June 30th, 2025

 Last week, the car I just bought took a shit on me.

I brought it to my guy over at the Riverside Garage. He gave it a once over and told me the job was so big, he had to kick it to a bigger shop. He is honest as the day is long. I had just fixed the blower for the A/C and heat fan the week before. Two hits in two weeks on a car I just bought in late winter.

To put the cherry on top, I was driving home from the Southside Saturday night. I didn’t feel like taking surface streets, so I jumped on the 294. Somewhere along the way, a piece of trim near the windshield ripped off and flew into the expressway. I caught it tumbling in the rearview like a plastic tumbleweed.

So what did I do Sunday afternoon to collect myself?

I walked over to my local tavern, a solid Irish pub and sat down for a cold draft and some peace of mind.

About halfway into the pint, a woman walked in with a stack of flyers and a determined look. She went straight to Miro, the bartender, and asked if he was the boss. He hesitated but said yes. I figured it was business.

It wasn’t.

Her name was Barb. Her daughter had gone missing. Recently discharged from the nearby hospital with postpartum depression. She often came by the Chinese place next door to the pub, so Barb was canvassing the block. She asked if she could tape a flyer in the window.

I felt a wave of shame roll through me. I was feeling sorry for myself over a busted water pump, while this mother was out here, desperate to find her baby.

I told Barb her daughter, Anitra, who she lovingly calls Grace, would be in my morning prayers. She teared up, thanked me, and said she believed in the power of prayer.

After she left, I sat there with my beer in hand and felt a jolt. I'm sure it was my Oldman giving me a "you’ve got to be shitting me, son" straight from his eternal rest. Heaven is much closer than 220 South Lombard, which is just up the block in Oak Park.

All of it.... the timing, the conversation, the name Barb, a sacred family name. The postpartum connection, which I’ve always believed changed the course of my ex-wife’s life...

...it wasn’t just coincidence.

It was one of those signs from Heaven. And God has a way of delivering them like a steel-toed kick to the nuts when I'm in a "woe is me" mood.

I will drop three grand this week to get Francine the Ford Flex back on the road. That’s just life. Things break, you fix them, and move on... until the next thing breaks.

But that mother?

She might not get to fix anything. She might not get to hug her daughter again. Car maintenance pales in comparison to search parties and a possible funeral plan.

That glass of beer changed meaning halfway through. A glass emblazed with the Sox emblem. Which only added to the evangelical lesson that I was experiencing. Now Father Bobby from the Southside was involved in this signal from heaven

I finished my beer, had one more and went home to make George dinner. Before I handed him his plate, I gave the big magnificent son of a bitch a tight hug that lasted longer than usual. He asked me if I was alright and I told him that I loved him.

Something Barb might not ever get to do again.

Everything is temporary.

Cars.

Problems.

Even Keith Richards will play his final blues riff one day and Willie won't be on the road again.

So, as your Monday gets underway, say a prayer that Barb finds her baby girl.

And keep your eyes open Chalkheads for dimes on the curb and signs from heaven. They are out there and they are astounding...

June 29th, 2025

Another month draws to a close and summer has hit full stride. It is hard to believe 2025 is already halfway in the books, it barely feels like it has begun.

The only proof is in the calendar...

...we have moved through winter into spring and now the Summer of 2025, but it feels like I just put the Christmas tree away yesterday.

Years that end in “5” have always carried weight for me.

1975, I was nine. My parents were splitting up, I changed schools and I was learning that life doesn’t always go according to plan. But that same year, a new running back brought electricity to a Bears team still trying to find its footing out of last place.

By 1985, I was nineteen, caught in the limbo between adolescence and adulthood. That same running back was a seasoned pro who finally reached the mountaintop. I was still figuring out which way was up.

1995 brought early morning opening bells and late night last calls. I was driving a Cadillac, I bought a leather couch at Marshall Fields and I was standing in a trading pit making a decent living. I didn’t realize how good I had it. I had the world on a string and I was sitting on a rainbow.

2005, I was a newlywed on the edge of fatherhood. The White Sox brought home a title, and for a while, everything felt right.

