According to today's Boston Herald, a 4-foot long female alligator was captured yesterday along the banks of the Charles River, on the Dedham-Needham line west of Boston. There have been 22 alligators found wandering New England since the beginning of the year, and it is believed that the creatures were imported into the Northeast illegally and abandoned by their owners.
I know that there are folks who like exotic pets, but I'm still trying to fathom the ferret craze. ("Would you like to come up to my place and see my weasel?") Keeping a personal alligator is beyond the pale. Do people like gators because they're easier to keep than crocodiles? Does one feed them Purina Alligator Chow? Are they good with children?
In Florida, where the alligator is a general nuisance, the latest trend in animal companions is the Burmese python. These massive snakes often escape, or are dumped, into the Everglades, where they wreak havoc with the ecosystem. They also occasionally visit suburban neighborhoods and swallow cats.
When there are millions of fellow mammals in animal shelters awaiting adoption, why does anyone choose instead to smuggle a latter-day dinosaur from Boca Raton? Enough already with the reptiles! Just get a damned dog. If they were good enough pets for Neanderthals, they're good enough for you.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Calls from home
Dad was at his girlfriend's because she can't go out, being on an oxygen tank. Why did he call during the day, in the middle of the week? News of suicide, an overdose. That's the second this month ... not that I was close, like the last one. But she was a year older, and lived a few blocks away. Our fathers are still tight, old boxing cronies, and her younger sister and I were best pals in second grade. She was the "tuff" girl that the other girls emulated, but never mean.
At the end of the conversation we discussed another suicide, this time a jumper, who I only remember as a tiny kid, from the next street over. I've taken to reading my hometown paper and it was reported as a homeless man jumping from an abandoned mill. It's hard to picture that in my mind.
Six blocks, two deaths. Hmm.
I keep meaning to tell my Dad that I'm engaged but I just can't seem to find the right time.
At the end of the conversation we discussed another suicide, this time a jumper, who I only remember as a tiny kid, from the next street over. I've taken to reading my hometown paper and it was reported as a homeless man jumping from an abandoned mill. It's hard to picture that in my mind.
Six blocks, two deaths. Hmm.
I keep meaning to tell my Dad that I'm engaged but I just can't seem to find the right time.
I have a love/hate relationship with Price-Rite the discount grocery store. On the one hand, its really cheap and I love that you really get a lot for your money there. On the other hand, its a horrible shopping experience. Everything is in boxes, and not put out nicely on shelves. The meat is always questionable looking. But the vegetables are outstanding and very very reasonable in price. But often the vegetables are not perfect. You can get red peppers for 99cents lb. At Stop and Shop they go for $3.99, but they are perfectly shaped. The ones at Price-Rite are sometimes funky shapes. And this goes for other veggies too. So last night I opened a 5lb bag of carrots and look what I found!
Is it the lower half of Jesus? Or The Virgin Mary? Or Maybe Elvis?
Wonder what I can get for it on Ebay? Well we will never know because after I shot the pics, I chopped it up and put it in a salad. It was delish!
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
I Wonder What Mr. LaRouche is Doing?
Today is my birthday. Other people born on September 8th are Sid Caesar, Peter Sellers, Patsy Cline, Lyndon LaRouche, and the Virgin Mary. Someone is taking me out for German food, and since I'm named after an uncle who was killed fighting against the Wehrmacht in WW-II, I suppose this closes a circle.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
To the Max
A zillion years ago, at the tail end of the Carter Era, I worked in a family-owned hardware distributorship in East Cambridge, Mass. One of my coworkers was a little old Jewish guy named Max Gass.
The name Max Gass may sound like a Mel Brooks shtik, a character with horrible flatulence, but Max was a dignified man. He wore glasses and a neatly clipped moustache, and he donned a dapper fedora when he set off for home. He was in his late 70s and was a retired high school teacher. The word was that he had been denied a university teaching post because of anti-Semitism.
