I bring a milkshake every other we… to an old man in a nursing home, a refugee from Germany who paid me 50 cents to cut his grass when I w… a kid in Chicago after WWII.

Jesus, can we talk? Some folks say you’re coming back any day now but many of them have been saying that for years. They say it could happen tomorrow, or maybe next week, and they’ve al...

She’s at a flower show miles away arranging roses in a vase very carefully.

Couples age and a sign of age is w… the husband hires someone to shove… and the wife hires a cleaning lady… Sometimes the wife doesn’t like th… and the husband doesn’t like the c…

I don’t see her often since she died but when I do it’s eerie over there at dawn or dusk.

Sometimes you sit for days sucking yourself in praying the right words will fall in your ear toboggan over the whorls

In my all-boys school sixty years ago there were two boys who were different. All four years they walked to classes together, books

Thirty years ago, long before ISIS started executing Kurds, Muslims and Christians, I hired a Pakistani Muslim as an art director in Chicago. I was an Irish Catholic editor putting out ...

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...

It’s your anniversary so you’re thinking steak but your wife wants ramen so you go to a nice place and order the fancy ramen

Ten years ago, when they were tykes just in their 70s, Melvin used to tell Emma eat your Wheaties

You had to have a Schwinn to lead this pack of boys riding bikes full speed baking under the Chicago sun laughing after senior year

I lived in the attic back then, and late those evenings I had to s… and couldn’t afford to go drinking I’d run down to the deli and buy bagels and smoked lox.