24. December 2009 by admin.

If you had known me prior to meeting Pat, you would have known I didn’t have any special affection for animals of any sort. Oh, sure one was part of the family when I was growing up. The only characteristic I really remember about her was that all my mother had to do to get her to cower was bite her hand. Mom was Irish, but she was heavily influenced by dad’s family, which was very Italian. Hence, my mother would get her wish by biting her hand.

I had met Pat in an online chat room before the internet was the internet. She was planning on leaving her house in Florida to move up to NY. I told her if she needed a place to crash, she could always call me. As much as I didn’t really expect it (in fact, the offer was made in the same spirit as so many such internet offers are made; I was just trying to sound heroic), when Pat showed up at my workplace on 61^st St, after I composed myself into at least trying to look pleased (which I am sure I did no such thing) I was true to my word and brought her home. Well, since I had taken the train and subway in from Elizabeth, where I lived at the time, I let Pat drive us to the apartment in which we would live for the next several months. Pat, and her afghan hound, Crystal.

Crystal and I had an understanding. I didn’t mess with her and she mostly ignored me. Ignoring people is as easy for an afghan as it is for most cats. They’re beautiful animals, and they will constantly let you know that. And they tolerate no angry words directed at them or those whom they love. And Crystal loved Pat.

I found out how much she loved Pat when I hollered at Pat about something or other (no I don’t remember. I have short-term memory loss about such things). Before I knew it I was changing my pillowcase because Crystal squatted on my pillow and let go. Needless to say I never yelled in front of her again.

As time went on, and Pat and I grew closer, the old girl and I developed a relationship, albeit strained at times. I had yet to fully appreciate dogs, but I did begin to understand Crystal.

We were eventually forced to give Crystal to a friend. Shortly thereafter we walked into a pet store and met the first of several guinea pigs we would call ours. The most memorable of these was Mikie. Mike was in the bottom aquarium of a 2-level stand. When I passed the stand I couldn’t help but notice Mikie was standing on his hind legs as if to beg me to take him home, which is, of course, exactly what I did. He wasn’t our first guinea pig, but he had the most charming personality.

We had about seven or eight guinea pigs when we moved from NJ to TX. We had a van-line move the bigger stuff, but we were able to stuff a ton of things into the Chevy, including the cages replete with guinea pigs and one rabbit, named Midnight. And sneaking all the cages into a motel room on the way to TX was no small feat. But they enjoyed the ambiance, and the room service, as provided for by Pat and me, was beyond reproach.

There is so much more to tell you about how I eventually learned to not only love animals, but how they became an integral part of my life. Until next time, dear reader, enjoy yourself and your family, regardless of the number of legs they may have.

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17. December 2009 by admin.

What was I thinking?

For the next few months (and beyond when I think of new stuff), I’m going to tell you about me, a displaced New Yorker who lived in the greater NY Metro area all of my life, my wife, who has lived in a number of places, including Guam, Maine and Colorado, not to mention the state of her birth, Florida, and a lot of assorted residents who have lived in and outside of this house over the last 15 years or so.  I will try to be linear in my presentation, but since I tend to have an abstract mind, you’ll forgive me if I jump from here and flit to there, then  at some point remind myself that someone else may be reading this, and reel myself back in.

On June 1^st, 1994 my new wife, Pat, and I arrived in our new home. We moved from the largest city in NJ,  population well over 200,000, to a “city” in Texas. I put that word in quotes because, while, technically, the new town was incorporated as a city, that is as much a misnomer as the expectation that they keys to the city would actually unlock the door to a vault in Fort Knox. The city of Josephine had a 1990 population of 301, although I truly believe they fudged on that number by adding to the numbers a few of the town’s cows and barn cats.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Up until May of 1993 I was working in Manhattan, where I’d worked, in various capacities for better than 11 years. When I was let go from a company on East 61^st St , I began re-evaluating my life on the east coast. Sure, home is home, but I felt like I wanted something more. Maybe some land. My girlfriend of the time, the aforementioned Pat, and I looked at various options and settled on Josephine, a town that time forgot, and so, it seems, had the rest of Texas. Well, unless you fail to pay your property taxes on time. But that is a discussion for another time.

During much of the time that I worked in New York City I lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which is just a couple of subway stops east of downtown Manhattan. Now, Greenpoint was largely a quiet neighborhood sandwiched in between Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens. I haven’t been back there in many years, but as I understand it, it’s become a very gentrified area, more like a suburb of Manhattan, instead of the bastion of the working class that it was when I was there in the 80s. I should go back there. Maybe I’ll take a virtual tour of the old neighborhood and hope the photographs are at least fairly recent. Who knows, I may even see my ex-wife, who as far as I know still lives in the same apartment building. Ah, the charm of rent stabilized and rent controlled housing. I never did know the difference between control and stabilization. But then learning the vagaries of the housing situation in New York is most decidedly not on my to-do list. It’s almost as unimportant to me as figuring out why dogs sniff each other’s butts. No, no, I understand it’s a way for dogs to identify each other. But I figure after you get to know Fred that intimately when you first meet him, why do you have to continue to sniff his butt? Talk about obsessive behavior! But again, I digress. Remember, I did tell you that might happen.

New York, to me, was and still is the greatest place in which to spend a lot of time. Sure the city is overloaded with cliches. Broadway, AKA The Great White Way, the museums, the street and subway entertainment, the restaurants (and if you’ve spent any time listening to the street entertainment, be it on or below ground, you know it’s free (unless you toss some cash into the hat or open guitar case), and some of it as every bit worthy of being on American Idol as anyone can be). But as with all cliches, there is truth to them all. Well, maybe not the part about the crocodiles in the sewers…but every metropolis has it’s share of urban legends.

Almost every Friday after work, my buddy John and I would go from our workplace on West 34^th St to get pizza on Bleecker Street. I remember John’s pizzeria, on Bleecker a block east of 7^th Avenue, had pizza to die for. Fresh veggies and chopped whole cloves of garlic…OMG. It was so wonderful that the line to get in there on a weekend night stretched south down 7^th Avenue for a good block. It was so crowded in there they’d opened another pizzeria right next door called John’s II. Okay, maybe not the height of cleverness. But then who cares when the food is the thing. Then after we’d devoured the manna from heaven, John and I would walk over to a small hole-in-wall drinking establishment called the “Peculiar Pub.” Last time I checked both John’s and the Peculiar Pub were still there. The pub had something like 200 beers from around the world. It was there I learned I loved stout (it had to be on tap. Stout any other way, even from a bottle, was barely palatable) and I despised weiss beer. weiss beer – one word…yuck. I think if my first taste of beer was weiss, or wheat beer, I would have sworn off the brew for the rest of my life, and perhaps a few lifetimes after this one. Now I drink wine almost exclusively. But more about that in the future. For now, fellow denizens of the world, I will close and bid you good life. Until next time – Thanks for reading.

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