Month: July 2026

When Mark and I moved to Kansas City 34 years ago, we thought of it as a 5-10 year stay and that once he got his career established we’d move to a city with a bigger university. In those first few years if he’d have said, “Let’s blow this joint,” I would have had the kids and the house packed up in two days. Except for the two biggies of less traffic and affordable housing I was not a fan of the place.

Over time that changed as I found my people and it began to feel like home. Mark would often talk about moving, mainly due to frustration over his job, but after three moves for his career I flipped my mindset and was dead set against it. Our kids were in good schools, we had an established network, and living in a smaller city was so much easier than the east coast or Chicago. When family would come to visit I’d always say, “The longest it takes us to get anywhere is 20-30 minutes tops and we rarely have to pay for parking.” The badge of honor in a smaller city.

Over the years we got a world class performing arts center, our baseball and football teams started to get noticed, and two years ago the first stadium built specifically for a women’s professional sports team opened. By that time Kansas City had become an established soccer town and FIFA deemed us to be one of the host cities for the World Cup. My kids were excited. I thought oh how nice as I had very little knowledge of the World Cup or what it meant for my adopted hometown to be a host city.

In preparation for all the expected visitors, our streetcar got extended, roads filled with potholes got a rehab, and there were daily news stories about getting spiffed up for company. I did not grasp how big of a deal it was until we were in the airport a few weeks before the start of the games. It was blanketed in welcome signs for travelers coming to the cup and a FIFA pop-up shop selling merchandise.

Michael and his son are big soccer fans and I offhandedly suggested that he should try to get tickets for one of the games. Two of the people who work in his lab are a married couple from Argentina and they walked him through the process which was basically a lottery. Months later he found out he got two tickets for two games. My daughter and her husband got four tickets for the same two games.

June came and we were surrounded by professional soccer players – Argentina was using the Kansas City area as their base as was Netherland. England bought out a hotel for the last month that is ten minutes from where we live. Algeria was in a college town forty minutes away. On a whim, Michael bought two tickets for us for the first game of the match here – Argentina versus Algeria. We got jerseys, drove by our shopping and restaurant district where Argentinian fans had taken over, and 24 hours later hopped on a bus to Arrowhead Stadium for the game. It was the craziest, most electric environment I had ever been in and I was hooked.

We consumed a daily diet of soccer and it was all anyone talked about. The retired owner where I work asked me what shows I’ve been watching. “The soccer show,” I said, “only the soccer show.” My coworker went to the KC Current stadium with a friend and their sons for a watch party. It was miserably hot so they ended up watching in a restaurant then boarded the streetcar to head home. “I’m letting you out here,” the operator said, “because I can’t go any further.” They stepped onto the street and were swept up in a swarm of fans from Columbia and she said it was the highlight of the night.

Last week I took my grandson to the pool. He lives and breathes sports with soccer being his favorite thanks to his parents who have had season tickets for him and his siblings since they were babies. He showed me how each of his favorite players celebrates when they score a goal – Ronaldo, Messi, Haaland, Yamal, Bellingham, Mbappe, then went underwater and mimicked it and I had to guess who it was. I couldn’t keep any of it straight and was throwing out guess after guess when he popped up out of the water. After many failed attempts he said, “Mimi, you’re really bad at this,” which was 100% correct. We came back to the house, had popcorn, cheered for England versus Argentina, and ended up disappointed. I took him home after that and we talked some more about the World Cup, the stickers he has collected, the England players he got to see and get their autographs, the soccer he’ll be playing next month.

What I wanted to say to that sweet boy on the cusp of 2nd grade was that this summer, the summer of ’26, was one that will stay etched in his heart and head forever. That he was lucky to live in a place that the world came to visit, that in the stifling heat of the Midwest we left our houses to be a part of something special, that at a time that feels so dismal for the adults in his life we got to have fun, and that even when he’s as old as his Mimi is now he’ll remember every minute of it like it was yesterday.

Thank you, Kansas City.

