The Luna Park Gazette

I knew I saved that fortune for a reason. Whenever I do one of my wonton-soup-and-movie nights, I like to get a stack of fortune cookies to munch on whilst I enjoy my flick. I’ll readily admit that soup and fortune cookies don’t make for the healthiest meal plan, but I like to give myself a pass on the weekends. And I make sure to read every single fortune in the pile—both for entertainment as well as instruction because good advice can come from anywhere. The other day I found an old fortune on my kitchen table that read “we are taught by every person we meet.” The concept is not new, of course. I’ve seen a couple of variants on Instagram, including one attributed to John C. Maxwell that says, “each person we meet has the potential to teach us something.” The important word here is “potential” because we can’t learn a lesson unless we are willing to receive it. This can be quite challenging when we run across the seemingly endless supply of dopes, dickheads, liars and ...

I had to ask. It’s cold in New York right now, cold as a bastard, to be honest, and car owners of a certain generation might be familiar with the expression “dead as Kelsey’s nuts.” I was speaking with my brother Saturday morning while walking face-first into a freezing wind and he reminded me how our father loved to use that colorful phrase, which means something is done for, kaput and out of commission. After speaking with my brother, I recalled how Dad had dropped that line on me one time in the Eighties after he’d gone out to start up my old Toyota Corolla, which had given up the ghost in our garage. “It’s as dead as Kelsey’s nuts,” he said upon walking into the kitchen. I was too angry and upset about my lifeless car to ask him where the hell he had gotten such a weird expression. This was one of many phrases my parents used to say that hark back to an earlier time, such as “another job well done by your Treasury men in action,” which my father liked to say, and whic...

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I’ve been looking all over my house today for my father’s prayer card. The card, which was given out at his wake, featured an image of St. Patrick on one side and a poem on the other. My mother’s prayer card had a portrait of St. Martin de Porres and for years I used to carry them both with me everywhere I went. It felt good to have them close to me, but I realized now that I haven’t seen St. Patrick in a while. Today is the 17th anniversary of my father’s death and I feel like reconnecting with him in some small way. My father had been hospitalized after falling and hitting his head a few weeks earlier. My sister and I saw him briefly in the intensive care unit and we were told that his condition was critical but stable. Early the next morning, my sister called me to say that he had died. It was five years after we’d lost our mother. “The new year is one week old and with the passing of Little Christmas on Saturday, he died right after the holidays officially ended,” I w...