In Plain Engel-ish

One of my earliest memories is when I was about four years old. Running through our kitchen, which was absolutely verboten, I brushed up against a beautiful plate that Mom displayed on the breakfast room hutch. I almost knocked it to the floor, but she snatched it in midair — right before it stopped being Spode and started being Smithereens.  “ELLIOT DAVID!” my mom exclaimed. We all know middle names were invented only to let kids know when they’re in BIG trouble. “You almost broke my favorite china. Now I’m going to have to hide it away. That’s your last...

We Engels aren’t singers. I would say we sing off key, but no evidence of any recognizable key has ever been discovered coming from a mouth in my family. If the four of us became a barbershop quartet, audience members would be frisked for aptly-themed hidden razors, due to a real danger of their being used to slit our throats — or to slit their own. Even singing in the shower was forbidden at our house, since it amplified our tone-deaf crooning, and our dog Bobo would often howl in agony. Now that I have clearly established that there were no...

I’m pretty sure every family has a Hugger, that loving relative who just can’t help embracing anyone who moves within arm’s length of her vast, substantial smile. Ours was Aunt Sophie. Her hugs were so breathtakingly tight that the first time I heard of the famous wrestler “Bone-Crusher” Lewis, I was convinced that he, too, must have been related to Aunt Sophie. Up until I was about eleven, I was shorter than Sophie’s diminutive five-foot height. And so when she hugged the daylights out of me, I found my head nestled between her ample neck and equally ample midsection. Let’s...

I’ve been thinking a lot this past week — for reasons that will soon become apparent — of my first car trip outside the United States. I was only nineteen in 1967 when my older cousin and I crossed the border into Canada so we could join the throng of sixty-four million (!) visitors who were headed to “Canada Expo 67” that was held on Notre Dame Island in Montreal, Quebec.  My parents were wary of letting me go with my cousin Ron, who was only a year older, on such a long drive where we also had to experience...

It was a few years ago that a new spice shop opened near where I lived here in Raleigh. For the first month, the owner was giving tastings of their most popular spices and requesting that customers rank their favorites. I was asked to choose between two kinds of salts: one very coarse sea salt and the other an unusually tangy, vinegar salt. I liked the vinegary one best. “So,” the overly jolly owner replied with a wink that was a bit too pronounced, “you’re putting the Tart before the Coarse!” I get a kick out of bad punning as...