I must have watched the old guy for 20 minutes, maybe more. All he did was sit at that table with his coffee and stare out the window. I couldn’t understand it. How can someone just sit for extended periods of time and do nothing but stare at something? Or nothing? I studied him for ...

Gather ’round, kiddies, and your ol’ Uncle Burtie will tell you about how we survived in the ancient days before Amazon. Oh, yes, it’s true, there was a time before Prime and FedEx trucks roamed the land. I was there. I also remember when there was no such thing as the Super Bowl, ...

I was a twig-sized seventh-grader at Rowe Junior High School — the puniest of ranks in the strangest and most emotionally unstable three years of a human being’s “wonder years.” I sat at a table with my loud and obnoxious friends in an echo chamber of a lunchroom full of loud and ...

I mopped my brow with the bottom of my T-shirt. “I am sweating like a pig.” “Nope.” Cousin Ollie shook his head. “Pigs don’t sweat.” “Then how come we say ‘sweating like a pig’?” “WE don’t. YOU do. Real farm kids know better.” I sighed. “My mom says my room ...

Writing a column every week is hard. Not the writing so much. It’s the coming up with topics week after week that taxes the nooks and crannies of my cerebrum, cerebellum and Cocoa Wheats. That’s why I keep a file of random thoughts and observations — to goose the gerbils in my brain to ...

As I rooted around for inspirational quotes about February, I came across this ridiculousness: “February: Our last chance to NOT play in the snow.” Whichever great philosopher came up with that piece of faux wisdom obviously isn’t from northeast Ohio! We can NOT play in the snow all ...