On Ash Wednesday, Danny came home from Mass and informed me that the priest had reminded the assembled faithful that eating meat on Fridays during Lent was still contrary to the teachings of the Church.
"All right," I said, "since you go by the fish and poultry store on your way home, why don't you pick up a piece of fish?"
"No," he said, "we divided up the housework, and shopping is your job."
"Legalistic little . . . ," I thought, stopping short of any number of nouns that one doesn't quite want to apply to one's husband, even in the privacy of one's own head.
I pointed out that whatever purpose was served by requiring abstention from meat on Fridays, the idea wasn't to put fish on the menu for a Catholic husband who likes fish, and inconvenience his non-Catholic wife, who doesn't. Then I got out the vegetarian cookbook and started to read recipes for things like tofu with peanut butter sauce.
I didn't make that; but on the four Fridays of Lent that year, I concocted four different vegetarian entrees. They were all rather bland and not particularly good, confirming my impression that vegetarian food isn't worth the trouble. That's what I had bought the book to find out. From my point of view, the vegetarian Lenten meals were a learning experience and thus a success.
Danny was never shy about letting me or anyone else know when their activities didn't suit him. When he gave me trouble about something I thought was ridiculous, I wasn't above suggesting that he offer up his discomfort for the suffering souls in Purgatory, usually adding, "I don't think they'll be impressed."(That refers to a Roman Catholic system for dealing construc-tively with unpleasantness. It involves some kind of mental gymnastics that I never understood.)
Danny didn't think much of the vegetarian entrees, but for once he didn't dare give me trouble. He ate his penitential Friday dinners with a great air of brown-eyed martyrdom but didn't say a word.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
WHEN ICICLES HANG
I'm sure it's perverse and wicked to enjoy ice and snow formations as much as I do -- but once all that frozen precipitation is there, it doesn't cost any more to admire it than to fulminate against it, even while concerning oneself appropriately about the ice dams on the roof that are encouraging water to get into the house.
I have nicknamed one of the bedrooms the Icicle Room, in honor of the prince among icicles that forms outside one of the windows at the corner where the two roofs come together. Four or five inches thick at its top, it spreads itself for most of a foot along the gutter and extends downward to the porch roof, where it stabs itself into whatever snow is there.
One moonlit midwinter night, on my way back to bed from the bathroom, I stopped in to have a look at the blue-white tree-laced landscape and, while I was at it, the icicle. There it was all right -- but what really caught my eye was the icicles lined up immediately in front of the window with the full moon directly behind them, silver-white and black, just tinged with blue.
The effect was so wonderful that I had to share it. I crept down the hall and woke up my poor old husband, and dragged him a room or two down the hall to look at the moonlit icicles. He tried to be properly impressed, even though, as he reminded me, he couldn't see any color involved. I assured him that snow and ice and tree-branches in moonlight are all but colorless.
He admired the icicles for a few minutes before respectfully requesting permission to go back to bed. He did; I followed.
I have nicknamed one of the bedrooms the Icicle Room, in honor of the prince among icicles that forms outside one of the windows at the corner where the two roofs come together. Four or five inches thick at its top, it spreads itself for most of a foot along the gutter and extends downward to the porch roof, where it stabs itself into whatever snow is there.
One moonlit midwinter night, on my way back to bed from the bathroom, I stopped in to have a look at the blue-white tree-laced landscape and, while I was at it, the icicle. There it was all right -- but what really caught my eye was the icicles lined up immediately in front of the window with the full moon directly behind them, silver-white and black, just tinged with blue.
The effect was so wonderful that I had to share it. I crept down the hall and woke up my poor old husband, and dragged him a room or two down the hall to look at the moonlit icicles. He tried to be properly impressed, even though, as he reminded me, he couldn't see any color involved. I assured him that snow and ice and tree-branches in moonlight are all but colorless.
He admired the icicles for a few minutes before respectfully requesting permission to go back to bed. He did; I followed.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
LEGS AND CORN CHOPPERS
My great-grandfather, Ephraim Wyman, lost a leg in the Civil War. I accepted for years, having been told as much by someone who I thought would know, that the wicker box under the canopy bed in one of the back bedrooms contained his wooden leg --possibly both of them. He had two, even though he was only missing one leg. Maybe he had one for everyday and one for best? He also left behind a pair of crutches. My father, in need of large, sturdy crutches after a skiing mishap some decades ago, retrieved his grandfather's from whatever closet they had come to live in. Sometimes the family accumulated stuff comes in handy, although I haven't heard of anyone wanting to borrow Ephraim Wyman's leg.
