The Five Pillars

 

  I was driving between Riverside and Oak Brook, just before five o’clock this morning. The road was all mine. No freight trains and a steady flow of green lights. Fog rolled low through the forest preserve as Jupiter and Orion hung brightly in the dark sky. The air carried that heavy scent of summer’s last breath. After a talk with heaven about all you Chalkheads, I found myself behind the wheel of a large automobile and I asked myself, “Well… how did I get here?”

The answer came back in five pillars, built on my Foundation of Faith, Family, and Friends.

The Five Pillars of John Shepley

1.      Serving early morning Mass for Father Morris
Father Morris was a taskmaster. He demanded discipline and reverence, but when he celebrated the Eucharist, it was powerful! More powerful than any celebrant I have ever seen. From him I learned the weight of respect, the importance of showing up, and the beauty in routine done right.

2.      Getting Yelled at by Don Shepley
My old man didn’t just yell, he taught. He was strict, but he nurtured too. He could smack me in the back of the head one minute and hug me tight the next. Accountability and integrity wasn’t an option, it was the standard.

3.      Getting Hit on the Football Field by Dale Speckman
An Oklahoma drill lined up across from Dale Speckman, it didn’t take long to find my weaknesses. Pain came quick and sharp, but it also came with a lesson: the only way forward is to get up, square your shoulders, and hit back harder the next time.

4.      Working on a Trading Floor
The chaos, the pressure, the sharp elbows… there was no faking it there. Instinct, grit, survival, those things were forged in the cacophony of bids and offers, in the rush of winning trades and the sting of losses.

5.      My Gramma and the Greatest Generation
She was my connection to a tougher, simpler America. She showed me how to tackle hard work, how prayer before and after every meal keeps you grounded, and how to make the best of everything. Keep it simple, keep it steady… that was her gospel.

Those are my pillars built on my foundation

    Here is a chore for all of you at the beginning of October: Write down your five pillars on a piece of paper or on Microsoft Word like I did. This could be a great therapeutic tool for you to take some inventory.

 Life will test the structure sooner or later. Better know what’s holding you up.

September 30th, 2025

 The hardest thing in life isn’t the work, the grind, or the setbacks…

…but the choices when we come to a crossroad. Knowing which bridge you cross and which one you torch. One wrong step and you are dragging the past into your future. One well-timed fire and suddenly the road ahead clears. It isn’t about being fearless, it’s about being wise enough to know when to walk and when to strike the match.

Sic transit gloria mundi is our Latin lesson today. Thus passes the glory of the world.

Every empire, every dynasty, every administration, every championship team all had their day in the sun. Then the sun melts under the western horizon like It always does. The scoreboard resets, the applause fades, the seasons roll forward. Glory never lasts forever. What matters isn’t hanging on to it but having the guts to keep moving when it is gone.

Here we stand at the edge of September, the sun setting earlier, the nights creeping in quickly.

Summer is gone and winter is loading. Life doesn’t wait for us to figure it out. The question isn’t whether the glory will pass, because it will. The question is whether we are smart enough, tough enough, gritty enough to choose the right bridge while the daylight still lasts.

September 29th, 2025

 The last chalkboard of the baseball season. The Northsiders are grinning ear to ear. Already making room on their calendars for October baseball.

The South Side?

We get to add another hundred-loss season in the books. I’m stuck here in Limbo still carrying a torch for the Pale Hose. Call it loyalty, call it stubbornness, call it stupidity.

Einstein supposedly said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” I stay with problems too long myself, and the Chicago White Sox are Exhibit A. This is the first year since 1971 that I didn’t walk through the turnstiles at Comiskey... or whatever corporate billboard they are pimping on the facade. That is fifty-five seasons as a White Sox fan. In those fifty-five years, we have had fifteen winning seasons.

Fifteen!

Do the math, that’s about one decent stretch every presidential administration or so.

I got married, had three kids, got divorced, all while waiting for the Sox to figure it out. Life changes, people come and go, but this team, they just keep losing.

