So if you’ll recall from last time, I had driven from Chicago to New York as a terrified 19-year old in my girlfriend Lisa’s 1974 Ford Country Squire Station wagon – all 14 glorious feet of it. Having run out of gas several times in Ohio, and experienced the thrill of driving the speed limit in the passing lane through New Jersey, I was less enthusiastic about the drive back, but I couldn’t abandon the car, and nobody wanted to drive back with me, so at the appointed hour, I took a bus across town to my parking space and headed west across the George Washington Bridge. Continue reading
Stories
Return of Willard
If you remember, when we moved to the suburbs, we were greeted with open paws by the local rat population, whom we immediately started to kill – with varying degrees of success. By August, after several high profile rat rubouts, most of their rat peeps had fled the premises, never to return. Or so we thought. Continue reading
Roughing It
Like many other city boys, I went away each summer to a sleep-away camp, in my case one of the oldest ones, founded in 1904 and tucked away in the Adirondacks on the northern shores of Lake George. One of the counselors at that camp was also a teacher at the all-boys school I attended, so a fair number of boys went there. I started going in 1968, at the age of 8. I guess the rationale was that if I could survive second grade, then I could survive two months in the North Woods. Continue reading
My Personal Gas Crisis
Okay, so I came to driving a little late.
Having grown up in New York City, I had no reason to learn to drive. And I went to college in Chicago, so again no reason to drive – until you realized that without transportation, you are essentially a prisoner of Hyde Park, which is not without its own peculiar charm, but please. Continue reading
Son of Willard
So with the power back on, we prepare to move in a couple of weeks later – on the second hottest day of the year (the first being our closing date). We begin to realize much to our horror that our late rodent friend (which I picked up by its desiccated tail, slipped into a ziplock bag and deposited into trash) was the patriarch of a seemingly vast family of rats, all of which were none too happy about our moving in. Now we were immediately considering a quick resale when by coincidence an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) saying that rats were a growing problem in the posher suburbs, citing a case where some fancy housewife opened her viking wall oven in her Beverly Hills mansion, only to have a rat jump out and disappear into the adjoining great room. Continue reading
Willard
So we live in this big, 200-year old, charming, but decrepit house in the suburbs. We moved there about 10 years ago from an apartment in the city. This is the first house I’ve ever lived in – I had always been an apartment-dweller before then. Continue reading
Schmeherazade 