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It was a bright June day. Prior to that moment, I had never wielded a golf club in my 31 years of life. It was my turn to tee off, and I stepped up to the golf ball, took my first swing - and missed the ball. Everyone gave me an encouraging nod to try again. I swung again and missed a second time. I could feel the tension growing, and so I hastily swung a third time. I missed yet again. I quickly swung again, and I finally hit the golf ball, which traveled about 10 feet along...
My brother-in-law recalls a time in the early '60s when flying to a vacation destination with his parents meant wearing a suit. He was 8 or 9 years old. Everyone laughs along with him when it's brought up, because seeing a child dressed so formally for a flight these days would be something of an oddity. And yet, I have to admire the implied degree of respect for air travel that existed back when flying was more of a novelty. Now that commercial passenger flights have become...
As we celebrate our country's independence this week, I can't help but chuckle about some of the crazy holidays the world has conjured up over the years. How do you celebrate National Zipper Day or World Mosquito Day in your household? What about Count Your Buttons Day or Super Mario Day? Want to know my opinion of Sweetest Day? Just ask my wife. Father's Day, however, is a different story, or at least it has been since I became a dad some 26 years ago. I never gave it much...
We often find our best selves during our toughest moments. Unfortunately, that simple truth seems to be going the wrong way. Consider a recent morning in Hinsdale. A woman finishes her workout and gleefully punches in an order for a tall Starbucks on the iPhone tucked into her Lululemon pants. She jumps in her SUV to pick up her mobile order, which looks to be ready in three minutes. However, her mood collapses when she walks into the store and realizes the order is not...
I’ve been jettisoning stuff of late and have found it harrowing, liberating and, on this Fathers’ Day, very affirming. For too long, I avoided it: throw too much overboard, and too much of what aspired to make you “you” is lost. Toss too little, and too much of what clutters the “you” in you remains. Now, I’ve reached that stage in life where, in plumbing parlance, I’m circling the drain. I’m clinging to the porcelain with as much tenacity as I can muster, but I’ve learned that keeping too many old aspirations, withou...
Today is my husband's birthday (love you, hon!). He is a year older than me, but looks younger by virtue of his hair somehow remaining as golden as it was on our wedding day, whereas mine gets regularly shellacked with dye. It's rather annoying. My weight goes up and down (mostly up, honestly), my hair started graying before we even met, and yet my Sensible Husband has not changed one bit after almost 18 years of marriage. He hasn't even lost a single (non-gray) hair on his...
When I was 10 years old, I was the new girl at a small school. To feel better about myself, I was mean to another girl, a girl who'd been nice to me. I also kicked a boy named Jerry on the playground. I know these are little things but I'm sorry nonetheless. I also recognize that I was a scared little girl, and I temper my self-judgment with compassion. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do the same with others? Adopt a "walk in their shoes" level of understanding when we re...
One of my favorite childhood memories is looking up at the night sky with my dad. After pulling into the garage/tool shed following an evening outing, my four siblings and I would follow Dad across the gravel drive toward the back door of our farmhouse. On clear, moonless nights, he would pause, tilt his head back and point out the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, the North Star. Now I find myself wondering what was going through Dad's mind as he stood there, surrounded by kids and...
Having the Art Institute of Chicago nearby was a definite bonus of growing up in Hinsdale. Thanks to a steady cadence of visits that included Oak School class trips and the obligatory tour for out-of-town visitors, the Art Institute provided me with a world-class early education in the visual arts. "Nighthawks," "A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte" and all the Monets entranced me, every time. It has been such a joy to encounter "Water Lilies" not just in my "home town" but...
Growing up in The Region, my Dad had a sub-30-minute stretch goal from our driveway to Comiskey Park. Depending on the Dan Ryan traffic and his risk-taking appetite, this was sometimes achievable with us having lived in Munster (not the case for some clodhopper down in Griffith, Ind.). My love for the White Sox was cemented in the '70s, even though the Sox failed to make the playoffs throughout my childhood fandom. To me, the characters associated with the Sox (Bill Veeck,...
It's never too late to write a new beginning A few years ago, in a strange turn of events, my law school mistakenly published that I had died. I had not seen that edition of the alumni magazine. So, I was surprised when I suddenly began receiving urgent text messages from thoughtful colleagues and friends. Yikes! I moved and suddenly others thought the worst had happened. I was grateful to everyone who looked into the matter and found me alive and well. Nevertheless, it was...
I opened my car windows on a recent warm spring day, and, as I drove, the fresh air hit my cheeks and whipped my hair into happy knots. U2's song "40" played on the radio, and Bono's voice led the concert audience as they sang in unison, "How long to sing this song?" As I sang along, I thought about how the song fits what we're all experiencing right now - it's about a person who is suffering and praying repeatedly to be rescued. These past months, I've found myself looking...
