The Luna Park Gazette

Police Story

2012-01-29T13:51:00.001-08:00

I walked into the community affairs office at the 68th Precinct and approached the cop behind the desk.

“You fuck!” He roared before I had a chance to open my mouth. “You didn’t bring us any coffee!”

I stood there in shock, trying not to wet my pants or run out the door. I didn’t know what to expect when I entered this place, but I surely wasn’t expecting this.

It was sometime around 1986 and I was working as a reporter for a weekly paper in Bay Ridge. I had been sent there to get some stories for the police blotter and this cop, Larry, was the guy to see.

I don’t think I had ever been in a police station prior to that day. I hardly had anything to do with cops at all. Shucks, I was a good Catholic boy living in a quiet neighborhood. Why would I get involved with the police?

It turned out Larry was just breaking my cojones, something cops the world over like to do to reporters. I later learned that if cops yank your chain it usually means they like you. If they’re curt and professional, it’s probably a sign that they don’t trust you and you should find another line of work.

And Larry wouldn’t have turned down that coffee if I had thought to bring some along. Cops, I discovered, like freebies.

While some people dream all their lives of being reporters, I kind of backed into the profession. I was lacking direction and other than the fact that I wanted to write for a living, I didn’t know any definitive career plans.

The weekly paper was a good place to start. I covered all kinds of local stories—including crime.

We got a call one day from a woman in Park Slope. That was pretty much the fringe of our coverage area, but this woman said that she had looked out her window and seen “a cop on the ground.”

She didn’t know any more than that and, since we didn’t have a scanner in our newsroom, neither did we. But it sounded serious, like maybe a cop had been shot. So off I went in the pouring rain looking for mayhem in a neighborhood I barely knew.

I drove all around the street where the cop had supposedly gone down, but I didn’t see any serious activity. I didn’t see any activity, just wet streets and dark skies.

But I wanted to be thorough, so I drove to the police precinct in downtown Brooklyn. This was an older building, a holdover perhaps from the Forties, and bore no resemblance to the modern-ish design of the Six-Eight.

I was still a little tense about being in a police station, but I approached the desk sergeant and asked about an incident involving a police officer being injured.

And he started laughing.

Closer Than You Think

It turned out that the cop in question had indeed gone down—after slipping on the wet sidewalk and falling on his butt.

However, he quickly got back up--something our tipster failed to notice--and he and his partner arrested their man.

The sergeant brought me back to speak with the two officers.

“Here they are,” he said loudly, “the hero cops.”

The cops filled me in on what the suspect had done, and honestly it was so long ago, I don’t remember, except that it was incredibly minor, compared with what I had been expecting.

And please understand I wasn’t wishing that someone had gotten hurt; I just wanted a decent story.

“Where’s the suspect now?” I asked.

“He’s right behind you,” one of the cops said, nodding over my shoulder.

I whirled around and saw this morose young man handcuffed to a radiator pipe.

“You may want to step back,” the cop casually added, “in case he tries to grab your keester.”

I did exactly what I was told, got the rest of the facts and scooted back up to Bay Ridge.

It turned out that I would be spending a lot of time in police stations over the next several years and doing all sorts of crazy things.

The police scanner would be my constant companion as I ran to fires and car accidents on freezing cold nights, got cursed at by criminals and their families, and worried constantly about making a mistake or being scooped by competing newspapers.

I remember hanging out with a bunch of Pennsylvania state troopers at a traffic stop on my birthday just to shoot the breeze. I even helped carry a body bag away from a fatal fire scene one time.

I also had to fight to keep alleged “colleagues” from helping themselves to my stories. It never fails: when there’s a four-alarm fire in the dead of winter, you can be certain that you’ll be on your own.

But when you come across some juicy scandal, you’ll find that you have dozens of little helpers just itching to get a piece of the story.

I didn’t know of any this back, of course, and if I had I would’ve found something else to do. But I can look back upon this experiences fondly now.

Police reporting can be stressful, miserable work, but it can also be thrilling, where you see people at their very best and their very worst; where you speak to people who have lost their loved ones or been burned out of their homes and where your whole day can be turned upside by the codes coming out of the scanner.

It forced me to do things I would never thought I’d be capable of doing and I know I’m the better for it.

And despite all the high pressure, long hours and strange people, I’m happy to say that no one ever grabbed my keester.

God Bless You, Miss Indelible

2012-01-22T18:20:00.000-08:00

When I first started blogging, I decided that I would allow people to write whatever they wanted in the comments section.

I wasn’t going to silence critics and only retain the positive remarks. I wasn’t going to stifle anyone’s freedom of expression or be a cyber-nun parsing each and every word someone left behind.

Say whatever you want, I thought, it won't bother me a bit.

But then the “Cheap Viagra” ads started and I couldn’t seem to stop them. They were particularly annoying because they were often worded to appear as if a real human being has read your post.

“You’re so right,” they’ll say, or “that’s really funny,” before launching into their shtick, which, of course, involved logging on to some website and buying whatever they were peddling. (No, I didn’t and shame on you for asking.)

So now I monitor the comments and occasionally I’ll be forced to zap some bit of digital drivel to the ninth circle of Internet hell where it belongs.

Recently, though, I got a comment that was so bizarre, so monumentally twisted that “spam” doesn’t begin to describe it. This tome wasn’t computer-generated-—somebody actually sat down to write the damn thing, which I find rather frightening.

It’s a verbal freak show, a linguistic dumpster fire, a toxic collection of syllables that should be surrounded with yellow crime scene tape and hosed down by the EPA.

It’s kind of messed up.

I have no idea what this guy’s problem is and, sadly, I don’t think he does either. My original post was about my on-going back troubles and this individual chose to respond with a blazing torrent of gibberish that could peel the paint off an aircraft carreir.

And it went something like this...

You're So Wrong

'Lunatic' would be better - look forward to an eXXXplosion in the come'n year, with alla the outta-work, underpaid, lower-class families in this hardcore, whorizontal depression caused by the OWG.

They need work? Selling their flesh is maybe the only way besides praying and asking for forgiveness.

Nyah! They're too proud. See why our Mother sed only 1/4 of humanity's gonna make it??

If you delete this, the sin is on YOUR head. I'm only the prophet --- Here's what we'll have in Heaven (for the women): HEAR YE! O HEAR YE! Wanna be at my BIG-ol, kick-ass, party-hardy celebrating our resurrection for eons and eons in Heaven Above, girly?

A profusion of peace, eternal plethora of paradise, palm trees, 72ish degrees, fuzzy-navels, point-blank, passion-in-primetime, pink, picturesque-portions-we’ll-possess, delicious-and-nutritious perennial pleasures, too, without price, nor pride, without passwords, nor plastic, nor pretext.

You’re more than welcome, girl; you’re definitely invited - God’s calling you through this sinfull mortal.

Whether you respond YAY or NAY is up to you --- God only gives bawls to those who see the need for humility, Miss Indelible. God bless you.

See what I mean? There’s some kind of religious message here and a warning about Armageddon, but it’s so garbled that suddenly the end times don’t look so bad.

I’m not sure what the “girly” or the “Miss Indelible” is about as I’m pretty sure I’m a male. Or at least I was when I got up this morning.

But then it’s probably asking too much of this "sinfull mortal" to write something that makes sense. He's only the prophet to whom God has apparently given a large set of "bawls."

I did eventually delete this rant—once I got over my shock—so I guess the sin is on my head now.

God bless you, whoever the hell you are. I wish you a profusion of peace and an eternal plethora of paradise and you’re definitely invited to go comment on somebody else’s blog.

Tuxedo Farewell

2012-01-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

The year has just begun and I’ve already lost a friend.

My sister’s cat, Tuxedo, crossed that Rainbow Bridge after suffering a stroke and left this life on the same day our father did in 2007.

Tuxedo had a heart condition and the vet had warned my sister that he could go at any time. But that doesn’t lessen the pain of losing him.

I had a special fondness for Tuxedo. I used to drive him and his brother, Smokey, to their vet's office in Manhattan. They weren’t happy about being packed up in their cat boxes and hauled over to the city, but it had to be done.

Both Smokey and Tuxedo were very shy around strangers and would run like hell whenever I came over. Often the only sight I had of them was their rear ends disappearing under my sister’s bed.

But Tuxedo surprised me one night shortly after our first vet run. We were sitting in the kitchen and he came walking in like he owned the place. And being a cat, of course, he did own the place.

I was stunned because usually if I wanted to see him, I’d have to get down on my knees, lift the blankets of my sister’s bed, and peer into the darkness. And now here he was out in the open.

But then it got even crazier when Tuxedo walked up to me and jumped right into my lap.

Okay, now I was completely speechless—no wisecracks, no jokes, no words whatsoever. I was too shocked to say anything.

How could this cat who was once so terrified of me now suddenly feel so at ease in my presence?

Up We Go

I didn’t think he knew that I was his driver, since he was in the cat box the whole time, but maybe he identified me by my voice or my scent, or used that animal ESP that I hear so much about. In any case, he made me a very happy man just by performing that simple act.

And now Tuxedo’s jumped into God’s lap.

That’s trouble with pets. They give us so much love and devotion and yet they’re only with us for such a painfully short time. It doesn’t seem fair.

Tuxedo was gone by the time we got to the animal hospital. While we waited to see him one last time, we heard a woman sobbing in another part of the building, indicating that someone else had lost a loved on this night.

My sister was very rightfully concerned about how Smokey would handle the loss of his sibling. The vet suggested rubbing a cloth over Tuxedo’s body so Smokey could get his brother’s scent.

The only problem was we didn’t have any cloth. I was wondering what to do and then I looked down at this ratty old scarf I’ve had since the Carter Administration.

I’ve been meaning to toss it for years, but each spring I throw the thing back in the closet and forget about it until the cold weather comes back.

It was time to break the cycle. Instead of just trashing this old garment, we’d use it for a good cause. I pulled the scarf off my neck and handed it over to my sister. She rubbed it over Tuxedo's body and now it belongs to Smokey.

I have a new scarf now and it’s a real beauty. Every time I put it on I like to think of a good friend who made me feel so special and whom I'd gladly drive to the ends of the earth and back.

Thanks, Tuxedo. And rest in peace.

Thy Perfect Light

2012-01-08T19:22:00.000-08:00

It’s amazing the things you see when you actually start looking.

I had this experience on Friday when I went to the noon mass at Trinity Church.

It was Epiphany, the official end of the holiday season and I had seen several discarded Christmas trees on the sidewalks in my neighborhood that morning. The lights would be coming down next.

Epiphany comes from the Greek ephiphaneia meaning “manifestation” or “striking appearance" and during the sermon, Rev. Mark spoke about the importance of the star that the Three Wise Men followed through the desert.

He encouraged us to “find the star with your name on it.”

“You can also be the star,” he told us.

I love the whole idea of stars and light since I tend to sink into dark moods if I’m not careful. But things got really weird when I happened to look up over the altar to the stained glass windows depicting Jesus and several saints.

I looked a little bit higher and I saw…a star.

It was actually a star-shaped light, but the point is that I have been going to Trinity for at least four years now and I’d never seen the star until Friday.

Am I really that unobservant…or is this star a new decoration? Either way, I found it to be very inspirational.

At the end of the service I went to greet Rev. Mark and wished him a Happy New Year.

“Are you going to make this year better than last year?” he said, pumping my hand.

Well, he got me so motivated, so enthusiastic that I completely forgot where I was and to whom I was speaking.

“Oh, hell, yes!” I declared.

I immediately slapped my hand over my mouth. Did I just say a bad word to a priest…in church? Yeah, I kinda think I did…

If I had said “hell” back in Catholic school I’d be seeing stars, all right, as the nuns would mercilessly pound me into a coma. That would be a genuine striking appearance from which I would never recover.

But I was several light years away from those bad old days and instead of getting Inquisitional on my butt, Rev. Mark put his head back and laughed.

I was embarrassed but relieved and I asked him about the star over the altar.

“Is that something new?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s been there for years.”

“But I just saw it today,” I said.

“That’s what I’m talking about!”

I left church feeling pretty good. I had found my star, gotten a good laugh, and narrowly avoided excommunication all in less than an hour.

That’s the kind of productivity I want to bring into the New Year.

Halfway to the Stars

2012-01-05T20:25:00.000-08:00

Whenever our family went on vacation, my father would complain that he was doing too much driving.

“I’m chained to the goddamn wheel,” he’d declare in full victim mode.

Of course we ignored him and demanded to be driven here, there, and everywhere in between. That's what kids do, right?

I just returned to New York after spending Christmas week in San Francisco with my family and this time I was the one chained to the goddamn wheel—and I enjoyed every second of it.

I haven’t owned a car since I moved back to the city 14 years ago. The insurance rates are too high, traffic is a nightmare and parking is even worse.

I do miss driving, though, and since I’ve never owned a new car, I'll jump at the chance to sit behind the wheel of anything made in the 21st Century.

Well, we had a great time. My sister, auntie, and myself all flew out to see my brother, his wife, and my niece Victoria, who turns 17 (oh, God) this month.

Apparently our flight out of JFK was delayed, but I was so zonked out on Xanax that I have absolutely no recollection of this and, from what my sister tells me, that’s all for the best.

There was something about waiting for a replacement part and getting us to our destination “as safely as possible” that I thankfully missed.

Say “no” to drugs? Not on an airplane, brother.

After getting the car and finding our hotel, we zipped over to a local restaurant where Victoria works as a waitress and paid her a surprise visit. Oh, if only I had gotten a picture of her as we strolled in through the back door…she would have killed me.

I even had my magical Christmas moment when I was talking with Victoria at my brother’s house and Kristin, my other beautiful niece, called me from New York. For a few lovely minutes I had both of them with me at the same time. God bless us, everyone, indeed.

That night we had dinner at Benihana, where the chef does all these funky things with your food before you stuff your face.

During the week, we went to the Legion of Honor, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, while hitting Carmel, Monterey, and the Ferrari-Carano winery in Healdsburg.

Ferrari was my mother’s maiden name, so this place had special meaning for us. Of course I couldn’t do any drinking because I was chained to the goddamn wheel---oops—because I was driving. But I had fun nevertheless.

That's All Folks!

There’s a huge statue of a wild boar outside the winery, commemorating the demise of a savage pig that had been raising hell in the vicinity until he got his porcine ticket punched.

A plaque beneath the statue cites an old legend that “if you rub the wild boar’s snout, good luck will come your way.”

You can bet a month's wages that we all lined up to rub that porker’s honker until his beak put Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer's to shame. Not that I’m superstitious or anything…

In the name of full disclosure, I did have a chance to turn the car over to my brother at one point because my relatives were worried I might have trouble getting through the fog around the Golden Gate Bridge.

To be honest, I was a little nervous myself, but I didn’t want to give into my fears. Hell, I didn’t fly all the way from Brooklyn in a drug-induced stupor just to punk out over a handful of mist.

And I didn’t want to chain my brother to the wheel either, so I took the keys and hit the road.

There was a point when we were coming home from one of our trips where I was driving and just listening to my relatives talking to each other. I didn’t join in the conversation, I just enjoyed the moment and I wonder if my father, in spite of all his protests, didn’t relish his time behind the wheel as well.

My father came to mind again while we were walking through Land’s End in San Francisco one day. We were standing out a spot overlooking the bay and we came upon a note that someone had written to his or her deceased father.

“Dad,” the letter said. “Hope you enjoy the beautiful view. Mom is very sick and we miss you.”

I hope whoever this person is found some solace in writing this message and leaving it at this lovely spot.

The trip had to end, of course, and so we all packed into the car and headed down 101 North to SFO.

Naturally I was a nervous wreck just thinking about getting into an airplane. There were cars zipping all around me and this big-ass truck wouldn’t get out of my way.

I got a little closer and saw that the rig belonged to—are you ready?—a freaking casket company, which I think is proof positive that God has a sense of humor. Too bad I don’t.

I turned over the car, swallowed a bucket of pills, and slipped into a coma. No offense to the Ferrari boar, but it takes more than a lucky pig snout to get me airborne. The next thing I knew, I was back in Brooklyn freezing my tail off.

So the holidays were a rousing success and I’m slowly working on all those things I put off until after Christmas. I’m sorry the vacation is over, but I’ll never regret being chained to the wheel.

Star of Wonder, Star of Night

2011-12-22T19:43:00.000-08:00

I switched the TV on to the Christmas carol channel to get the holiday spirit going last night and came away with some valuable information.

The cable people like to run little Yuletide factoids along the bottom of the screen while the music plays. So I learned that in Hungary, food cannot be eaten on Christmas Eve until a twinkling star is seen in the sky.

No food, I thought, that’s ridiculous. What happens if it’s overcast and you don’t see any stars?

You go Hungary! (Ouch! I'll be getting a lump of coal for that one...)

But as I thought about it, I started to like this tradition. A star is a sign of hope and given the current state of the world we could all use a little hope right this very minute. It seemed like a good idea to hold up the party until you get that sign from above.

I just got done watching “Scrooge,” the best film version of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” and it got pretty emotional.

I grew up watching this movie with my family and now here I was sitting by myself, remembering all those great holidays. I went through a lot of tissues as I recalled Christmas past, but it’s still a great movie.

I was planning to Scrooge my way through Christmas this year. I was sickened by news of Black Friday shoppers pepper-spraying each other or trampling over their fellow human beings to snatch up two-dollar waffle irons.

Keep Watching the Skies

And then there’s the commercials that Santa Claus peddling everything from electronics to candy. St. Nick is even walking the floor of a car dealership for God’s sake. This is how we celebrate the birth of Jesus? No, thank you.

But you can rise above all that misery and still enjoy Christmas. There is a festive mood in the air, there are so many beautiful songs, and then, of course, there are all the lights.

The Salvation Army set up a kettle on Church Street near my office and I saw one man holding up a sign that said “It’s our last week—can you at least give us a smile?”

And instead of Christmas carols the boom box was playing the Beatles “All You Need is Love.” That got me smiling all right.

I joined my sister and some friends for a trip through Dyker Heights to look at the Christmas decoration extravaganza. For those of you who haven’t been there, the homeowners go insane with lights, music, animatronic figures, and people in costume.

So many cars drive up one particular street during the holidays that the police have to direct traffic. There’s even a tour bus that brings people over from Manhattan to look at the Brooklynites in their native habitat.

My sister suggested parking the car a few blocks away from Christmas Central and walking around the various streets. That turned out to be a great idea.

We avoided the traffic jam, but more importantly, we got to walk around with other people. I honestly don’t know how these homeowners can afford to pay their electric bills—they must have separate generators.

I kept thinking this is crazy, this is over the top, but then I’d see how much fun the kids were having and it all seemed worthwhile. I didn’t have to look into the sky to see any twinkling stars—they were all around me.

I’m going to take some time off for the holidays, so I want to wish everyone a merry and a happy whatever-it-is-you-celebrate. Enjoy yourself, keep searching for your twinkling star, and don’t ever go Hungary.

'A Disturbing Image and A Crude Gesture'

2011-12-18T17:46:00.000-08:00

In the movie “The Next Voice You Hear,” God skips the burning bush and uses the radio to speak to humanity.

I recently saw this 1950 film, starring James Whitmore and future First Lady Nancy Davis, and found it to be a bit clunky and contrived.

But it made an impression on me because it showed how good, decent people can forget that they’re good and decent as they rush around trying to find a place in the world.

Upon hearing the voice of the Almighty, everyone starts taking life slower and being more respectful to one another.

I thought that was important and it seemed to tie in so nicely with my Day One project, where I vowed I would improve my outlook on life.

And then I decided to go the movies on Friday night and everything went to hell.

I rarely go to the movies, preferring to watch films at home. Most movies are overrated and overpriced and most theater audiences are comprised of inconsiderate morons who talk, act stupid with their smart phones, and do just about anything else they feel like doing except to clam up and watch the goddamn movie. (Not too hostile now, am I?)

But I had heard great things about “The Artist” and I didn’t feel like waiting on Netflix. So I went online to buy a ticket. And that’s where it all went wrong.

My credit card information at the ticket website was outdated and every time I tried to correct things, the website crashed. I was going nuts. Day One turned into Day None as I fumed and swore at the Internet as if it had passed me a bad check.

I finally ordered the damn ticket—or so I thought—and staggered out of the office. I was running late and since I was in a hurry that meant everyone else in New York was operating at super slow motion.

The woman at the restaurant where I went for dinner screwed up my order. When I finally got my chicken chili on rice—not the beef chili!—I had to wolf it down while listening to crappy Christmas music or risk being late for the movie.

There were two or three other people sitting alone at their tables and later I thought we looked like a modern version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

Outside, people seemed to be a daze. Total strangers approached me, got in my way.

“Papi, you got a cigarette?” one woman asked me as I walked down Broadway.

“I don’t smoke.”

Another woman stopped me in the stairwell of the R station.

“Excuse me….”

“I can’t talk to you now!” I snapped and kept going.

Coming Through

The train took forever to show up and when it did it crawled into Brooklyn like it was going under a barbed wire fence. Some loser at DeKalb Avenue shoved his hand in the door at the last second, holding up the train even more.

When I finally got off at Atlantic Avenue, another idiot clogged up the stairs as he walked and fumbled with his Blackberry at the same time.

