September 23rd, 2026

 

    There was something floating around the internet yesterday about men who treat their birthdays like any other day.

   It said these men are used to doing life alone. They don't need much fuss and they tend to give more than they receive. They have learned how to create their own happiness and instead of measuring life by birthdays, they measure it by whether they are still growing.

      I read this story and thought that somebody has been spying on me. When I turned sixty this past summer, I spent weeks making everyone think I was planning some sort of extravaganza.

               "Sixty! I’m sure Jumbo is going to throw a party for his sixtieth. He always threw Christmas parties and Mardi Gras parties back in the day."

     There would be a great mix of people, noise, drinks, and outlandish stories. There will probably be somebody doing something stupid that would eventually become another Morning Chalkboard tale.

   Instead, when July 1st arrived, I got dressed up and took myself out and had a steak dinner, Han Solo, and I had a memorable evening.

    That probably sounds strange to some people but not to me. I am an only child, I learned a long time ago that being alone and being lonely are two completely different things.

   I do not have brothers or sisters, my parents are in heaven, and I have a spouse who is an ex. I know a shit ton of people, but I don't have that one close friend who gets an emergency phone call at two in the morning. Let alone planning a 60^th birthday party.

   The groups of people I have spent time with over the years are slowly doing what people eventually do, they drift apart.

      Families become empty nests. Retirements are starting to trickle in. Different towns, different routines, different lives…

    Nobody is doing anything wrong. Life just keeps moving the furniture around. That is why birthdays were never a huge production for me.

      I remember one or two birthday parties when I was a kid growing up. For my seventeenth birthday, my mom bought me tickets to an Indianapolis Indians game. For my twenty-first birthday, my Oldman bought me dinner and margaritas at La Majada in Oak Park. At thirty, I went to a White Sox game with my Wild Turkey buddies.

          And my fifty-first birthday?

     That one came with a particularly unusual present, my marriage ended. That July 1st became the opening act for what would eventually become my Felix Unger Day.

       Quite a birthday candle to blow out, but here is the thing.

             None of those memories make me sad, quite the opposite.

    They remind me that somewhere along the way I learned something of great value.

        I know how to keep myself company and that might be one of the great gifts of being an only child.

      You learn how to read, how to think, how to wander, how to listen to the radio and how to sit quietly by yourself.

     You learn how to go somewhere without needing somebody sitting beside you. How to walk into a restaurant and say, "Table for one please," and not whisper it like you are confessing to a crime.

           I have gone to ballgames alone, restaurants alone, bars alone, church alone, concerts alone, movies alone, and road trips alone.

      The funny part of it is wherever I go somewhere alone, I rarely stay alone long.

     

    Now autumn has arrived, maybe that is why this is on my mind this morning.

    Fall has always felt less like an ending to me and more like an inventory. Summer throws everything outside and Autumn brings it all back in.

    The screens come down and the storm windows go back up. The days get shorter and shadows grow longer. Leaves begin surrendering from their branches and we start preparing for winter.

     I am going to do a little of that myself this year. I have had enough noise and running around. This fall I am going to prepare the cave.

    Books piled up next to my chair. Writing all hours of the day. A radio constantly on in the kitchen. Football and hockey take over baseball. Hot meal in the Crockpot. Prayers and swearing, more swearing, and more praying. Early mornings with a pot of coffee and the occasional martini and Manhattan.

   When winter arrives full force, I may very well disappear into my little corner of Riverside and hibernate until spring of 2027. Not because I am hiding from life, but because I rather enjoy reinventing life.

      There is an important distinction.

   Loneliness is wanting someone to show up. Solitude is realizing you already did. Somewhere in these first sixty years I learned that I don't need balloons hanging from the ceiling to know I had a good year.

  I do not need people singing Happy Birthday to know I matter. I don't need a crowded calendar to prove I have a life.

     The scoreboard is simpler now.

Did I grow?

