The Luna Park Gazette

So, what was I doing in 1994? The question came to mind the other night while I was washing the dishes. I noticed that the towel I was using to dry off the plates and silverware was an old cloth calendar that had once hung in the kitchen at my parents’ house. That year caught my eye. I couldn’t believe this thing in my hands had survived nearly four decades. The calendar bears the image of a house with a picket fence and trees on either side. Near the top there are a pair of roosters crowing on either side of a scroll bearing the Kitchen Prayer. “ Lord, warm all the kitchen with thy love ,” it reads, “ and light it with thy peace. Forgive me all my worry and make my grumbling cease. ” I’m particularly fond of that last line since it would pretty much take an act of God to get me to cease my grumbling. There’s little doubt that my mother had picked out this calendar. She had fondness for colonial theme décor and these cloth calendars fit in much better than any of the fr...

A week ago, I had some hope. I can be a bit cynical—some might even say “hostile”—if I don’t keep a close watch on these thoughts of mine. People can get on my nerves rather quickly—if I allow them to--but every so often something happens that almost restores my faith in humanity. Last week, I went to my bank’s branch on 86th Street and 5th Avenue after the gym and found the ATMs had been taken offline. This sucked monkey balls. I had planned on doing some shopping at a fruit store one block away and I wasn’t sure if I had enough cash in my wallet. Some of the local businesses strongly prefer cash over plastic. As I was leaving, a man approached me and began speaking in Spanish, obviously looking to get some money as well. I did my best to explain the branch was out of the commission and pointed to a sign indicating the next one was 11 blocks away. It took a little effort, but he eventually got the idea. As I started to walk away when he called out to me. I thoug...

Whenever I griped about my various jobs, Fred the Shrink had a great response. “It funds your passion,” he’d say. Fred knew that I really wanted to write fiction for a living, but he also knew—much better than I did—that writing professionally is a tough gig and that many writers have some kind of day job to keep them solvent. Fred’s encouragement helped me get through some tough employment times, which thank God, have gotten markedly better in recent years. And I thought of him this weekend when I went to the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney Museum. Born in 1882, Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker who had an incredible gift from finding drama in the commonplace subjects. He’s perhaps best known for his 1942 painting Nighthawks , which portrays four people in a downtown diner later at night, as seen from a distance through the diner’s window. These people seem so lonely and isolated, but Hopper himself said that he didn’t see Nighthawks as par...

The Happy Hour, yes, of course. How could I have possibly forgotten the name of the tavern that was pretty much my second home some thirty-odd years ago? Well, I’ve been forgetting a lot of things lately, so perhaps we shouldn’t ask that question. The important thing is that I met up this weekend with a bunch of my co-workers from the Pocono Record, where I worked from 1988 to 1992. We had our grand reunion in the Philadelphia suburb of Swarthmore. Naturally, I was a nervous wreck in the days leading up to Saturday. I was positive I had gotten my hotel reservation wrong; then convinced I had gotten the date of my bus ticket wrong; and then drop dead certain that I would get lost in Philly and not be able to find the commuter train that would take me out to this lovely college town. Do I really have to tell you that none of these things happened, and that I can find things to worry about like a truffle hog on a fungi hunt? No, I didn't think so. Anyway, I...