Hair Today

I ran into Anthony, my mother’s former hairdresser, on Thanksgiving Eve and greeted him with the old standby “how’s business?”

And he told me.

“I sold the building,” he said. “I’m retiring.”

I couldn’t believe it. Another familiar place disappearing? Anthony has been running the beauty salon on Fifth Avenue for as long as I can remember. He can’t just close up shop.

Anthony said he’s not leaving Brooklyn. I thought he might head off to someplace like Florida, but he dismissed that idea.

“Maybe I’ll go to Key West for a couple of weeks,” he said, “but I don’t want to boil down there—especially in the summer.”

Anthony was one of the few people who actually loved his job.

“I couldn’t wait to get to work,” he said. “It was never really work for me.”

Not too many people in this world can make that claim.

One of my earliest memories of Anthony was coming home with my brother from grocery shopping when we were kids.

We had gotten caught in a terrible downpour that soaked the paper bags—no plastic bags back then-and the groceries began falling to the ground right in front of Anthony’s salon.

I remember a bottle of Coke hitting the sidewalk and exploding. No plastic bottles back then.

It was getting pretty desperate when Anthony opened the door and handed us some shopping bags so we could get our stuff and go home.

My mother had often gone to Anthony’s salon to get her hair done there and I did, too, for a while—back when I still had hair.

And the day I went into his salon to tell him my mother had died, Anthony was very kind and supportive.

“She’s sleeping with the angels now,” he told me.

I had to ask him how long he had been in business.

“Since 1966,” he said.

I did a double-take. I knew he had been there a long time, but I had no idea it was that long.

So that means I was seven years old when Anthony opened up. Lyndon Johnson was President of the United States that year, the first of eight presidents who would enter the White House during Anthony’s 43-year run.

There were no cell phones, Blackberries, no Internet, and no widescreen TVs, but Gemini VIII docked with an orbiting satellite in 1966 and Russia’s Luna 9 landed on the Moon.

It was the year of the Miranda decision, where cops had to tell you about your right to remain silent. It was the year a man named Richard Speck killed 8 student nurses in Chicago and, a short time later, a man named Charles Whitman killed 13 people from atop a building at the University of Texas.

A loaf of bread cost 22 cents and a gallon of gas went for 23 cents. A new home cost $40,000 and a new car had a price tag of $2,401.

John Lennon set off a firestorm of self-righteous outrage that year when he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. The Fab Four released Revolver, played their last live concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, and began work on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club’s Band, which would be released the following year.

Both Star Trek and How the Grinch Stole Christmas made their debuts that year. A Man for All Seasons won the Oscar for Best Picture and its star, Paul Scofield won for Best Actor. Elizabeth Taylor won Best Actress for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?

I guess you could 1966 a tumultuous year, but then what year isn't?

Anthony and I talked about how Bay Ridge has changed and how we don’t recognize it anymore. It felt strange because I used listen to adults talk this way when I was young and I had no idea what they meant.

My world wasn’t going to change. The people, the shops, the neighborhood, they were all going to stay the same.

“I had all these beautiful ladies, like your mother—God rest her soul.” Anthony said. “All these beautiful ladies and they’re all gone now.”

We shook hands and Anthony wished me a happy new year. So now something else from my generation will disappear and the neighborhood will look a little less familiar.

Page One Story

We pulled into the funeral home parking lot just after 8 pm, found a spot, and waited for the cops to show up.

It was June 1988. I had just started working as a reporter for the Pocono Record, moving to Pennsylvania from Brooklyn a month earlier, and on this night I was handling the police beat.

Frances Cox, one of our photographers, was sitting next to me in the passenger seat and we were waiting to get a picture of a man named Jerry Burgos, a New York transplant like myself, who was inside the attending his wife’s viewing.

Nilsa Burgos had been discovered in the couple’s burning home a few days earlier. Her death had been ruled a homicide after an autopsy found no trace of smoke in lungs, meaning she was dead before the fire started. She was seven months pregnant.

The paper had been running stories about the killing for days and then one of the reporters had gotten a tip that the state police would pick up Burgos at the funeral home and charge him with his wife’s murder. Frances and I were assigned to cover the arrest.

I was new to daily journalism, my only prior reporting experience being at a couple of weekly papers in Brooklyn. I had walked a beat with some cops in Sunset Park, covered some drug busts with Brooklyn South Narcotics, but I’d never witnessed a homicide bust.

