Author: ruhlwrite

The century-old glass-front door opens, and there stands Mr. D with Friday, the 77-pound pit bull/pointer bruiser who howled his head off when the bell rang. “Are you afraid of dogs or kids?” It’s a moot question; Friday’s nosing around, and the kids — 10-year-old Ian and 6-year-old Willow — are bound to be bounding down the stairs any moment. James A. DeSoucey Jr. is a squat muscle-bound square with laughing baby blues. The kids he coaches on Willow’s first-grade…

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You can get mad. You can get sad. You can get even. Or, like Clif Militello, you can do all three. By writing a book. Of fiction (wink, wink). Clif is many things — art director, cartoonist, caricaturist, inventor, lecturer and proud mustachioed bald man — but he’s the first to admit that author is not one of them. Still, when he lost his job as an art director for MTA-NYC Transit on Sept. 17, 2010 during a “workforce reduction,” he decided to pen, a who-might-do-it…

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“Where’s the baby? She has to be here somewhere.” Donna Bungo knows this because when she packed the insulated cooler this morning, there were four. And now there are only three. There’s no way one escaped, at least she doesn’t think so. Casually alarmed, she carefully culls the covers, her old flannel pajamas, until she comes up with the critter. She playfully scolds her five-week-old charges and cuddles the sleepy-eyed squirrel who almost beat her at hide-and-seek.…

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The sweeping starts with the first blush of spring. In the beginning, it’s whisper soft. But as the roses bloom and their fragrant petals stoop to kiss the pavement, it takes on a frantic urgency. Sweep, sweep, sweep. SweepSweepSweep. All those plunging petals and so little time to get them up! SweepSweepSweep the sidewalks clean. Before long, the Petal Pushers, in housecoats and hair curlers, in pumps and pearls, are in full spring swing. Like crocuses popping up out of the ground, they burst…

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On the gleaming coffee table in the surgically spotless living room, there are only three items: a scrapbook, a binder and a pamphlet. They’re lined up like soldiers standing at attention. Beatrice Frish, a white-haired woman with blue eyes and an ear-to-ear smile who wouldn’t top five feet even in stilettos, unfastens the white ribbon of the scrapbook and starts flipping through the pages. Things begin on Aug. 13, 1874. That’s when her maternal grandparents got married. Beatrice…

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