What a difference a single Mickey Picayune makes. Two weeks ago, my brother, suffering from COPD caused by chemotherapy, and wholly dependent on cannisters of oxygen, awaited a lung transplant. Today, if all continues well, he will walk out of the ho...

The men’s basketball coach at my alma mater lost his shit a few days ago at the end of the game. If you follow American sports at all, you’d at least have seen or heard a headline about Coach Howard smacking the opposing team’s assistant coach upside...

My childhood was fine; I have little reason to complain: my parents were together and did their best for us, we felt loved, safe and secure. But there are some bad memories of dumb stuff I did that haunt me. I suppose some people can just shrug the d...

As a little kid, I had a weird relationship with swimming. Due to a combination of fear and my mother’s schedule conflicts, I didn’t attend lessons at the city pool as had my older brothers. They started at the age of five and got the hang of it fair...

When I was in ninth grade, a new kid moved into my neighborhood — we’ll call him “Joe” — and I was hopeful that we’d be friends. There weren’t any boys my age in the neighborhood; just two girls, and I was terrified of girls. Joe, being the new kid,...

I was sitting in the back seat of our station wagon, behind my father who was behind the wheel. My mother, riding shotgun, flipped through a magazine. My two older brothers sat beside me in the back seat. We’d been on the road for an hour and it wasn...

I decided I wanted to be a writer my second year of college. I was in the engineering school and engineering is not usually a path to literature, but, I entered the Hopwood Awards, which is a literary prize at the University of Michigan. Arthur Mille...

Did you ever have a crazy day when expectations are flipped, and just when you think one thing is going to happen, the day flips again? Of course you have. If you’re paying attention, it probably happens every day in one way or another. But sometimes...

I got a chance to visit with family during Thanksgiving and to play Euchre. If you’re not familiar, Euchre is a trick-taking card game with trump (like Bridge) using half the normal deck of cards (like Pinochle). Euchre’s one mind-bender is that the...