We didn’t have to wait too long. It seemed like I was just putting my car into park when Burgos, a heavyset Hispanic man with glasses, walked out into the warm spring evening. We got out of my car and got closer as two state troopers, Clark Ritter and Mike Hartley, approached Burgos.

There was none of the “freeze, punk!” stuff you see on TV; no wrestling the perp to the ground and slapping on the cuffs. Looking at these guys huddled together you’d never think one of them was being charged with a horrible crime.

“Now, Jerry,” Ritter said in a low voice, “we’re going to get into the car…”

“…and you keep your hands were I can see them,” Hartley said, spreading out his fingers.

Burgos took one step toward the unmarked police car and---FOOSH!—the flash from Frances’s camera lit up the three men like a stray lightning bolt, creating the photo that would appear on page one the next morning.

People snarled and glared at us and one of the cops told Burgos “I had nothing to do with that.”

“That was uncalled for!” one man shouted and it struck me as such an odd choice of words; it was so formal, like he was going to challenge me to a duel.

The cops hustled their prisoner into the car and drove off, while Frances and I made the long march back to my old Toyota through a gauntlet of angry mourners who yelled and cursed at us.

“Why don’t you come to the funeral, assholes?” one man shouted.

“It’s the job,” I said, my eyes to the ground.

We got into the car and took off looking for the courthouse in a town called Mountainhome. As I drove around this unfamiliar territory, I started having serious thoughts about a career change.

“This isn’t for me!” I wailed. “I can’t handle the stress. It’s bad for my health.”

Going to Court

It was one of those nights where the whole world seemed to be spinning out of control. I stopped at a gas station on the way to the courthouse and instead of getting a normal attendant, I get some bearded Deliverance reject who apparently was engaged in a fierce argument with an imaginary friend.

I asked him for directions—just directions, that’s all—and this loon looks up to the sky and shouts “whaaaaaaaat?” at the top of his lungs. He did this about three more times in our short encounter before I got my change and floored the pedal.

We finally got to Mountainhome and I began looking for the courthouse. Being a New Yorker, “courthouse” to me meant a huge marble structure with massive columns and long, wide steps leading to giant iron doors.

But this wasn’t New York and here the district court was just a store front, so there was no place to hide from angry relatives.

I went inside while Frances waited by the front door to get another shot of our man. I got the affidavit from the judge—a very nice lady, by the way—and for some odd reason I took a seat in the waiting room.

The cops showed up just then and I saw a flash through the window, indicating that Frances had gotten another photo. A woman who was one of several people accompanying Burgos shouted “why don’t you write how hard he worked?”

And then they saw me.

One man complained to the state troopers, demanding that they throw me out of the courthouse.

“They’re harassing us!”

I’m harassing you? I thought. I’m about two seconds away from jumping into my car, tear-assing back to Brooklyn, and becoming a Sanitation man. What are you talking about?

The cop explained that the arraignment was open to the public and anyone could attend. Then the guy sat down and started on me.

“So there’s nothing else going on tonight, buddy?” he sneered.

The tension was so awful I don’t know why I didn’t go wait outside or sit in the courtroom. One of the cops looked away, probably embarrassed for me, while I just sat there.

“Look,” I said finally, “I will gladly take any comment you want to make, but I have to be here.”

“I’ve made all my comments,” he snapped.

The arraignment was brief and ended with the judge ordering Burgos to be held in the county prison. When it was over, I heard him mutter something about wanting to get a drink. I felt the same way.

We got back to the office and I went to my desk to write the story while Frances went to develop her pictures. The paper would hit newsstands in just a few hours.

That weekend I told my father about the insane things that had happened in one evening and he gave me a great pieces of advice.

“Sometimes,” he said, “you just have to put your head down and keep on going.”

Jerry Burgos was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death. One of the most damaging witnesses for the prosecution was his own son, a young boy who innocently told police that he didn’t see any sign of a fire the night his mother died until after "Daddy carried me out to the car.”

Burgos appealed his sentence and managed to get a second trial, but he ended up being sentenced to life without parole.

I didn’t quit my job that night and race back to Brooklyn to work for the Sanitation Department. I became the full time police reporter, covering fires, car wrecks, arraignments, and the occasional murder for the next five years.

