Nonfiction | May 07, 2016
The Polish Prince
John W. Evans
During Prohibition, Granny Wiskowski sold bootleg gin out of her living room and, at the end of her life, she was still a skilled gambler. The night she won a gold-and-turquoise Miami Dolphins pendant at hospital bingo, she took down the box from her bed stand, held it out to me and poked a figure into my sternum. “Don’t take no shit from no one,” she said in her hoarse half-Polish, half-English whisper. I had never heard an adult swear except in anger, and now I wasn’t even in trouble. I hooked the clasp around my neck and wore the pendant for most of the decade, right through the tarnish. A necklace. My new favorite team.
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