Brian Fleck

Walkin'
05/09/2013 - 6:17pm
Brian Fleck
Pearl, our ditzy labradoodle, and I are in the doghouse lately. She committed her sin several weeks ago while we were watching Lexi, a Jack Russell terrier that comes to visit from time to time. Lexi is over 100 years-old in human terms, and has been given only several months to live from a variety of doggie disorders she’s contracted over the past decade. She keeps turning kibble into cobble, however, if you get my drift. Lexi’s owner attributes the dog’s against-...
Walkin'
03/19/2013 - 7:03pm
My back went out for the first time in the late 1970s. I was a twenty-something publishing a newspaper for the military community of Bamberg, Germany. Once a week I’d check a sedan out from the motor pool and drive 140 miles to the Stars and Stripes headquarters in Darmstadt to get my paper printed. Occasionally, a vehicle from the pool would not...
Walkin'
03/06/2013 - 9:02pm
Barney almost shot me by accident, twice. The year was 1970, and I was working the night shift on the loading dock of the Marshall Fields Department Store in the Woodfield Mall outside of Chicago. I unloaded semi trailers as they arrived and then sorted the packages into two-dozen piles, one each for the drivers who delivered them the next day. I...
Walkin'
02/27/2013 - 7:59pm
I’ve killed many a musca domestica, aka house fly, in my day. As a child visiting Wisconsin, one of my favorite barn chores was poisoning the little buggers. Grandma had an old-fashioned pump sprayer, which she filled, I’m guessing, with a capful of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, aka DDT, and water. This was long before we knew that the...
Walkin'
02/19/2013 - 8:33pm
What I remember most about Aunt Izzy, my mother’s twin sister, is eating dinner at her table. Our family, the city slickers from Chicago, would visit her family, the farm folk, at least twice a year. Izzy had seven children with husband Ray, and Mom and Dad added five to make an even dozen. Not that there’d be 12 kids at a meal. By the time the...
Walkin'
02/13/2013 - 9:37pm
I’ve been offered the sale of a handgun three times. The first was in the early 1980s when I lived in North Twin View Heights, a housing development outside of Solon. I was having breakfast at the nearby Vern’s Lakeside Cafe, a small restaurant run out of a converted mobile home. The sign out front boasted hot food and fresh bait. Inside, the dé...