You are currently viewing the stories for “July 2006.”
“Now, you know, when I was a young girl, before your Granddad came along, I lived in Chicago. And boy was that an experience.” My grandmother takes a sip off her still steaming coffee; black the only way she’ll take it. “It was a grand time. So much energy, so lively. And then we moved to Wichita, Kansas and I [...]
I have an intimate relationship with my bike lock. In fact, I dance with it. It is not, at first glance, an obvious dancing partner—a heavy chain swathed in a black nylon sleeve, but then there are many unlikely dance partners in our lives. Just as many people will do an unconscious two-step when they are opening the refrigerator, or [...]
The woman comes into the New York restaurant where I work and is reading a poetry magazine. “Say,” I say, “is that some sort of poetry magazine?” “Yeah,” she says. “I like Billy Collins,” I say. “Yeah?” she says. “Yeah,” I say. “But don’t you think Poetry is Dead, kinda?” “Not really,” she says, and she gives me facts and [...]
I slept on my fire escape one night last week but it wasn't due to martial strife or a daredevil spirit. Rather, the sight of yours truly three flights up sporting boxer shorts and a death grip on the bars came courtesy of Con Edison (with a nod to Mayor Bloomberg). The lights first dimmed on Monday, July 17—smack dab [...]
This morning I saw a dead bird on 52nd Street. It was lying on its back on the sidewalk in between Park and Madison Avenues, in front of a Duane Reade Pharmacy. Its feet were in the air. At first I wasn’t sure if it was dead. It looked like it was just dozing, sunning its chest and staring at [...]
I am sitting at my desk in my coop one day on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, paying my monthly expenses: coop mortgage; coop maintenance; coop insurance; four other kinds of insurance--health, for four people (I’ve got a stay-at-home wife and two kids); life, in case I die on them; disability, in case I collapse; and car, in case [...]
The women lined up early for a chance at the best gift bags. Some had spent the past 20 hours miserable and sleepless on a Greyhound from Iowa, such was the desire to inhale some combination of cupcake accord, sumac leaf note, and diet brambleberry liqueur that was reputed to possess magical and potentially aphrodisiac qualities unknown to the women’s [...]
“Where does a pickle come from?” I asked my second grade class. “It comes from a diner,” one student answered. “And before it got to the diner, what was it?” “It was always a pickle,” he said. “It was once a cucumber,” I countered. “It was soaked in vinegar until it became a pickle.” “You’re wrong,” he argued. “My mother [...]
A.K. is as often used in mild, fond condescension as it is in derision: “Let him alone: He’s just an A.K.”...I make no special plea for alter kocker, but I certainly prefer A.K. to its English equivalent, “old fart.” –Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish We arrive for our weekly game on Mercer near Houston Street, four players just shy [...]
During my second year of living in the city I almost drowned in despair. I refused to admit it to myself – and especially not to my nagging parents who regularly suggested I move home to California –but New York was crushing me. The city had delivered a series of blows, starting with a broken heart. My Greek borough-bred boyfriend, [...]
On my corner of 167th Street and Grant Avenue in the Bronx was a small grocery that sold “Appetizers”—dairy foods, pickles, milk, eggs, and fresh tub butter and cheeses in large refrigerated glass cases. The owners were refugees. From the War, my mother said. I was twelve and that War had ended fifteen years ago. One white-jacketed worker behind the [...]
I was riding in our friend’s red, rattling car. The car that had been filled with balloons to celebrate my last birthday—the time we traveled to visit Mom. Now my wife and I were going to inform my forty-five year old brother of her death. To inform, support, and console my kid brother—the brother who relied so heavily on Mom [...]
In the past decade, many attempts have been made to assist women in our efforts to meet a significant other. Self-help books with titles like The Rules or He’s Just Not That Into You proliferated, but instead of providing a sense of relief or assurance, they seemed only to add to the mass hysteria. Well, now we can all wipe [...]
I noticed him during the first week of living in my new apartment. I was staring down from my fourth floor two bedroom. He sat in a window on the south side of the block, to the west of Kelly's Flat Fix facing 3rd Avenue, his elbow hanging out the window as if he were driving along in a car [...]
Last July, a friend of mine called to tip me off about an upcoming water gun assassination tournament. I was swamped at work when he called, crimping duvets for a big Neiman Marcus order—but seconds later I was on the tournament's website, reading the requirements for entry. By midnight I was in the back of a GMC Envoy, paying my [...]
175th Street, between Audubon and Saint Nicholas Avenues was the playing field for hundreds of boys each year, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Anchored mid-block by Incarnation Grammar School, 175th Street was a four-car-wide, smoothly paved, level, treeless, usually-blocked-off-during-school-days street. The sidewalks were also wide and level, the street curbs sharp and unbroken, and the six floor apartment [...]
