November 15th, 2025

 Today we have a Hemingway quote on The Morning Chalkboard.

There comes a point in a man’s life when the only competition left is the reflection staring back at him while he’s brushing his teeth at four in the morning. You can blame society, age, ex-wives, kids, colleagues, your parents, the world, whatever. Deep down you know the truth... the real fight is always with your former self.

That is why the quote today rings true.

It isn’t pretty.

It isn’t poetic.

It is pure Papa.

The daily grind of trying to be just a hair better than the guy you were yesterday. That is definitely no small task. Especially at this stage of life when the body creaks, patience thins, and the miles on the odometer can’t be erased.

It took me a few years to realize that the world doesn’t hand out do-overs. We all get one sunrise a day, and you either use it or lose it. Today’s sunrise is at 6:41 AM, same for everyone in Chicagoland.

Some folks roll over.

Some folks complained.

Some folks get up and try again. Because they know damn well that yesterday doesn’t owe us a thing.

Every scar, every mistake and every stupid decision are dead weight if carried like an anchor. Instead, use them as stepping stones, then you are walking forward, not backward. Just the quiet resolve to show up, grind, and improve by inches is true nobility.

Take today's quote for what it is... a mirror.

Look at it, own it, and outdo the person you were yesterday.

Inch by inch.

Day by day.

Mother Nature gives us a crack at warmth today. Store it up and rub it all over your body. The moon is waning into newness. Use that as a chance at a do-over. Every month has a new moon and an opportunity to find newness as well.

November 14th, 2025

 The distance to here is short.

As I got older, I started realizing how true that is. All that running around I did as a kid, all the wandering I did in my twenties, all the detours, all the screw-ups, all the victories, every curve in the road eventually dropped me right back at my front door.

The whole map of your life folds tighter and tighter until you can see that the thing you were trying to reach was never that far away.

That is the part nobody tells you when you are young. They say chase the whale, chase the dream, chase the thing on the horizon.

Ishmael didn’t understand what the hell he was chasing until it had already swallowed half the ship. He opens Moby Dick with “Call me Ishmael,” and the rest of the story is just one long reminder that some quests take you halfway around the world just to show you the truth you already knew. The distance, in the end, is always shorter than the journey you imagined.

... And the distance to here, this exact spot, turned out to be pretty damn short after all.

It is Friday and it is going to be gorgeous in Chicagoland. Gusto with friends, astonishment with the world, flavor in the crock pot and love between the sheets.... book it Danno!

November 13th, 2025

 There is an awkward tension in that line on the Chalkboard today, “Waiting sharpens the truth ahead.”

Patience is supposed to be noble, virtuous, the sort of thing our grampa preaches about from his rocking chair. Let’s not bullshit ourselves here. The clock isn’t slowing down for any of us. Every sunrise comes a minute later, every sunset a minute earlier and the truth doesn't sharpen with time. It isn’t some grand revelation waiting at the end of the rainbow. It is the simple stuff that we have been circling for decades.

We wait for a “better moment.”

We wait for “after the holidays.”

We wait for the New Year like it is a magic reset button.

...But you and I both know the New Year doesn’t hand out miracles.

It doesn’t bring goodness wrapped in a bow, and it sure as hell doesn’t fix the parts of us that we have ignored for eleven months. January 1st shows up whether we are ready or not. All it really offers is a clean slate... nothing more, nothing less.

The truth is sharpened long before the ball drops. It is sharpened in the way we handle disappointment, in the way we get back up, in the way we love the people who rely on us. Especially on the days when we are bone ass tired.

Maybe patience isn’t about waiting for a moment to change. Maybe it’s about giving yourself enough quiet to hear what is already there. A New Year doesn’t deliver truth; it just turns the lights back on so you can see what you have been avoiding.

Forty-eight days until that calendar flips into 2026. Don’t wait for it to save you. Use the time to sharpen what already matters: your work, your purpose, your kids, your faith in something bigger than all this useless noise.

The truth ahead doesn't feel sorry for itself and it sure as hell doesn't wallow in the mud.

November 12th, 2025

 Short and sweet on Humpday.

I put a sun with a smile on the Chalkboard this morning and Chicagoland will feel the warmth and security of Dick Butkus for a high temperature.

It is French Dip Day, and I will always have a fondness for the Broker’s Inn French Dip. Served on a crusty loaf of bread with tender pieces of beef perfectly seasoned. Either plain or with mozzarella and green peppers. Always accompanied by a bowl of rich au jus.

Where can we get a good French Dip today?

Alright you Chalkheads. Get some sun on your face this afternoon before it quickly disappears into the horizon. Making room for a glance at the Northern Lights.

November 11th, 2025

 Today is Veterans Day, Armistice Day, Remembrance Day.

For it was on this day, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month that The Great War would cease. It is also on this day that my family remembers the life of PopPop, who passed two years ago today.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Lest we forget..................

