The Luna Park Gazette

Nearly 30 years ago, a co-worker at a newspaper in Waterbury, Connecticut gave me a candle as a Christmas present. The candle is a round swirl of red, white and green wax and I kept it ever since, never once thinking of actually using the thing for its intended purpose. It's so attractive I thought it would be shame to light it up and watch all that beauty melt away. And I’m already paying enough money to Con Ed for the lights, what's the point of going all Ben Franklin? Then one day last week I caught sight of that candle sitting on my kitchen table and I thought, yeah, it’s time. I honestly don’t know what came over me; why, after more than three decades I had this sudden urge to finally light that wick. Maybe it was a desire to change, to break out of old molds and do something different, no matter how small or insignificant. The businessman John G. Shedd once said that “a ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” I think the same can be...

The wind was the first clue. I woke up this morning some time before dawn to the sound of a harsh wind blowing outside my window. Wow, I thought, that doesn’t sound like sunny Southern California at all. Well, that’s because it wasn’t. I had been dreaming and I quickly realized that I was nowhere near Los Angeles, where it was sunny and 75 degrees. I was still in my home in Brooklyn on a cold December morning waiting for the sun to come up. L.A. was a mirage and it served as the setting for a larger, and ultimately more painful, delusion where I reunited with my former best friend who ghosted me several years ago and moved out West a few months back. I recall walking down a wide boulevard with the sun shining down on my face when my buddy came bouncing up to me from the opposite direction. I don’t remember when we said to each other, but I do know he stepped right in to give me a strong and very sincere hug. That feeling of his arms around me is so, real, so...

It’s a funny how a song can sneak up on you. Two things I love most about the Christmas season are the lights and the beautiful music. You can pretty much keep the rest of the madness, but don’t take away those fabulous decorations or my holiday tunes. My favorites songs include “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” and “O Holy Night,” which can bring tears to my eyes if you get me in the right mood. Most of the more modern holiday songs leave me cold, though I must confess that I am one of the few people on earth who actually likes “All I Want for Christmas is You,” even though it was voted the most annoying Christmas song in 2019. I’ll certainly take Mariah Carey's song over “Grandma Got run over by a reindeer,” any day of the week, and don’t even get me started on “Dominick the Italian Christmas Donkey,” which is so bad it could turn the Pope into an atheist. And then we have “ Driving Home for Christmas ”, Chris Rea’s holiday song that was re...

When I worked at my old office on Wall Street, most mornings I would make a point of stopping by to see my buddy Juan. Juan’s a great guy and I always got a nice lift whenever I spoke with him. We’d shoot the breeze for a little while before I’d have to leave, and Juan would send me on my way with this fabulous line. “Make it a great day,” he’d say. Did you catch that? Juan didn’t say “ have a great day.” He said, “ make it a great day.” That suggests that we have more power over the events in our lives than a lot of us realize. This message was reinforced recently when I went to my gym and spotted a small, handwritten sign near the front door. “Make today matter,” it said. There is it again. A literal sign encouraging us to make something happen with the time allotted to us. These two threads were pulled together last week when I read an editorial by New York Times by Lindsay Crouse called “ You Can Make Any Day the Best of the Year .” In her column, Cro...