Monthly Archives: May 2011

Each afternoon I visited my mother at the hospital.  Sometimes we spoke, sometimes we didn’t.  She developed a craving for ginger ale.  Sometimes she just slept.  I often sat in her room while she was asleep, working on my Regents … Continue reading →

Because of the discounts available to my mother while she worked at Saks Fifth Avenue, I was one of the better dressed teachers in the New York public school system.  My children, when they were babies, were also rather well … Continue reading →

Somewhere buried in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon there is an insight which I remembered every day I was in the classroom.  Well, that’s probably an exaggeration, but I did remember it.  The line, roughly translated, is “Zeus loves the kindly teacher,” and I … Continue reading →

My near-championship season began in a normal way, by attending try-outs.  I had already made up my mind to ask one of the fathers with an athletically outstanding son to become my assistant, and he agreed, and then we jointly … Continue reading →

I knew nothing about baseball.  Yes, as a teenager, I had memorized batting averages just to have something to talk about with other kids, and later, one afternoon (while in the Brooklyn College cafeteria) I remember the excitement attending Don … Continue reading →

Mine was not the only house with a history.  I’m sure that each of these homes had an interesting past, but there was one in particular that seemed  steeped in trouble.  It was the house on the corner of Highwood … Continue reading →

I wanted to get back to the conversation we’d been having when I first met George C.  I wanted to find out more about the old lady who lived upstairs, next door, when I first moved in, but George knew … Continue reading →

After my last comment, the one about the fact that he did have two legs, George said,“Well, it’s the leg I was coming to, because that, in a way, is the strangest part of the story, and for me the … Continue reading →

Although I expected George to tell me just the story of the blue cast on his leg, he insisted on telling me his story from the beginning. He was born right here, at Valley Hospital, in Ridgewood.  When his mother … Continue reading →

Today I can’t find the name Schiunatulander anywhere, not even on Wikipedia, but I’m sure he is a minor character in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, written in the first quarter of the 13th Century.  It is because of Schiunatulander (who … Continue reading →