And when I got to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the ticket machine wouldn’t print out my ticket. I was borderline psychotic by this time, but I got a ticket at the box office and took a seat.

“The Artist” was excellent and everyone in the audience managed to behave. But I was in such a foul mood that I decided to go straight home after the movie ended.

Today I looked over the ticket receipt to figure out why I had gotten shafted. It was only then that I saw the words “Almost there. Review your order and then click PURCHASE TICKETS.”

Oh…that’s why I didn’t get a ticket the other night. I didn’t actually buy one.

The receipt lists the movie’s rating—PG-13 “for a disturbing image and a crude gesture.” It seemed like a perfect way to describe my evening.

I was feeling pretty miserable for most of Saturday. Once again I had promised to change my evil ways and once again I had bitten the dust.

But luckily, I happened to be walking down 86th Street when I came across an old soldier who was sitting outside a bank and collecting money for veterans.

I love talking to these old timers—they’re like living history books. And since my father was a veteran, I can never get enough WW II stories.

This man—I’m so sorry I didn’t get his name—told me he was in the Navy—“and nowhere else but the Navy!”—and had fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

“Those are some of the toughest battles of the war,” I said.

The old veteran smiled.

“We had fun,” he said.

I wished him a Merry Christmas and headed for home. This man had seen things I could never begin to imagine and gone to places where getting a movie ticket was the last thing on anybody's mind.

He had lived in a time when there was no Internet, or I-pads, or any of this other crap that weighs us done and obliterates our attention span. And he’s still with us.

Day One is not going to be an overnight sensation. It’s going to be a slow, painful process as I eliminate disturbing images and refrain from crude gestures.

The next voice I hear will be my own, telling me to get back to work.

Beautiful Boy

2011-12-11T17:47:00.000-08:00

Every night when I come home the first thing I see is Ben’s heart.

It’s just a heart-shaped piece of green glittery paper that I have taped to my front door, but it means so much to me.

Up until recently, Ben was my four-year-old next-door neighbor. I knew I’d miss him after I moved, but I didn’t realize how much.

He gave me that green heart back in the summer as my sister and I were cleaning out our family’s house. Every weekend we’d look forward to seeing Ben poke his head in from outside and shout “Wob-ert!”

He would talk with us, look around the empty house, and then suddenly say, “I have to go now.” And off he’d go.

Ben is such a sweet kid, always willing to share things, which I find amazing for a child that age. I don’t think I was anywhere as near as generous when I was four years old, so Ben has taught me an important lesson.

We told him not to give us anything, but nevertheless Ben stopped by the house one time and gave my sister and me some balloons he had. Then he promptly ran for the door.

“You keep! You keep!” he said over his shoulder.

It was great having such a devoted fan. I offered to blow up a beach ball for him one afternoon and while I huffed and puffed, Ben cheered me on.

“Awesome! Awesome!” he yelled. “C’mon, Robert, you can do it!”

A Friend Indeed

I could do it, but it took a little more lungpower than I had expected. I finally got the thing inflated and handed it over to Ben. He stopped playing with it long enough to ask me a question.

“Do you have kids?” he asked.

No, I don’t, but if I did I’d want them to be just like Ben.

During this summer’s Senator Street block party, I got into a wild basketball game with a bunch of little girls who were visiting one of my neighbors.

They surrounded me, grabbed me from behind, tried to kick the ball away from me—it was more like the WWF than the NBA. But Ben jumped in between me and my tormenters and put his arms out, determined to be my bodyguard.

“Those girls are cuckoo,” I said when the game family ended.

“Those girls are tutu,” Ben added. Oh, well, close enough…

One day I watched Ben crossing the street with his grandmother and her homecare aid. The grandmother was on a walker, the aid was busy helping the old lady, and Ben was standing next to them. They looked so vulnerable as they stepped off the sidewalk.

“I’m going to the park!” Billy told me, all excited.

I winced imagining these three being exposed to the cuckcoos that drive around here. I told them to wait until there were absolutely no cars coming down the block.

When the street was finally clear, the three of them started across with Ben putting his hand out in the traffic cop position. Atta boy, Ben.

After we closed on the house my sister and I stopped by Ben’s house to say goodbye. We had to go now.

“You give me your phone number,” he said.

I gave Ben my card, though I don’t expect him to call. He’s a kid and I’m a grown man-more or less-but I do get tempted sometimes to knock on his door and ask if Ben can come out and play.

I’m glad for the time I had with Ben. He has a special place in my heart and he’s welcome to it.

You keep, Ben. You keep.

Day One

2011-12-04T16:34:00.000-08:00

Over the summer, DC Comics took the incredible step of resetting all 52 of its continuing series and starting them all over again with issue No. 1.

Superman and Batman may have been around since the 1930s, but DC is scrubbing everything that’s happened in their comic universe over the decades and beginning anew.

I don’t know how comic book fans are reacting to this plan, but it sounds like a great idea to me.

I have gone through so much upheaval over the last few months that I’ve decided it’s time for me to start my life all over again at Day One.

And I’m doing this right now. I can’t afford to wait until New Year’s Day to make any resolutions—my life needs a radical reboot ASA-freaking-P.

I’m in a new place, we finally sold the family home, and I’m back at the gym five torturous months after my back went out and took my right leg with it.

There was a time when I thought I would never heal, that the incredible pain in my shin would be with me forever. The agony started one Friday night in July--just as we started clearing out the house and I was searching for a new apartment. The timing was perfectly hideous.

I also thought we’d never finish the clean-up. Every weekend I’d look at all that…stuff and wonder if we’d ever get down.

But the mission’s been accomplished and I’m feeling better. I’m not a hundred percent—still getting a tingling in my foot--and I have to do a daily series of core exercise for the rest of my natural life, but I’ve made a lot of progress and I’m very thankful.

I’m sure all of things coming together is just a coincidence, but I’m going to treat these events like a screaming, 20-megaton message from the Universe that says “start over from Day One!”

Look! Up in the Sky!

I have to change the way I think, shake off this negativity that’s been part of my make-up for far too long. I have to bury the past like it’s nuclear waste. It’s time to replace agonizing with action and worry with work.

I have to do things I’ve never done before, see new places and new faces. I’ve got to stop playing it so safe all the time.

Of course, I’ve made scores of these vows, promises, declarations, proclamations, and resolutions to change, only to see them go south as I returned to my old ways.

To be honest, I’m not sure how my Day One plan is any different from the other times, except that it’s a month ahead of the traditional date.

If I were still in my old frame of mind I’d say that I started early so I could quit early, but it’s Day One, so I ain't thinking that way no more.

I put a “Day One” sign on my bathroom mirror and on the wall of my cubicle at work so I can remind myself that every day is a chance to make things better.

I wheezed through my first boxing class in months on Thursday, but I wouldn’t allow myself to get down over this. It’s Day One, I told myself. Pretend this is the first time you ever walked into the gym.

On Saturday I took a boot camp class, where you work with weights and a stepper until you’re ready to die—at least I was. I’d never taken the class before, so I was glad I had done it, but I’m sore from working dormant muscles. I’ll bet Superman never had this problem.

This Day One project is going to be tough. I see that I really have to monitor my mind, lest I slip back into a pile of ugly thoughts or rotten memories. There’s more to change than just vowing you’re going to do it. I have to totally rewire my noodle.

It's a long shot, but if it pays off, I know that I'll be a lot happier. And I won’t even need a cape.

All the Old, Familiar Places

2011-11-29T19:24:00.000-08:00

There was a time many years ago when I was struggling to find my way.

I had trouble holding on to a job, my physical health was bad and my mental condition was even worse.

I was so upset that I went to my mother looking for some kind of guidance.

“What’s going to happen to me?” I asked her in desperation.

She paused for a moment, clearly upset at my state of mind.

“Well, you know,” she said, “when I die, you’ll get money for this house.”

My mother meant well, of course—she always did--and I know she was trying to comfort me. But those words really shook me up. Did my mother have to die before I could make something out of myself? If I were making a list of the lowest points in my life that conversation would certainly be in the top five.

My mother and father are both gone now, I’ve found something like a career, and today we finally sold our parents’ house.

After all the work, all the cleaning, all the worry and aggravation, everything came down to a few hours at a local bank. We signed a stack of papers, like generals putting their names to a peace treaty, my sister and I handed over our house keys, and it was all over.

The house that had been in our family for over 60 years, the place where we were raised, is no longer ours.

After the closing my sister and I went back to the house to say goodbye to our neighbors and take one last look at our home. We took some flyers off the front steps and brought them to the backyard to throw them away.

“Do you realize we’re trespassing now?” I asked my sister.

I’m feeling so many different emotions right now. The first is relief, now that the sale is over, and then guilt because I feel relieved. I feel sad about giving up the house, but our family isn't there any more. It really is time to move on.

We did the walk through on Sunday with the new owner and while I waited for my sister to pick me up, I heard Jimmy Durante on the radio singing “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

It’s a song from my parents’ day about holding on to memories and the lyrics seemed so appropriate.

“I’ll find you in the morning sun and when the night is new. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.”

I wonder what the new owner will do with the place. I've seen people do some incredible things with the old houses in the neighborhood--rip out the insides, pave over the gardens, or add an outdoor porch. Whatever happens, we'll have no say in the matter.

When we were leaving, I stopped to look around and make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. I spotted something on the refrigerator and when I got close I saw it was magnet with the image of the Virgin Mary and the words “God Bless the Lenihan Family.”

I slipped it into my coat pocket and now it’s on the refrigerator in my new home.

I see how blessed we were to have that house, to have our parents for as long as we did, and to have so many great memories. Now it’s time for someone else to make that house into a home.

We Meet Again

2011-11-27T18:36:00.000-08:00

I feel like I’m living in an American Express commercial.

The massive financial services outfit used to run ads featuring various celebrities who asked the musical question “do you know me?”

I was more partial to the Traveler’s Cheques spots where Karl Malden sternly declared, “don’t leave home without them.” He said it with such intensity that I was afraid to leave my house--and I wasn't traveling anywhere.

I could’ve used Karl Malden’s help last week when I ran into a series of people whom I vaguely recognized but couldn’t initially identify.

You look at them for a few seconds, they look at you, and you search your mind to find a name to go with the kisser—like Karl and Michael Douglas chasing down a perp in “The Streets of San Francisco."

It started one night when I was coming from work and I followed this older gentleman into my local grocery store. I know that guy, I thought, I’ve seen him someplace before…

It wasn’t until I was paying off the cashier—and this old timer was right behind me—that I realized he was my ex-boss’s ex-husband.

I hadn’t seen him since I left that job, nearly 24 years ago. He was a nice guy and we always got along, but we never had that much to do with each other.

I think I might have seen a flash of recognition in his eyes, but I didn’t say anything to him and now I wish I had.

To be honest, we probably wouldn’t have had much to talk about after “hello,” but I think that’s better than pretending to be strangers.

The very next day I’m walking by the same grocery store—what is it with this place?—when I saw a man with white hair and glasses walking toward me.

It took a few seconds to withdraw the name from my memory bank, but then I remembered that it was Brother Myles, my eighth grade math teacher.

I used to greet him in the schoolyard with the “be seeing you” salute from “The Prisoner,” my favorite TV show of all time. Brother Myles always returned the gesture, though I don’t think he was a fan of Number Six.

I also used to tell him the lamest jokes I could find—bad puns, hideous one-liners, the whole shtick. I can’t recall a single one of them now and for that you should consider yourself very lucky. These bits were the toxic waste of comedy.

Before the Beginning

I had actually run into Brother Myles years ago while working at a local weekly newspaper—the same place where the ex-boss’s ex-husband would occasionally turn up. (See above.) Brother Myles had some business with the editor and I introduced myself. He had trouble recognizing me, but then I made a clunky pun and he winced.

"Oh,” he said, “it’s all coming back to me.”

See that—and I didn’t even need an American Express card.

I’m not sure if Brother Myles recognized me during our most recent encounter, but I didn’t say hello. It’s been so long since we’ve had any kind of contact and I didn’t have any bad jokes to tell him.

I had one more repeater two days later and this time it wasn’t anywhere near the grocery store. I was walking along 75th Street when I passed this woman on Seventh Avenue.

“It’s a beautiful day,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” I replied, thinking to myself, gee, what a nice lady.

We reached the corner and while we waited for the light, I thought I’d keep the conversation going, which turned out to be a huge mistake.

“My only complaint is the cold weather,” I said. “I really hate the winter.”

“Yes, you hate the winter,” she said, “but do you love God?”

Oh, for the love of God, not another religious psychopath. I hate them more than I hate winter.

And what a brilliant segue. Here I am talking about the weather and she brings the Almighty into the act. Life is so simple when you’re a mindless fanatic.

“Yes, I do,” I said and promptly set a speed-walking record for getting the hell out of a tight situation. I nearly got hit by a car while making my escape, but I’d gladly risk a fender to the keester than deal with that freak.

I tried to put her out of my mind, but something was gnawing at me about this woman and it was beyond the initial annoyance at her idiotic behavior. No…I had seen her someplace before…

Do you know me?

Oh, it’s all coming back to me. This was the same nutbag who had harassed me on the subway back in June. And she had used the same sneaky approach where she pretended to be sane before launching into her sermon.

Unlike our last meeting, however, I wasn’t jammed into a two-seater on the R train trying to be polite. This time I was able to escape.

But I don’t like running into the same loony more than once in a lifetime. It’s bad medicine. I thought this woman was out of my life, but here she was again, turning up like a bad penny or a good boomerang. Either way I want nothing to do with her.

So I’m had these three reunions in less than a week. I don’t know if that’s a sign of cosmic forces beyond my comprehension or just a series of coincidences.

What would Karl Malden say?

Now Playing

2011-11-20T17:21:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to visiting the Great Wall Supermarket on Fort Hamilton Parkway this week.

The place opened up about six years ago, but I haven't had any reason to come down this way in ages.

I had actually been here many times in the past; I practically lived in the building when I was a teenager—only back then it wasn’t a supermarket; it was the Fortway Theater.

God alone knows how many movies I saw there, but the titles include Batman, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Excalibur, Deliverance, The Omega Man, The Lone Ranger, and, of course, The Exorcist, when I had to pretty much carry my poor traumatized mother up the aisle after the movie ended.

The Fortway was one of four theaters in my neighborhood when I was growing up. There was the Harbor (now a health club); the Dyker (now a Modell’s) and the Alpine, the sole survivor--if you call being subdivided into eight broom closets with paper-thin walls “surviving.”

The Fortway was the cheap place, charging $1 to see second run movies and we always knew that the quicker a film got there, the more likely it was to be a dog.

“It’s at the Fortway already,” was our way saying “this movie must really suck.”

It had quiet a history, though. According to Cinema Treasures, the Fortway opened its doors on October 21, 1927 with a silent film called The Rose of Kildare and four vaudeville acts on stage. It had a Kilgen theater organ and “an atmospheric style interior where electric stars used to twinkle on the dark blue ceiling.”

Unfortunately, I never saw the Fortway in its heyday. By the time the Seventies rolled around, the Fortway looked a lot like New York in the Seventies—rundown, battered, and barely holding on.

To paraphrase my mother on the night she saw The Exorcist, it was a shadow of its former self.

One night while trying to enjoy a movie, I saw a cockroach crawling on the back of the seat in front of me where a young woman was sitting, her boyfriend right beside her.

Cinema Para-sleazio

The roach was getting awfully close to the woman’s neck and, in addition to being grossed out by the bug, I was concerned the disgusting critter would crawl down the girl’s back, causing her to shriek, whereupon the boyfriend would presume I was the culprit and dropkick me clean up into the twinkling electric stars.

Luckily, that did not occur and the creepy little fellow disappeared into the darkness.

“The Fortway is the best advertisement for a VCR that I have ever seen,” I declared at some point in the Eighties.

I guess a lot of other people felt that way, too. The theater was split in three in the Seventies, destroying the electric stars effect, and further divided into a five-screener in 1982.

In June of 2005, the curtain came down for the Fortway and the Great Wall went up two years later. The marquee is still there, the only evidence of the theater’s existence. The supermarket’s clientele is mostly Asian, reflecting the neighborhood’s demographic overhaul.

I walked around the place trying to imagine where the lobby used to be, where the pinball machines had been set up. I pictured the candy counter, where the matrons doled out buckets of stale popcorn and soda in cups the size of wastepaper baskets. It was all gone.

I got angry looking at these people trampling all over my past. Yes, the Fortway was a dump, but it was my dump. I wanted to get on the PA system and shout “Attention, Great Wall shoppers—get the hell out of my theater!”

I felt like Jesus rousting the money-lenders out of the temple. A theater is a sacred place where dreams come to life, where magic becomes real. It’s not some soulless warehouse for peddling Cheerios and toilet paper.

But these people weren’t doing anything wrong. They were just out shopping and probably knew nothing of the building’s history. Movie fans aren't bound by theaters anymore. They can watch films at home, on the subway, or on the toilet if they're so inclined.

My parents used to tell us about buildings and businesses from their childhood that had been torn down or paved over, but I didn’t appreciate what they were talking about back then.

When you’re a kid, there is no was; everything just is and you believe it will always be. Until the day it isn’t and then you're the one giving the nostalgia tours.

During my visit to the Great Wall, I passed by a woman giving out small cups of noodles.

“Is it good?” I asked a little girl standing nearby.

“It’s spicy,” she said.

Indeed it was. And while it could never satisfy my craving for stale popcorn, it wasn’t half bad.

Tales from the Scrap Heap

2011-11-13T19:52:00.000-08:00

They come out on Sunday nights, just as the sun is setting.

“There they are,” my sister said the other week, “the metal people.”

We were outside our parents’ house and I could see a few people at the end of the block going through garbage cans. They’d have a lot of competition as the evening wore on.

We’ve grown accustomed to seeing people collecting soda cans and bottles so they can get the deposit money. They tend to be elderly Asian women lugging overstuffed trash bags on their shoulders.

There was one lady in particular who used to come around every Sunday night. This was back during my chronic Diet Coke addiction, when I was drinking the vile stuff for breakfast, so she made a small fortune every time she stopped by my house.

I don’t know anything about her, since we didn’t speak each other’s language, but she had a nice smile and she’d always clasp her hands together and bow slightly whenever I gave her some bottles.

She had an eye for the recyclables, that’s for sure. I handed her a bag of soda bottles one time and gestured that there were no more. But she scanned my trashcan anyway and, sure enough, she found a discarded water bottle that I had missed.

I went cold turkey on the diet soda after a major reflux incident and I never saw her again.

Lately, I’ve noticed people of different ages and ethnicities going through the garbage and they’re looking for more than just bottles and cans. They want metal.

Now we’ve been throwing out a lot of metal in the last few months as we clean out the house—battered pots, scratched up frying pans—stuff that we didn’t want to keep and isn’t good enough to donate.

Who Goes There?

Maybe that’s why we’re seeing these folks around our house, but I really think it’s a sign of bad times, of people doing anything they can to get by.

I’m always tempted to speak with these people, but there is the language barrier. And while I would never pass judgment on anyone, I don’t want to embarrass them by asking why they’re doing this.

Yet I’m dying to know their stories. Who buys this stuff from you? How much do you get for it? Do you make enough money to feed your family?

We came out one afternoon to find an Asian couple with a little girl going through the trash. I offered them an old glass bottle, but they politely declined. The girl said “bye-bye” as they left.

Last week we put out our mother’s old ironing board, which she had used for years. I can easily picture her standing in the kitchen and dutifully getting the wrinkles out of our clothes.

It was a little banged up, but still usable. However, it’s more suited to a house than an apartment, so we decided to toss it.

We already had a pile of trash outside the house, so I tried to set up the ironing board so it wouldn't obstruct the sidewalk.
The last thing we needed is some Whiplash Willy to trip in front of our house and haul us into court.

I wasn’t even sure the garbage men would take damn thing, since they can be so picky about junk sometimes.

It disappeared in less than an hour.

Whoever took it didn’t wait for sundown; they scooped up that ironing board in the middle of the day. I hope they get plenty of use out of it.

The Metal People will probably be with us for a long time. Given the current economy, you’d better pray to God that you don’t become one of them.

Runner's World

2011-11-06T19:42:00.000-08:00

My sister and I stood on a corner in Brooklyn this morning and watched the world go by.

The New York Marathon made its yearly pass through Bay Ridge on Sunday and you can see people from just about every country on earth competing in the 26-mile race to Central Park.

The marathon is such a fabulous event. It’s like a moving version of the UN General Assembly. We saw competitors from France, Italy, New Zealand, Chile, Denmark, Argentina and Japan, to name a few.

I’ve been going to see the marathon for years and I never get tired of it. There’s nothing quite like watching a seemingly endless stream of humanity stampeding down Fourth Avenue like a herd of Texas longhorns.

It’s looks as if the residents of an entire city have dropped whatever they were doing, strapped on their running shoes, and hit the road.

There's so much going on. Helicopters crisscross the sky; photographs snap pictures, local bands set up and jam right on the sidewalk, and people like me and my sister stand along the route of the marathon cheering the runners on.

The runners move in waves so just when you think everyone has gone by, another pack of perspiring people will come blasting down the street.

Running is certainly tough, but being a fan isn’t a walk in the park either. My hands went numb from constantly clapping and high-fiving runners and I cheered myself hoarse trying to spur them on. We need a training program for fans as well as participants.

