Author: Scott Saalman

I watched the resort’s breakfast cook, John, via the kitchen’s pass-through window crack eggs. He had an Anthony Bourdain vibe. I looked forward to my free seaside omelets. Omelets were his oeuvre. I don’t know much about eggs, but I know what I like. Torrential rain saturated our tiny island. I watched the swimming pool’s…

My earliest memory of being embarrassed by a parent happened at Saddle Lake in 1974. I was 10. The episode scarred my psyche so badly that even now, at 58, I still can’t retell it in first-person narrative. The worst thing that could happen to a boy happened: his mom, forgetting that her bathing suit…

“In the tropics, they come and they go.”-Jimmy Buffett I could complain, I guess, about my wife surprising me with a trip to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and how I, a vacation control freak, was denied the privilege of sacrificing hours of precious personal time to arrange for the right flights ….

Paul Michael Ash made me cry. This was way before he died 10 years ago (March 28, 2013), back when I barely knew the man. It was during a Spoken Word event. I loved Paul’s music at Spoken Word. One night I handed him lyrics I wrote 30 years prior, hoping he would put music…

So, everyone has boarded our transoceanic aircraft at O’Hare. The flight safety message starts. It’s the kind you watch on TV monitors instead of a flight attendant’s live reenactment of what you should do if something goes woefully awry.  I still don’t understand why airlines offer flotation devices instead of parachutes. The power goes out,…