How do you divorce a baseball team? If I could go down to the the Daley building, I would have been in front of a Cook County judge decades ago.

“Your honor, irreconcilable differences: I’m tired of watching middle relievers turn every Tuesday night into a funeral.”

Stamp the papers, hand me visitation rights to Polish sausages with grilled onions and let me go.

Sure, 2005 was a magical season that kept us believing. The World Series parade down LaSalle was great. Not as good as the Super Bowl XX parade and sure as hell not as good as watching each Shepkid come into the world, but close.

It is still a memory I can pull out on a cold winter night. I can walk into the park, order a polish, and remember that first bite back in ’74. The mustard dripping on my polyester pants. Some things will never lose their taste.

They say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Easy for Tennyson to write, he wasn’t stuck watching Mike Caruso ground into double plays.

Maybe that is the hook?

Every spring, we are all virgins again. We forget the heartbreak and convince ourselves this is the year and when it isn’t, well, we already knew what we were getting ourselves into. Marriage vows and Sox fandom run on the same contract: sickness and health, until death do us part.

Third place in the Central doesn’t look so bad anymore compared to a miserable marriage.

Good luck to the Cubs and our Northside neighbors. Enjoy the Padres and whatever you do, don’t start Leon Durham at first base.

September 28th, 2025

    For several years when I was a kid, I lived in Indianapolis and my dad lived outside of Chicago in Oak Park, Illinois.

A good majority of those trips up to see my Oldman were on The Amtrak. The train would arrive in the late morning and my Oldman would be standing in the concourse. Most of the time with a big smile on his face. Sometimes he'd have his pierce eyebrow clenched mouth look that his face would make when he was pissed off at me. I'd get that growl face whenever I did something stupid down in India-no-place.

Now that I think about it... I got that growl face more often because I was always in trouble during my Exile in Indy.

I will tell you this, either happy or mad, my dad always said, "I'm glad you are here."

People don't say these words to each other as often as they should. Like my Oldman, I always tell the Shepkids how happy their presence makes me.

Let's try and make this a thing going into October and the end of 2025.

"I'm glad you are here."

It is always welcoming and it doesn't have to be during a crisis. It doesn't have to be during grief or when we face a life challenge.

It could be at the supper table with family or out at the tavern with the guys. Even the quiet times when I see three pairs of shoes scattered by the front door. It is comforting to know they are here.

It is always good to see a familiar face when you are in a strange or uncomfortable situation. Even at the Ace when you are looking for a do-hickey or a thing-a-ma-bob. When the friendly hardware man asks you if you need help. You are always glad that they are there.

Back to this end of the year telling people that you are glad they are here.

How about the spontaneous moments of kindness?

Just smiling at a stranger or letting them cut in line when they have three items and you have fifty. Give that person who is grieving or who is lonely or going through a life crisis a visit. Not a text, not a phone call, but show up unannounced.

Just like Uncle Charlie swinging by when I was a kid. Just like Father Coogan knocking on the door during his Tuesday night walk through the neighborhood. Just show up and make someone glad that you are there.

Our time on the blue marble is limited; let's all be glad that we are here together. My Oldman doesn't pick me up at Union Station anymore to tell me he is glad I am here, but I can still hear those words.

Go do it before it is too late you Chalkheads and always know that this old husky prick is glad you are here.

Another July day in late September. I don't think I have used this much GoldBond so late into the summer and into early autumn. I'm glad I bought that industrial size bottle in mid-August.

Gusto and astonishment today and don't ever forget, I AM GLAD YOU ARE HERE!

September 27th, 2025

 I thought that Chalkhead Nation needed to start Saturday with a little John Prine.

Today’s quote comes from one of his more popular songs, “Illegal Smile.” I don’t remember how I was introduced to the mailman from Maywood, Illinois, but after hearing that first song and listening to those lyrics, I was hooked.

I think chasing a rainbow can be easily summarized by watching a dog chase its tail. All that is accomplished is exhaustion and a losing proposition.

I’m going to bet most of the people that read the Chalkboard are familiar with John Prine. The rest of you will have a new favorite songwriter before supper.

