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The Heat

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  The heat was oppressive — no surprise, it was July. No relief. There were showers, but it was not water that flowed from their pipes. Crammed together, whimpers climbing the wooden walls, no escape. Hope lost for some, ready to go, ready for the relief that only death could bring. Thoughts went to the apartment in Warsaw — not a mansion, just a three-room third-floor walk-up. Cold water to cool oneself. How one missed those simple things, the things we all took for granted. The smells of cooking swirling up the stairs: onions, cabbage, meat. One could never tell from the aroma what kind of meat was cooking. Here, in the now, there is no doubt. How this heat crushes the soul — stripped of humanity, stripped of a future. There were days I begged to be taken. I would catch my reflection in the window and not recognize myself: a poor waif, beads of sweat dripping down a shaved head, hollow eyes staring back. I prayed for a breeze, only to recoil as the wind carried the smell fr...
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The Pot of Gold

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                                           Ramblings of a Retired Mind                                                The Pot of Gold As the rain began to let up, hope stirred in me. Today, I thought, could finally be the day. Since moving to Polson and settling onto our lot with its ever-changing mountain views, we've grown to love the vivid rainbows that follow a good storm. But we'd been waiting for the one. The full, sweeping arch that a sky like this deserves. Back in the Chicago suburbs, rainbows were more rumor than reality. With houses fifteen feet apart and trees crowding every sightline, you might catch a whisper of color through the branches, but never the arc. Never the whole thing. This is a special day, a d...
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Nasty

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind Nasty I have been thinking about the word nasty for the past few days. At some point in life, everyone encounters a nasty person. What troubles me is that over the past decade, we as a society seem to have grown more tolerant—perhaps even more accepting—of nasty behavior. We have conditioned ourselves to believe that it is acceptable for someone to behave badly so long as their nastiness is not directed at us. It is self-preservation in its purest form. We look the other way. Sometimes we even applaud it. In the arts, we have long rewarded those who make a living by being nasty. Comedians, for example, often stand before paying audiences and hurl insults at the very people who came to be entertained—laughing all the way to the bank. Don Rickles comes to mind. Those who knew him personally insist it was all an act, that he was, in fact, a warm and caring man. That may well be true. Still, it is easier to appreciate the performance when you are not...
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You know you should

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind You Know You Should We all fall into this at one time or another. We stumble onto a new “must-watch” television series, fall in love with it, want more of it, and want everyone we know to watch it too. Inevitably, when speaking with relatives or close friends, the subject turns to our latest obsession — a movie, a series, something we simply can’t stop talking about. I am 100% guilty of this. Over and over again. If we are honest with ourselves, we realize that part of it is the desire to belong. We want to be part of the “in crowd.” No one wants to be the outlier, the person who doesn’t get the reference. So we proclaim to anyone within earshot, “You have to watch this!” Of course, this behavior isn’t limited to movies or television. It extends to music — the new artist we’ve discovered or the obscure performer from forty years ago we have suddenly unearthed and now feel compelled to introduce to everyone we know. Books are another arena entirely. ...
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Hold my Hand

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind Hold My Hand Moving after retirement isn’t something most people do lightly—especially when you’ve lived in the same place for nearly your entire life. Yet that’s exactly what my wife, her twin sister, and I did. We left the northern suburbs of Chicago and moved to western Montana. And yes, plenty of people thought we were crazy. Leaving Everything We Knew All of our friends were in Chicago. Most of our relatives were there too—including those who now rest there. My wife and her sister had never lived anywhere else. Aside from a two-year stint in Stamford, Connecticut, neither had I. We had lived in our home for thirty-five years. Thirty-five years of memories. Thirty-five years of accumulated “stuff.” Letting go of a third of what we owned was both freeing and painful. We also had a cabin in Galena, Illinois, which we ultimately decided to sell, furnished and ready for someone else’s memories. Our house sold the day before it officially hit th...
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“I Know I Am, But What Are You?”

