I promised myself. Someday, I’d read many books by authors including Homer, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Steinbeck. After my kids came along in the 90s, I abandoned books except for the occasional one. I traded Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather for thousands of backyard baseball tosses to Quinn Tracy and Ian Tracy. Colin Tracy favored soccer and track and field, about which I knew very little. Yeah, we’d do some math and science homework back then

My mom liked puzzles. Some were easy. Some were formidable. Some were impossible. And some— as we all know— are enigmatic.  When she suffered horrific tragedies in 1986 and thereafter, life presented her with new challenges. Do you rage? Do you seek revenge? Do you abandon your faith? Or do you wait— sometimes patiently, oftentimes in agony— until you see your loved ones again? There was a day when life’s lessons were not nearly as brutal.  When I was a little kid, there was

I was in Cheers Cafe about a month ago when I sat down with my friend Lois Ciali for a nice chat. She saw me sitting at the end of the bar gazing not into space but at the paneled walls and the Steelers signs and the pictures of friends with friends. I was thinking about her husband, the late Jimmy “Goose” Ciali. He employed me as a part-time bartender through the years. My first stint was in 1991, right after I got married.  My wife and I had an apartment a few blocks up the

I can't help but feel that after suffering horrible fates, some restless spirits wish to make their presence known on Earth or make their way someplace else. Me? I never wanted to get in between those spirits and any of their wishes. Around these parts, nothing exciting happened in the late 1970s during my early teenage years. There was the occasional keg party in some place where you’d hoped the cops would never find you. Something else might find you there. And when all was

My grandma Molly “Cookie” Keating would cross the Pittston Bypass and walk down William Street from Cork Lane to meet me after I suffered a rough day in fourth grade at St. John the Evangelist Grade School. She had silvery white hair mostly worn in a pristine bun. She wore bright floral dresses and ornate hats like an Irish Carmen Miranda. She led me downtown to a retail boutique— the ABC Shoppe on Main Street. Its tall, wide storefront windows trapped omnipresent vapor trail

Until my oldest brother Mike moved out of our half of a double-block home, we had three bedrooms for four kids. Briefly, I squeezed in a...

On the walk down the hill he could hear the bell in the not-so-distant spire. The peal of it sounded in groups of three. That’s how many...

I couldn't let my friend Ray go without writing down a few things. I'm glad I got to tell him how I felt when we got together. I remember...

There was a bunk behind Greg Lynch’s house. It sat about a third of the way up from the ground in a giant maple, like the mythical...

I’d never have written a word if it wasn’t for Terry Shaw. Oh, I’d send emails. I’d text. But that would have been the sum of it. Now...