When I was a little girl, if my father didn't know the answer to a question, he would say, "Let's look it up in the Encyclopedia." A full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, printed on thin, brownish paper, old even when I was young. He must have bought it soon after he came to this country as a young man, after he left his family behind in Germany, before they vanished into the maelstrom that was the Holocaust. I have very little that belonged to my father. A portrait by a lifelong friend who…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 30, 2009 at 2:41pm —
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He wears a Brooks Brothers suit and a perfect silk tie, carries a leather briefcase; on his feet, silver shoes with gold airbrushed over the seams say, “Don’t let the clothes fool you, my heart is in the ‘hood.”
A middle aged man with a major mullet is dressed in black denim, looking like Johnny Cash , except for the hi-top Keds-- from the ankles down, he’s twelve years old.
Imagine a thirty-something –something woman in a grey business suit and pearls, close-cropped dark…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 28, 2009 at 1:30pm —
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Calhoun stands at the kitchen door and barks the “out” bark, so we open the door to let him into the back yard. He takes one step outside, into the summer rain. Then, he turns back into the kitchen, and barks again, one short, sharp bark. We open the door again, he goes outside, wheels around and returns. This time, he sits down in front of the door, cocks his head, and looks at us, quizzically, as if to say, “This isn’t out, this is bathtub. What have you done with out?”
Added by Ann Mintz on October 27, 2009 at 12:00pm —
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I'm sixteen, not remotely pretty as it was defined in an era of flowered blouses and circle pins, with an unfortunately adult sense of humor, and I’m watching television with some other misfits. We’re not friends, we’re a coalition of the friendless: Joan, who has the body of a prepubescent girl and the soul of a CPA, who identifies everything she owns by its brand name; Jimmy, the pudgy math whiz; Armando, who came from Argentina and remembers the year all the students in the country did their…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 24, 2009 at 10:30am —
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If we had been looking for a dog, we would never have picked Jasper, but there he is, chewing his fifteenth pair of shoes, running like spotted lightning through the woods, enticing the two older dogs into play-- yes, even Ceili, the dignified Queen of the House, plays tag with Jasper like the bruiser she used to be. He's small and skinny and very, very fast and when we first got him, he'd bolt out the front door and we'd spend hours…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 23, 2009 at 1:30pm —
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All our dogs have been rescued; Tyler took more rescuing than the rest. We will never know what happened to any of them before we found them, but we know that Tyler was picked up by a shelter in mid-winter, hours away from starving to death. He's a beautiful boy, a passionately loving dog with the silkiest ears in the world, and even after seven years, he flinches when you touch certain places on his back. To love Tyler, you have to understand…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 22, 2009 at 4:00pm —
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As this story begins, it’s the middle of the night, I’m in an outhouse in Egypt, and the outhouse is surrounded by a pack of dogs. I wait for a long time-- long enough, I think, for the dogs to give up and for me to walk back to my room. But I’m wrong, the dogs surround me in a loose circle as we run towards my room, me muttering under my breath, half cursing, half praying. I get there first, slam the door shut, the dogs throw their bodies against the door, the latch holds.
Later, I…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 22, 2009 at 4:00pm —
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The writer from the Wall Street Journal looked like Alice with a Wharton M.B.A--long straight blonde hair held back by a pink headband and a pink business suit. When I saw her, I said, under my breath, "My God, the woman's fourteen years old." After she left, Bucky came into my office and said, "Darling, I heard what you said about that woman, and we have to talk; they are going to get younger and younger and you had better get used to it now or you are going to spend the rest of your life…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 22, 2009 at 9:00am —
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“I beg to differ,” she said pursing her lips. Queen bees reserve their stingers for rivals-- so do the queens of small towns. Once men ran the organizations where she volunteers. Now women do, women, like me; women who smell of different hives. She hired me because of where I’ve been, what I know, what I can do. But she begs to differ.