I never bothered to look in the wicker basket, not being particularly interested in wooden legs. The basket migrated around that back bedroom: under the bed, in the closet, in a corner. I'm not sure it wasn't downstairs in the living room for a while. When my sister lived there she sprinkled her rooms with"anti-queues" (her pronunciation) that I understand were supposedto be decorative. The large basket containing half a dozen small organ pipes has been retired. The rectangular thing on wheels at one end of the living room, covered with little cutesy objects of which I have no distinct individual memory, remains.
For a while, I muttered threats to pack Paula's bric-a-brac in a box and consign it and its anti-queue to the attic. While Iwas getting around to doing so, I discovered that my son approves of the whatever-it-is and its cutesy objects and votes to leave it alone. Since I can't move it myself, it will have to stay until I need the space for something else, which may never happen.
At one time I had an impression that that Paula called the object in the living room a "corn chopper." I never could see how it would go about chopping anything, but what do I know? It has since come to my attention that the "corn chopper" is a different family artifact -- the one that sits on a structure at the side of the house that I think of as a porch but my mother, for reasons too complicated to recite here, calls a "stoop." So the conversation piece in the living room must be something else.
When my son came upon Ephraim Wyman's leg-holding basket and I related to him my understanding of it, he, of course, opened the basket and looked inside. It proved to contain, not the leg, but the leather apparatus for strapping in on. "There ain't no leg in there," Justin said in disgust. Scratch one family heirloom. I put the basket with the leather strapping under the bed in the back bedroom. It goes without saying that such things should never be discarded; but I don't see the need to put this one on display.
I never bothered to look in the wicker basket, not being particularly interested in wooden legs. The basket migrated around that back bedroom: under the bed, in the closet, in a corner. I'm not sure it wasn't downstairs in the living room for a while. When my sister lived there she sprinkled her rooms with"anti-queues" (her pronunciation) that I understand were supposedto be decorative. The large basket containing half a dozen small organ pipes has been retired. The rectangular thing on wheels at one end of the living room, covered with little cutesy objects of which I have no distinct individual memory, remains.
For a while, I muttered threats to pack Paula's bric-a-brac in a box and consign it and its anti-queue to the attic. While Iwas getting around to doing so, I discovered that my son approves of the whatever-it-is and its cutesy objects and votes to leave it alone. Since I can't move it myself, it will have to stay until I need the space for something else, which may never happen.
At one time I had an impression that that Paula called the object in the living room a "corn chopper." I never could see how it would go about chopping anything, but what do I know? It has since come to my attention that the "corn chopper" is a different family artifact -- the one that sits on a structure at the side of the house that I think of as a porch but my mother, for reasons too complicated to recite here, calls a "stoop." So the conversation piece in the living room must be something else.
When my son came upon Ephraim Wyman's leg-holding basket and I related to him my understanding of it, he, of course, opened the basket and looked inside. It proved to contain, not the leg, but the leather apparatus for strapping in on. "There ain't no leg in there," Justin said in disgust. Scratch one family heirloom. I put the basket with the leather strapping under the bed in the back bedroom. It goes without saying that such things should never be discarded; but I don't see the need to put this one on display.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Dear Santa --
I know this is late -- I was distracted by the ice storm and subsequent snow -- but since I'm asking for miracles, not package delivery, maybe that's all right.
If you have up your sleeve for me a line on the Matthews-Berkeley edition of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, offered at a knockdown price by an academic widow who can't wait to get rid of all those books so she can have a sewing room for her quilting club -- if you really have arranged this, please disregard the rest of this letter. I promise I'll give more money than I can afford to Rosie's Place, or that shelter in Cambridge for homeless women and children that our church activists have been beating the drums for.
If not -- I'm afraid this will sound ungrateful. I don't mean it that way. It's just that from principle and long habit, I'm not big on wanting things. Sure, I could use a food mill, even though the large ones don't seem to exist any more and the small ones cost $100. I'll probably get around to springing for one one of these weeks, hopefully before all those apples in the woodshed begin to soften and develop spots. But the food mill can easily retreat to the back burner where such things live in my life. I certainly don't need for you to provide it.
