The ride.

“You can’t reach for anything new if your hands are still full of yesterday’s junk.” ~ Louise Smith In our 20s, my wife and I were young and poor, scraping by with big dreams and a tiny budget. We had just enough in our financial plan for one car, not two. Then, out of the blue, a guy I knew was selling his 1978 Yamaha 650 motorcycle for a really great price. It was sleek and black,  whispering tempted freedom to my adventurer heart and low-priced kindness to my bank account.

“Everything you’ve ever wanted is just on the other side of fear.” ~ George Addair   I woke up one day a few years ago and realized that many of the things that prominently defined me once were no longer part of my current and were not going to be part of my future. It was an astonishing discovery that sent me into a dramatic, downward spiral of depressed confusion. Life had become swampy, and I was really quite lost. After some time and a great deal of processing, I came to

Webster defines genealogy as “an account of the descent of a person, family, or group from an ancestor or from older forms.” Older forms, indeed.   June Lofgreen is the mother of a few of my closest friends and the grandmother of some of my other closest friends. I became a semi-adopted grand-dude of Grandma Lofgreen in the late 80s (that’s the 1980s for those of you born in this century). While some grandmothers bake and serve cookies for their grandchildren and grand-dudes,

Last September, I had to be in St. Louis to manage a video shoot for work on the last Friday of the month. It’s only about 300 miles from Chicagoland, or about a five-hour drive, so it didn’t make any sense to fly. I made plans to drive down with the video team Thursday, returning Saturday or Sunday. Wednesday morning, I woke up with a thought… what if I rode my motorcycle down instead? Stupid, right? Crazy. Last-minute and dumb. I mean, I’d never taken the bike anywhere but

Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in her 20s before rescuing her family and some 70 or so others from bondage via the Underground Railroad in the 1850s and early 1860s. I learned about Ms. Tubman one February in 2nd grade when we studied famous African Americans. I was inspired by her courage and service then and it stayed with me. I celebrate this modern-day Moses for doing what most of us can only dream of: securing our own freedom and then helping to lead others to theirs. Tr