I have always been sensitive to smells and tastes, but this was too much. On a four day getaway with my husband in NYC, the city of my girlhood, I sat down to a sesame bagel with scallion cream cheese. I took the first bite–soft, chewy, crispy, nutty, creamy, tangy, sharp. I burst into tears. Covering my face with my hands, my sobs alternated with laughing. Shock. Shame. To be so flooded with memories at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning in midtown. Fresh bagels were the central experience of my childhood. At least once … Continue reading It’s Not a Madeleine But by Rachel Lutwick Deaner →
The city of my birth, as seen from above, is a ragged landscape of canyons. Highrises, lowrises, the steeple of an old brick church. Streams of yellow taxicabs where forests of hickory and chestnut once grew. To the north lies the green rectangle of Central Park, the woody heart of this metropolis. There, red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons prey on pigeons and squirrels and sometimes an errant Chihuahua. To the west, across the Hudson River, the fair state of New Jersey. To the east the bridges that stitch the island of Manhattan to the boroughs … Continue reading The City of My Birth by Margaret Erhart →
She was four-foot-something, ancient, squat, and elegant. I assumed she was Russian, though I only ever heard her speak once. She was born before there was such a thing as the Warsaw Pact, before the Cold War, before the founding of the Bolsheviks. Even in her diamonds and furs, she did not seem out of place in our eleven-story, turn-of-the-century university building, nestled between Harlem and the Hudson, where the elbow-patched faculty of the 1970s lived alongside the Old World émigrés of earlier decades. I could already see over her hat by the time I … Continue reading The Hit Lady by B.K. Marcus →
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