2015 found me with three kids, a full home, and a marriage beginning to show its cracks. I was deep in the joy of parenting and the confusion of everything else.

Now it is 2025, and I don’t have the hindsight yet to sum it all up. What I do know is that I’ve gone from a young man to middle age and now into whatever comes next...

... something Sinatra called the autumn years.

I’m not looking at the box scores every morning. I can’t even tell you who won the last Super Bowl. I’m not looking ahead to 2035 with dread. I’m hoping by then, the Shepkids are standing tall in adulthood and I’ve transitioned gracefully from commodity broker to a man with more mornings on the porch than the pit.

Life moves fast. The decades turn over like pages, and each one teaches you something you didn’t know the last time around.

So here is to the start of July. The start of another chapter, maybe a quieter one, but no less meaningful.

Finish June strong you Chalkheads. Celebrate liberty and freedom this week. Keep the beer cold, check the propane and for heaven’s sake, change your bedsheets.

June 28th, 2025

     I could be snotty and say my life has been something Shakespearean... grand, tragic and layered with poetic meaning.

Though I would lean more David Mamet than William Shakespeare.

No iambic pentameter, but vulgar dialogue with a cynical, street-smart edge. Think Glengarry Glen Ross, but on a trading floor with Old Style bottles scattered on the stage.

That famous passage from Macbeth has been with me since I had to remember it in high school.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day… Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more…”

It hits differently as I get older. I have realized that most of life is spent in the quiet moments between tragedies and punchlines. That I often carry the weight of every yesterday, learning to dress it up with humor and hindsight.

If my life were a play, it would not be a polished Broadway run. It would be a one-man show in a store front theater with folding chairs and a flickering neon light from a laundromat. A man talking to the ghosts of his own memories, chasing streetcars, lost parade routes, 24-hour diners and daydreams. Wrestling with the thin line between growth and self-delusion. It would be the story of an immature character trying like hell to grow up and rewrite himself scene by scene.

There would be plenty of laughs built in, but right behind the laughs would be the tears nobody sees. The ones that show up during intermission, when the house is dark and you’re alone in the wings wondering if the audience will still be there after the next monologue.

Maybe that’s the goal now?

Not perfection, not applause, but just putting on the damn play with the right balance of comedy and tragedy. Telling it like it is and not bullshitting the audience. Giving the people a few honest lines, a couple laughs and a good cry before the final curtain.

Alright theater goers, today’s sunrise already opened the curtain at 5:18 AM.

You’ve got stage time until 8:30 PM today. Strut around with passion as your conquest for a windmill leads to astonishment.

June 27th, 2025

 It is already the last Friday of June...

Our life.... flies by so quickly. We are slotted into a stretch of time like a bookmark in the middle of a chapter that we didn’t get to start and won’t get to finish.

I was placed on this path during the last part of the 20th century and walked it into the first half of the 21st. From climbing trees while Elton John sang through WLS to watching the Weather Channel before I go to bed, before the streetlights even flicker on.

That is the arc. That is the slide.

Most of the ride, it seems, we are meant to suffer. The rest of it, we are masking that pain, but I’m done with the mask and I’m damn well done worrying about the pain.

I have seen the evangelical right hijack one party and the socialists put the other in a sleeper hold. I watched my baseball team, my football team and my hockey team win it all, but my basketball team fell down this week. Still, I keep watching. That’s the thing that we always do, we keep rooting for those teams from our youth.

I get this strong urge to call someone on a payphone. Not a contact. Not a screen name. No caller ID, I want you to guess who’s calling.

I want to hear my mom pick up the line and shout, “WMAQ is gonna make me rich!”

.. and for a moment, believe her.

Give me a Larry Biittner card flapping in my spokes. Give me a world where I don’t know what a boob feels like and a French kiss is still a mystery.

I want to get yelled at for leaving my plate on the table. I want to throw a tennis ball against the front stoop and have my Oldman yell at me from the porch.

I want my mom cutting up my hot dogs and putting a plop of ketchup... yes, ketchup on my Hong Kong Phooey lunch plate. I want to watch a game on a TV with rabbit ears and not give a damn about not having cable television yet.

I want Orion Samuelson to tell me where pork bellies are trading and Wally Phillips spinning an Ellery Queen mystery before school.

