My son has always been the smallest kid in his class, often mistaken for being much younger than he actually is. But it isn’t only his size. His voice is high. He loves stuffed animals. And when given the choice at recess, he’s one of the few boys who would still rather fight dragons and…

My son who is autistic wrestles in high school because he doesn’t mind pain. My other kids would cry when they stubbed their toes playing in the yard, but this son of mine, more than once came to me with gaping wounds needing stitches and hardly a tear in his eye. Now he has a…

Here I sit, watching the Olympics again; it hooks me every time. I always say I like the winter ones better because there aren’t so many sports to keep track of, but when I start watching the summer ones, they suck me in too. In the winter, the downhill racing and the extreme sports I…

Every Saturday morning in fall I wake up and feel a tinge of disappointment that I have not woken up in a dorm room in South Bend, Indiana; that my Notre Dame marching band uniform does not hang in the closet at the foot of my bed. I’m disappointed because I’m not eighteen, nineteen, twenty,…

My children attend public middle and high school; hence the school year always begins with the ritual of the sports physical. There’s a clinic at the orthopedic surgeon’s office: five doctors, three hundred students, all in a line waiting to have their nuts grabbed and their eyes checked.

Much as the Greeks lived in close proximity to their gods, who dwelled on Mt. Olympus, my family lived in Odessa, Missouri, only a half-hour’s drive from Kansas City, where the Royals loomed larger than life for me.