Many of the marathoners put their names on their shirts so you can add a personal touch to your cheering.

You’ve never seen these people before and you’ll never see them again, but for a few fleeting seconds you get to bond with them. It feels great to see them smile, or give a thumbs-up before they disappear into the crowd; it’s a stationary version of runner’s high.

All these people, from all these countries and each one has their own story, their own reason for being here.

On Your Marks...

I fell instantly in love with a French woman one year after she blew me a kiss in response to my spirited shout of “Vive le France!” I go back every year hoping I’ll see her again… catch her eye…and get her to slow down for a few goddamn minutes.

Marco, a young man from Italy, was a standout this year. He slapped palms with anybody who had a hand out and worked the crowd like he was running for office instead of the finish line.

Of course some of the runners didn’t hear us as they had I-pods plugged into their ears. Seriously, what is the story with that?

I would think that being in the middle of the New York Freaking Marathon would be plenty of sensory stimulation, that you wouldn’t want to block out the sounds of this incredible event. But then what the hell do I know?

My sister saw one guy texting as he ran and I saw another one talking on his cellphone. I suppose the conversation went along the lines of Hey, you’ll never guess where I'm calling you from…

I’d like to think of the marathon as the antidote to technology, a temporary rejection of all things digital and electronic in favor of the primitive pleasure of running your heart out in an event that dates back to ancient Greece.

My sister and I used to compete in shorter races back when the running craze first started. We even ran in a race that went from Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island, across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. It was quite a run, but we were somewhat younger at the time.

The pack of runners finally thinned out to just a few people and the back-up vehicles.

As I watched the stragglers pass by, I once again flirted with the idea of joining them, of finally getting off the sidelines and running with the likes of Marco, my French flame, the I-pod people and all the other mobile life stories that beat a thunderous path around the five boroughs.

I haven’t done it yet, but there’s always next year.

Devil’s Note

2011-10-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

It’s Halloween, the perfect time to chase some old ghosts out of my life.

I finally moved all of my stuff out of the family home and now the house where I was raised is scary empty. You can actually hear an echo when you speak or walk around on the wooden floors.

The weather was hideous on Saturday, which seemed strangely appropriate seeing as how we had a monsoon a few months back when I moved to my new place. Apparently the weather gods don't like to see me changing addresses.

Now I’m sitting in my home office surround by more boxes than a FedEx driver and I keep telling myself that I’m going to get this stuff in order and the place will look fabulous when I’m done.

I think if I say it enough times I might even start believing it.

One package that did not make the trip was a box filled with my old diaries. I had been putting off deciding what to do with them for the last few weeks, but now that the clock is winding down to the closing deadline, I had to do something about this stack of marble notebooks.

I’ve been keeping journals fairly regularly since I moved to Pennsylvania 1988. I remember my first night in the Poconos, sitting in my room at the Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, writing in a journal about what a terrible mistake I had made.

I kept it up when I moved to Connecticut five years later, dubbing my first journal “The Waterbury Tales” after my newest hometown and I’m still doing it today.

Each journal starts out the same. My handwriting is neat, my thoughts are organized, and, since many of them begin on January 1, I put down my resolutions as well.

But the nice penmanship and good attitude usually last just a few weeks before the entries degenerate into unreadable scrawl that even I can’t stand to look at and my mental state takes on a similar appearance.

So do I want to keep these things?

Captain's Slog

Yes, they could provide insight to my past lives, something I could use to mold myself in a better person. On the other hand, it’s just more stuff that’ll take up space in my new apartment.

I settled the issue last week when I started leafing through some of the journals. Good jumping Jesus, was I really that miserable for all that time?

Did I have any fun in my life? Convicts serving life sentences are happier than I am, if my journals are to be taken seriously. My existence could not have been that bad, but clearly my vision of the world was seriously twisted.

I do think keeping a diary or journal is a good idea, but they have to be more than annals of angst and chronicles of complaints. They should be workbooks for your life.

Often you can get identify what’s really troubling you by putting your darkest thoughts down on paper. That’s one way of chasing out the demons—just put your finger down your mind’s throat and stand back.

But then you have to come up with a plan, figure out what you’re going to do next instead of just reporting your crappy circumstances. Okay, we get it. Life sucks and everybody else on the face of the earth is a mouth-breathing imbecile. Now what?

I certainly don’t want to bring these toxic tomes into my new life. I was thinking I could mail them to any of my old Catholic school nuns who might still be above ground.

One look at my atrocious handwriting should be enough to send those miserable old hags sailing through the pearly gates like Evel Knievil jumping over a line of Greyhounds. But I don't know...that sounds a little hostile.

My sister said she might have a journal burning party to get rid of her old diaries. I decided to dump my memoirs into a bucket of water and watch them turn into a pulpy mess. That'll show 'em who's boss.

Now I have a new notebook and I don’t allow myself to write down a negative thought unless I find something positive to balance things out. Maybe a sense of balance is the best thing you can get out of a journal. It’ll drive the ghosts clear out of town.

Palms Away

2011-10-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

I got a non-contact palm reading the other night and high-fived the hand of fate.

I had gone to Pret a Manger on Friday in hopes of getting some of their fabulous turkey chili.

The place is a block away from my office, but it took a while to get there because I walked out into the lobby of my building just as a group of demonstrators from Occupy Wall Street came marching down Broadway.

“We are the 99 percent!” they chanted. “We are the 99 percent!”

I was going to wait until they went by but then I realized that I’m the 99 percent, too, and thus should be out there walking with them, if only for half-a-block. I marched, but to be honest I’m not much of a chanter.

Pret wasn’t serving turkey chili, so I settled for soup and a sandwich and grabbed a table in the back of the room. There were a number of people around me who appeared to be part of OWS.

An older gentleman with a full gray beard stopped as he walked by my table and looked down at me.

“Press?”

“Is it that obvious?” I asked.

“I could tell by your hat,” he told me.

Actually the hat is a giveaway from WQXR, the classical radio station, but the call letters do suggest news media and the guy was right. I am indeed the press.

He told me he was an anthropologist and he was studying the people at OWS. We chatted briefly about the goings on down at Zuccotti Park and then my newfound companion made an odd request.

“Put up your hand.”

I obliged, raising my hand in the old western movie “How” position and waited to hear my fortune.

I don’t really believe you can tell anything from eyeballing the lines in someone’s palm, aside from seeing if they've washed their hands or not. But I’m fascinated by these ancient beliefs, and, well, you never know, right?

But it’s hard for me to discuss palm-reading without thinking about Bela the Gypsy from “The Wolf Man” who, upon seeing a pentagram in a customer’s hand-—that sign that says she's going to be his next victim when he turns into a wolf--promptly gags and boots her out of his tent.

Moments later Bela gets all canis lupus and has her for dinner. If only they had some turkey chili...

And How

Fortunately my palm reader didn’t react in this manner and he skipped the prognostication in favor of some character studying.

“You tend to think too much,” he said, hitting the bull’s eye. “You need to trust your intuition.”

He asked me to turn my hand around, which surprised me because I didn’t know palm readers did the flip side, but I cranked my paw and showed him some knuckles.

“You’re very smart…”

Okay, stop right there. Naturally I love hearing this kind of thing, but I wonder if at any time in the lengthy history of palmistry if anyone ever looked down at a person’s hand and said, “dang, you are one stupid son-of-a-bitch!” Probably not.

My dinner guest, however, hit the target once again.

“…but you have a tendency to use your intelligence as a way of keeping away from people.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m here by myself on a Friday night…”

The timing here is interesting since, among the many books that we’ve come across in our parents’ house, is a tome called “Palmistry For All” by the single-named Cheiro. I don't know how long we've had it or who brought the book into our home, but I think it's a keeper.

Cheiro, a.k.a. William John Warner, was an Irish astrologer and occult figure of the early 20th century who took his nom de palm from the word “cheiromancy,” another term for palmistry.

He read the hands of such notable figures as Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, Mata Hari, Oscar Wilde, Grover Cleveland, and Thomas Edison.

“Everyone knows that ‘the face can wear a mask,’” Cheiro writes in the preface to the American edition of his book, “that a person may be a good actor and put on a certain expression that may deceive even the best judgment. But hands cannot change as the result of a mere effort to please; the character they express is the real nature of the individual—the true character that has been formed by heredity or that has grown up with the person by long years of habit.”

The book is in one of the many boxes I have stacked around my apartment and I predict I will find it…some day.

So I didn’t get the turkey chili, but I got to walk in a demonstration, had a decent bowl of soup, got some good advice from a total stranger, and I wasn't attacked by a werewolf. Hands down, it was a pretty good evening.

Worm and Fuzzy

2011-10-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

When you’re trying to remember something, the worst thing you can do is to try to remember it.

I find that when I forget things like movie titles or actors' names—and this is happening more and more as I grow older—the missing information will often pop into my head when I’m busy doing something else.

Like true love or an audit by the IRS, these things always hit you when you’re not looking.

I’ve been breaking this little rule lately as I try to recall an exchange I once had with my mother and predictably I'm getting nowhere fast.

I don’t remember the time or the occasion, but I know I was trying to get a rise out of my dear mother and I succeeded admirably. I remember how angry she got, but I can’t recall what I said.

Her reaction was vivid as she put her hands on her hips like so many Italian ladies do when they’re furious, and snarled—I swear to God—“You worm!”

Yes, you read that right. My mom compared me to a slimy crawling thing that lives in the mud and manure. And I had it coming. This was a premeditated, coldly calculated act of outrageous smart-assery. Was it something I said? Damn straight. Do I remember what it was? Hell, no!

“Mom said that to you?” my sister asked in disbelief when I told her.

“Yes, she did!”

Many people will tell you that their mothers are saints, but my mother really was a saint, an angel, and the sweetest person you ever want to meet.

Hey, she put with me, right? If that isn’t cause for canonization on its own then all twelve apostles can pull off their halos right now and form a celestial Frisbee team.

So for her to respond in that way means that whatever I said must have been a four-alarm, paint-peeling doozy of a snide remark.

Glimmer, Glimmer

This bout of amnesia is so annoying because I can easily call up all sorts of useless stuff, like who played Festus on Gunsmoke (Ken Curtis), but I can’t get a handle on such a very personal encounter.

I know that I was young, in my teens or early twenties, and like many people in that age bracket, I had an answer for everything. There are some people who will tell you that things haven’t changed much in the last four decades but I like to believe that I’ve matured.

My mother was obsessed with keeping us healthy during the winter and she was always chiding me to button up my coat and cover my chest.

But instead of telling me that, mom always said, “Button your chest!”

“My chest doesn’t have buttons,” I’d shoot back without fail. It was a winter tradition with us.

I was leaving the house one soggy morning and my mother called out “watch your feet!” This was mom’s shorthand for “don’t step into puddles and catch your death of cold.”

However, since she said “watch your feet,” that’s exactly what I did. I slowly turned my gaze downward until I was looking at my feet.

“They’re not doing anything,” I said, playing the fool with award-winning skill.

I closed the door when I heard my mother’s exasperated harumpf! and went my wisecracking way.

See, I can remember these idiotic quips, but the big one still eludes me. It’s become my White Worm.

I know that my mom and I joked about this incident for a quite a while after it happened, with me imitating her by standing arms akimbo and shouting “you worm!”

Maybe the remark will come back to me one night. I’ll be half asleep, ready to drift off, and the offending sentence will buzz through my brain like Halley’s Comet cruising across the sky.

Or perhaps I’ll be buttoning my chest or watching my feet when the magic happens, and I'll shout, “yes, that’s what I said!”

I know that line is crawling around some dark corner of my head like the ugly little bugger it is and I want to pull it out into the sunshine.

I owe it to mom. And I owe it to Festus.

Kitsch of Death

2011-10-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

That didn’t take long.

I’ve been in my new apartment for about two months and I just had my first decorating catastrophe.

I’ve been trying to change. For years I’ve never really bothered to put a personal mark on any of my apartments--mostly because I was living in towns I didn’t like, working at jobs I had grown to hate.

It didn’t seem worth the trouble to make my place homey when I was always dying to find another gig and skip town like an escaped convict busting out of death row.

I’m going to do things differently with the new place. Not only am I only going to keep it neat, but I’m going to put up posters, photographs, and knickknacks to make it look like someone actually lives here. And I’ve got plenty of stuff to choose from since we’ve been cleaning out my family’s house.

One of my favorite items was a wall-clock sized thermometer from Hatfield Quality Meats that had been hanging in our home for several presidential administrations.

This thing is a kitsch classic, emblazoned with the face of a cartoon pig wearing a chef’s hat. It’s a tacky salute to a bygone era when…pigs wore chef hats.

My father was a meat salesman and after getting the thermometer as a freebie, he brought it home and proudly showed it to my mother. He wanted to give the thing a prominent place in the dining room, but my mother took one look at the Hatfield pig and turned in a real McCoy. She banished the temperature-telling porker to the porch wall.

It makes me think of that atrocious leg lamp from "A Christmas Story" that Ralphie’s dad so dearly loved and Ralphie’s mom so thoroughly loathed.

Hog Heaven

However, unlike the leg lamp, the Hatfield thermometer—spoiler alert--wasn’t destroyed under suspicious circumstances. It was doing just fine until I got my hands on it.

We were all set to put the Hatfield hog into the donation pile, but I got this sudden urge to keep it in the family. I actually liked the thing, so I packed it up, brought it to my new place, and hung it over the doorway leading from the kitchen to living room.

All right, I thought, so satisfied with myself, I’m making my mark. Only I didn’t make it for long.

My landlady had given me these sticky hook things for hanging pictures because she doesn’t want me hammering holes into the walls. I thought they could handle Hatfield, but then I came home and found out otherwise.

It was a pretty grisly sight. There was shattered glass all over the kitchen floor and the porcine chef, now uncovered and exposed, look forlornly up to the ceiling.

The only thing missing was a circle of yellow crime scene tape and two detectives from “Law & Order” taking my sobbing statement. It was a case of negligent hamicide and I was the guilty party.

I was so upset I want to go to crying all the way home, wee-wee-wee, but I already was home.

I shot an email to Hatfield Meats asking for their advice, which was really a stealth appeal for a replacement, but an executive wrote back to say that I was “probably one of the few who still have one of the thermometers.”

One of the few? Maybe I should call Indiana Jones.

I was ready to give old Hatfield a proper burial (throw it in the garbage) but my sister encouraged me to contact a local glassmaker to see if I could get a new cover for the thermometer.

So I’ll give him a call and see if I can’t get Hatfield repaired and returned to his rightful place on my wall. It’ll be something to squeal about.

Smokin’ Faces

2011-10-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

It’s been eight years since New York’s anti-smoking laws drove cigars, cigarettes and Tiparillos out of the bars and restaurants and sent smokers out into the streets.

You won't hear me complaining. I don’t miss the smoke stench that would take root in your clothing after a night out on the town, or that smoker’s cough you’d get, even though you didn’t smoke, you didn't chew and you didn't go with girls who do (or did).

I grew up when smoking was still acceptable, when cigarette commercials ran on TV, and movie stars didn’t hesitate to light up.

Some of the stranger, more personal, artifacts from that distant era have been turning up in my family’s house in the form of ceramic ashtrays that we made as children.

I had forgotten how my fellow Cub Scouts and I used to make these things for our arts and crafts projects.

Now let’s think about that for a moment: children making ashtrays. Kids were actually aiding a deadly and disgusting addiction by making one of its more important accessories.

My dad used recite a parody of the Boy Scout oath that went “On my honor, I will do my best to smoke cigars and cigarettes.” Maybe it wasn’t such a parody after all…

We’ve found two of these ashtrays so far. One is the simple coiled clay model that just about every kid made and then there’s the ingenious ceramic house one of my brothers designed.

The idea was that you put your cigarette through one of the windows and the smoke would rise out of the little chimney. I remember my parents--who didn't smoke--marveling at my brother’s ingenuity while visitors to our home complimented his handiwork and made full use of it.

All of that is behind us now. I don’t know what Cub Scouts are making these days, but I would hope ashtrays are off the list.

Full Smoking Jacket

There is, however, one thing I do miss from the Tobacco Age and that’s the smoking jacket. I suppose it’s a little strange to miss something that you never had and was out of style long before you were born, but I miss smoking jackets nonetheless.

Maybe it’s because of all the old movies I saw as a kid, but I associate smoking jackets with class, dignity, intelligence…and money.

Yes, all right, I admit it. The characters wearing smoking jackets in those old flicks weren’t exactly living on Skid Row. They had mansions or palaces, or really cool flats like Sherlock Holmes.

Basil Rathbone often put on his smoking jacket and fired up the old calabash pipe before cracking his toughest cases. (Of course the contents of the pipe might have helped, too, but only Mrs. Hudson knows for sure.)

Smoking jackets were intended to protect the wearer from falling ash and absorb smoke from cigars and pipes, though I suspect your lungs did the yeoman’s work on that count.

A 1902 newspaper editorial declared that smoking jackets were “synonymous with comfort” and Fred Astaire, who sang about putting on his top hat, was so fond of smoking jackets that he was buried in one.

I recently learned that my great Uncle John on my mother’s side of the family had actually owned a smoking jacket factory in Manhattan during the Twenties.

Details are pretty sketchy, but I do know that the business, like countless others, was wiped out by the Great Depression.

People weren’t particularly interested in purchasing silk smoking jackets when the cupboard was bare and the landlord was pounding on the door.

My dad’s father was also in a rather exotic line of work at the time of the stock market crash. Grandpa Lenihan, who had been everything from a barge captain to an honest-to-God cowboy, was cleaning Turkish rugs when the stocks went south. And like great Uncle John, my grandfather saw his enterprise go under.

I thought that smoking jackets had gone the way of straw hats and walking sticks, but they seem to be on the comeback trail.

While wasting my time on Facebook, which, of course, is redundant, I came across an ad for an actual smoking jacket. It goes for $195, which I’m sure is a hell of a lot more than what ancestor charged, but that’s inflation for you.

But it’s kind of interesting. Great Uncle John had a smoking jacket factory just before the stock market crashed. So is the return of the smoking jacket a portent of another financial meltdown? Will we be ground out in the ashtray of fate while we're heedlessly puffing away?

Let’s hope not. But just in case, I think I’ll treat myself to a smoking jacket and a Turkish rug. If we’re going to hell, we might as well go in style.

The Tao of Ow

2011-09-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

It’s officially autumn in this part of the world and while I loathe the coming cold weather, I’m not sorry to close the door on the Summer of ‘11.

My life took a bad hop back in July, when I had to drop out of my beloved boxing class due to extenuating—and excruciating—circumstances in the form of a bulging disc.

An MRI revealed that I have a mild case of arthritis in my back.

It was a bit of a shock. I mean, arthritis…me? C’mon, old people have arthritis; I’m strong, fit, in the prime of life…sort of…I can’t get arthritis.

Except that I can. My doctor said this is a degenerative condition, that he can treat the symptoms, but not the disease, and promptly packed me off to a sports medicine facility for physical therapy. The head trainer seems positive about my recovery.

I’ve gone to two sessions so far and I’m following the home exercise program the trainers have given me. At least it’s some kind of workout, even if it’s mostly stretching.

I also get to see people who are in much worse shape than I am trying to get their bodies—and their lives—back together.

The rehab’s radio dial has apparently been Krazy Glued to a classic rock station and I’ve been hearing songs by Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, and other Jurassic rock stars.

The other night I was trying to extend my shockingly tight calves to the tune of “Celluloid Heroes” by The Kinks, a band whose name seems rather appropriate given my current situation.

Everybody's a dreamer and everybody's a star, and everybody’s in the movies, it doesn’t matter who they are…

But being unable to work out like a lunatic the way I used to is driving me batty. Doctors recommend regular exercise as a treatment for everything from diabetes to depression and what’s the one thing I can’t do? Yep…

I always knew I wouldn’t be able to do the boxing class forever, that some day I’d be so goddamn old I wouldn’t be able to put the gloves on let alone do the workout.

Time For You To Leave

When that time came, I had planned to shift over to my Tai Chi phase and replace the beastliness of boxing with the gentle movements of the ancient Chinese martial art. I just hadn’t planned on doing it so soon.

But since boxing’s off the menu for the foreseeable future, I decided to take a free beginner’s Tai Chi class last week at a place on Dean Street.

I had a good time. We did five moves of this lengthy form and it felt strange, but I was getting into it.

The people were nice—there were no Karate Kid loons running around smashing cinder blocks and screaming that their hands were deadly weapons. The instructors here try to help you.

Tai Chi has been described as moving meditation and I can see why. You have to be in the present moment if you want to do the forms correctly.

I’m always worried about the future or stewing over the past, so I found I really had to change my way of thinking to keep up with the class.

At the end of the night I felt a nice pull in my lower back as if things were loosening up down there. Great, I thought, I sign up for a month’s classes and see what happens.

I was thinking that this could be the start of a whole new life for me. Instead of a wheezing Rocky Balboa wannabe, I would become Shaolin Rob, speaking softly, living on rice and vegetables, riding the subways in a lotus position and levitating up to my office instead of taking the elevator.

Hell, I already have the shaved head. It’s time to get in touch with my inner Kwai Chang.

First I thought I should run it by my trainer. I was sure he’d have no problem with me doing these simple routines. And I was wrong.