My retail background started years ago when I was shopping at my favorite store and the manager came up to me one day and asked me if I would be interested in working there. I was a stay-at-home mom at the time and the idea of getting out of the house for hours at a time was the lifeline I needed. Eventually that store closed and I went to work for another store owned by the same company. While working there one afternoon there was a commotion and the manager and general manager went flying out the door. A few minutes later they breathlessly came back in and that’s when the rest of us found out that they had been chasing a shoplifter into the parking lot. “You should have seen Stephanie,” my coworker said. “She jumped on the hood of the car to stop them.”

Years later I was at a different store helping two women who said they were Christmas shopping. I was chatting with them as they looked at a table full of men’s sweaters. They were remarking on the price and I said, “In case you’re interested this table here has some great options and are 30% off.” One of the women looked at the other and said, “Can you believe this bitch? She thinks we can’t afford these,” and they both started laughing. I was so rattled, so stunned that I had totally misread and offended them that I told my coworker I was going off the floor for a few minutes. I went to find the manager to tell her what happened when I heard my coworker yelling. I ran back onto the floor and those two women had lifted an entire rack of leather coats off a display rod and ran out the door.

It has been awhile since I have worked a retail job. The last was in a shopping and restaurant district where shoplifting was an ongoing but hush-hush problem as to not disrupt the bougie vibes. On a Saturday afternoon a family came in and the two young daughters were wreaking havoc in our busy store. It was a beautiful spring day and I couldn’t understand why the dad didn’t take them into the courtyard just outside our doors. I was walking towards the back of the store when I saw the mom frantically stuffing clothes into a tote bag. On the headset I described her so the two employees working the front of the store could stop her. As she approached, the dad stood nearby and said to his daughters, “Why don’t you ask these nice ladies if you can smell the candle,” while the mom and her stolen clothes slipped out the door.

While that happened more times than we probably knew, the bigger problem with shoplifting over the years was how pervasive and organized it had become. We had a couple who came in regularly who were masters of distraction while outside a car would circle the block. They’d walk out the door with their arms full of stolen merchandise, the car would pull up in front of the store, they’d jump in and speed off, and the whole thing happened in minutes. Neither security or the police were interested in these crimes even though every store was dealing with it. As an employee those incidences shook you. During the course of a week you steamed, hung, folded, and moved those items dozens of times and there is ownership in that. But once a thief crosses the threshold of the doorway you could not confront or pursue them. “It’s a liability issue,” we were told over and over. You could only stand in disbelief at the blatant audacity while the manager would try to rally the troops and say, “We’ll figure out what they stole and write if off. Don’t let it get to you,” but if you were an honest person hustling clothes for a paycheck it got to you plenty.

For eighteen months we have watched the most blatant of thefts happening in the highest office in our country. Absurd amounts of money changing hands in no-bid contracts, people stolen from their families and placed in detention centers with no charges, no trial, or no oversight to the conditions they live in, theft of fair elections, theft of services for kids in public schools, theft of food benefits for the poor, theft of money earmarked for science and clinical trials, theft of careers in public service, theft of decency and empathy, theft of an entire wing of the White House. And like what any practiced thief does, distraction is the method used to make sure that what’s really happening isn’t noticed until it’s been slipped into a very large tote bag.

At my favorite retail job in a small shop I worked at minutes from my house, one of my coworkers saw two teenage girls steal a dress. Against all protocol she followed them into the drugstore nearby and said, “Hand over the dress you stuffed into your backpack or I call the police.” They did and on the way out she said, “Don’t even think about coming into that store again. Do you understand,” and they nodded in stunned silence.

Since the threshold between right and wrong seems so murky lately, the first place we need to draw the line is in the People’s House, our house, where even the suggestion of we’ll just write it off is a crime against every one of us who looks at a paystub, looks at photos of a reflecting pool that resembles the above ground pool in a run-down house that has been on the market for a year, and has yet to witness any accountability for who is helping themselves to all that money as if were their own.

Then we need to make sure they never set foot in there again.