With Thanksgiving dinner over and the dishes done and Christmas dinner not yet planned, let’s have a conversation that guarantees a family food fight in Southern Illinois. Or at least it would in my family...

 I may not be a starting linebacker any longer, but I’m still on the team, so I’ll show up and be ready to go in the game, just in case...

Veterans’ Day is the day our nation thanks its veterans for what they have done for our country. This Veterans’ Day of 2021 let me, as a veteran, thank our country and the state of Illinois for what they have done for me.

As Billy Joel sang; "Only the good die young."

Why is it so difficult to get rid of stuff? I’ve read Marie Kondo’s book on paring down possessions and want to follow all its prescriptions. But somehow the stuff just hangs on.

Valor and sacrifice, twenty years later.

Otherness 

Every now and then in life you meet someone you just know is going somewhere. Someone who is smart and talented and has the ability to talk with anyone. Someone, who with all those gifts, doesn’t have an ego that gets in the way.

I had lunch with a person like that last week...

Kabul fell 

Eerily like Saigon fell forty-six years ago...

With the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, my mind returns, as it does most days,  to the soldiers that I trained, equipped and ordered to Afghanistan during the five years of that two-decade long war that I commanded the Illinois National Guard...

She left me without a word, MS Word that is...