Category: stories

One morning in August 1955, Eppie found herself reading and rereading the lovelorn column, called “Your Problems,” in the Chicago Sun-Times. And she suddenly realized exactly what she wanted to do: she would assist the lovelorn columnist! Eppie immediately phoned Wilbur Munnecke, a Sun-Times executive whom she had befriended years before. Might the columnist Ann Landers need help answering her mail? “Funny you should ask,” Munnecke responded. “It is odd that you are calling me now. Ruth Crowley, our Ann Landers, died suddenly last week.” The newspaper was, in fact, seeking a replacement for Crowley. When Eppie suggested that she could be the new Ann Landers, Munnecke laughed out loud. Crowley had been a journalist and a nurse. Her column was syndicated in more than two dozen newspapers. Eppie Lederer was a housewife without a college degree, and more than 25 other women, many of whom were experienced journalists, had applied for the position.

It’s awful to write to you because, even though I love writing to you, it brings you so near me I could almost touch you and I know at the same time that I cannot touch you, you are so far away in cold, unkind Ringwood and I am in stale Barnet in a roadhouse pub with nothing but your absence and your distance, to keep my heart company.

Madame Godin [Isabel Godin des Odonais] was the wife of one of the French mathematicians who were sent to Peru, in South America, about the middle of the last century [1769], for the purpose of making some observations there, which should improve our knowledge of geography. She set out from Rio-bamba, the place of her residence, with the design of joining her husband at Cayenne, a distance of thirteen or fourteen hundred leagues.

An interesting example of a mathematical pattern found in the real world is the arrangement of petals and florets (the small rudimentary flowers that are found, easily visible, in the center of some flowers such as sunflowers). In some species these florets are distributed in groups of spirals that curl in different directions and intercept each other. Often the number of elements that curl in one direction is 34, while the number of elements curling in the opposite direction is 55….

“Bad language” was a relatively accepted aspect of English even in Shakespeare’s day — not that he actually used the most forbidden words, but he clearly alluded to them (“Do you think I meant country matters?”), and he revelled in vigorous insults. In King Lear, when Oswald asks the Earl of Kent, “What dost thou know me for?” the latter replies, “A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny the least syllable of thy addition.” He follows that up with “Draw, you whoreson cullionly barbermonger! Draw!”…

“‘When on board the ship,’ said Edison, as we sat down to déjeuner on the terrace of the Eiffel Tower, première étage, ‘they put rolls and coffee on the table for breakfast. I thought that that was a very poor breakfast for a man to do any work upon. But I suppose one gets used to it. I would like one American meal for a change — plenty of pie for a change.’ He then smashed the roll with his fist.”

True or false, the public airing of this dirty washing might have harmed Onassis’s reputation irretrievably had the whole affair not suddenly taken a fantastic twist….

“Left Padua at twelve, and arrived at Lord Byron’s country house, La Mira, near Lusina, at two. He was but just up and in his bath; soon came down to me; first time we have met these five years; grown fat, which spoils the picturesqueness of his head….”

About eight o’clock I strolled in very jauntily. In my mind I had the whole programme mapped out. I would stay at the hospital for, say, two days following the operation — or, at most, three. Then I must be up and away. I had a good deal of work to do and a number of people to see on important business, and I could not really afford to waste more than a weekend on the staff of St Germicide’s. After Monday they must look to their own devices for social entertainment. That was my idea….

As the means to his end Poniatowski seemed specially suited. Williams had heard enough of Catherine to infer that she was not averse to an intrigue, and great though her devotion might be to the banished Soltykof — was it not the gossip of the ante-chambers that she had once waited for him till three in the morning at a rendezvous to which he never came? — the wily diplomatist was too much of a cynic to believe in the deathlessness of any passion. Broken hearts could always be mended, and who was more likely to patch together deftly the shattered fragments of the Grand Duchess’s than his charming young Pole?…

The “Fejee Mermaid” was by many supposed to be a curiosity manufactured by myself or made to my order. This is not the fact. I certainly had much to do in bringing it before the public, and as I am now in the confessional mood, I will “make a clean breast” of the ways and means I adopted for that purpose. I must first, however, relate how it came into my possession and its alleged history.

