The Luna Park Gazette

I don’t want to brag, but I’ve got some pair of balls. Before you take offense, please know that I’m not bragging about my manhood, nor am I claiming to be some fearless risk taker. I’m talking about real balls—the round objects. In this case, these are exercise balls, which I’ve been using at my rehab facility to get my battered back back on track. The wonderful staff have shown me some exercises to ease my pain and encouraged me to do them at home. I’m impatient to get healthy, so I’m more than happy to comply. Every morning I go through a series of stretches to combat spinal stenosis. One of the things they have me doing is rolling an exercise ball back and forth with my legs to help stretch my lower back. In my zeal to heal, I ordered an exercise ball—or Swiss ball—of...

When the winds of change blow, some people build walls; others build windmills. – Chinese proverb Peter’s windmill is gone. Well, the basic structure is still there, but the sails—the things that make it a windmill—are gone. Now it looks like a pawn with windows. The model windmill stands outside a house at 78th Street and Shore Road, and when my brother Peter was a kid, he loved that thing so much we all called it Peter’s Windmill. It stood unscathed for decades. I never noticed anything amiss until last week, when I was walking to my sister’s apartment building for a barbecue and saw that its limbs had been amputated. It was a shock. We lost Peter last year, and now one of his favorite landmarks was also gone. I’ve been thinking about my brother a lot this week. The next day, I visited my aunt, and while the express bus rolled up Sixth Avenue, I saw that 8th Street had been dubbed Jimi Hendrix Way in honor of the rock legend. And I was thinking about Peter again, sinc...

I got a look into the future last week while standing in the present as I slipped into the past. Okay, let’s see if I can make some sense out of this. I’ve been going to physical therapy for the last two weeks for my aching back, which—praise the Lord—is finally showing some signs of improvement. The facility is a cozy little spot on 75th Street, about a 15‑minute walk from my house. The reception area is very small, and the first thing I saw when I walked in was a widescreen TV displaying the image of a young man wearing headphones. My doctor’s office has a TV in the waiting area that seems permanently stuck on NY1, so I thought nothing of the setup at the PT facility—until this fellow started speaking to me. It turns out I had come face‑to‑widescreen‑face with a growing healthcare trend called a Virtual Front Desk (VFD), or video‑enabled virtual receptionist kiosk. While remote telephone answering services have existed for decades, streaming a live, dedicated receptio...