What I would like you to do for me is this: Please take whatever you have in mind for me and apply it to someone else's account. Find a single mother in failing health with a little kid or two and an ex-husband who's making all the trouble for her that he can. Give her a lead on a job that she can live on, that won't demand her whole life in exchange. A lead on an affordable but decent place to live would be nice, too. A single mothers' commune would be ideal -- I stumbled on one or two such things in the early 1980s, so they may still exist. (While you're at it, you might provide a high-paying job for the ex, in Alaska, maybe, unless he's really seeing the kids when he's supposed to. If he's being even that much use, distract him with the girl of his dreams instead.)
Please don't try to solve this mother's problems by sending her romance and a second husband, unless there's no alternative. Romance fed by desperation so often winds up out of the frying pan back into the divorce court, with another set of kids in tow.
That's all for now. I'll go back to looking around on line for that Diary. I hope you had a very merry Christmas yourself.
Your old friend,
Aunt Stanbury
I know this is late -- I was distracted by the ice storm and subsequent snow -- but since I'm asking for miracles, not package delivery, maybe that's all right.
If you have up your sleeve for me a line on the Matthews-Berkeley edition of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, offered at a knockdown price by an academic widow who can't wait to get rid of all those books so she can have a sewing room for her quilting club -- if you really have arranged this, please disregard the rest of this letter. I promise I'll give more money than I can afford to Rosie's Place, or that shelter in Cambridge for homeless women and children that our church activists have been beating the drums for.
If not -- I'm afraid this will sound ungrateful. I don't mean it that way. It's just that from principle and long habit, I'm not big on wanting things. Sure, I could use a food mill, even though the large ones don't seem to exist any more and the small ones cost $100. I'll probably get around to springing for one one of these weeks, hopefully before all those apples in the woodshed begin to soften and develop spots. But the food mill can easily retreat to the back burner where such things live in my life. I certainly don't need for you to provide it.
What I would like you to do for me is this: Please take whatever you have in mind for me and apply it to someone else's account. Find a single mother in failing health with a little kid or two and an ex-husband who's making all the trouble for her that he can. Give her a lead on a job that she can live on, that won't demand her whole life in exchange. A lead on an affordable but decent place to live would be nice, too. A single mothers' commune would be ideal -- I stumbled on one or two such things in the early 1980s, so they may still exist. (While you're at it, you might provide a high-paying job for the ex, in Alaska, maybe, unless he's really seeing the kids when he's supposed to. If he's being even that much use, distract him with the girl of his dreams instead.)
Please don't try to solve this mother's problems by sending her romance and a second husband, unless there's no alternative. Romance fed by desperation so often winds up out of the frying pan back into the divorce court, with another set of kids in tow.
That's all for now. I'll go back to looking around on line for that Diary. I hope you had a very merry Christmas yourself.
Your old friend,
Aunt Stanbury
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
FLAT TIRE
It was raining. I wasn't well and was counting the minutes until I could take a nap in the chair in my office. My son Justin and his friend Nathan and I were traveling the twenty-five miles from Arlington to their school in Framingham, by way of a customer's house in Weston where I was picking up some work.
I didn't quite fall asleep at the wheel; but my concentration slipped badly and I veered just far enough off the road to smash a tire against a rock. In my muddled condition, with darkest suburbia spreading for miles all around us, I couldn't come up with any better way of getting to a telephone than to drive into the center of Weston on the flat tire, certain damage notwithstanding. Justin protested: "Mom, don't do that, you'll wreck the tire. Me and Nathan'll go ask if we can use somebody's phone."
I looked at these two fourteen-year-olds with the heightened awareness that strikes when one's belongings are in danger of scrutiny by the world: their intense eyes -- Nathan's a striking green, Justin's warm brown under a thick uni-eyebrow (his word) -- their shoulder-blade-length hair, and their clothing.
Nathan was wearing a trench coat of his father's, a desirable item in its day, his mother maintained, but by that rainy morning it was shapeless and tired, the pockets awry somehow, the lining draggling in back. It would have gone around this lanky six-foot kid at least a couple of times. He wore it hanging open with the belt dangling. He would, as usual, have been wearing one of his collection of wolf T-shirts. "Wolves are nifty," Nathan maintained.