Today is National Ghost Hunting Day. I have gone ghost hunting twice in my life.

The first time was with my Oldman during one of the first weekends he had visitation after my parents split up. So, what does he do with his sad faced son? He grabbed a sack of sliders from White Castle and drove us to Bachelor’s Grove cemetery. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon in the fall. We walked around; I was scared shitless. We didn't see any specters, but I did leave with soggy socks.

The second time I went looking for ghosts was with my fiancé at the time, Terri. We got in the car and drove down Archer Avenue looking for Resurrection Mary. Again, it was a rainy Saturday afternoon in autumn just before dusk. We didn’t find the famous ghost, but we found a great pub that poured Guinness and Harp pints like liquid gold.

So, whether you are chasing rainbows or hunting ghosts today, do yourself a favor... put on some John Prine.

The last Saturday of September is going to feel like the first Saturday in July. The only difference, today has a longer shadow, you still might want to GoldBond those thighs.

Take that shadow for a walk because in just over a month, we set back the clocks and fall into the winter doldrums.

Go get that vitamin D, find some gusto and be astonished.

September 26th, 2025

 Happy Friday, Chalkheads. We have reached the last weekend of September. Hard to believe the month is nearly gone, but here we are.

Alea iacta est.

The die is cast.

That is your Latin lesson for the day. Julius Caesar said it as he crossed the Rubicon, knowing there was no going back. The meaning holds for us today. What is done is done and the past cannot be cured.

Don’t spend your hours staring backward. Old grudges, old failures, old losses, they don’t deserve to live rent-free in your head. All they do is steal the daylight from what we still have.

What we have is a stretch of years ahead, that no one knows the length of. Push into them with your eyes open and your feet forward. Don’t let yesterday’s shadows drag down tomorrow’s promise.

Tonight, the sun will set at 6:41, the long September shadows stretch into the supper hour. Enjoy them while you can. Soon enough, the days will shrink, and the dark will arrive early. That is life’s clock, ticking steady, reminding us to savor the light we are given.

Make this weekend count.

September 25th, 2025

There are certain days on the calendar that carry a weight no matter how many years pass.

For me, September 25th is one of them. I got married on this day in 2004. What should have been a yearly celebration became, after 14 years, a reminder that nothing in life is guaranteed. The phrase on today’s board, “Pride goeth before the fall,” fits too well. I didn’t walk into marriage thinking it would unravel. Nobody does, but it did, and the fall was hard.

Co-parenting has been the toughest lesson of all. Divorce doesn’t end the story, it rewrites it. Instead of walking side by side, you split the road and try to raise kids from different lanes. Sometimes different highways all together. It is messy and frustrating and some days it feels impossible.

Yet out of the hatred and destruction came the greatest gift: the Shepkids. George, Fritz, and Hazel are the bright proof that even broken glass can scatter light.

I moved on to a different chapter in Riverside. Life has steadied and joy has returned, and my home has its own rhythm now.

But this date still lingers. It teaches me humility, reminds me of mistakes, and forces me to swallow the taste of loss. Oddly enough, the farther I get from that marriage, the more the good memories surface. The laughter, the Sunday dinners at PopPop's, the small family victories, the endless hours of kid movies... they have climbed out of the wreckage and survived.

Today I sit with the bitterness and the sweetness, both belong. Failure doesn’t erase the good, just as pride doesn’t cancel out love. The Shepkids are the legacy and I still have a mother-in-law that needs my help every once and awhile.

The rest is part of the story, part of the lesson. If I can carry both the fall and the rise, maybe that’s the real definition of moving on.

The first week of autumn and I gave you an idea of holiday timing in the Grabber section this morning. I put a smile on the sun and a pleasant temperature in the corner. Sunrise and sunset mark the last twelve hours of daylight until next spring. Soak it up with astonishment.

September 24th, 2025

We don’t always get a say when the bottom drops out.

Our children experiencing unexpected growing pains. Someone that we care for suffering a painful illness, a friendship we leaned on that vanished, even a piece of ourselves that we thought was unbreakable, could be gone in a snap. It feels like failure. Standing in the ruins with nothing left to carry forward.