“Not yet,” he said. “You have to wait a little longer.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I’m too fragile for Tai Chi? I see 80-year-old Chinese ladies doing these routines in every park in town, but I can’t join them? If not Tai Chi, what the hell can I do—basket weaving?

I was tempted to ignore my trainer and take the class anyway, but I don’t want to do myself any more damage. He’s also twice my size and it wouldn't be smart to piss him off. A guy who specializes in pain management could probably manage to inflict a lot of pain if you rubbed him the wrong way.

Yes, I wish my life were a non-stop Hollywood movie show because celluloid heroes never feel any pain—but I sure as hell do.

I’ll do what my trainer tells me to do and stay away from boxing and Tai Chi until he gives me the thumbs up.

In the meantime, does anyone need a basket?

Let There Be Drums

2011-09-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

I complain about the subways a lot, but some nights you can feel like you're inside a rolling concert hall.

There are mariachi bands, rappers, gospel singers, and nostalgia acts and many of these people are quite talented. And all it costs is the subway fare and whatever you feel like giving a particular performer.

You get the occasional clunker, like the guy I saw at the W.72nd Street C station one night who did such a horrific job with “Unchained Melody” that he should have been hauled off in irons.

A tourist actually took this loser’s picture, though there’s no way you could capture that hideous noise in a photo. And if you could, you’d be clawing your eyes out as soon as you saw it.

One night I heard the sound of no less than five different drummers as I rode uptown and then home to Brooklyn.

First a couple of guys got on board the northbound No. 2 train with large African drums and proceeded to rock the house. I was annoyed at first, since I was tired after a long day at work and I wanted some (relative) quite. But these guys were good.

Outside I crossed paths with a deranged man who was screaming “Never Can Say Goodbye” at that top of his lungs as he fished for change out of parking meters. He wasn’t on the subway, so technically he doesn’t count, but I just felt like sharing this little acoustic nightmare.

He took a break from his change diving to yell out a string of obscenities at persons real or imagined before pouncing back on that poor song that has been done so well by Michael Jackson, Gloria Gaynor and Isaac Hayes.

You can say goodbye, I thought. You can say goodbye right now and no one would ever miss you.

I did my usual the-nuts-always-find-me lament, but then I decided to get off that schtick. Obviously the guy was not right in the head and if this is what he has to do to get attention then you should probably feel sorry for him.

On the way home, I was waiting at Columbus Circle for the D train when two guys on the uptown platform wailed away on some overturned plastic buckets. They were good, too, but I was hungry and a little grumpy (shocking, no?) so I was glad when that train pulled into the station.

Watch the Closing Doors

At 34th Street the doors opened and there was guy sitting on the platform with a full drum set playing to beat the band--if there had been a band to beat. And, once again, he was very talented.

It was strange-- I felt that instead of moving, the train was sitting still and the world was turning for us, displaying different musicians. Of course I hadn’t eaten in a while.

At 36th Street in Brooklyn, I was overjoyed to see the R train sitting across the platform just waiting for me to jump on board. But then the train pulled out of the station and I started cursing like the “Never Can Say Goodbye” guy, only without the singing.

While I waited for another local I caught sight of sign taped just over the third rail. It said “Test Site. Nano Insulators.”

I have no idea what that means, but I suspect it has something to do with large and lethal amounts of electricity. I hear a lot about the third rail of politics, but nothing beats the real thing when it comes to delivering the fatal goods.

And I do like that sign. It sounds like a band: Test Site and the Nano Insulators. They’ve got a wicked drummer.

I caught the N train and crossed my fingers that we’d overtake that loco local and found I was sharing the car with a man who was afflicted with a seriously bad cough.

Now I am fairly kind person. Not a candidate for a sainthood, perhaps, but I do have compassion for my fellow human beings.

However, I am also a Metrocard-carrying hypochondriac so when I’m trapped inside a moving metal box with an ill person I shift from “We’re all God’s Children” to “Every man for himself!” faster than a speeding contagion.

I was ready to pound on the door like a berserk bongo drummer, but fortunately the train pulled into 59th Street and I blasted out onto the platform. Naturally I missed the local and it was only then did I think about that man on the N train.

Perhaps he couldn’t stay home because he feared being fired. Maybe he couldn’t afford to go a doctor; maybe he didn’t have health coverage. I felt pretty ashamed of myself. But shame isn’t productive so I just sent good wishes his way and waited for the local.

There were no musicians on this train—nobody was even humming along with their Ipods. But I felt okay. I had the music in me.

You Will Know That I Am Gone

2011-09-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

In the weeks before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, WNYC and WQXR, the local public radio stations, asked listeners what they wanted to hear as they thought about the attacks and the events that followed.

I meant to contact them and make my own suggestion. I kept telling myself to do it, seriously, dude, don’t forget to do this or you’ll be very sorry.

However, like a lot of others things in my life, I never got around to doing it.

I find this especially irritating given that one of the many important lessons that came out of 9/11 was that we should do things now and not put them off until later—because there may not be a later.

But I ignored that lesson and so on Sunday I listened to other people’s musical choices, while my own played only in my mind.

For the record, the song I wanted to hear was the old folk tune “500 Miles.” Credited to Hedy West and copyrighted in 1961, the song is a mournful ballad about a traveler who is broke, far from home, and ashamed to go back.

I always associate this song with Peter, Paul and Mary, since I grew up listening to their version of it. There’s something so haunting about Mary Travers’s voice that goes right through my heart every time I hear it.

The song has been recorded by scores of performers over the years, including Sonny & Cher, Jackie DeShannon, Bobby Bare, Elvis Presley, and, yes, even Jim Nabors, who sang it during an episode of Gomer Pyle that I somehow managed to miss.

The song is about loss and missed opportunities and the opening is deceptively powerful.

“If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone, you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles…”

“500 Miles” has taken on a special meaning for me since 9/11. Shortly after the attacks, Goldman Sachs, my then-employer, relocated me and all of the other staffers who had been working at Liberty Plaza, which was across the street from the Trade Center, to its property on Water Street.

The change put a little distance between the ruins and me and got me one R train stop closer to home. I was also near Battery Park and I often went there during my lunch break.

A Walk in the Park

One day as I walked through the park I was shocked to see that The Sphere, the metallic sculpture that had once stood in the Trade Center’s plaza, had somehow survived the attacks and had been relocated to the park.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I didn’t think anything could have escaped the collapse of the towers, particularly a piece of artwork.

Created by German sculptor Fritz Koenig, The Sphere is 25 feet high and cast in 52 bronze segments.

It had been placed at the center of a ring of fountains designed by trade center architect Minoru Yamasaki to mimic the Grand Mosque of Mecca.

The Sphere stood at the place of the Kaaba, described as the most sacred site in Islam. And to think that it was all destroyed by Islamic extremists...

Six months after the attacks, the sculpture had been relocated to Battery Park and rededicated with an eternal flame.

As I stared at The Sphere, I could hear someone somewhere in the park playing “500 Miles” on the guitar. I didn’t look to see who it was; I don’t think I wanted to know. I just wanted this slow, somber tune to be the soundtrack for my discovery.

Of course the song was written decades before 9/11 and has absolutely nothing to do with the attacks, but the idea of losing someone, of knowing that they’re getting farther and farther away from you, seemed painfully appropriate in a city that had lost so many thousands of its people.

“Lord I'm one, Lord I'm two, Lord I'm three, Lord I'm four, Lord I'm 500 miles from my home.”

When I hear this song now I think about the victims’ friends and families who never got the chance to see their loved ones again.

“The artwork was meant to symbolize world peace through world trade,” according to Wikipedia.

We all know how well that worked out. But The Sphere still managed to survive that horrific day and, as the plaque near the sculpture says, it “endures as an icon of hope and the indestructible spirit of this country.”

The Sphere should serve as a reminder for us to keep striving for peace and to never let it slip away like a train leaving the station.

Fall and Rise

2011-09-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

I walked out of my building at lunchtime one day last week and saw two Buddhist monks crawling on the ground.

They were robed and barefoot, right there on Broadway, and I watched them stand up, raise their hands to the sky in prayer, and then get back down on the pavement to start all over again. A woman I assumed was a nun followed closely behind them.

They didn’t make a sound, didn’t look left or right, they just kept on going, very slowly and steadily.

It was a strange sight, even for New York and people walking down the street stopped to look and take pictures. This ceremony clearly had something to do with the 10th anniversary of 9/11, but I'm not sure what.

Ground Zero is right around the corner, so they must have been honoring the thousands of people who were lost on that day.

This may sound strange, but I actually felt a bit of hostility toward these people as I watched them scuttle along the cement.

Seriously, what was the point of this abuse? How are these monks any different from the other religious nutbags I mock and condemn on a daily basis? Let's not forget that the slaughter on 9/11 was perpetrated by psychopaths who thought they were doing God’s work.

“They’re full of shit, too,” I muttered toward the crawling contingent.

I know, I know--shame on me.

It’s so hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since I stood across the street from the World Trade Center watching the North Tower burn. Ten years since a second plane struck the South Tower and sent a sheet of orange flame rolling across Church Street. Ten years since we all ran up Liberty Street on a sidewalk that suddenly felt like a hellish treadmill as we desperately tried to get away.

It's been ten whole years since I sought refuge in a seniors home on Water Street while the earth was covered in the toxic cloud created by the towers’ collapse and ten years since I joined the crowd of survivors hiking over the Manhattan Bridge while fighter jets streaked over our heads.

My father turned 80 on that day; my mother was in the hospital fighting a losing battle against lung disease and she was moved out of the ICU in Lutheran Medical Center to make room for the expected wave of victims that never came.

On 9/11, either you got out or you didn’t.

Where Does the Time Go?

My mother died in July of 2002 and my father left this world in January of 2007. We’re about to sell our parents’ house and we’re busy cleaning out every trace of our family’s history from the property.

I thought about going to the ceremony at Ground Zero today, but I was just too tired and I wound up watching it on television. I sent my yearly email to a woman I met in that seniors residence and whom I escorted to the Atlantic Avenue LIRR station after the dust finally settled.

On Friday I went to an exhibition of 9/11 photographs called “Here is New York” that had been set up in the lobby of my building.

The images of the smoldering rubble, horrified spectators, and courageous rescue crews brought back everything from that day except the godawful smell, which hung in the air for weeks after the attacks.

I think of how Americans all came together back then, supported each other, wept and prayed, and it makes me heartsick to see how, in such a relatively short time, the country has degenerated into a nearly ungovernable free-fire zone, its people more divided than at any other period in my lifetime.

September 11 has been used as an excuse to start a disastrous war, create a string of bogus charities, and drum up business for an online gold peddling company.

It’s difficult not to believe that we’ve learned absolutely nothing from the events of 10 years ago. We live in a country where a major political party’s presidential candidates say—with straight faces, mind you—that God told them to run for the nation’s highest office.

They’re not interested in the power or the money; no, they’re just obeying the will of the Almighty. Think about that the next time you feel like mocking the crazy Muslims.

On Friday night I walked over to the Brook Brothers store on Church Street where I was standing when the second plane hit the South Tower. I moved around a little bit until I was convinced that I had found it, the exact place where I watched history unfold.

I wanted to grab somebody, anybody, a guy heading home, a family of tourists, and say, here, look, I stood on this very spot on September 11, 2001. Aren't you impressed?

I managed to calm down and enjoy the moment privately. And as I looked at the new towers reaching up toward the clouds, I suddenly felt that the Buddhists had the right idea. They weren’t performing some bizarre ritual on Broadway; they were doing the most intelligent thing imaginable when faced with the nightmare of 9/11.

And I thought they shouldn’t be doing it alone. We should all join them; every one of us should get down on our bellies, crawl on the ground like animals, and then stand and pray up toward the sky.

Green-Eyed Driver

2011-09-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

“Envy's a coal comes hissing hot from Hell.” -- Philip James Bailey

I caught sight of the helicopter flying a few blocks ahead of me and I floored the pedal. I was going to catch this bastard no matter what.

It was late and I was blindly driving into some roughneck part of town filled with crumbling warehouses, burnt-out factories, and pitch black alleyways.

As I pulled up to a red light, a freight train came rumbling out of the darkness just a few feet from the roadway. I had no idea what I was going to do when and if I caught up with that helicopter, but then it wasn't really a night for ideas--or rational thought.

But, wait, there’s something wrong here.

I don’t own a car. This neighbor is a little too weird-—it kind of looks like the old Industrial City down by the waterfront, but it kind of doesn’t. It's familiar territory, but it has a Blade Runner twist. And I don't chase helicopters for any reason whatsoever.

Okay, now I get it. None of this is real. It’s actually yet another of my loopy nightmare-dream-delusions that strike me without warning or anything resembling logic.

In this latest hallucination, I had seen this massive helicopter rumbling overhead and I noticed it was dangling a large poster announcing the debut of a new anchor for a network news program.

The anchorman was a former colleague of mine whom I had worked with at a newspaper many years ago. I hadn’t seen him in years, but I always thought he was a decent guy.

But in this dream he had committed the one, hideous unpardonable sin for which there can no atonement whatsoever.

He was more successful than I was.

Down These Mean Streets

Now a normal person might feel happy when a former coworker makes good. He would congratulate his old buddy, maybe drop him a line and wish him all the best on his new gig.

Yes, that’s what a normal person would do. But we’re talking about me, remember?

I started to get all sorts of mad dog angry. How could that stiff possibly get such a big time network job? I whined as I roared through the streets of Freak Town determined to catch that chopper. I’d smarter, better-looking, more talented than that loser will ever be. I should have the goddamn anchorman job, not him.

I lost sight of the helicopter—and my mind--just as I reached the traffic light. I was trying to decide my next move when this huge car came driving from the opposite direction, crossed over the dividing line, and came much too close to my ride.

“Join us,” this gang-banger in shades said from behind the wheel of the invading auto. “Join us or we’ll cut you.”

Join you? Cut me? What was this lunatic talking about? And how can he drive at night with sunglasses on?

I had about two seconds to ponder these scintillating questions when a guy with a tire iron leaned out of the rear window and began pounding the living beejeezus out of my car.

I don’t recall much after that and I’m not complaining. If the rest of the dream was anything like the stuff I can remember, I’d much rather forget it.

And now the moral of our story. This dream clearly was a warning about the dangers of envy. My obsession with somebody else’s success had caused me to abandon all sense of caution, drove me into some extremely dangerous territory, and brought me on a collision course with the Psycho Twins.

Envy really is the green-eyed monster, taking a wicked toll on your time, energy, and brain cells. It can cost you a good night’s sleep.

And it’s pretty tough on your car, too.

All Clear

2011-08-28T18:17:00.000-07:00

I was almost done removing the tape from the windows this afternoon when the wind started up again.

Trees were bending, dark ugly clouds tumbled through the sky, and I thought, here we go...

Hurricane Irene had been busted down to a tropical storm and was heading off to New England with her head hanging low.

But, of course, now that I had removed the protective tape from my windows, she would make a bloodthirsty U-turn and come roaring down my block shrieking “I ain’t done with you yet, skinhead!”

All right, so maybe I’m a little oversensitive, but it’s been rough couple of days.

I was trying not to worry about the storm, but it seemed like every five minutes we were getting reports of Irene’s destructive progress as she stomped her way up the East Coast.

Friends from all over the Internet wished me well, including one in Florida, which was kind of spooky since I always thought of the Sunshine State as a hurricane haven. If a Floridian is worried about you making it through a hurricane, you know you’ve got trouble.

We had a tense night with pounding rain, mandatory evacuations, and tornado warnings. I was getting pretty worked up until I finally decided that it was all in God’s hands and sat done to view the UFC fights on Spike.

There’s nothing like watching a bunch of heavily tattooed men pounding each other senseless in a cage to take your mind off a killer storm.

New York seems to have been spared any serious damage, but the latest news reports are blaming Irene for at least 21 deaths.

The victims included a man who was killed in a fire in Prospect, CT, which is just a short ride from my old place in Waterbury and another man who was killed in the Poconos, where I lived for five years, after a tree fell on him. Police said the man pushed his son clear of the falling tree, but could not get out of the way himself.

Live From Armageddon

The storm coverage was nonstop, of course, and it included lots of live scenes of reporters standing in middle of the hurricane and yelling over the storm that the wind was very strong. Yes, and in other news, water is wet.

Honestly, I’m in favor of melodramatic video footage as much as the next shameless news hack, but this is getting a little tedious.

There was a time when if you wanted to say someone wasn’t too bright, you’d declare that “he’s doesn’t know enough to come in from out of the rain.”

Apparently not coming in from out of a hurricane makes you a journalist.

One Fox reporter in D.C. really got dumped on when he was showered by raw sewage. Better him than me.

Years ago I recall seeing Dan Rather clinging to a palm tree and yelling into his microphone as he covered a hurricane.

I could barely make out what he was saying so I switched over to Tom Brokaw, who sat in a studio and reported on the very same storm. He looked warm, safe, and sane.

Okay, so Hurricane Irene didn’t come back to level my house. I’m glad that very long night is finally over and my heart goes out to those who lost loved ones.

And I’m especially thankful for all the support I received from my friends. They held me together better than any tape ever could.

A Mighty Wind

2011-08-26T20:40:00.000-07:00

So when does the lava start flowing?

I’m sitting here in my family’s nearly empty house waiting for Hurricane Irene to show up and raise all kinds of hell and high water.

The storm is supposed to make landfall in North Carolina early Saturday morning and then churn its way up the East Coast and hit our fair city tomorrow night.

The Alpine Theater on Fifth Avenue has removed all the lettering on its marquee, the oil delivery company on the corner has taped up its windows, and my local grocery store was crammed with anxious shoppers stocking up on food and water. (I was one of them.)

I still can’t believe it--a hurricane coming to New York. It’s the kind of thing that I read about happening in other places, not in my hometown. I mean, they're closing the subways--the subways!--and there's talk of mandatory evacuations.

I got a good look at the destructive power of hurricanes when I went to Florida in 1992 to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew for the Pocono Record. It was like an atomic bomb hit the place.

But a hurricane bearing down on New York? C'mon, that’s about as unlikely as an earthquake rocking the city.

Oh, yeah, that’s right, we had one of those, too. Just a few freaking days ago…

I haven’t gotten over that little incident, where I was sitting at my desk Tuesday afternoon and I felt this wave of energy come up from below and roll right through my chair. I tried to ignore it, told myself I was imagining things, but then I heard my co-workers all round me asking “what was that?”

When I went down to the lobby of my office building the people in the upper floors were streaming out of the elevators and going the hell home. It wasn’t easy getting back into the elevator and returning to the sixth floor.

The Hour and the Day

But I figured at least we were done with bizarre occurrences for a while…until I heard about Irene.

Irene hasn’t even gotten here yet and already I’m fed up. We want to sell our parents’ home and all of a sudden all kinds of natural disasters are heading our way. What next? Locusts? Frogs falling from the sky? Maybe Godzilla will swim over from Japan and breathe radioactive halitosis all over Bay Ridge.

I was going to skip church this afternoon because I’m so tired with all the packing and moving and this goddamn leg of mine that refuses to get better. But then I reasoned that when you’re looking down the barrel of a hurricane now is not the time to lose your religion.

The gospel reading at Trinity was “The Parable of the Ten Virgins” from Matthew, which ends with the line “therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.”

The hymn of the day was “Peace Like A River.”

When I got out of work this evening, a homeless man was sitting outside St. Paul’s Chapel holding a sign that read “No home, no job, have fun.”

“It’s all bullshit,” he shouted at a woman walking down Broadway. “Nothing’s going to happen on Sunday.”

“I like the way you think, brother,” I said, as I dropped a handful of coins into his cup.

“You have fun,” he told me.

I shall do my level best, given the circumstances. One block away some ranting loon with a portable speaker system was haranguing weary commuters about the power of God.

“The earthquake wasn’t enough,” he said through a mouthful of static. “God is real!”

Yes, and, unfortunately, so are you. I probably could have paid the homeless guy to hit this loser with his sign, but that wouldn’t be the Christian thing to do. It would have been fun, though.

So now we’re doing this strange dance of going on with our normal lives while waiting for the catastrophe to smack us upside the head.

I hope the weather people are wrong and that Irene loses power, blows out to sea, becomes nothing but a joke on Twitter and a one-day punch line on late night TV, and that we all have peace like a river.

That’s what I hope. But until then, we have to keep watch…

'All Will Fall Into Place'

2011-08-22T20:12:00.000-07:00

I never thought I’d be able to walk from one end of our basement to the other in a straight line, but the day has finally come.

That probably doesn’t sound like big news, but if you had ever seen the basement of my family’s house, you’d probably be as stunned as I am right now.

Our basement had been something of a garbage dump for as far back as I can remember, filled with old refrigerators, furniture, books, toys, and boxes, boxes, boxes.

In fact, other than the Arc of the Covenant and Jimmy Hoffa’s mortal remains, it’s hard to imagine what wasn’t down there.

We recently hired a crew of extremely capable contractors to come in and haul all the stuff out. Sergio, the head man, took time to show us old photographs, papers and other items he thought might be valuable to us, but pretty much everything else got the heave-ho.

When the crew drove off the first day, I said to my sister “thank God there are guys like them to do jobs like this.”

These men don’t sit behind keyboards or crunch numbers or yak about gigabytes all day long. They roll up their sleeves and work.