I mercifully don't remember what Justin was wearing. His footgear, then and long after, would make strong persons weep. Nathan's appearance was a fashion statement, I suppose. The only statement Justin's clothing ever made was, as he once matter-of-factly told his grandmother: "I look as if I don't care -- and I don't."
Even though they had both been in the car and were as dry as I was, there was an indefinable ambience of drowned-rat about them. I pictured this team knocking on doors of some of the most expensive real estate in Massachusetts, and settled myself down for a long nap.
Maybe five minutes later they were back: "Uh, Mom, we found somebody who'll bring the cordless phone down to the garage." I followed them to the nearest house, probably the first one they had tried. The homeowner was pleasant and affable, willing to give the benefit of the doubt to this mother in distress with her scraggly kids (people who didn't know us, and some who did, were apt to assume that Justin and Nathan were brothers). We called AAA and took our leave of the homeowner, with many thanks.
The AAA guy arrived and, in the phlegmatic way of tow-truck guys, changed the tire in the rain and accepted our thanks and my signature. I've made the acquaintance of a lot of tow-truck guys, and one tow-truck lady, but that's a bunch of other stories.
We were all outside the car, of course, during the changing of the tire. When I turned to get back in, Justin planted himself between me and the door, telling me I was in no condition to drive and that he was going to take us home.
He knew how to drive. From lessons in the family field and in cemeteries as soon as he could manage the pedals, he graduated to piloting us home from astronomy club meetings on back-ish roads in the middle of the night. The route from Weston to Medford lay along city and suburban streets in broad, albeit rainy, daylight. I expostulated as best I could, but Justin was adamant and in some sense clearly right: I had demonstrated a certain incapacity to keep us on the road.
I let him drive as far as Nathan's in Arlington, where they continued their agenda of self-education in the ways of computers. I continued another two miles home to Medford and went to bed.
I didn't quite fall asleep at the wheel; but my concentration slipped badly and I veered just far enough off the road to smash a tire against a rock. In my muddled condition, with darkest suburbia spreading for miles all around us, I couldn't come up with any better way of getting to a telephone than to drive into the center of Weston on the flat tire, certain damage notwithstanding. Justin protested: "Mom, don't do that, you'll wreck the tire. Me and Nathan'll go ask if we can use somebody's phone."
I looked at these two fourteen-year-olds with the heightened awareness that strikes when one's belongings are in danger of scrutiny by the world: their intense eyes -- Nathan's a striking green, Justin's warm brown under a thick uni-eyebrow (his word) -- their shoulder-blade-length hair, and their clothing.
Nathan was wearing a trench coat of his father's, a desirable item in its day, his mother maintained, but by that rainy morning it was shapeless and tired, the pockets awry somehow, the lining draggling in back. It would have gone around this lanky six-foot kid at least a couple of times. He wore it hanging open with the belt dangling. He would, as usual, have been wearing one of his collection of wolf T-shirts. "Wolves are nifty," Nathan maintained.
I mercifully don't remember what Justin was wearing. His footgear, then and long after, would make strong persons weep. Nathan's appearance was a fashion statement, I suppose. The only statement Justin's clothing ever made was, as he once matter-of-factly told his grandmother: "I look as if I don't care -- and I don't."
Even though they had both been in the car and were as dry as I was, there was an indefinable ambience of drowned-rat about them. I pictured this team knocking on doors of some of the most expensive real estate in Massachusetts, and settled myself down for a long nap.
Maybe five minutes later they were back: "Uh, Mom, we found somebody who'll bring the cordless phone down to the garage." I followed them to the nearest house, probably the first one they had tried. The homeowner was pleasant and affable, willing to give the benefit of the doubt to this mother in distress with her scraggly kids (people who didn't know us, and some who did, were apt to assume that Justin and Nathan were brothers). We called AAA and took our leave of the homeowner, with many thanks.
The AAA guy arrived and, in the phlegmatic way of tow-truck guys, changed the tire in the rain and accepted our thanks and my signature. I've made the acquaintance of a lot of tow-truck guys, and one tow-truck lady, but that's a bunch of other stories.
We were all outside the car, of course, during the changing of the tire. When I turned to get back in, Justin planted himself between me and the door, telling me I was in no condition to drive and that he was going to take us home.
