But I don’t always look on the bright side. To be honest, when things turn to worms, my immediate reaction is to stomp and slam cupboard doors, cursing my bad luck and snapping at the nearest living thing — any person, animal or even plant. (Though I do try to be nicer to my plants, because unlike people or pets, they don’t snap back.)

However, after I get that initial reaction out of my system, I default to the “bright side.” Things have turned to a bucket of worms? Good. Let’s go fishing. Life gave me lemons? Yay, let’s make lemonade.

That’s what happened in the IGA parking lot while talking with a friend. I heard the squawks of dozens of seagulls and,of course, I looked up. When I looked at my friend to say, “Don’t look up!” a seagull, or perhaps seven, let loose. On me. Direct hit. Hair, back, front, head to toes. People tried to help me but all that stuff does is smear. I drove home, cursing the whole way, wrapped in IGA grocery bags and threw out those clothes on my way to the shower.

How is there a bright side to being a target of an aerial poop bomb? Because it could have been worse. Way worse. Just a splitsecond before the assault I was gazing upward, mouth open, talking. Are you picturing it? Obviously, that’s the target they were going for. But the lemon-icing on the bird splat is that my friend bought me a souvenir T-shirt covered with fake seagull droppings. Yay me!

Often, when I force myself to look on the bright side, things turn out better than I’d ever expect, or dare I say deserve, which is what happened with me and Bruce Springsteen. Yes. That Bruce Springsteen.

He was on his “Born to Run” concert tour, and we got free tickets through Coecles Harbor Marina because Billy Joel was their customer. After a threeplus- hour drive to the Meadowlands, we were to grab our tickets at will-call. Since the tickets were free, I was expecting nosebleed seats, but that was okay because, Bruce plus Free equals Jackpot! But “Yay me!” turned into a bucket of worms real fast when our tickets were not at will-call. And the show was sold out, which was probably a blessing because even the cheap seats were hundreds of dollars.

Who knows if it was name-dropping “Coecles Harbor” or “Billy Joel,” but after a few minutes we were handed off to a lady with a clipboard and a walkie-talkie who said, “Follow me.” I wiped my tears and we followed as she led us not up, but down, down, down, to the rows of seats in a dark area behind the stage. By then I was sputtering, “Forget this! Let’s go home!”

My companion tried to calm me by saying, “Calm down!” (In recorded history, when has saying “Calm down!” ever worked?)

I tried though, telling myself that the bright side was a nice ride from Shelter Island to New Jersey. And back. Yay me.

And just like that, things got brighter as we followed Miss Walkie-Talkie past the back of the stage to the floor level, finally stopping in the high-rent district, at two front-row seats just feet from the stage. So close I could look up Springsteen’s nose and by the end of the concert, when he was drenched and spraying sweat, it landed right on me. I kid you not. I could have reached out and touched his boot if it wasn’t for the mean-looking security guard who was already keeping an eye on me. What started out as a bummer turned into a great night.

A more recent “bright side” event happened last month after I’d donated a purse to a thrift shop. I’d swing through every week and it bothered me enormously to see it still there, forlorn and rejected by other thrifters. Finally, I paid the stinking $5 and bought it back. So what’s the bright side of that, paying again for a purse I didn’t want and no one else did either?

Tucked inside was a hundred-dollar bill I’d forgotten that I’d stashed into the deepest pocket when I bought the purse (the first time). Yay me! Of course, my “bright side” cheated some other thrifter out of their “Yay me!” moment, but come on, they had three weeks.

If there’s a lesson here, I guess it’s to try to always look on the bright side. And also in the deepest pockets.

Joanne Sherman is a Shelter Island resident and longtime contributor to Times Review Media Group.

The post Guest Column: The bright side appeared first on Riverhead News Review.

New Year’s Eve lived up to its name as Amateur Night for those drinking before they turned pro. But it was also a nightmare of people from Omaha coming to New York to see the ball drop and thinking a yellow cab was some kind of tour bus where a friendly driver with amusing patter would show them the sights.