November 10th, 2025

 The first job I had on the trading floor was with a little outfit called Index Futures.

I was a runner in the grain room. I proudly wore a gray trading jacket with yellow piping on the lapel. I was a snot-nosed kid trying to figure out where my life was pointed. I worked alongside a guy named Hank. Back then, I didn’t have the words for it, but looking back now, Hank was almost certainly on the spectrum. He was a smart kid who was just wired a little differently.

The desk was run by three guys in their early thirties who thought they were wolves, but really, they were assclowns. They picked on Hank and tried to shove me around too. I remember thinking... How are these grown men still acting like eighth graders?

One Saturday, my Oldman and I sat down for breakfast at the diner in downtown Oak Park, right across from the bank. I told him I was ready to quit. I could easily find another job on the floor.

Before I could finish the sentence, he shut that idea down.

That was when the father part kicked in. He told me something I didn’t want to hear but needed to:

Anywhere you go in life, you are going to run into a brown-noser, a backstabber, someone who talks tough but folds quick. There will always be a prick with no integrity and a selfish agenda.

You don’t run from that.

You learn how to handle it.

You learn how to carry yourself around it.

So I stayed.

I stopped taking any nonsense from those thirty-something “adults.” I kept an eye on Hank and in time, those three jagoffs were gone. I built a life down there, a career, a name. Hank stayed on the floor for a long time. He passed a couple years back. I think about him more than I expected I would.

Funny thing about age: a thirty-two-year-old once looked like a grown man to me. Now I know they were just kids who hadn’t figured out how to act yet either.

Here is the lesson today, Chalkheads...

...You don’t always get to choose the room, but you damn sure get to choose the way you stand in it.

My neighborhood woke up to the first snowfall this morning. Just a dusting, but enough to remind us winter doesn’t ask permission. If you need a soundtrack for a November Monday morning like this, cue up Gordon Lightfoot. Might as well feel the season and recall those twenty-nine lives.

And tomorrow, get your flag out. It is Armistice Day.

Lest we forget.

November 9th, 2025

 I turned to the guy standing next to me in the trading office last week and said, “It’s crazy. I can remember things from fifty years ago clear as day.”

That is when it hit me. Fifty years ago tomorrow is when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior. I remember Fahey Flynn reporting about it on Channel 7. That is how I learned where Lake Superior was on the map, tracing it with a little kid finger above the lake that wasn't far from my front door, Lake Michigan. I remember the Bears had a rookie running back named Walter Payton. Within those cold months of late 1975, I learned about shipwrecks and greatness. Not much later a new poster of Sweetness hung above my dresser. I wish I still had that poster.

But that’s the thing. In your head, fifty years ago is Prohibition and the Depression, not Watergate.

Not Billy Beer.

Not "Jaws" or "The Bad News Bears."

Not my first trip up the Sears Tower.

Not the Christmas I got “The Duke” football from Santa. That ball was as hard as a cannonball. If you landed on it wrong during smear-the-queer, you would have a bruise in the shape of Texas for a week. So we beat the hell out of each other with a Nerf instead. That new lime colored foam thing that could survive a war at the neighborhood playground.

Fifty years ago was also the time that I started noticing boobies. Turns out Marcia Brady had them the whole time, I just finally noticed once "The Brady Bunch" went into syndication. Carly Simon had banana ones, Raquel Welch watermelon ones. That is what sucks about being a grown up...

... you can't compare breast to fruit anymore.

Back to why this came up. Twenty-nine men met Heaven’s Gate seventeen miles north of Whitefish Point, Michigan. I can still see my Oldman explaining the whole thing to my Ma in the living room. They were ancient to me then, maybe late thirties. My gramma, who ended up living to 106, was only sixty-nine at the time.

And in that same era, my bedroom was being painted red, white, and blue for the Bicentennial coming up in 1976. My dresser, my walls, even the plywood flag my father cut by hand. America was everywhere.

But fifty years moves fast.

The Fitzgerald is just a footnote now. The people who raised me are gone. Walter ran for touchdowns until 1987, and his poster eventually was replaced by Farrah Fawcett. Staring down at me like a sun you couldn’t stare at too long.

One day you are throwing wobbly passes at the playground. Next thing, you’re the guy in the trading office telling stories from the olden days.

Those twenty-nine seamen have been strolling in eternal rest for half a century. Maybe when I get there, I’ll see Farrah? I'm sure Walter is still breaking tackles.

My parents who ended up divorced are spending eternity together. Which means that I will end up in the same place with the mother of the Shepkids. The joke is on us Chalkheads. Maybe instead of watching the timer, we need to love more, hate less and forgive one another?!?!

Snow is starting to fall lightly in the Divorced Dad District. The Bears are home on a cold, stubborn November afternoon. Veterans Day is this week, the day the world agreed to stop killing each other. Lest we forget.

Put the scraper back in your car. See the beauty in the first blast of winter.

