Older and Better with Shelly

It brings tears to my eyes. The sad Passover story? No. It’s that horseradish I am allergic to. When I was an eight-year-old kid my father, who was the sweetest human being on the earth, said you want to find out what horseradish smells like?   Being a gutsy kid I never backed away from anything. I don’t know what he was thinking but he liked stuff like that and I took a whiff.   It brought tears to my eyes and I’ve been crying ever since. My dad, who lived to only 82, even ate a raw onion the week he died. Turns out I am allergic to raw onions too. Speaking of crying, how about preparing a dinner for 15 to 18 people at my age? Now that’s enough to for an extra-large bucket of tears. A dinner this size requires a ton of plates. One for the fish, which you would not want to serve with anything else. Another one for the Seder plate, which has the nut, apple thing, and Passover wine mixture. A third for the soup, which I am proud to say is made by my s...

So our beloved cockatiel died a few months ago at age 26. In the words of my son, our bird had a good West County life. However, my husband began missing his little friend. He was the only one in the house that actually listened to him and talked back. We have three cats so we really weren’t planning on acquiring another two-winged friend. But the house was so quiet. We missed his chirping.   Our bird was always happy to see us.   He loved it when we came home from shopping or dinner with friends. He could hear us pulling into the driveway and would start chirping before we even got our car into the garage. Unlike our kids, he always was welcoming to his parents. We enjoyed him so much that we decided to get another one, a cockatiel. So we decided to visit a pet shop. A friend had given us our first bird, so going through a pet store would be a whole new experience. After doing some research we found a shop that sold all sorts of birds. They...

New Yorkers just don’t get us. Hey New York if it makes it here it’ll make it anywhere. St. Louis is the city of discriminating taste. And proud of it. We don’t need the rest of the country to tell us how to eat our bagels. Like my mom used to say, it all goes down to the same place. Who cares what it looks like when you’re eating it? I can’t believe those snobby New Yorkers who get insulted because we have the nerve to like our bagels sliced like bread. Nobody’s holding a gun to their head. Oh wait let’s not say gun. How about a bagel slicer. At least New York knows where St. Louis is. We used to be flyover country. We may still be stuck in the middle but we’re having a good time, right here in the ‘Lou. If you’ve never been here you’re missing out, too bad! We actually have nice people in the Gateway City who are not quite so opinionated. Present company excluded. I guess New Yorkers like to wolf their bagels down and get fat. Their problem. T...