Added by Ann Mintz on October 22, 2009 at 9:00am —
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When Baxter found us, his rusty collar had rubbed the skin from his neck and his thin body was covered with raw, red patches. He had no idea that he had been neglected to the point of abuse—he approached everyone, people, dogs, horses, with a huge doggy smile and a wagging tail. There was a shadow from his early life, though; he was always desperate for food, and so determined that we had to keep a thumb latch on the refrigerator. He was the…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 20, 2009 at 1:30pm —
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We always said he was the most beautiful member of the family, a Golden Viking with amber eyes. He’d been living on the streets for months, sleeping on porches and cadging handouts; four families tried to adopt him but he was too wild, bursting through screen doors and closed windows when he decided it was time to go wandering, to regain his freedom. I was Annie Sullivan to a canine Helen Keller; the first thing we had to teach him was that…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 19, 2009 at 12:00pm —
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Calhoun was Jack's dog, but he was a little bit mine too, a big, rangy hound of a dog who stayed with me when Jack traveled. He stole the ice cream out of a kid's cone at a block party once, leaving the kid standing on the street, empty cone in hand, a bemused look on his face, while Calhoun trotted down the block, beaming with pride, vanilla ice cream running down the sides of his jaws. You could talk to Calhoun in English, not in weird, terse dog commands: My favorite was, "It's a sad tale…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 18, 2009 at 1:00pm —
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Some moments are like pearls, touchstones you take from your pockets, never tiring of their touch. Jack lived in Houston and when he was dying, my husband and I went there a lot. Once, I said that something- I don’t remember what—had happened a long time ago, back when we were in love. Jack said, I thought we still were. We hadn’t been lovers for almost twenty years. He was right though, we still were in love.…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 16, 2009 at 2:00pm —
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The short answer: he was my best friend, and he died. Ten years after he died, almost a hundred people came to a party to celebrate his life, in a city he had left ten years before that. If I could have given him half the years I had left, I would have. He died of AIDS, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that he lived, and was very much loved. Still is, for that…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 14, 2009 at 3:30pm —
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She’s wearing a burlap dress embroidered—very badly—with verses from the Bible. We’re walking behind her, my friend Jack and me. Jack says, that dress belongs in a museum.
I say, why, it’s hideous.
He stops, tilts his head, and asks, "Wouldn’t you like to see a dress embroidered by a madwoman in 1876?"
I work in museums and for the next thirty years, I remember the dress and ask myself, will this be interesting in a hundred years?
Added by Ann Mintz on October 13, 2009 at 10:00pm —
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In the winter, north of the Arctic Circle, you don’t see a lot of color, except for the hair. Russian women have red hair. Not red like hair is red, but wine red, berry red, lipstick red, even Barbie pink. Truly-- 50 year old women with Barbie pink hair.
After a couple of days in Russia, I went to a drugstore and looked at boxes of hair dye. The women on the boxes had hair like berries, like wine, like…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 12, 2009 at 4:42pm —
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I had been working at a museum in downtown Philadelphia for almost ten years when the director retired. My longtime boss, my mentor, my friend. The board has defined what they're looking for--"Jesus Christ with an M.B.A.," I say to a friend, "But they won't hire him because he's Jewish." I thought I was going to stay there for the rest of my career. I didn't.
Added by Ann Mintz on October 12, 2009 at 11:51am —
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I see her on the train, a middle aged woman, hair perfectly arranged, wearing flowered blouses and pastel pants. Warts cover her face and hands, thick as pebbles on a beach. Sometimes, she sits next to me. I want to talk with her as I would talk with any stranger who shares my seat. I admire her courage for walking in a world that stares at her and averts its eyes. I remain silent, ashamed of my fear.
Added by Ann Mintz on October 12, 2009 at 11:49am —
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I'm twelve, maybe thirteen, at a party with my parents and their friends in the apartment on West 9th Street in Greenwich Village. We're clustered around the coffee table with the blue glass ashtray we bought in Venice, the silver box of cigarettes from the little store on West 4th Street, and an ugly brown melamine plate that holds hardboiled eggs and red caviar. My Russian father loved caviar. Brad, my very first gay friend, said something about a conversation pit; George, his much less…
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Added by Ann Mintz on October 12, 2009 at 11:30am —
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