Max said he needed to get away from Mrs. Gass for a while every day, so he asked his friend Mr. Kaufman, owner of Kaufman Industrial Supplies, for a part time job. Every weekday morning, Max would humbly pack boxes in the shipping department at Kaufman's. I was the shipping clerk, and I had great conversations with Max on a variety of subjects. He was of the opinion that vampire movies destroyed the morals of the young. He was worried about his digestion, and every workday at 10:00 a.m. he would put on a yamulke and have a mug of hot water and a banana, a combination that he believed would keep him regular. Once, someone at work played a joke on Max by stuffing a pair of dungarees and a pair of sneakers with newspaper, placing the half-dummy in the men's room toilet stall so that it appeared to be a person hogging the crapper.
Max confessed to me about his wildest caper, when he was a young man during Prohibition. He and some friends went to Montreal on the pretext of going to see the great actor Boris Thomashefsky in a Yiddish theater production, when the main reason for the trip was to have alcoholic drinks! Max's little mamele (mother) was never the wiser.
About a year after I left the place, Max had an industrial accident when a steel locker fell on top of him. He put my name as a witness on the accident report, but he wasn't trying anything fraudulent, he was merely confused. He stopped working not long after that, and he died a couple of years later. I always smile when I think of him, and I believe he may have been right about the whole vampire phenomenon.
The name Max Gass may sound like a Mel Brooks shtik, a character with horrible flatulence, but Max was a dignified man. He wore glasses and a neatly clipped moustache, and he donned a dapper fedora when he set off for home. He was in his late 70s and was a retired high school teacher. The word was that he had been denied a university teaching post because of anti-Semitism.
Max said he needed to get away from Mrs. Gass for a while every day, so he asked his friend Mr. Kaufman, owner of Kaufman Industrial Supplies, for a part time job. Every weekday morning, Max would humbly pack boxes in the shipping department at Kaufman's. I was the shipping clerk, and I had great conversations with Max on a variety of subjects. He was of the opinion that vampire movies destroyed the morals of the young. He was worried about his digestion, and every workday at 10:00 a.m. he would put on a yamulke and have a mug of hot water and a banana, a combination that he believed would keep him regular. Once, someone at work played a joke on Max by stuffing a pair of dungarees and a pair of sneakers with newspaper, placing the half-dummy in the men's room toilet stall so that it appeared to be a person hogging the crapper.
Max confessed to me about his wildest caper, when he was a young man during Prohibition. He and some friends went to Montreal on the pretext of going to see the great actor Boris Thomashefsky in a Yiddish theater production, when the main reason for the trip was to have alcoholic drinks! Max's little mamele (mother) was never the wiser.
About a year after I left the place, Max had an industrial accident when a steel locker fell on top of him. He put my name as a witness on the accident report, but he wasn't trying anything fraudulent, he was merely confused. He stopped working not long after that, and he died a couple of years later. I always smile when I think of him, and I believe he may have been right about the whole vampire phenomenon.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Plan 9, Channel 7
I had written this for Bob and posted it originally at Bad Girls Go To Hell, a poetry website that I'm part of. Bob was, and remains, our only follower. I created this blog partly for him to share his writing, but he could never get it together to learn how to post.
Are you happy now?
Am I supposed to send
the flowers of romance
into the void?
©Donna Lethal
Are you happy now?
Am I supposed to send
the flowers of romance
into the void?
F.Y.B.W.
1962 - 2010
1962 - 2010
©Donna Lethal
The Beauty of Anti-Triumphalism
In Boston there is a subculture of unemployed individuals who spend a lot of time in Catholic churches, and since being laid off last year, I have become a member of the tribe. One day I went to a 5:15 p.m. weekday Mass at a Franciscan shrine downtown. The priest came out of the sacristy with aid of a walker, the lector was an older woman with a hunched back, and one of the men who took the collection had a prosthetic hand. The scene reminded me of the title of a Flannery O'Connor story, "The Lame Shall Enter First," and I found it all to be sublime.
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