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind “I Know I Am, But What Are You?” Since I was twelve years old, I have had little tolerance for hypocrisy. The word itself comes from the Greek hypokritēs , meaning "actor" or "stage performer". In the New Testament, it described those who outwardly displayed religious virtue while inwardly being insincere — people who wore a moral mask while living by entirely different standards. Even as a child, something about that unsettled me. What once felt like youthful outrage has matured into a deeply rooted conviction: integrity matters. Pretending to be something you are not — especially in matters of faith, morality, or justice — does real harm. It erodes trust. It distorts truth. It weakens institutions. And today, hypocrisy feels less like an exception and more like the status quo. We see it when leaders preach love while practicing exclusion. We see it when officials dismiss science until it becomes politically convenient to embrac...
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An Ethical Will

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind An Ethical Will A message of love, values, and legacy In our faith, there is a tradition known as an Ethical Will — a letter of the heart, written not to distribute possessions, but to pass on values, lessons, love, and blessings to those we leave behind. In recent years, I have spent time reflecting on my own life and on the lives of my children and grandchildren. Those reflections brought me back to a short letter my father left for me to find after his passing. That letter was brief, but it was powerful. My father wanted me to know how proud he was of the man I had become. He wanted me to know that although he was gone, he hoped that, in some way, he would still be watching over his grandchildren and over my wife and me. He wrote about the lessons he had learned in his life and about the importance of living with honesty, truth, and loyalty to the ideals of our faith. The letter was written after the passing of my mother, his wife of forty-eigh...
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Time

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind Time Where has the time gone? How did it get this late already? Where did the day go? Time, as the saying goes, waits for no one. Theories That Hurt My Head There are, broadly speaking, three theories of time: realist, relational, and idealist . The realist view holds that time is a physical thing— time is relative , tied to space, just as Einstein described. The idea that time slows as speed increases is fascinating, but also enough to give me a migraine, so let’s not linger there too long. The relational view suggests that time depends on the sequence of physical events in the universe. In an empty universe, time wouldn’t exist at all. Where the realist says the universe has a clock, the relationalist says the universe is a clock. Thinking about who—or what—started that clock brings on a dull ache along the top and sides of my head, so it’s probably best to move on. That leaves the idealist view, which claims time is a construct of the...
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Say it Enough

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Ramblings of a Retired Mind Say it Enough  Yesterday, we witnessed yet another American tragedy of our own making. A mother. A daughter. A friend. Renee Good lost her life during a confrontation with federal ICE agents. Almost immediately, the federal administration moved to define the event on its own terms—casting the victim as the villain and shaping a narrative that aligned neatly with its worldview. We have seen this before. History Has a Way of Repeating Itself On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, four student protesters—Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Schroeder—were shot and killed when twenty-eight Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on students protesting the war in Southeast Asia. Sixty-seven rounds were fired in thirteen seconds. Nine others were wounded but survived—an often-forgotten fact. Though eight guardsmen were charged with violating civil rights, all were acquitted. The Nixon administration quickly blamed the student...
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Death Among Us

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                                             Ramblings of a Retired Mind                                            Death Among Us   Living With Death, Choosing Life Nothing stirs emotion quite like death. It is the one certainty we all share, yet it arrives without a timetable or warning. We never know when it will come—only that it will. We encounter death constantly. Sometimes it touches our lives directly; other times it reaches us through news headlines and distant tragedies. We witness loss involving strangers and people we love, and the difference between those two experiences is profound. The Distance of Public Tragedy Recent weeks have been filled with reminders of how fragile life can be. Acts of violence driven by hatred, live...
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Our First Christmas Tree

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind Our First Christmas Tree When I married a fallen Catholic, I quickly learned that Christmas comes with a rulebook—one that is invisible, ironclad, and absolutely nonnegotiable. My wife’s family is wonderfully complicated and just scattered enough to make every holiday an exercise in logistics. She has four sisters and one brother, and every single one of them had their own Christmas traditions. Separate celebrations. Separate locations. No exceptions. So when her brother announced he’d be bringing his family up from South Carolina to spend Christmas in Chicago, my wife made what seemed like a perfectly reasonable suggestion: “Could we all celebrate together, just this once?” The answer was swift and unanimous. No. Since her brother and his family would be staying with us, I figured they deserved a proper Christmas—tree, lights, the whole deal. The problem was simple: we had never had a Christmas tree. Ever. “Well,” I said, “let’s get one. We’l...
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I Can Change

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind Can I Change? The question hit me today: Can I really change? A simple inquiry, yet somehow endlessly complicated. I’ve always believed that part of our purpose in life is to keep learning, seek new experiences, and grow. But for all its importance, change is hard—much harder than I like to admit. Some days it feels as though I’m living in a permanent state of self-renovation. This drive toward self-improvement shows up everywhere. There are the shifts I know I need to make, and the personal adjustments I owe my wife. Then there are the subtle behavioral tweaks—the ones that affect friendships and everyday interactions. The feedback I receive is rarely cushioned: “Bob, you’re talking too much.” “Stop interrupting me!” Statements delivered with the sting of inconvenient accuracy. Still, I’m willing to put in the work. I’ve changed before, even when I fought it at first. For years, I terrified passengers with my driving, brushing off their ...
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The Glance