Still, you did make good money, even if it produced cabbie PTSD that could last into March. 

About Thanksgiving, I should have listened to my friend Donahoe, a former cabbie who scored a job as a police photographer. Low man on the totem pole, he was assigned the 4 p.m. to midnight tour one Thanksgiving, shooting mugs in the basement of the precinct house. “The usual parade of skells and knuckleheads, but now and then there’d be a regular person standing with the height numbers behind him, looking at the camera like he was about to be hanged,” Donahoe said. “A cousin, who’d been invited by some family member who thought he’d finally make up with a relative he hadn’t talked to in years — and who hated him. But too many cocktails and it started all over again. Fistfights and, you know, at Thanksgiving you have those big serving forks? And knives? It was awful, these guys in nice clothes with blood on their shirts, asking me what came next, you know? What could I tell them?”

Mary and I got married in August and on Thanksgiving, figuring we could use the money and then have a long weekend, we had the meal and did the family thing before I went to work.

There were just a few guys waiting for cabs to come in off the day line when I took a seat on the bench next to Fitz. He was an old guy who was one of the great raconteurs. Everybody — from the young Black, Latino and white guys to the old cabbie wizards — talked and listened to him.

Fitz was an immigrant who came to America as a young man and achieved the dream. He started out selling insurance and worked up to running his own agency in Queens, getting married and starting a family.

But then he lost it all, through years of betting on slow-running horses. Coming to his senses at rock bottom, he got help and started over, driving a cab. He helped some other guys in the garage to find help.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he greeted me. “Get out of here. Don’t you have a home to go to?”

I told him I’d heard it was a good night to work. Lots of happy and generous people splurging on cabs. Plus, all the restaurant workers and everyone else punching clocks on Thanksgiving would be ready to treat themselves by hailing a cab home.

“But you didn’t answer my question,” Fitz said, and told me a story.

One Thanksgiving afternoon, he got a fare 20 minutes out of the garage on Park Avenue, an elderly man, holding a bouquet of two dozen roses, dressed in a three-piece suit, a camel’s hair topcoat, leather gloves and a jauntily angled fedora.

“The smell of those flowers in the cab,” Fitz said. “The smell of money.”

The old gentleman gave him an address in Little Falls, N.J. Any trip beyond the city limits automatically meant the fare would be doubled.

“I told him about double the meter and he knew all about it. I thought, ‘I’m gonna be rich tonight, mining gold in Jersey.’ ”

The dapper old gentleman was going to his brother’s, he said. He and Fitz chatted about Thanksgiving, covering everything from the proper way to cook a turkey to whether the Lions had a chance against the Packers. “He directed me to Little Falls and then started to direct me through the streets,” Fitz said. “It was already dark when he said, real quiet, ‘Here. Here we are.’ ” It was a cemetery. The passenger directed Fitz in through the gates. “I saw him in my mirror slumped in the back, his face white as a sheet. Staring straight ahead.”

The passenger told Fitz to stop and wait for him, got out and climbed a hill with his bouquet, stopping at a grave. “After a while I could see his shoulders heaving,” Fitz said. The bouquet was hanging straight down from his hand, touching the ground. Fitz waited 20 minutes before he got out and went up to the man and put his hand on his shoulder. He had pulled himself together by then, putting the flowers on the grave, drying his eyes.

Back in the cab the man apologized, saying he was alone today — some kind of old family dispute — and had suddenly wanted to be with his only brother, who had been kind to him. He had somehow neglected to express his love for him when he was alive. “I’m alone and so is he,” the man said.

Fitz suggested a cup of coffee. “We went into a diner, sat and talked. He was a terrible old man, really,” Fitz said. “Tossed his life away by not paying attention to those nearest to him.” On Park Avenue the old gentleman paid the double fare. “And stiffed me on the tip,” Fitz said, with a smile.

“A real prince,” I said.

“Where’s the wife today?”

“Home,” I said.

“What are you doing here?” Fitz asked, his voice soft. “Do you have to work today?”

I took the subway home, and going down the hall to our apartment, I saw the light under the door.