I learned to blend in, back off, and look inconspicuous. I got used to people hating my guts and cursing at me. When it got bad, I just put my head down and kept on going.

I worked with several of those cops—particularly Hartley, who loved to break my balls—and I had a lot of page one stories, but nothing as dramatic as that first crazy night.

Frances Cox, whom I would jokingly call “Frances the Talking Photographer,” was later diagnosed with cancer and died a few years after she took that picture.

The last I heard of Jerry Burgos, he was still in prison. I haven’t thought about him in years, but every now and then I look back on the night when I stood so close a murderer.

And I wonder how much he’s changed since the day he made page one.

Tale of the Ticker Tape

A decade ago, while working as a reporter in Connecticut, I was driving through some small town on my way to some forgettable assignment and listening to the news on the radio.

The Yankees had won the World Series and New York was going to give them a ticker tape parade that very afternoon.


I’m not much of a sports fan, and I usually root for the Mets when it comes to baseball, but it just killed me to be sputtering around the back roads of East Deer Tick when my hometown was throwing such a huge bash.

"What am I doing here?" I whined within my old Toyota. "I should be back there."

Well, today, I got a second chance to see the Yankees parade down the Canyon of Heroes. And it was certainly worth the wait.

My office is on Broadway, overlooking the parade route and, after a little hustling, I got to see a good portion of the show without facing the cold or the crowd.

And the crowd was unbelievable. I know it’s New York, the Big Apple, and, yes, Toto, I know I’m not in East Deer Tick anymore, but still the number of bodies amazed me.

I looked out the windows to Dey Street on one side and Fulton Street on the other and both were crammed with more people than there were in many of the towns I had covered. But then there are probably more players on the Yankees than in many of the towns I’ve covered.

It was weird seeing the streets I walk on every day suddenly choked by such much humanity. I don’t know what, if anything, the people in the back of these crowds saw, but I hope they had fun.

I crammed into a corner office on the sixth floor with a bunch of my co-workers and watched the parade from the safety and comfort of our workplace—which we rarely associate with safety or comfort.

We got to talking about ticker tape parades and one of my colleagues told us how he saw the ticker tape parade for the astronauts who landed on the moon.

"That was…40 years ago,” he said, a little surprised by the number.

Wall Street gave up ticker tape a long time ago, but judging by all the debris flying through the air today, I'd say we’ve got a long way to go before we reach that paperless society I’ve been hearing about since the fifth grade.

It looked like a blizzard going on out there and rolls of toilet paper kept sailing through the air like low flying artillery rounds. Somebody was tossing some stuff that actually looked like hay, which made me wonder how they got a horse into an office building.

I saw Hideki Matsui and Derek Jeter, but I needed help identifying some of the others. Whenever the crowd roared I knew it was somebody big. Fortunately one man had brought his 10-year-old son, who sported a Yankees cap and shirt and was able to set me straight.

I saw one guy on a flatbed truck with hair down to his rear-end who periodically crank his head back and forth and whipped his massive do like a samurai sword. I don’t know what he was doing there, but he’s probably in a neck brace now.

I was told that Rudy Giuliani showed up and I’m happy to report that he didn’t take credit for the Yankees’ win. Knowing his tyrannosaurus ego, I was surprised he didn’t get all Kanye West and grab the trophy for himself. Oh, by the way, Bernie Kerik couldn’t make it.

I saw Reggie Jackson, who was looking rather old, and then—ugh!—former Mayor Ed Koch, who was looking even older.

“The first ticker tape parade was in 1886,” one of the executives said, reading the information off his computer.

“Yeah,” I said, “and it was in honor of Ed Koch.”

Actually, that’s not true. The first ticker tape parade was a spontaneous event that occurred during the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. Ed Koch was just a kid then.

The parade broke up and eventually I drifted back to the desk, but I heard shouts and cheers for most of the afternoon.

By the time I left the office, the people had moved on and the only evidence of the parade was the portable barriers that had been set up for crowd control.

The nearby bars were clogged with Yankee fans who didn’t feel like going home. There were knots of them hanging out in front of the local dives.

Some of them were feeling no pain, as the expression goes, and navigating around them was a bit of a chore, but it sure beat driving the back roads of East Deer Tick.

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

There once was a time when I looked forward to the sign of peace.

