The Reindeer Keeper

  The summer before my freshman year in high school, I met a girl who was two or three years older than I was. She was from Indiana. She came with relatives to visit for a few weeks. Back then, my family lived out in the country next to my grandparents and an aunt and next door to them, lived another family household with an aunt, uncle and two cousins. So when the Indiana relatives came, it was lots of fun-especially when they brought along that older girl. It took me a while to talk with her. After all, she was older. Back in Indiana she was a cheerleader and, she had a boyfriend. I thought she was beautiful. With her blonde hair and the way she spoke, she reminded me of Marilyn Monroe. But after being around her for about a week, I realized what was most intriguing about that girl was her eye make-up. I'd never been around anyone who wore eye make-up. And she wore it every, single day. One evening when we were all hanging around I had the nerve to ask her about eye make-up. I re...

I hardly ever wore crinolines under my skirts way back when wearing crinolines underneath skirts was the fad. Not participating in a fad was unusual for me. After all, I ran to a department store located in the downtown of where I lived  the moment Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" grabbed my attention. I had to have bellbottoms and short-sleeved ribbed sweaters. I had to grow my hair down to my waist. But crinolines were a different story. I didn't like all of that netting. I didn't like my skirts pushed way out in front of me even when most of my friends wore crinolines all the time.  However, there are most always exceptions to most anything-even when it comes to wearing crinolines if crinolines aren't your thing. For me, that exception  came when my grandmother made me a velvet green dress to wear to a Christmas party. It was going to be held in a grand old hotel in that downtown where I lived. My date was a Freshman at a nearby college. He was so cute. We...

  Years ago there was a rhubarb patch growing alongside a sandbox in front of a garden near a river and that rhubarb patch, just like the sandbox, the garden and the river, was enjoyed all summer long. Children big and small would sometimes pull a stalk of rhubarb when going to play in the sandbox or run through the garden. One day, a glorious, beautiful day, a bunch of teddy bears, of all shapes and colors and sizes and conditions, gathered together by that rhubarb patch to play outside in the sunshine. Big, lovable Dandy, wearing quite the straw hat, was more worn out than the Care Bear or other teddy bears enjoying their time together. Dandy’s condition had nothing to do with his age. Rather, it was all about the love he received and the love he gave back—reminding me of one of so many quotable lines from the treasured children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams—      “What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by s...

  I must have been twelve or thirteen when I first looked through a New York Times’ Sunday edition that my father brought home from work. I was instantly intrigued by such an extensive newspaper with so many sections and the smell of all that ink on all of that newsprint. I remember standing at the kitchen table with the paper wide open. There was just so much to see and read. But I never made it through all of those pages. I never got beyond the first section. I was stopped in my tracks by a logo. You have to realize this was way before computers and instant everything. There were only three news networks on the TV. Cable was nonexistent. Magazines ran cigarette ads. It was a whole different world. So when I turned a page of that newspaper and saw for the first time a pen and ink logo that swirled off the page in creativity, I was hooked.  The logo was the Lord & Taylor logo. The ad said the item advertised was available at all Lord & Taylor stores. I wasn’t intereste...

With zucchini so plentiful in the garden last week, my son Brian and I spent a few days making small loaves of zucchini bread. Some loaves will be for Christmas gifts and some will be for giving away—and some are for our own enjoyment. The process began when I brought out my mother’s old Universal food grinder. The old grinder holds so many memories of preparing for so many Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I can still hear cranberries poppi ng as they were squeezed through the grinder. Some never made it through. Instead they’d go flying through the air when the grinding speeded up and the juice from the cranberries fell into a yellow bowl sitting on the floor underneath the grinder. My mother once told me she bought the grinder at Barr’s Hardware located in a downtown of long ago. The grinder is still as good as new. There are no buttons to push or speeds to select or cords to plug in. You just put the parts together and off you go. Brian did all the grinding of the zucch...