Rick is a 62-year-old man who was diagnosed with ALS in January 2007. Currently a resident of Southwest Florida, he has lived in four other metropolitan areas, but greater Chicagoland will always be “home.” Rick is a degreed engineer, spending his career in the medical device industry. He’s had the good fortune of extensive travel throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. He writes, in part, to be an ALS advocate. Additionally, it is his hope that his output will help dispel the myth that technical folk and digestible prose aren’t mutually exclusive.The spark of inspiration for column topics sometimes comes to me from surprising sources. Last Saturday, with my submission deadline looming, I had nothing … nada … bupkis. Fearing I would to have to forgo my weekly passion, I passed the time reading, with some music playing in…
Glaciers are known for their slow movement and the transformative change that they leave in their wake. Most move only a few centimeters a day. Yet they produce lakes, cliffs, moraines, valleys, mountain arêtes and horns, and pronounced landscape striations. Perhaps stem cell research…
Consider the wheel. Nothing comparable exists in nature. Its conception was not the byproduct of observation and imitation, but a 100 percent original human brainstorm. Evidence suggests that the first wheels were used for making pottery around 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia. They weren’t employed for locomotion until 300 years…
I always have had a fascination with words. It stems from my mom and dad, both of whom instilled in me a voracious appetite for reading and writing. Letters from my grandfather blending humor, pathos, self-deprecation, irreverence, sobriety, fact, and thoughtful opinion cemented the notion that words, carefully pieced together,…
“For the past two weeks, you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” —Lou Gehrig, July 4, 1939 Lou Gehrig was my father’s favorite baseball player, which for a fair bit of my youth,…
“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. … That’s the signpost up ahead — your next stop, the Twilight Zone!” —Rod Serling I took my eyes off the figurative road and missed the signpost entirely. It began one…
I recently reemerged from a plummet into the dark depths of my psyche. An eight-day hospital stay triggered my dive into an emotional abyss. About 2 1/2 weeks ago, a piece of chicken stubbornly lodged itself in my esophagus. After waiting 24 painful hours, in the hope of uneventful digestive…
A 1992 episode of the hit television series “Seinfeld” is a “life-imitating-art” story titled “The Pitch.” The character of George Costanza (with brief help from Jerry Seinfeld) attempts to explain the concept for a new show to fictional NBC executive Russell Dalrymple: George: I think I can sum…
The sun is setting on another ALS Awareness Month. If we’ve been successful at drawing attention to the disease, we’ve reminded those who are untouched by its tortuous path that ALS is an indiscriminate, relentless, amoral, sadistic, Machiavellian monster. But to what end? Pity is superfluous and attention-fleeting; empathy…
“What one man can do, another can do.” So said actor Anthony Hopkins, playing the role of Charles Morse in the movie “The Edge.” He used that mantra as inspiration to fell a rogue, predatory grizzly bear. It may be hyperbolic to equate the difficulties of securing one’s…