Falling apart isn’t always the end. It is the break that makes space for something stronger to grow. The waxing crescent in tonight’s sky is proof. Just a sliver of light, nothing to brag about, but it is the beginning of something new. Growth doesn’t arrive all at once, it creeps in quietly, building night by night until the whole moon burns bright once again.

That is how it works for us, too. The first step back after failure doesn’t shine. It’s small, shaky, and easy to miss, but it is still movement forward.

If you are staring at the pieces of something that once mattered, don’t mistake the wreckage for the end. Sometimes what breaks apart clears the way for better things to fall together.

Whenever a Shepkid fell off a tricycle or out of bed or running along the sidewalk, I would quickly say, “What do we do when we fall down?”

Through tears and crying they would reply….

… “get back up Dada!”

Time to get back up ________!

September 23rd, 2025

 Today is National Pot Pie Day. It is fitting that we celebrate this comforting edible at the beginning of autumn.

It begins our five month journey through the darkest and coldest days of the year. The warmth of a pot pie, just like a bulky sweater or a thick afghan gives us the security to trudge through on a cold wintry night.

For me the pot pie must have the bottom crust and the sealed top crust. I like beef over chicken and won’t stop at the supper table. A solid breakfast pot pie can start off a morning perfectly.

I would also add the distant cousin of the pot pie, the shepherd pie. A thick stew covered with crusted mash potatoes. Pair that with a pint of Guinness and a shot of Tullamore DEW and welcome to paradise.

Enough chalking about pot pies.

Give Tuesday a go for its money, but leave yourself time for a daydream.

The sky is calling, calling out my name.

September 22nd, 2025

 Everyday we’ve got to show up ready. Life doesn’t hand out victories like candy at a parade. Most days it is a grind…

…head down, shoulders squared, waiting for the breaks that don’t always come.

But as long as Mondays keep showing up on the calendar, you have another shot. Victory doesn’t come often, but when it does, it tastes like nothing else.

To our Jewish brothers and sisters, Shanah Tovah. May the year ahead bring sweetness, strength, and renewal.

Go get ’em, Chalkheads.

Stick with it.

Believe in it.

Victory will knock one day and when it does, it will be astonishing.

September 21st, 2025

 It is September 21st, 2025. Fourteen thousand, four hundred eighty-two days since the Chicago Bears last hoisted a championship trophy. That number isn’t shrinking anytime soon. At 0–2 with Dallas on the schedule today, the tally is only going to keep growing. Chicago football has turned “next year” into a generational lullaby.

Today is Earth, Wind & Fire Day. Unless you have lived under a rock, you already know the lyric, “Do you remember, the 21st night of September?” It’s not just a line, it is a national hymn. DJs drop it, weddings dance to it, back porches hum with it. On a day when the Bears remind us of futility, the music reminds us of joy. That’s the Bears fan way, living in the middle of frustration and celebration, never letting one cancel the other.

The sky is gray with rain in the mix. Fits the mood as we end summer and prepare for another mediocre football game this afternoon. Fall officially arrives this week, and the air already carries that shift. Sunrise is a little slower, night falls a little quicker, and you can feel the jackets calling from the hall closet. Baseball is winding down, football is dragging us along, and the season tells us, ready or not, it is time to move forward.

Mark Twain nailed it: “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” The Bears need that message more than anybody, but so do we. Life’s scoreboard doesn’t wait. You can either count the days since glory, or you can start again today.

Here is to September 21st, Earth, Wind & Fire, the coming of fall, a Bears victory and the reminder that nothing begins until you start.

September 20th, 2025

 “Friendship shouldn’t be a battle.”

That is the chalk today, and it is not just a throwaway line. Back in 1975, the band War dropped a song called Why Can’t We Be Friends? A tune that asked that question thirty-six times in three minutes. It was playful, funky, and deceptively simple.

Let us look closer at the lyrics and you find lines that cut to the bone: “The color of your skin don’t matter to me, as long as we can live in harmony.” That’s not just a rhyme. That’s a plea.

