To Be Finicky Traveler for a Day

I have vivid childhood memories of a television program called Queen for a Day. Women in dire straits would tell stories that could make anybody cry – often dealing with illness, death, and job loss, and always about a financial reversal. The contestant who told the saddest story would get things like new appliances, bikes for the kids, and perhaps clothing from a catalogue retailer.

I also recall hearing stories about schools that have Principal for a Day, allowing kids to feel the power without any of the responsibilities of running a school. My own alma mater, Forest Hills High in New York, never had anything like that.

Frankly my own fantasy is to be Finicky Traveler for a Day or better yet, a week. Finicky Traveler is a Wall Street Journal feature written by Laura Landro. As a long time Wall Street Journal reader, I know she also wrote a compelling series of stories about her grueling and ultimately successful battle with cancer. But in the Finicky Traveler pieces, she assumes the mantle of a princess who arrives at some of the most expensive hotels in the world, and immediately requests a room change.

The room in question is either too small, too noisy, or lacks a requisite amenity like a fireplace or fabulous view. With her husband in tow, the Finicky Traveler actually gets paid to sample and critique spa services, poolside drinks, bedding, etc. My own fantasy is simply to go to a few 5 star hotels and experience luxury.

5 star hotels are mostly off-season memories for me. That unfortunate Election Day when George W. Bush was ultimately judged to have defeated Al Gore found Dennis and me at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona. Unable to forgive Al Gore for losing, my husband could only stare at the television, shouting “You could have won, you jerk!”

The Hotel Arts is a Ritz-Carlton and the breakfast buffet had every manner of smoked fish, along with eggs, waffles, and pastries to die for. The fresh strawberry ice cream with a large pitcher of hot fudge served in the lounge after dinner was memorable.

It was too cold to use the pool overlooking the Frank Gehry fish sculpture. I will say that when I returned from my run along the Mediterranean, the doorman was solicitous, handing me a towel and bottle of water. Unlike the Finicky Traveler, I found nothing to criticize.

As of this writing, I’m headed to a business conference in New York on a Bolt Bus with spotty wi fi service, and will be returning to Boston later this evening -- without so much as a stay at the Midtown Holiday Inn with its thin towels, tiny bars of soap, and a pretty decent location. Or even a stay at the Parker Meridien, with its tiny Danish modern, once chic rooms in serious need of refurbishing, but also a great location.

As for food and beverage, the only coffee I could find inside the bus terminal at Boston’s South Station was at McDonald’s. But I’ve got six energy bars inside my Timbuk 2 bag, and if I’m lucky I will find a place to buy a sandwich as I sprint from the bus station to my conference at Chelsea Piers.

Ice Cream Therapy

I love ice cream, and frequent the J.P. Licks in Coolidge Corner, usually before going to the movies, and also the one in Newton Centre, mostly after dinner at Jumbo Seafood. As for the one on Huntington Avenue -- at Brigham Circle, right near the Harvard medical area -- it’s long been on my list of places to try.

The store at Brigham Circle, featuring a large outdoor space with tables and chairs, is closed when I usually go by, which is around 5:30 a.m. and I’m running my Brookline, Boston, Cambridge loop before heading off to work. But yesterday was different.

It was a Friday, and at 4 p.m. I stepped off the trolley with half an hour to spare before my appointment for an M.R.I. of a balky wrist at Brigham & Woman’s Hospital. Feeling the sun kiss my face, I sat outdoors, savoring three scoops of my new favorite flavor, Peanut Beckett & Jelly.

Granted I’m a little slow on Red Sox culture. So it’s taken me a while to figure out that this flavor, which is actually raspberry ice cream with swirls of peanut butter, is part of J.P. Licks’ “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” line of flavors and named for Red Sox starting pitcher Josh Beckett.

