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…

September 11th, 2026

 

     Twenty-five years ago, nearly 3,000 people went to work, boarded airplanes, poured coffee, kissed somebody goodbye, complained about traffic and worried about things that would have seemed unimportant a few hours later.

        Some never came home.

   Marcus Aurelius wrote something centuries ago that has been banging around in my head this morning:

            “Reject the sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”

   I don't know if I completely agree with the old Roman emperor.

     Some injuries don't disappear. Some names stay with you. Some voices stay in your head. Some mornings remain frozen in time no matter how many years the calendar piles on top of them.

              …But maybe he wasn't telling us to forget.

    Maybe he was telling us not to surrender. Remember the injury, remember the person, remember what happened, but don't let the people who inflicted it decide what becomes of you afterward.

            Twenty-five years later, we are still here.

       We went back to work, we raised a family, we watched ballgames, we buried our parents.

        We got a chance to fall in love. We made friends along the way, and we lost friends as well. We laughed again and we cried again…

           We got the chance to continue to live, and that is the part Marcus Aurelius got right. The wound can remain without becoming the whole story, just don’t surrender to it.

September 10th, 2026

           September 10th will always be "Last Day" for me.

      It was on this day that 3000 people lived their last full day of life. Not knowing the next morning would be a tragic ending..... 

September 9th, 2026

 

September 8th, 2026

 

     Labor Day is over and with it, so are the ninety days we spend every year pretending summer might last forever.

      The coolers get emptied, and the beach chairs go back into the garage. Somewhere a swimming pool is being covered. The mums are replacing the tired flowers on the porch, and the baseball season begins handing the calendar over to football.

     There is one thing I still miss every Labor Day weekend. The Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon.

      If you are Generation X, you probably don't need much explanation. You can already see the television glowing in a dark living room. You can hear the phones ringing behind the celebrities. You can picture that giant tote board with the numbers climbing higher as Sunday night turned into Monday morning.

   For me, though, the Telethon was never really about Jerry Lewis. It was about my mommy.

     There was a stretch of Labor Day weekends when I would drag a blanket and a couple pillows into the living room and make myself a bed on the floor. My mom would get comfortable on the couch, make some popcorn, and the two of us would announce that this was finally going to be the year we stayed awake all night.

             I never made it.

   I was a chubby little kid. Ten-thirty was apparently my physical limit. Every once in a while I would wake up, half asleep, and see my mom still there on the couch. Sammy Davis Jr. might be singing or Jerry would be talking. Somebody would tell another story about a kid fighting muscular dystrophy.

          Then my eyes would close again.

    The next morning, before I asked what was for breakfast, I wanted to know one thing. “How much did they raise?”

            My mom knew because she always stayed up to watch.

    That may be one of the reasons the memory still gets me. The first Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day weekend telethon aired in 1966. Jerry hosted through 2010. After that, the marathon was shortened and shortened again until the final national telethon disappeared in 2014.

        Think about that.

  For most of our childhood, it seemed permanent. Labor Day meant the Jerry Lewis Telethon the same way Thanksgiving meant the parade, New Year's meant Dick Clark and Christmas meant Charlie Brown.

      We never considered that these things had expiration dates.

   We assumed the people sitting on the couch will always be sitting there. We assumed the house would always smell the same. We assumed Mom will always know the total on the tote board in the morning.

      Then one day you are sixty years old, the telethon is gone, Jerry is gone, your mom is gone, and somehow you are the one sitting awake remembering all of them.

     Maybe that is what Labor Day really does. It doesn't just close summer. It reminds us every year that seasons close shop.

     Yesterday there were swimming pools, long evenings, baseball on the radio and sunlight hanging around until bedtime. Now the sun hits the street at a different angle. Soon the leaves will flash their brilliance and let go. The sweatshirts will come out. Chili goes on the stove, chuck roast in the crockpot. Sundays are devoted to the NFL.

      The “Ber” months have arrived. September. October. November. December. My favorite stretch of the year, but before I rush into mums, bonfires, football, Thanksgiving and Christmas, I want to turn around once and look back at summer.

      Or maybe farther than that. Back to a living-room floor in the 1970s. A blanket, a bowl of popcorn, a glowing television, a tote board climbing toward some impossible number.

      …And my mom on the couch, staying awake long after her little boy had fallen asleep.

    We thought the Telethon would always be there. We thought summer would always come back exactly the same. We thought our parents would always be waiting for us when we woke up.

             None of that turned out to be true.

   Which is probably why the memories matter so much.

         Labor Day has passed, Summer's tote board has stopped…

     And Tuesday morning, once again, and I’m already in, in a daydream.

