The Luna Park Gazette

One night back in the 1980s, I came home to find my brother Peter and his wife had stopped by our house for a visit. They were sitting in the living room with my parents and when I walked in, my brother loudly called out, “hey, it’s Uncle Wimp!” Peter and I had a long history of relentless ball-busting, so I shrugged off his latest sophomoric insult and tried to move along. But he wasn’t letting it go. “Hey, Uncle Wimp,” he said. I was about to tell to shut his trap when I realized that the key word in his two-word insult was “Uncle”—meaning my sister-in-law was pregnant, and that I was indeed going to be an uncle. Well, I forgot all about the “wimp” business and gave my sister-in-law a hug, I was just so damn happy. The time flew by and the next thing I remember I was sitting at my desk at the Bay Ridge Home Reporter when my phone rang. “Robert,” my mother said urgently. “You’re an uncle!” “Boy or girl?” I shouted. “Girl!” “All right!” I hung up the phone, ran r...

"What stands in the way becomes the way.”--Marcus Aurelius There, I said it again. The words popped into my head on Sunday, and I immediately asked myself, “hey, isn’t that the name of a song?” Yes, in fact, it’s a 1941 tune written and published by Redd Evans and David Mann. Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra recorded a version in 1945 that reached No. 1 on Billboard's chart of “Records Most-Played on the Air”. Bobby Vinton’s version, the one I know and don’t particularly care for, spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard Chart in 1964, before being ousted by The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But I wasn’t thinking of the song when the phrase came to me. I was thinking about how many times I’ve said some version of “I wish Peter were here” since my brother left this world three weeks ago. I said it on Saturday when I was helping my auntie defrost her refrigerator, a job we’ve both been putting off for weeks. It’s an older model and probably should be s...

I wonder what I was doing on December 23, 2023. It was two days from Christmas, so I probably cranking out those last few holiday cards and looking forward to dinner with my family. It was a Saturday and the most popular song in the U.S. at that time was Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”—I still like that song, damn it--while “Last Christmas” by Wham!—which I wrote about in my blog the following day- was top dog in the U.K. In the post entitled " Moments of Wonder " I talked about how I had regained my Christmas spirit, after my listless response to the most wonderful time of the year 12 months earlier. The reason I’m so fixated on 12/23/22 is because that’s the date of the only voice mail message from my brother Peter, who’s been gone for about two weeks now. It’s just 17 seconds long and rather mundane, to be honest. “ Hey dude what's going on? ” he says, sounding a little disoriented. “ Got confused for a second…I just called to say Me...