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St. Louis Park High School, Minnesota, 1979, on the strange and stormy night of our graduation ceremony. A gypsy fortune teller sets up her tent in a small corner of the parking lot, and she offers glimpses of an event 40 years into the future. We newly-minted graduates see our older selves gather at a gleaming Colossus of Football, built over the ruins of a more prosaic facility for which construction would commence

The game proves to be a closely contested, nip-and-tuck affair, with the outcome on the line in the bottom of the ninth and assorted Rangers on the basepaths. The Twins’ reliever managed to find the third out, though, securing the visitors a 4-3 victory. Highlights were monstrous home runs by Twins’ batsmen Jonathan Schoop and Max Kepler, the former of which deposited into section H of the bleachers, where it bounced

The Stretch DC-9 had landed, taxied across the tarmac, and stopped just short of the gate. This model of airplane is properly called an MD-80, but I happen to think that Stretch DC-9 is a more descriptive and interesting name, so I’m sticking with it. I’m sure the pilot of the Stretch DC-9 announced something to us passengers, but we were parked for I-forget-how-many minutes, sitting in the dark, waiting

I speak the title line of this post to my three cohorts—aka my family—from behind the wheel of our vehicle for the past week, the silver Saturn Vue. My family faithfully ignores me. Both my wife and our older boy, Maxwell, are on their iPhones, the former sending emails to the animal caretakers with the news that we’ll be a day late, the latter sending texts and instant messages to his recently-made

The time is six o’clock on an August afternoon that is turning into an August evening. Maxwell and I are driver and passenger, respectively, in the silver Saturn Vue, and we are stuck in miserable freeway traffic at the edge of downtown Chicago. Just ahead, enticingly, is clear passage to the ramp for Interstate 290, also known as the Eisenhower Expressway, because the freeways in Chicago all have names. Maxwel

Regular enemies are common and easy enough to acquire. Everyone earns them eventually, I imagine, and they come and go. Arch enemies, though, they are special, they are a different kettle of fish. Your arch enemy is your lifelong antagonist, your intractable opponent, against whom conflicts resolve in draws or, at best, incomplete victories, and always temporary. He or She is your structural equal but ethical opposit

Congratulations to us all for surviving to the middle of November, in the year designated by the number 2017, which I just confirmed is a prime number. Meaning, 2017 cannot be written as the product of other integers, like 5 x 13 x 71 (or whatever). The Internet is an amazing repository of trivial information of use to a needy writer. The Web site I consulted for the prime number thing, which is www.calculatorsoup.co

My grandfather graduated from Purdue in 1921 and worked his entire life as an engineer for the Indiana Bell Telephone Company. That’s how we came to have an antique box telephone in our basement. The telephone was a rectangle of polished oak, about twice the size of a shoebox.Two round bell-­eyes stared from the top of the rectangle. The side-­mounted crank fired up the electricity that connected this telephone to th