If I had to guess, I’d say my moment of self-indulgence set me back 1,000 calories, something I felt I needed to justify. Engaging in a solo, but fast-paced mind game with my conscience, I offered three excuses: I hadn’t eaten lunch; according to my heart rate monitor, I had burned off 700 calories when I ran that morning, and I was planning to walk home after getting the M.R.I., perhaps burning off 200 calories before going out to dinner with Dennis.

But my fourth excuse seemed the most compelling. My favorite coping mechanism for dealing with the anxiety of dental and medical appointments has been ice cream or some other, sweet treat. Last week, before what I knew would be a particularly long and unpleasant dental procedure in Arlington, I stopped in at Chilly Cow, an ice cream store I like, but not as much as the J.P. Licks that used to be there.

As a child, despite living in Queens, my father often drove me to a dentist just off the Grand Concourse in The Bronx. It seemed ludicrous to travel that distance to see Irving Schreiber, even if he was the brother of a guy Dad worked with. But since I knew Dad would attempt to compensate for the unpleasantness of having my teeth drilled – with a visit to Krums or Jahn’s for a hot butterscotch sundae or a malted – I didn’t mind.

Over dinner last night I told Dennis the M.R.I. had caused me great anxiety. If the experience was tolerable because my head never went inside the tunnel, it was intolerable because I have difficulty being absolutely still for any stretch of time, let alone 40 minutes.

When I told him about my trip to J.P. Licks beforehand, Dennis couldn’t resist telling me his own ice cream story. Having been lucky enough to survive polio without any lasting effects, he still smiles when he talks about traveling with his mother from their home in Chelsea to Childrens Hospital Boston for physical therapy. Though the sight of other kids in iron longs was frightening, Dennis said he looked forward to those trips because they also meant hot fudge sundaes at an ice cream shop near the old Sears building outside Kenmore Square.

Will Craigslist Murder Fuel Technophobia?

Craigslist is getting bad press – ironically in the very newspapers it helped destroy with its free classifieds. Here in Boston, the headlines have focused on the “Craigslist killer.” Interestingly the alleged killer is not some newspaper publisher outraged that Craigslist with its free classifieds has killed print media. Philip Markoff, the guy arraigned on charges of killing Julissa Brisman -- a young Bronx woman who reportedly advertised exotic massage services on Craigslist -- is a student at B.U. Medical School.

Dennis loves Craigslist because that’s how he found the studio where he paints on weekends. A middle-aged woman from Wellesley, arrested last month after a dustup with the state police at Logan Airport, must love Craigslist too. No doubt to the dismay of her criminal defense attorney, she used these free classifieds to solicit witnesses who might have seen the incident involving her not wanting to move her Mercedes SUV, and then posted what sounded to me like a rant about government abusing its authority.

The accounts of the Wellesley woman’s use of Craigslist made me smile. It struck me as sort of old school, particularly when she might have used something more au courant to solicit witnesses, such as Twitter. She struck me as too buttoned down to be using Facebook.

As for her thoughts about government, a blog might have been a more appropriate forum. Given her experience being interviewed for television about personal finance, she might even have chosen to broadcast her views on YouTube.

The truth is that I hate Craigslist in the same way that I hate Amazon.com. At the risk of sounding defensive, I’ll tell you I had no difficulty using a site called Row2K to sell an old racing shell, that I’ve placed messages of sympathy on Legacy.com, and that I usually have no trouble buying clothing through a variety of online retailers. The one or two times I tried using Craigslist to place an ad or for research, I got just as confused as I did when using Amazon.com, a site too clever for my tastes.

The police say they dislike Craigslist for a different reason. The recent Craigslist killing has sparked new allegations about the site’s unwillingness to regulate illicit activities such as prostitution.

What troubles me about the Craigslist killer stories is the suggestion that the Internet is somehow exponentially more dangerous and sinister than the Yellow Pages or the classified section of one’s local newspaper. I’ve lived in Boston long enough to remember when the Boston Phoenix and another now defunct tabloid called Boston After Dark carried ads for escort services which I always thought was code for prostitution.