September 7th, 2026

 

   I watched Matt Suhey play for the Bears from my freshman year in high school into my early twenties.

        Eventually, he became a colleague of mine on the trading floor.

    We had mutual friends and would occasionally run into each other. Funny how an eight-year age gap narrows with time.

    When I was fourteen, Suhey was the fullback blocking for my boyhood idol, Walter Payton. He wore number twenty-six for the Chicago Bears, and I watched him every Sunday. When I was thirty, he was one of the guys on the trading floor.

    Last month, I chalked that when Dolly Parton died, I felt like I had lost another little piece of my mom.

    I'm not exactly sure how I feel about number twenty-six moving up to heaven. I lost a member of my favorite football team from when I was a boy. The man who scored the Bears' first touchdown in Twenty. He is now the seventh player we have lost from that 1985 squad.

    I also lost a guy who wore a trading coat and shared the same arena I walked every day. Another Board of Trade alumnus who died too damn early.

   Matt Suhey was a fierce competitor on the football field and in the trading pit. He was also one of the nicest and funniest guys around. His personality fit perfectly with the cast of characters who inhabited the trading floor.

     Maybe that is why this one feels a little different. He belongs to two chapters of my life that I thought were separate, but it turns out they weren't.

        Life moves on.

   Football seasons come and go quickly. Opening bells ring, prices react, markets close, and before you know it, another year is gone.

    People come into our lives from a distance. Some eventually stand right beside us. Some are there for a moment or a month. Some appear for a couple of paragraphs. Others somehow find their way into several chapters.

            Then life moves on, and people leave.

   The Bears will pay tribute to their warrior. Penn State will honor one of their own, and somewhere among the remnants of the old Chicago Board of Trade, stories will be told about Suhey in a trading coat instead of a football uniform.

        Out of all of it, there is one thought that makes me smile. Walter Payton has his fullback back. Not just his blocker or his teammate, but his dear friend.

     The Bears moved from Wrigley Field to Soldier Field and may someday wind up in Alsip, Illinois, but eventually, Bear fans and Bear players all end up together in heaven.

  Unfortunately, like an ex-wife, Vince Lombardi and Packer fans are up there as well. What the hell does it matter anyway? Jesus is a Saints fan.

 

            Bear Down, Twenty-Six.

September 6th, 2026

 

     You would think from the Sir Winston Churchill quote on today's Chalkboard that I must be going through hell.

        I am not.

    Unless taking a twenty-year-old and a seventeen-year-old to a matinee on a beautiful Sunday afternoon qualifies. We are going to see a movie the three of us have watched approximately 3,759 times over the years, “Cars.”

   It was released twenty years ago, which seems impossible because I remember when Lightning McQueen, Mater and Radiator Springs first became part of the Shepley household. We had the DVD, we watched it on television, we streamed it.

     We watched it in the morning. We watched it at night. We watched it enough times that there was a period of my life when I probably knew more about the Piston Cup standings than the American League Central.

          But the Shepley brothers have never seen it where a movie is supposed to be seen, on the big screen.

    So for its twentieth anniversary, that is exactly what we are doing and there is something pretty damn cool about that. The little boys who once sat on the couch watching Lightning McQueen are now twenty and seventeen, and their sixty-year-old father gets to sit between them in a movie theater and watch it all over again.

     Afterward, we are heading over to my mother-in-law's house for a Labor Day get together. Burgers, bratwursts, hot dogs, cold beer, a cigar, the Shepkids and my gorgeous ex-wife.

        Okay…

     Maybe Churchill was onto something with the going-through-hell business. At least I didn't wake up this morning with some goddamn hippie song stuck in my head, wondering where I belong in the universe.

         I know exactly where I belong today.

    In a dark movie theater with my boys watching a red race car learn that there are more important things in life than winning. Then in a backyard with people who have been part of my life since the new millennium began.

    Maybe that is enough philosophy for one weekend.

   Yesterday I needed a rugby scrum, and a Chicago hotdog stand to find my way home.

    Today I need Lightning McQueen, a bratwurst, and my ex-wife.

          Sunday Funday, Chalkheads, a day filled with gusto and astonishment.

 

                  Ka-chow.

