Shrugging is not an option.You can blame the CIA and demand an investigation or you can blame President George W. Bush and demand his accountability. But you cannot shrug. You cannot walk away. You cannot say, "Oops." Not unless you're the kind of person who sees a dead man in the street and steps over him.That's not the kind of person I am. And that's not the country I live in.
His hands are bleeding. So are his knees. He picks up the rope and pulls it taut. He has beaten four others and now, across the rope, stands the last of them, a teammate, a younger teammate, no less, a kid he had taught to lift weights, a kid he had always been stronger than. Heck, he had been stronger than all of them -- but that was last fall, before it all happened. Before the year from hell.
Itook off my jacket. I emptied my pants pockets. I put the bag on the conveyer belt.I walked through. Beeeeep. "Step over there," the security man ordered. "Wait for someone to wand you."Ah. I slapped my forehead. My glasses. In my jacket pocket."It's these," I said, waving the glasses. "Can I put them through? I'm sure I won't beep then.""NO, SIR," he barked. "You only get one chance!""But if I don't beep without the glasses, isn't it the same as . . .""You only get one chance!"
CALGARY, Alberta -- What is it about hockey losses that melts the hardened heart? Here was Brendan Shanahan, head slumped, sitting in a visitors' dressing room that looked as if a hurricane had just blown through it, gloves and socks and tape strewn across the floor. It was noticeably devoid of players, most of them preferring not to discuss what had just happened out there on the Saddledome ice, a stunning 1-0 overtime loss that ended the Red Wings' top-ranked season and in all likelihood, their roster as we know it.
Well, I lost them. All 60 songs. I don't know where I put them. They could be under a sock. They could be behind a credit card in my wallet.Sixty songs. Gone like that. That's what I get for living in the era of shrinking music.See, kids, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far, away -- the 20th Century -- music came on big discs called 78s. They were heavy, solid things. You could bang a nail with them or throw them like a Frisbee. Odd Job could flick one and take someone's head off.Who is Odd Job, you ask?That is why you're kids.
What they did to Steve Yzerman last summer, you wouldn't wish on a prisoner. They cut his leg bone with a saw, then chiseled it until a path was opened. They wedged that path wider with a fork-like device, then inserted a steel plate, then tightened that plate with screws, then packed it with spare bone material. Then they woke him up.They call this medicine."Osteotomy" is its official name, and if you're lucky and you fully recover, you have less pain as you walk your grandkids to school. You are not supposed to resume an NHL career.
And you thought Solomon had it tough. Dividing a baby might seem simple compared to the task attempted by a Florida jury last week.The jury tried to determine blame in the death of a teacher gunned down by a 13-year-old student. You remember this case. Nathaniel Brazill, the student, was sent home on the last day of school for tossing water balloons. He came back with a gun from a neighbor's house. He asked his teacher, Barry Grunow, if he could speak to a girl in the class. Grunow said no, not in the hallway, but he invited Brazill into the classroom.
I hadn't watched a baseball game on a small, handheld TV set since 1986, when I was stuck in a cab in New York City. That game -- complete with snowy fuzz -- was an American League championship affair, featuring an unlikely comeback by the star-crossed Boston Red Sox against the California Angels in which the Bosox were one strike away from elimination yet ultimately reached the World Series.
Mitch Albom writes about running an orphanage in impoverished Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his kids, their hardships, laughs and challenges, and the life lessons he’s learned there every day.
