The afternoon was cold, dark and rainy at Calvary Cemetery. Maybe that’s why I ended up in my short walk there, focusing on the textures of things, such as this sideview of one of several angels adorning a tombstone.     I liked the simple sharpness carved into the fronds of this ornamentation on another.     And the boulder-like character of…

Building ornamentation caught my eye today, and one little city emblem:               Patrick T. Reardon 4.16.20    

  One of the guys from basketball at the Levy Senior Center in Evanston is recovering, apparently well, from the coronavirus.  But he’s been stuck in a motel for weeks. So, at noon today, a bunch of us formed a cavalcade to drive past as he stood on the sidewalk, masked, waving at us like a dignitary. …

The lakefront parks are closed, as are all the other city parks. Walking on the sidewalks of Edgewater — normally an invigorating exercise — is weird.  I find myself scanning ahead of me to judge whether anyone’s coming near me, whether the person is or isn’t wearing a mask, whether the person is or isn’t alone. Do…

Early on, it was pretty clear that my wife and I — both over that red-alarm age of 60 — are going to be spending basically all our time in our home for what could easily be many months. And one of my first thoughts was….time to read a long book! Well, maybe.  Long books, after all,…

Eight and a half years ago, an elderly friend of mine died, and one of the guys I play basketball with got leukemia.  It got me thinking about that thing we always seem to believe is unthinkable — Death. So I sat down and planned my funeral service. I wrote an essay about this which appeared in…

I think I’ve always enjoyed walking in cemeteries. That may seem odd, especially during our present national crisis. But walking — well-separated from each other — is one of the few activities that are still available to us as we keep our heads down or, like turtles, keep ourselves inside our shell.  Walking and running and biking. There…

    Over the last year, I’ve read two books that knocked my socks off — the exquisitely evocative “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison and that massive, epic, beautiful whale of great literature, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. I came to read them because, back in the spring of 2016, a friend recommended a book that had…

In recent days, I’ve been doing a lot of walking. I know that this may soon come to a halt if the efforts to combat coronavirus in the United States lead to a mandatory quarantine, keeping me at home, away from everyone else. For now, though, I’m dealing with mild cabin fever by walking as I did…