Nancy Ruhling's Astoria Characters

I moved to Astoria on a February day, when the daffodils were in full bloom and the snow was on the red, red roses. It wasn’t just my front yard that was blossoming. Up and down the block, the mini gardens were filled with summer flowers in winter: black-eyed Susans, tulips, lilies, iris, dahlias, carnations and a profusion of petals in comical circus colors that I’m sure even God doesn’t have names for. There were a lot of other surprising things in my front yard — a crumbling…

Continue Reading →

Pull open the drapes! Betty Gelb wants to see the sunshine. She’s as excited as a kid going to the circus because she’s opened her eyes to another day. She’s pushing 102, and, hey, you never know. She pulls out her crocheting — she’s making a red and black scarf for her physical therapist. She’s sitting in a wheelchair, she’s tethered to an oxygen tank, and she’s got an ACE bandage on her right wrist, but her golden crochet hooks are flashing like shooting…

Continue Reading →

NAILS. That’s what the neon sign says in capital letters the color of pale-pink petals. Wrapped in its rosy glow, Emily Zhang is sitting demurely like a mannequin at her little station inside the plate-glass window waiting for her first customer. When the door opens, her baby-doll hands with their severely short nails, sans polish, fly into action as they have every day for the last six years since she and her husband, Michael Guo, opened Butterfly Nail Spa. She’ll spend the next 10…

Continue Reading →

On the Near West Side of Chicago, there used to be an annual saint’s feast on the grounds of a Roman Catholic church. It was the early 1960s, and Josephine Traversa, the baby of the four-child family, was only 3 or 4. She and her mother were standing in a big, sprawling lot when a plane roared overhead. Her mother looked up at the sky and told Josephine that the family had come to America from Italy on just such a jet. “Was I on it?” Josephine asked innocently. Josephine is U.S.-born,…

Continue Reading →

She had to work late last night and didn’t get to bed until after 2 a.m. So it’s coffee that Joanna Psoroyannis goes in search of. That, she hopes, will open her doe-like mocha eyes. Model tall, she’s a Greek goddess cloaked in black from the top of her turtleneck to the toes of her knee-high leather boots. She takes up coffee cup and settles into the sofa that faces her flat-screen TV, wrapping her lithe, long legs under her with the ease of a ballerina. Her bookshelves hold ragged…

Continue Reading →