I think about that song when I look at the divide we are in today. Families that won’t sit at the same table because one voted blue and the other voted red. Friends who won’t pick up the phone because four years under one president meant agreeing with Dad, and the next four meant screaming at Uncle Steven.

We are slicing life into chapters: childhood, teenager, college, marriage, middle age, gray hair...

...and each one feels shorter than the last.

And now we are letting politics erase the people who matter most inside those chapters.

Unless your friend is consumed by hate. Someone who lives for argument, who is bombastic and cruel in every conversation, then you’ve got something not worth saving.

If it is a Republican friend who stood at your parents’ wake, or a Democrat who called during your divorce to check in, then you can’t throw that away over an election cycle.

That is when you brush the difference aside and carry that friendship into 2026. Because in the long run, what do you really want? To stand alone in the name of being right, or to sit with someone who was there when you needed them?

Our time here is short. Break it into decades, into eras, and you will see just how short it really is. Friends are the glue in those years. The ones who walk with you in Chinatown, who share a drink, who make you laugh when you’re broke and standing in line. Friends who knew you when you were working for the CIA. Those are the ones you keep.

Today's Grabber Section: Tomorrow we will celebrate Earth, Wind & Fire and remember the 21st of September. I want it to be Jumbo who asks you, Do you remember?

Today, though, the 20th is going to be a cloudy day.

I successfully earwormed you Chalkheads with two songs from the same decade, with the same message...

... it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about choosing harmony over division. Why can’t we be friends in the key that our souls were singing?!?!?!

September 19th, 2025

 Today is POW/MIA Recognition Day. We hang the flag, we salute, we nod.

Steinbeck’s words, “You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself," remind us that it can’t stop at a ceremony. To honor someone missing, you need to imagine it was your father, your brother, the neighborhood kid who never came home. That is the only way it cuts deep enough to matter.

We should carry that same weight when we look at each other on the street. Since the covid flu, the world has been running on a short fuse and the smartphone era has intensified it. Everybody is shouting into the glow of their screen, pumping out their hot takes like smoke from a glue factory. You can’t miss the loudmouth liberals and the caustic conservatives; they are too busy telling us how bad it all is.

They aren’t the ones I worry about.

It is the quiet ones that need our attention.

The guy staring down at the sidewalk, so he doesn’t have to meet a pair of eyes. The woman sitting in her car in the parking lot a little longer before heading inside. The distraught who deleted the text instead of hitting send. That’s where the hurt lives now, behind lowered heads and swallowed words.

Doing a kind act doesn’t magically make you a kind person. Steinbeck’s line says the real work is in feeling someone’s burden in your own chest. That is harder than dropping a few dollars in a GoFundMe or clicking a like. It is taking a beat, looking at the stranger in front of you, and asking, what if that was me?

The flag for the missing flies high today. Let it remind us that every day, in every ordinary place, people are missing as well. Not from a war overseas, but from the simple recognition that they really do matter. Our job is to see them, to understand them and not let anyone slip through the cracks in this short time we have together.

Happy Friday Chalkheads, make sure Eleanor Rigby isn't missing in action this weekend...

September 18th, 2025

    When you are a single father, you think about what you are going to leave behind. Not just in the bank, not just in the will, but in the marrow.

You can hand down a car, a watch, a pile of bills, but those things rust and fade. What stays are the lessons your kids carry after you are gone. Everything left from my parents' lives are packed away in three boxes in the back of a closet, but I chalk often the words passed down from my Oldman and my Ma.

Honesty is the richest of them all. Not the Hallmark version, not the kind that pats itself on the back, but the tough honesty that leaves a scar. The kind where you look your son in the eye and admit you blew it. The kind where you tell your daughter the truth even when you know it will make her mad. The kind where you swallow your pride and say, “I was wrong.”

On the trading floor, plenty of guys tried to bullshit their way through the session. They lasted about as long as a margin call. The ones who stood the test of time were the ones who kept their word.