Did I learn something?

Did I help somebody?

Did I laugh?

Did I remain curious?

Did I stay grateful?

Did I use the day I was given?

     If the answer is yes, put another mark on the board.

      So welcome, Autumn. I will gather some firewood. Stack some books. Turn up the jazz. Watch the leaves come down. Prepare for winter and continue this strange, wonderful experiment of being perfectly capable of sitting alone while remaining completely available to the world.

    Because after all, I know exactly what I am bringing with me. Not my pronouns or any titles. Not the number of candles on a cake. I am bringing my adjectives…. Gregarious and Grateful.

        … And as long as I have those two things, I suspect there will always be somebody to talk to, something to marvel at, and another reason to get out of bed tomorrow morning. Even if I crawl right back into the cave at sunset.

     Happy Autumn.

       Get out there today with gusto and astonishment and do not forget to put a smile on the sun.

September 22nd, 2026

 

    Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. Fitzgerald wrote that almost a hundred years ago, and I will be damned if he didn't understand September.

   There is something about that first cool morning. You walk outside and the air has changed with the flick of a switch.

    Not winter cold, but the crisp and refreshing change that nips the staleness of summer. Just enough bite to remind us that July didn't own the place forever.

   The windows open up giving the air conditioner a deserved break. The sweaters comes out and football is on the radio. Leaves begin collecting along the curb, and somewhere in the neighborhood somebody gets the first fireplace going.

    You can start over on a Tuesday morning in September.

        All you really need is a little crisp air...

                                …and another piece of chalk.

    Chicago Henge is beginning as the sun leaves the southside and travels towards Fullerton and Belmont for the next few months.

                       I am already in, in a daydream….

September 21st, 2026

 

     There are mornings when the sun comes charging through the windows and practically orders us to get moving, and then there are Mondays like this one.

      

     Gray sky and damp air is the forecast for EWF Day 2026. Coffee tastes a little more necessary as I prepare for remembering the 21^st of September.

  

           Ba-dee-ya.

