Authors Electric

The closest I've come to kicking the bucket was when peritonitis put me in a coma for three days at age 5. (That was in 1942, when I was saved by new antibiotic wonder drugs), and late one night a month ago, at age 89, when my inamorata, artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, found me unconscious on the floor of my home office, where I had fallen due to low blood sugar - a hazard for   type 2 diabetic octgenarians on insulin like myself. Lucky for me she called 911. (I won't count the murder of a character that my friend and prolific  mystery writer Lewis Perdue named after me in his 1985 thriller, " The Linz Testament .")   The non-fiction me woke up in St. Fra ncis Hospital, in the pricey 'burb of Evanston, Illinois, not far from my home on Chicago's North Side. Not that  I'm a believer, but St. Francis, as well as Eleanor, must have been watching over me because I remain whole, and in possession of my faculties. I was bruised from my fall, but no broken bones. ...

Keeping a list... Ho, ho, not to worry. Kris Kringle will still bring gifts for children everywhere. But I hate to report that we adults in America have made this year's naughty list in blackest ink. A majority of us will find a lump of coal in our Christmas stockings. The lump will be orange, slimy and smell bad and be called a Trump. I'll not name names. You know who you are, and so does this season's frowny Father Christmas.  It's not party politics or the finer points of trade that have our Elf-in-Chief in a snit this Christmas. It's the summary, mass roundups of aliens that our doddering Don has already set in motion. Like under his first term, it includes separation of families and incarceration of children - by the millions this time. Hate based cruelty is not a byproduct here. It is the self-professed point. I t doesn't take an all-knowing Santa to recognize this pogrom for what it is - persecution, with holocaust looming.  Christmas celebrates the birth...