My muscles ache now.

My breath ain’t so deep.

My hair is wiry and my skin is starting to spot just like Aunt Tillie’s did, but I am still here.

It is already the last Friday of June 2025. Next June, we will be getting riled up for the semi-quincentennial. 250 years of this wild, stupid, brilliant American ride.

And me?

I went from little league

to my first solo CTA ride into the Loop

to popping my cherry

to my first lap dance

to my first steak at Gene & Georgetti

to my first diaper change

to receiving emails from AARP.

All of it, just like that... tucked into this sliver of history. From one century into the next.

Friday night, maybe I’ll sit out back, listen to the ballgame on my transistor, spill a little mustard on my shirt and yank an Old Style out of a cold bath of ice. Gershwin on low in the kitchen, Sacred Heart on my mind and Shabbat peace humming through my heart.

We’ve done it, haven’t we?

We made our parents proud.

We didn’t make it all the way perfect, but we showed up and showing up is half of the battle.

We made sandwiches.

We gave rides.

We bought a Weber grill.

We tucked them in with all of our heart.

We said, “I love you” even when it burned.

Now all that is left is to leave this motherfucker a little better than we found it and maybe, just maybe, we can make someone else feel what we felt when the phone rang and we ran to answer it, not knowing who it was, but hoping it was someone who loved us.

Astonishment.........................

June 26th, 2025

 Dear George, Fritz, and Hazel,

Your mom turns 48 today.

That number caught me off guard, not because 48 sounds old, but because 24 feels like it was five minutes ago. That’s how old she was the first time we celebrated her birthday together, back on June 26th, 2001. We’d been dating for ten months, and I had it all planned out.

I drove out to Hinsdale before sunrise to pick her up for work. I brought her coffee just how she liked it, a card, and a birthday present sitting shotgun. That morning, instead of hopping on our usual separate trains, we rode in together on the Eisenhower, side by side. Watching the early morning sun dazzle behind the skyline.

We worked on the bond floor of the Chicago Board of Trade that day, and after the market closed, we sat outside on the biergarten at Ceres, letting the day settle. The sun caught your mom’s face in a way I’ll never forget, making her squint and smile all at once.

That night we met PopPop and JoJo at Butterfield. It was the first of what I thought would be many birthdays together.

I didn’t know how long we’d last. I just knew I wanted to grow older with your mommy.

The last birthday we shared was her 40th on June 26th, 2017. We went out with one of my buddies and one of her girlfriends, both stood next to us at our wedding. None of us knew it then, but that would be the last birthday dinner your mom and I would ever share together. The last dinner period.

Romance has a funny way of coming in like thunder and going out like a soft rain. We won’t light candles on the same birthday cake anymore. We won’t take those early morning drives into Chicago anymore. However, that doesn’t mean our love has completely vanished. It just changed shape and became the three of you.

Your mom has known me for half of her life. I won’t know her for half of my life until I turn 68. Maybe I’ll get there and we will be friends again? Maybe we won’t. All that matters is that we love you three pain in the ass cheeks...

But what I do know is this:

every laugh,

every fight,

every diaper change

every quiet cup of coffee we shared gave way to something far greater. The three of you.

Love,

Dad

June 25th, 2025

 My Oldman would have blown a gasket if I told him I made friends online.

“You gotta be shitting me, Moose?

You have never met these people?”

That kind of thing just didn’t make sense to him. To him, friendship was sacred ground, you had to earn your way onto it. It was gospel that a man knew the difference between an acquaintance and a true friend. He used to say, “You can get through life with just a couple dear friends. That’s all you need.”

He walked that line. He was dear to a few, acquainted with many, and had no use for pretense.

He wouldn’t have understood this online buddy business. The truth is, I barely do either. I ask the Shepkids where they met someone and they say on Mindcrafts. If you don’t know their last name or their birthday, they don't count as friends.

That was Dad’s measuring stick.

On my 21st birthday, my Oldman gave me two heavy crystal beer mugs etched with a Yeats line:

“Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”

That quote will always rattle around in my head like a nickel bouncing in a warm Falstaff can.