That’s the part of the mass where you shake hands with everybody around you. It's kind of like a spiritual version of the seventh inning stretch.

We started doing the sign of peace in the Catholic Church when I was in grammar school and I remember how one of my classmates once grabbed another kid’s hand during mass and said “hey, how’s the wife and kids?”

Fortunately for him, none of the brothers caught him in the act for they would have no doubt sent him to meet his maker right there in church. It’s a much shorter trip.

I’ve been attending services at Trinity Church for a few years now and I’ve gotten to enjoy this little hand-to-hand routine. I greet my regular buddies and new arrivals and next to the sermon, it is—or was—my favorite part of the mass.

But that was before the H1N1 virus and all its attendant hysteria came to town. Now my church has a hand-sanitizing android stationed in the vestibule ready to spew its gooey contents into any outstretched palm.

It looks so out of place, a penny arcade reject, standing in this venerable place where Alexander Hamilton once worshiped. But as much as I hate the damn thing, I’m glad it's there.

Unfortunately when the priest says “let us exchange the sign of peace” I often hear “let us exchange our various germs.” And I remind myself to keep my hand away from my face and make sure to get a spritz of hand sanitizer on the way out the door.

But it doesn’t end with the sign of peace. After that comes communion, where the priest puts the host in your hand and then you take a sip of wine from the chalice.

Now I do not drink from other people’s cups, I don’t care where I am. Nothing personal, no offense, but it's not going to happen.

I did, however, con myself into believing that if I just gave the host a quick dip into the chalice, I could get a taste of the sacramental wine without risking infection.

That, of course, is delusional thinking, and it took the swine flu outbreak and my recent heavy cold to shake me out of this fantasy.

I thought about skipping the wine entirely, but that’s not easy to do when everybody else around you is either sipping or dunking.

I’m ashamed to admit this, but a couple of times I’ve actually fake-dipped my host into the chalice, stopping just short of the wine--which is incredibly lame given that I’m trying to save my immortal soul here.

I always slink away, half-expecting a voice that sounds a lot like Charleston Heston to thunder from the rafters “I SAW THAT, NUMB NUTS. WHAT PART OF ‘ALL KNOWING’ DON’T YOU GET!?”

Your Host Today

A few weeks ago I was all set to fake-dip when an older priest whom I didn’t recognize actually yanked the host from fingers, sank it into the chalice, and rammed it right into my kisser.

I felt like I was back in Catholic school where you’d turn to a pillar of salt if you even thought about touching the host.

I went to church this week, wincing every time someone coughed. It reminded me of my morning subway ride, where I play a little game I call “Find the Cougher.” I take a seat, open my book or newspaper, and within a few minutes, it’s guaranteed somebody sitting right near me will start hacking and choking like a career coal miner.

One morning the my train was so full of coughing people I wanted to jump up, wave a baton like Arthur Fiedler and lead them in an all-hacking version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” I wonder what non-hypochondriacs do during their morning commute.


So now I’m standing in church and I realize that a heavy duty cougher is in the pew right behind me. The guy’s got a cold, virus, swine flu, the heebie jeebies, who the hell knows? All I know is that he’s sitting near me and that means I’ll have to shake hands with him.

Yes, I am brother’s keeper, but if my brother’s sick I really want him to keep him the hell away from me.

During his sermon, Rev. Mark encouraged us to look for God in everyone we meet. And if can’t see Him in someone we don’t care for, he said, then we should look harder. Does that include the guy spewing his germs all over me?

All right. I shook hands with the guy during the sign of peace, but I didn't have much choice. He was right behind me. I made a mental note to keep my right hand away from the rest of me until I could sterilize it.

The cougher dashed up the aisle ahead of me at communion, which meant no sipping, dipping or even looking at the chalice for yours truly. I took my host straight up and then headed back to my pew ahead of everyone else, which felt a little like the walk of shame after a lousy date.

I shook hands with Rev. Mark on the way out, as I always do—he wasn’t coughing--and then I slipped around the tourists, pushed the door open with my shoulder, and put my hand beneath the hand sterilizer’s nozzle. The thing hummed and squeezed some glop onto my fingers.

It wasn’t the sign of peace, but it did give me some peace of mind.

Peace Now

I finally found peace this week.

No, not serenity, calm, stillness or tranquility—don’t be ridiculous. I’m still as neurotic as ever.

