As I was going through my father’s tools when writing about the trowel a few weeks ago, I came across something I hadn’t seen in years. It was a small strip of wavy sheet steel with a few holes punched at regular intervals. About six inches long and an inch wide, these thin galvanized metal artifacts once roamed in large piles among our masonry tool kit.

I swear I still have a large box full of them sitting snugly on the natural shelves created by the ancient scaffolding stacked in my garage. That’s a shrine to my grandfather. That’s where his tools are. That box contains the ties he never used, hidden somewhere behind a sheet of plywood leaning up against it.

My father called them “ties.” Other masons call them “brick ties” or “corrugated ties.” In hardware stores, they share the aisle with other forms of wall ties. Those other forms can appear as wires or wall fasteners. They’re really nothing worth noting.

They certainly don’t have the same sentimental value. They weren’t worth saving, unlike the Continue Reading “The Invisible Support Of The Ties We Cannot See”

Bills coach Joe Brady watches as Josh Allen is about to score the first touchdown at the new Highmark Stadium against the Detroit Lions in the stadium’s first game on Thursday night, September 17, 2026. Photo by Chris Carosa

For as long as I can remember, my brother and I wanted to go to a Buffalo Bills game. We couldn’t go. It was to

o expensive.

My parents went once during the Bills’ AFL Championship season. We couldn’t go. It was just for adults. We stayed home with the babysitter, my great great aunt (that’s not a typo, she was my grandmother’s aunt).

Every week, we’d listen to the game on the radio. Those were the days of “blackouts.” Back then, local television often couldn’t show the games. So the radio was the only choice. My father, my brother, and I. No matter where we were.

We’d listen in the car on a radio that had only the AM band. We’d listen in the spare room on a radio embedded in the Show and Tell. My mother would serve the three of us little sandwiches to make the event a special family event. We’d listen outside on a portable radio while my father laid bricks for a raised flower bed at my great aunt’s house (that would be my mother’s aunt).

I remember that last one. The Bills beat the Jets. It was 1968. That was their only win that season. But they beat the eventual Super Bowl champs.

What I don’t remember is when we first asked our father if we could go to a game.

“Someday,” he promised. “When you boys are older.”

My brother and I wondered when we’d be older.

Then, one day in early 1973, my father finally sprang the question on us. “Boys, do you want Continue Reading “Destiny Is Calling Me”