I’m All Wet

My efforts with Total Immersion swimming are slowly paying off. The number of strokes it takes to go 50 yards is down by half, and I can actually feel the thrust, with little effort, when I get the mechanics correctly. People are still a little curious why I’m doing this now, at my age, and … Read more

Shower and Tell

I thought I’d seen everything in the shower at the YMCA. In fact, I thought I could handle most anything in a gang shower because I’ve seen the HBO prison series “Oz”, and, more importantly, I survived the hazings in the gang shower on the hockey team when I made varsity as a freshman. You … Read more

You say Galumpky, I say Kapusta

The Polish of this world have made Galumpky almost synonymous with Cabbage Rolls, but I knew them as Kapusta, which is the Slovak word for the same thing. Of course the recipes might vary wildly. In my mother’s Slovak World Congress cookbook, there were no less than six different recipes for cabbage rolls. The point … Read more

Total Immersion Freestyle Swimming

I am in the process of learning to swim. I taught myself to swim when I was 14, and did a very poor job of it. In fact, because of an incident at the city pool, I have a very strong aversion to getting my face in the water, and that has hampered me forever. … Read more

The Revenge of the Cabbage Rolls

I never got around to telling this story about the cabbage rolls and my father’s intestines. As I’ve said earlier, for family events, my mother would prepare cabbage rolls by the dozen. It was usually a major production for her, but she never asked for help. She prepared it all herself, creating dozens of them … Read more