Many years ago on the last day of our Jamaican honeymoon the hotelkeeper called a taxi to take us from Ocho Rios to the airport in Montego Bay for our flight home. When the driver picked us up he worried we hadn’t enough time for the 100 kilometer trip, and so as we left the hotel, he began to speed. Sure enough, we were soon pulled over by a policeman. “Please man, you got to let us go.”, our driver told him. “Time, she is against these two people.” The...
I recently told you about my wonderful childhood dog. (See FLUFFY, OR HOW I GOT MY DOG, Nov 1, 2016) Sadly there is more to tell. I’m sure that today’s child rearing experts would advise you to tell your kids the truth, no matter how painful. But I suspect my folks practiced the old school kind of parenting. When I was ten Fluffy was hit by a car. The awful thing was I saw it happen, I was coming home from school when she ran into the street towards me. I...
As my faithful blog readers will remember, when I was growing up we lived over the store – actually over my father’s office. (See Parkchester, Celebrate Me Home and The Corpse in the Office) Nowadays my dad would be called an internist or a primary care physician, but in those days he was just a GP. In fact he was the kind of GP who could take out your appendix or deliver your baby, and he actually made house calls carrying his iconic black medical bag. Hearing that he...
As you may remember, I spent childhood summers with my family in the small Catskill town of Liberty, New York. (See MY HEART REMEMBERS MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOTEL, Dec 20, 2013) What you may not know is that one of my beloved childhood pets – a cat with a beautiful gray coat named Smokey – spent many a summer with us at my Grandma Esther’s hotel. Many years later when I was married and living in the city, we had another cat named Smokey who I once feared had been...
I must confess I often find myself goggling my college crush. Actually M was more than a crush, he was my steady boyfriend during my freshman and sophomore years, until I took a camp job that following summer and met someone else. But that’s another story. M was a class ahead of me and after the breakup we’d often see each on campus until the end of the academic year when he graduated and went off to law school. Years later after I was married and living in Manhattan, I was pushing...