Back in the late ‘80’s, when I did a stint covering murder trials for a wire service, the story that captured my attention was the killing of Robin Nadine Benedict by Dr. William Henry Douglas, a professor at Tufts Medical School. She was a prostitute described by tabloids as a former beauty queen, and he was a married guy looking for a little excitement in Boston’s Combat Zone. There was no Internet back then, but if memory serves me, there was no classified ad involved either.

Not long ago, I saw a huge heap of Yellow Pages in the lobby of our condo. My first reaction was disbelief that a print directory was still being published, and my second reaction was irritation – wondering how long it would be before someone came and carted the useless volumes away.

As some guy on the MBTA loudspeaker in Park Street station once said in his warning about pickpockets, “Not everybody goes to church on Sunday,” (or synagogue on Saturday). Despite my fundamental sense of optimism, I accept that there are creepy people lurking in the shadows – whether it’s down dark alleys, in cars attempting to lure children from playgrounds, on the T, or online.

Sure online tools like Craigslist facilitate connections with dangerous people, and could benefit from tighter regulation. But please don’t let the Craigslist murder fuel the anxiety of technophobes. Nothing in my lifetime has done more to connect decent people with other decent people than the Internet.

Give Social Media a Chance

Last week I had lunch with a contemporary who does fund-raising for a non-profit. When I told her I was looking forward to a workshop here in Boston that evening with Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at Columbia Journalism School, and one of the world’s social media rock stars, she rolled her eyes.

Having grown up professionally in a world where hard copy reigned, my friend is horrified at the thought of needing to understand social media and the threats and opportunities its different platforms pose at this stage of her career. Betraying her own anxiety with what she sees as a brave new world of relationships facilitated by technology, she chooses not to participate in anything that might raise her online profile.

More to the point, she cannot imagine why anybody would want to reveal oneself to the online world in any form, and thinks it risky for me to have a personal blog. Yet I’d be surprised if she could be effective in fund-raising without an arsenal of online research tools providing her with detailed info on prospects.

Sree’s workshop, sponsored by the South Asian Journalists Association, focused on opportunities for two way conversations presented by LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. He explained that a key value of LinkedIn is its search function, enabling journalists or anybody else for that matter, to use one’s own list of connections as a bridge to other people, such as sources or prospective employers.

Just a few days before Oprah’s debut on Twitter, he reported that luminaries ranging from Gourmet magazine’s Ruth Reichl to The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof to CBS’ Katie Couric are putting out 140 character utterances on Twitter. His larger point was that media people are expected by their employers to promote themselves and their work products online. But I think there was also an underlying message that if you want to get anything you’ve to give a little by revealing a bit of your humanity.

A white-haired woman in the audience expressed indignity at the need for journalists to be contributors, not just lurkers in the social media sphere. A young journalist expressed concerns about personal safety. I’m a woman who always looks before stepping onto an elevator and finds parking garages creepy, but even I had to smile at her naiveté.

Don’t get me wrong or think me cavalier about life in the big city. Whether it’s a request to add a connection to my LinkedIn network or “friend” someone on Facebook, I have no hesitation in ignoring those from folks who make me uneasy. We should all be concerned about personal safety – along with preventing identity theft – making smart choices about what we choose to reveal or conceal.

Still, it’s been several years since people working at law firms and other professional services firms have been expected to put headshots and some times full body shots on their web sites in an effort to humanize what they’re selling – along with professional biographies. Though some may have been slow to get with the program, we know that online bios without pictures raise more questions than they answer.

As I listened to the young journalist express her concerns, I thought back to my own days as a journalist -- working free-lance so I could be home with Daphne when pre-school let out. With a gig profiling celebs for a paper called the Brookline Chronicle-Citizen, my favorite research tool was a hard copy of Brookline’s street listings.