September 20th, 2026

 
     I have a habit on Saturday mornings. When XRT does Flashback, I send the year they are featuring to a handful of friends. Sometimes someone gets a personal shoutout because I know this week’s year was special to them.
          Yesterday was 1996.
  One of the guys texted back that 1996 was the year that had just fallen out of his Golden Years. I immediately thought, what a great subject for Sunday’s Chalkboard.
         What are the Golden Years of our music?
   Music has always been called the soundtrack of our lives, but if that is true, no two soundtracks can possibly be the same.
    Too many things go into making our own song list. It starts with when you were born. Before you ever had any say in the matter, somebody else was picking the music. Your parents, your older brothers, sisters or cousins.
   Whatever was playing on the stereo in the living room, the radio in the kitchen, your sister's turntable, or the car radio. Maybe it was a family trip to a concert or a musical or Maxwell Street.
    Long before we developed musical taste, we were absorbing somebody else's.
        I was born in 1966.
  My parents had one of those big console stereos in the living room that was as much a piece of furniture as it was a stereo. Their record collection was heavy on Broadway musicals, with some jazz and the singer-songwriters who were emerging around the beginning of my life.
   So before I knew what kind of music I liked, I knew Broadway. I knew Gershwin and I knew Carole King.
          Then came the transistor radio.
   I got my first one in the early 1970s, and that bad boy was glued on WLS. That is probably where my first Golden Years began, somewhere around 1971.
      Then came another giant leap forward, my own record player.
   Back then, the neighborhood record store would post the weekly Top 20 albums and Top 40 forty-fives. Buying a record wasn't clicking a button while sitting on the crapper. You went to the record store. You looked through the bins. You studied the album covers, and you spent your allowance on the Bay City Rollers or ABBA.
     My first album was Simon & Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water. My first forty-fives were ABC by the Jackson 5 and Betcha by Golly, Wow by The Stylistics.
    Then, in 1977, I was given my first real stereo with a turntable and cassette deck. That was the day my Golden Years exploded.
   Like every boy in 1977, I owned the famous Peter Frampton album, but I also still had a shit ton of those hand-me-downs.
     Al Green, Carly Simon, The Beatles, The Stones, Marvin Gaye, Leslie Gore, Miles Davis, Preservation Hall…
    Looking back, the foundation of my record collection was not really built by me at all. It was built by the older people in my life and what a solid footing they gave me.
   My beginning was Broadway, Vivaldi, and Frank Sinatra, but I was also surrounded by classic rock and hard rock, too. Funk, soul, and classic R&B became a huge part of it.
    Saturday mornings started with cartoons and ended with Soul Train. I was probably one of the few ten-year-old white boys who preferred Don Cornelius to Dick Clark.
      Then came pubic hairs and along with them came punk rock, New Wave, and synth-pop.
        What a time to be a kid discovering music.
   My generation went from AM Top 40 to album rock on FM to music videos on MTV in what seemed like the blink of an eye.
    Think about that. In just a handful of years, the way we found music completely changed. By high school and college, my musical world was all over the place.
   Bob Marley to Talking Heads. John Coltrane to R.E.M.. Grandmaster Flash to the Beastie Boys. The Clash to Elvis Costello. There weren't any rules or guidelines anymore.
     Then our record collections began disappearing and our CD collections took their place.
     For me, that meant losing many of those old hand-me-down albums and starting over. This time I was buying the foundation of my own Golden Years of Music.
   After college came another change. Rap became hip-hop and Grunge exploded on the scene. Alternative rock fought for space with Britpop. Madonna was sharing the airwaves with Mariah and Janet… Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty.
      Somewhere around then, I started realizing that my musical tastes had pretty much been formed.
   The guy who texted me about 1996 might have it about right. By the time I reached my early thirties, a lot of new music was beginning to sound the same to me. It seemed less original. Maybe the music changed or maybe I did.
    If I had to put dates around my own Golden Years of Music, I would probably say the peak was 1983 and the era was 1971 through 1991.
       Here is where this little Saturday morning exercise surprised me.
    My Golden Years of Music and the soundtrack of my life are not the same thing. They cannot be because music that existed long before my Golden Years helped create them.
     Old country standards, gospel, Chicago blues, and bluegrass are part of my soundtrack. So is early rhythm and blues before rock and roll came along and stole it. Classical music and opera wander in every once in a while.
               And jazz... how I love jazz!
    Dixieland, Swing, Bebop, and the cool sounds of the late '50s and early '60s. Much of that music isn't technically from my Golden Years, but it sure as hell is part of my soundtrack.
       My parents are still in there, too. Man of La Mancha. Bach, Camelot, Dvorak, Fiddler on the Roof, Beethoven, Porgy and Bess, and Godspell.
   Records they put on a console stereo in a living room when I was a little boy somehow survived transistor radios, turntables, cassettes, eight-tracks, FM radio, MTV, CDs, iPods, streaming and sixty years of living.
          That is the difference right there….
    The Golden Years are when your musical identity was formed. The soundtrack is everything that found a way into your life and stayed there.
     And even inside my Golden Years, I didn't love everything. I never got into all that hair-banging music that showed up right in the middle of my years. Give me Morrissey over Axl Rose every damn time.
      So there is your rainy Sunday assignment, Chalkheads.
               Think about it.
          What are your Golden Years of Music?
  Not your favorite decade. Not what The Rolling Stone magazine tells you was important. Not what you are supposed to like because of your age.
        When did music become yours?
      Then ask yourself the bigger question, what is the soundtrack of your life?
  What came out of the kitchen radio, the dashboard, the neighborhood record store, the college dorm room, the jukebox at your favorite tavern?
    What songs can still put you inside a particular room, with particular people, on a particular day, forty or fifty years later?
        And finally...
         Do you have a theme song?
  Hell, that last question might be a Chalkboard all by itself.
   Now that you have your assignment, enjoy the rainy day in Chicagoland. Put on an old record that takes you somewhere filled with gusto and astonishment.

