December 2006
-
We've had two major snowfalls in the last week and the road crews haven't yet found their way to our street. It's a knee-deep icy mess out there. Yesterday one of my neighbors spun himself into quite a hole. He needed a push, so I went outside to help. Even with my professional-grade ice-chopper, I…
-
Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, published in 1924 and now hopelessly dated, was a mere thirty years old when we read it in Erasmus Hall High School English classes. I must confess, once again, that I recall almost nothing from my 1950s reading — just a vague sense that I'd been there before. Nevertheless, the novel wasn't…
-
When I was a child, haircuts were perpetrated at Joe's Barber Shop on Coney Island Avenue. It was a pleasant place: there were wall-to-wall mirrors on either side of Joe Montuori's shop, and a boy sitting in the chair could lose himself in the infinitely-regressing images. Joe always had a friend or two in the…
-
For an entire lifetime I've had a ghastly relationship with Sir Walter Scott. Ivanhoe was a mandatory book in the Erasmus Hall High School English curriculum and I remember reading the novel with painful indifference. It's entirely possible that I didn't persevere to the final pages but instead relied upon the 1952 film. At various…
-
We're just back from a week in Greenwich Village. Here are some of the stores that were within two or three blocks of our temporary residence: "Beasty Feast Pet Food Supplies"; "Cherry Boxx" (sex toys and outfits); "Golden Rule Wine and Liquor"; "Henrietta Hudson Bar and Girl"; "Badlands Entertainment" (xxx videos); "Condomania" — all kinds…
-
If the profoundly religious seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical moment, it might be where the Lord (speaking through His prophet Amos) severely condemned the vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." The Lord of Hosts…
-
We’re in Washington visiting our four-year-old granddaughter (and her parents, of course). This morning I walked the little girl to her Montessori pre-school. As we passed some dormant rhododendrons, the grand-daughter told me that she saw a "very large antelope" resting under the bushes. I like her style — not a dog, or even a…
-
In the little read Book III of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself on the island of Luggnagg, where there is a group of people called Struldbrugs who are "blessed" with eternal life. On hearing of Struldbrugs, Gulliver waxes ecstatic: "happiest, beyond all comparison, are those excellent STRULDBRUGS, who, being born exempt from that…