There I would search for subjects to profile, including authors whose names I recognized from The New York Times Book Review, and business leaders whose names I noticed in business publications. Few if any people declined my request to profile them.

The more my subjects knew about me, the more comfortable they were about letting me come to their homes for the interview. This pleased my editor, always eager for the homey context, no end. Not to date myself, but my days as a journalist pre-date dial up Internet.

Daphne is now a journalist working in Florida. I think she gets a kick out of putting out Twitter queries yielding new sources. My son-in-law, Etan, has been Twittering a bit longer, but then he’s a consumer tech columnist. She has also used it to identify the best place in Orlando for cooking classes, and he recently used it at the airport -- in search of people interested in sharing a ride downtown. His Twitter query yielded a suggestion that he take a particular bus letting him out right near his office.

My daughter has told me about other, more costly online resources available to journalists. Her paper’s librarian inputs one name and out comes information about every place a person has ever lived, along with names of relatives and neighbors. Not long ago, when Daphne had to find family members of a man killed in a plane crash, she said the man’s daughter seemed even more upset that she could be located so easily than about the death of her father.

A few journalists, fund-raisers and anybody else with the need to gather information are showing signs of high digital anxiety. The same info they once gathered about others with ease can now be gathered about them at no cost. Enjoying social media to its fullest will require that they join in the conversation as participants. Regardless of the communications platform, relationships still reign supreme.

Useful Links:

Sree Sreenivasan

LinkedIn

Twitter

Self-Inflicted Wounds

It’s a lousy way to begin the week – particularly for an early morning person – but I spent most of Monday evening at the Apple store in the Chestnut Hill Mall, and most of the wee hours of Wednesday morning obsessing about whether the MacBook laptop I purchased two years ago was ever going to work the way I wanted it to again. I take full responsibility for what happened, and fully acknowledge that the wounds I now have are self-inflicted.

After some initial glitches associated with getting my first laptop, and establishing a wireless connection in our condo, I was perfectly happy with the setup I had, and developed a strong emotional attachment to my computer. That was before my son-in-law, Etan, questioned me about whether I had Leopard, Apple’s newest operating system.

When I confirmed that I had the earlier, perfectly serviceable operating system called Tiger, I felt like a second-class citizen in the world of consumer electronics. A lot worse than I felt when I realized my flip video Mino was not the high definition version, or the way I will feel when Apple comes out with the next edition of its iPhone.

Etan makes his living reviewing tech products for the Orlando Sentinel, and he’s my go to guy for any type of tech purchasing decision. He had also expressed concern about my not having an external hard drive for my MacBook. My friend, Dan, who sent me a Facebook message saying the failure rate for hard drives is 100 per cent, echoed that concern.

The fact is that I’ve owned just five computers since they became essential household items. I’ve never had a hard drive fail, perhaps because I’ve tossed each computer after four or five years, but more likely I’ve just been lucky.

The day before we passed papers on our home in Chestnut Hill and moved to a condo in Brookline, I made a shoot-from-the-hip decision -- that my Dell had become too slow to justify moving. With Dennis’ help I unscrewed the back of the computer, removed the hard drive, broke it into pieces and threw it into a green bag, along with household trash.

My more tech savvy friends seemed appalled that I hadn’t transferred any of the files. Despite my claiming to care only about preventing thieves from gaining access to financial information on the computer, I feel sad that there were documents that now exist only in my memory.

I don’t particularly miss having access to my letter telling the gas company that the service contract they’d sold me was actually a disservice contract – even it netted me a reimbursement check for work my plumber did to bring the heat back on. But I miss my correspondence with Daphne during her year at Columbia Journalism School, when the two of us shared experiences about how best to develop ideas for fun stories, as well as how to approach evasive sources.

No doubt we’d be having that exchange today via Twitter or maybe even Gmail, which would allow for archives. The fact that I now use web-based email provides me with a modicum of comfort when I reflect on my current situation.

