Two very different men recently asked me seemingly unrelated questions that had everything to do with the other.

I watched the heavy machinery bludgeon the parking lot at Manhattan High the other day, and I felt a little part of me die.

Last weekend somebody asked me to predict who would win the upcoming All Star game, and I gave the only answer I was sure of: I don't know. Predictions are the coin of the realm in contemporary conversation, but they have little value.

She stands five feet in heels and is light as a feather but as tough and as strong as an NFL linebacker.

Wamego was a great place to spend the summer when I was growing up there in the 1950s and 60s.

Look up ''viable'' in the dictionary. According to Webster, one of the entries is "workable and likely to survive."

I took a year of Spanish in college, but today I can't habla español.

Some books walked into my office the other day. I have about a thousand of them on my shelves at home — hand-crafted mahogany shelves, I might add — and a surprisingly strong fraction of that thousand have nothing whatsoever to do with baseball.

Tens of thousands took to the streets two weekends ago in cities all across the country protesting the newly minted Arizona immigration law.

Our kids — who are now adults — were middle-school-age and less when my wife Joyce and I first began to hear about cell phones.