I love the way nature just doesn’t give a shit. No dirt? No problem.
I planted snapdragons in our window boxes three summers ago, and every year since, at least one plant pops up in some random crack in the sidewalk. This one is growing out of my neighbor’s house.
The short answer is, the Jimmy John’s No. 6 vegetarian sub may very well have saved my life.
On the evening of Sept. 23, 1997, I put myself in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. That is to say, an ambulance and some paramedics put me in the hospital, but I’m the one who started it.
It looks kinda like this, except they dont do sprouts anymore. (Courtesy of JimmyJohns.com
I remember this much before waking up on a gurney as I was wheeled into Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Mich.
Yesterday at work we said goodbye to the Latte Lounge.
Our office was testing it out this week. Friday was its last day with us, and I can already feel that it’s made a change all our lives.
The Latte Lounge is a remarkable little machine. Actually, it’s enormous. It must outweigh our old coffee maker 10 to 1. It stood in an underused part of the first floor like a robotic guard watching over the adjacent vending machines.
Turning to my neighbor and enjoying an excuse to use the cliche, I said, “I can literally see my house from here.”
He turned toward the window as if he could see it, too. Out of politeness or empathy, I suppose. Just a reflex. I might have done the same thing.
I’d avoided talking to him so far. If there is anything I hate on an airplane, it’s verbosity, but we were so close, I thought I could risk it.
He wore a fedora and a black short-sleeve oxford shirt. He looked to be in his late 50s. His arms were covered with coarse brown and gray hairs, and the backs of his hands were spotty and freckled. I mention these details, because I looked at him so little, I believe it’s all I saw of him. I think he wore glasses.
I imagined he was a man who said “cat” and “cool” and “babe” a lot and who liked to sit in bars and recommend jazz clubs to tourists.
I was probably completely wrong.
It wasn’t strictly true that I could see my house — but it was possible, so I let the syntax stand. We were close enough. I could see my block. Ergo, I could see my house.
We had just curved slowly over Center City. The edges of the crystalline spires of Liberty Place glowed red that night, and the mirrored panes of glass shimmering like spangles from one to the next as we rotated past seemed close enough to touch.
From there, I could trace my way through the lighted grid below us. The streets spread out like a geometry problem. There’s Broad. There’s East Passyunk. That’s the Acme. So that’s Reed, Dickinson, Tasker, Morris, Moore, Mifflin. There’s the Catholic high school. My house should be just about… there.
Seemed a shame to go all the way to the airport to catch a cab all the way back up here. Couldn’t I just parachute out and walk home? Surely I’d land somewhere nearby.
But of course not. That would be silly. I had a checked bag that I needed to claim.
“Coming from Detroit,” my neighbor said, “this place must seem so beautiful.”
It was beautiful. And where I came from had nothing to do with it.
Thumbs down to Joy Tsin Lau, 1026 Race St. Try David’s Mai Lai Wah (1001 Race St.) or Tai Lake (134 N. 10th St.) instead.
We should have known that, on a night like this, when all our first choices in Chinatown had a long wait to get in, the restaurant without a line would probably not be all we hoped for.
It was Christmas. Jeff and I were excited about having a night out with friends in Chinatown on Christmas with chopsticks and fortune cookies and red lanterns and silly tropical cocktails.
My mom laughed when I told her. She recited that little bit of good-humored racism from A Christmas Story. ”How does it go?” she said. “Deck the hars with bars of horry…”
But the place we chose turned out to be nothing to laugh at. Continue reading ‘Fa ra ra ra ra …’
The importance of fixing our oven lay not just in the Thanksgiving dinner we had to host, but also in the unbaked DiGiorno pepperoni pizza and the box of Mrs. T’s jumbo fish sticks in the freezer just waiting to be consumed.
During a visit in the spring, my mom treated me and Jeff and a couple of our friends to some serious Polish-lady cooking: golabki, chicken stew and biscuits. The huge baking dish full of stuffed cabbage boiled over. We had a baking sheet on the lower rack, but it wasn’t placed well, and tomato soup spilled right on through to the gas valve and shorted out the electronic controls. If you’re going to go out, go with a bang, I guess—and a sizzle and a pop.
We had to bake the biscuits for the chicken stew at our neighbors’ house. They were repaid the next day with my mom’s home cooking. Continue reading ‘It’s not delivery’
