To my cat, doors are the enemy. That includes the hall door where the evil vacuum lives, and the dreaded bathroom door, which she has learned to push open—self taught—to the surprise of guests who mutter, “Wait, wait. There’s someone in here.”
Your Naughty Parts May Vary
When my friend’s mother died, she inherited a steamer trunk. She assumed it held the sentimental detritus of her childhood: photos, baby shoes, grade school report cards, artwork from her early poster paint period
including the cubist rendition of her family who seemed to have triangular heads.
Mensa Densa
Address Book of the Dead
Putting Christ in Christmas
I’ll always remember 1963 as the year my parents put Christ in Christmas. That year my mother set up her nativity in its usual place of honor–on top of the console TV. The carved wood nativity was lit by one incandescent bulb that served as both general illumination, and, through a cleverly cut hole in the peak of the stable, the star of Bethlehem. Oh, and it served as one other thing—the ignition point. But I’m jumping ahead. Continue reading “Putting Christ in Christmas”
The Truth About Santa
It’s Christmas Eve 1961, and I am eight years old. At my house, the pillaging of presents starts at sunrise tomorrow. My parents won’t allow me to wake them any earlier after last year when I rousted them at 4:30 by banging a metal spoon on the bottom of my mother’s best Faberware pot. It still bears the scars of my greed.
The Christmas Gift
I don’t complain about the drought because it’s easy to maintain. Nothing falls from the sky, which has to be raked, shoveled, chopped or pumped out of the basement. Let me explain.
Picture winter in Philadelphia. Are your brain cells feeling brisk and frosty? Well, that’s not cold enough. Now picture 20 below with a wind chill that could freeze the balls off a polar bear—and you’re close.
Knife Skills Snobs
Before I took my first hands-on cooking class at Sur La Table, I considered myself a pretty good cook. But little did I know, I’d walked into Hell’s Kitchen. Our chef instructor, Monique or Lalique, assigned workstations and gave us our first task: chop a shallot into ¼-inch dice for a basil cream sauce.
Everyone around me was going chop, chop, chop, chop. It was like a scene from Ratatouille, but I’m going, slice-pull, slice-pull because I don’t have a rat under my hat telling me what to do. The chop, chop, chopper next me looked at my technique and said, “That’s not how you hold a knife.”
What a Turkey
I’m a vegetarian—except on Thanksgiving. Call it hypocrisy, but this annual gustatory weakness is not my fault. If God had wanted me to be a strict vegetarian he would not have made turkey so delicious. And the big guy upstairs must really have it in for turkeys because he also made them stupid. Delicious and stupid. Now, I may be rationalizing, but I see nothing wrong with eating an animal with an I.Q. lower than my own. This odd epicurean belief is the reason why I avoid all gatherings of Mensa. Around them I get the unsettling feeling that I’m being graded, and fall somewhere between Choice and Prime.
Love is Blind
As I walked a back alley of Ghost Town, an ominous purple fog hung in the air, and with each step it swirled like a brew in a witch’s cauldron. Eerie green lamplights flickered devilishly, casting a sick pallor on my skin. From the corner of my eye, I saw something lurking, something in tattered clothes with a hideous half-missing face, like the victim of a flesh-eating bacteria.