And remember...

...fifty years ago, we were the kids skitching behind the bumper of a car.

Time flies. It always has.

November 8th, 2025

 People are giving me heat for stepping away from Facebook.

Let me make this plain: everything is fine in the Divorced Dad District. Nobody needs to send in a rescue squad. I didn’t leave because I’m broken. I left because I could feel myself slipping into the same trap I complain about in my own home.

I would have the phone in my hand checking Facebook like a reflex. Couldn’t go ten minutes without scrolling. Hard to bark at Hazel about TikTok or Fritz stacking fake blocks on MindCraft when I’m doing the adult version of the same thing. If you are going to set rules, you’d better follow a few yourself. Otherwise, you are just the guy who talks and doesn’t do.

So I hit delete.

Not the account.

Just the app on my phone.

I needed a little distance. A winter mode. A chance to tighten the bolts and get quiet for a while. Not everything needs to be screamed out loud like we once did on the trading floor.

I’ll tell you something that surprised me: once I said I was stepping back, people came out of nowhere to tell me how much this Chalkboard means to them. I didn’t know it was landing like that. I didn’t know it was the first thing some folks look at every day. I didn’t know the words were traveling farther than my kitchen wall.

A thousand hits a day, plus everyone on Facebook, and half of you never said a word until you thought it might stop. That meant something to me. More than I’ll admit publicly. Oh wait, I just did!

So don’t panic. I’ll still be here every morning. Coffee, quiet house, chalk on the fingers.

You’ll still get your JumboLove.

Just not in real time.

November 7th, 2025

    He is well beyond the days of his youth.

Not old, not young, not senile, not naive.

Just in that stretch of life where the miles show in the legs and the memory holds a thousand closing bells, a thousand fast markets, a thousand mornings when the trading floor opened like a bat out of hell. He came up in the noise, in the sweat, in the pit where a man’s voice and his word mattered more than any spreadsheet.

Open outcry was its own religion.

The floor was a church with quick hands, sharp eyes, and fast instincts. The weak didn’t last, the unsure got run over and those who stood, day after day, year after year.... those were the men who built something real.

He was one of them.

Then the world changed.

The trading pits went quiet.

The floor emptied out.

They turned the screens into the battlefield and took away the roar. What once was a storm of humanity became a whisper of keystrokes in a room lit by monitors. He adapted, not because he wanted to, but because that is what a working man does. He doesn’t get the luxury of quitting when the game changes. He adjusts the stance, squares the shoulders, and digs in again and again.

Now he works in a trading office tucked miles west of the lake. A place where on clear days he can still see the city’s outline, just a faint blue ridge on the horizon. The distant building doesn't have a statue of a Greek goddess on the roof, but inside, every day, he shows up.

He puts in the hours.

He calls the bids and offers.

He fills the orders.

He does the job.

And the job has taken its toll. The long grind, the early mornings, the market cycles that don’t care about fairness, loyalty, or how hard a man tries.

Because he is from the era where a man keeps his chin up, even when the lungs burned. Where you didn’t show weakness, not in the pit, not in the locker room, not at the kitchen table. You walked forward, even if the steps hurt.

But he is not done.

He wants a few more good years. Just enough time to show his kids what finishing looks like. Enough time to stand on his own two feet and not let the last chapter be written by someone else’s hand. He wants to retire where he is, not bouncing around like a quarterback trying to squeeze one more season out of a worn-out arm in some other town, wearing a jersey that never quite fits. He wants to walk off the field with the same colors he fought for.

“What are the damn chances?” he says.

About fate.

About curves in the road.

About how life is shaped by things you can’t see coming.

The chances are whatever they are. Fate doesn’t explain itself. A man only controls how he responds.

So he laces up again tomorrow. Shoulders the weight. Does the job.

Not to prove them wrong.

To prove himself right.

November 6th, 2025

 Let’s get back to a normal Morning Chalkboard.

The last couple days I did my best impression of Ernest Hemingway. I’m a big adjective guy and Papa didn’t have much use for them. It was tough to bang out seven-hundred-word stories without modifying my nouns.

Many of you might have received an email from me in the past. You noticed that I didn’t use pronouns, but had adjectives in my signature.

I use gregarious and grateful as my two adjectives.

That is how I roll.

I don’t cut myself short with he or him. I go for the gusto and let you know that I am a sociable and thankful man.

“Redbeans and Ricely yours, John S. Shepley (gregarious/grateful)”

I will have to admit that I stole that line in my signature from Louis Armstrong.

Damn, it’s three o’clock in the morning and I want a plate of redbeans. Actually, a bowl of chicken and sausage gumbo would hit the spot right about now.

Let’s get this Thursday started. I’m going to make some coffee and stand under the remainder of the Beaver Moon. I do it every month. It gets a little cold in the winter and I can’t afford much more shrinkage at my age.

Anyway, TMI…. Go get some nachos today and find something astonishing.