Nancy Ruhling's Astoria Characters

Kyle Marshall is still new at this father stuff, and he wants to make sure he’s doing a good job. Kyle’s in the duo Monkey Pudding Face. It’s 9 a.m. The rest of the world is up, but Cove is ready to go down. Kyle longs to hold him a little longer. He reluctantly releases the baby to the crib for sleepy time. Kyle and Cove. Cove is only 6 months old, which is about the age Kyle was when his parents divorced. He never got to know his father but felt fortunate to have a supportive…

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Technically, our tale starts in the summer, but turtles are slow-shuffling creatures so it makes sense that everything has come to a head in the dead of this winter of our discontented spring. The koi pond on Ditmars Boulevard at 28th Street. It was June or July when Ben Tostado and Christian Kolarz saw a turtle sunning itself on the stones surrounding the koi pond they built at the street-side corner of their front yard on Ditmars Boulevard. The pond, set up three years ago, is something of a neighborhood…

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If you don’t know that Susan Weiman is creative, all you have to do is look at her living room. Susan is a curator of clutter. The coffee table is a lemon-yellow ironing board, the mirror is framed by fluffy feathers, and the desk, filled with jewelry she is making, is a white plastic fold-up table. But this is controlled creativity: The magazines are neatly stacked, the library books are lined up in their cases like soldiers, and even the Slinky is sitting tight, silently waiting to spring. …

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It is so quiet in Galina Tsypin‘s office that you can hear a pin drop. Or, to be more precise, a needle. Galina, you see, is an acupuncturist, and the studied silence is part of her healing process. Galina is an acupuncturist. Acupuncture For All, which is shaded by a sidewalk tree and the packs of apartment buildings that line 30th Street at Broadway, is her serene space. Long and lean, the white-walled office with the sky-high shiny silver tin ceiling looks like a luxe spa. The single,…

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It was art that drew them together. Patricia Boes, the official artist in the family, doesn’t remember exactly when it happened. She does recall that Devin, her son, was the first to join her. Seasoned Art on 43rd Street at 30th Avenue. “I was teaching an art class, and he must have been about 10, and he sketched a bird,” she says. “He’s been creating ever since.” Some five or six years ago, her husband, James, who is a writer, started painting, and recently,…

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