I feel for these kids raised on iPhones and robbed of social skills by Covid lockdowns. We were lucky... we could walk outside and pull together enough kids for a baseball game at the park or a round of smear the queer on the high school football field.

I never told my Oldman that I tried the online dating scene. He would have come unglued. But truth is, one of the first dates I had after my Exile west of Mannheim turned into one of my dearest friends. She tried to give me her heart, but I wasn’t strong enough to hold it. So, we remained dear friends and she has been part of my foundation ever since.

Today is her birthday.

Happy birthday, Maureen.

I have been blessed with a damn good collection of friends. Many who have been better to me than I’ve been to them. Some that I once called on a rotary kitchen phone. Some I ask Siri to ring for me now. I could still recite every number I knew before 2003. After that, I’ve got to scroll my contacts like I’m looking for a lost sock.

I daydream of gathering all my people together in a field somewhere. With a keg truck, a barbecue pit, and a garage band playing Foghat really loud and off key.

We are all wearing togas and drinking panther piss beer through beer bongs, laughing till we hurt. That, to me, sounds a whole lot like heaven.

It is Wednesday already and I am making peach cobbler for the ShepKids...

...just a can of peaches, a yellow cake mix, and butter.

June is slipping out the back door, See you at the kegger in July.

June 24th, 2025

 “If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice.”

I have been thinking about this line throughout most of the night. For some of us, especially the ones raised on cereal, sitcoms, and silence…

…what we sacrificed was never a choice.

It was already baked into the deal. Survival meant you figured things out because no one else was going to do it for you.

I’m a Gen X man.

That means I belong to the generation that grew up when the American family was coming apart at the seams. Divorce wasn’t just a statistic, it was a Tuesday afternoon. In my case, it meant my dad was in and out of my life, more gone than present from the time I was ten until I became an adult. He was around for visitation weekends and the occasional man-up moment, but the day to day was handled by my mom. Just the two of us. Beginning on the Southside of Chicago and down to the Broad Ripple neighborhood in Indianapolis.

Let me tell you that my Ma was a pioneer. A divorced woman in the Catholic Church during the 1970s. That wasn’t just rare, it was damn near scandalous. There weren’t support groups or hashtags or blogs. There was shame, judgment, and a whole lot of guilt. My Ma handled it the best she could and didn’t crumble. She went to work, she paid the bills and she raised me the best she could with the tools she had.

While she worked late, I was home alone. I had a key around my neck and a pantry in the kitchen. I vacuumed the carpet, scrubbed the bathtub, made dinner occasionally and learned how to be fine without help.

I wasn’t neglected.

I was entrusted.

I was the man of the house before I had armpit hair.

I didn’t just learn chores.

I learned life.

I learned how to care for a home, how to bake a cake from scratch and how to prune roses without bleeding out. Between my Ma and my Gramma, I was handed every domestic skill a man could ever need. I knew how to fold a fitted fucking sheet, hem a pair of pants and clean the crapper like it was the holy grail. When I needed answers that didn’t come with an instruction manual or I couldn’t ask my mom or her mom, I had Playboy.

I had my first subscription when I was thirteen. I thought I was pulling a fast one on my mom. Decades later, she told me that she knew all along. She was just proud that I paid the bill on time and didn’t let it go to collection like I did with the Columbia House fiasco.

That was her way…

…let me explore on my own, but do it responsibly.

That kind of upbringing shaped me. It made me independent, maybe too independent . Gen X men like me didn’t grow up needing women to survive. We didn’t look for someone to cook, shop, clean or mother us. We already had that covered.

Our emotional needs?

We buried them under sarcasm, sarcasm under humor, humor with carnal knowledge learned in Asa Baber’s column in Playboy magazine.

I didn’t get married until my mid-thirties. Married a woman eleven years younger and who grew up in a house with a maid. That should’ve told me all I needed to know. We played house for a while, like a couple kids with a brand new EasyBake oven. Unfortunately, playtime ended and when it did, I moved back East of Mannheim Road, carrying only what I came with…

…my independence, my life lessons and the echo of a latchkey swinging across my chest.

