A Family Tradition - a Column by Carlos Briceño

The anniversary of my sister’s death is coming up in about a month. Rose died on Halloween last year after a massive red oak tree fell on the car she was in during a fierce storm. The car was parked in her driveway, and the tree was from a…

My wife, Jill, and I have not been to the local movie theater in months. It’s been so long that we can’t remember the last movie we saw there. By contrast, we averaged about two movies a month before the pandemic struck. With the recent reopening of our town’s theaters,…

I stumbled into my future profession when I took a creative writing class as a junior in high school. I took the class because it was an elective, something easy. In other words, it was what my teenage self considered a “blow-off,” something that didn’t require studying. Studying, I thought…

One of summer’s guilty pleasures is watching mindless movies. On a recent weekend, Jill and I watched “Bill and Ted Face the Music,” which is so egregiously and heinously bad, it’s good, dude. (This is how the time-traveling characters talk to each other. Needless to say, the dialogue is…

My mom is dying. She’s 90, has dementia, can’t walk, yells angrily at times, and lives in an assisted living home, where visitors are frowned upon because of the COVID-19 threat. Several days ago, an ambulance picked her up because she had vomited and was unresponsive. Several hours after visiting…

Last year, I wrote about the possibility of telemedicine visits for Huntington’s patients with the Huntington’s Disease Society of America’s Center of Excellence in Chicago. My wife, Jill, and I were excited about this possibility because she has “white coat syndrome.” As someone who has witnessed Jill’s anxiety,…

If you could go anywhere on vacation, would you take your time planning the perfect trip? Would you look at all of the travel websites in hopes of finding the most interesting places to go? Would you spend large amounts of money to see all of the typical tourist attractions?…

Ever since my wife, Jill, and our daughter were tested and diagnosed as gene positive for Huntington’s disease, I have been impressed with their positive attitudes and outlook for their future. Today I realized their attitudes are the long-standing views of their family. I realized this after Jill spoke…

What makes a great marriage? That age-old question has been the subject of many books over the years, hundreds of talk shows, and millions of arguments. Money, especially fighting about how much to spend, is always a big topic. Many think that if you are an active listener,…

Did you ever watch cartoons when you were young? One of my favorites as a child was “Scooby-Doo,” an animated cartoon series that featured teenagers Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy. They also had a talking brown Great Dane named Scooby-Doo. This motley crew of mystery-solvers would travel from town…