I have wealthy cousins — men — who judge others by the shoes they wear. When I was a teenager, I remember hearing one of them advise that you could tell if someone was really rich by looking at his shoes.

Shoes were the last thing I was thinking about when my grandmother died on Christmas day, 2006, two days before her 95th birthday. We were at my aunt’s, just starting her Christmas party for family and friends, when my father’s cell phone rang with the news from the nursing home. I was just finishing my first deviled egg. [Read more →]

Tags: fashion & clothing, reflections & recollections by Scott Stein
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A few months ago I signed up for Facebook and got in touch with a bunch of people I haven’t heard from in years. Mostly it was a superficial but friendly, “Hey, I’m still alive, glad you are, too.” Even before then, I’d been thinking a lot about old friends I no longer speak to. Or hear from. T is one of them. We go back to elementary school, but in seventh grade, we had every class together. We read the Far Side in the newspaper each morning in homeroom. We took art class while other kids were in band. We shared an intense interest in comic books and drew pretty good pictures of superheroes fighting it out. T would draw caricatures of our teachers and make up songs to mock them. He sat right behind me in all our classes, because of the alphabet. [Read more →]

Tags: reflections & recollections by Scott Stein
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My Italian uncle Lou had a large collection of guns and rifles. I say had not because he doesn’t still have the guns — he might — but because he isn’t my uncle anymore, not technically. He and my aunt divorced well more than a decade ago. When I was growing up, they lived in the apartment above ours in the three-family house that they co-owned with my parents in Bayside, Queens.

Lou went on a hunting trip every year. He managed to kill something only once, that I can remember, a deer. At the Christmas party that year, the calamari, baked ziti, and sausage and peppers were joined by venison parmigiana. To warn squeamish guests, I drew a picture of Rudolph with his nose so bright and wrote Bambi Parmigiana on a small piece of oak tag. Perhaps not in good taste. I was a kid. [Read more →]

Tags: blood, reflections & recollections by Scott Stein
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You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to think that it might be for the best if some people didn’t own pets. Living in the fraternity house was dangerous business for animals of any genus or phylum. The guys weren’t especially cruel. Not intentionally. Or usually. Maybe sometimes. Mostly, we just weren’t responsible enough to care for living things. Some of us weren’t responsible enough to care for ourselves. We should have practiced with plants first. A cactus might have been a good start. [Read more →]

Tags: reflections & recollections by Scott Stein, wild things
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I started seeing Dr. Waxman on Long Island when I was in kindergarten. Jason was in second grade. We were fighting a lot. [Read more →]

Tags: blood, reflections & recollections by Scott Stein
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I have, on occasion, impetuous bowels. Sometimes when I’m minding my own business, nature calls. Urgently. Nature doesn’t care if I’m stuck in traffic on I-95 or in IHOP. [Read more →]

Tags: reflections & recollections by Scott Stein
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Every serial killer biography begins with a kid in the forest torturing squirrels.

When I was 13 and 14, I would go to the Poconos with my friend Eric, his older sister, and their parents. They had a house. We’d usually stay for two nights. [Read more →]

Tags: reflections & recollections by Scott Stein
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According to the most reliable sources, the mythological Cyclops was tortured by the precise advanced knowledge of when and how it would die.

I’m no mythological creature, but I too know the precise how — if not the when — of my death. I will die by tripping over shoes my wife has left on the floor. [Read more →]

Tags: his & hers, reflections & recollections by Scott Stein
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An older brother’s job is to protect his younger brother or sister. That’s what I’d always been told by my parents, and that’s what I’d seen. My older brother protected me. [Read more →]

Tags: reflections & recollections by Scott Stein
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