Same goes for fathers. A kid can smell a lie from a mile away, and once you lose that trust, it is hell getting it back.

So you build your legacy brick by brick, not with speeches or trophies, but with little truths stacked over years. Maybe it doesn’t look like much to outsiders, but for your kids it is everything. It’s the foundation they stand on when their world tilts.

Tonight the moon is in its waning crescent. Thin, fading, almost gone. A reminder that light comes and goes, but the dark teaches too.

You don’t have to be perfect.

You just have to be honest.

That is the kind of light that doesn’t burn out.

September 17th, 2025

 When I was a kid in the ’70s, you couldn’t escape Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.”

It was everywhere, even in NFL Films highlights. It wasn’t my song, it was a mom song, the kind of tune ladies born in the 1930s carried like a locket. Still, I filed it away in the soundtrack of my life. I had a huge crush on Streisand, and maybe that’s why, whenever the song plays, my own life rolls back in slow motion like a highlight reel. I don’t know why I kept it, but it stuck.

The song is on the Chalkboard today because Robert Redford died. Redford was the crush for all the moms of that generation. Mine adored him in The Sting and Butch Cassidy. Thank goodness he wasn’t cast in Love Story, if he had ruined Ryan O’Neal’s role, it would have been criminal.

I will say this... I never forgave him for The Great Gatsby. That is my favorite book, and Redford hijacked Jay Gatsby. He was Hollywood’s Baskin-Robbins flavor of the month, and Fitzgerald had to have been turning in his grave watching Redford paste a golden-boy smile on the most tragic dreamer in American literature.

For me, that was unforgivable.

So why does his death even matter to me? Not because of Redford himself. What stings is that every time another one of those icons fades...

...another piece of my mom goes with them.

Her Hollywood crushes, her movies, her hug, her soundtrack, her era, her phone conversations on the kitchen telephone. They are stitched into my memories, same as mine are stitched into the Shepkids’.

Today's Grabber section has some Latin.

Explicare te ipsum.

Explain yourself.

Today we don’t do that. We are reduced to profiles, followers and highlight reels. Nobody takes the time to unfold who they really are. I don’t need another social media update.

Just tell me something new. Tell me what made you fart in the elevator.

Let me finish chalking.... a smile on the sun. An eighty-four on September 17th and an astonishing memory to make.

Memories... Light the corners of my mind. Misty watercolor memories. of the way we were.

September 16th, 2025

     The old Englishman said it clean: “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” Shakespeare dressed it up in iambic pentameter, but here in Cook County we know the translation. Nobody is coming to save you. The moon and the stars don’t give a damn whether you sink or swim.

Studs Terkel would have called it the gospel of the working stiff. The guy in the steel mill with the punch clock, the nurse with the double shift or the kid hustling his way through night school to get a law degree. All of them writing their own story, one tired morning after another. No horoscope ever paid the rent.

Mike Royko, God bless him, he would laugh at the notion that fate was going to bail you out. He would point at the guy bellyaching at the end of the bar and say, “Buddy, if you’re waiting on destiny, you’re already late for work.”

Same went for the trading pits. The opening bell brought the floor to attention, and it wasn’t fate buying the lows or selling the highs. Luck never built a destiny. The ones who walked out with their wallet still in their pocket were the ones who went the distance and stayed consistent, day after day, until the closing bell.

Call it Shakespearean or call it Chicago common sense...

... you own your choices. You build your life.

The stars on Armitage are just orangey streetlights overhead.

It is going to be a gorgeous Taco Tuesday and it happens to be National Guacamole Day. Complete your day with some tortilla chips and a deep bowl of gwak!

September 15th, 2025

 I came across today’s quote and thought about Newton’s cradle.

Do you remember that device that might have been on the principal’s desk? Maybe in your therapist's office? My Oldman had one on a bookshelf. Five metal balls hanging from a rocker. One swings out, then returns to center, passing its force along until the ball on the other end clicks to the other side. The three in the middle stay steady, holding the balance.

