Internal References
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 18:
In this room my mother tried for several years to run small businesses of her own, one after another, illegally, I think, since the neighborhood wasn’t zoned for that sort of thing. At various times she tried to sell lamps made from bottles encrusted with seashells, chenille automobile seat covers for hot summers, handmade crewel place mats stitched up to resemble photographs of a customer’s loved ones, and, as I’ve mentioned, bamboo fishing poles. The most successful of her businesses, Ella’s Lunch Launch, came later—and that is another story.
That other story is told in Inflating a Dog.
Projects: Practical and Impractical
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 18:
Most of the homeowners on our block had built patios. Magazines were full of plans for them. […] Squares, diamonds, and hexagons were the usual shapes for the blocks, but the man who lived next door apparently found regular polygons dull. He built his patio of unique, oddly shaped blocks, each one molded in place, its shape decided only after a long period of beery meditation. The patio took him months to build, but it must have been worth it, because he was thereafter held in high regard as a screwball genius, with depths of personality unimagined before he built his odd patio.
Share the experience. Build a concrete-block patio of your own:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, and Reservations Recommended.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.