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind The Glance A Year of Change The year I turned twenty was a trying one. I was studying History with a Pre-Law minor at Roosevelt University in Chicago. My sister was on the verge of graduating from the University of Illinois. With both of us grown and busy, my parents decided it was time for one last family vacation . Two years earlier, they’d traveled through Italy and fallen in love with it. Now they were determined to share that love with us. And so, in May 1972, we embarked on a multi-city road trip that would stay with me for the rest of my life. I took the wheel; my father became navigator. Into Italy Our flight from Chicago took us through a chaotic layover in Paris—customs lines, hustling crowds, and a near-missed connection. But eventually we touched down in Milan in the gentle light of early morning. Within minutes of picking up our rental car, Italy offered its first challenge: a five-lane traffic circle with no clear escape route. Aft...
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Refugee

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 We never really know when we’ll meet our closest friend. Many people drift in and out of our lives, but only a rare few become the ones we can trust completely—the ones who understand us without needing an explanation. Back in 1974 , I was working days in an institutional food factory and attending college at night. One morning, I showed up to find a new guy had joined the crew on the loading dock—the place where tons of sugar, flour, and other staples came in to be turned into food for schools, hospitals, and prisons. He was tall and lean, with a long shock of hair and a spark in his eye that told me he didn’t quite fit the mold. We hit it off almost immediately. Before long, we were inseparable during breaks. His sense of humor matched mine perfectly, and within a week, we’d developed our own nicknames for the rest of the crew—our little inside jokes that only we understood. Did I know then that this man would change my life? Not a chance. But through him, and later through ...
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The Stroke

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind Warp Speed Stroke—formally known as a cerebrovascular accident—runs deep in my family. A Childhood Memory In 1965, my parents moved my sister and me from the only home we knew in Chicago’s Rogers Park to Stamford, Connecticut. We went from neighbors stacked on top of us to an acre of land with a pond out back. I was in heaven. We arrived in October, right after my Bar Mitzvah and my thirteenth birthday, beginning our new life out East. The following spring, my father’s parents came to visit. But at that age, treasure hunts through the vast three-hundred-acre forest beside our house with my best friend, Fang Ferguson, were far more appealing than slow afternoons with grandparents. One afternoon, Fang and I were watching a baseball game in the den with my grandfather when my grandmother headed toward the kitchen—and collapsed face-first to the floor. At first, we thought she’d tripped on the step. But no—Anna had suffered a stroke. An ambulance wa...
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The Award

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind The Award I knew she was sick. Her body was frail, but her mind remained sharp. She may have been down to ninety pounds, but nothing was going to stop her from seeing her beloved grandson receive his award. The trip from Chicago to Washington, D.C., would be difficult—airport lines, cab rides, and long days of exploring our nation’s capital. She knew her limits. She would go slow, steady, and never let anyone rush her. From an early age, everyone recognized my son’s remarkable artistic talent. It came naturally to him, and his grandmother was his biggest cheerleader. Her house was filled with his drawings, proudly displayed for anyone who visited. The award—presented by Hallmark through the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards—recognized his detailed drawing of a busy street scene. She couldn’t have been prouder. The trip to Washington would be unforgettable. The Journey The winning artwork was to hang in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, home to the Co...
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Some Weeks

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  Ramblings of a Retired Mind Some Weeks In my retired life, the weeks often pass with predictable regularity. A text reminder tells me it’s garbage day, so it must be Tuesday. When I finish brushing my teeth and see my pillbox is empty, I know it’s Sunday—time to refill it again. Most weeks go by like this: small routines, simple markers of time. Yet each day still brings something new—a fresh idea to write about, a new book to start, or a grandchild who needs a ride home from school. But the past few weeks? Anything but ordinary. So unusual, in fact, that I sometimes wonder if they really happened. The Mini Cooper Incident It all started about six weeks ago when I decided to clean my beloved Mini Cooper convertible. During the winter, I keep it in the garage with the top down—mostly so I can track where dust, dirt, and stray candy wrappers (thanks to my grandchildren) have settled. One day, I spotted a wrapper poking out from under the back seat and decided to retrieve ...
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