He knew how to drive. From lessons in the family field and in cemeteries as soon as he could manage the pedals, he graduated to piloting us home from astronomy club meetings on back-ish roads in the middle of the night. The route from Weston to Medford lay along city and suburban streets in broad, albeit rainy, daylight. I expostulated as best I could, but Justin was adamant and in some sense clearly right: I had demonstrated a certain incapacity to keep us on the road.
I let him drive as far as Nathan's in Arlington, where they continued their agenda of self-education in the ways of computers. I continued another two miles home to Medford and went to bed.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
THE MASK
Halloween brings out the best in eleven-year-old boys. The year Justin turned eleven -- his birthday on November 1 has always heightened our awareness of Halloween -- we stopped in to a costume shop on Moody Street in Waltham. Of the extensive display of rubber heads, his heart's delight was one called Rotting Corpse, a new addition to the collection, we were assured. It was and remains the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It was also too expensive. Presumably I had already bought him a birthday present, probably also too expensive. But you can't fight love at first sight. From the moment he saw this hideous thing he had his heart set on it and was blind to everything else in the store. We cut a deal whereby he paid for some of it himself; even the magic phrase your own money didn't deter him.
On the way home we stopped at Friendly's. Before we left the car he insisted on laying my coat on the back seat, with the mask tucked into the collar, face up. The coat must have been stuffed with something: nobody would be impressed by a dead guy in the back seat that's as flat as Judge Doom (the paper-thin evil Toon who framed Roger Rabbit).
All the way home he kept thinking of ways to improve the mask. I firmly vetoed any modifications. I know what happens if you compromise the integrity of substances like whatever kind of rubber these things are made of. I put my case as strongly as I knew how and hoped for the best.
An indeterminate while after we got home I was sitting at the computer in my office, focusing on work for a customer, when what should walk around the monitor but Justin in that grisly, overpriced mask with a steak knife protruding from one eye.
Several things were going on here. First, I was concentrating on something else and entirely unprepared. Second, the visual impact of one's child with a knife sticking out of his eye gets a parent's attention even if this can't possibly be for real. Third and perhaps most important, the mask is so distorted that it isn't obvious just where the eye holes are. I was sure he had put the knife through the fabric of the mask, in direct defiance of my firm and unambiguous orders. Not to mention that walking around with a knife in that position while wearing a mask that, as he had already told me, interferes with one's vision is a really, really bad idea. I blew my top.
To this day, Justin has a tendency to lead with the most dismaying aspect of whatever he has in mind, like the time he announced that he and Nathan were going to Connecticut for the weekend. Fine -- by then eighteen, he could go to Connecticut with Nathan with my permission or without it. But the night before they left, discussing his arrangements by telephone from Nathan's, he said nonchalantly, "Oh, by the way, we're taking your car." On that occasion, as on many others, once I stopped screaming and listened, what he was proposing wasn't as outrageous as it sounded. He and Nathan and my car went to Connecticut, after some tense after-midnight negotiation.
In re: the mask, we established (1) that the knife was in fact through a hole representing an eye that had fallen out or fallen in or whatever eyes do, i.e., there were no newly created holes; but that (2) walking around with a knife that close to your eye when you can't half see is as aforementioned very ill-advised, don't do it any more. He saw the force of my argument and didn't, nor did he mess up the mask in any other way.
He wore that ghastly thing that Halloween and from time to time since, in combination with various garments. I haven't seen it since he moved out; he must have taken with him.
On the way home we stopped at Friendly's. Before we left the car he insisted on laying my coat on the back seat, with the mask tucked into the collar, face up. The coat must have been stuffed with something: nobody would be impressed by a dead guy in the back seat that's as flat as Judge Doom (the paper-thin evil Toon who framed Roger Rabbit).
All the way home he kept thinking of ways to improve the mask. I firmly vetoed any modifications. I know what happens if you compromise the integrity of substances like whatever kind of rubber these things are made of. I put my case as strongly as I knew how and hoped for the best.
An indeterminate while after we got home I was sitting at the computer in my office, focusing on work for a customer, when what should walk around the monitor but Justin in that grisly, overpriced mask with a steak knife protruding from one eye.
