Ron Franscell's Blog

This essay was originally written just two days after the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in 2012. Yesterday’s tragic shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis makes me want to re-run […]

The post We’ll always have mass murder appeared first on Ron Franscell.

Essayist Robert Fulghum once surmised that everything he ever needed to know he learned in kindergarten, but I was a slow learner. Yesterday, the 2025 Little League World Series got […]

The post Everything I need to know, I learned in Little League appeared first on Ron Franscell.

Fifty years. Half a century. And yet, if I close my eyes, I can still hear the music drifting down the hallways, feel the sun warming our faces on autumn […]

The post Class of ’75: Old friends, young again for one night appeared first on Ron Franscell.

A few years ago, I was contacted by the friend of a friend of a friend. He had a strange request: Could you help this French guy find the descendants […]

The post This boy died far away for a country that wasn’t his appeared first on Ron Franscell.

It was after 2am and the graveyard-shift nurses drifted like ghosts in the hallway, tending to the dead and dying. It wasn’t that Michael* couldn’t sleep, even with meds he […]

The post Better Angels: No veteran should die alone appeared first on Ron Franscell.

The potato patch behind Dermot Healy’s stone cottage wasn’t much bigger than a parking space, but the Irish winter had left it dog-eared and bedraggled. “The first thing,” Dermot said as […]

The post The day I planted Dermot Healy’s potatoes appeared first on Ron Franscell.

This was excerpted from Ron Franscell’s DELIVERED FROM EVIL, a book that explores the lives of 10 ordinary people who survived mass killers. One of those monsters was a racist […]

The post 52 years ago this week, a different terrorist unleashed himself on New Orleans appeared first on Ron Franscell.

Ready or not, a new year is about to begin, even though it doesn’t seem like that long ago when the “old” year started. An amateur philosopher friend of mine has […]

The post A new year already? But … appeared first on Ron Franscell.

I originally wrote this essay as a newspaper column in 1995. It appears here today with a few minor but festive updates because, well, Scrooge is timeless. No businessman in […]

The post In defense of Ebenezer Scrooge appeared first on Ron Franscell.

My son Matt visited over Thanksgiving. He helped me with some little household repairs and improvements that were beyond my skills and reach, then helped us put up our Christmas […]

The post The Ladder Guy appeared first on Ron Franscell.