(A song, to the tune of Winter Wonderland) Going away is John Kelly He took a swift kick to the belly You'd think it takes a real chump To want to join up with Trump Working in a White House Wonderland

Having a cold is a pretty nostalgic experience for me. It seems like during my childhood I was often sick around the holidays. I contracted most of the 1950s childhood illnesses between my Thanksgivings and Christmases – mumps, chicken pox and measles. They all came down my chimney during the holidays. Ah, sweet nostalgia. A lot has been written about the narcissism of nostalgia, especially baby boomers’ nostalgia. Folks love to hate anything we boomers enjoy. If we continue to treasure mid

A fresh covering of snow is something I find invigorating every time. Snow has a way of converting a drab, overly familiar landscape into an exciting blanket of new potential. It covers all, smoothing out irregularities. I’m not too old to still see the promise of fun in a snowfall, even if it does have a flip side of icy treachery that one my age can’t afford to ignore. This early snow, less than a week after the election, reminds of the surprising new landscape we awakened to last Wednesday

Kids are putting on their costumes, candy’s waiting by the door There are tombstone decorations in the yard Skeletons and ghosts are posed to give their friendly scare once more But something about this Halloween is really hard

We were chatting at my house the other day about Halloween. We do a bit of decorating for it - nothing fancy like they do in College Hill, but a few strands of orange lights, an autumn leaves wreath, stuff like that. It was interesting to compare Halloween decorating today with what we did during my 1950's and 60's childhood.

So wife and I spent a few days out of town recently, which meant we had to deal with that most gut-wrenching and fretful of all issues: What do we do with the dogs? Elderly dog, Lucy, had a wonderful, loving drop-in dog sitter. But young, bouncy Labradoodle, Perry, got to stay at a local doggy B & B. There he could bark and romp to his heart’s content, sniffing the posteriors of the other rowdy guests at will. When we went to collect Perry many of the other anxious dog owners were there

I’m trying to stay optimistic, weather-wise, but my favorite annual event is coming up in less than two weeks in Winfield...

“Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.” That is a quote from the great Jackie Robinson, who broke the Major League Baseball color line, wearing number 42 for the Dodgers. Here in Wichita, I know a guy who took Robinson’s quote seriously. He hopped out of the grandstand and clambered onto life’s field. On his way to the diamond, he enlisted about 600 kids from the heart of

I’ll never forget the evening I performed Chopin’s “Etude in G# minor, Opus 25,” on a $75,000 banjo gifted to me by Earl Scruggs. My concert was a command performance for the Queen of England. During one of 26 standing ovations, it was announced that I had won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. I had drawn a cartoon that anticipated the calamity of global climate change, resulting in multinational actions which completely ended the climate damage and pretty much saved the world.

“Everybody wants to go to heaven. But nobody wants to die.” I’m not sure which blues singer first came up with that line, but it certainly has the ring of truth. And it sure seems to fit our perpetual fiscal dilemma. In fact, the sentiment could even more specifically be sang this way: