Tillicum

How the Mariners can win the Pennant. Sing it with me (to the tune of the Armour hotdog song. Not the ‘take-me-out-to-the-ballgame hotdog song):

Summer: endless sunny days, rosy cheeks, no more wildly-flying-pigtails-while-airborne-into-puddles but the same peals and squeals of laughter are heard back-and-forth on the swing. Once the harvest is in.

Tillicum lost another of its leaders in the recent death of Pat O’Brien. Perhaps my favorite story of those we swapped by phone over the years, and again in the waning days at his bedside, was the opportunity he had to set aside the standard requirements that had been imposed by the school in order […]

The Tillicum Crushers – the 9-and-10-year-olds all from Tillicum Elementary School’s third-and-fourth-grades – will have brand new uniforms this season with a big, bold letter ‘C’ on the cap. Far more than the name of the team is what the letter signifies illustrated by the day many, many years ago that my then-little-daughter and I […]

It’s an old scraggly, stark-naked tree, not a leaf on any of its many – and most decidedly – dead branches. Like the twisted, gnarly and bony fingers of what remains of a skeletal hand thrusting claws up through the soil which our mom was fond of placing about the yard at Halloween, the solo […]

The little guy was standing at third base. Seven years old. His fellow teammate at the plate had swung furiously at the first two pitches. And missed. I knelt down on my knees in the third base coaches’ box and leaned out over the chalk line that fairly shouted ‘proceed no further,’ and spoke as […]