September 5th, 2026

 
    I woke up this morning with Steve Winwood in my head. There are worse things, I could wake up with Muskrat Love playing in my noggin.
     Mine was “Can’t Find My Way Home,” written by Winwood and recorded by Blind Faith back in 1969. I hadn't heard it recently. It was simply there when I woke up.
              Somebody holds the key.
      Apparently somebody had been screwing around with the locks while I was sleeping. Because I had dreams all night that I could not quite remember, followed by this strange feeling when I woke up that I was somehow adrift.
    Which makes absolutely no sense.
I am sixty years old and living on the top floor of a three-flat in the Divorced Dad District. I have a roof over my head. I have a good job and a trading desk where I intend to finish my career. I have three kids I love. I have friends and family who care about me. I know where my coffee pot is. I know where my church is. I know where Comiskey Park is and I know several establishments within fifteen miles capable of producing a decent Italian beef or Gyros.
   By almost every reasonable definition, I know exactly where home is and yet this morning I couldn't find my way there.
      Maybe that is what happens at sixty. You stop wondering where you are going and start wondering where the hell you are right now.
     Not geographically, or spiritually or emotionally. Somewhere down inside where Google Maps is absolutely no fucking help.
    Maybe I'm looking for peace. Maybe I'm looking for a stronger connection to God. Maybe I need to spend more time listening and less time talking. Maybe I'm supposed to dig around inside myself and find some spiritual balance that I have neglected while spending forty years worrying about corn prices, utility bills, kids, politics, divorces, careers and whether the White Sox have enough bullpen arms.
    Maybe there is still one piece missing from the puzzle. The piece that makes you look at the whole picture and finally say: Oh. So THAT IS what all of this was about.
           I do not know and that is okay.
     Because I also don't believe I am supposed to spend Saturday sitting cross-legged on the living-room floor trying to locate my inner soul.
     My knees hurt and God knows where to find me.
          I am not wasting the day trying to solve myself and I'm certainly not waiting around to find my way home.
     I am going to a rugby match where there will be thirty enormous human beings beating the shit out of one another over an oddly shaped ball.
     There will be a scrum, a ruck, a maul, and there will be cold beer and camaraderie.
   .. And afterward, if God is willing, there will be a Chicago hot dog dragged through the garden with no mustard.
     Maybe that is the answer. Maybe peace isn't some magnificent moment when every piece of my life suddenly falls perfectly into place. Maybe sometimes peace is simply recognizing that I already have enough of the pieces.
       A safe place to sleep. Work that is not a job. Kids who worry me. People who give a damn whether I wake up tomorrow. I have Faith and a Saturday afternoon watching rugby and grabbing a hot dog.
       Steve Winwood can keep looking for his way home, I know where mine is.

September 4th, 2026

            Tom Petty was right. The waiting really is the hardest part.

  The older I get, the more I wonder how much of my life I have spent waiting for something that was already happening.

   Today is my cousin Chuck’s birthday. Chuck was the guy who got me my first job on the trading floor. I don’t see him much anymore. Since the trading floors closed, he has pretty much isolated himself.

   Maybe that is part of getting older, too. You start realizing that some of the things you once thought would last forever were actually passing right in front of you.

    Back then, we stood on those trading floors waiting for the opening bell, waiting for an order, waiting for a fill, waiting for lunch, waiting for the closing bell, waiting for Friday.

    We had no idea we were standing in the middle of something we would someday give just about anything to have back for an afternoon...

          Here I am this morning bitching about another 94-degree September day.

   I am tired of the heat and ready for fall. Give me a sweatshirt, some football weather and a little chill in the morning air, but I know how this works…

    A few months from now, when the wind is howling off Lake Michigan and the thermometer is struggling to find double digits, I’ll be waiting for a day exactly like this one.

     Maybe that is the trick Tom Petty didn't tell us. Sometimes the hardest part isn't the waiting. It is realizing that while we were waiting, this was it. Maybe we ought to spend a little more time recognizing what we have while we still have it.

         Because someday soon, today will be one of the good old days, too.

September 3rd, 2026

 

    Friendship will take us under the goalpost… I wrote those words to an old friend last night.

    They aren't Shakespearean and they probably aren't grammatically correct, but he knew exactly what I meant. Just a typical JumboLove saying pulled from a big booty.

     At sixty, friendship looks a hell of a lot different than it did at twenty. Back then, friends were the guys you went drinking with, went to Sox games with, chased girls with, stayed out late with and occasionally helped make some very questionable decisions.

   We thought those were the important moments. Turns out, they weren't. The important moments came later.

      Divorces, parents dying, kids growing up, careers changing, friends getting sick, people we loved disappearing from our lives...

       …And that strange realization that there are more miles behind us than there are ahead of us.

     That is when you discover who your friends really are. They don't necessarily fix anything and sometimes they can't. They just stay in the huddle.

     They listen to the same story for the fifth time. They call when they haven't heard from you. They remember your Oldman. They know your kids' names. They can make you laugh when there isn't much worth laughing about and when you have taken about all the hits you can take, they put an arm around you and help move you a few more yards downfield.

