I hope you had a pleasant holiday, however you celebrate. We had high hopes around here. Both our adult children were going to spend Christmas with us, arriving on Christmas Eve. But we had another guest arrive first. My wife was stricken with food p...

The other day I helped my son move into a house here in Lansing. Directly across the street, there was a fire in the front yard. It was past eight o’clock in the evening and pretty damn cold out. I came outside to grab more stuff out of the car and p...

I’ve always been a sucker for get-rich quicks schemes. I’ve never fallen for a brazen pyramid scheme but I have nothing against them. It’s just that I want to get in early enough so I can score and get out while the getting’s good. Perhaps it’s more...

Marv Albert, Hall of Fame sports broadcaster, was accused of sexual assault back in 1997. He lost his job (at least for two years, which was significant back when white men were rarely held accountable for such things). This morning, I had to look up...

Forty years ago, after graduating high school, I worked diligently at playing slow-pitch softball. It was something I wanted and wasn’t afraid to do. Slow-pitch softball was my sub-culture of choice. Some people like to ride motorcycles, some collect...

When I was in high scholl, once both my brothers had moved out to college and beyond, my father wanted to save money in the winter and closed off our attic bedroom. I slept on the pull-out couch in the “TV” room, which was next to my parents’ bedroom...

I went canoeing with my wife over the weekend. We want to canoe more often but we’re not really canoe people. It came up repeatedly during the summer: “We could go canoeing…” But there was always something else going on, some “thing,” just enough dis...