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A Perfect Storm
LISTEN HERE Lucy Gardner and Malcom St Clair stacking wood. RALPH GARDNER JR. One tries not to repeat oneself. And I did a commentary about snow and snowstorms less than a year ago. But the one that...
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In Search of the Perfect Tree
LISTEN HERE The 2019 Gardner Christmas tree CREDIT RALPH GARDNER JR We have this road trip game we play in our family that I like to think we invented – actually my wife invented it – but lots of...
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Scents and Sensibility
LISTEN HERE Carolyn Mix (left) and Darcy Doniger of 2 Note in Hudson,NY RALPH GARDNER JR. I was walking through Greenwich Village – after scoring stocking stuffers at Myers of Keswick, a store...
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Thanks a Latke
LISTEN HERE Sylvia Center participants at the 11th Annual Latke Festival. SYLVIA CENTER How often must you do something for it to qualify as a family tradition? Obviously, once isn’t enough...
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Things Change
LISTEN HERE A Christmas Carol, Christmas dinner at the Cratchits’, published by Harper’s Magazine PUBLIC DOMAIN / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Sometimes your kids get married and move away. Sometimes they move...
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Einstein in the Adirondacks
LISTEN HERE Taff and Jack Fitterer CREDIT RALPH GARDNER JR My wife proposed calling it a staycation. But that wasn’t strictly accurate because we traveled a couple of hours north – even longer if...
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A Professional Organizer to the Rescue
LISTEN HERE Professional organizer Robyn Stein CREDIT RALPH GARDNER JR Our basement is large. How large I can’t say because I never measured it. But there are two sections that we refer to as the...
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A TV Timeout
LISTEN HERE Old Phillips television, photographed at the museum Terug in de Tijd, Horn, The Netherlands. ALF VAN BEEM / PUBLIC DOMAIN, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS I couldn’t pick a worse time to take a...
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The News from Over the Rainbow
LISTEN HERE Lucy Gardner CREDIT RALPH GARDNER JR For a news junkie, I picked one heck of a week to go away. Trump got acquitted. The coronavirus, since named COVID-19, continued to spread. The...
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Take a Tree to Lunch
LISTEN HERE PHOTO CREDIT: RALPH GARDNER Maybe it’s because of the book I’m reading at the moment – The Overstory by Richard Powers – as well as the current transgressions against life in general...
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Stockpiling in Style
LISTEN HERE I’m not sure what it says about my priorities – but I hope something pleasant – that two of my first purchases, addressing the current crisis, were birdseed and alcohol; while I suppose...
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One Quick Visit
LISTEN HERE Ralph’s plant CREDIT RALPH GARDNER JR. I paid a quick visit to New York City this week to pick up the mail, clothes and some prescriptions. And when I say quick I mean quick. Fifteen...
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Cocktails in the Age of Coronavirus
LISTEN HERE Cocktail hour at the Gardner house RALPH GARDNER JR We’ve held four cocktail parties this week and counting. Don’t panic. These aren’t in-person events. They’ve been conducted from the...
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Lots of Time for Chores
LISTEN HERE A selection of Gardner family memorabilia to be filed RALPH GARDNER JR I’m reluctant to describe the coronavirus as having a silver lining. But I am finding time to get chores done that...
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An Adequate Matzo Ball
LISTEN HERE Virtual family Seder at the Gardner house RALPH GARDNER JR The current crisis has caused all of us to improvise in ways both great and small. I’m not sure where my first foray into...
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Back to the Garden
The author says that, planting a garden has several advantages: there is the redemptive power of nature in the midst of a pandemic, and also because the fewer trips you have to make to the...
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Koreatown On My Mind
LISTEN HERE Korean dishes on display in Koreatown of Manhattan, New York City ALEXISRAEL / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS It took me a full month upstate before I started to feel homesick for New York City. It...
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Into the Woods
LISTEN HERE RALPH GARDNER JR It’s taken a pandemic and its attendant isolation to make a lot of us realize that we’re social animals. I’m not suggesting that this comes as a shock. Only that most of...
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Doing Well, Making Do
Beth Rundquist, View from Olana, 2019, oil on panel, 8 x10 inches Some important instructions to follow to ease the pain of the current moment. The first, obviously, is to...
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Columbia County’s Family Meal
LISTEN HERE Chefs Jaime Parry (left) and Jon Carr CAROLE CLARK One of the most compelling but I suspect overlooked reasons that people enter the cooking profession and the restaurant world is because...
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