On a quiet evening a short time before my first wife, Cindy, passed away, we engaged in a conversation about the future. We were looking ahead to retirement. Cindy had recently lost her parents. My father had died 20 years earlier. A few months earlier, I purchased larger life insurance ...

I’m going to make a safe assumption: most of the world’s population today cannot remember a time when there were no electronic games. This is based on two facts: (1) the world’s median population is approximately 30.9 years old (meaning half of the world’s population is older than ...

It wasn’t smart to bet against Dorothy S. Miller, my fifth-grade teacher at Washington Grade School in Bloomington, Illinois. She said many memorable things, including one day in civics class: (sic) “It’s the duty of good citizens to read a daily newspaper.” Every day at 8.20 a.m. we ...

The waitress had just refilled my coffee cup when a familiar character slid into the opposite side of the coffee shop booth. It was my old buddy, Eb Griper. I’m not saying Eb has a sour personality but he can curdle a pitcher of cream just by staring at it. “Morning, Eb,” I ...

While chatting with a high school classmate recently we discussed some childhood and school memories. He said he could remember back to his pre-kindergarten years and I said I can remember bits and pieces of when I was two years old. That’s nothing special but it is uncommon. ...

Many of the toys kids play with nowadays had not been invented when I was a kid. In fact, today’s kids probably would not recognize many of the ways we entertained ourselves in the 1950s. As the days heat up I think back to the summers of my childhood. These memories often include the toys ...