I’m talking about a novel called Peace by Richard Bausch, a gift from my brother which I thought I had lost somewhere between my house and the New York City subway system.

I had just made up my mind to read that particular book after looking through the stacks of paperbacks around here. I brought it to work, kept it in a brown plastic bag to protect the cover, but when I got home that night and looked in my bag, I found that I had been seperated from Peace.

I looked all over my house, peeked into the garbage can, I even checked out the re-freaking-frigerator--nothing. I tried the Zen thing of letting go and the book apparently returned the favor because I couldn't find it anywhere.

At breakfast the next morning I because convinced—convinced—that I had tossed the book in the trash can. Seconds later I heard the garbage truck pulling up in front of my house and I seriously thought about running out in my pajamas and yanking the can away from the sanitation man.

But I got to the front window just as the guy was dumping the contents of my garbage can into the truck's churning innards, so if the book was in there, Peace would soon be in pieces.

The Peace attack came just a few days after another brain bust when I forgot my cell phone number. This wasn’t a momentary lapse of memory where I paused for a few brief moments. No, I completely forgot the damn number.

I was making an appointment to have my chimney inspected when the woman at the other end of the line asked me for my contact information.

“It’s probably best to call me on my cell phone,” I said.

“Okay…?”

And my mind went completely blank.

Zip, gone, erased from my memory, like Ben Affleck in that crappy movie Paycheck, on which I wasted a small piece of my own paycheck renting and a large chunk of my time watching.

And even though the movie sucked from pillar to post and from hell to breakfast, I still felt compelled to watch the damn “Making of…” features on the DVD.

Why, why do I torture myself like this? It’s like eating a hideous meal and asking for the recipe. Maybe that’s why I’m forgetting things: I’ve got too much junk in my head that the important stuff is being pushed out.

I struggled to recall the number, which only helped to freeze up the locks on my memory bank. I kept coming up with bits and pieces of other people’s numbers, but I couldn’t find the right combination of digits.

Forget Me Not

“I’m sorry,” I finally I told the chimney lady. “I can’t remember my own number.”

“That’s okay,” the woman at the other end of the line said. “You never call your own number.”

Yes, but I never send myself Christmas cards and I still know my address. While we went over some details I dug out my wallet, fished out my ragged mini-phone book and looked for my number.


“I found my cell phone,” I blurted out like a losing game show contestant.

"Okay...?"

A few days later I was trying to recall the name of a popular British actor. The guy’s a huge star; he played Batman in The Dark Knight.

He got a lot of bad press when a tape of him screaming and cursing at a cameraman while filming the last Terminator movie was leaked to the news media.

There’s a point in the tape where this actor sarcastically sneers “Oh, good for youuuuuu!” at the hapless cameraman. I tease my sister with that line, dropping it unexpectedly when she tells me what she’s been up to. And now I couldn’t remember his name.

I could see his face, I could hear his voice. But nothing else would come. And I didn’t have his name in my little phone book.

C’mon, he’s Batman for Christ’s sake. Heath Ledger was the Joker and that other guy was Gordon…another British actor—yeah, Gary Oldman. But the Dark Knight had me dazed.

I’ve written before about memory lapses—haven’t I?—but this one really got to me. I was set to throw in the towel and look it up on IMDB.com, when it came to me--yes, Christian Bale. Oh, good for meeeeeee!

I’ve been joking about senior moments for a long time, but now I’m starting to wonder. It’s been happening more often lately, but I can’t recall any specific cases, which makes me even more upset.

The annoying thing is that there are so many people, places and things I would love to forget, but they’re still hanging around my hippocampus, which is odd since I didn’t know hippos went to college.

But there's some good news. The other day I was ordering something over the phone and the operator asked for my contact information. I hesitated just a second before reciting my cell phone number flawlessly.

And when I got to my office I saw a small brown plastic bag on my desk. I looked inside and there was Peace, safe and unread.

I had started reading another book, but that’s all right. I put Peace in a safe place. Now if only I knew where that was…

Sound Tracks

I was doing my evening shopping the other night when I heard a familiar song on the radio.

I had trouble making out the tune because of the noise around me, but I knew I’d heard this song before.

As I put my groceries down in front of the cashier, I listened carefully and tried to figure out the words.

It was from the eighties, one of my favorite decades for music. And I could tell it was a woman singing. Then there was a sudden gust of silence around me and I was able to name that tune.