September 19th, 2026

 

          J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, “Not all those who wander are lost.”

   Apparently Tolkien never tried to fit an emissions test, a Bluesfest, an Oktoberfest, two rugby matches and a cocktail with his mother-in-law into one rainy Saturday.

      Because I intend to wander today. I just need a schedule.

  This is the last full weekend of summer, and Mother Nature has decided to celebrate by throwing thunderstorms at us. That is fine, summer has never gone quietly around Chicagoland anyway. We will just have to wander between the raindrops.

     There is Bluesfest down the river. BuckleDown, the best damn brewery in Illinois is holding their Oktoberfest. The Chicago Blaze has a doubleheader against a great rival and somehow in all of this wandering, I need to make it back for my traditional Saturday cocktail with my mother-in-law.

    That isn't wandering, it is coordination.

      I may need that Star Trek thing that lets you travel around.

     Maybe that is the point of Tolkien's line. Wandering doesn't necessarily mean you don't know where you are going. Sometimes it means you are willing to take the long way. Stop somewhere you had not planned. Listen to a blues band for another song. Have one beer with people you were not expecting to see. Stand along a rugby pitch in the rain because going home would be sensible, but sensible wasn't what you had planned for the last Saturday of summer.

      So today I am going to wander down the river for some blues. Over to BuckleDown for Oktoberfest. Out to the pitch for some rugby and back in time to raise a Saturday glass with JoJo.

           …And if the rain changes the route, so be it.

  Getting a little lost every once in a while might be the whole idea. Besides, autumn is waiting right around the corner and pretty soon I will have an entirely new problem…

     Trying to wander through all those falling leaves without busting my ass.

  Enjoy the last Saturday of summer and the smell of summer rain.

September 18th, 2026

 

     We all have unheard melodies in our lives.  

    The person we didn’t marry, the job we didn’t take, the city we never moved to, the trip we postponed, the conversation we never had, the dream we quietly put away.

     Since those lives were never the ones we lived, they remain perfect in our imagination. They never had to deal with mortgages, arguments, Monday mornings, sick kids, pissed off bosses or flat tires.

       The life you didn't live has one enormous advantage over the life you did. It never had the opportunity to disappoint you.

   At sixty, it becomes easy to look backward and romanticize the roads not taken.

     … But maybe Keats's “unheard melodies” aren't telling us we chose wrong. Maybe they are reminding us that imagination will always make the unlived life sound sweeter.

  Meanwhile, the life we actually chose is noisy and imperfect. It has missed notes, but it is our song.

       Maybe the trick isn't wondering how beautiful the unheard melody might have been. It is listening closely enough to appreciate the one that is still playing.

      Put the needle on the record Chalkheads and sing like the world really is listening.

   

September 17th, 2026

      At sixty, I can look backward now and see that some of the things I once considered disasters changed the direction of my life for the better.

      I just couldn't see it while I was lying on my ass feeling sorry for myself.

        Sometimes you have to get back up, dust yourself off and dig back in.

   Chalkheads, if you stumble....

                                          I will try my best to pick you off the ground. 

 

September 16th, 2026

 

     I have two boxes in the back of my bedroom closet. That is all that remains of my parents’ lives.

   Things they bought. Things they cherished. Things they saved. Things they probably thought they needed are all in two boxes in their son’s closet.

   I was thinking about those boxes recently while looking around my own place. Where in the hell is all my stuff going to end up?

   I am sixty years old. Maybe instead of figuring out better ways to organize everything I own, I ought to start figuring out why I own it in the first place.

     I have a shot glass collection. Why?

