Best Baseball Opening Day Ever (Minus the Actual Baseball)

Mets legend Ed Charles, right, assists the author is showing off his 1969 World Series ring.

Spring is here again in the Northeast! It’s time to put away your warm winter clothes and dig out your equally warm but beer-proof Opening Day of Baseball Season clothes!

I’ll be doing that soon in preparation for today's New York Mets home opener, a near-annual ritual for me that includes the near-annual threat of the day being the coldest and/or wettest ever recorded for that date in history.

Maybe that’s why when I look back on all the Opening Days I’ve attended (22 unless my math fails me which it often does because ... writer), one of the most memorable was one where the game wasn’t even being played at the field.

To Each Generation of Students Comes the Need to Walkout

I’ve been asking my children about the National School Walkout planned for Wednesday, and they don’t seem excited about it — my questions or this demonstration. 

There’s much debate among their peers about what the walkout aims to achieve, they said, and there’s much more resignation that, regardless, it will achieve nothing. 

Lucky for them, I’ve got experience as a successful high school protester.

Answering the Questions No One Asks Me

The time has come, the blogger thought, to write of many things. So let’s once again reach into my imaginary mailbag to see what real topics are on the minds of people who would need real help if they imagined I could provide any.

What can be done to bring back diplomacy that would lessen the threat of nuclear war between the United States and North Korea? — Signed, Stop Pushing His Button

Holiday Newsletter for the Modern World

Dear friends, relatives and co-workers who are not on the HR “watch list,”

Merry/Happy Whatever-You-Do-And/Or-Don’t Celebrate! Welcome to our family’s annual holiday newsletter!

We know it’s 2017. We aren’t Luddites. We’re are on all the major social media platforms (including Anxietizer, D-Nouncer and, of course, TimeSukk). We dutifully document by word, photo and hashtag every meal and movement (even THOSE movements — bless our poor parakeet’s IBS) because, as our youngest child says, “Thank you, Kardashians!”

But the physical act of writing a letter, putting it an envelope and paying a deep-in-debt quasi-government agency to deliver it oh-so-slowly is so comforting, so cathartic, so old-school uncool America. That’s why I’m writing this by hand with a piece of only the finest Appalachian strip-mined coal available from Williams-Sonoma. If it was good enough for Lincoln’s homework, it’s good enough for you! So pardon the smudges, and here we go:

Killing Them with Random Acts of Holiday Kindness

The holiday season is a time of traditions: some beautiful, some hokey, most with the best of intentions unless they involve “The Chipmunk Song.”

In our home, the one tradition we deal with even more often than even that screeching novelty tune is the call to “be nicer to one another.” It is usually made by my wife and often punctuated with me yelling “dammit.” (Her request tends to come when I’m in midst of testing burned out strings of Christmas tree lights.)

This year, as reliable as a Starbucks’ holiday cup controversy, My Love made her annual plea for more civility almost no sooner than we had disposed of the Thanksgiving turkey carcass. However, her request contained a twist.

A Higher Education in Going Broke

These graduates spent so much on their education that they could not even afford pants. (Photo by Melissa Johnson on Unsplash)

You’ve undoubtedly heard about the rising costs of higher education in the United States.

As the parent of “rising” high school senior with "falling" income who is fresh from a two-day, three-university, 600-mile tour of prospective Northeastern institutions, I CANNOT say this is true.

Only because the astronomical price tags have left me completely speechless.