The Luna Park Gazette

I thought everything was fine until I threw my book into the freezer and discovered that I had stepped into a steaming pile of tsundoku . Perhaps I should explain. On the way home from the gym yesterday, I passed a table covered with used books that had been set up outside a local secondhand store. Keep walking, I told myself, you’ve got books at home that you’ll never read. This is painfully true. There are stacks of used books all over my computer room and boxes of them in my closets. Hell will freeze over and Satan himself will be handing out ice cream sodas before I ever get to them all, but I can’t seem to part with any of them. Knowing this, you’d think I would’ve kept going yesterday, but I couldn’t resist. I’m always amazed at the excellent books I find for a fraction of their original price. I came across my all time favorite novel, Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion, at a secondhand store more than 25 years ago, and that book has stayed with me ever since. ...

I climbed into the back seat of my ride and got comfortable. I just had come from an appointment with my nutritionist and I decided to reward myself by taking car service home instead of waiting for the bus. It’s more money, sure, but the driver takes you right to your front door and you don’t have to worry about some mutant coughing all over you, hitting you up for change, or trying to save your soul. Yeah, I thought as snapped on my seat belt, this was a good idea. And then the music started. Oh, cut me a break, buddy, will you? The driver was playing some kind of Middle Eastern music that was slicing right through me. Bay Ridge has seen a large growth in its Arabic population over the years, with some wags sarcastically calling it “Beirut.” There are mosques in the neighborhood now, women in hijabs are a common sight and it seems like every other store on Fifth Avenue is either a hookah joint or a Middle Eastern coffee shop. It’s certainly much different from the pl...

On the last day of the third grade, my teacher, Sister Joan Bernadette, thought so much of me that she gave me a huge stack of baseball cards. She had confiscated them from one of my classmates during the school year and apparently thought I was so well behaved that I deserved a reward. I really wasn’t well behaved so much as terrified to step out of line. And I didn’t even like baseball cards, but I enjoyed getting free stuff and I was pleased that my gutlessness had paid off in some small way. I raced home to show the bounty to my father and somewhere in the conversation I let it slip that the cards had originally belonged to a classmate named Sal who just happened to live down the block from us. “They’re Sal’s cards?” he asked. “Well, then you have to give them back.” I was floored. What was my father talking about? Give them back ? Oh, hell no. These were my cards now. A nun, one of God’s emissaries on earth, had given me this prize, which was the next best thing to ha...

The message was right there in front of me, floating above the stream of hot air that blew through my fingers. Feel the power… I was walking up 69th Street last week when a total stranger suddenly crowded into my space. “Hey, how you doin’?” he said. I was momentarily surprised, but then I looked closer and saw that this guy wasn’t a stranger at all. He was one of my buddies from the gym. I see him every flipping week. He’s a big, beefy fellow with a crew cut and thick glasses, someone who most definitely sticks out in a crowd. Yet I had no idea who he was until he was right on top of me. “Hey, how’s it going?” I said a bit embarrassed. “Sorry I didn’t recognize you.” “You were lost in thought,” he said, gently dismissing my concern. We chatted for a few minutes and then I told him to have a nice day. “You made it better,” he said, and went on his way. That was a very nice thing to say and I made a note to pass his kindness along. But I was still upset at being s...

In the early 1700s, Paulus Vander Ende, a Dutch farmer, built a house in what is now Ridgewood, Queens. Two centuries later, the Onderdonks, another family of Dutch farmers, bought that house and their descendants lived there for nearly 100 years. The house on Flushing Avenue then went through several owners, who turned the place into a scrap glass business, a stable, a speakeasy, an office for a greenhouse company and a spare parts factory for the Apollo space program. The place was later abandoned and nearly destroyed by fire before being restored and opened to the public in 1982. And, luckily for me, the restoration included a bathroom. I discovered the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House entirely by accident—or near accident—during a walking tour of Bushwick with my Brooklyn Meet-Up group. We had gone to see the Bushwick Collective , a fabulous outdoor art show of murals painted on many of the neighborhood’s factory buildings. Now when I was growing up, Bushwick was a crime-r...