   I don’t collect shot glasses anymore. I am not opening a shot glass museum in Riverside. Nobody is going to come through the front door and say, “Jesus Christ, Jumbo, thank God you kept the shot glass from Milwaukee.”

      I have about fifteen coffee mugs. There is one person in my apartment who drinks coffee, Me. I could go three weeks without washing a coffee mug.

    Then there are my AAL speakers that I bought at MusicCraft in 1989. These goddamn things are enormous. They are bigger than the speakers Lynyrd Skynyrd used at stadium concerts. I have dragged them through more than three decades of my life because somewhere along the way they stopped being speakers and became my speakers. There is the difference, but it is 2026 and I could buy two bookshelf speakers the size of toaster ovens that sound better.

       So why do I still have them?

       Because getting rid of stuff is harder than acquiring stuff.

   We spend the first half of our lives accumulating. Then one day we look around and realize we have become the curator of a museum nobody asked us to build.

    My generation may be particularly good at this. Our parents and grandparents saved things because they remembered when things were hard to replace. You didn't throw something away just because a newer version came along. You fixed it and you put it in the basement. Because you might need it someday.

   Then we came along and spent our lives living in an America that became fucking good at selling us shit. Bigger televisions, better stereos, another coffee mug, another jacket, another kitchen gadget, and box after box delivered to the front porch.

    When we ran out of room, somebody sold us plastic containers so we could organize all the shit we had already bought. Maybe that is where we got it backward.

    Owning less is better than organizing more and I don't think this is only about possessions.

     We accumulate other things too. Grudges, obligations, expectations, old disappointments and even relationships maintained out of habit.

    Ideas about ourselves that might have been true twenty years ago but are now ancient Chinese secrets.

  We organize those things too. We put them into their proper little boxes and carry them from one year into the next. Maybe some of those boxes can go to Goodwill this coming weekend.

      Eventually somebody else is going to have to decide what to do with everything we couldn't bring ourselves to get rid of.

   I already know how this story ends for me. Someday I will be laying stiff at Zimmerman-Harnett Funeral Home. Kevin Harnett will wrap a rosary around my hand, everybody will say their goodbyes, and they will send me upstairs to see my family and friends in heaven.

       And I won't be taking anything with me. Not my White Sox coffee mug. Not my Old-Style pitcher with the matching tavern glasses. Not the shot glasses from Vegas, New Orleans, and the Cotswold’s.

    I sure as hell won’t be getting those AAL speakers through the Pearly Gates. Although I wouldn't mind seeing St. Peter's face when I tried. I could play that Led Zeppelin song about the stairway.

    What I leave behind that matters won't fit into a box anyway. It will be whatever the ShepKids remember.

    Something I wrote. A story somebody still tells. A lesson I managed to get right. Maybe a laugh. Maybe somebody remembering sitting on my balcony drinking coffee out of one of those fifteen damn mugs.

   That is the best part of the whole deal. The mug doesn't matter, but that morning sure did.

    My parents taught me that lesson without planning to. Two entire lives have been reduced into two boxes in the back of my bedroom closet, but my parents aren't in those boxes. They are everywhere around me.

    Maybe at sixty the job isn't finding a better place for everything. Maybe it is deciding what deserves a place at all.

     Keep the things that serves you. Keep the things that tell the story. Give away what somebody else can use. Throw away the bullshit and make damn sure that when your life eventually gets reduced to a couple of boxes, the best parts of you aren't in them.

      Okay Chalkheads, it is Wednesday and you won’t find gusto and astonishment packed away….

                    Tits Up….

