A Christmas Eve tale of changing tides

The greatest gift of any holiday may be to remind us how far we have traveled down the road since the last time that holiday rolled around — or even over the past half-century or so of holidays.

Last Christmas was the first Christmas I spent without my wife in almost a half-century. She had passed away from a Valentine’s Day stroke in 2018, and I spent last Christmas day in Florida, paddling alone in my kayak, feeling the tides change.

But this Christmas, almost two years after Gail’s passing, I had other thoughts on my mind.

You don’t have to win the lottery to get a trunk full of dough

Never trust everything a fisherman tells you. His story may start believable enough, but always hold on to the tag-end of suspicion, just in case his tale plummets past plausibility, pulling you into the gulch of gullibility.

That’s why, as I stood in Southwestern Michigan in October, listening to the guy casting into the Black River as it flowed into Lake Michigan, I kept listing for the moment his tales started to stretch beyond believability.

Out-of-style leather jackets—collect ‘em all!

I slipped the leather jacket on and walked to the upright mirror, with a chorus of three female “Oo-o-ohs” echoing behind me. Always a good sign.

It was a beautiful leather jacket, the kind I could never afford when they were in style decades ago. The leather was soft and supple (“like buttuh” some might say) and it fit me perfectly. It was the bomber style I love, with snap closures at the wrist, leather collar, and zip-up front. Slash pockets on the side, and two internal pockets with buttons to close them for security. Even a zip-out liner for extra warmth on cold, windy days.

Sinking my teeth into the Tooth Fairy’s essence

It was a tooth-popping weekend when the grandkids came to visit, and one more chance to learn how far out of the loop I have fallen.

“Do you want to pull it?” I asked Olivia as she sat at the dinner table, wiggling that little bicuspid in her lower jaw. She had three teeth in her head that were ready to jump ship, but this one was likely to be the first to weigh anchor.

American democracy in the crosshairs

As frightening as it is to imagine a madman with an assault weapon targeting indiscriminate victims, it is even more harrowing to imagine a weapon like that in the hands of a madman who views himself as a patriot.

Someone, for example, like major league umpire Rob Drake, who on October 22 tweeted this threat: “I will be buying an AR-15 tomorrow, because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!! #MAGA2020.”

More than one way to skin a … cantaloupe?

When I read that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) urged all Americans to be a little more sensitive with our animal metaphors by banning phrases like “bringing home the bacon,” or “your goose is cooked,” I reacted as I think any sensitive American would.

You would cry, too, if it happened to you

I really don’t think I felt all that old when my great-granddaughter, Anastasia, was born last September. Oh, sure, there were all those “great-grandpa” jokes everybody thought were so funny, but among all the other emotions flooding through me — pride, joy, love, wonderment — I think “old” was curiously absent.

But things change.

A weekend’s jaunt in the way-back machine

I took a time-machine trip with a friend a couple weeks ago.

Well, to be honest, the machine was actually a 2012 Subaru Outback. But it had no trouble carrying us back into the past.

It’s time to take an adult look at our childish toys

When I was a kid, Mom had a little pearl-handled pistol that she kept in her top dresser drawer. I wasn’t supposed to know where it was — but I did. And sometimes when Mom and Dad were in the yard I would sneak into their room, take the gun out and play with it because it was prettier than any toy I owned.

I don’t know if it was loaded, because I never pulled the trigger. It may have had a safety that would have kept it from firing if I had pulled the trigger, but I don’t know. I just pointed it here and there and pretended I was shooting bad guys. I squinted one eye and stuck my other eye into the end of the barrel to see what it looked like down there.

The spinning hoop goes round and round

As I stood on stage last week with my band, little brown-eyed Isabella smiled right in front of us, twirling her hula-hoop around her hips. She hula-hooped through our entire 90-minute show.

And so near the end of the show I called for the band to swerve out of our set list so I could sing “Brown-Eyed Girl” and dedicate it to her. The crowd of more than 800 erupted in applause for this energetic little 8-year-old girl — the real headliner of the night.

If you don’t believe in psychics, prepare to be chilled

My sister-in-law went to see a psychic recently, and when she called to report back to me how the meeting went, I had my reservations.

After all, there are psychics, and then there are psychics. The fake ones should be put in jail for lying to us about their phony abilities. The real ones should be put in jail for not telling us when an earthquake or tornado is about to hit.

All roads lead to Rome … or something like that

Like most Americans, whenever I feel a bit anxious and lost, I trust my faith in a higher power — my car’s navigational system. She always seems to get me back on track.

