Welcome to Secrets of the City, formerly rakemag.com and mnspeak.com. Learn more and submit feedback.
Filtering by tag
The Cure for Scrooginess: A Hot Martini at Oceanaire
I've spent only one Christmas alone — and by "alone," I mean myself and three young kids.
I was recently divorced. My parents were visiting my sister's family in Philadelphia. And my ex-husband, a "recovering" Catholic and practicing alcoholic at the time, had slid into his annual holiday slump. This is how I found myself in a movie theater Christmas Eve, with my three all lined up and feeling — I'm sure — a lot less melancholy about the situation than I.
Great Joy
It was an old, quiet horse, the color of gray corduroy, or child's clay, those elephant slabs wrapped in wax paper that Reston remembered from classrooms in his childhood. Six months earlier the horse had been delivered to the pasture out back of Reston's trailer, and it had taken four men to coax her from the truck. She didn't kick or fuss, but simply refused to budge. Reston had paid 100 dollars for the horse to save it from being put down. He had inherited his ex-girlfriend's pathological weakness for downtrodden animals of all kinds, and he had a dog
