I always wanted to be a writer like my dad. He was a sportswriter. Ever since he was a kid, head was mad about sports. After he got out of the Navy in 1945, for as long as he lived, he made sportswriting the center of his life.

I hated playing sports… Read full post »

My grandmother, who we called Mom Mom, lived with my grandfather, who we called Pop, two blocks up the street from where I grew up in South Buffalo, N.Y. Every Saturday morning Mom Mom would get out her giant battered aluminum mixing bowl and a five-pound bag of Pillsbury Enriched Flour… Read full post »

This is a re-post of a story I wrote in my earliest OS days. I wanted then, as now, to mark my son's birthday, a time he can't remember but one I'll never forget. He means more to me than even the most carefully chosen words can say: 

My son Grady will be 39… Read full post »

A new year is upon us, and if, as it seems to me, the future looks bleak at times, then there’s no better time to look to the past for inspiration and insight.

Writers in particular can draw on what must be the deepest well of inspiration – the words… Read full post »

A small boy and his mother braved winter winds one December evening some years ago. They walked through slushy snow to buy some milk and beer. The milk was for the boy and his baby sister. The beer was for their father, who liked to wash down his cigarette smoke… Read full post »

My fellow boomers!

Remember back in the late '60s, how intently we listened to our elders when they told us what to do and how to do it as we tried to make accountable a government gone berserk?

Remember how eagerly we wanted to hear what mom and dad and Uncle Harry and… Read full post »

Some still call it the National Pastime, though everyone knows the time of pastimes is long past.

 I’d say that tired description hardly does the game justice, because at some down-deep level, baseball is something closer to the National Religion. That idea came to me after spendin/… Read full post »

In answer to my friend Writer Adam's request asking people to tell their 9/11 stories,  I'm re-posting a bittersweet reminiscence I wrote a year ago.  I think it speaks to the ambivalence a lot of people, including myself, have experienced about why some of us need and want to remember thos… Read full post »

"Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts" -- Paul Simon

Superman has been given a complete makeover by DC Comics, in hopes he and all his partners in crime fighting will make it to the Top of the Pops again.

The guy formerly known as The Man of Steel… Read full post »

AUTHOR’S NOTE:  What follows is a re-post of an AP-style news story told from an unusual perspective. I offer it as someone who has long practiced just-the-facts-ma’am journalism and who will probably be doing so again on Sunday, when Hurricane Irene is expected to make a slow, rains… Read full post »

NFL training camp will begin within days. That means football is back from the bargaining table. This makes me happy. But there was a time when the arrival of training camp was a  pure misery for me.

Many years ago, in  the summer of 1966, I was… Read full post »

We found each other in the parking lot outside the hilariously misnomered Tiki Resort on traffic-clogged Lake Avenue in Lake George NY on the Fourth of July weekend. We shook hands then drew each other into an embrace -- a brotherly embrace if ever there was one.

Joe is my brother,… Read full post »

It was 6:30 in the morning. Soon a nurse would take my vitals and an orderly would wheel me down the dim hallway to where a guy I’d only met the day before stood ready to cut me open like a ripe casaba.

Anxiety coursed through me like a shot of… Read full post »

I was a 19-year-old college freshman who felt unduly burdened by my father’s insistence that I get a job as well as attend the occasional class at Fordham University in the Bronx in the autumn of 1969. 

Being a 14-year-old putz wasn't easy for someone who'd never planned on being one. But the mysterious introduction into my teenage body of strange hormones, the sudden emergence of an outsized honker, a generous splash of zitz and the resultant blast of teenage lonlieness provided less… Read full post »

                  Approaching Marwencol . . .

A note about this story

I wrote the story that follows a few weeks ago for the newspaper I work for, The Times Herald-Record out of Middletown, NY. It w… Read full post »

My father cleared his throat and fixed me with a serious eye.

“Let’s go down to my office,” he said.

I was only 10 years old, but I knew trouble was on its way. Downstairs was Dad’s domain. None of us were expected there, unless we had a load of laundry… Read full post »

Edwin Newman, a network news reporter whose wit and high professionalism made being a network news reporter seem a gallant, even alluring, calling, has died at the age of 91.

The New York Times obit describes him as being “genteely rumpled, genially grumpy,” a man of “constituti… Read full post »

I remember very well where I was on September 10, 2001. I was in Newark International Airport, worried that my daughter Annie’s flight to Northern Ireland would be hijacked by terrorists.

I also remember – I’ll never forget – how, while driving home that evening, my wife Patt… Read full post »

Stop me if you've heard this one.

Cain raised crops. Abel was a shepherd.

God, no longer the chatty, come-stroll-with-me--in-the-garden Guy his parents still talked about, had gone all cranky and demanding. Bring Me offerings, he tells them, in a tone that leaves no room for doubt about what… Read full post »

It looks like the fate of ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich, the bad-haired boy of Illinois, will soon be in a jury’s hands. Excuse me if I fail to be shocked at his decision not to take the stand in his own defense. Did anyone seriously expect him to do what he said… Read full post »

I never much liked the two short stories by William Faulkner ("A Rose for Miss Emily" and "The Bear") that I was forced to read back in high school. At the time I thought that was Faulkner's fault. 

I was set straight about "The Bear" on the eve of cancer surgery… Read full post »

As many of  you already know, some lucky few of us OSers spent a day  happily and usefully ensconced in the stony aerie that is Mohonk Mountain House, members of a writers' retreat. Some of us came from across the country and some from just down the winding road. Some were… Read full post »

They come to me whenever they want, these moments, arriving unbidden and with unexpected force. They can't be conjured intentionally. The instant I recognize them, they dissipate like the smoke that used to curl from the White Owl cigars he loved.

I can't even claim to recognize them when these… Read full post »