September 15th, 2026

 
       “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
   There is something cocky about that quote in a world obsessed with getting shit done immediately. We measure ourselves by deadlines, promotions, bank accounts, weight loss, problems solved and how quickly we can get from where we are to where we think we should be.
       Nature keeps a different clock.
   The oak tree in front of your parent’s house didn't apologize for taking decades to grow. September doesn't arrive out of the blue. Summer doesn't slam the door and leave abruptly. It leaves quietly, a couple minutes of daylight at a time.
    Tonight reminds us of that. Here in The Divorced Dad District, the sun actually slips below the horizon at about 7 o’clock, meaning our run of 7:00 PM sunsets has ended, and we won't see it happen until next spring.
     Above us tonight is a waxing crescent moon, only a few days removed from the new moon, slowly adding a little more light each evening on its journey toward the September 26 full moon, which is the Harvest Moon.
      Nothing dramatic is happening here…
          The sun moved a little earlier in the evening. The moon grew a little brighter overnight. Summer surrendered another inch to autumn.
    Maybe that is how most worthwhile things happen in our lives.
      Quietly, slowly, uneventful, just one day at a time, and somehow everything works out.
          Tuesday morning Chalkheads, are you already in, in a daydream?

September 14th, 2026

September 13th, 2026

 

      I was six years old when I first saw Dick Butkus play football.

    It was 1972, and I was sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room watching the Chicago Bears on television. I didn't understand defenses or formations. I didn't know what a middle linebacker was supposed to do, but I understood Dick Butkus.

           He looked like a warrior.

    I remember telling my dad that I wanted to be Dick Butkus when I grew up. The Oldman looked down at me and gave me one of those answers fathers give their sons, an answer that doesn't mean much when you are six but somehow makes more sense fifty-four years later.

            “You'll never be Dick Butkus. Just work hard at being you.”

    That afternoon, without knowing it, I became a Chicago Bears fan, and the Bears have been there ever since.

         Three years later came Walter Payton.

    In 1975, Sweetness arrived in Chicago, and the deal was sealed. Then came 1977. Walter ran for more than 1,800 yards, Bob Avellini was behind center, and the Bears went 9–5 and reached the playoffs. It was the first Bears playoff team of my lifetime.

    People can give me McMahon, Cutler, this new kid out of USC, whoever they want, but Bob Avellini will always be my favorite Bears quarterback.

     Because sometimes your favorite player isn't the greatest player. He is the one who was there when you first believed.

          Then came 1985.

   Chicago didn't merely have a football team that year. We had a civic religion. The Super Bowl Shuffle, McMahon, Sweetness, Singletary, Hampton, Mongo, Otis Wilson, Wilber Marshall, Fencik, Richard Dent, The Fridge, and Mike Ditka.

  I go against the grain on this one, but I have always believed the coach who really won that Super Bowl was not Ditka. It was Buddy Ryan and that defense.

    The Bears went 15–1, then 3–0 in the playoffs, including consecutive shutouts, before destroying New England 46–10 in Super Bowl XX.

     For a Bears kid who had started with Butkus, we had finally reached the mountaintop, but football isn't really about mountaintops.

     Not when you follow a team for fifty-four years. It is about all the ordinary Sundays in between.

   It is walking into the backdoor at 220 South Lombard wearing a $124 Chicago Bears Starter jacket and having the Oldman look at me like I had just invested my life savings in magic beans.

                  “Why did you waste your money on that?”

    Then he told me something else. Someday, the Bears wouldn't be as important to me as they were then. Damn him, he was right again.

          Because life happened, but through the ups and downs. The good days and the bad. The Chicago Bears were always there.

    I remember my wife bringing a breast pump to a Bears game, disappearing at halftime to pump and dump so we could stay for the second half.

           Try explaining that to Dick Butkus.

   I have sat inside the old Soldier Field on a November Sunday when the wind came howling off Lake Michigan and cold worked its way through your boots, your gloves and eventually your bones.

   I have also sat in a neighborhood tavern staring at a Bears game on an old Zenith television with an Old Style in front of me.

                    Both somehow felt like church.

   Then came Super Bowl XLI. The Bears lost to the Baltimore Colts, 29–17, in the rain in Miami. I don't remember that night primarily for Rex Grossman's interceptions or Peyton Manning holding the Lombardi Trophy. I remember my six-month-old son George lying on my belly while we watched the game.

