So there I was, stranded along a quiet country road littered with smashed cut-flowers, beneath a darkening sky, beside a field full of foraging cows. Later that same day, a twitchy kid would stick a loaded semiautomatic rifle in my face. I’ve determined just now, via a quick consult with Google, which was not yet …
Y’know how the most mundane of things can drop you smack-dab in the middle of the most poignant of memories? No? Well, get to be my own sparkling young age, and trust me, you will. For now, let us begin: With a text received just the other day, from an insurance company. Not some business …
Wounded-crow handoff to wildlife rehabber. I didn’t expect this to get to me like it did. Too often, I find myself uttering those very words. Yet, live and learn, that’s what they say we’re supposed to do. At least that’s what I’m led to understand it says in the manual on being human, if anyone …
My angel mother died three nights ago. She was at last peaceful, drifting out of several days of semi-consciousness following a steady decline from what was by then a rapidly spiraling dementia, compounded in her final days by a COVID-19 infection that may well have produced a stroke. Jeanne Patricia Eaton Rabey, gone now, permanently …
I want to thank the great number of you for the outpouring of support and kind wishes over the loss two days ago of one of my best, my dearest and truest of friends, who just so happened to be an old, blind cat named Banjo. He was indeed better people than most people you …
So today my fabulous old man would have been 87. Salud, Pops. Salud. His was a life of dogged perseverance, launched into a chaotic world, 1932, the final child in a family of 10, to dirt-poor immigrant parents who died early, from grueling sweatshop work and, in my grandfather’s case, from general hard living that …
Trying to put my hands on these photos all day yesterday; now, as a new today is upon us, I find them, not at all where I remembered them to be. I’m not sure there’s not something awfully appropriate in that. So above is my old man as a young man, career Army, visiting family …
I have my particular issues with life, as we all do. A constant for me: Why does doing the right thing so often feel like doing exactly the opposite? I got home from this afternoon’s ill-advised sick-Frank walk in the wilting heat, and was stumbling and coughing and post-nasal-dripping my way through putting up the …
Tributes have been piling up for Anthony Bourdain since news of his death last Friday morning in a luxury hotel in Strasbourg, France. As tributes will when death intersects celebrity, particularly when suicide is the culprit. Tributes in this case are requisite, however. This was Anthony Bourdain, for chrissakes. Anthony Fucking Bordain! Former chef and …
To view this personal family obituary as a downloadable PDF, click here. FRANK RABEY Jan. 10, 1932-Sept. 26, 2017 GREENVILLE, N.C. — He was both jokester and Depression-era pragmatist. A cut-up, a card. A contrarian of the very first order. He was a lover, above all, of family, including his pets, and of travel, classical music, the …