I shall never forget the first time I ever saw a pickpocket at work. It was when I was about thirteen years old. A boy of my own age, Zack, a great pal of mine, was with me. Zack and I understood one another thoroughly and well knew how to get theatre money by petty pilfering, but of real graft we were as yet ignorant, although we had heard many stories about the operations of actual, professional thieves. We used to steal rides in the cars which ran to and from the Grand Street ferries — and run off with overcoats and satchels when we had a chance. One day we were standing on the rear platform when a woman boarded the car, and immediately behind her a gentlemanly looking man with a high hat….

By this time [1906] the new factory was built and new machinery had been put inside it, and one day in January, a little before my thirteenth birthday, we went to see it. Mario took us round, and as I was standing with a mass of loose curling hair almost to my knees, the wind of a steel shaft caught it. I was snatched up, revolving, with my head ground against the shaft and my feet floating horizontal. I know that it seemed a very long time: at each revolution my feet struck a wall or pillar and I wondered if my shoes were coming off….

When I was in high school, in Lancaster, I formed my first band, the Black-Outs. The name derives from when a few of the guys, after drinking peppermint schnapps, purchased illicitly by somebody’s older brother, blacked out. This was the only R&B band in the entire Mojave Desert at that time. Three of the guys (Johnny Franklin, Carter Franklin and Wayne Lyles) were black, the Salazar brothers were Mexican and Terry Wimberly represented the other oppressed peoples of the earth.

The tree men came and chopped up his home. They took half the tree away — half his home. They weren’t good tree men. They didn’t even have a chain saw to do the job right. They used machetes. When they were through there were raw wounds and splintered stubs of branches everywhere on the tree.

Stieglitz brought Georgia to the bright little studio apartment of his niece, Elizabeth, who was living elsewhere. When Georgia had arrived in New York, she was tired and ill. Stieglitz ordered her to stay in bed, and had his brother, a well-known doctor, examine her. Stieglitz himself visited every day, and even learned how to boil eggs for her. He returned to his apartment after his wife was asleep. Within a week he was writing to Arthur Dove of Georgia’s “uncommon beauty, spontaneity, clearness of mind and feeling, and the marvelous intensity with which she lived every moment.”

Folk legends surround the life of Old West Outlaw Jesse James. Once, it has been told, while Jesse and his brother Frank were riding in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains with the Younger brothers, they stopped at a small, out—of—the—way cabin to ask for food. The sole occupant of the house was a poor, saddened woman whose husband had recently passed away. Overcoming any apprehension, the woman kindly agreed to throw some scraps together and feed the strangers. Once inside, however, Jesse sensed that something terrible was troubling the widow….

It was here [Budapest] that I suffered the complete breakdown of the nerves to which I have referred. What I experienced during the period of that illness surpasses all belief. My sight and hearing were always extraordinary. I could clearly discern objects in the distance when others saw no trace of them. Several times in my boyhood I saved the houses of our neighbors from fire by hearing the faint crackling sounds which did not disturb their sleep, and calling for help. In 1899, when I was past forty and carrying on my experiments in Colorado, I could hear very distinctly thunderclaps at a distance of 550 miles. The limit of audition for my young assistants was scarcely more than 150 miles. My ear was thus over thirteen times more sensitive. Yet at that time I was, so to speak, stone deaf in comparison with the acuteness of my hearing while under the nervous strain….

I once dated a cute guy in high school who served me spaghetti by candlelight and taught me to play Frisbee. He was a great kisser. He was good at French and geometry. But I had to break up with him because he liked the rock band Journey. Plus, he wore a puka shell necklace. In college, I dated a gorgeous Rhodes scholar who spent his summers distributing sacks of grain to starving children in Africa. He took me to wine tastings and the opera. But I had to break up with him because his name was Yehuda. Imagine having sex with someone and screaming, “Oh, do me, Yehuda.” Just not possible. After college, I had to break up with a civil rights lawyer because he had a mullet….

The only recurrence of the temperamental joyance that was a large part of his nature was when he related the Spray’s experiences. For no sadness of soul could ever rob Jack London of his native delight in a boat. In relation to this very trip, I am tempted to quote from “Small-Boat Sailing” (in The Human Drift): “After all,” he says, “the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat sailing….”