After having purchased the external hard drive at the Apple store, backing up whatever was on my MacBook, and then installing Leopard – all with the help of a friendly if harried store employee on Monday evening -- something bad has occurred. When I got home at 8:30 last night, I discovered that I can no longer access my Comcast E-mail account by clicking on the little postage stamp icon at the bottom of the screen.

Worse yet, my MacBook refused to let me to turn it off and reboot. Like a rat randomly looking for an exit to the cage, I became more and more agitated each time I got a message saying I needed to close the Mail program before shutting down the machine. The reality is that the Mail program refused to close.

Knowing I’m an early riser, Dennis urged me to “let it go” and get some sleep. Easier said than done. Sleeping fitfully and dreading the prospect of needing to sacrifice a blogging session to a long call with AppleCare, my own internal hard drive kicked into action.

At 2:52 a.m. I sprang out of bed, and went to the “Help” menu, in search of “reboot.” What I got was useless. But then I remembered that Apple’s equivalent of Control-Alt-Delete is “force quit” under the Apple icon. The operation was a success, and I tried to back to sleep, amid recurring thoughts that I may need to schedule an appointment with the Genius Bar.

Lessons Learned

- Be grateful for my new external hard drive, and try to identify what’s on it.
- Beware of shiny new toys like Leopard.
- The most important hard drive is the one inside my head.

Helpful Links

Etan Horowitz

Leopard Operating System

Politics of a Boathouse

Last Saturday night Dennis cheerfully escorted me to a black tie gala marking the 100th birthday of my rowing club. With volunteers developing plans subject to approval by other volunteers in leadership positions, there was plenty of controversy over choice of venue, agenda, and ticket pricing. The event got pricey at $160 per ticket with cash bar, but the food was excellent, and the Cambridge hotel overlooking the Charles was more comfortable than our boathouse.

The rowing club is a lovably quirky place, and according to the hard copy yearbook published in honor of the centennial celebration, I’ve been a member since 1992 -- just long enough to get to know the cast of characters. Part of the quirkiness derives from two distinct member populations.

There are members who rowed in their youth and at college before going on to become Olympians or at least members of the National Team. Buff beyond belief, these are the people who row annually in the Head of the Charles Regatta because their times are good enough to exempt them from the vagaries of the lottery. A handful of these male members hang on to their old school rowing blazers – to be brought out for events like last Saturday night.

Social members love being able to hold dances, wine-tasting dinners, and potluck suppers featuring writers and artists inside a boathouse -- enjoying the aura of a drafty structure with rowing pics on the wood-paneled walls. While some claim tennis or Boston Marathon credentials, the average social member cannot imagine participating in a sport whose primary badges of honor are the accoutrements of mental toughness and discipline: blistered and calloused hands along with wrist, elbow, shoulder, hip or back pain.

The social members provide an important source of financial support that comes in handy for boathouse maintenance and operations as well as the latest and greatest in racing shells and blades. Still they are treated as second-class citizens. Once, when sitting amid a sea of white folding chairs for the club’s annual meeting, I queried the rower next to me about the identity of a woman asking about the club kitchen. “Oh, a social member,” she sniffed.

In the spirit of let’s all get along, I’ll advocate that rowers support the club’s social activities. This means more than racing into the boathouse on Sunday breakfast days in your sweaty JL unisuit, grabbing a bagel and cream cheese, and saying that you can’t stay because you need to complete your workout – swimming laps.

I’ll confide that I couldn’t imagine being a member of a rowing club if I didn’t row. Real camaraderie comes not from dining on chicken casserole while listening to the author of a diet book clad in a heavy sweater to mask his paunch.

Camaraderie comes from gathering on the dock on a cool, crisp morning – and being asked if you have a spare set of lights on suction cups -- because the sun has yet to rise. It comes from wiping down your boats afterwards, feeling fully spent and sharing a comment or two about too many novice crews on the water. It also comes from talking about whether you’re planning to row in the Head this year, but that’s a subject for another post.

