Three times a day a train roars through a field a farm away booming like an Angus bull looking for companionship.

Tim Murnane was born to parents who lived in a small brick bungalow in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Chicago. His father worked as an electrician for Commonwealth Edison Company ...

Like the poor the sparrows we will always have with us, my neighbor lady tells me as she feeds the birds

An hour before dawn the paper is out on the lawn white in the moonlight a trumpet dozing after a long night in a jazz bar

I’m not saying my father hated the English, God forbid. If he were still alive, he’d hate to hear me say that. He’d correct me right away and say he didn’t hate the English. Truth be to...

It isn’t a flophouse where Fred lives now but he calls it that a month after moving in and seeing his fellow

We have something in common, a fellow I talk to now and then. We’re about the same age and perhaps the only ones in the diner who think our past lives are interesting. So when the two o...

The scruffy old man and his white poodle on a long red leash were neighborhood icons years ago down at the corner

Some things you can’t undo. A remark, perhaps, you can retract or try to with an explanation. But a certain look can burn forever in the mind

It wasn’t long after her mother died my wife asked if her father could live with us. We had an empty apartment upstairs. Dad wouldn’t be much trouble, she said. He was old now and had d...

This time Wilma is ready for the bastards jimmying her front door, coming back for more. The first time she was asleep,

Through the nursery glass Carlos Montero peeks at Consuela, his twelfth, in the arms of a nurs… Pink as a peony with brilliant black hair,

We’re upset when vandals desecrate a cemetery and disrespect the dead not so much when doctors vandalize the womb

Although it snowed a little Wedne… Jane’s hyacinths are blooming. And in the yard she saw this morni… 50 robins hopping in the sun. Some flew in couples into trees