Getting The Good Girl Stoned

blue jeans

My buddy tells me a sad thing, that The Good Girl’s father had died. We all loved the Good Girl. She was pretty, she was popular, but she had none of the in-crowd mentality of avoiding being seen with out crowd people. She was good hearted in a calm and clear and deep kind of […]

The King of the Kids

boy

I went to school in Mahopac from Kindergarden through 12th grade. And from the first days I showed up in school it was clear who was the King of the Kids. He wasn’t the biggest kid. He was never the best athlete. But he was the leader. We all wanted to be around him. He […]

18-28-34

master combination lock

When we got to 7th grade we were now in High School; no middle school. And one big change was Gym Class. In grade school we just had recess and played in our normal clothes. We must have been really dirty, sweaty, little kids (though I don’t remember that). Starting in 7th grade we had […]

My NFL Career

football

One day in high school gym class, a group of coaches had us try to kick field goals. I think they were looking for a kicker for the actual football team. I had never kicked a football from a tee before and never at a real goalpost. But when my turn came I drilled the […]

Our White Class

yearbook pictures

During this period of intense focus on race in America, I am thinking back to my school days in Mahopac. We were nearly 100% white, with only rare exceptions. For a while, there was one black girl in our high school, and I used to think about how much courage it took for her to […]

Maynard

baseball glove

He was my first friend.  He loved close enough that we could walk to each other’s houses along Barrett Hill Road and Mexico Lane. It was shorter to try to get through the swamp, but I sometimes got lost and turned around going that way. Going to visit at his house was a big cultural […]

The Orfords

This is an odd place to start a little tribute to the couple that fostered music in Mahopac schools for decades, but this is what came up: It hit me how one day the powers that be decided to break our wonderful little gym-auditorium in two by building a wall down the middle.  This friendly […]

Seven Up

lunch counter

This memory just bubbled up, pun intended. Someone on the radio mentioned 7Up, the drink. And here comes the memory of the little lunch counter diner on our one block long street in Mahopac. It was run by Mrs. O, but I can’t remember the  actual name of the place. My mother would bring me […]

Ravioli

ravioli

The regular school lunch portion of ravioli was 3 squares. For an extra cost you could get a “jumbo” portion, which was two extra squares. And many days after school I would go home and immediately eat an entire can of Chef Boyardee ravioli, with probably about 20 squares. It’s not like any of us […]

Ricky Jay

playing cards

One time in the mid sixties, friends took me to see a guy who had a place in Lake Mahopac. This guy did card tricks. For two hours he amazed us, then he pinned us behind the couch throwing cards at us at blazing speed. Some of the cards actually stuck into the pine paneling. […]