Helpful Links

Head of the Charles Regatta

National Team

JL Designs

Rowing Blazers

Food Police Head for Brookline

Before there was Weight Watchers or Overeaters Anonymous, there was Grandpa. He was a general practitioner on the Lower East Side in the days when doctors gave their patients specific weight reduction diets to follow. Grandma would type each diet out on her Remington. The salient item was cottage cheese, a food that makes me gag.

Grandpa may have believed his orders had come from a higher authority. Although he didn’t necessarily think of his walks through the neighborhood as compliance tours, he often peered into the windows of restaurants to see which patients were eating items in blatant non-compliance with the diet he’d handed them.

Woe to the patient insisting she’d been unable to loose weight despite following the diet to the letter. Had he owned a flip video Mino, Grandpa would likely have produced the evidence: a clip showing the patient seated in Ratner’s on Delancey Street, eating an enormous piece of strawberry shortcake. Instead he provided a lecture.

I now live in Brookline, Massachusetts, where a recent proposal would make our town the first in the nation to require restaurants to post calorie counts for every item on the menu. Brookline is a community that usually has its heart – if not its head – in the right place.

Alan Balsam, the town’s Public Health Director, seems like a sensible guy. According to a story in The Boston Globe, he believes that for a large chain with many restaurants serving the same items all the time, economies of scale would come into play and the cost of complying with the calorie listing requirement would not be especially onerous. For a small, individually owned restaurant where the menu changes with the seasons, the requirement would be unreasonable.

I eat out far more often than I should, and can point to dining experiences as recent as yesterday. After a breakfast consisting of three energy bars, each clearly marked as having 160 calories, I purchased lunch at an Au Bon Pain in Boston’s Financial District. This particular fast food eatery provides caloric and other nutritional info as a competitive advantage, and I love it.

Checking the labels carefully to ensure I didn’t exceed my caloric limit, I purchased four Au Bon Pain “Portions.” Two containers of pesto chicken, one container of red pepper humus with cucumbers and black olives, plus a container consisting of a tiny wedge of Brie, a small bunch of red grapes, and four crackers tided me over until dinner.

Dinner was at La Morra, a small elegant restaurant in Brookline Village, where a friend and I celebrated her new job. Were it the weekend, I might have started with a Violette, a martini made with Crème de Violette, gin, lemon juice, and no doubt sugar or simple syrup. Counting calories, I selected a glass of Pino Grigio.

Knowing that I’d be want to finish the meal with lemon ricotta cheesecake, I selected just a basic red and green salad, along with a half portion of tagliatelle Bolognese.

Were there less caloric options on the menu? Sure I could have ordered the sorbet trio for dessert and often do when I don’t like the reading on my bathroom scale. I could have ordered cod rather than the pasta, except that I don’t love fish. La Morra is a friendly place, and had I asked for info about ingredients, the server would have checked with the chief.

The charm of Brookline Village is its abundance of non-chain restaurants, and I would hate to see them burdened with the expense of mandatory calorie counts. Dennis and I dine at least once a week at Village Smokehouse, where if I’m counting calories, I know that a glass of Chardonnay is less fattening than the Margarita, and the Southwest chicken has far fewer calories than the ribs. Though we enjoy dining at Pomodoro, I make it a once in a while venue because the very sight of the large bread basket is too tough to pass up, and I know cheese bread is not a low calorie food. Nor is the fig bread pudding with hot fudge sauce.

I don’t know what Grandpa would have thought of the Brookline proposal. I can tell you that his least compliant patient was the one who typed the diets from memory. Grandma had a life long weight problem. Despite making it a point of eating cottage cheese when her husband was around, she was a stealth eater who loved butter and heavy cream.