It was eerie walking around that nearly empty basement. The barren space really underscored the fact that we won’t own the house much longer.

There were still some bits of the past hanging around. I saw the battered box of the old Green Ghost game that we were so crazy about when we were kids. Sergio found Creeple People, a toy where you made the heads and limbs of troll-like creatures and put them on pencils.

There was a single plastic toy soldier, the remains of a game where you knocked them over with a cork fired from a little cannon. I forget the name of the thing, but I do remember having fun nailing those soldiers. It was a simpler time.

Message From The Past

As I looked around the basement, I saw an old birthday card on the floor. It was stained and filthy, but I could just make out an image of a bunch of grapes on the front, the one in the center sporting shades and a smiley face.

The card was addressed to me and it was from my parents—Mom was the one who actually picked and signed the cards--and it read “When it comes to sons, you’re the best of the bunch.”

I can only guess how old this card is, how many years it had sat forgotten in some dark corner of the basement.

At first, I didn’t think it was terribly different from the scores of other cards we’ve found until I looked on the inside flap and saw a note from my mother.

“Dear Rob,” she wrote, “I have faith in you and you will succeed. Just be patient. I have enclosed information on St. Martin. Pray to him and all will fall into place.”

Do I have to even mention that I started sobbing when I read this? No, I didn’t think so.

St. Martin de Porres was very important to my grandmother and I took Martin as my confirmation name in the fifth grade, the year she died.

I remember walking home from school with my mother one day and she started to cry as she told me how happy she was that I was taking St. Martin’s name.

I was a little embarrassed at seeing her cry, but I was a child and back then I had no idea how incredibly painful it is to lose your mother.

Years later, when my mom died, we had the funeral director put St. Martin’s image on her prayer card.

I’ve been struggling over what items I should keep from our house and what I should throw away, but part of me believes that if I walked away from our home with just that battered birthday card and the clothes on my back, I’d have everything I need.

The line about falling into place is so important at this time of my life because right now it feels like everything is up in the air. My sister said it was my fate to find this card and I’m not going to argue.

What’s even more amazing is that St. Martin is often depicted holding a broom because he believed all work to be sacred, no matter how menial.

I wish we had taken a broom to our basement decades ago so we could have used it for something more than a subterranean junkyard.

I think we all just assumed that the space would never be cleaned because it had always been in that hideous condition and, thus, always would be.

That’s a dangerous way to think because you wind up accepting a lot of bad things in your life merely because that’s the way they’ve always been.

You can’t allow junk to pile up in your house or in your mind. Trash should be thrown out the door at the first opportunity and toxic thoughts should get the same treatment.

If negative thinking starts to overwhelm you, say a prayer, then roll up your sleeves, grab a broom, and start sweeping. You’ll be doing sacred work.

If You’re Still Alive…

2011-08-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

Who is Jeffrey Meyer and why is saying those terrible things about me?

It seems that Mr. Meyer, whom I have never met, is telling people on the other side of the globe that I am no longer amongst the living.

I know I don't have the most active social life in the world, but I think putting me on the DOA list is a little harsh.

Michael Williams, the director of the Bank of Africa, that venerable financial institution, sent me an email wanting to know if I had authorized Mr. Jeffrey Meyer of West Virginia to claim funds of $500,000 “because he informed us that you were involved in a fatal car accident.”

He informed you of that? Funny, Mr. Jeffrey Meyer never informed me. Hell, it was the least he could have done since he wants all that dough. I wonder how it happened.

The inheritance funds had been used to open an online account for me at Bank of Africa by the United Nations Compensation Unit, which we all know and love.

“So if you are still alive," Mr. Williams wrote, "please kindly get back to us so that we will not be making any mistake as we are about sending him your user name and password to logon to your online account with Bank of Africa.”

If I’m still alive? I’ve been feeling a little run down lately, but I’m pretty certain I’m still breathing. And if I’m not, it may take me a little longer to get back to you.

Now I could probably use $500,000 as much as the next person, but I’m a little suspicious of this deal.

I mean, seriously--West Virginia? Bank of Africa? Mr. Williams, could you be a little more precise? West Virginia’s a pretty big place and I believe Africa is even bigger.

“The reason why your funds were delayed last time was because you did not provide the requested documents,” Mr. Williams wrote, “To confirm that you are still alive and you are ready to transfer your funds through our online banking transfer, get back to us with the details as required below for confirmation.”

Cash or Check?

There was a last time? I thought this was the first time.

I have to be honest here: I was reluctant to write about this email at all since it mentions death and I am so incredibly superstitious.

That’s not too surprising, I guess, given that I’m Irish and Italian. I believe in leprechauns and the evil eye, and on really bad days, when I’m not sure if I’m still alive, I believe in leprechauns who give the evil eye, which are the very worst kind.

I’m so superstitious that I actually created my own irrational belief when I was a teen-ager.

I had gotten into the habit of taking the second newspaper from the stack at newsstands for the perfectly logical reason that the top one was usually pretty tattered by cheapskates who pawed the front page but didn’t bother to buy the damn paper. (This was back when people still read newspapers instead of computer screens.)

However, as time went on, I found myself avoiding the top newspaper on the stack because—I told myself--it was bad luck. Somehow bad things would befall me if I took the first paper.

Where did that come from? I can’t blame Jeffrey Meyer for that one. Superstitions can usually be traced back to something people fear or misunderstand.

In my case, I think I was trying to create some feeling of power against all the bad things in the world—like fatal car accidents.

If I take the second newspaper, I thought, I’ll get a booster shot of luck that will protect me from all the Jeffrey Meyers in the world.

I didn’t answer the Bank of Africa’s email. If Michael Williams wants to take Jeffrey Meyer’s word over mine, then I don’t want to do business with his bank.

However, he is free to send me that half-million bucks, which I’ll put to very good use—if I’m still alive.

Everything Must Go

2011-08-07T19:06:00.000-07:00

In 1997, I moved back to Brooklyn from Waterbury, CT, to take a job at a trade magazine in New York.

My plan was to stay at my parents’ house for a few months and then get an apartment, preferably in Manhattan.

Things didn’t work out that way. I could make all sorts of excuses as to why I didn't move—my career difficulties, my parents’ illnesses—but that’s just what they are—excuses. And I’ve had a bellyful of those.

Both of my parents are gone now, our two-family home is empty except for me, and I’m finally, finally, moving on.

It’s not Manhattan, L.A., the left bank of Paris, Park Slope or any of the other exotic places I’ve dreamed about. No, I’m still in Bay Ridge.

I’ve found a very nice apartment just a block away from Shore Road. It’s a longer walk to the subway, but it’ll be worth it for all the space I’m getting. The express bus stop is just around the corner if I feel like treating myself and with this bum leg of mine that’s not such a bad idea.

I was hoping to move a long way from New York to some place much warmer, instead of six blocks away from my parents’ house. But that’s not going to happen, at least not yet.

I know that I’m luckier than a lot of other people in that I have a roof over my head and a steady paycheck. In this nose-diving economy I consider myself pretty fortunate.

So I’ve got to clear out of here and make way for the new owner, which means everything of mine has to be packed up, given away or thrown out.

This is going to be tough because I’ve always used my parents’ house as a kind of a storeroom. I kept my foot on home plate, subconsciously believing I could always go back there. Reality has finally caught up with me and now everything must go—including me.

Moving is so stressful, weighing hard on the body and the mind. It can be painful looking around at all the boxes that make up your life and wondering, this is it?

Boxing Day

I came home from work one night last week and my little buddy Ben, the four-year-old who lives next door to me, ran up the block towards me shouting “Robert, Robert!” He was so excited to see me.

Too bad you never had a family of your own, my dark self said, then you could have this kind of welcome every night.

But there’s no point in abusive thinking. I can only deal with what I have now.

The clean up of our house has turned up so many incredible finds. We’ve come across stacks of arts and crafts books, a reminder of my mother’s love for such projects, and one book is appropriately titled “Don’t Throw It Away!” Mom sure took that to heart.

I’m finding birthday and holiday cards from my parents and other family members that are years old. It’s fabulous watching how my nieces matured, with their awkward child’s scrawl slowly being replaced by fine adult penmanship.

Do I keep all these cards? It seems wrong to throw away messages from parents even if it’s just “Love, Mom and Dad.” But where do I put them?

And what about my high school yearbook? I hated high school, hated myself in high school and wouldn’t go back to that life for a stack of gold bullion the size of the Chrysler Building. But throwing it out…?

There’s one item I know I’ll be keeping. It’s a little envelope from the now-defunct Lincoln Savings Bank that my sister and I found in our parents’ closet.

“Roberta Curls?” my sister said, reading what I’m sure is my mother’s handwritten note. “Who’s Roberta Curls?”

But then we looked a little closer and saw the note actually said “Robert’s Curls” and was dated July 1, 1959, just two years after my birth.

We opened the envelope and out came locks of beautiful brown baby hair that once adorned my now hairless head. Where are you now that I need you?

I’ve said this before, but there are times when we feel like archeologists, only instead of searching ancient ruins, my sister and I are digging through our family’s past.

But I have to deal with the future. I vow that my new digs will be a real home, not the debris-laden bachelor hovels that my other apartments were. It’s going to be a refuge from the outside world, not a hellhole that recreates that dilapidated condition of my mind.

This apartment will be a proper place for me and Roberta Curls.

My Right Leg

2011-07-31T20:40:00.000-07:00

Oh, yeah, I really needed this.

It’s been 9 days since I somehow managed to injure my right leg and while it has improved a little bit, I’m still limping around like Long John Silver and dealing with a lot of pain.

And the worst thing is that I don’t know what the hell happened. All I can say is that I went to my gym last Friday, did my usual workout and went home feeling just fine.

A few hours later, though, I could barely walk and it hurt like hell when I tried to sit down.

I haven’t been this seriously laid up since I broke a bone in my arm while I was taking a jiu-jitsu back in the Seventies. And even then I heard the damn bone crack.

This time around I felt nothing and I’m starting to wonder if someone is sticking pins in a voodoo doll version of me.

I’m already living with the twin miseries of looking for an apartment and working with my sister to clean out our family home, so this little bit of grief is not appreciated.

What’s worse is that I’ll be feeling better one day and then be in terrible pain the next. This injury ain’t playing fair.

My doctor thinks this condition, which has something to do with my back, has been building up for a while. He took some blood tests and told me I have to sleep on my back with pillows under my legs to take the pressure off the discs.

I was waiting for him to say “for the next few weeks…” or “for a month…” but he swung for the fences and said “from now on.”

From now on? You mean as in forever? I’ve got to sleep like a space monkey until I limp off this mortal coil? Gee, that’ll do wonders for my love life.

I hate being laid up like this. I’m an exercise junkie so missing the gym is killing me. I’ve been trying to come up with alternate forms of exercise, but outside of push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups, there’s not much you can do with a bad leg.

No Mambo Tonight

I’ve had to change my lifestyle. All the stores that I normally walk to without a second thought are suddenly far away. My sister has kindly offered to drive to me some to places that are just a few blocks from my house. It doesn’t seem natural going to these stores in a car.

I can't kneel down to say my morning prayers and I can' fold my legs to mediate. I have gone back to working out with this chi gong DVD that I got while taking a class at The Open Center. It's helped a little bit.

I feel old and useless. My right foot flops loudly to the ground whenever I walk and I’m getting this tingling feeling running up my ankle.

I was sitting in my parent’s bedroom and caught sight of my late father’s cane hanging on a shelf. How soon will I need that, I wondered?

My doctor gave me all kinds of painkillers and I’ve been taking them with gleeful abandon—anything to make this agony go away, even if it’s only for a little while.

He wrote me a prescription for an X-ray, but warned me not to do get one unless I really felt I needed it.

“If you can avoid radiation,” he said, “do it.”

Good plan.

I’m trying to find the good in all of this, but it hasn’t been easy. I recall the words of Jack, an elderly gentleman I met in the Apple store recently.

“Be thankful for everything you have,” he said, “because one day you won’t have it.”

Now I’m getting it.

I probably shouldn’t put so much emphasis on my physical condition because that’s bound to change. And to be honest, this is nothing compared to the problems so many other people in this world are facing.

I’ve walking slower now. And I’ve been trying to be patient with people who are in my way. I’m attempting to deal with the anger I feel and I’m hoping to come out of this thing a happier human being.

Okay, so can I feel better now?

Beastie Boy

2011-07-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

I cranked up the DVR last week and took a ride through a sea of memories on the back of man-eating dinosaur.

I had recorded The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, an old time monster flick from 1953 that I watched scores of times when I was a kid.

I remember sitting with my family in the glow of the old Motorola and enjoying this classic that starts with an A-bomb blast in the North Pole and comes to a fiery climax at the Cyclone in Coney Island. (It was actually shot an amusement park in Long Beach, CA, but it's still pretty cool.)

There were no DVRs or DVDs back then, just plain old TV with commercials and everything. But we seemed to enjoy ourselves.

The plot? Well, let’s see. A nuclear test in the frozen north accidentally defrosts a prehistoric predator who does the backstroke down to the Big Apple, climbs out of the water and promptly does more damage to my hometown than Donald Trump.

The Seventh Seal it ain’t, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Named as the first movie to star a nuclear-awakened monster, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was supposedly inspired by a re-release of King Kong. The film, in turn, helped spark the birth of Gojira , or Godzilla as he's known in the States.

Beast features the work of two of my favorite Rays—author Ray Bradbury who wrote the short story credited with being the source for the screenplay and special effects wiz Ray Harryhausen, whose stop motion work brought the monster to life.

The creature is called the Rhedasaurus, which sounds like some kind of reference book, but it looks like no dinosaur known to man, something for which we can all be eternally grateful. Some observers say the “Rh” in the monster’s name is a reference to Ray Harryhausen’s initials.

The story goes that Bradbury looked over the script for a possible rewriting gig and mentioned that there was scene in the movie that was very similar to a short story he had written for the Saturday Night Post. (The monster pulls the plug on a lighthouse, one of my favorite scenes in the picture.)

The next day Bradbury received a telegram offering to the film rights to the story.

The Bronx is Up and the Battery is...Down!

“Are We Delving into Mysteries We Weren’t Meant to Know?” The trailer asks. I hope so, or otherwise there would be no monster movies.

“Is mankind challenging powers beyond the cosmic barriers?” What else is new?

“Will science unleash the fearsome forces of unknown worlds?”

Hey, enough with the questions already. Just shut up and watch the damn movie.

As with most of my favorite childhood films, I picked up on things in this movie now that I had missed entirely when I was a kid. For example, I noticed the flick has some rather outdated attitudes about atomic weapons.

“You know every time one of those things goes off,” one scientist says after detonating the nuke of the North, “I feel as if I was helping to write the first chapter of a new Genesis.”

Watching that scene in the comfort of my living room, I heard something crash to the floor and it took me a few seconds to realize it was my jaw. He said what? And with a straight face to boot?

I doubt seriously if the survivors if Hiroshima and Nagasaki would share that sentiment. They would probably think of something like The Book of Revelation and the whole Lake of Fire thing.

That particular scientist becomes the monster’s first victim but he soon has lots of company, as the beast sinks a ship, chomps on a bathysphere, knocks out that lighthouse and then goes on to New York.

Once on land, the Beast tears through the financial district like Bernie Madoff with a tail. To make matters worse, the monster’s blood is so toxic that soldiers and civilians alike keel over when they get near it.

Only one thing can save us:—Spoiler Alert—radiation!

The hero declares that the only way to kill the beast is to shoot it with a radioactive isotope. It has something to do with purifying his tainted blood though I’m a little dubious.

I don’t know much about isotopes and I suspect the people who made this movie didn’t either. No matter. Just remember radiation is your friend.

It was fun re-connecting with this old movie and recalling how we all enjoyed it so much.

I’m tempted to ask what the Sanitation Department did with that big monster carcass, but I don’t want to challenge powers beyond the cosmic barriers. I got enough problems.

Simian Says

2011-07-17T16:42:00.000-07:00

There’s an episode of the old Outer Limits TV show where David McCallum plays a Welsh coal miner who gets roped into a bizarre experiment that speeds up his own private evolution.

The man who played Ilya Kuryakin is transformed into the Freak of the Future with an extra finger, a Jiffy Pop cranium and some wicked psychic powers. This is progress?

In an attempt to reverse the situation, his girlfriend dials down the mutant machine a little too much and our hero gets Neanderthal for a few moments before he’s brought back to normal.

I always figured this was just science fiction, but a recent workout at my gym has me wondering more about de-evolution.

I take boxing classes at the New York Sports Club, which provide a great workout and allow you to imagine that you’re a tough guy for 55 minutes. Last week I stopped by the club near Lincoln Center for some early morning abuse.

The instructor ran a great class, breaking us up into pairs and having us hit a series of stations that he had set up throughout the room. We ran sprints, shadow-boxed with elastic bands on our ankles, pounded the heavy bags, and punched the focus pads—the teacher even put on body armor so we could whale on his ribs.

There was a point during the workout where you picked up a medicine ball and threw it against the wall so your partner could catch it and return the favor.

Simple, no? Oh, yes, indeed. It was so deliciously simple that I couldn’t get enough of it.

Medicine ball training is one of the oldest forms of exercise. I remember a scene in I, Claudius that featured two ancient Romans throwing a medicine ball back and forth. Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, had his patients toss around medicine balls for both injury prevention and rehab.

Bedtime for Bonzo

I had a good sweat going by the time I got to this station and I started hurling that thing as hard as I could. It was fabulous.

Unlike barbells, dumbbells and various exercise machines, medicine ball training can be so gloriously crude. You don’t think about sets and repetitions and you certainly don’t worry about form. You don’t worry about anything, really.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more focused during a workout. I threw that big (faux?) leather ball up against the wall like I was trying to knock down the building. I was grunting with every throw and I could feel myself regressing, becoming more primitive…and I liked it.

I wasn’t feeling anger or rage. It was more like liberation. Where else can an adult who is not in a mental institution do something like this?

It was a great experience because by getting so loose I saw how uptight I am. For these brief few minutes I wasn’t concerned about what people thought of me or how I looked or what I had to do when I got home. I just chucked that big old matzah ball until the round ended.

Now I have to stress here that we obviously cannot go through life like huffing monkey people. I think a lot of the world’s problems come from humans acting like gorillas all too often. We as a species can be so obtuse that sometimes the only thing that seems to be separating us from the banana bunch are the Ipods jammed in our ears.

However, it is nice to do a little knuckle-walking now and then to remind us that too many thoughts spoil the brain.

At the climax of that Outer Limits episode, David McCallum is about to use his newly-acquired powers to zap his crappy home town into coal dust when his highly-developed noodle tells him that the prehistoric path is not the way to go.

You don’t need six fingers to figure that out.

'I’ll Never Let You Go'

2011-07-10T19:08:00.000-07:00

Children have this fabulous gift for shaking you up with just a few words.

I had this fact reinforced for me the other night when I was talking with Ben, my neighbor’s four-year-old.

Ben is a really sweet kid. He always greets me with this excited “hi!” whenever he sees me and then he’ll tell me what he’s up to and ask me all sorts of questions.

“He always looks for you,” his mother told me. Well, in the the interests of full disclosure, I always look for him.

Last week while relaxing in Central Park, I got a Frisbee advertising the Museum of Modern Art and since I have no use for the thing, I gave it to Ben. He responded by giving me a hug that made me one very happy guy. It really is better to give than receive.

While I was speaking with Ben on his front stoop, he went and got the Frisbee and started reading all the information printed across the front of it. He did a pretty good job, too, except for pronouncing “MOMA” as “Momma.” Hey, close enough.

“Well, Ben,” I said finally, “I’d better go inside and have dinner.”

Maybe the words “dinner” and “momma” triggered something in his mind, but whatever the reason, Ben had a question for me.

“Where’s your mommy?”

I had nothing to say for a few seconds. My family will mark the ninth anniversary of mother’s death this week, so I was a little stunned.

“Oh, she’s gone,” I said. “She’s in Heaven.”

“She’s not coming back?” Ben asked.

“No,” I said, “she’s not.”

I started saying something about why it’s so important to be good to your mother while she’s still with you, but I stopped myself.

When you’re four years old you believe that Mommy will be around forever, that she’ll always be there to take care of you and make things right. There was no need to tell Ben otherwise.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly a decade since I got the call from my mother’s doctor to get over to the hospital on Staten Island where she was being treated. She was gone before I arrived.

That was truly the worst day of my life, the day when I finally had to accept that Mommy wouldn’t be around forever. Though to be honest, I’m still having some trouble with that.

I have so many memories of my mother, but recently my sister shared something with me that I was too young to remember.

She recalled a time when I was a baby and my mother was holding me up in my playpen. She was tickling me, my sister said, making me laugh, while saying “I’ll never let you go!”

Naturally I started blubbering as soon as my sister told me this.

“That was supposed to be a happy memory,” she said with some exasperation.

I know, I know, but sometimes memories can be both precious and painful. The ones that fill your heart can also break it and you can laugh and cry at the same time.

I sometimes wish I had total recall so I could actually remember that day myself, but maybe it’s better to experience it second hand.

And now as we clean out our parents’ house and prepare to sell it, letting go is pretty much the order of the day. We’re taking the things we want—photos, furniture, and other such stuff—and giving away or throwing out the rest.

