Careful the tale you tell That is the spell, Children will listen…    I still remember the moment, as if it had just happened. I’m 17, and I’d been passing around to classmates some absurdist prose I’d begun experimenting with. The reaction I was getting from them surprised me. Big laughs. Really big. That explosive […]

Photo by Carol Madigan    Carol decided to go to Urgent Care after a bee sting she’d experienced a week before had continued to bother her. (Never mind she stepped on the bee while walking barefoot on the beach. Barefoot? On a beach? I mean the sand, the surf, the whole idea of bare feet […]

Photo credit: Roberta Deutschman    Carol’s second grandchild celebrated his 13th birthday this past weekend. He is half-Jewish and half-Catholic, which means he feels twice as guilty all the time. It also means he likes to eat. And so it came to pass, that for his celebration of achieving manhood, he would get in touch […]

   April 22, 2021    Dear diary,    So, Reid’s latest “adventure” appears to be Iceland. He says it’s the first country to open itself up to tourists who’ve been vaccinated. I get it, but I’m not sure whether he’s thought through some of the details. (In fact, in all my travels with Reid so […]

   Mike Madigan died on this day in 2017, on a treacherous stretch of Orange county’s Ortega Highway, two days after Carolyn Marquardt entered Seattle’s Swedish Hospital to begin treatment for a virulent leukemia that would claim her life less than six weeks later. Without any idea of it at the time, Carol and I […]

   One of the great things about travel with me is that you never have to regret missing something you should have seen. Since I prefer to travel without a plan, there’s nothing to miss. Back in the 70s, I traveled to Paris four times and never visited the Eiffel Tower. Never felt I missed […]

   The recently concluded Masters tournament was the first one I’ve watched with interest, but not passion. I’ve lived in cold climates, where this tournament, held during the second weekend in April, conjured strong feelings of springtime and getting my own clubs out of the shed. Not this year. If a sport is capable of […]

   I had trouble comprehending the bill from the Palm Desert-area ER I recently received on that Spring Training trip I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I’d spent all of two hours in the ER, during which blood was drawn, an EKG administered and a hemorrhoids ointment prescribed. The bill was for $5405. […]

  Len Kasper has left the television booth, where he’d been the play-by-play broadcaster of the Chicago Cubs for the past 16 years. He left to become the play-by-play radio announcer for the Chicago White Sox. Radio. Kasper said it has always been his dream to do baseball on the radio. There’s nothing more Old […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    When I was a boy, in the weeks leading up to Opening Day, I’d read my Chicago White Sox yearbook over breakfast every morning. My baseball heroes growing up were not Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris but Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, two players many of you might never have  […]