It was “Papa Don’t Preach” by Madonna.

Okay, well, if you just ring me up, I'll be on my way. Please, for the love of God, ring me up.

As soon I got my change, I bid farewell to the Material Girl and bounced down to the corner drug store for some additional shopping.

At first I wasn’t paying too much attention to the piped-in music, but as I roamed the aisles in a futile search for whatever the hell it was that I wanted, I started to listen to the song pouring out of the sound system—and wished I hadn’t.

This was a song from the seventies, one of my least favorite decades for music, clothes or just about anything else.

It was a man singing this time…wait, don’t tell me…oh, crap, please don’t tell me it's “Everything is Beautiful”— Jesus, Mary, and Ralph, don’t I have enough problems?

Come back, Madonna, all is forgiven.

If you haven’t picked it up from the title, “Everything is Beautiful” is a mawkish streak of audio bilge that it so cloying and creepy it can make the skin crawl clean off your bones.

Ray Stevens, the towering talent who gave us “Ahab the Arab (pronounced “A-rab”, by the way), “Guitarzan,” and “The Streak,” is also responsible for this atrocity and it’s rather hard to believe that one man could do all this damage and still avoid incarceration.

“Everything is Beautiful” was Stevens’ attempt at a serious work, I suppose, and it certainly is a seriously bad piece of work.

The thing actually won a Grammy—another reason to hate the seventies--and I remember my father singing it incessantly, which, of course, made me loathe the disgusting little ditty all the more.

Obviously beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but some things in this world really aren’t beautiful in their own way or any other goddamn way. Face it, some things just suck--like this song.

I guess I was fortunate to be in a drug store, so if I felt the urge to lose my lunch, I’d be close to plenty of medicine. Maybe I could get some earplugs, too.

I got to the cashier just as this nightmare was ending and another seventies song came on. I recognized this one, too. Funky opening…strings coming in…another “poppa” tune...this was-oh, yes--the Temptations’ classic “Poppa Was a Rolling Stone.”

Finally, they’re playing a song I liked.

Hymn and Me

This was a big hit when I was a sophomore in high school. One kid would start singing it in mechanical drawing class, half-a-dozen more would join in and pretty soon the teacher would be bouncing off the four walls.

I really wanted to hear this song again, but it has a rather long instrumental opening and, since I had just gotten my change, I really had no business being in the store.

I decided to do some bogus browsing until I heard the first verse. The place was crowded, though, and I kept having near misses with legitimate shoppers.

When I found myself walking through the cosmetics section looking at the make-up, I decided to throw in the towel and get the hell out. And then I heard those opening lines…

“It was the third of September,
a day I’ll always remember, yes I will.
‘Cause that was the day my daddy died…”

I rolled out of the store, a satisfied customer.

The soundtrack of my life continued while I was attending mass at Trinity Church. (No wisecracks, please.)

A recent service began with a beautiful hymn called “Be Thou My Vision.” The lyrics go back a little further than the eighties or the seventies to more like the Sixth Century.

I can’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow and I never sing in church. I lip-synched my way through eight years of Catholic school and I’m proud to say I never got caught.

But I was so moved by this song that I actually picked up the hymnal and joined in. That has never happened before. Next I’ll start speaking in tongues--which might be improvement.


Naturally, I sounded godawful, but this was church, by God, not American Idolatry. And it still sounded better than Ray Stevens.

Even the priest was in a singing mood. Rev. Mark was giving us a sermon about being at our best and he mentioned an old Sammy Davis Jr. song called “I Gotta Be Me” to prove his point.

How well I know that song—also from the seventies and another one of my father’s favorites. He liked it so much he bought the single and played it seemingly non-stop on this crummy old phonograph we had in the living room.

The record used to skip at the end, so that when Sammy was supposed to say “Daring to try, to do it or die,” the needle got stuck on “do it or die” and that’s all you heard until my father tapped the needle. After a while I wanted to die before hearing that song again.

“Forgive me,” Rev. Mark told us, “I’m not that good a singer….”

Oh, no you’re not, I thought. You’re not going to stand there before God and everybody else and sing that old clunker, are you? Well, as matter of fact...

“Whether I’m right,” Rev. Mark sang, “or whether I’m wrong…”

You know he was actually pretty good. Maybe he could do “Poppa Was a Rolling Stone” for an encore.

