I’ll admit it right up front: I’m flummoxed by Christmas, especially the gifting part. I have three granddaughters, and I swear there are times when I think I can buy each of them a box of cigars and they’d all be happy. The oldest is 11, yet I imagine the three of us lighting up […]

Hanukkah celebrates a miracle. When the Maccabees defeated their Syrian overlords and reclaimed the Temple in Jerusalem 200 years before the birth of Christ, the victors lit a lamp they thought had only enough oil to light for a day. Well, it burned for eight and both a miracle and tradition were born. Figure the […]

   As I’ve already suggested, Carol’s family is close – intimate really. So when her daughter April called one morning asking, “Can you come over and smell my son’s wash,” even that didn’t strike me as inordinately “close” for this brood. I thought, sure, there are no skeletons in this family’s closet that have to be […]

   Then there are the family Thanksgivings that don’t even try to be special. They just naturally are. The Madigans Thanksgiving is in that category.    All I ever wanted from my own family’s Thanksgiving traditions was a TV tray table, a football game and getting through dinner without anyone hurling a combination of threats or fists […]

   I grew up believing the MLK maxim that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe, though, I had another thought. The arc of the universe is actually a sine wave, not an arc. It oscillates back and forth, not bending to anywhere. It might be better in the […]

   And no, this is not some sinister reference to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Nor is it an attempt to measure our marriage using the metric system. But earlier this week, Carol and I celebrated our 1000th day anniversary. How do I know this, and why am I choosing to measure my marriage in days […]

   Volts divided by watts equals amps. I’ve learned that now, even though I wouldn’t know a watt from a volt or an amp, were one to suddenly jump out of a wall and bite me in the…    I’d learned this tidy bit of electrical math as a result of a fried electrical outlet. We don’t […]

   Carol was explaining to her daughter a recent couch move in our living room. Pointing toward the end of the couch where I’m normally found and happened to be at that moment, she said, “This one sags.” Mind you, I was wearing a shirt which color matched that of the couch, a shirt that clings […]

   I thought this would be an emphatic but easy “no!” This time Carol had won tickets for something called the Willie Nelson Outlaw Music Festival. If anything sounded like a MAGA magnet to me, this was it. But after my third “no!” It was clear Carol wasn’t even listening to me anymore.  “It’s a festival. […]

   My mother grew up in an orphanage, and my father grew up in the bayous of Louisiana. Both their childhoods spanned the Great Depression. That harshness of that experience did not fade as they slowly clawed their way into a materially sufficient lower middle class. Not wanting their children to go without the way they’d […]