May 16, 2007 by MoPat.

My friend (of more than 50 years) Barb Henechowicz (nee Cohen) sent me this email forwarded to her by someone who knows and loves Buffalo. Enjoy!

“I’m from Buffalo. We eat chicken wings, not Buffalo wings. Jack Kemp is a quarterback, not a politician. We drink Labatt Blue and love it. Mighty Taco always has preference over Taco Bell. Pop, not soda and Pepsi, not Coke.

They are sneakers not tennis shoes. It’s a sucker, not a lollipop. Bison Chip Dip, La Nova Pizzeria, Aunt Rosie’s Loganberry, Chevettas Chicken, Peter K’s
Potato Pancakes and Ted’s Hot Dogs are all too familiar…not to forget Taffy’s Shakes and Charlie the butcher.

A fake ID is unnecessary, there is always Canada …But we have them anyway. Our bars don’t close until 4 a.m., and we DO sell beer in a grocery store (Tops or
Wegmans), which always makes for early starts and late nights. Jim’s Steak Out at 4 in the morning is calling it an early night…

We never cuss, but we swear entirely too much. Driving in the snow not only
comes naturally, it is fun.

We know what Artvoice and Nightlife are and we either love them or try to burn every copy we see. We start the weekends off right at Thursdays in the Square
enjoying beer, free music, and an interesting crowd.

We lived through Wide Right, The Forward Lateral, and No Goal. Dubbed by Dan Marino as “the meanest fans because no-one actually wants to live here”… We all know he wouldn’t stand one winter up here. We love the Bills (no matter what) and accept that it takes 2-4 hours to get home from a game.

Nothing closes in 3 feet of snow or -20 windchills… In fact, that’s how we prefer to tailgate. The 2001 Christmas Storm that dumped nearly of 7 feet of lake effect snow we still think is a mere second to The Blizzard of ‘77.

We can correctly pronounce, spell, and identify Chippewa, Scajaquada, Lackawanna , Cheektowaga, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Olean , Tonawanda and Gowanda without hesitation. When giving direction it’s not “take I-90 to Route 33 east” it’s “take the 90 to the 33 east”…”the” is not an option.

We are 30 minutes from another country, one of the seven wonders of the world, and even a few beaches. We’re the second largest city in New York.

I AM FROM BUFFALO , a drinking town with a sports problem, and damn proud!

GO SABRES!!”

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March 7, 2007 by MoPat.

My friend Charlene died Feb, 20, Mardi Gras night. She was only 56. She was from WNY but I didn’t know her back there; I met her in Arizona. But I could tell she was a Buffalo gal–feisty, funny, smart and generous.

The only other person I had been with at the moment of death was my dad, who died in a Phoenix area hospital. We flew his remains back to Buffalo and he got his wish–to have his funeral Mass in the little chapel of St. John Neumann on the grounds of St. John the Baptist in Kenmore. He’s buried in Mt. Olivet next to my mom and next to their long time buddies, Homer and Mary Hanson. When I go back in the summer and fall seasons, I borrow clippers and trim the luscious green grass around their small inset gravestones, and pat the muddy soil down into the edge cracks.

Charlene was buried in Sedona, at the most beautiful site of any in-ground grave I have ever seen, except perhaps those of my Auntie Irene Kane Miller, her husband Art and some other family members up on the Assumption Church Cemetery hill near Letchworth Park, NY. My brother Kevin is buried in a Phoenix Catholic cemetery–flat, austere, sunny and dry. My brother Jim rests in a wall vault at Rosewood Mausoleum at the most incredible cemetery I have ever visited, Forest Lawn in Buffalo.

Forest Lawn is full of marvelous sculptured angels and art deco orbs, neoclassical crypts, duck ponds, and beautiful trees. It reeks of immortality–those memorials will be there forever, no doubt about it. People visit Forest Lawn from all over the world and take the tour of the more prominent markers and memorials there. Even without a hyperactive imagination, you can conjure up vivid stories about some of the people whose “leftovers” are turning or have turned to dust in Forest Lawn Cemetery. So long ago they lived, but they breathed the same summer air, felt the same drizzling rain, heard the same birds crowing, trudged through the same crunchy snow, and smelled the same golden leaves underfoot as we the living still do in Buffalo.

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December 26, 2006 by MoPat.

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October 29, 2006 by MoPat.

The thing about “missing” Buffalo is that I’m not in Buffalo, so I can tell you what I miss only after hearing firsthand stories about the awful Friday the 13th snowstorm and havoc it wreaked. And I still believe that, even if you were there and suffered the effects, one day, you will miss Buffalo, too, despite this storm.

I miss waking up and being surprised by seeing snowfall in October. I miss hearing on the radio that school’s out for the day, in more places than the usual rural towns and villages that luck out every winter. I miss seeing the mess left by fierce, unpredictable Nature cleaned up over time–totally cleaned up, until next time.

I miss people who, just because it’s in their nature, knock on their neighbors’ doors to see if they’re OK. I miss neighbors who shovel your sidewalk and a path to your door as well as their own, expecting nothing in return. I miss seeing kids and grownups rolling a small snowball in the wet snow, pulling up packed, dense white stuff all the way from the grass below, then trying to lift that huge ball onto the first huge ball to make a snowman.

I miss walking along carless roads in the crisp night air hearing only my breath and the crunch of snow under my boots.

There are plenty of things I don’t miss, too, but I do miss the character those things instill in the people who learn to handle them.

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