For being the owner of a restaurant, in those days at least, I don’t remember my grandmother ever making anything too fancy when we came to visit and stayed at her house. One, two, three weeks at a time; the only intervals I was ever able to know her, growing up eight hours away and usually seeing her only when we came to her house twice a year. Her house is old, so very, visibly old, what people not familiar with it must imagine every house in New England is like. And yet th

If Brooklyn has anything equivalent to the small town main street, the one street that defines the essence of such a town, anyone from that borough would likely say that its road equivalent would be Flatbush Avenue. Traversing the borough, with a major bridge at either end and shopping along almost all of its length, that street meanders its way through Brooklyn in the pathway it so chooses, violently cutting through the regular, uniform street grids in favor of its ancient r

Downhill from the tall, sprawling, spaceship-like Columbia University hospital complex, across Riverside Drive, and under a forsaken maze of ramps that connect the George Washington Bridge to the Henry Hudson Parkway lay our unlikely climbing destination for that July Sunday. The boulder Sam and I were attempting to reach lay on a patch of grass that is technically on the public land of Upper Manhattan’s Fort Washington Park, although one would never guess it given its car-do