She held up a sign that read F-O-O-D! I handed her two bucks, but she stared at my McDonald’s bag.

“Thanks for the bucks, honey, but I thought it was food you were bringing me.”
7-Eleven was down the block, Krispy Kreme was across the street. “But that’s junk food,” I said.

“Yup, that’s just junk food,” she answered.
“How about the Cress Café?” I asked.
“Oh, hon, that’s too expensive,” she said.

She grabbed two $10 bills from my hand and ran across the street, her gray hair, shopping bags, and the cardboard sign flowing behind. She never looked back.

— Jane Schulman writes poetry and short fiction. She works as a speech pathologist in a Brooklyn public school with autistic and emotionally-disturbed young children, teaching them to find and hone their voices. 

In our convertible en route home from a Yom Kippur camping trip in Sinai while living in Israel, my husband and I dodged a gauntlet of rock throwing, orthodox boys positioned upon a precipice outside an observant village. We vowed to remain at home on that holiday ever after and, holed up indoors the following year, felt safe from the projectiles of fanatically devout youth. But as we heard the rumble of tanks in the distance, we were soon to find out that a much greater peril lay in store. It was 1973 and the Yom Kippur war had begun.

—Rita Hall, a retired art director who lives on Long Island, now devotes her time to political action, arts fundraising, writing, singing and when lucky, her grandson.

My mother took me from Israel to Europe in 1950; I was five. She wanted to see about her father’s grave in Vienna. He had died there before her mother was deported to Theresienstadt.

Tourists could only take out a bit of money, so she smuggled black market American dollars, some rolled in a fountain pen, others folded neatly into chewing gum papers, the sticks removed. I carried these hidden dollars in my pocket. They suspected her and she was stripped naked.

Afterwards I asked, “Can I have a stick of mastic (gum)?” “Yes, Mirale. Once we’re on the ship.”

—Miriam Frischer cooks, writes, and collages in the Hudson Valley (and is grateful to wake up to its beauty every day).

Our neighbor Richard Riley died yesterday. Since they were both railroad men, I asked my dad how Richard lost his leg.

“In 1940, halfway between New Lisbon and Necedah, on the Valley line to Wausau, a steam locomotive’s boiler exploded and killed the engineer, the fireman, and the brakeman. The explosion hurled boiler and engine parts hundreds of feet ahead of the blast and blew the shoes off their feet. Inspectors determined that the train crew had been drinking and forgot about the boiler. But the boiler didn’t forget. She blew.

“Richard, the switchman, had been riding in the caboose.”

–Jim Krotzman is a retired English teacher at Watertown (WI) High School. He is a struggling haiku poet and fisherman.