You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Sweet and Sour.”
I went to Penn Station to snap a picture or two and perhaps in the process imbibe a feeling for my grandmother, Bubby, who went there ten years ago (this month) to catch a train... I didn't know Bubby growing up. She and my dad had a fight when I was 2 and didn't speak for the next 15 years. [...]
Paul Simon did not wear a tux. He sat by the fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center, a photographer by his side, and another guy, a journalist? Several people wandered up to him. He seemed very approachable, as though he wanted to chat in the pleasant evening light. He wore a tweed jacket and a blue baseball cap. His [...]
I just got back from Uncle Dick's funeral service out in Cortez, Colorado. I didn't know Dick alive, but I got to know him pretty well during his memorial service, and then later staying at his house while Cheryl’s mother tied up some of his personal affairs. From all traces Dick was an authentic man’s man; he grew wheat and [...]
P> My boiler broke in February, after the pedestal sink on the second floor of my home gave way and tipped over, thanks to an aging sixpenny nail. The upstairs bathroom quickly filled with water and began seeping through the gaps in the floor’s tile grout. The ceiling of my kitchen, on the first floor, starting leaking in spots where [...]
I try to call my Great Aunt Doris every day. She's ninety-years old and lives alone. I love her desperately and as she gets older, especially of late as she becomes more feeble, my love seems to be picking up velocity, overwhelming me almost, tinged as it is with panic -- I'm so afraid of losing her. I usually call [...]
I heard that Jack died. I take that back. I heard he was killed. I take that back too. I heard he was put to sleep. It was one of those pieces of information that had a hell of a lot more resonance for me than it did for the person who told me. In fact, the person who told [...]
It was the beginning of summer and my two young sons had taken to counting Jaguars. “There’s one!” Alex, then eight, would cry, elated, from the backseat of the car. “Oh, there’s another one.” “Look over there—there’s two more!” five-year-old Ferran would trill. Anyone unfamiliar with the Hamptons might have assumed we were on a safari, mistaking my sons’ enthusiasm [...]
On Broadway, between 84th and 85th Street, next door to Haagen Daas and Godiva, is the Origins cosmetics store. Outside the store sits the Origins gumball machine. Someone has scratched off the ‘e’ in “Peace of Mind,” so that the gumball machine now reads, “Pace of Mind.” The pace of the gumball is slow. Intended to evoke the purity of [...]
I was going through a cycle of uneven haircuts and interesting colors that summer; Franco, my stylist, gave me a discount because I was always underfoot, always fetching him beer, always up for a change in color or fringe. When Allie moved in upstairs from his salon, the three of us spent hours sipping beer and coffee on the metal [...]
Ariel was convulsing. I had been trained in CPR, but couldn’t remember how to do it. The patient telephone was sitting by her side and a loud dial tone rang out. She was a bouncing fish on the stool, spewing foam from her mouth. I held her head so it wouldn’t rap against the wall. Her eyes rolled back. I [...]
This recent snow made me think of my friend Glen Seator, who is dead. In January or February of 1996, there was a bad snowfall -- Glen and I were very good friends then. I was living in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, next to the BQE, and Glen was about two miles south of me, right next to the Manhattan Bridge. [...]
If I leave the windows open in my classroom, I can hear the endless hum of traffic coming from the Long Island Expressway. There's a certain degree of wonder in its sound. So many people, an endless whoosh of thoughts and dreams whipping past me like rush hour- forever. There's this postcard I keep in my classroom that reminds me [...]
I saw it all from a bench in the park, sitting next to some gathered pigeons and a pile of peanut shells. And nearby, across the street, a statue and an American flag. The man with the black hat and the enormous red-shirted gut was sprawled out on a bench and he appeared to be dead. Perhaps he was. A [...]
I have been in psychotherapy just over a year, and the whole experience at this point boils down to the single image of a young private school girl sitting two seats down from me on the cross town bus. She is accompanied by her Dominican nanny, who gazes absently out the bus window on to 96th Street as it crosses [...]
We were on our way to a downtown loft party in Emily's Volkswagen, Emily, Kay and I, when we stopped off to see the ruins of a fire in the waterfront district, on Thritieth Street and Twelfth Avenue. This whole neighborhood, along the western spine of Manhatan, has always been mysterious to me, with its deserted steamship offices that look [...]
Lately when I go for a walk I make a vow not to walk under any scaffolding, in protest of there being so much of it these days. Two minutes later I realize I'm walking under scaffolding. One day I stopped and looked at the scaffolding around the NYU tower at East 8th Street and Mercer and realized it had [...]
The family practice doctor I go to probably would not want to be in this piece, so let’s just say that his last name sounds like a company that makes really good frozen blintzes, or soup that, when you stick the plastic bag in boiling water and cut it open, the pearl barley and mushrooms taste as rich as a [...]
In 1956, at the age of nineteen, Rosa Morrone was almost past the prime marrying age in her native town, Polla, south of Naples, Italy. Her father was beginning to seriously worry that she wouldn’t marry. At the same time, Gabriele Morrone, who had left Polla for New York City when he was 14, returned home to marry. But when [...]
I’m not a PTA mom, and I’ve never hosted a parent potluck dinner. I’ve said no to volunteering at annual school galas and spring fairs so many times that, at this point, no one even bothers to ask me. I adore my two sons, but their time in school is precious. And since it seems as if school is closed [...]
I live in a medical ghetto. Within my zip code there are 12 hospitals, one famous medical school, one re-known cancer center, one biomedical research institution, 18 medical laboratories and 1,866 doctor‚s practices. Vamps, a shoe emporium two blocks away from my apartment, stocks Danish clogs popular with area nurses. The mission of the Roman Catholic parish around the corner [...]
The Upper East and the Upper West sides distinguish themselves relative to each other--their identities are based on slandering the attitudes on the "other side" of the Park. Today, however, they were connected by a giant rainbow that stretched to the ground on both sides. A six-year-old boy stared intently up at the larger-than-life rainbow, his mouth dropped open like [...]
Since September, my family has experienced an unusual barrage of schizophrenic divisions on personal and global levels -- our kids’ schools, the subway series, the election, and Christmas/Hanukah overlap – each of which raised unique parenting dilemmas, the kind they don’t write about in those "What to Expect" books. Because our daughters are 3_ years apart, we are now in [...]
I tried to break into the Marble Cemetery . One Tuesday, towards midnight, I changed out of my office clothes into jeans, a sweater, and narrow-toed tennis shoes, because I would have to climb a chain-link fence entwined with barbed wire. I gathered up supplies--a bottle of Poland Spring water, a Power Bar, and a flashlight--rejecting the Swiss Army knife [...]
This essay appears in "How To Be a Man: Scenes From A Protracted Boyhood." For more information about the book, click here. Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Books were stacked in piles around my new apartment, looming like weird stalagmites in a cave. They were encroaching from all directions. A bookcase was badly in need, and yet months slid by without [...]
If I didn't have the summer to look forward to, I might just cap myself. Think about the glory of planning a summer. The forward-looking nature of the enterprise is inherently optimistic. You're at the back end of a long winter and up ahead shining in the middle distance is the summer's three emotionally clustered months. They are so gentle [...]
Newer Entries »
