Posts by Dan Szczesny
The home of Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania is not easy to get to, either, not being on the way to someplace or other. You have to want to go there. And yes, about 10,000 souls descended on Punxsutawney yesterday, as they annually do, to bear witness to Phil the groundhog’s winter predictions.
I’m usually not one to wax philosophical about politicians, but there is one who stands out and played a pretty important role at a key moment in my life.
Manchester’s Bob Baines passed away Friday. He was the city’s mayor from 2000-2006.
A few years ago, our library – somehow – became a PokéStop. No, we didn’t know what that was either until suddenly our parking lot was getting full everyday with people just sitting in their cars, eyes down on their phones or in some cases laptops.
We are down in Plainville, Massachusetts, at An Unlikely Story, the remarkable bookstore and cafe owned by Jeff Kinney, the writer and author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.Â
For months and months now, Little Bean and I have been eyeing the International Cryptozoology Museum (ICM) up Portland way, and we decided as a family to head up there for my daughter’s birthday. Even the lady of the house came, putting aside her curious suspicions that the poop was not real Yeti poop, to join us. We’re very proud of her.
Ashley Suppa has been singing and playing rock and roll since her guitarist dad helped set her up as a background singer for Ace Frehley’s 2009 solo album Anomaly. She was six when she did that gig and she hasn’t looked back!
I confess that my first reaction was that she was feeling peer pressure by her more sporty friends, as opposed to actually being interesting and wanting to play basketball – a sport she herself admitted she knew almost nothing about.
She began to learn piano, slowly, weekly, on an old electric, stand-up keyboard. She played a grand piano at her lessons. After six months, she sat at a piano at a historic New England church for a recital. She had memorized all four songs she played.Â
And two months ago, she wrote her first song.
It was time.
O P I N I O N TRANSCENDENTAL DAD By Dan Szczesny 2 stories about family and reclaiming a neighborhood,
Buffalo’s East Side is a wreck. When the majestic (and now abandoned) Buffalo Central Terminal was built in the 1920s, it tore the neighborhood apart and signaled the area’s slow decline from thriving ethnic neighborhood to neglected urban decay. Today, the neighborhood spills over onto the broken sidewalks and dirty streets like it’s been punctured, like the houses and yards and churches are all open, bleeding wounds.