It started out like an ordinary Thursday. Although now that I think of it, I actually remember feeling like it was a particularly peaceful weekday morning. The boys got up and to school on time, well fed and happy; I remembered to pack my daughter's show-and-tell treasures before dropping her at preschool. The beds were made, teeth brushed, dishes put away. I patted myself on the back for doing such a good job with the morning routine as I stopped for coffee before I headed...
The arrival of April 1 also brings final college decisions. Let me be the first to say, it has been a wild ride. The Class of 2021 knew that college applications were going to be like nothing ever before. But surges of applications at Top 50 universities have created what colleges are calling the "most competitive applicant pool in history." March Madness took on a whole new term in my household. The Round of 64: If you were like me and applied early to a handful of schools,...
There are two cats in my life right now. One's in Ireland and the other is in Hinsdale, and both of them have made this crazy time more bearable. Moomin is my rescue cat. Like so many, lockdown inspired me to add a pet to the household. We found Moomin at the Hinsdale Humane Society after they featured her in The Hinsdalean. She's a white-haired beauty who won't give a cardboard box a second look but can spend hours stalking an elastic hair band. She's not much of a cuddler,...
My double nickel birthday falling on Fat Tuesday had me pining for a return to the city not for spectators, but for participants. The following travelogue recollections spotlight how "bon temps" are an easy pursuit in New Orleans. NOV 1993: My Big Easy intro included a memorable dinner at Emeril's. A seat at the "Chef's Table" provided an up-close kitchen view of a young Emeril Lagasse prepping meals. The night concluded with a Neville Brothers concert at the legendary...
Waist deep in a flowerbed full of colorful zinnias, I stopped weeding. I looked up and saw a monarch butterfly and then it hit me - I was wonderstruck. Its beauty was so captivating that it filled me with awe. I often feel this way when I experience the presence of something bigger than myself. Perhaps you have felt it, too. It's easy to get lost in a nature's great splendor - a starry sky, a technicolor sunset, a summer garden in full bloom. Have you ever observed the way...
It's not as if my teenage son needs more reason to be embarrassed of me, but at lunch recently, I know he wanted the earth to swallow him alive, right there at the cash register. I had been working at home that day as a mom. A mom whose kids were about to go back to school after a summer that had started the day before, in fact, had barely even happened. As such, I was online all morning filling out forms, ordering supplies, synching calendars, buying books, etc. On this parti...
I confess I've been reading other people's mail for many of the past decades. No, I've not been opening stuff misdelivered to my mailbox. I'm talking about the letters of people famous enough to have theirs collected into books. But that's gotten me to thinking about the words of the rest of us - we who are not famous - whose stuff will never be collected into books. I've heard it said that ultimately, all we have to leave behind are our stories. I fear, by that measure, we...
Remember the old cliché about insanity - doing something over and over again, but expecting a different outcome? That's, frankly, kind of the way I've been behaving for the past year. Same stuff, different day, so to speak. To my distress, I've become accustomed to the monotony, my capacity for surprise dulled into complacency and cynicism. Nothing new happens. Notre Dame had an undefeated season, only to get crushed in their final game. Again. Someone with a name that...
In my last column, I wrote about getting drenched. I said that the sky above our family was falling and our roof was leaking. Since that column, our monsoon has thankfully passed. My family is dry, and we are together. I mentioned the buckets we placed to stave off flooding. Today, I want to tell you about the umbrellas that shielded us from the worst of the storm. They do not, cannot, mop up the messiness of our lives, collect our pain in buckets and hope it will be...
With Valentine's Day just around the corner, I have started paying extra close attention to the way the definition of love has changed over the last few decades. Over dinner the other night, my mom told me about the love story of her parents. My grandpa lived in Panama and kept a long distance relationship with my Grandma, who lived in Switzerland. He would call her every night after he got off work. But with the time difference, this would be around 3 a.m. in Switzerland. My...
When I moved my household from Washington, D.C. into storage, I got rid of about 100 books. Some were obvious choices, like the global trade textbook that was required for a class I took in 1989 but irrelevant both to me and the current study of economics. Some gave me pause, like the novel "London" by Edward Rutherford. It's an informative history of the city wrapped up in a gripping 2,000-year narrative, but it comes in at 829 pages and weighs a ton. As I went through this...
In September 2019, I thought it would be wise to get my doc's clearance prior to running 26.2 miles on a Sunday the following month. In my check up, he asked something typically not asked by a doctor - "What do you eat?" Although I ate relatively healthy at the time, he strongly encouraged focusing on a plant-based diet. He recommended some Netflix documentaries ("Forks Over Knives" and "The Game Changers"), a website (NutritionFacts.org), and a book ("How Not To Die" by Dr. M...
T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock once famously stated that he had "measured out (his) life with coffee spoons." In these parlous times, however, I've found myself measuring out my life by limited streaming series. Normally, all I do is read, but it's been difficult lately. At least, it's been difficult to concentrate on the type of fiction I normally read - that is, realistic fiction about everyday people in everyday settings having everyday problems. Honestly, that kind of wri...
