“I took your winter coat to the dry cleaner today,” he bellowed.

What’s the proper response to that? “Um…thank you?”

“When I cleaned out the coat pockets, I found—THIS.” Producing a carefully folded tissue, he opened it to reveal something red nestled inside.  READ MORE

My mother developed some unusual habits while I was away at college. Most glaringly: after decades of teaching the rules of phonics to elementary school students, she started making up her own.

Take, for example, a name that somehow filtered into her consciousness, the fashion designer Liz Claiborne. Should be simple: short i Liz, followed by a long A for Clai; the silent e at the end turns the o vowel long, CLAY-bōrn. But that’s not where Ma went rogue. She placed the sounds far in the back of her throat—like she was trying to speak while swallowing a spoonful of tapioca—and it emerged as, pretty much, GLI glay-BUHHHH. READ MORE

Back in the olden days — before the internet, I mean — I knew of only two ways to find a girlfriend: in person (at a bar or, during the ’80s, a disco) or by mail. If you were shy — and I was very, painfully, almost self-destructively shy — the first method didn’t work so well. The second cost a lot of money, especially for someone in an entry-level job: first to place a personal ad in the back of the newspaper and second to rent a mailbox at the publisher’s offices to receive the responses. READ MORE