Highlights from The Writer, in the Lockport Daily

As you read this, I am on my way to DeSales Catholic School to read aloud to my granddaughter Bella’s pre-kindergarten class. There are few joys in life as grand as reading aloud to a room full of 4-year-olds. Read it here.

What would you say if someone told you to drive down Transit Road, at top speed, with your kids in the car, but you had to wear a blindfold? This is what it is like when a community loses its local newspaper. Read it here.

Maybe it is the sweet revenge of the Bills clobbering the Kansas City Chiefs on their home field the week before last. Or Josh Allen vaulting over a Chief’s defensive man like he was just a low fence in the way of a first down.  Read it here.

An audit released last week by the New York State Comptroller confirmed what has been widely reported before: Officials at Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corporation (OTB) have been doling out lavish gifts to themselves and their friends, at the people’s expense.  Read it here.

In 1876, 80 years before the US Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the nations schools, a Black brick maker in Lockport NY led the movement that did it here. Now the city's junior high school bears his name. Read it here.

From ancient history to present day, there have always been foolish things that people have believed based on fantasy.  What saves us from such nonsense is science. But we live in a moment when it seems like a lot of people have forgotten what science actually is.  Read it here.

I read an article recently about how our minds like to conjure up alternative realities of how our lives might be different if we had taken different roads. What if we had that other career, or moved to that other place, or married that other person? Where would we be now? My mind conjures up something else, images of the alternative realities in which my family and I have lived. Read it here.

On Tuesday afternoon last week, my neighbors on Independence Drive were kayaking along our flooded street. On Transit, one of the parking lots could have been renamed Lake Five Guys as the flooding rose up to the height of people’s knees. Basements filled with water and backed-up sewage.  Read it here.

In May, word leaked that the Lockport School District had submitted a $500,000 funding request to the New York Department of Education, to start a My Brother’s Keeper project here.   Even though the funds are supposed to directly target help to these students, the district never bothered to speak with any of their families about how best to use that money.  Read it here.

I have been driving, walking and busing my three children to school in one form or another, and in one country or another, for nearly 30 years. Last week I did that for the last time, driving my daughter Mariana to her last day of classes at Lockport High School. Read it here.