ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

DAILY BLOG

  • FRIDAY FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Bonhoeffer on Gratitude

    “In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.” (cf. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison.) Read more

  • THROWBACK THURSDAY:”The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes

    “Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over 15 years for various blogs. This was first posted on July 21, 2016. I first read Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in 1981 when I was living in Chicago. It was part of a volume of Hughes’s poetry that I bought in a used… Read more

  • What to Do With The Anxiety?

    I have mentioned here before that one strategy I am trying to use to deal with the anxiety Trumpian Chaos causes is to avoid the 24-hour news cycle. This involves avoiding online doom-scrolling, social media, and not listening to or watching the news. My only news source currently is my local StarTribune newspaper that I… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “The Killers” by John D. MacDonald

    “I recently discovered John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. Every time I finish one of those slender books, I tell myself it’s time to take a break and return to the pile on the night stand but then find myself deep into another McGee novel. Before there were Lee Child and Carl Hiaasen, there was MacDonald — as… Read more

  • Hardboiled Coffee Night

    The attendant filled my cup and made change without waking, moving as if his starched coat was holding him up. I sat at the shining enameled counter, slowly burning my throat with coffee and thinking with a chilly three o’clock brain. Ruth was clear, of murder at any rate. But the Schneiders’ alibi was at… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “Rides a Stranger” by David Bell

    I have said here before that Bibliomysteries are one of many subgenera that are always in my wheel-house. Books, bookstores, libraries, book collecting make the perfect subject and setting for mysteries. David Bell’s stand-alone, short story, “Rides a Stranger” is a great example of the Bibliomystery sub-genre. Don and his father shared a love of… Read more

  • What Matters

    Believe it or not, this blog posting for the first Saturday of March 2025 is actually being written on December 23rd, 2024. That is how far ahead I am working now on ClimbingSky. I am not certain if that is a good thing or a bad thing from a reader’s point of view. But for… Read more

  • FRIDAY FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Hank Aaron on Failure

    “Failure is a part of success. There is no such thing as a bed of roses all your life. But failure will never stand in the way of success if you learn from it.” – Hank Aaron Read more

  • Kirby

    On this day in 2006, Kirby Puckett died at the young age of 46. In honor of Kirby, I am reposting this that I wrote and posted in July here at ClimbingSky: I was lucky enough to move to the Twin Cities and to begin going to Twins games regularly in 1986. That meant I… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “The Euthanasia of Hilary’s Aunt” by Cyril Hare

    The Short-Story form allows writers to be more “playful” than they could be in a longer form. TExperiment, even cheat a little, if you will. All in the name of entertainment. Cyril Hare was the pen name of Alfred Clark a barrister and a member of the famous Detection Club. He wrote a number of… Read more