    The Bears lost, but I had my boy and somehow, that made everything all right.

         That is what fifty-four years does to a football fan.

    The six-year-old who once watched grown men as mythological warriors is now a sixty-year-old man watching players young enough to be his sons.

     Some of my warriors are gone. Walter Payton, Dave Duerson, Dick Butkus, Doug Buffone, Steve McMichael and now Matt Suhey, Walter's great friend, and lead blocker, gone at only sixty-eight. He sure seemed older when he was 28.

      One by one, the names that once seemed permanent remind us that nothing really is.

Not football players.

Not fathers.

Not marriages.

Not childhood.

Not us.

     Maybe that is why sports begin to mean something different as we get older. Terence Mann talks in Field of Dreams about baseball marking time and remaining a constant as America changes around it.

       I have come to understand exactly what he meant.

   Because since that afternoon in 1972, when a little boy sat on the floor of his parents' living room and announced that he wanted to grow up to be Dick Butkus, I have watched the Chicago Bears go 410–438–1.

    Four hundred and ten victories. Four hundred and thirty-eight losses and one tie.

   Miraculous victories that sent me screaming around the room. Heartbreaking losses that ruined perfectly good Sundays.

    Great teams, terrible teams. Quarterbacks who were going to save us and quarterbacks we couldn't wait to get rid of.

     Coaches arriving as geniuses and departing with moving boxes.

  Soldier Field changed, Chicago changed, the NFL changed, my family changed and I have changed.

    I finally understand what my Oldman was trying to tell that six-year-old boy. Do not spend your life trying to become somebody else's hero, work hard at being you, and maybe he was right about that ridiculous Starter jacket, too.

    The Bears aren't as important to me today as they were when I was twenty. Something better happened, they became part of the scenery of my life.

    Every September, the leaves begin turning. The air off Lake Michigan gets colder. Somewhere, somebody pulls an old Bears sweatshirt from the closet.

    Soldier Field fills again, and another generation of Chicago kids discovers its own Butkus, Payton or McMichael.

      And I take my place again. I am not six anymore, but sixty.

     Older, hopefully wiser, and certainly more aware that our seasons together are numbered.

      But still watching, still remembering, and still believing that maybe this Sunday will be one of the good ones.

    The one constant through all the years, Jumbo, has been the Chicago Bears. On the shores of Lake Michigan, autumn has returned. The Monsters of the Midway are playing football, and somewhere inside this sixty-year-old man, that six-year-old boy is still sitting on the living-room floor.

                  Bear Down.

September 12th, 2026

 

        September 12th is Come Together Day. At least, I think it ought to be.

     It was the day America came together to grieve, to heal and to rebuild, and twenty-five years later, it is painfully clear that we didn't stay together.

            We have been ripped apart. Some of that was done to us. A lot of it, we have done to ourselves.

             Let's think back to September 12th, 2001.

    For one brief moment, race didn't seem to matter. Gender didn't matter, politics didn't matter, red states and blue states didn't matter.

                    We were Americans.

   We had watched together as four airplanes were hijacked and our ordinary Tuesday morning disappeared. Our routines were altered by Islamic terrorism. Thousands of families suffered unimaginable loss, and the rest of us lost something as well.

                       Our naïveté.

    September 12th gave us an extraordinary opportunity. History handed us a moment when we could have looked at one another differently. We could have worked closer together. We could have healed some old wounds instead of creating new ones.

       We did not take advantage of it, and I have been wondering why.

   There is something else about September 11th that separates it from so many tragedies that came before it.

                      We watched it happen.

   Human beings have always experienced disasters, assassinations, wars, and atrocities. Television had already allowed us to witness some extraordinary moments as they happened. The Hindenburg burning to the ground, Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, the Munich Olympics, the Challenger explosion, but September 11th was different. 

