Every Douche up in Douche-ville liked holidays a lot. . . . But the Jana, who lived just south of Douche-ville, Did NOT!

Getting to know your apartment building neighbors is a perverse and excruciating city-specific experience that I will look back on with warmth and misplaced nostalgia when I am aged and living in seclusion in the country. So like, three years from now.

My urban neighbors are to my adult life what my best friends’ parents were to my adolescence: familiar looking strangers, about whose lives I know wildly inappropriate and intimate details. [ . . . ] Continue »

My 91-year-old maternal grandfather, Poppi, the widowed husband of The Dead Nana, may just be a geriatric G.* And this causes problems for some people.

* A “G” being defined as a Gangster.

I could set the scene with the whole,

My sister said, “Did Mom tell you yet?”

And I thought, “Someone is (1.) dead, (2.) in the hospital, (3.) gay, or (4.) in jail.”

But it was none of the above, and upon hearing the actual news, I gasped, “That’s amazing!”

[ . . . ] Continue »