Ratner's

La Morra

Village Smokehouse

Eat This, Not That

Boston Globe Story

Au Bon Pain Portions

Weight Watchers

Overeaters Anonymous

Lost Jackson Heights

The arrival of spring has rekindled my love affair with Boston, which tends to wane amid winter’s snow and ice. If not yet in full swing, my rowing season has begun and I’ve already logged 22 miles on the Charles. Boston even has its own World Pillow Fighting Day celebration -- one more indication the city I adopted as my home nearly 40 years ago has come into its own.

Still I feel a longing for home, and that’s New York. I’m not talking about Zabar’s, H&H Bagels, Harry’s Shoes, or all those images evoked by visits to Daphne during her days at Barnard and Columbia Journalism School. Nor am I talking about Broadway shows or visits to MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Whitney -- even when it includes lunch at Sara Beth’s Café.

I’m talking about what I rarely get to see when Dennis and I spend a weekend in New York, and that’s the Queens of my early childhood. Asking Dennis to join me on a walking tour of “Lost Jackson Heights” sounds like a quirky but not unreasonable request.

Since St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone, we would start with Easter. The Jackson Heights of my childhood was predominantly Irish Catholic, and even though I attended P.S. 69, not St. Joan of Arc, our teachers made a big deal – in a nice way – of Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter. I can’t recall Hanukkah or Kwanza ever being mentioned, but that was before public schools enhanced their understanding of religious pluralism, other cultures, or separation of church and state.

This was also before No Child Left Behind. In addition to learning to read Fun with Dick and Jane, and do basic adding and subtraction, I learned how to make an Easter bonnet. Although my Jewish family focused on Passover in a minimalist sort of way, the Easter Parade was a big deal in the New York of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. My own Easter bonnet was constructed out of an inverted white paper plate with pleated edges -- decorated with odd dress buttons my mom kept in an old jar, and tied with pastel colored ribbons.

My Jewish identity notwithstanding, I reveled in the start of what we called Easter vacation. As we walked out the door for a one-week break, our first grade teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, handed us an Easter basket. She probably stayed up all night to make 30 some odd baskets lined with fake green grass, filled with a bright yellow marshmallow chick, a foil covered chocolate Eastern bunny, along with big candy eggs colored in fuchsia, baby blue, and yellow.

The P.S. 69 I attended grades one through three was on 37th Avenue, a street containing a fruit store with a big outdoor fruit display under an awning. You were supposed to pick your fruit and then go inside to pay.

Despite Mom’s best efforts to make me avert my eyes, it was another sight that captured my attention. I’d say the man was “on all fours,” except that he was a double amputee sprawled on a handmade wood dolly.

I wish I could remember asking my mom whether the man had any source of help or support, but that would be dishonest. I asked her why he would grab an orange, squeeze it so hard that the juice came squirting out, and then return it to the bin with a toss. She told me not to stare.

My “Lost Jackson Heights” tour would most certainly include a trip to an asphalt playground surrounded by a very high chain link fence that we called a park. The park was across the street from a six-story apartment building on 34th Avenue where we lived from 1956 until 1959, when my parents bought a row house in Forest Hills.

By today’s standards, our apartment was tiny for a family of five, and I think my stay at home mother counted on that park for her sanity, and tried not to look too annoyed each time I returned home for adjustments on the roller skates with wide, steel clamps clamps that went over my shoes. A skate key was required for tightening or loosening the skates, and I don’t think she trusted me with the skate key.

To see me in late June at that park was like witnessing a small child experiencing the magic of opening Christmas gifts, except that as I told you, we didn’t do Christmas. I lived for the opening of the cement wading pool, and the minute I saw the fountains emitting water, I raced home for my bathing suit.

If it were still there, I’d show Dennis a private school in a ramshackle structure on a steep hill adjacent to the park. Before anybody talked about helmets, the prospect of bodily injury, or liability, this was the hill I used for sledding in winter. Despite my parents being overprotective about lots of stuff, they never questioned me going sledding alone on a hill that in retrospective seemed close to traffic and trees.