Today, I’m closer to seventy than forty. I don’t pine for a do-over. I don’t wish I took a different path. I was raised in a crucible that forged men who could live alone, love hard, and walk away if they had to. I may go to my grave as a latchkey kid, but I won’t go bitter. Unless I meet a woman like the one in that John Prine song, “In Spite of Ourselves,’ someone who laughs at my busted wiring and lets me laugh at hers, I’ll stay a latchkey kid just fine.

Because what my Ma taught me, what my Gramma molded for me and what that lonely adolescence instilled in me…

…was how to be whole all by myself.

Me, Han Solo, Eric Carmen and Gilbert O’Sullivan.

It is Tuesday and I’m already in…. in a daydream.

June 23rd, 2025

  It is going to be ninety-five degrees today and the sun will be smiling.

The word today is Stewardship.

Lately, I have been thinking about what it means to be a steward. Not an owner, not a king, not the first or the last, but someone who has been handed something to take care of for a while.

A tighthead prop wears the number three jersey, one of many who have and will wear it. It isn’t about glory, but about grit, duty, and respect for those who came before.

The mayor of Chicago isn’t some political deity. They are just one more name in the long ledger of caretakers watching over the city by the lake.

Farmers tend to land passed down and when their clock runs out, it passes again.

Homes we live in? They were someone else’s once, and they will be someone else’s when we leave. We only dress them with our lives for a short time.

So maybe Hemingway was right. “No one you lost is ever truly lost,” because we are all part of the same unfolding story. The same line of succession.

Whether it is a jersey, a tractor, a public office, a teammate, a spouse or a house on a corner lot in Oak Park or Broad Ripple….

…we are only holding it down for now.

Take care of it while it is yours.

June 22nd, 2025

 Some folks will walk into a courtroom or a gymnasium and already have their minds made up. That’s what Judge Taylor was getting at with Harper Lee’s quiet warning that most people aren’t searching for truth; they’re just hunting for confirmation.

Same could be said up in the rafters of old Market Square Arena.

Slick Leonard didn’t waste time trying to convert people. He just called it how he saw it… Boom Baby!

And in doing so, he made believers out of all of us. He didn’t care about what people thought. He knew the soul of the game, and he spoke it fluently.

Judge Taylor gave us wisdom wrapped in patience. Slick gave us grit wrapped in a leisure suit and a raspy growl.

They both taught us that the real fight, whether it was on the hardwood or in the hearts of men…

…is about seeing what matters and listening past the noise.

So today, I give a nod to both the bench and the bench coach. To the ones who knew that integrity doesn’t need a spotlight…

…just a platform.

Boom Baby…. Bring it home tonight Pacers.

June 21st, 2025

 I’m grateful this morning...

...grateful that a heavyset guy in his fifties like me isn’t on any prescriptions. Maybe it’s because I’ve been keeping an eye on my sodium and sugar… or maybe it’s because today is National Martini Day.

That’s right.

Maybe a few well trimmed gin martinis have quietly kept the blood pressure in check and the sugar demons at bay. I’m a gin guy, and I’ve been in the game long enough to know the difference between stirred and shaken. I’ll do either, depending on which bar utensil I can reach first.

Yesterday marked the longest day of the year at fifteen hours and fourteen minutes of daylight. And yes, I will be the jagoff that reminds you that from here on out, the days start getting shorter and the shadows will stretch a little longer.

But don’t panic.

Don’t let your blood pressure launch through the sunroof or reach for that dusty pack of Chuckles in the glove box. We've still got sunsets after 8:30 for another week, and forty-seven more that come after eight o'clock. Plus eighty-five that occur past seven o'clock.

We are far from winter’s doorstep, but remember this Chalkboard when the bottom left corner has sunset at 4:19pm in December.

So what’s today’s lesson on this warm Saturday morning?

You don’t need to add salt to your Parky’s fries this afternoon.

You don’t need two slices of key lime after dinner tonight.

...And a pretty smile with a devilish grin is a Red flag, pal.

One of my old New York traders used to say, “If it’s a trap, fall back!”

Stirred or shaken doesn’t matter.

What matters is you make time for astonishment…

....preferably with a magnificent martini in hand and a stuffed olive staring you down.