Grant Hill wanted to buy a house. This was years ago, when he was still a Piston, still figuring his future would be in Michigan. He asked if I could show him around a particular neighborhood. So one afternoon, in the off-season, we took a ride. Hill was looking for privacy, and we saw a "for sale" sign at the bottom of a long, hidden driveway. We drove up through a thickly wooded area and emerged into a clearing that surrounded a huge, modern house."Whoa, this is nice," Hill said.
I'm sure winning the lottery is good for something. But that something obviously isn't marriage.Take the recent case of Robert Swofford, a postal worker in Florida. He had been separated from his wife for three years. That's a long time to be separated. That's longer than many marriages. You figure that much time apart, you might as well finalize it. But they never got around to it.Then Swofford won the lottery. A fat $60 million. And wouldn't you know it? Just like that, his wife served him with divorce papers -- and claimed half of his prize.
The coach sits in a janitor's closet. Two mops rest in yellow buckets. A faucet and drain are in the corner. There are no windows. No desk. A telephone, tethered to the wall with a loose gray cord, sits on the floor."My office," Ben Kelso says with a chuckle.And you should see the gym.The gym is a tile floor, dirty white linoleum, with tape marking lanes from the 1950s, before Wilt Chamberlain forced them to be widened. There is one basket hanging loosely on a tin backboard. The whole "gym" is the size of a large classroom.
On the morning of Oct. 12, a homeless man was pushing a shopping cart down Lincoln Street in Highland Park. He came upon a body, lying near the sidewalk. It was a slender body, tall, athletic, only a teen, wrapped in two T-shirts, jeans and black athletic shoes. The homeless man took a better look. Maybe it was sleeping. Then he backed away. There was a bullet hole in the rear of the teen's head and another in the front where the bullet exited -- police call that a "through and through" -- and this body wasn't sleeping and it wasn't waking up, not that morning, not ever.
Mitch Albom writes about running an orphanage in impoverished Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his kids, their hardships, laughs and challenges, and the life lessons he’s learned there every day.
