Carol’s 13-year-old grandson happened upon a week this summer, where he had no scheduled activities, camps or play dates. I seized the impending idleness, and challenged him to a miniature golf tournament. I figured since he had absolutely nothing better to do, he’d accept. And he did.    Over the three years we’d gotten […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    My son and I possess complimentary fonts of common knowledge in a cognitively dissonant sense. Meaning, what each of us know is, in many instances, something completely unknown to the other. A good analogy might be that my font of knowledge is a mile wide but an inch deep. (Thus, […]

   Taking in some of the current Olympics (I think, anyway. They’re mostly repeats because of the time difference, so they could be showing events from any Olympics for all I know), reminded me of a period of incipient midlife crisis as expressed in feats of athleticism.    Back in the late 1980s, I sought […]

Photo credit: Pete Deutschman     One thing was clear from the beginning. There’d be no kids sitting in the back seat of cars eating cold hot dogs, while the parents up front argued who’d started the fight. Even my obliviousness to facilitating the introductions was taken for granted, and everyone knew everyone else before I […]

Photo credit: Lovisa Photo   When Carol returned from shopping the other day, she saw that I had made the bed with fresh sheets from the dryer. “Thank you for making the bed,” she said, giving me a kiss. I thought, What’s up with this? She makes the bed every day of the week, and I’ve […]

   So the least sociable of both the Madigan and Champagne families is the one who decided to resurrect the reception celebrating our wedding that covid had canceled last July.   Why didn’t I let this sleeping dog lie? While it’s true that nobody can outperform the Madigans when it comes to creating social events […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan July 19, 2021 Dear Diary,     Well, Reid truly surprised me this time. In the weeks since he first said “We’re going to Iceland,” I was so expecting him to suddenly look up from the book he was ignoring me with and say, “I said what and we’re going where?” Like […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    Carolyn told me about a trip she made to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. She traveled with a tour, but she went alone. On the flight home, she told me she said to herself, “I can do anything.”    As Carol and I were flying home from a bucket […]

Laughter has many benefits such as it helps burns calories, boost the immune system, releases endorphins and many more.

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