This is a very difficult process, as we resurrect all kinds of memories. It’s like getting open-heart surgery without the anesthetic.

My childhood is long over and the life we knew in our house is gone. It’s Ben’s turn to play and run around the backyard before coming inside to have dinner with Mommy. I hope he enjoys every minute of it.

We’ll sell the house and I’ll find somewhere else to live. But wherever I go, I want my mother to know one thing.

I’ll never let you go.

Hand in Mirage

2011-07-03T18:07:00.000-07:00

Strange dreams have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, but I’ve had a few gems lately that were so twisted it’s a shame I couldn’t sell tickets.

First there was the dream of the sliding horses, which got weirder and weirder as it went on. A short time later, I dreamed I was walking down Main Street in Northampton, MA on a rainy afternoon when I saw my late father sitting on a rope swing that was tied to the branch of a large tree.

This was particularly upsetting because my father was in a state of serious mental and physical decline. He looked lost, with one shoe off and rocking back and forth on that swing. It was painful.

My aunt has a farmhouse in this area, so that explains the locale. And I had been traveling with my uncle—my dad’s brother—so maybe that’s why I saw my father. I just wish I had seen him at a better time in his life, but then the most recent memories are usually the freshest.

Still, as unusual as this dream was, it was mere fairy dust when compared with an experience I had a few nights later.

This particular fiasco was one of those rare four-alarm paint-peeling nightmares that are so truly awful that the moment I woke up I looked up at the ceiling and literally thanked God that it was all a dream.

Our story goes something like this: I am getting married and preparing to fly out to the West Coast with my family for the service.

However, on the night before the trip I realize that there’s one little problem.

My bride-to-be does not exist. She is actually someone I had dreamed up—while I was dreaming.

Now this can be a pretty serious issue if you plan on getting married. I’ve noticed that weddings tend to go much more smoothly if you have two people at the altar. (On the other hand, I suppose a one-person divorce would be a breeze.)

Please understand that I was not deliberately lying to my family. I genuinely believed that I had a loving fiancée waiting for me in California.

She Was Here A Minute Ago...

As soon as I realized what was going on, I did what I do best: I freaked. I ran around in circles wondering what was I going to do, what was I going to tell my family, and why the hell was I imagining phantom brides in the first place?

The next thing I remember I was talking to a friend of mine—we’ll call him “Phil”--whom I had not seen in a while. We had a bit of a falling out over politics—his are completely wrong—so I think seeing him in the dream reflected my desire to patch things up with him.

But Phil also brought along his chronically hot girlfriend and I’m ashamed to say that my devious little dream mind was thinking that maybe I could somehow swipe her from Phil and make her my emergency fiancée—sort of a fill-in-the-blank bride.

I cautiously floated the idea to my sister, who showed up in this nocturnal train wreck, telling her something like “you know, Phil has a real nice girlfriend…”

And that was as far as I got. My sister instantly saw the perverted path I was taking—something she’s very good at in real life—and let me have it.

“That’s disgusting!” she shouted before doing an abrupt about face and walking away. All right, all right, it was just a freaking suggestion…

And then I’m in a psychiatrist’s office--can’t imagine why. The shrink gives me some Prozac, but for some reason I walk out without paying the guy. (My relatives say this sounds just like me--hrumpf!)

I was convinced the doctor was going to have me busted, so I probably should have popped a few happy pills just to calm down before the cops hauled me off to the calaboose.

I tell you waking up never felt so good.

Clearly, this nightmare shows that I have a strong desire to settle down. So strong that I skipped some important details--like having a partner. But there are a few lessons here, too.

You can’t sleepwalk through life; you can’t fantasize your way into happiness, and you’ve got to get out into the real world if you want to meet the person of your dreams.

Now pass the Prozac: I’ve got to return my dream tuxedo before I lose the deposit.

The Friends of Whitey Bulger

2011-06-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

I was working at a newspaper in Waterbury, CT when Whitey Bulger went on the lam.

It was December 1994 and I hadn’t been in New England for very long, so I didn’t know much about the infamous gangster, who, according to at least one law enforcement official, was more feared in Boston than John Gotti was in New York.

And I certainly didn’t know about his bizarre relationship with the FBI that allowed him to work as a government informant and a ruthless hoodlum simultaneously.

Bulger was in his 60’s at the time and the FBI description of him warned that the career criminal was known to carry a knife strapped to his ankle.

I couldn't believe that. A knife strapped to his ankle? The guy was old enough to be someone’s grandfather and he’s running around with a shiv down his sock? But like I said, I didn’t know much about Whitey Bulger.

Bulger’s run from the law finally came to an end a long way from South Boston. The FBI said a search of his Santa Monica, CA apartment turned up more than $800,000 in cash, 30 guns, including rifles, pistols, and shotguns, and several knives. They didn’t say anything about the old guy carrying a knife around his ankle.

Clearly there’s a ton drama in this story, from the supposed “good” brother who was president of the Massachusetts State Senate and then president of UMASS; to the FBI agent who so outrageously aided and abetted 81-year-old former fugitive.

I read where Bulger was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Departed,” but I’ve been thinking more of a 1973 movie called “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” which I saw years ago at the dearly departed Fortway Theater in Brooklyn.

Based upon a novel by George V. Higgins, the film stars Robert Mitchum as an aging Boston hoodlum who is desperate to stay out of jail.

To be honest, I didn’t enjoy the movie the first time I saw it. I was a teenager and looking for an action head banger with screeching car crashes and slow motion machine gun battles.

But I’ve been on a bit of Seventies kick lately so I rented this film and now I can see that it was never intended to be a thriller.

The film is really a window on a very dangerous world, where no one can be trusted, the threat of prison looms overhead like the guillotine’s blade, and a night out with friends could very well be your last night on earth.

One character, a gunrunner, draws down on some customers because he fears they’re going to rip him off. I don’t know if they were or not, but when you make your living selling illegal weapons you can’t afford to be wrong. (The actor who played this part, Steven Keats, committed suicide in 1994.)

The criminals and the feds operate with a kind of willful blindness, with the law enforcement people knowing full well that their snitches are up to no good, but not really caring as long as they get to throw somebody in the can.

Unlike so many other crime movies, there is no sense of justice prevailing or rights being wronged in this film; it’s just another day in the jungle.

Hollywood has often been accused of romanticizing gangsters, but that is definitely not the case with "The Friends of Eddie Coyle."

In fact, I would advise anyone considering a life of crime to watch this movie before putting on that ski mask. See how friends stab each other in the back; watch how the cops twist hapless losers into knots.

If you see all of that and still want to be a hood then I wish you luck. And I suggest you think about strapping a knife to your ankle.

This Budd’s For You

2011-06-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

When I was studying film in high school, I remember reading a quote by Peter Ustinov about his 1962 production of “Billy Budd.”

Ustinov, who directed, acted in, and co-wrote the screen adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella, said he had decided to shoot in black and white because “color prettifies everything” and would undermine the serious story he was trying to tell.

The line came back to me last week after all these years (I think it had something to do with the word “prettifies”) when I finally saw “Billy Budd.” And I was quite satisfied.

Even though this was his second film, Terrence Stamp is introduced in this movie—“A new face! A new talent! A great new star discovery!”—as Billy, a painfully naive merchant sailor who is impressed by the British Navy in 1797. He quickly falls afoul of Claggart, the ship's sadistic master-at-arms, and tragedy ensues.

Now I have to confess that I, an English major, never read the novella. I know, I know, shame on me. But, seriously, it’s on my list, along with War and Peace and Twilight.

Ustinov plays the ship’s captain, David McCallum—Illya Kuryakin if you’re from my generation--plays Wyatt, the gunnery officer, Melvyn Douglas plays the sail maker everyone calls “The Dansker,” and Robert Ryan, one of my favorite actors, plays the sadistic Mr. Claggart.

This was an intriguing choice and I have to say that, initially, I thought Ryan was somewhat miscast, being the only American amongst all these Englishman. He didn’t even attempt to do a British accent, which bothered me for the first few minutes of the film. But then I got into it.

First of all, Ryan was such a powerful actor that I could watch him play any role.

Secondly, Claggart is such a vicious bastard, so unlike everyone else on board, that it almost makes sense that he sounded different from everyone else. He moves around the ship like a thundercloud and everyone on board is terrified of the guy, including the captain.

The Angel Must Hang!

But as evil as he is, Ryan brings such humanity to this character. Similarly, I thought Stamp made Billy believable even though the young man is so innocent and saintly. When these two come together, you know things are going to end badly. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but she really hates extremes.

Benjamin Britten used the story as the source material for an opera. The novella was also dramatized for television in the Netherlands, and it was done twice on television in the Fifties in what so many people call the golden days of television. (That was before Illya Kuryakin so I wouldn’t know anything about it.)

Don Murray plays Billy in the 1959 production on the DuPont Show of the Month, which also starred Roddy McDowall and Malachy McCourt.

And in 1953, Billy Budd was broadcast live with a cast that included Patrick Macnee as a young office; Basil Rathbone as the captain, and, in the starring role—I still don't believe it--William Shatner.

I saw a clip of this production and I couldn’t believe my eyes: Sherlock Holmes and Captain Kirk were sharing the same space.

I thought my head was going to explode.

Light years away from the commander of the Enterprise, Shatner has blond hair in this production and he speaks with an accent I can’t quite place. It’s kind of…strange.

And this being live TV, it wouldn’t be fun if there weren’t a near disaster.

Shatner said in a 2004 interview that early on in the broadcast Rathbone got his foot caught in a bucket and couldn’t deliver some of his first lines.

I’m trying to picture the man whom I considered to be the definitive Sherlock Holmes clattering around a soundstage like Jerry Lewis with a bucket on his foot. There’s no way to prettify that, mate.

When Holmes told Watson the game is afoot, I don’t think this was what he meant.

So I finally saw Ustinov’s film. Unfortunately, it came out in the same year as "Mutiny on the Bounty" and "Damn the Defiant," two other sea sagas, and it sank at the box office.

But I’m going to try and track down Shatner’s version and I’ll even check out the opera. Then maybe I’ll read the damn book.

Let the Wrong One In

2011-06-12T19:33:00.000-07:00

And she seemed like such a nice lady…

I got on the R train early one morning, headed straight for my favorite seat—the corner two-seater in the first car—and prepared to read and relax as I rode to work.

There was a lady in her fifties sitting next to me and she asked me what I was reading. Lush Life by Richard Price, I told her and we started having a polite chat as we rumbled toward Manhattan.

I’ve had a number of this commuting conversations in my years as a subway jockey and they are often quite pleasant. New York can be a very lonely and unfriendly place, so I always welcome an agreeable encounter.

My companion and I talked about work and traveling and other such day-to-day stuff and things were going quite well, or so I thought.

And then she dropped the bomb.

“So,” she asked in a sly tone, “do you read the Bible?”

Oy gevalt, not one of those, please God. I just wanted a quiet ride to work. I was in no mood to engage in some heavy theological blather.

“Well, yes,” I mumbled. I really didn't want to talk to her, but I didn't want to be rude--even though it was a clear case of justifiable rudeness.

But she was off to the holy races, quoting different passages from the Bible and telling me how she was born again in 1977-- back when I was a sophmore in college and desperately trying to score. She had been visiting her sister and the sister's boyfriend when--presto chango!--she was born again. Or so she claims.

How do you know it wasn't indigestion? I wondered, keeping my thoughts to myself. I don’t know much about this born again business but apparently it gives you the right to harass people on subways.

I sat there listening to this drivel, feeling increasingly jealous of the guy with the Ipod on a nearby bench who had his nose jammed into a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

I have an Ipod that I won in a drawing a few years ago, but I’ve never used it. I think I’ll start packing the thing to work so I can wear the earphones and at least look like I’ve got something better to do than listen to religious crackpots. Of course with some people you could be wearing an old timey diver's suit and they'd still try and save your soul.

Blood and Metrocards

“Who said a priest can forgive sins?” the woman demanded of me. “Who said this?”

I don’t freaking know, lady. Why are you asking me? I just assumed that it was part of the job description. Who said pilots can fly airplanes? They go to school and get a license, so I guess priests have a similar arrangement.

“Jesus shed his blood,” the lady told me. “only blood can cleanse sin!”

Yes, but blood stains are really tough to get out. And this born again thing is starting to sound a lot like a slasher movie.

I find this behavoir so incredbily offensive. First, my religious beliefs—or lack of them—are no one’s business but my own and I’m certainly not going to answer to a total stranger.

I’ll gladly have an intelligent conversation with anyone about religion, but—and this is important--it has to be an intelligent conversation. I don’t want someone haranguing me about cleansing blood and being born again in a disco era delusion.

For the record, I attend weekly services at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan and I’m very happy. The people are great and we keep the bloodshed to a minimum.

And while I know this sounds incredibly naïve, I felt betrayed by this woman. I had thought she started the conversation because she was sincerely interested in me.

Instead she was just another hustler, no different than the guys who walk through the trains peddling pirated DVDs and batteries of questionable ownership. I felt like a rube who comes to the big city and gets nailed by some conman. What kind of self-respecting New Yorker falls for a scam like this?

The lady had to get off at Union Street—praise the Lord!—and on her way out she gave me a flier with an address printed on it.

“Come to our church,” she said over her shoulder.

“Oh, sure,” I said, suddenly feeling born again, just as soon as I get a blood-proof poncho.

Time to dig out that Ipod...

Bat Boy Returns

2011-06-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

My sister and I have been going on a weekly time traveling adventure as we continue to clean out our parents’ home.

We’ve been going through old photographs, letters, cards and other bits of family history. It’s been emotionally wrenching at times as we recall childhood memories and there’s still plenty more to discover before we finally put out the “For Sale” sign.

But there have been some fun finds as well. Last week we came across my old Cub Scout ID card, certifying that I was indeed a member in good standing with Pack 277. The card looks so official I wonder if I could use it in airports.

But today we came upon a true treasure. While cleaning out the living room bureau, we discovered—are you ready?—my fifth grade Science Award Certificate.

When I was growing up, children had to prove their scientific knowledge by assembling some kind of display that would illustrate a basic factoid of nature.

I recall kids making buzzers for the projects on electricity and there were others with lights and whirling propellers. I think my brother did the old baking soda-erupting volcano routine that was a grammar school classic for a generation of children.

I don’t recall enjoying this yearly ritual, as I was more of your sensitive literary type and had little use for molecules and gravity. I usually struggled to come up with something at the last minute.

But this one time I was able to create an awarding-winning project with the killer topic of all time--bats.

“Bats?” you say. Yes, damn it, bats, those freaky flying mammals that make Halloween and horror movies so special.

What made this project such a standout was that, in addition to researching the hell out of the topic—I went absolutely batty—(there, I said it!)--I also made a paper-mache model of a bat for my class presentation.

Oh, paper-mache, how I loved that stuff! I felt like Michelangelo as I dunked strips of old newspapers into the paste—all under my mother’s supervision, of course--and wrapped them around a long balloon to create the body and a smaller balloon for the head.

I don’t remember what I used for the wings, but whatever it was I slapped dripping newspaper clippings all over it. Once the glue hardened, I popped the balloons, got the brown spray paint, and made myself a bat.

A Special Study

The model was supposed to be a Big Brown Bat—eptesicus fuscus to those in the know—but it looked more like a giant mud butterfly or Mothra’s anemic cousin. Bear in mind I was 10 only years old.

The certificate is stained and a bit battered after all these years, but it bears the image of a Flash Gordon-type rocket ship on the surface of some distant planet with Mother Earth looming high in sky.

“To further an interest in science and related subjects,” the certificate said, “Robert Lenihan has pursued beyond class requirements, a personal program of study and achievement, which has resulted in a special study of the subject—Bats.”

The certificate is dated January 26, 1965 and signed by—oh, no!--Sister Frances, the original bat out of hell herself.

Long have I loathed this woman, a creature of the night who dressed in black and went forth from her convent-cave to strike terror into the hearts of hapless school children. Real bats may be scary, but they don’t know any better.

However, on the day I made my presentation, I was able to impress Sister Frances with my bats-pertise and stunning visual aid. I gave her and my classmates a rundown of the various types of bats, including one kind that sports a three-foot wingspan.

“Three feet,” Sister Frances exclaimed. “Ye gods!”

I fantasized about Sister Frances and the mega-bat actually running into each other on some moonless night where they could go at it fang and claw, but I have no doubt that the bat would get the worst of it.

God knows what kids are doing today for their science projects—probably splitting the atom and creating mutant life forms. I’m sure paper-mache and baking soda look laughable in contrast to what can be conjured up with a computer.

But it was nice coming across this little sheet of paper. It reminded me of a pleasant time I had with my mother without bringing me to tears like some of these other relics around here have.

This was a real personal program of study and achievement.

The Last Sunbeam

2011-05-30T06:37:00.000-07:00

Dirge for Two Veterans by Walt Whitman

The last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finish'd Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.

Lo, the moon ascending,
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,
Immense and silent moon.

I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-key'd bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they're flooding,
As with voices and with tears.

I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring,
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
Strikes me through and through.

For the son is brought with the father,
(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans son and father dropt together,
And the double grave awaits them.)

Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o'er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin'd,
('Tis some mother's large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing.)

O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.

The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.

Rob, 54, Where Are You?

2011-05-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

And so I’m now 54 years old.

I’ll skip all the “I’m so old” and “where did the time go?” crap because this is a day for celebration not flagellation.

A lot of nice things happened today. My sister treated me to a delicious dinner, I received some very nice cards, and I got a ton of birthday wishes from all my friends on Facebook.

Plus Modell’s sent me a discount coupon in honor of my birthday and if that isn’t cause for unrestrained merriment I don’t know what is.

I started the day early with a 7am boxing class because even though it’s my birthday, it’s also gym day and I never miss a chance for a little self-abuse.

I pushed things today as I tried to keep up with a much younger classmate during a heavy bag workout. I survived the class, but towards the end I began to understand how the bag felt.

My niece likes to tease me about not straining myself "because of your age and your condition." I'm starting to think she may be on to something.

We had our annual health fair at work and I sat down for a five-minute Reiki session. It was fantastic. I could feel my body relaxing, my shoulders coming down, and my breath slowing. And this woman hardly touched me. I have to investigate this further.

I was listening to an interview with the talk show host Tavis Smiley and he mentioned that he does not make resolutions on New Year’s Day. He said he prefers to take stock of himself on his birthday, “the day God brought me into this world.”

I like that. On January 1 it’s you and all the other losers making grand promises. But your birthday is your day to make plans for the rest of your time here on earth.

I made a friend last week while attending a one-to-one session at the Apple store on Prince Street. His name is Jack and he is 91-years-old.

“My kids are all older than you,” he said when I told him my age.

Jack is a kind of local celebrity at the Apple store. All the employees seemed to know him and anyone who doesn’t will soon make his acquaintance—a shrinking violet he ain’t.

He started the conversation by asking me if it was still raining out and pretty soon he was pumping my hand and telling me about his years making instruments for the shipping business.

Jack lamented how people today have no idea that the shipping industry really built New York. Jack told me that his grandson, a TV producer in L.A., had treated him to a $2,200 laptop when Jack wanted a cheaper model.

“I asked him why he did that,” Jack said, “and he said, “because Grandpa, you’re the only one left.’ I kissed him on both cheeks.”

Jack recently called his grandson and asked him when he was coming to New York again. When the grandson asked why, Jack told him, “I need a new camera.”

Jack showed me photos of the New York waterfront he had on his laptop and told me stories about the great shipping lines. I could’ve listened to him all night but I had a session to attend. I gave him my card and I hope I see him again.

I’m thinking about all the times I whine about growing old and then I look at this man, who will be 92 in December, and see how happy and vibrant he is. I’m so glad I met him and I'm proud to say that I know Jack.

Spam I Am

2011-05-22T13:59:00.001-07:00

Do you want to be happy every day?

Save your money and time. Don’t miss the chance of your life!

Just trust me and life will change to better immediately. Just do it! You won’t be disappointed!

I want to help you with your infernal ache. I know the place where you can buy the best drugs.

The preceeding statements were made in my name, but I had nothing to do with them.

My email contact list was hijacked recently so everybody on it received messages about the secrets of sexual attraction, were told that sex is the only satisfaction, and advised that “OMG! I have never had such a long sex!” and “LOL! It’s the funniest thing in the world!”

Only it wasn’t funny at all. It was downright creepy. I got messages from so many people demanding to know what the hell going on. There’s nothing quite like having an ex-girlfriend writing to find out why you sent her an ad for cheap Viagra.

The only satisfaction for me would have been finding the idiots responsible for this spam-icide and inflicting them with an infernal ache that could never be cured—even with the best drugs.

I changed my email password as soon as I learned what was going on. I sent out emails explaining the situation, but I realized that there were a number of people on my contact list with whom I have had no contact at all. I’m not even sure who some of them are.

I suspect that this breach may have occurred during my vacation when I was using various hotel computers. That’ll teach me to monkey around with the Internet while I’m traveling.

A recent New York Times article said spam is still on the menu, despite filtering technologies, legal investigations, and convictions.

“Seven years after the famous prediction by Bill Gates, then chairman of Microsoft, that spam would be eradicated in just two years,” the story said, “about 90 percent of all e-mail is spam.”

