Although Pennsylvania is locked in ice, the baseball season is starting up in Florida and Arizona.  The following is the best baseball story I’ve ever written that no one has read.  It is a repost here and can be found at my website (jeff-howe.net) under “Stories” as &ldq/… Read full post »

“Keep the juices moving by jangling around gently as you walk.” – Satchel Paige

The act of walking is so basic, so elemental, so essentially human that we take it for granted.  We don’t analyze it.  We don’t think about it. We just put one foot in front of the/… Read full post »

It’s the hideous, screaming, bone jarring “BAM!” that I can’t get out of my mind. 

It keeps echoing over and over and over again in my head like a gun shot going off next to my ear.  It’s the broken glass and the sudden rudeness with which my car’s path… Read full post »

 (Sunday, October 2, represents the five year anniversary of the day that a heavily armed man walked into a one-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and opened fire - killing five young girls and wounding others.  I was less than five miles from the school house when the shooting occurred… Read full post »

At 8:30 a.m. on a blisteringly hot and humid morning – it is already 94 degrees outside - I step into the deep marble air-conditioned cool of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Carlisle, Illinois. The dry wall of cold is at first shocking, but as I become accustomed to it I… Read full post »

(Note:  Last week marked the 44^th anniversary of rioting in Detroit so severe that the effects there are still being felt.  This is an account from the rural suburbs.)

The night sky to the southeast glowed a smoldering orange the color of embers, and from the roof of… Read full post »

I have become convinced over the past 20 years, that I am destined to die a late-seventy-something old man, in a soiled refrigerator box over a heating grate, behind a dumpster.   Someone will find me frozen on a sub-zero morning, huddled amongst hamburger bags and cast-off blankets and sho… Read full post »

It is a banded, wave-rounded cobble of gneissic rock the size of a small fist.  Likely over a billion years old, it is Canadian by birth and Michigander by design.  Wet it glistens, dry it glitters: sparkling, alternating, perfectly parallel black and white bands of minerals e/… Read full post »

(November 22, 1963)

“May I have your attention please…”

The Principle’s voice over the public address system was stern but uncharacteristically shaken.  I turned  toward the 10” speaker near the door with my fellow seventh grade science students and a/… Read full post »

“Need any help?”  I call to the back stall of the otherwise empty boy’s bathroom at the local high school.  I can hear earnest rustling and the awkward “clunk” of a plastic urine bottle as a young boy struggles to pee.

“No, I’m OK,” comes the… Read full post »

There’s a young boy, about fifteen, with multiple mental deficiencies caused by a severe automobile accident when he was young.  Although physically capable and reasonably athletic, he speaks with a lisp and can only read, count and tell time with difficulty.  He is on constant medica… Read full post »

Based on all of the snickered comments, off-color jokes and endless references that we heard from adults, all indications seemed to be that girls had something very special in their pants.  What that might be wasn’t immediately obvious to us as ten year-old boys, at least not as obvious as… Read full post »

Somewhere within the greater London area right now, John Isner is sleeping.   He is sleeping the bewildered, exhausted sleep of a man who is in the middle of the longest tennis match of his life – the longest tennis match in Wimbledon history - the longest tennis match e/… Read full post »

(Milwaukee, 1988) 

Huge puddles of dark rainwater still filled the corners and low spots as I pulled off the quiet expressway and into the almost-empty parking lot of old Milwaukee County Baseball Stadium.  The wet pavement reflected the overhead vapor lamps and the skyline of the distant… Read full post »

I was driving through the outskirts of town not long ago when I saw something that made me stop and ponder.  It was an old guy, (a “boomer” about my age actually), who had stopped alongside the road to smoke a cigarette.  He had thinning grey hair and a speckled beard. … Read full post »

It’s taken me all day to process it.   Up front, let me tell you that I don’t know all the details.  I have purposely avoided the details of what happened, I don’t really want to know.  The details aren’t important.  It’s the image that lasts.

I… Read full post »

The surface, or “crust”, of the Earth is like the shell of a large blue egg that has been accidentally dropped on the floor.  It is criss-crossed by jagged fractures that separate the surface into irregular pieces, often referred to as plates.  These plates float o/… Read full post »

Global warming, like abortion, evolution and gun control, is one of those issues that automatically raises the hackles of people at its very mention.  I predict that your hackles are already raised, one way or the other, just by choosing to read this. You’re curious as to which flavor… Read full post »

In many ways, teaching is often very similar to stand-up comedy. 

In both, a natural feedback loop is set up between the teacher (comic) and the class (audience).  When energy is generated and reflected by both sides, it grows and multiplies.  Each side feeds off the other and good… Read full post »

In retrospect, looking back upon my own youth, I can’t imagine how any parent could have allowed their curious and fertile teen-aged sons and daughters to go to drive-in theaters. 

“Drive-ins” were common and enormously popular in the 1950’s through 1970’s. … Read full post »

It was a lead pipe about four feet long and about an inch in diameter.  When it hit the old man’s head it sounded like a baseball bat hitting a watermelon.  And when the old man’s crushed skull hit the pavement, it sounded like a canvas bag full of… Read full post »