Tag Archives: boston

IMPURE AT HEART by Peter Nolan Smith

February 10, 2022 – 7:01 pm

In the early 60s the nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills taught their students that our sins were punished in the burning fires of Hell, until then Mother Superior subjected the palms of potential heretics and religious backsliders to a cane. Whisperers and jesters suffered the yardstick. All of her victims were boys, for […]

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Black Ice

January 29, 2022 – 1:52 am

Last month smug northerners ridiculed the snowbound paralysis of Dallas. ‘Maybe we should airlift Maine drivers down to the South to teach them how to drive in winter conditions,” joked a friend at the 169 Bar in Chinatown.. “My grandfather once said, “There are two seasons in Maine, the season of good sledding and the […]

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Linear Algebra 101

December 10, 2021 – 8:15 pm

Back in the 1960s most New Englanders’ were loss at sea when asked to count beyond ten on their fingers. Multiplication and long division flummoxed college students. Calculus was the Black Plague, but I loved the intercourse between numbers and in 1966 I was awarded a scholarship to Xaverian Brothers High School on strength of […]

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MISSILE AWAY by Peter Nolan Smith

August 11, 2021 – 3:13 am

During his youth my older brother was a pyromaniac. Frunk nearly burned down each of our houses and those of our neighbors. Each time my mother punished us both with a wooden spoon and my father sternly admonished our incendiary behavior, yet my older brother was undeterred by cracks across the knuckles and hards words. […]

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15 Ways to Know That You’re Old School South Shore

July 25, 2021 – 12:56 pm

1.) You have dove off Shipwreck at the Quincy Quarries and lived to tell the tale without getting a car antenna in your arm. 2.) What about the SS Mayflower at Nantasket Beach? I had a head-on crash there in 1969. VW versus a Delta 88 was no contest, but my four passengers and I […]

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