The portraits were the size of baseball cards. I recognized one of the names, Stanley Musial, a great outfielder who, in his heyday, had been known as “Stan the Man.”…
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terry berkson
One frog was foolish enough to hop under the enclosure and was immediately set upon by Rosie, one of my golden comets that looks more like a Rhode Island red than the rest...…
In Richfield, on top of being confined, snowy weeks would go by without the sun shining. It didn’t take long for the ache of loneliness to get to me and sometimes I’d find ways to get out of the house to visit a friend, even if I had to climb out my second floor bedroom window.…
On the Christmas of her tenth year, I went to Sears and bought Elizabeth a full size, 26-inch, candy-apple red touring bike and stood it under the tree. As a family, we had already done a lot of riding and I thought she’d be delighted to get a full-size bike like Alice’s.…
Max didn’t see her again until his Easter break from school. The child had come, but its father had not shown up. One night they went for a drive while Winkie’s sister watched the baby. It was unusually warm for that time of year. Max turned off the blacktop and followed a stone road down to the lake. He shut the engine and they just sat there, not talking.…
Back in the coop, I lifted the outside door to the laying box and was about to reach in when I noticed that there was something in there, apparently sitting on the eggs. A chicken, I thought. I bent to look inside and came face to face with a raccoon.…
My earliest memories of The Pavilion are when I was about 5 years old and my dad rented a rowboat there. At the time, I was impressed with the lake’s dam and the giant towers that supported the power lines with their huge ceramic insulators.…
Lady Ostapeck, whose birth name was Alma Kaukinen, was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother died a few days after she gave birth and her father, an immigrant from Finland, left the newborn child in the care of her mother’s sister.…
For several weeks I was gathering as many as 10 or 12 brown eggs a day until one late morning three of the eggs I collected turned out to be green. I thought maybe it was because of all the dandelion leaves the chickens were eating when I’d let them out to free range, but neighbors assured me that eating weeds wouldn’t do that.…
“Now, don’t ya be touching that crank,” my father warned. “Last time it rained I had a flood.” He was referring to the handle that operated the Sky View window in the roof. It was somebody in Detroit’s brainstorm—people riding in the city cab would be able to see the tops of skyscrapers. Dad viewed the innovation as a leaky nuisance, a target for pigeons.…
