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Showing posts from January, 2007

Father's Night

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When I was growing up, every Christmas Eve my old Italian grandmother would put out food on the dining room table as a gift for the souls of the dearly departed. She had enough of them, poor woman, including her husband and my Aunt Mary, who died at 18 from lung disease. It's an old world custom, which I'm sure can be found in many cultures, and as a kid I found it somewhere between cool and creepy. I remember my grandmother as a tough old dame, but my Aunt Marie said grandma was never the same after Mary died. She was only human and the loss of her daughter took a lot out of her. I guess she was better at hiding her pain than a lot of people. Now that I'm dealing with my father's recent death, I see that grandma's yearly tribute to the dead was more for her benefit than for any wandering spirit. Putting out food for her deceased relatives was a way of connecting with them, of keeping them here them alive in her world. I think of grandma, who died when I was in the

A Message From Uncle Joe

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I got an e-mail from my Uncle Joe in Los Angeles today. Joe is my father's younger brother, the last surviving male in my dad's family I believe; he wanted to share some of his memories of my father as a young man. It's so hard for me to imagine my father as young so I really appreciated reading what Joe had to say. " As a young man , "Joe wrote, " Jim could always be recognized by the speed with which he raced from one place to another . " He ran constantly--up and down the four flights of stairs in the tenement we called home--to and from school--down to the baseball field or just off wildly in some direction to see a friend ." Joe said my father played sandlot football and baseball, sometimes with a guy named Sid who would grow up to be Paddy Chayefsky, the author of Marty, Network , and The Hospital, to name a few. I remember my dad talking about Paddy Chayefsky. He told me one time they were playing a game and the loser had to pull some goofy

High Wire Act

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So now the Gazette is two years old. I was looking through the archives yesterday and I saw that I actually missed my blog's second anniversary, which was yesterday. With the recent death of my father, it's hard to get worked up over much of anything and I let my blog's birthday slip right on by me. I went out to a local Meet-Up group event tonight in Bay Ridge. I didn't want to go at all, but I like the people and I want to see this group succeed. It didn't feel right going out and hanging with people in a bar. I didn't tell anyone at this group that my father had just died on Jan. 7 as I don't know them that well and they don't need to hear to my problems. I put in an hour and left. It feels so strange being in this house by myself. After complaining about not being able to go places or not having any privacy, now I can go anywhere I want and I have more privacy than I know what to do with. I feel pretty foolish about all that whining I did. Last night

His Life As A Dog

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A woman was hit by a car at the end of our street earlier this month, on what turned out to be the last night of my father's life. My sister and I had left our dad in the hospital after being told he was "critical but stable" and we were taking car service home when the driver told us there was a report of an accident on Senator Street. When we got there, we could see the lights of the various police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks, at the end of the block. My sister held back a little, while I walked down to the corner and saw an elderly Asian woman on the ground being attended to by the EMT's. A younger woman was standing nearby sobbing while two people held on to each of her arms. "Don't worry," one of them said, "she's going to be all right." I had a flashback to my old police reporting days when I went out to accident scenes. There were the cops and emergency people, the victim, the family members, and all the on-lookers, their faces

Old Soldiers Never Die

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An old soldier was laid to rest today, as we buried my father with full military honors. A veteran of World War II, he will be reunited with my mother, whom we lost nearly five years ago. His funeral mass was held at Our Lady of Angels Church in Bay Ridge, the same church where he and my mom were married 56 years ago. My sister told me that after my mother's funeral, as they followed her casket, he said to her, "the last time I walked down the aisle with her was with her." Now they're together again. My father did not express his emotions easily so when he said that to my sister, it was a bit of a shock. For while after my mother's death, when my father was still driving, he used to drive over to the cemetery in Staten Island and visit my mother's grave--or "go to see Mom," as he put it. I was worried because his driving skills had eroded considerably and every day at 4 o'clock I'd call him from my office, praying to God that he had made it h

Letter From Boo-Boo

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My sister and I were eating dinner on Sunday, the day our father died, when a thought suddenly popped into my head. "He used to call me 'Boo-Boo'," I blurted as I zipped up my coat. For those of you who don't know, Boo-Boo was Yogi Bear's sidekick as the pair of them prowled Jellystone Park in search of picnic (pic-a-nic?) baskets. I don't remember much about Boo-Boo, but since he was small and I was the baby of our family, I guess it seemed like a natural choice for my dad. I hadn't thought about that nickname in years. We had a bit of scare earlier this week when the Medical Examiner's Office said they had taken my father's body and required us to go down to their office near King's County Hospital and identify him. It seems that since his injuries resulted from a fall, they "wanted to ask us some questions." Naturally, it was pouring raining when my sister and I went and naturally I was furious and frightened. I felt like I was

The Man in the Rearview Mirror

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Good, Better, Best

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My mother had this little ditty she would recite whenever she wanted us to buckle down and do our work. " Good, better, best ," she'd say, " never it rest. Until the good is better and the better is best ." Yeah, it's a little simplistic, but it's also hard to argue with. What? You want to just sit there and be mediocre? Come on, now... I've been trying to watch my thoughts since 2007 began and I've notice my tendency to get angry and stay angry, like rage is some kind of drug. Of course it is, and if you don't get a handle on it, it can be deadlier than heroin. I recall incidents in the past, get all worked up, waste time and damage my health. I started getting worked up about something the other day--I can't remember what it was to save my life--and I thought of the line from John Lennon's Christmas song, "war is over if you want it." Obviously he was talking about wars between nations, but I think it applies to individual

A Year Without Fear

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I'm nursing the first hangover I've had in God knows how long today. But I've got the perfect excuse: it was New Year's Eve. I didn't set out to get drunk--and to be brutally honest, it doesn't take much to get me plastered--but you get into a party mood and then your brain pulls an Elvis and leaves the building. I started the countdown early Sunday morning at my gym where I sparred with Peter, my boxing instructor at New York's Sports Club. I know we're all sick of the "see you next year" jokes, but honestly, writing about that class now, it feels like it was ages ago, instead of just 24 hours. Peter is a professional boxer, kick-boxer, cage-fighter, ah, hell you name it--he'd box kangaroos if you gave him a chance. A truly nice guy, Peter is merciless when we put on the gloves. He likes to make jokes at my expense as we suit up. "My left jab and your nose should get married," he says, "they spend so much time together."