https://t.co/OmbvBZRwic. I have been one of the Boys of Winter longer than some of you have been alive. It matters not. Pens fans young and old, new and old school, passionate and casual: #LetsGoPens
Though his time in Pittsburgh was brief, it was memorable and impactful. So happy for him to get another Cup. And a hard earned Conn Smythe! Good for you Staalsy!
When across the room feels farther away than Earth to the Moon.
Like seeking light from a star that long ago stopped shining in my sky.
The love leaves and haunting emptiness remains.
Was it ever real? Or was it a means to an end?
Only myself left to blame.
@TheStingisBack I'm at an age where I was young and impressionable when Color of Money released. I got to see that chapter of Fast Eddie's life first. It made my first viewing of The Hustler that much more impactful.
He married her when everyone was watching. He stayed when the audience left.
Delta Burke had it all in the late ’80s. As Suzanne Sugarbaker on Designing Women, she was quick, magnetic, the kind of star you couldn’t look away from. Night after night, she made America laugh. She was famous, in demand, untouchable.
Off screen, life wasn’t a sitcom.
The years that followed brought things no script could fix. Health problems showed up and stayed. Her weight became tabloid fodder. Type 2 diabetes, exhaustion, a body that didn’t feel like hers anymore. The same magazines that once called her glamorous started treating her struggle like a headline. The world got cruel.
Gerald McRaney never did.
He wasn’t some distant cheerleader. He was in it every doctor’s appointment, every bad day, every moment when the mirror was unkind. He was there, steady, refusing to flinch.
Delta put it best, years later, with that Southern honesty she’s known for: “He loved me when I got as big as a house.” She said it with a smile, not shame. Because she knew what it meant.
Gerald didn’t love an idea of her. He didn’t love the version in reruns or on magazine covers. He loved the woman across the breakfast table. The one who was tired, who was scared, who sometimes didn’t recognize herself. He saw past the weight, past the illness, past the headlines. He saw Delta.
And when it got hard, he didn’t go. When the criticism was loud, he got quiet and held her hand. When her career shifted and the phone stopped ringing, he was still there, choosing her.
That’s the kind of love Hollywood doesn’t know how to sell. It’s not flashy. It lives in waiting rooms and pharmacy lines. It lives in quiet nights when the day was too long and the news wasn’t good. It lives after the applause dies down and nobody’s taking pictures anymore.
For more than thirty-five years, Gerald McRaney has loved Delta Burke through every version of their life together. Not the image. Not the fame. Her. The real one.
She knows what she has. A man who took those vows in sickness and in health, for better and for worse and meant them. Not once at an altar, but every morning since.
Their marriage is proof of something simple and rare: real love isn’t about who stands next to you when life is easy. It’s about who doesn’t move when life gets hard. Who looks at you on your worst day and still sees you. Who stays.
Gerald stayed.
And sometimes that’s the whole story. Choosing the same person, day after day, year after year, especially when it’s not easy. That’s the most powerful love there is.
I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.
In 1999, Diane Lane's sister was left by her husband with four children under ten years old and nothing else. No money. No plan. No warning.
Most people would have seen an impossible situation.
Diane saw four children who needed someone.
So she took them in.
What was supposed to be a temporary crisis became a commitment that lasted decades. While continuing her own career, she raised those four children as if they were her own.
She paid for school.
She paid for college.
She attended graduations, celebrated milestones, and stood beside them through every stage of life.
When weddings came, she was there too.
In every way that truly mattered, she became their parent.
Twenty years passed.
The children grew up.
Their lives moved forward.
Then, in 2019, the man who had walked away returned.
He was dying.
He was broke.
He was alone.
Standing at the door, he asked for help.
The children he had abandoned were adults now. They remembered exactly what had happened and exactly who had been there when he wasn't.
Their answer came immediately.
Send him away.
He had earned nothing from this family.
Diane listened.
Then she said something none of them expected.
She told them he had already taught them what not to be.
Now she wanted to teach them what forgiveness looked like.
It wasn't an easy lesson.
It wasn't a popular one.
But she believed it mattered.
Diane paid for his hospice care.
She made sure he was looked after during the final weeks of his life.
Near the end, he admitted something to her.
He told her he didn't deserve what she was doing.
Diane answered simply.
That was exactly the point.
Mercy wasn't about deserving.
The children watched the woman who had raised them choose something harder than anger and more difficult than justice.
They watched compassion win a battle it had every reason to lose.
Some lessons cannot be taught in classrooms.
Some cannot be explained through speeches or advice.
Sometimes they have to be lived.
Sometimes they happen beside a hospice bed, for a man who earned none of it, by someone who understood that forgiveness is never only for the person receiving it.
It is also for everyone watching.