The Luna Park Gazette

My mother also prided herself on making good us good costumes for Halloween. She had no use for store-bought outfits, the cheap plastic junk that rolled off some assembly line in Hong Kong. Oh, no, not when she could whip up something 10 times better with just a needle and thread. I think the pinnacle of her costume-making career was the one Halloween when she dressed up my sister and me as Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. My memories of that time have faded, and I have yet to find any photos of us in our outfits, but I do recall distinctly that we were the hit of the neighborhood. My brother Peter and I used to team up for Halloween. He was older so he was stuck with the job of watching me. We had good times, though. Back then it seemed like the whole world was comprised of three or four blocks, like a small town. There was streams of kids going from door to door, no parents necessary back then, and we got tons of this godawful stuff that we actually considered a treat (except for the ca...

As I was walking through the Stillwell Avenue subway station this afternoon, I saw a sign reading "Tell us your Coney Island story." There was a photo of Luna Park, the name I took for this blog, and the idea is to preserve Coney Island's rich and rather bizarre history by getting people to share their memories of the place. I've got plenty of Coney Island stories and on this day I added a new one. My father is being treated at Saints Joachim and Anne Residences , a rehab facility on Surf Avenue, a few blocks up from the Cyclone, the parachute jump, Nathan's and all those other spots that make Coney Island the unique place it is. He suffered a stroke last week and after seven days in the hospital we had him moved to this spot just off the boardwalk. There's a hospital in our neighborhood, but this place has a better reputation and we thinking of putting my dad in there long-term. So it's a longer haul for us, but his health is more important than our commu...

My cell phone battery died on Thursday and I damn near joined it. I think I used that phone more in that one day than I have for the whole time I've owned it. I should glued it to my head and saved my arm muscles a little trouble. My father had a stroke that day. Not a major one, but he had to go to the hospital, where he remains, and there were a crazy few hours on Thursday afternoon when I couldn't get hold of my sister and I became convinced something terrible had happened to her. The nightmare started at 4:30 am when I heard my father shouting for me. I ran into his room and found him on his back. He looked up at me and said those famous words: " I've fallen and I can't get up! " I pulled him off the floor and checked to see if anything was broken or bruised. He assured he was all right and I thought that was the end of it. I mentioned the fall to Mary, his aid, when I left for work that morning and thought no more about it. I went to my gym at lunch time ...

I just got back from the funeral parlor a little while ago. A man I used to hang out with when I was younger, named John Lucarelli, died of a heart attack over the weekend. He was 47 years old. When I knelt down before the casket, I saw there was three CD's lined up over John's body--Jethero Tull, the Moody Blues, and some other ban I didn't recognize. I remember sometime back in the 80's John had talked about going to an Asia concert. "That was the best concert," he declared. "I don't wanna hear it." I don't wann hear it. That was a line the boys said to indicate that they would not tolerate any dissension on a particular issue. The wake brought out a crowd of people from the neighborhood, older, fatter, with less hair and failing vision. I saw faces I barely recalled, people just on the fringe of my memory, and others I thought I should know but didn't. I had not seen John in years. He was suffering from multiple sclerosis for many yea...

I got some of the best advice in my life today from the Stairmaster at my gym. It was just two words that appeared on that little screen at the end of the workout, but to me they had the power of a Zen master’s teaching. Cool down. Obviously this was a reference to my physical condition, not my mental state, and it was meant to be descriptive rather than instructive, but after a day like today the words had power far beyond the confines of the health club. Tell Me About It It started this morning, when I stood on the subway platform and realized my ATM card was gone. That seemed pretty much impossible as I use that thing nearly every single day. If that card was missing it would probably mean my hand was missing along with it. But I had both my hands…and no card. I raced back home, looked all over, and then called the bank to cancel the card. I had visions of some crack addict-terrorist-bunko artist giddily cleaning out my life savings and blowing it all on drugs, pornography and Slim ...

Maybe F. Scott Fiztgerald was wrong: there are second acts in America. As long as you're a car. I came out of my house the other day and saw my neighbor's brother was driving a nice shiny Toyota Corolla. It liked kind of familiar, which was only natural, as the car had belonged to my father for many years. My father's health has been in decline for several years and so did the Toyota. As my father aged in the back bedroom, the Toyota did the same, a few yards away, in the garage, growing older and dirtier. It was an eyesore, a kind of urban version of the car-on-the-blocks lawn decorations you see outside many rural homes. The thing became a millstone around our collective necks and I was convinced that our lives would surely change for the better if we could just get rid of the damn thing. Of course, this being my family, getting rid of something can be a real struggle. My father refused to sell the Toyota, convinced he could still drive, despite the dementia, poor eyesig...