Several things were going on here. First, I was concentrating on something else and entirely unprepared. Second, the visual impact of one's child with a knife sticking out of his eye gets a parent's attention even if this can't possibly be for real. Third and perhaps most important, the mask is so distorted that it isn't obvious just where the eye holes are. I was sure he had put the knife through the fabric of the mask, in direct defiance of my firm and unambiguous orders. Not to mention that walking around with a knife in that position while wearing a mask that, as he had already told me, interferes with one's vision is a really, really bad idea. I blew my top.
To this day, Justin has a tendency to lead with the most dismaying aspect of whatever he has in mind, like the time he announced that he and Nathan were going to Connecticut for the weekend. Fine -- by then eighteen, he could go to Connecticut with Nathan with my permission or without it. But the night before they left, discussing his arrangements by telephone from Nathan's, he said nonchalantly, "Oh, by the way, we're taking your car." On that occasion, as on many others, once I stopped screaming and listened, what he was proposing wasn't as outrageous as it sounded. He and Nathan and my car went to Connecticut, after some tense after-midnight negotiation.
In re: the mask, we established (1) that the knife was in fact through a hole representing an eye that had fallen out or fallen in or whatever eyes do, i.e., there were no newly created holes; but that (2) walking around with a knife that close to your eye when you can't half see is as aforementioned very ill-advised, don't do it any more. He saw the force of my argument and didn't, nor did he mess up the mask in any other way.
He wore that ghastly thing that Halloween and from time to time since, in combination with various garments. I haven't seen it since he moved out; he must have taken with him.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
MISSING IN ACTION
It was Rosh Hashanah and my son was about seven when he lost himself on the Brandeis campus and I had to have the University police find him. I didn't know it was Rosh Hashanah. Working at Brandeis on a flexible non-schedule, I had keys to the building and could come and go at will and bring Justin with me as necessary. On that lovely fall day we had his bicycle as well. A college campus is a marvelous place for a kid with a bicycle. Knowing he'd be at least as safe there as in our neighborhood in Medford, I focused on my work until I was ready to go home and Justin was nowhere in sight.
I drove around looking for him; but the very thing that makes the campus good for bicycles -- all those paved non-automotive roads -- makes it hard to cover in a car. I tried it on foot, asking from time to time if anyone had seen a seven-year-old with a bicycle. There seemed to be an unusual number of dressed-up older people strolling around the campus in the sunshine. One woman mentioned that she was there for the holiday. Holiday? She gave me that what-planet-are-you-on look that I'm so familiar with, and explained. She, like the others I inquired of, was sorry I had misplaced my child but couldn't tell me anything about him.
At a loss for what to do, I enlisted the campus police. The officer who subsequently appeared with Justin in the car and the bicycle in the trunk was not pleased at being troubled with a kid whose mother didn't know better than to turn him loose on his own recognizance. He had found him at the chapels, bicycle dropped nearby, playing in the pool in a wet and dirty and disreputable and thoroughly happy condition. I thanked the officer, trying not to picture the contrast between this goyische ragamuffin desecrating the chapel pool, and the nicely-dressed middle-aged parent-types celebrating the New Year.
Before our next trip to Brandeis, I bought him a watch and instructed him to report to me every hour. Thereafter, he turned up reliably enough that I didn't have to bother the police again.
I drove around looking for him; but the very thing that makes the campus good for bicycles -- all those paved non-automotive roads -- makes it hard to cover in a car. I tried it on foot, asking from time to time if anyone had seen a seven-year-old with a bicycle. There seemed to be an unusual number of dressed-up older people strolling around the campus in the sunshine. One woman mentioned that she was there for the holiday. Holiday? She gave me that what-planet-are-you-on look that I'm so familiar with, and explained. She, like the others I inquired of, was sorry I had misplaced my child but couldn't tell me anything about him.
At a loss for what to do, I enlisted the campus police. The officer who subsequently appeared with Justin in the car and the bicycle in the trunk was not pleased at being troubled with a kid whose mother didn't know better than to turn him loose on his own recognizance. He had found him at the chapels, bicycle dropped nearby, playing in the pool in a wet and dirty and disreputable and thoroughly happy condition. I thanked the officer, trying not to picture the contrast between this goyische ragamuffin desecrating the chapel pool, and the nicely-dressed middle-aged parent-types celebrating the New Year.
Before our next trip to Brandeis, I bought him a watch and instructed him to report to me every hour. Thereafter, he turned up reliably enough that I didn't have to bother the police again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)