Lost and Found - Heartache, Hope, and a Little Dog

When my daughter was born, I darkly mused that that our dog, Ellie, would be the thing that would teach my daughter about death. The pup recently turned four and the baby three months, so assuming that Ellie lived an average life, Lucy should be well into grade school before we were faced with saying goodbye to our dog.

Stories from the Street - Chicago Homeless Audio Project

For the past several weeks, I've been talking to some of the homeless people I pass on the Chicago streets  as I drive to and from work. The stories I've heard are brief and fascinating and offer insight into a much different world than most who reading these essays know. The project is still rather amorphous, so it will be interesting to see how the next few episodes evolve, depending on who I speak to and the stories I hear.

Occupy Chicago - One Year Later

A few weeks ago I attended the Occupy Chicago General Assembly in an attempt to understand what the organization had been doing over the last year. The Occupy Movement, started as "Occupy Wall Street" in New York City, fell out of the mainstream spotlight as the winter weather and presidential politics overwhelmed the protestations of "the 99%" against the control of the elite. I joined some friends at one of the events that Occupy Chicago held last fall in Grant Park, and remembered thinking that this movement would last as long as it had the ability to bring large crowds to conspicuous locations in Chicago, Oakland, Zuccotti Park, and beyond. But I doubted its ability to survive the winter.