A recent New York Times article recounted how a group of elderly Korean men are getting grief from McDonald’s management at a store in Queens, New York because they spend too much time there socializing while spending hardly any money. They might shell out $1.39 for a small order of fries to split among them, but mainly they are there to gab and presumably get away from their spouses. Now that might be an stereotype, but there must be a reason these men are willing to risk having the police called on them to overstay their welcome at a Mickey D’s.
Old men — and women — socializing at a McDonald’s...
Read more...
DALLAS — Inside the NorthPark Center is a sculpture titled Fountainhead. Images of folding currency stream down the sides, an endless river of money descending in two-dimensional form. The sculpture resembles a smaller version of one of those fake rock walls one can pay to climb, often in malls such as NorthPark. The purpose of this sculpture, I later read, is to encourage people to donate money to worthy causes. That was not immediately obvious. I figured it was an altar to spending, which seemed fitting. That is what the hordes of folks crowding this place the weekend after New Year’s were...
Read more...
Working at the car wash
Working at the car wash, yeah
Come on and sing it with me, car wash
Sing it with the feeling now, car wash yeah
— Rose Royce
|———|
That banal disco song runs through my skull each time I head to the self-service dog wash I recently discovered, with a smelly pooch riding shotgun and looking concerned. Especially if it is Rosie, who hates traveling and pants so incessantly that she leaves drool all over the seat. Rosie is possibly part Yorkie, certainly part Nervous Nellie. She does not like change of routine and equates a car ride with being boarded or suffering...
Read more...
Working at the car wash
Working at the car wash, yeah
Come on and sing it with me, car wash
Sing it with the feeling now, car wash yeah
— Rose Royce
|———|
That banal disco song runs through my skull each time I head to the self-service dog wash I recently discovered, with a smelly pooch riding shotgun and looking concerned. Especially if it is Rosie, who hates traveling and pants so incessantly that she leaves drool all over the seat. Rosie is possibly part Yorkie, certainly part Nervous Nellie. She does not like change of routine and equates a car ride with being boarded or suffering...
Read more...
I was talking to a nephew the other day. We were comparing notes about the first time we put on glasses and saw the world in it all its beauty. Both of us were about the same age — 8 years old. For me, that means a half-century of wearing spectacles. Without them, I am at the mercy of errant barbers who take off my glasses before the trim and then ask me what do I think about the results. How would I know? Children can make funny faces at me with aplomb. In fact, pretty much anything much beyond arm’s length is a blur without glasses.
Years ago, I read “The River of Doubt,” a nonfiction...
Read more...
The winter solstice approaches. The shortest day of the year arrives on Saturday, followed by the longest night. Forecasters predict severe thunderstorms and lots of rain that day as a cold front moves through, and winter returns after a slow warming trend. Last weekend we had a fire blazing nearly nonstop, our family gathered around it. This morning I worked up a slight sweat while walking Sam the Dog along the Boorman Trail.
The trail has taken a beating this fall, flooding leaving a layer of mud left splayed on the concrete during the autumn gullywashers. City workers do a good job getting...
Read more...
Grief is an inconstant companion. It shows up at inopportune times, trailing the event that precipitated its arrival. Other times it lurks in the background, allowing us to get on with our lives, or at least pretend to. I was talking the other day to a colleague I don’t know that well, about my father-in-law’s murder. Something she said in sympathy set me off. Suddenly I was enveloped in a cloud of sadness and had to get out of her office as quickly as I could.
(If you’re just now arriving at this story, please go to these two articles: (http://garyborders.com/pages/harris-teel-always-a-fighter-in-his-biggest-battle/...
Read more...
A surgical intensive care unit is a solemn site. It can be a place of despair or of hope, of lives lost or restored. My mother’s life was restored in Good Shepherd’s SICU in 1995 after she suffered a massive heart attack while I was visiting her in the emergency room. She had gone there complaining of chest pains and nausea. As we were talking she went into cardiac arrest. Soon they were slapping her chest with shock paddles and ushering me out of the room.
Minutes later, I signed papers allowing a surgeon to operate and perform a double-bypass surgery. She bounced back from the bypass relatively...
Read more...
I last talked to my father-in-law on Sunday. Friends had bought a swing set and playscape that had for years sat in his Gilmer backyard. Our daughter Abbie had long outgrown its use. I was meeting them there to help load it.
“How are you doing, Mr. Teel,” I asked. I have always called him that, out of respect for the patriarch of this clan.
“Fine as froghair,” he said, as always.
Two days later, he was in Good Shepherd Medical Center’s operating room, the victim of a random stabbing attack in a waiting room at the hospital’s day-surgery center. He was there waiting to take...
Read more...
Like all of us of a certain age, I remember the moment I learned President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. I was sitting in Mrs. Mahoney’s third-grade class in Allenstown, N.H. She had left the classroom on that early Friday afternoon. When she returned, Mrs. Mahoney was crying. She wrote on the chalkboard, “President Kennedy is dead.” Then she left the room again, leaving a dozen third-graders sitting in silence.
With my myopic vision, at first I thought she had written “Principal Kenney” is dead.” That was the name of the fellow who ran the school. I wondered what could...
Read more...