It was then I realized I’d forgotten to ask Fitz why he was working on Thanksgiving. 

The post Guest Column: A working holiday appeared first on Riverhead News Review.

“This isn’t going to end well,” I was warned by my nearest and dearest.

I’d volunteered to substitute for an ailing Sunday school teacher, minding her class of 5- and 6-year-olds. All I had to do was teach kids to cut out paper angels with blunt scissors. Come on. How hard could that be?

Nearest and dearest was concerned because at that time our boys were in high school, so I hadn’t had recent experience with little ones. “It’ll be fine,” I insisted. “Our kids survived.”

He walked away muttering, “Was that because you were their mother or in spite of it?”

Since the jury was still out, I took the high road, ignoring the comment.

Performance anxiety kicked in that Sunday morning when I was handed a three-page lesson plan.So much for cutand- paste.Turns out these kids didn’t go to Sunday school to make paper angels. They were there to learn about holiness and saintliness. From me. And for that hour, 13 wee souls were in my hands.

I expected this baker’s dozen would march in, single file, like good onward Christian soldiers, but they tumbled in and never once did I get all the soldiers’ bottoms on their little chairs at the same moment.

Instructions said I should start with the Lord’s Prayer, but as I did, Nolan began to cry. Joleen told me it was Nolan’s week to lead the prayer. That was OK by me, so I put away my prayer cheat sheet. (Just kidding, I know it, calm down.)

Every kid has their own version of this prayer. Nolan wiped his eyes and runny nose on the back of his hands and holding them solemnly together, snotty little fingers pointed towards the ceiling, gave us his: “Our Father has a car in heaven …”.

It got worse but I let him finish, then, recited the prayer the proper way. Thirteen blank faces stared up at me. Clearly they preferred Nolan’s version.

“Today’s lesson is about the good Samaritan,” I told them and read the parable, which had been paraphrased to be more easily understood by youngsters. But whoever did the paraphrasing didn’t know squat about youngsters or that certain words cause pandemonium. It was the part of the parable where the man is stripped of his clothes and left naked at the edge of the road that the room exploded with screams, giggles and mayhem.

“Naked! Oh, gross!” Completely naked or only partly naked? These kids wanted all the sordid details and it became a rowdy competition to see how often each could screech the word “naked” in a sentence.

So I lied and said that the robbers let him keep his underwear and that calmed everyone down.

I continued reading, but no one listened. Three of the boys were engaged in a contest to see who could flick spitballs across the room into the straw collection basket. Fancy was busy braiding Ruby’s hair and several of them were trying to see how far back they could lean in their chairs without tipping completely backwards and cracking open their tiny, fragile skulls. Attention focused on me again at that part of the parable where the good Samaritan put his clothes on the semi-naked man.

“Does that mean now the good Dalmatian is naked?” Lucille asked. They assured me and each other that under no circumstances would they ever walk naked down the street leading a donkey. I lied again and said he was wearing long johns.

The Golden Rule lesson went haywire because every kid wanted to shout their favorite: Wash your hands after the bathroom. Don’t put the kitten in the dishwasher again. If Mom says no, ask Dad.

“Those are all good,” I said, “but they’re not the Golden Rule. Who knows it? Don’t shout; please raise your hands.”

Elvira raised her hand and shouted, “Do under others what they do under you.”

I explained that Elvira was kind of correct, but it was too late. She was already crying because Nolan called her stupid, then Ruby cried because Elvira was her best friend.

“Be quiet!” I shouted. Twentysix frightened eyes widened and 13 chins trembled, but God bless them, they got quiet. So quiet the teacher from the next room checked if we were all right.

After she left, I handed out the blunt scissors and taught them how to cut out angels. When Sunday school was over they were smiling and in my book, that’s a win.

Author’s note: The following year I became their weekly Sunday school teacher and – so far – they’ve all survived. Was it because of me or in spite of me? The jury’s still out.

Joanne Sherman is a resident of Shelter Island and a longtime Times Review columnist.

The post Column: Tales out of (Sunday) school appeared first on Riverhead News Review.