     Maybe that's what I meant last night. Life is one hell of a long football game. None of us gets through four quarters without getting knocked on our ass a few times.

    When the clock finally starts winding down, I don't think it will matter much how many points we scored. It will matter who was still in the huddle.

      And maybe, if we're lucky...

                    …friendship will take us under the goalpost.

September 2nd, 2026

 

     At 11:30 last night, three Riverside police officers knocked on my door. They woke me up and asked about the well-being of my son. Someone George knew online had called the police because George threatened to take his life.

    I opened his bedroom door and found George was asleep. He startled awake when I walked in. He was fine and I was pissed.

    Because once you say something like that, people have to take you seriously. Tuesday night became Wednesday morning sitting in an emergency room while my autistic son was evaluated.

       The ER was filled with tired nurses, stressed doctors, people in pain, crying babies and frightened families…

                                … and there I sat, pissed off at George.

   All of this because he had been ghosted by an online friend. I’m just an old man, but I don't understand this shit.

    How did we go from being social together to being social misfits? We met friends at school, at church, at work, in the tavern or at the ballpark.

   Today, your best friend might be a made-up name in a chat room whom you have never actually met. I don't understand that crap, but I don't have to.

    I have to understand George. Autism already makes it difficult for him to express what he is feeling. Add a world where friendships begin and end through words on a screen and something that seems ridiculous to me doesn't feel ridiculous to him.

    I've lost friends. I've been dumped. Hell, my wife cheated on me. I never threatened to kill myself, but that is my measuring stick and not George's.

 

       …And somewhere during my long night/early morning, my anger ran headfirst into gratitude. Because today, September 2nd, is Look for Charlie's Star Day.

     Charlie was the son of a friend of mine. Charlie’s family doesn’t get the chance to see him every day. They only see him when they look up to heaven.

   His parents do not have the luxury of being pissed off at their son this morning. They can't open Charlie's bedroom door and find him sleeping. Charlie’s parents didn’t drive him home from the hospital, but I was able to drive George home.

   There are parents who have lost children to suicide, overdoses and car accidents who would give everything they own for one more stupid decision. One more argument. One more chance to be pissed off. 

    Instead of silently driving their child home from the hospital, they drove to a funeral home to make arrangements. I drove home with George.

              That is the lesson from last night.

     George told us he never intended to hurt himself. It was something stupid that he said during a painful moment, but somebody online didn't know that.

      Somebody cared enough to call, and three Riverside police showed up in the Divorced Dad District. Then the paramedics showed up. Then the ambulance ride to the hospital. Doctors and nurses evaluated him, and George didn't fall through the cracks.

     In a world where we spend so much time talking about everything that is broken, last night the system worked. Someone took a young man's words seriously and this morning he is back in his bed.

      My anger will go away. I'm heading to work on about ninety minutes of sleep, and I'll survive that too.

     Because I have something Charlie's family would give anything to have. I get to be pissed off at my son today.

     Sometime tonight you Chalkheads, look up. Find Charlie's Star and tell him that you love him.

September 1st, 2026

 

           We have reached the ’Ber months of 2026.

     It might be the meteorological start of autumn, but September is beginning with a Gold Bond alert.

      Why in the hell would I quote Scotty Fitz talking about the crispness of fall when it is going to be in the nineties today?

  The Grabber section has three important dates on our autumnal schedule.

      One is the day we dress up like ghosts and vampires. One is the day we remember the veterans who fought for the liberty and freedom we woke up with this morning. The last is the day we give thanks for everything we have and the opportunity to argue with relatives about politics and football while somebody asks who wants another piece of pie.

      So, reach into the sweater drawer and pull out the gusto and astonishment. The sweater can stay there for now.

              Powder up, Chalkheads. September has arrived.

August 31st, 2026

 

     There is something satisfying about finishing a month on a Monday. Mondays are supposed to be beginnings but today happens to be an ending.

    August gets one last day before we flip the calendar and September takes over. Summer has not officially finished, but we can see the finish line from here.

T.S. Eliot wrote, “To make an end is to make a beginning.”

     That is a clever way to look at today. We spend too much time waiting for the perfect moment to start something. The first of the month, Monday mornings, New Year's Day, and our birthday.

    Today gives us both. It is Monday, and it is the last day of the month.

Finish something.

         September arrives tomorrow morning.

We do not have to drag everything from August into September. Some things deserve to be carried forward, and some things are better left behind.

              ..And some things need to be finished.

       

     Give August a proper goodbye today because tomorrow morning we get thirty brand-new days.

       The Cubs and Sox having winning records at the end of August, W I N N I N G!