Thanks a lot, Jessica Seinfeld. You just had to go and write a cookbook, becoming a big food sensation in the process. Thanks! Now I’m eating spinach brownies and hearing about chicken nuggets with sweet potato or beet puree. (Actually, that sounds kind of good.) I’ve had apple sauce muffins with carrots stuffed in, and chocolate chip cookies with garbanzo beans tucked discreetly inside. Garbanzo beans in cookies! I have no idea what else is coming down the pipeline, but my wife has become a baking fool. And it’s all because of you. If you haven’t heard of Jessica Seinfeld, she’s the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld and now has a mega-popular cookbook out called “Deceptively Delicious.” It’s all about showing you how to “deceptively” work vegetables into everyday food so your children (and stubborn husbands) will eat them. (For the record, I eat my spinach and love broccoli. The irony is that my wife is the one who’s never been a fan of vegetables. But I guess children change all of that.)

Fear. Trepidation. Panic. Dehydration. Heat stroke. Butterflies. Muscle spasms. Leg cramps. Abdominal cramping. Ear lobe cramping. Fever. The shakes. Ingrown toenails. Deviated knee joint spontaneous combustion. Nausea. Indigestion. Frizzy hair. Anxiety. Terror. Abject terror! No, this was not the result of my marathon training. (For the record, I’m training to run the Marine Corps marathon in Washington D.C. this Oct. 28.) Rather, all these feelings and reactions hit me while walking around the block last weekend right after my neighbor John yelled out to me from his porch: “Hey, you hear they canceled the Chicago Marathon mid-way through because of the heat?” Then, for added effect, “Someone died.” Actually, it turns out that the individual died from a heart condition, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Death from heat during a marathon or death from heart condition during a marathon: which do you prefer? Any way you look at it, he DIED … in the marathon. (Here come the stomach cramps again!)

I was shocked — literally shocked! — when I saw the story. The headline read: “Germs taken to space come back deadlier.” That’s just great. As if we don’t have enough problems in the world, now we have to deal with juiced-up salmonella that WE sent up into space. Just great! What did these people expect? That the salmonella would come back tamer and help find the cure for cancer? Any kid who has ever read a comic book or watched a sci-fi flick could have told you how this one would turn out. Send germs into outer space, and they come back to eat your face. It’s that simple. If you haven’t read the story, I will sum it up for you: Enterprising scientists decided last year to send salmonella up in a space shuttle, curious to see how the bacterium would fare on such a voyage. The year before they sent salmonella on a cruise to the Caribbean, but between the bacterium getting drunk all the time and contracting the Norwalk virus, that experiment was a complete bust. So this time they picked space. Makes perfect sense! Maybe it’s just me, but I get these pictures in my head of astronauts conducting little, tiny tests on the weightless salmonella. You know, like how long salmonella can pedal on a stationary bike in zero gravity. Whether they react differently to ink blot tests while orbiting earth. How long it takes them to put a miniature puzzle of the Eiffel […]

I’m not one for sappy or overly-sentimental moments. Leave them for the maple trees and the sorry movies. But once in a while you have that sensation you just can’t shake. That moment that really gets to you and lights you up inside, as if the universe takes a big, deep breath and sighs with relief. Something had been different this night. Something lighter in the air. Something energized and upbeat in the voices of my mother and my aunt. The two of them were at my grandmother’s house when I called. They sounded upbeat and joked on the phone with my daughter Amelie — listening to her say “hi,” “bye,” and other mangled bits of a language called “Toddlerish.” Something felt good. For the past couple of months, my grandmother’s health has been failing. To be blunt, her body was shutting down. Not slowly and gradually — she was dying fast. Hospice was caring for her at home, and my mother and aunt were with her constantly. I had already gone to Tampa to say my goodbyes. There’s nothing tougher than waiting on death. Every time the phone rings, you answer it with stiff shoulders and ears that don’t want to touch the receiver. When family members talk, they sound tired, monotone and mournful. There is no joy. It’s agonizing and tedious. It hurts and wears you out. But something was different this night, as if we had all let our guard down. Like we allowed, for just a […]

Dear Leona Helmsley’s Dog, First off, let me just send my condolences and tell you how sorry I am for your loss. This must be very tough on you. Maybe as tough as when your mother was sent off to the federal pen for tax evasion. Things got tough then, and we all read about how you had to go off your foie gras diet and switch to boiled lobster. No butter! Is there no humanity in this world? And now she’s gone forever, that wonderful hotel heiress who the cruel media dubbed the “Queen of Mean.” I always liked the woman. Not that we were close or anything. In fact, we had never met. But I walked by the Helmsley Park Lane in Manhattan once, and the hotel actually sneered at me and tried to steal a quarter from my pocket. So I feel like I knew her well. Is it true she could suck a dollar from a billfold three blocks away? But to the point of this letter: I read in the newspapers that you have suddenly come into great wealth thanks to your master’s unfortunate demise. If I’m not mistaken, you were left a total of $12 million. That’s good money for a Maltese. Shoot, that’s good money for a beagle or a shitzu. In fact, in dog dollars, I believe that’s $84 million. Not bad, and I’m sure you have big plans for that money. Jetting out west to party all night with Paris Hilton. […]

Nothing cools the savage heat like visions of icicles past. My cool reminder came from a sheet of newsprint my father handed me. The Thompsons had ventured south to Tampa this past weekend. My grandmother, a little Cuban woman about yay tall, is under Hospice care now and things don’t look too good. We wanted to go down and see her, maybe for one last time. It was a somber occasion, yet joyous at the same time. My family has that way about us. Nothing gets us down too much, and we’ll find a way to see the bright side on the darkest of occasions. Or maybe the heat was too much for our brains to handle. We suffered. Tampa is not a place to visit in August. During Tampa summers, the heat gets so bad that the asphalt on the roads gets soupy like chocolate syrup. Popcorn kernels burst just sitting around in a jar. And in my mother’s house, where there isn’t air conditioning, it’s like being a rotisserie chicken. My mother has believed since the oil crisis of the Jimmy Carter years that air conditioning was just a passing fad, and that one day we’ll have to all give it up.

Suddenly it doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. When did it? I’m having trouble thinking back to that time, trying to pin the blame on a moment, when I said to myself, “Sure, dopey, let’s go run 26.2 miles for fun, not because a bear is chasing you. For fun!” Rational people don’t say things like that, and rational people can’t really relate to why a sane human being would run a marathon again. Years after running my first, I’m now training for October’s Marine Corps Marathon in D.C. And I know there was moment, months ago, when this seemed like a good idea. I must have forgotten about all the pain, and just how grueling it can be. Memory is short, and common sense even shorter. So I signed up and stood around a lot in a Superman pose thumping my chest.