The Puppy Farm

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...

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Fluffy, or How I Got My Dog

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...

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Hotel Kittens – for Grandma Esther

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...

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Cherry Coke

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...

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Bless the Bread

We planned to be away last New Year’s weekend when our son, who follows the rock, jam-band Phish,  had tickets for several shows during their annual Madison Square Garden winter tour. He and five of his Phish-loving out-of-town friends asked to stay in our Manhattan apartment during our absence. On that Friday afternoon one of the group offered to go down to the supermarket for groceries and my son asked him to also pick up a challah.  “And tell them not to slice it.”,  he...

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