Robbie's Memories

           I love jelly donuts.  Well, more specifically, I loved Frannie Belzer's father's jelly donuts, the one's we used to get from Belzer's bakery on 5th street in Olney, back in the '50s and '60s.   Mr. Belzer fried his donuts, so the outside was a little crisp.  He rolled them in granulated sugar, not the awful 10X powdered stuff that gets all over your clothes.  Then he pumped them so full of raspberry jam that the skin on the top started to crack.  They were amazing!            Until the summer of the camping trip: I must have been 11 or twelve.  Our Girl Scout troop camped at Camp Laughing Waters outside of Philadelphia for a week each summer.  We had a huge troop, 66 girls, the second largest in the city.  Every summer we turned into the world's worse softball team so we could keep meeting, and we went camping.  I'm not sure how many went on the camping trip, somewhere b...

     Two friends posted skunk stories on Facebook this summer.  My personal/professional skunk story is too long for that, I think, so I'll post it here.      This took place back in Delaware, when my father was living at Catherine's.  Catherine had a sort of boarding house/ nursing home, taking people in to her home and taking care of them.  She called me and asked me to see some people with medical problems living at her house, when I first opened my practice.  She took good care of those people, while planting a huge garden and raising pigs and chickens and distributing food bags and raising children.  I had never seen that in the city, but in the country I took care of patients in a number of people's homes.  Catherine's was the best, though, and when my father became homeless in Philadelphia, I asked Catherine if she would take him in.  My father was a risk; he tended to fall asleep with cigarettes in his hand....