of the heart,” a line from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Holidays.” “The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart ...” The phrase struck me when I read it and is on my mind this week, even though the anniversaries of the heart I am celebrating are not particularly secret...
So let me get this straight. A group called Local Government Information Services - linked to conservative Republican Dan Proft - decides to print what is essentially campaign advertisements disguised as a newspaper. The Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, whose press does commercial jobs in addition to printing its own paper, prints the piece. And now the Daily Herald and its owner, Paddock Publications, are the bad guys? What? Let me be clear. I am not a fan of what I would...
I wrote a column once about the cost of raising kids and got an estimate from my financial planner on the price tag for four years of college starting in 2027, the year Ainsley graduates from high school. The projected tab to go to Northwestern at that time was $475,000. Almost half a million dollars. At first I was shocked. Then I tried to convince myself that she seems more of a state school kinda girl. A visit to Illinois Wesleyan University for homecoming one year...
"Right now, it's like this." I was introduced to this phrase earlier this week while listening to one of the Teacher Talks on the Ten Percent Happier app. "Duh," you might be saying to yourself. "Of course right now it's like this. How else would it be?" Or it might have reminded you of another phrase often used to characterize current circumstances: "This too shall pass." So how is it for you right now? My right now is Wednesday afternoon, with deadline looming and my...
I hope all of you love reading the work of our contributing columnists as much as I do. You’ve seen some different — but familiar — faces this summer as former contributors penned some guest columns to fill our annual summer break. Now it’s time to return to our regularly scheduled programming. And, as is the case every September, I must bid farewell to the writers who are moving off the rotation. This year that is Bret Conway, Mistie Psaledas, Kelly Abate Kallas and student...
Despite the appearance of pumpkin spice coffee and baking mixes in the grocery store and the start of "meteorological fall" today, I continue to mark the beginning of my favorite season with the autumnal equinox (Sept. 22 this year). That said, I appreciate the fact that the kids are back in school (unless they go to Hinsdale Central) and that Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer. With those facts in mind, it seems appropriate to reflect on the highlights of summer 2022....
I still remember the outfit Ainsley wore the first day of kindergarten - a navy short-sleeved T-shirt dress with fuchsia and yellow trim. I bought it for her weeks before school started and might have asked her if she liked it. But that was the extent of her input on her first-day-of-school attire. Things proceeded like this quite nicely for several years. In first grade, she wore an adorable light blue dress with white butterflies. In second grade, a sleeveless shirt...
If you are a woman of a certain age, perhaps you've seen this Facebook post. "To all my female friends from 40 years and up ... most of us are going through the next phase of our lives. We're at that age where we see wrinkles, gray hair and extra pounds. Menopause has already appeared or just waiting around the corner. We see the cute 25-year-olds and sigh. But we were also 25, just as they one day will be our age. What they bring to the table with their youth and zest, there...
We concluded what I have dubbed “Summer of The Beatles: Part 1” (Paul McCartney concert, two American English performances, one by the Beatelles) with a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland this past weekend. I should note early on, lest she feels overlooked, that my sister and her husband live outside of Cleveland and the weekend was a wonderful chance to visit them as well. But we’ve known about the special Beatles exhibit at the Rock Hall for some time now a...
Typing up obituaries was part of my very first reporting gig in 1989. The way things were structured at the time, the new reporter in The Doings newsroom inherited the responsibility — and kept it until the next new reporter was hired. The person who preceded me, if I remember correctly, had to type up obits for about a month. I did it for a full year and was oh so happy to let the assignment go. But life in so many ways is circular, and when Jim Slonoff and I started The H...
Working remote is nothing new. I've done it while I've been sick, while my husband had COVID and the first two years my daughter went to sleep-away camp in Holland, Mich. But I've never worked remotely "on the road," so to speak, where I've stayed in a different hotel every night. That's what I did last week as I accompanied my husband, Dan, on sales calls. We dropped Ainsley off near the shores of Lake Michigan Monday and hit the road Tuesday, traveling some 558 miles to...
Signs provide us with all kinds of information. "Slow, children playing" lets us know kids reside on a particular block. (Since kids live on many blocks that don't have such signs, these warnings also might indicate worried parents live on the block as well.) Signs indicating downtown Hinsdale and the Robbins Park subdivision are on the National Register of Historic Places demonstrate the importance of the village's past to Hinsdaleans - or at least to those who are...
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 ......