I’m so glad that the world didn’t come to an end on Saturday as these rapture loons had been predicting. Oy vey iz mir, I have enough sins on my slate already without having to explain to the Lord why I was sending out pornographic emails. (I wrote about these people last year. )

And it didn’t help that on this very same day I went to my local grocery store and rang up a bill for—I swear to God—$6.66. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten that beef jerky.

I thought for sure that with a number like that my number would be up and I’d have an eternal infernal ache, but then a funny thing happened on the way to Armageddon—it didn’t happen.

Shocking, no?

Apparently humanity is hard to eradicate--just like spam.

A few hours after the world was supposed to have ended, I was walking through the Atlantic Avenue subway station when I saw a group of Mennonites singing hymns in the passageway where 24 hours earlier one of the rapture artists had been handing out pamphlets.

These people were so white, so incredibly Caucasian, they were almost glowing. It looked as if they had been raptured straight out of Kansas and dumped into Brooklyn.

But they seemed nice and they sang their hymns so beautifully. One of them even gave me a free CD. Unfortunately, the CD came with this little handout that went on about the lake of fire and the wages of sin. At least the music was pleasant.

I have to admit that some good came out of all this e-monkey business. I had a nice exchange with my ex and I got a call from a friend of mine whom I had not spoken with in years.

I surprised to hear from him—I hadn’t made the spam connection yet—and we were having a great conversation when my friend shifted gears and said, “by the way, I got this email from you…”

LOL! It was the funniest thing in the world!

Gigi

2011-05-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

I made a new friend on my vacation and while she’s not very good at her job, she did teach me an important lesson.

Her name is Gigi and she's not an actual person—that’s the name my uncle and his wife gave to their car’s Global Positioning System (GPS).

I haven’t owned a car in years, I rarely drive, and I’ve never used GPS. I supposed it’s good idea, but it feels a little creepy to have some device telling you to turn here and turn there. I went through this once with the nuns in Catholic school and I don't feel like repeating the experience.

I’ve got a cell phone that will mouth off without warning, asking me to please repeat my command, even though I haven’t made a command. This keeps happening, usually at the worst possible moments, and I can't turn the damn thing off. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve been known to pick up the phone and shout “drop dead!” in public places. Maybe I should calm down a little.

But I got to like Gigi. She had some severe directional issues, which admittedly is rather serious given the fact that the sole reason for her existence is to give people directions.

Whenever we came close to an intersection, Gigi would tell us to make a turn, even though she was dead wrong. I don’t what her problem was, but in the immortal words of my late father, Gigi couldn’t find her ass with her two hands--assuming she had an ass and two hands to find it with.

My uncle rightly ignored her and proceeded to go his own way. We made a game of mocking Gigi and telling her to clam up, but I finally noticed something about Gigi’s reactions.

Every time we blew off Gigi’s advice, she would pause, say “recalculating” in her fembot voice and offer a fresh set of directions at the next available turnoff.

We ignored those new directions, too, but that didn’t slow Gigi down at all, and she’d promptly come up with another batch of directions.

I liked how Gigi kept her cool. She didn’t shriek when we ignored her, she didn’t whine, or wail “why me?” and fall to the ground sobbing.

She just quietly regrouped, came up with a new plan, and kept doing her job. She wasn’t at all distracted or discouraged. At one point she did go into silent mode, but I didn't take it personally.

I waste a lot of time thinking about things in the past or worrying about events in the future—just about anything other than what I should be focusing on.

While I was on vacation, I caught myself dwelling on some incidents from years ago and I remember thinking that I should come up with some kind of trigger word that would return me to the present. Well, I think I’ve found my word: Recalculating.

It certainly worked for Gigi, so I’ve tried adopting her method for my EPS, or Emotional Positioning System. Whenever I get distracted—or more accurately, whenever I distract myself--I try saying the word “recalculating.”

This reminds that I’m wasting precious time and gets me back to the problems at hand. If I get angry about those hideous nuns, babbling cell phones, or various rotten people in my life, it's time to recalculate.

Thanks, Gigi. I owe you one.

Infernal Falls

2011-05-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

My sister and I stood on the trail to Vernal Fall in Yosemite National Park wondering what to do next.

It was pretty intimidating. The falls, which measure 317 feet, were crashing to one side, while the narrow and rather soggy path before us seemed to snake right up to the sky.

Neither one of us is very good with heights and we had a lot of climbing to do before we reached the top.

What the hell am I doing here? I thought. I’m not Sir Edmond Hillary. I’m just a schmoe from Brooklyn.

“It’s up to you,” my sister said.

Oy, I was afraid of that.

I really didn’t want to go any farther, but then I didn’t want to come on this trip to California in the first place because I really didn’t want to get on a plane, and I really didn’t want to leave Brooklyn and God forbid I should break up my precious little routine for 10 entire days. The way back down looked so inviting.

“Let’s go a little higher,” I finally said.

And so we did. When we got to the next level, I saw that the last leg of the trip was just before us and then I thought, what the hell, we came this far, let’s finish this thing.

Naturally, the last leg was the toughest, consisting of a narrow stone staircase slapped up against the side of the mountain with nothing but a wire fence separating you from a nasty tumble into the great beyond.

You had to share the space with these pesky goddamn tourists who always managed to be going in the wrong direction, which, of course, is the opposite of the direction I was heading.

But we did it. The falls were beautiful and Yosemite is a tremendous location. We also checked out El Capitan and spotted some of the lunatics trying to scale that 3,000-foot monstrosity. I didn’t join them as there is something about hanging off the side of a mountain that doesn’t agree with me.

My uncle and his wife drove us all over the place before we headed on to Lake Tahoe, where I got sunburned during a lengthy boat ride.

I couldn’t help it. After that godawful winter we just had I’m naturally drawn to the sun.

While in Tahoe, we sneaked over to the Nevada side where I lost a buck at the cheapo slots. I felt like I was in a time warp as I read casino marquees announcing upcoming acts like Eric Burdon & The Animals, Sammy Hagar, and Paul Revere & The Raiders.

Next we headed back to L.A., where we checked out the Hollywood Bowl, the Walk of Fame, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and the El Capitan Theater (I can’t escape that thing). I did this routine many years ago, but it was fun playing tourist again.

This vacation was supposed to happen back during Christmas, but my sister and I had to scrub that trip due to illness. As this second attempt grew closer, I went through my traditional travel breakdown: I shouldn’t go, I have too much work to do, it’s too expensive, and all that assorted crap.

And now I’m back in Brooklyn, back to my precious little routine. The days just flew by and I enjoyed every single one of them. I’m so glad we went and I’m really happy that we kept on climbing.

Wild Horses

2011-04-30T18:34:00.000-07:00

I had a dream about wild horses one night, but it wasn't a nightmare.

It started with me opening a door in a dark room and being amazed to find that I was at my aunt’s farmhouse in the Berkshires. Apparently I thought I was still in New York.

The sky was shockingly blue and the grass was so incredibly green, as if the colors had been computer-enhanced. Any tension I may have been feeling immediately began to fade.

I looked to my left and I saw several wild horses sliding down a hill on their backs. At first I thought they were in some kind of trouble, but then I realized they were playing, sledding down the grass and running back up the hill to do it again.

I don’t think real horses can do this, but I’m from Brooklyn so what I know?

In the dream I kept thinking I had to get in touch with my father, who died four years ago, but he was apparently alive and living in our home in the city.

Then an old man, who worked on my aunt’s farm--there is no such person in real life--came into the house, sat down across from me, and started talking.

Or at least he tried to, but a heavy cold had reduced his voice to a barely audible rasp.

“Dude,” I shouted, “I’m going on vacation soon. I don’t want to get sick. Stay away from me!”

Even in my dreams I’m a hypochondriac.

I leaned back in my chair to get away from this guy, who kept on talking despite his failing voice, and I started to nod off.

The next thing I remember I was riding on a bus through Pittsfield or Springfield, MA. As the bus rode by a group of teenagers playing basketball in a park, they stopped their game to jeer and give the finger.

The streets were crowded and I saw a young man running out into traffic, forcing cars to slow down, and then running back to the corner while his girlfriend cheered him on.

All right, so what does all this mean? Psychologists believe that you are everybody--and everything--in a dream.

I believe the horses represented my playful side, the part of me that isn't saddled by worry or reined in by fear. I think the sick old man was a stand-in for my father in his final years as well as a manifestation of my fears of aging and illness.

Now I had watched “The Fighter,” which takes place in Lowell, MA, just before going to bed on this particular night and I think that planted Massachusetts in my mind.

Lowell reminded me of Pittsfield or Springfield, which are near my aunt’s place, and the film is populated with blue collar types, so that explains the roughnecks who were throwing me the bone. And maybe part of me wants to be one of those louts, giving the finger to the world.

I notice how this dream gets progressively more unpleasant, as I leave the playful horses, face age and illness, and return to the urban world and all its hostility. It's almost like life as we age from innocent children to wary adults.

The wild horses were telling me to enjoy life and not worry so much. I think they had the right idea and I'll ride them some day.

The Trigger of Life

2011-04-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

I had a “wish I’d said that” moment at work this week.

I was speaking with a co-worker around quitting time. He told me that he while he didn’t mind staying late at the office during the winter months, things changed now that the weather is getting warmer.

“Yes,” I said, “once you see the sun is still shining at 5 pm, you want to get outside.”

“It’s the trigger of life,” my co-worker replied.

The trigger of life—I thought that was such a great expression. It’s so fitting, given this grisly death march of a winter we just went through and it’s the perfect theme for Easter.

We got a good look at the trigger of life today when my sister came up with the brilliant idea of visiting the Brooklyn Botanic Garden prior to our Easter dinner.

She also recommended going early, so we could beat the crowds and enjoy the sunshine while it lasted. The gardens were beautiful and the weather was so nice I couldn’t believe it.

The holiday weekend had gotten off to a rough with a Good Friday that was anything but. My office was opened even though Wall Street was closed and the streets were clogged with tourists.

I didn’t get to church, which really bothered me. It was Good Friday, after all. I did make sure to skip eating meat for the day, but I would've felt better if I had attended services at Trinity.

Then as I was racing to catch the train home, I got annoyed at this elderly man with a cane who started to move in front of me.

Please understand—I didn’t say anything rude or offensive, it was just my thinking that was all wrong. I wasn’t trying to help him in any way, I was obsessed with making the train, which had just pulled into the station and opened its doors.

I made the damn train, all right, but I turned around and saw the elderly man struggling to get his Metrocard through the turnstile. I tried holding the doors for him, but the conductor would have none of that, so I let go of the doors and the train pulled out of the station.

I felt so ashamed of myself. I tried blaming my thoughtless actions on big city life and the fact that I was racing to a gym class in Brooklyn Heights, but those are just excuses.

It seems that I’m always in a hurry. I always have to be someplace else—I’m never happy where I am--and now I was blasting by old people on this of all days.

I’ll be 54 years old next month, so I’m probably not all that far behind the old man in age. Some day that could be me struggling with the cane and the Metrocard while younger people race by me in a huff

Okay, so I guess this rates as a teaching moment. It’s time for a change and that walk through the garden was a good start. It helped clear my head and reminded me of the beauty that exists all around us.

I’ll make a point of being more aware of my fellow humans when I go out in the world. I’ll be kind and considerate and instead of racing by in a huff, I’ll slow down and pull that trigger of life.

Tiger, Tiger

2011-04-17T19:18:00.000-07:00

The e-mail to my sister went something like this: Arrrgh!!

Maybe I was overreacting a little bit, but I was upset. I had just received a discount offer to see the play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” with Robin Williams for $47.

It sounded like a good deal. Big name star, decent price--for Broadway, at least. The only trouble was we had already seen “Bengal Tiger,” we weren’t terribly impressed, and we had paid 87 bucks for the privilege.

Like I said… Arrrgh!!

This is the risk you take when you want to be ahead of the curve. When we heard Robin Williams was coming to Broadway, we pounced on a chance to get tickets. We didn’t know anything about the show, but the problem with Broadway is that you’re either first or you're toast.

My father used to tell us about a time many years ago when he thinking of buying tickets to a new musical that was going to open on Broadway. However, he decided to hold off until he read the reviews.

The musical turned out to be a little show called “South Pacific,” and it’s safe to say that it got some pretty good reviews. In fact, the reviews were so good that tickets sold out instantly and you couldn’t get near the theater for the next three years.

We didn’t want to repeat that mistake so I went to the Richard Rogers Theater box office one night after work and picked up some preview tickets. (Richard Rogers wrote the music for "South Pacific," by the way.)

Williams plays the eponymous—don’t you just love that word?--tiger in the equally eponymous Baghdad zoo who is caught up in the American invasion.

He appears to the audience as a man and speaks to us directly, giving a tiger’s eye view of the madness that follows the invasion. And he becomes a victim of that insanity minutes into the show when he is gunned down while gnawing off an American soldier’s hand.

“I get so stupid when I get hungry!” his ghost declares as he looks over his own corpse. It's something you could say about humans, too.

He spends the rest of the play as a ghost prowling around a crumbling topiary garden, commenting on life, death, and war. Robin Williams is very good in the role and he has some great lines as he ponders the existence of God.

“It’s alarming, this life after death,” he says at one point. “The fact is, tigers are atheists. All of us. Unabashed. Heaven and hell? Those are just metaphorical constructs that represent ‘hungry’ and ‘not hungry.’ Which is to say, why am I still kicking around?”

Unfortunately, the tiger is also the most interesting character in the play. The story also features two American soldiers, an Iraqi translator who once tended the topiary garden, and the ghost of Uday Hussein, who walks around the stage carrying his brother’s severed head in a plastic bag.

I didn’t find any of this to be terribly moving or convincing. By the time the play is over the theater is crawling with ghosts—they outnumber the living—and I really think the playwright should have limited his story to just the title character’s wandering spirit.

I feel duty-bound to mention that both the New York Times and L.A. Times raved about the show. I’m assuming they saw the same one I did.

I also have to say that while I wasn’t thrilled with the play, there’s nothing like the experience of live theater. I’m a movie freak through and through, but I still love seeing real people performing before my eyes.

I haven't reached that point where I am so jaded that seeing a play is a routine activity--and I hope I never do. When you go to the theater it’s always an enchanted evening.

So we didn’t luck out this time. These things have a tendency to even out and I know that if we hadn’t gone to this show, we’d be kicking ourselves for missing it—just like my father did with "South Pacific".

An Unseen Style

2011-04-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

Thirty years ago I was walking through the park near the Verrazano Narrows Bridge when I saw a film crew shooting a scene for a movie.

The film was Prince of the City, a story about police corruption in the NYPD starring Treat Williams, and the director was Sidney Lumet.

I was just out college, a budding film genius, and I was dying to get a look at the man who had given us Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Pawnbroker and so many other great films.

They were shooting right under the bridge—the scene is only a few minutes long in the movie—and I couldn’t see very much.

There was this rather obnoxious English production assistant stalking around the barrier—what the hell was she doing in Brooklyn?--and I asked her if Lumet was there.

“Yes,” she said with mild exasperation, “he’s here directing.”

Well, screw you very much, sweetheart. Maybe he hadn’t gotten there yet, okay?

I hung around a little while longer, hoping I would see Lumet, bowl him over him with my awesome talent, prompting him to take me on as his assistant, which would kick off my fabulous career on the other side of the barrier and soon people would be craning their necks in hopes of getting a view of me.

That didn’t exactly happen. I hung around for a little while before leaving and I never got the chance to meet Sidney Lumet, who died on Saturday at the age of 86.

Glad as Hell

As I read his obituary, I couldn’t get over how many great movies this man had made. In addition to the ones I already mentioned, there was Network, The Verdict, The Hill, 12 Angry Men, Murder on the Orient Express, The Anderson Tapes, just to name a few more.

And he was working almost up to the end, having made Before the Devil Knows Your Dead in 2007. If you want to see my head explode, just ask me to name my favorite Lumet film. I don’t think I could do it.

Lumet’s films were always so powerful, mercifully lacking in all the film school trickery that may look good on the screen but doesn’t advance the story or expand the characters one inch.

“Good style, to me, is unseen style,” he once said. “It is style that is felt.”

Oh, how right he was. Who could forget Al Pacino chanting “Att-it-ca! Att-it-ca!” in Dog Day Afternoon? Or those gripping scenes in Fail-Safe where Henry Fonda, as the president, tries to avert Armageddon as he speaks through an interpreter—a young Larry Hagman--to the Soviet premier. The scenes feature just two fine actors, a telephone and some incredible filmmaking.

I recall reading that Lumet never allowed the credit “A film by Sidney Lumet” to appear in any of his movies. This is shocking when you think of all the no-talent losers out there who have the gall to use the “A film by…” line on the some of crappiest movies imaginable.

And interestingly, Lumet said that he didn’t think art changes anything.

“I do it because I like it,” he said when asked why he made movies, “and it’s a wonderful way to spend your life.”

Watching his movies is a wonderful to spend your time.

I try to imagine what I would have said if I had actually gotten the chance to meet Sidney Lumet by the bridge that day.

Knowing my younger self all to well, I probably would’ve gotten all tongue-tied and wound up making a fool out of myself.

But I know what would I like to say to him now and it’s summed up in just two words:

Thank you.

A Little Tin Box

2011-04-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

In the movies, pirates always lock their treasure up in a massive chest, but in real life you can find the most valuable things right inside a little tin box.

My sister and I are cleaning up our parents’ house in preparation for sale, so we’ve been busy going through 60 years’ worth of clothing, furniture, books, and little knickknacks—like faux vintage tin boxes.

My mother liked to collect these boxes and put all sorts of stuff inside them—buttons, paper clips, coins, whatever would fit.

We have a tobacco can sitting in the front porch dubbed the “Roly Poly Businessman” because it’s painted to resemble a fat robber baron type puffing away on a pipe.

Some time in the mid-80s the Roly Poly Businessman served as a family bank, where we all put in a certain amount of money every week.

When we had enough cash, we went out for a night on the town: dinner at Gargiulo’s in Coney Island and then on to the theater in Manhattan. I believe the show was Little Shop of Horrors in the Village, but my memory is a little fuzzy.

It was a good idea and we had a lot of fun going out together as a family. But we didn’t stick with the plan for very long.

The Roly Poly Businessman was eventually relegated to the porch and his bright colors have since faded from all those years of sitting in the sunlight.

There’s another tin box that’s been up on a shelf in the dining room for years. Made by Bristol Ware in 1988, the can has two handles and is decorated with images of a woman from the early 20th Century holding a bottle of Coca-Cola.

The thing has been there for so long I don’t really see it anymore. I always assumed it was empty, but when I opened it last week I found out that I had been wrong.

There was no cash, no jewels, no gold doubloons, or documents proving that we’re all related to the Queen of England.

No, it was just a small stack of recipes that my mother had cut out of newspapers many years ago. The moment I saw them she came right back to me-it was almost like finding a letter from her—and I started crying.

They’re all crinkled and brown with age now. One of the few that has a visible date goes back to January 27, 1988. It’s a recipe for pot-roasted chicken with garlic, carrots, onions and potatoes there that serves three or four.

Dinner is Served

On the back of another—“Georgia’s Finest Peace and Peanut Cake” are coupons from the A&P advertising a two-liter bottle of Pepsi for 79 cents and box of Oreos for $1.69. I can only imagine how old those are.

They’re only bits of paper, but they remind me so much of my mother—I can see her sitting in the living room with her glasses on carefully cutting out the recipes and putting them aside for use at some future date.

I don’t think she ever made any of these dishes. So I guess one lesson here is that you should do things as soon as you can before you run out of time.

But the real takeaway is that even though she didn’t make those meals, at least my mother was trying to do something different, trying to break out of a routine and learn new things.

I have this fantasy where I make a deal with God to bring my mother back to us just long enough for her to finally make all these dishes.

Let her return to the kitchen that I barely use now, pick up the pots and pans that haven’t been touched in years. Give her the chance to make cod fillet in lime salsa, oven-fried chicken, baked French toast with orange syrup, and Italian-style stuffed artichoke.

Let us hear her sing all the old songs she loved so much while she chopped up the vegetables and prepared the meat. Let her call us to the table again and again—“Jim! Joan! Peter! Robert!”—and let’s all sit down for dinner night after night.

I’m not the finicky eater I was as a child, so I’ll gladly clean my plate and ask for seconds. Hell, I’ll even eat asparagus for her. And then we can have desert, like Roman holiday cookies, blueberry Italian cheesecake, and plum torte.

But I’m greedy and I know if we ever had the chance to get my mother back we’d never let her go. I’d just go on cutting recipes out of the newspaper so she could stay with us forever.

As we continue to clean up the house there will no doubt more discoveries like this, more opportunities to cry and remember the good times and the ones we love so much. There will be more treasures to find.

Monster Mash

2011-03-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

Somewhere back in the Eighties my brother came in from California for a visit one year and we went to see a Broadway musical called “A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine.”

The first half of the show featured several song and dance numbers staged outside Grauman’s Chinese theater. I don’t remember much of this show after all this time, but one tune called “I Love A Film Cliché” still stands out in my mind.

The singer describes the pleasure he gets from hearing familiar movie lines. Throughout the song other cast members pop up behind him and utter such gems as “why this is an egg from a dinosaur thought to be extinct for two million years!”