Though I hope some of the physical structures exist, “Lost Jackson Heights” lives mostly in my memories. Dennis and I will be in New York in mid-June, if not before then. I expect to go solo, but I will hop on a train to Queens and retrace some important moments in my life.

Reader Grieves for City Section

One of my favorite stories in The Boston Globe this week focused on cabbies and their fears that a pending air quality regulation requiring them to purchase hybrids will put them out of business. Who knew that cabbies have been purchasing second hand Ford Crown Victorias from the Boston Police Department? I loved that little nugget of news, and feel grateful that my local paper still has a stand-alone Metro section.

If it sounds like I want to eat dessert before vegetables, or that I’m hopelessly provincial, go ahead and criticize. But if I had my druthers I’d start with metro news. The truth is that unless an international story has a compelling human angle, I skim so I can move on to stories about the lives of people living in cities where I live or have lived.

As a New York transplant living in Brookline, MA, I receive a New York Times, sans N.Y./Region section. So I make do with a few metro stories, usually toward the back of the paper. For my money, the dean of the metro beat is Alan Feuer. Despite his prodigious writing and reporting talent, he doesn’t seem to feel he has to be filing from Baghdad to provide gems for his readers. Though it appeared a while back, I will never forget his story chronicling the first 24 hours of a man who has just completed a prison term. Amid a complete lack of support, the man returns to the only life he knows before the day is over.

Yes I know Anna Quindlen turned her hand to writing best-selling novels a long time ago. But I still miss the “About New York” columns she wrote for the Times back in the ‘70’s. She wrote about swimmers taking the test to become lifeguards at the city’s many beaches, and she would make the stories come alive by talking about the tests being taken when most of New York was dreaming of winter get-a-ways to the Bahamas. She also wrote some very poignant columns about inspectors’ funerals for policemen killed in the line of action.

Having spent the first 18 years of my life in Queens, I loved James Barron’s’ piece in this week’s Sunday Times about the Queensboro Bridge sparking the development of Queens as home to the many ordinary people who work in Manhattan. But for me, the big metro story coming out of Queens this year was the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova. Despite a first name suggesting good luck, she is the internist convicted of having her cousin shoot her estranged, orthodontist husband in front of their five-year old daughter. The Annadale Playground, just blocks from my childhood home in Forest Hills, provided the backdrop for the grisly murder.

This particular metro story has a soap opera quality likely to yield a made for TV movie. Still the Times’ Anne Barnard, who may in fact miss her days reporting from Baghdad and other war-torn cities, provided rich context to the trial of Dr. Borukhova and her cousin – weaving in fascinating details about the challenges of finding unbiased translators and also describing the economic woes of the cousin, a real estate developer whose investments went south.

My passion for newspapers doesn’t mean I don’t get a lot of my info online. So it was that I received some very sad news, via Twitter, on Monday. Rachel Sklar’s tweet included a link to a story from The New York Observer, reporting that the City Section of the Times will soon cease to exist. Not a lot can be conveyed in 140 characters but Rachel noted that she’d gotten her first Times byline in the City Section. She referenced but did not identify Connie Rosenbloom, editor of the section.

Prominently displayed on a wall in the dining area of my condo is a framed reprint of a story about a man who sleeps most nights on a mattress in a church in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, returning home to Cambria Heights, Queens on weekends to do his laundry. Though he has a job with the phone company, his real work is restoring the church’s J.W. Steele pipe organ.

This beautifully quirky story, written by my daughter, Daphne, was published on Mothers Day, 2002. She was a student at Columbia Journalism School at the time, and after hearing Connie speak, decided to try her hand at something for the Times. Daphne forwarded me Connie’s email saying she’d like to publish the story, and I now wish I’d transferred the files when I switched from Dell to Mac.

The impending death of the City Section is a metro story that has hit home, literally.