Chagrin, you say?

    When I was a child, and evidently immune from any child labor laws, I worked in Sara's Store. The store adjoined our house, so it was relatively safe, so I only sparingly had to call for security backup. The call for help or assistance meant knocking on the inside wall with a can of soup from the grocery aisle shelf and waiting for my mother to cross the porch to smooth over any problem.  The problem almost always derived from the actions of "older boys," who would seize on the opportunity to engage in disorderly and larcenous behavior in the presence of an eleven-year-old, but would slink away at the appearance of an adult.
    During my time in the store, I spent many hours reading:  not books because I was working, but the reading materials in the store. One wall had an almost floor to ceiling magazine rack, including a wide assortment of comics, and I would read from these on a selective basis. Many held little interest.  I abhorred the romance magazines that so many girls were addicted to, my father always had in our house copies of the Saturday Evening Post and True Magazine,which I'd read at home, but didn't care for his Official Detective and True Crime magazines, only occasionally perusing a story or two in them.  
    Newspapers were a different story.  They were arranged on a square brown library-type table in front of the window, alongside an ice-cream-parlor chair which held the copies reserved for Sara's regular customers, who would pay in advance to guarantee their paper would be there.
   THE DAILY NEWS and THE MIRROR were the papers I read every single day. I don't know why they held such an appeal for me because I never discussed what I read in them, didn't even personally know anyone else who read them.  But they were the Tabloids, sensational at the time compared to the stuffy newspaper my parents subscribed to. These tabloids, which sold then for 5 Cents, were masterpiece of design and allure.  I would read them cover to cover, even the sports pages, which were of no real interest. Those papers were easy to hold, easier to read, and invited the reader in. Why else would I read columns by Jimmy Breslin or Pete Hamill.
    The News seemed slightly more respectable than The Mirror, for reasons unknown to me then as well as now. I forget which paper  carried every day a pair of  small single reader-submitted items titled "The Urge to Kill"  and  "My Most Embarrassing Moments."  I read them faithfully every day, even in my tender years finding them silly, but still necessary to read. I suppose no paper or media outlet today could pass off a column wherein the writer felt like killing someone for whatever annoying reason, but it was okay then to hate someone or somebody.
    The Most Embarrassing Moment item would be less controversial today:  of the hundreds, probably thousands, I read, I can recall only one embarrassed contributor :  She was on the subway, wearing a new dress, and became aware that eyes were on her---admiring her outfit, she assumed.  Only when she got home, Horror of Horrors, she discovered that the belt of her dress had been turned inside out,  revealing, in large print, that she wore a Size 12!!
    Now this is where my vocabulary became enriched.  This unfortunately embarrassed soul, as well as at least half of her fellow contributors, revealed the source of their embarrassment using the phrase, "To my chagrin,...I found, blah, blah, blah..."
    I'm trying to think if I have ever heard the word chagrin  anywhere else.  Maybe it's extinct now.
   

Fueled by Addiction

   Opioids or Snake Oil.  Whatever it takes.

Unfortunate Pearls---

   ---to be cast before swine

Future Tension

The pearl is IN the river.  (Or in 'z liver.)

Bit(e) Me

On the arm.

June 17, 2015

The beginning of the end of life as we knew it.

Random Recollections

   She stood up in class, and began her speech:  "Nobody gives a damn about you."  I was 18 and she may have been a transfer student, a few years older,  and needing a Freshman Speech Credit Unit.  I didn't know her, remember nothing about her except those words, which led to kind of a power talk about self motivation or such.  I have no idea why those words and that thought stayed in my mind.  At the time, I had parents, other relatives and friends who I assumed cared about me.  I suspect I thought she may have had  some experience or insight which might reveal itself later in my life.
     That message the young woman delivered may have served as an inspiration in youth, but plays out cold and bitter when too much time has intervened.

Three Little Stones

   I've seen them over the years, the three small stones on Dorothy's headstone.  They've  appeared to have been arranged there, as if deliberately placed. All my visits to her grave have been solitary ones, and I knew I hadn't put the stones there.  I assumed it was the kids.  I remembered how some of my own children, on cemetery visits when they were young, would decorate their grandparents' graves with small things found in the cemetery, pinecones, ferns or such.
   A few days ago, I found out the answer, though the question was unasked, during a  chance meeting with an old friend.  She told me how much she missed Dorothy, and said if I ever noticed little stones on Dorothy's headstone she was the one who put them there. The placement of the stones is a Jewish tradition and is meant to symbolize good fortune.

June 1, 2011