The Luna Park Gazette

I heard the guy before I even opened the door. It was Saturday night, bitter cold here in Brooklyn and I was starving. I had gone shopping at my local supermarket and now I just wanted to pick up something for dinner and go the hell home. I decided to pick up an order of spaghetti and meatballs at Rocky’s & Nicky’s Pizzeria on Colonial Road. It’s not fine dining and I don’t have it often since I’m watching my cholesterol, but it’s just the right thing for a cold winter night. The hideous arctic blast was so nasty that my aunt had called earlier in the day from Los Angeles to see how I was doing. I let her know in no uncertain terms that I was trapped in my house and miserable as hell. “It’s like Covid all over again,” she said. I guess I was feeling particularly masochistic because I asked my aunt what the weather was like in L.A. “Well…a young woman walked by a little while ago and she was wearing shorts,” she said. I had to ask. Worse yet, I called my ...

Fidelity: faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support. My phone pinged late Friday morning and moments later I was traveling through time. I had just received a text message from my niece Kristin who had sent me a 1989 magazine ad that featured a photo of my brother Peter—Kristin’s father—when he became branch manager at Fidelity Investments’ Garden City office. “Dear Long Island,” the ad proclaims alongside a photo of Peter with a very serious look on his face. “When it comes to your investments, I’LL EARN YOUR FIDELITY…Instead of investment ‘advice’, I’ll give you useful, objective information. The facts and nothing but the facts.” It was such a jolt. I remember that advertisement so well. We had a copy mounted in a plexiglass frame that we used to keep on the dining room buffet. When our oldest brother Jim was visiting from California, he couldn’t resist making a wisecrack about insider trading. “Dear Long Island,” he said, ...

I remember hearing a story about two philosophy professors at a New England college. The men were bitter rivals and one winter day they came walking toward each other down a very narrow path in the snow. One professor, who was burly and quite aggressive, angrily declared, “I never step aside for fools!” The other professor, a much smaller fellow, quickly moved out of his way. “I always do,” he cheerfully replied. A week after the blizzard that slammed into New York, snow is still a large part of the conversation around these parts. We have long since moved away from the picturesque phase of snowfall and right to the yuk portion of the storm, where the snow is dirty, marked by dogs, stray cats and God knows what else, and very much in the way. And it’s cold as hell, too, and, like the snow, it’s still sticking around; day after day, we’re getting hammered with single digit temperatures. We’re supposed to reach a high of 30 degrees tomorrow, and I feel like breaking out...