Boo! The month of October requires at least one or two spooky stories, don’t you think? My focus in choosing this month’s four books was non-political. Enough, already, right? Presidential election years are always dreadful, but nothing compares to 2020. When you get to the point that you dream about one of the candidates (not the one you support) offering you a job, something’s got to give! Week 1: Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris My dear friend…
When I hear people complain about how breathing is uncomfortable in the year of pandemic mask-wearing, I think back to how we put up with a bit of discomfort when there was candy to be gotten. I mean, just look at this thing! See those two tiny holes right beneath this hideous cat’s nose? And right above the back of kitty’s tongue – that tiny slit? That’s how we breathed on Halloween. And no one complained. Growing up in the…
“… and it is a longstanding tradition that the Singing Hoosiers provide the chorus for this opera.” Opera, you say? It was the fall of 1977, my sophomore year at Indiana University. Bob Stoll, the director of the Singing Hoosiers (think Glee for college students; indeed, Ryan Murphy was a Singing Hoosier) had just broken the news that that a factory girl named Carmen was in our future. Here’s Mr. Stoll (who passed away in 2020) warming us up before…
My dad likes ice cream. Back in the ’60s, he’d take us out for a family drive around Berkshire County on hot summer Sunday afternoons. Chances are, we’d end up at Dairy Queen. We’d each get a dipped cone. Back then, there were two choices: vanilla soft serve, dipped in chocolate or cherry. Chocolate for my brothers. Cherry for me. Dad always had a plan. He wouldn’t order anything for himself, but was at the ready to “help out” when…
What a surprise to learn that my paternal grandfather was not just a painter, but a poet. Dad recently passed some of his father’s verse along to me. The paper is yellowed and fragile. Some copies are faint, thanks to carbon paper. For the youngest among us, that’s what we used to make copies before home computers and printers made life so much easier. Grandpa would have taken two pieces of typing paper and slid a purply piece of wispy…
Have you ever felt a sense of grace while going through a really hard time? Have you found something to smile or chuckle about through your tears of grief? Mom called this “a sense of holy laughter” in a recorded interview, below. She was referencing how she and her siblings managed to laugh as they stepped cautiously through the final weeks of their father’s life in the spring of 1982. A sense of holy laughter. Grandpa loved a good laugh….
Forget for a moment that we’re just weeks away from a presidential election. Soak in this far more important news: They’ve pulled the plug on TaB! Shocking as that may seem, no doubt many of us are going all Aunt Ethel (from the classic movie and play Harvey): What? I thought they killed off that swill decades ago! Well, they should have. That stuff was nasty! Medicinal. Metallic. Sweetened with Saccharin. But back in the ’60s, it was all we…
The year was 1944. Dad’s family had just moved to Chatham Street in New Haven, Connecticut. He was not quite 14, and already hungry to earn some money. Before long, he had a job as a paperboy. The Morning Journal and Courier had been around since 1848. As indicated by its name, it was the morning paper, so Dad had to roll out of bed early – about 5:30am – six days a week, no matter what the weather. With…
There comes a time in every mother’s life when she simply has to put her foot down. Dad recalls the first time Mom did this. It was in the mid-1960s, we were living in Pittsfield, and there was too much cussin’ going on in our house. “Mom got on my case,” he remembers. I asked Dad, “So what was it, mostly ‘hell’ and ‘damn’?” ” … bastard, too.” The response came much sooner than I would have expected. For those…
Dad – who is this? Do you recognize her? We were going through old black-and-white photos yet again. Dad‘s voice softened, “Oh yes, that’s my Aunt Alice. She was so soft and cuddly. A good hugger.” Alice Plante was one of my paternal grandma‘s younger sisters. Ten years younger, to be exact. As I ticked off the names of the nine Plante siblings from our Ancestry family tree, Dad did the math. What an accomplishment for his grandma; she kept…