I’m kind of like Newton’s cradle, but I prefer to use Jumbo’s Cafeteria as my example. Fitting, since I am both a Cafeteria Catholic and a Cafeteria Republican. My religion and politics are like a buffet line where I get to pick and choose my beliefs. Beliefs that would probably get me excommunicated by Rome and wandering aimlessly in D.C.

I am not going to chalk about what I support or don’t support. I will just let my balls click and clack from side to side and spread Jumbo Love wherever I go.

Someday I will have to answer to Pappa God for the stupid shit I’ve done, but until then, I will try my damndest to push a little positive momentum down both sides of the street.

Today is the last seven o’clock sunset until Saint Patrick’s Day. I know it is kind of a dick move, but the Grabber section gives you a heads-up that is not immensely popular. The dreaded end of Daylight Savings Time.

Days get long, days get short. It all balances out in the middle. Just like that Newton’s cradle on Father Kelly’s desk.

September 14th, 2025

 I want to step away from the political viewpoints of the major event from last week. I am not asking my Liberal Chalkheads or my Conservative Chalkheads to stand on a soapbox here.

Out of everything that happened, one thing stood out at me. A father turned his son in to authorities.

Let’s take Matt Robinson’s perspective.

I am a father.

That word once meant ballgames, scraped knees, fixing bikes, and waiting in the car after football practice, but now it means something I never imagined. It means looking at a grainy photo on the news, recognizing my own son’s face, and hearing him admit, with his head down, that yes, it is him. It means standing in a kitchen where the silence feels like a casket and realizing the boy I raised is now the man who took another man’s life.

I did what I had to do, but don’t think for a second it was easy. The world will say I chose courage over blood, and maybe that is true, but they don’t know how deep it cuts to hand your son over to the very people who will cage him, maybe even kill him. My duty as a father didn’t stop when I saw those photos, it widened. It became more about truth, about justice, about making sure more fathers didn’t get that midnight knock on the door.

Every parent prays their child won’t be the headline, won’t be the mugshot, won’t fall into the pit. We hope for the best and fear the worst, and one day the worst knocked on my door. I could have looked away, made excuses, clung to the belief that my boy was still good inside, but belief is not blindness.

I had to face what was in front of me and in that moment, I asked myself what God would have me do. What my faith teaches about truth and responsibility. Faith without work is dead. It wasn’t enough to pray in silence. I called in a pastor and leaned on my faith.

Because fatherhood isn’t only about protecting your own. It's about protecting everyone else as well.

Of course there were signs. A shadow here, a silence there, a drift into corners of anger that I didn’t fully understand.

Did I miss them?

Did I ignore them?

I’ll carry those questions forever.

Every father wonders if he should have listened harder, asked again, pushed more, fought more. For me it is too late to change that story, but maybe not for another dad out there. Now I live in the aftermath. I didn’t bury my son in a grave, but I buried him in another way...

...behind walls, behind chains, behind a justice system that will not give him back.

Parents who bury their children grieve with flowers on the grass. I will now grieve every morning with the knowledge that my son is alive but lost to me forever. Prison is another kind of coffin and I am the one who closed the lid.

So, what will my legacy be?

Some will say I did the right thing, that I was a “father of justice,” but what will my son say? What will he carry, knowing it was his own father who handed him over? I don’t know.

All I know is I could not let him run from the law, from the truth, from himself. They say the hardest thing a parent can do is bury their child, and maybe that is true, but I have done something just as impossible. I have buried my son alive into the cold earth of the state, knowing he may never come out. There is no prayer strong enough to soften that blow, no word that can carry the weight. There is only the hope that one day, because of what I did, another father will never have to face this choice.

That is it Chalkheads! I didn't look at this from a political viewpoint, but by a perspective that I could relate to... Fatherhood.

Let's shake away from today's lesson in life and reach for some gusto. It is Sunday Funday and we have some gridiron going on.

Grabber section tells you how much time you have to pick out a trick or treat costume. It also gives you the timeline to prepare for the turkey dinner debates.

Go out there today and measure how long your shadow is getting as Chicagoland sunsets are creeping for the last couple nights after seven o'clock!