“The Bronx? No thonx!”, wrote the poet Ogden Nash. As a kid growing up in the Bronx I didn’t get it. I didn’t realize my borough had a bad rap, and I certainly wouldn’t have understood why. The Bronx was my home and I loved it. (See Parkchester, Celebrate Me Home) I even went to college in the Bronx, but then grad school and marriage finally took me out. But altho I was living elsewhere, I spent four decades of my working life commuting back as a public educator...
Once years ago I heard that a lecture on transcendental meditation was to be given at a local community center. Intrigued and eager to learn about the benefits of meditation I went, and when the lecture ended I struck up a conversation with the young woman sitting next to me. Her name was Joan, we were about the same age, and like me she was recently married. Happily we exchanged phone numbers and a few days later Joan called and invited me and Danny to dinner. On the appointed evening...
Until it closed in 2004 and the building was razed to make way for a new luxury high use, Doctors Hospital stood on East End Avenue two blocks from our apartment. Opened in 1929 as a small, private hospital, originally for maternity cases, it was soon favored by celebrities and over the years counted Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, and Eugene O’Neill among its patients, while also serving our upper eastside neighborhood. One weekend some years ago I was serving my family lunch...
I’ve written about my years as head librarian at Jane Addams, small vocational high school in the Bronx. (See Magazines for the Principal and The Diary of a Young Girl) Here’s another story. Because of our large student body for many years our school had two sessions and all students and faculty were either early or late. It happened I was on late session the year of the great Jane Addams library flood. That fateful morning as I parked in the teachers’ lot I thought it...
Recently I spent a day in the ER. I had a Zoom book club meeting the day before and was eating a tuna fish sandwich as I sat at my computer chatting with my book club friends. I made the tuna salad myself and in fact my husband was eating it downstairs while I was upstairs Zooming, and he later told me he thought it tasted fine. But it tasted off to me, and a few hours later I felt sick to my stomach and that night spent more hours in the bathroom than in bed. The next morning I still...
Welcome to my blog World Thru Brown Eyes! Enjoy the read and please leave a comment and tell me how this old world looks thru YOUR eyes!
