The Poles are the only Catholics I know who celebrate Fat Thursday. Instead of driving up to Euro Deli in Deerfield and buying paczki (pronounced ponchki), I drove down to Coral Gables and met my friend David at the French café Chocolate Fashion. A young woman sat outside with her baby boy, talking in Portuguese with what looked like her mother. Inside, the woman next to us chatted in Spanish with her waitress. David called his friend Zosia in Warsaw and handed me the phone so I could wish her a szczesliwego Tlustego Czwartek.
“How ya doin’?” the man on the weight bench asked between pumps. I’d seen him there before: a small, bald, wiry fellow.
“OK,” I said. “How are you?”
“Trying to stay alive. It keeps getting harder. I was at the doctor’s the other day and a man in the waiting room asked me how old I was. I said ‘80.’ He said, ‘I’m 90. You don’t want to be 90.’”
I told him I hadn’t seen him in a while. He said his insurance pays for him to go to a high-end gym, with trainers. “I asked one of the trainers, ‘Which of these machines should I use to impress these pretty young women?’ And he said, ‘Try the ATM.’”
Shouldn't his name by Punxsutawney Paul?
The president can't start a war with the government shut down.
Hearing that a publication that always rejected you has folded.