        Cameras were everywhere.

      Millions of us watched the second airplane hit the South Tower in real time. Cameras captured people running through lower Manhattan. They captured the towers falling. They captured ordinary people staring upward at something none of us could comprehend.

          Then, almost immediately afterward, technology exploded.

    Twenty-five years later, we don't occasionally witness history through a camera. We personally live through history.

    Smartphones, ring cameras, dashboard cameras, GoPros, police body cameras, security cameras, and livestreams.

      Everything is recorded, everything is uploaded and everything is replayed immediately.

     Everything becomes somebody's content and the change has been astonishing.

    For most of my life, broadcasting something live to millions of people required television cameras, trucks, satellites, producers, and millions of dollars. Today a teenager sitting in a bedroom can broadcast to the entire planet by touching a screen.

   That is an incredible technological achievement. I'm just not convinced it has made us better human beings.

     Go to a concert and look around when the favorite song starts. A thousand phones go into the air. You can’t see the stage through the sea of screens.

     Go to Times Square on New Year's Eve and watch people staring at the ball dropping through their fucking cell phones while the actual ball is dropping right in front of them.

      They are not watching New Year's Eve. They are recording themselves watching New Year's Eve. AT&T is standing between them and their own life.

         Maybe that is part of what happened to us after September 12th.

   We became better at recording one another and worse at seeing one another.

     We see every crime, every fight, every hateful word, every jagoff losing his temper, every tragedy, every injustice, and every human being at his absolute worst.

     Then an algorithm delivers it to millions of us before we have breakfast. Of course the world looks like it is falling apart.

    Our grandparents were not handed a highlight reel of the worst behavior of several billion human beings every morning, but we have it.

      Somewhere along the way, instead of bringing us together, witnessing everything started pulling us apart. We stopped looking each other in the eye. We stopped talking to the stranger sitting beside us. We stopped experiencing the concert, the ballgame, the parade, the fireworks, Thanksgiving dinner.

      Most of all, we stopped experiencing the person standing right in front of us.

    We became so busy documenting our lives that sometimes I wonder whether we are actually living them.

        Which brings me back to September 12th.

     Twenty-five years ago today, we picked up the pieces of September 11th and started moving forward. I spent much of those first twenty-five years grieving what was lost on that Tuesday morning.

     So I am making myself a promise for the next twenty-five. God willing, when September 10th, 11th and 12th arrive in 2051 and America marks fifty years since 9/11, I would like to be able to say this….

     I spent the first twenty-five years grieving what we lost, and I spent the second twenty-five working my fat ass off trying to bring my little part of the world back together.

        Nothing astonishing or spectacular. No major Jumbo saves the world movement.

         Here is where I start…

    I am not apologizing for being a white man with beautiful blue eyes, and I'm not asking anybody else to apologize for who they are either. I do not give two shits if you are Black, gay, Jewish, Latino, poor, rich, handicapped, ugly or sexy.

     I do give a shit that you are here with me. That we happen to occupy the same tiny piece of this planet at the same moment in history. That we are breathing the same sweet and sometimes toxic air and maybe that is enough.

    I cannot put America back together and neither can you, but I can take responsibility for the few feet of America surrounding me.

     I can hold the door open. I can say good morning. I can listen to you. I can shake your hand. I can buy a stranger a cup of coffee, and I can disagree without deciding you are an asshole.

        The biggest thing…

    I can put the goddamn phone in my pocket and look you in the eye and when another human being crosses my path, I can try to leave that person a little better than I found them.

    Maybe coming together isn't one enormous thing America has to figure out. Maybe it is a million small things we have to start doing.

       September 12th is Come Together Day. We were given an opportunity twenty-five years ago. We just didn't hold onto it. I am not interested in missing the next one.

    Come together, Chalkheads.

             Stop recording your life and start experiencing it.

                      Gusto and Astonishment…