The Cubs’ 2016 Graveyard

Some people, in my neighborhood and in other places, turn their front lawns into faux graveyards at this time of year. So with Halloween upon us and the Cubs still playing meaningful baseball, here’s a look at some of the fake styrofoam tombstones that the Cubs could plant at Wrigley Field this year: The Cardinals’

A Halloween creep-out

Today I dropped off my teenager at her Saturday class, and then took a detour through the local cemetery on the way home. It’s a gray, cold, and slightly rainy day here in Chicago, and it’s also Halloween, so I figured why not. I parked the car in a random spot, got out and walked

An unconventional Halloween

This year, my little one didn’t go out trick-or-treating. And she’s at the age where Halloween and trick-or-treating are among the highlights of the season. So missing out on it wasn’t an easy thing. She participated in a Halloween-themed play, and the last show was on Halloween night. She loves being on stage, and I

A Halloween field trip

It was rainy and gray in Chicago on Halloween, and walking around in a cemetery for a few minutes was just what I needed to appreciate life a bit more than I already do. Life is short, as all of these tombstones can attest. So the best way to enjoy it is to go out

This person sure loved dogs

Today was a rainy and gray Halloween. It other words, it was perfect. If central casting can send days instead of people, it did a great job today. I walked around in one of the sections, looking for interesting things. I found lots of them, but mostly I was just glad to be here on

A Halloween baseball story

A piece that had been forming inside my head for the past few months came together this weekend, and it appeared on ChicagoSideSports this morning. It combines some of my favorite things: Baseball, history, Chicago, and Halloween. It’s the type of story that I love to tell to anyone who might be interested. Happy Halloween

Laugh about the old days

The last time I wrote in this space, less than 48 hours ago, I told the story of a baseball player that I never met, who died in Chicago during the regular season a decade ago. And just a couple weeks before that, I wrote a farewell to an ex-ballplayer who had a small connection

A Halloween reminder

It’s Halloween night in Chicago. Earlier in the evening, I was at the house of some friends of long standing. They’re possibly the best people that I know, and we were spending some time together, along with our kids and with some other families, on about the most special night of the year for kids.

Happy Halloween to all

Here’s a picture from a few years ago. Scary, huh?

A scary Halloween

In another life, I used to be a schoolteacher on the South side of Chicago. For the first couple of years that I taught, our school was located in the shadows of three abandoned high-rise buildings, collectively known as the Lakefront Properties. They sat in a neighborhood known as North Kenwood-Oakland, along Chicago’s lakefront (hence

A little too close

Halloween is supposed to be a night where the line between the dead and the undead is blurred a little bit. But this year, with at least 50 deaths caused by Hurricane Sandy, and millions without power and facing a clean-up from after the storm, I can understand how some might not embrace the concept

Darkness falls across the land

If you make it through this final weekend in October, and the days leading up to Halloween itself, without hearing Michael Jackson’s Thriller at least once, may I suggest that you haven’t really experienced Halloween at all? Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

A Halloween tradition

One of the ways I once knew it was Halloween season, other than the changing leaves, was the annual showing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown on TV. In the days before VCRs and DVDs and TiVo and On Demand, you had one chance to see it every year, and so whenever it was

A flash of inspiration

A few years ago, I was working as an editor for a large educational publisher. For Halloween, there was a costume contest held in one of the conference rooms in the afternoon. The safe route in a situation like this is to not dress up at all, and let others run the risk of embarrassing themselves.

Remembering the Donut Lady

Taking my kids out for trick-or-treating made me think about when I was the one out trick-or-treating, over 30 years ago. We would get those Ben Cooper costumes in a box (I was the Road Runner for two years running–sorry!), and one year I had a broken leg but made sure to have my cast removed