My neighbor Amy , who two decades ago purchased the house where my grandparents and aunts and uncles had dwelt, is a great hostess in all seasons, even mid-winter. She has a tree, a Norway …
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Mike Fink
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3/8/20
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Harry Ezratty’s helpful and useful study of Caribbean Jewish history, in “The Jews in the New World” trilogy, claims there isn’t much of a Sephardic presence in Puerto Rico: Spanish rule and the Inquisition discouraged all but a few …
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Mike Fink
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3/18/16
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I’ve been trying to collect a few fine moments from this summer – with the pleasant prospect that August may add to my treasures.
We spent an early June weekend in Chatham, on Cape …
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Mike Fink
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8/5/21
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The timing was perfect: daylight saving time ended, giving us back a lost hour. I went to Columbus, Ohio, to visit the homestead of my favorite American humorist, James Thurber.
My freshman roommate at Yale had handed me …
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Mike Fink
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11/27/15
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Just a story set in 1951, the start of the “Fabulous 50s,” after World War II and its aftermath.
We were deeply involved in the “Cold War” against our former …
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Mike Fink
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12/9/16
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Did you know that a pigeon is a dove and that the word “columbus” means just that in Latin, the bird that makes a cooing, melancholy melody over all the continents and builds …
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Mike Fink
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10/2/20
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In my school days, we had to learn poems by heart and then recite them by rote on the auditorium stage. I remember Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ode to the month of May, “The …
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Mike Fink
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5/9/21
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He sat by the burning logs in the open hearth of our parlor, in a wing chair. I think it was upholstered in patterned peach silk. This is the only memory I have of my maternal grandfather. He had paid this brief visit from Montreal when I was ... …
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Mike Fink
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3/13/14
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I had two uncles who fought for the four freedoms, and I think about them on Memorial Day.
One of them, the younger, was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and came home on crutches. The other, …
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Mike Fink
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5/4/23
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I have a winter garden here in Providence, plus a summer garden in, aptly, South County.
What does that mean, “have”? Oh, I pay taxes on each property, and I have the yards, front …
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Mike Fink
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8/4/23
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