After his number, Rev. Mark told us that there was someone attending the service whose father was in a coma and he began to speak to this person directly.

“I’ve gone with you to the hospital,” he said. “I’ve seen talk to him, tell him that you love him even though he can’t hear you. That’s what I’m talking about.”

He said this with such tenderness, such emotion that I started to think that maybe everything really was beautiful in its own way.

“When we’re at our best,” Rev. Mark said, “we are at our most-loving, our most-grateful, and our most-forgiving.”

Sammy Davis Jr. couldn’t have said it any better than that.

Retracing My Steps

"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Matthew 5:44

For the last few days I’ve been trying to remember where I was standing on 9/11 when the planes hit the World Trade Center.

I pass by Ground Zero every day on my way to work and as the anniversary drew closer, I'd walk by the Brooks Brothers store on Church Street and see if I could find my exact location on that most hideous day.

I had to imagine that the towers were still there and try and recall if I was closer to Church Street or Liberty Street when I watched smoke pour out the North Tower and when the South Tower exploded into flames as the second plane hit the building.

I had just come from my gym near City Hall and was on my way to my office, which back then was at Liberty Plaza—right across the street from the Trade Center.

That was my father's 80th birthday; my mother was at Lutheran Medical Center being treated for a chronic lung condition. I had all these nit-picky worries and concerns rattling around in my head that would soon become totally meaningless.

As the North Tower burned and a woman stood next to me sobbing, I looked in the direction of St. Peter’s Church a few blocks up the street, where I had been attending lunch time services, and thought that I’d go there and pray for the victims. I thought that the worst part of the day was over, but I was wrong.

Bear in mind that a lot of us who were so close to Ground Zero initially had no idea what was going on--we didn't see a plane, we just heard an explosion. One of my co-workers kept saying it was a bomb, but I told him I had heard something streaking through the air just before the blast.

I couldn’t begin to imagine that a commercial jetliner had crashed into the building. Or that it would happen again a few minutes later.

Eight years ago the weather was perfect—unlike today where it rained like hell. There wasn’t a cloud in the beautiful blue sky; it was the kind of day that makes you happy to be alive.

And those flawless conditions somehow seemed to make the attacks even more horrible--if that's possible. How could something so vile happen on such a lovely day?

Homeward Bound

As I walked over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn with thousands of other people, the wreckage of towers smoldering behind us, I vowed I’d treasure every day, that I wouldn’t get upset over petty things, and I'd just be thankful that I and those I cared about had survived the attacks.


And now I look back on myself this morning, riding the R train into work, bitching that I couldn’t find a seat like I usually do, annoyed that the conductor kept opening and closing the doors, and wondering why it was taking so goddamn long to get to Rector Street.

When I got to my stop, the rain was coming down heavily and the police were directing people toward Broadway and away from Liberty Plaza. The streets were jammed and I was getting drenched and even crankier as I tried to plot a course around all these people in my way.

I heard the names of the victims being read, but I was getting soaked and I just wanted to get inside. I had work to do and the weather was awful, so I didn’t go to any of the ceremonies on my lunch break.

I did go out briefly to get a soda and I ran into some Mennonite women, who seemed to have stepped out a time warp with their long dresses and cloth bonnets. They were standing on Broadway in the rain--without complaining--giving out CDs of spiritual music and a booklet entitled "Love Your Enemies."

Now I feel ashamed of myself, thinking about a job on this of all days--when we learned--or should have learned--that so many of the things we think are so important have no meaning at all. The vast majority of the 9/11 victims were going to work that day, too. What good did it do them?

And I wonder--did I learn anything on this day eight years ago? Had I forgotten running away from the explosions with everyone else who was standing in Liberty Plaza, many of the screaming or praying or crying?

And what about those first few days afterward when the burning stench from Ground Zero filled the air and missing person leaflets began popping up on walls and streetlamps around the city? How do you worry about a job after living through something like that?

That’s why these memorial services are so important—because we do forget the things we should always remember. We need to be reminded of life’s fragility, how tomorrow is promised to no one, and how everything we hold dear can be taken away in a second.

The crowds had thinned out by the time I left the office this evening so I made a point of going by Liberty Plaza and looking for my spot.

It was still raining pretty hard, but I took a few moments to stand still, look across the street, and remember that terrible sunny day.