You can learn a lot, both true and false, in a dingy all-night diner where old men gather at a table in back

Rudy in his wheelchair gets around pretty good. He has a good job and transportation via a special van. He shops at local stores and everyone is nice except at the drug store where the ...

I never remember year to year but then some morning in March I’ll walk out in the yard

He slaughters his hamburger steak with a fork and a butter knife, massacres ringlets of onions again and again thumps catsup all over

“Damn the vernal equinox! Full speed ahead!” is all that Cootie Murphy would ever say when he sat on the last stool at the end of the bar in The Stag & Doe Inn. He wouldn’t say it very ...

On holidays I hear from Paul, who’s 80 if a day, who may have won his war on poverty without help from his friends. He won’t accept a cent.

In a long marriage couples communicate in so many ways, often in silence. In recent years I rise very early and now leave post-it notes

They were refugees, too, back in the Forties, settled in Chicago, learned English, some a lot, some a little,

Take it from Martin, if you live in an old house, as much as you love it, bad things happen Despite maintenance,

A homeless man hangs himself from a tree at night in the city to close out the year. At dawn a passerby uses

Old Sam on his deathbed says he’d rewrite his life if he could. He’d do so many things differently… be nice to all his wives if he cou… but luckily they had died before h…

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...

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.