I call her “she,” of course, because her voice is female. And I’m glad she’s female, because who wants to put all your faith in some disembodied guy’s voice when you’re lost? We men are idiots when it comes to finding our own way, because we always think we can get there without asking directions. So that directional dashboard dude is probably just as lost as I am and is faking it to preserve his fragile manhood.

Searching for footprints that last forever

A couple months ago, while a friend and I drove through western Illinois, I realized that we were only a short drive from Macomb, where I had gone to college at Western Illinois University in the late 1960s. We decided to swing west and check out the university, which I hadn’t visited in decades.

But besides visiting the campus, high on my list of things to see was the little cottage at 435 N. Chandler Street.

Tracing the “enemy of the people” to its true source

Today — as with pretty much any other day — I heard our president call American journalists “the enemy of the people.”

He says it so often you would think he invented the phrase: “Enemy of the people.” He says it every time he refers to the press, that most American of institutions that our Founding Fathers insisted on protecting when they drafted our First Amendment, the most urgent document of them all, guaranteeing our most important rights that most clearly define what it means to be an American.

Are there really so few with our full 32?

I went in today for my bi-annual dental cleaning. (Or semi-annual? Bi-sex-monthial? I don’t know. I go in every six months — you do the Latin.)

Anyway, the deal went down the way it always does — Sue, the dental hygienist, asks me to open my yap, and after taking a gander she says: “Wow, wisdom teeth!”

Pondering the potential of a pee-poll

My buddy Jack is a high school science teacher — the kind of teacher you wish you had when you were in school. That’s because he goes out of his way to make science real and interesting in an everyday way.

Take his asparagus study, for example.

Skating past the winter of “Game of Thrones”

It’s here at last — the final season of “Game of Thrones!” Winter is here, when we’ll finally find out if things will end up happily or disastrously for…for…

OK, I’m faking it, because I’ve only seen a couple episodes of GoT over the past seven years or so. But I’ve read plenty about it — or at least just enough to know that it’s cool to call it GoT.

An Easter mystery: The case of the sketchy sleigh-coon

Easter this year was my first full-contact, no-holds-barred Easter in a long time.

It’s not that Easters didn’t “happen” for me over the past several years. But this was the first one in years that I spent in the good old-fashioned way: inundated by an infestation of kids.

The problem with picking the perfect super power

My son Dave and the grandkids spent last weekend at my house, and over breakfast we got around to talking about all the important things, like what kind of super power we’d like to have.

My grandson Jack jumped immediately to telekinesis, the power to move objects with his mind. “Well,” I said, “of course we’ll have to have some limits to our powers, right? I mean, I’d hate to find that you plunked the moon into my back yard.”

“OK,” he said, “what are my limits?”

Dealing card games with the old men in the club car

You might spend a lifetime trying to get it right, and go to your grave knowing that you’ve fallen short.

Or you might nail it when you’re still just a kid, and not know until much, much later in life that it’s the best you’ll ever do.

Becoming a writer — miracle or destiny?

I can’t decide if it’s a miracle I became a writer, or if I was destined to become one.

After all, I had plenty of practice when I was a kid growing up in Elmwood Park and had to go home after school at John Mills Grammar School to write 500 times on sheets of lined paper: “I promise I will never throw snowballs on the playground ever again.”

A full year of “Love. Sorry. Thanks.”

Someone once said to me, “Everybody, every day, does the very best they can do.”

At first I couldn’t agree, because the world is filled with slackers, malingerers and lazy louts who are just getting by. You’ve seen them, right?

Strolling home after someone else’s sacrifice fly ball

Maybe it’s because baseball’s spring training is here once again, and maybe it’s because baseball is America’s sport, and maybe it’s because America’s sport keeps spawning all those great metaphors to describe life in America.

In any case, one of my favorite baseball metaphors keeps coming to mind these days: “Just because you were born on third base, it doesn’t mean you hit a triple.”

No more fighting like cats and dogs about it — proof is in

Despite all the topics that divide us into warring tribes — border walls, Russian hijinks, gun control — it’s nice to know that two recent studies have settled one long-standing argument once and for all:

Dogs are better than cats.

The haunting — this time it’s personal

My ceiling fan is haunted.

I know, you might not believe in ghosts. I didn’t either, until an old Buick I once owned decided to lock and unlock its doors every now and then throughout the night. The garage was right beneath my bedroom, so I could hear it every time it happened.

Navigating winds and tides at Christmastide

I spent this holiday season in Naples, Florida, where my wife and I bought a home in 2009 to escape the bitter Chicago winters.

On Christmas morning this year, I slipped my kayak into the water by the Jolley Bridge at Marco Island and paddled the Big Marco River westward toward the Gulf of Mexico, tugged by the falling tide. The wind was northerly — neither help nor hindrance just yet.