Being a serious movie fan I’ve got some favorite film clichés of my own, but I haven't set them to music yet. One of them occurs in courtroom dramas when the crusading attorney stands up and makes some completely ridiculous request.

The judge will pretend to ponder this motion for a few seconds and then say something like “this is highly irregular, but I’ll allow it.”

Of course you'll allow it. Was there ever any doubt? You’re a movie judge, that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Movie judges never say “this is highly irregular and hell will freeze over before I’d ever allow something like that and if you ever make such a stupid motion again in my court again I’ll climb down off this bench and beat the screaming beejesus out you with my little hammer.”

There are also visual clichés. If a major character is ever injured in a movie and taken to the hospital, you can bet there’ll be a POV shot of the hospital ceiling lights rolling by as our victim is being wheeled into surgery. Apparently people in gurneys never look left or right--just straight up at the lights.

Look Out Below

I got around to watching Terminator Salvation last week—yeah, I know, but I kind of liked it. I thought it was a decent sci-fi action flick, though it’s probably best known for Christian Bale’s onset rant at a hapless cameraman.

Bale supporters say the tape was taken out of context, but all I heard was four minutes of paint-peeling obscenities. I think that pretty much is the context.

Anyway, this movie, despite the special effects and huge budget, manages to fall back on an old monster movie cliché. I should probably say “spoiler alert” at this point, but if you’ve ever seen a monster movie in your life I seriously doubt there will be any surprises here.

The hero will face off with a superhuman being—Terminator, Alien, Frankenstein, it doesn’t matter. The two will start fighting and the monster will display his superior strength by picking up the hero and throwing him across the room like a beach ball. Repeatedly.

He will never, I mean never, pick up the hero and break him in two, or twist his head off, or squeeze the life out of him with two fingers—even though he’s perfectly capable of doing so and it would end the confrontation instantly.

No, he’ll just throw a stuntman through the air, or into a wall, or onto a table filled with all sorts of breakable stuff. The hero will get up with some fake blood on his face and a few rips in the shirt, but he’ll still be very much alive. This will go on until the hero finds some way of killing the monster, getting the girl, and ending the movie.

I understand the monsters are evil, but do they have to be stupid, too? Can’t they see that all this showboating can be fatal? I'm not rooting for the villain, I just want the fight scenes to be a little more realistic.

Still I love a good monster movie. And even though the hero-toss irritates me no end, it’s a classic film cliché’ and I’ll allow it.

Night Shall End in Day

2011-03-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

This is Lent and the theme at Trinity Church on Wall Street is “Night Shall End In Day.”

I take this to mean that there is hope; we don’t have to live in darkness—unless we choose to do so.

I have been trying—really trying—to turn off the dark this week, but I sometimes feel like I’m running short on matches in a drafty room.

In January I applied for Hunter College’s Creative Writing MFA program. I graduated from Hunter three decades ago, when, as I said in my application “Jimmy Carter was president, bread cost 48 cents a loaf, and Hunter’s West Building was just a hole in the ground.”

I thought it would be great to go back to my old college and work on my writing. Well, I learned this week that the program’s selection committee had decided not to extend me an offer of admission, according to the online message I received.

In other words, I didn’t get in.

I was a little bummed, of course, but I’m okay with this—seriously. It was a long shot to begin with, and to be honest, I wasn’t really sure how I would be able to attend classes and go to work at the same time. Now I don’t have to worry.

My return trip to my alma mater began last fall when I heard a BBC radio interview with the novelist Peter Carey, author of Oscar and Lucinda and other works.

I was quite impressed and I learned that Carey was the head of the creative writing program at Hunter. When I found out that Hunter would be hosting an open house for the Creative Writing MFA, I made sure to get up there.

Me, Again

The auditorium was packed and the instructors and students on stage gave off this fabulous energy.

“We’re not teachers who write,” Peter Carey said at one point, “but writers who teach.”

I was so amped when I came out of that place that I decided I would apply for the program.

But it was strange being back at Hunter after all this time. As I wrote in my application. "this is where I tutored English, met a woman I wish I had married, and made the decision that I wanted to write."

And I remember making that decision. I was a sophomore, doing poorly in several classes, and I thought I'd better crank up the writing and try to make a living that way because I didn't see myself working on the stock exchange. I started reading Ellery Queen Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and writing crime stories of my own. I also signed up from creative writing courses.

In returning to Hunter, I found myself looking over my life and asking what have I actually done in the last 30-odd years?

You’re not rich, you’re not famous, this dark voice inside me said, and while you write for living, it’s as a reporter, not as the novelist-screenwriter-poet warlord you want to be.

I know so many people who have started families, created their own businesses, and generally done a hell of lot more with their lives than I have with mine.

I've also allowed my social circle to shrink, using the lousy weather as an excuse to sit in front of the TV most weekends and watch movies.

I think I applied to the Hunter program because I wanted a second chance at being a college student, a do-over, because I didn't do such a hot job the first time around. I thought I could write, hang out with really cool people, finish that novel and get on with my career before I became eligible for Social Security.

So it looks like that’s not going to happen. It’s no fun being rejected for anything, but I’m not going to crash and burn on this. And I’m certainly not going to give up on writing. I'll finish that manuscript sure as the night shall end in day.

My Kind of Town

2011-03-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve finally found the perfect place to live. Too bad it no longer exists.

The spot I’m thinking of is post-World War II New York City, the time ranging from the mid-forties to the early Sixties, when Manhattan was the center of the universe. This is my Camelot, my Shangri-La.

It’s the world of “Sweet Smell of Success,” one of my favorite movies, where Burt Lancaster, portraying a psychotic gossip columnist, witnesses a scene of midtown mayhem and happily declares, “I love this dirty town.”

So do I, Burt, so do I.

This is back when people went to clubs and men wore suits and ties and hats. Everybody ate steaks, smoked cigarettes, and drank bourbon round the clock. The neon lights really were bright on Broadway back then.

There were no laptops, cellphones, I-pods, or other such devices that I like to complain about, but, of course, would never give up now that I have them.

Newspapers were still the dominant media and this town had a dozen of them. Radio had its place, of course, and that pesky television thing started gaining attention, but typewriters still banged out the news of the world.

I got reintroduced to this period recently when I watched Kristi Jacobson’s fabulous documentary “Toots,” a film about her grandfather, the renowned bar and restaurant owner, Toots Shor.

Toots Shor’s seemed to be the epicenter of post-war New York. Movie stars, athletes, gangsters, and reporters all gravitated to Toots’ place.

One of the people interviewed in the film talked about walking into the restaurant one night and seeing Chief Justice Earl Warren on one side of the room and Frank Costello, the “Prime Minister of the Underworld,” on the other.

Frank Sinatra, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Bing Crosby, Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Frank Gifford are just a few of the people who found their way to 51 W.51 Street.

"Match Me, Sidney!"

Yet it seemed to be the kind of place where ordinary shmos could go to have a good time, too; where you didn’t have to beg for entry, the way Studio 54 patrons had to do a generation later.

The film includes footage from an episode of the show “This is Your Life,” dedicated to Toots and an audiotape interview that Shor made shortly before his death. In telling the story of one man, the film also chronicles a vibrant time of American history.

My parents met and married in this time so they knew--or knew of-- a lot of these people and places.

My father, a World War II veteran and heavy duty sports fan, used to tell me about the time Billy Conn took on Joe Louis for the heavyweight title. Conn, the former light-heavyweight, gave Louis a tough time, but he eventually fell in the 13th round.

A lifelong gambler, Shor said he dropped $100,000 on that fight—his biggest loss ever—when he put his money on Conn. I don’t even want to think about how much that translates into modern day dollars, but you can be sure that it’s a lot.

The world keeps moving and the days of Toots Shor eventually came to an end. Drugs, urban decay, and the upheaval of Sixties, all pushed the old generation aside. Athletes started making more money and opening up their own clubs.

The likeable rogue type gangster gave way to heroin dealers, who, Nicholas Pileggi observes, could never be considered likeable. Shor got into trouble with the IRS and lost his place.

I vaguely remember seeing ads for a restaurant called “Toots Shor’s” in the Seventies, but, according to the film, he was little more than a front man by that time.

Toots Shor died in 1977 and New York was in hideous condition by then. It has bounced back dramatically, but it’s not the same place.

Everyone has a favorite time period that looks great on paper. And to be honest, one man’s golden age can be another man's reign of terror. It’s easy for me to wax poetic about a time I never knew. If I lived back in that Fifties, I’d probably long for the days of spats and speakeasies.

You can’t live in the past and you can’t stop time. And no matter how much it changes, I'll always love this dirty town.

Riding the Rails

2011-03-06T16:32:00.000-08:00

I got some high praise the other day when I held the elevator door for a guy in the lobby of my office building.

“You’re a great man,” he said as he stepped aboard.

I wouldn’t go that far, but I wasn’t going to argue. You don't get called great every day of the week. Or least I don't.

The elevator service was anything but great, though, as the thing just sat on the ground floor making obnoxious beeping noises. It gets annoyed if you mess with the doors.

“Oh, come on,” my fellow passenger said in mock exasperation. “I’m a Southern gentleman, but I’ve got my limits.”

The elevator got the hint, promptly closing the doors and starting to move. I made sure to wish my travel companion a good day as I got off. I had a rotten commute that morning and I appreciated a little positive energy.

It had been freezing cold, the trains were all fouled up, and some loser insisted upon bullying his way on to the R train like he was racing to perform open heart surgery at Beth Israel. Everybody else on the platform were just obstacles.

I managed to get a seat on this sardine can, stuck my nose in a book and forget all about this cad. But the local morphed into an express and when we got to 36th Street, the blowhard pushed his way off the train in the same manner in which had stormed on. However, someone didn’t take kindly to this and the two had a testy exchange on the platform.

“Fuck you,” the bum rusher said, stretching the limits of his vocabulary.

The two verbal combatants were apparently from the same country because they switched to another language—possibly Arabic—and I assume they swapped the F-bomb in their mother tongue as well. It’s great to be bilingual.

Transportation has been much on my mind lately. A few weeks ago I had gotten goat-roped into participating in a travel survey by some research outfit.

"And then I took out my Metro Card..."

I was supposed to record my travel experiences for one day--trains, buses, tug boats, walking, pretty much everything but elevators. I’m not sure what the point of this thing was but I went along, making note of what time I left my house and when I arrived at work.

I also had to record my walk to church at lunchtime, my ride home, and the walk to the grocery store near my home train station. It felt weird tracking all this mundane activity and I was tempted to throw in a motorcycle jump over the East River to spice things up a little.

I had to load all of this stuff onto a website, which proved to be quite difficult for some reason. Maybe I should have watched that tutorial before I started filing.

I kept backing up, deleting stuff, and typing it in again. I was really sorry I had agreed to be part of this survey. I’m a northern gentleman, but I have my limits. I finally managed to finish the survey without throwing my computer out the window and took the subway home.

Friday came around and as I rode to work I heard the motorman of my train greet one his colleagues who was at the helm of the D train across the platform.

“Another day in paradise,” he said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

Sarcasm runs pretty heavily in the subways most days, but there are some bright spots. As I sat in first seat of the first car a young man brought his little boy up to the front window so the kid could watch the train heading down the tracks.

The boy was so excited I was going to peer over his shoulder to see if I’ve been missing something.

When I was this boy’s age, my brother told me about how cool it was riding in the front car and looking through the big window. I was so thrilled that I imagined something like the screen on the deck of the Starship Enterprise. Reality was a bit of a letdown.

I smiled and encouraged the boy to keep looking at the window. He and his father got off at Rector Street and I was grateful for getting a little bit of paradise before going to work.

The Key of Imagination

2011-02-27T16:47:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to watching an episode of The Twilight Zone that I recorded during the annual New Year’s cable marathon.

I’ve seen just about every episode of this classic series—many of them several times over--but there was one in particular that I wanted to watch again.

Entitled “Where is Everybody?” it is actually the show’s pilot, which was broadcast on October 2, 1959. It stars Earl Holliman as a man who is stranded in a deserted town with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

The man, who is wearing an air force flight suit, is slowly going crazy as he desperately searches for other human beings. If you’ve ever felt lost and alone in your life this story will probably touch a nerve.

In the end—spoiler alert!—it turns out that the guy is an astronaut training for a mission to the moon and has been hallucinating after 20-plus days of isolation.

"The barrier of loneliness — that's the one thing we haven't licked yet," the astronaut’s commanding officer says at the end.

The episode was written by Rod Serling, the show’s creator, and directed brilliantly by Robert Stevens, who won an Emmy for his work on the Alfred Hitchcock shows.

Stevens does incredible things in this episode and another one called “Walking Distance,” where Gig Young plays Martin Sloan, a harried advertising executive who returns to his hometown and winds up going back in time to meet the childhood version of himself.

The encounter is a disaster as Sloan chases the young Martin around a carousel, trying to tell the boy to enjoy his youth while he still can. And although this is very good advice, the kid is naturally terrified.

(A very young Ron Howard shows up briefly in this show, long before he was Opie, Richie Cunningham, and the director of The Da Vinci Code.)

Sloan tries telling his parents who he is and they think he’s nuts. His father does not believe him until he comes upon Sloan’s wallet late in the program and finds his identification. He tells his son to let go of the past, which is another good piece of advice.

“You’ve been looking behind you, Martin,” he says. “Try looking ahead.”

In both of these episodes, Stevens make extraordinary use of confined spaces and angled shots.

There’s a scene in “Where is Everybody?” when Holliman goes into a phone booth trying to call for help that feels so constrained it can bring on a case of claustrophobia.

When the young astronaut comes charging out of an empty movie theater, Stevens tilts the camera a few degrees and that’s all you need to feel the hero’s fear and confusion.

Stevens does a similar thing in “Walking Distance,” where the carousel ride turns into a nightmare. No special effects, no CGI, no huge budgets, just good filmmaking.

I looked up Robert Stevens on IMDB.com and found that he was a veteran TV director, working on Playhouse 90, G.E. True Theater, and a public TV series that ran in 1977 called The Best of Families, which I watched with my family.

He also directed films, including Never Love a Stranger in 1958 and a 1969 movie called Change of Mind, the story of a white man whose brain is transplanted into a black man’s body. I remember when this picture came out, though I never saw it.

In reading Robert Stevens’ biography, I was shocked to see that he died from cardiac arrest in 1989 after being robbed and beaten at a rented home in Westport, CT. I couldn’t believe that such a talented man died in such a terrible, violent way.

I’ve been trying to find out more details about this incident, but I haven’t come up with much. So I just want to pay my respects to a TV pioneer who helped navigate us through The Twilight Zone.

As Dreams Go By

2011-02-21T10:08:00.000-08:00

When Casey, our family dog, started to age, he had trouble getting around.

He was fond of sitting on my parents’ bed and since the climb was difficult for him, my mother would get behind him and give him a push.

“It’s tough to get old, sweetheart,” she’d say affectionately.

I’m appreciating those words more and more lately. For example, a woman greeted me at my gym on Sunday saying that she hadn’t seen me in a long time and asking me how I was doing.

We chatted briefly and then went our separate ways and I still have no idea who she is or how she knows me.

Should I be worried about this?

I like to listen to Jonathan Schwartz’ radio show on WNYC on the weekends. He plays a lot of tunes from the American Songbook—music from my parents’ day as I often say—but he also slips in songs from my day. This happened recently when he played a Harry Chapin song called “"W*O*L*D."

The song tells the story of an aging DJ trying to get back with his ex-wife. He’s bouncing all over the map to work at different radio stations, fighting to stay young in a business that does not forgive aging.

I hadn’t heard this song in years. It seemed like it was all over airwaves one minute and the next minute it’s an oldie.

I thought the song came out in the Eighties but a little net research told me that the song was released in 1974. I started feeling pretty “O*L*D” myself, but, hey, I was only off by a decade. You don’t have to make a federal case out of it. What’s your name again? Get off my lawn…

The song was Chapin’s only UK hit and it was said to be very popular with disc jockeys, who gave it lots of airplay. No surprise there.

"Where Were You When...?"

I actually remember what I was doing the day Harry Chapin died. It was July 16, 1981 (wow!) and I was working out at a gym on Ovington Avenue in Bay Ridge.

A bunch of us noticed that the radio, which was tuned to WNEW-FM, was playing one Harry Chapin song after another. (Schwartz was a deejay there, by the way.)

We wondered why Chapin was getting this special treatment and then it slowly dawned on us what was going on. Radio stations rarely play a block of a singer’s recordings unless something major happens. And, more often that not, it’s because they’re dead.

When the DJ finally came on we learned that Chapin had been killed in a car accident on the LIE. He was on his way to perform at a free concert and had suffered a heart attack, though it’s unclear whether it happened before or after the accident. He was 39 years old.

Chapin had other hits, of course, including “Taxi” and “Cats in the Cradle.” My favorite Chapin song, however, was a tune called “Dreams Go By,” which I don’t think ever got the airplay it really deserved.

The song has a deceptively bouncy melody and it describes how reality eventually—and inevitably—overtakes our dreams. And like so many other things in my life, the song takes on a special significance now that I’m older.

We hear about a young couple who gradually surrender their fantasies of being artists and instead go to school, get jobs, and have kids. By the end of the song, the two young people are now grandparents.

As the chorus tells us:
"And so you and I
We watch our dreams go by
We watch our sweet dreams fly
Far away…"

I’ve seen a lot of dreams go by myself. And while I haven’t given up on all of them, I must say that it really is tough to get old, sweetheart.

Very Superstitious

2011-02-14T17:47:00.000-08:00

There’s an old Italian saying that goes “spit in the sky and it comes back in your eye.”

It’s a warning not to wish ill on other people because those bad intentions may backfire all over you. My mother was a firm believer in this proverb and she made sure to teach it to her children.

If we ever said anything bad about someone, like “I wish so-and-so would drop dead”—she’d freak and literally chase us around the house crying “take it back! take it back!”

When I was a teenager my mom told me that my grandmother had compiled a collection of old Italian spells and charms. My grandmother died when I was in the fifth grade and when I learned of this volume I kept bugging my mom to give it to me so I could have the thing translated into English.

I was reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft and this collection reminded me of the Necronomicon, the handbook of black magic that appears in many of Lovecraft’s stories.

My mother wouldn’t let me see this tome, no matter how many times I asked her. Perhaps she was worried I would abuse the spells and turn my math teacher into a wombat. And she was probably right to worry; I really didn’t like my math teacher.

My grandmother was from the old country where people believed in spells and curses and things that go bump in the night. I recall one story where she saw a woman she believed to be a witch in the woods near her village.

The woman was bent over and wearing a monk’s robe. My grandmother saw her walk into a field where she apparently vanished. I know this happened a long time ago in a distance place, but it wasn’t all that long ago. My mother, being first generation American, was really a bridge between these two worlds.

My aunt recently told me about an incident that happened many years ago when one of my grandmother’s relatives became convinced that someone had put the evil eye on him and he went to grandma for help.

My aunt didn’t actually witness the ceremony because my grandmother made her and my mother leave the house before getting started. However, she said that when they were allowed to come home she could smell incense coming up from the basement.

I would have loved to witness this ritual. I’m fascinated by supernatural beliefs and I know so little about my grandmother that I’m desperate for any kind of details about her life. She and I share the same birthday and I feel this need to know as much about her as I possibly can.

I’m sure a lot of people would look at my grandmother’s actions and say, “oh, how primitive,” but those of us who knock on wood, throw salt over our shoulders, or avoid walking under ladders aren’t as far from the old country as we’d like to believe.

And my aunt said that the relative who asked for my grandmother’s help turned out all right, so maybe there’s something to this evil eye stuff after all.

My mother never did give me grandma’s book of spells and I eventually stopped asking her about it. She died nearly nine years ago and I have no idea where those spells may be or if they even exist anymore.

We’ll be selling the house this year and who knows? Maybe we’ll find the book of spells, I’ll get it translated, and wombats will suddenly start popping up all over Brooklyn.

But I don’t think so. I know my mother wouldn’t want me to dabble in the black arts. She wouldn’t want me to spit in the sky.

Rise of the Machines

2011-02-07T19:45:00.000-08:00

My cellphone bit me the other day.

Well, it didn’t actually bite me. I wasn’t paying attention while closing the damn thing and it pinched the top of my index finger.

It hurt like hell and if I hadn’t been coming out of church at the time I would have launched into an aria of obscenities. But thankfully I kept a civil tongue in my head.

I’ve been having a tough time with technology lately. In the addition to the carnivorous cellphone, my office computer got clotheslined by a virus, I lost my internet connection on my home machine, the battery in my landline phone died, and my bank refused to honor my ATM card.

That last one was particularly spooky as I was really short on dough. The bank freeze-out happened on the same day as the cellphone attack-only I was on my way to church instead of coming out.

I thought I’d pick up some cash before the service, but the ATM refused to hand over my money. For some reason I tried changing machines as if another ATM would be more cooperative. But they were all against me.

I was running late, so I went to church and tried real hard to keep my mind on the sermon, but it wasn’t easy. And that probably explains why I almost sliced my finger off.

On the way back to the office I stopped in my bank and asked for a human being. A young man—his card said “Personal Banker”--sat me down and after hearing my story and consulting his computer, he told me that I had run afoul of something called Federal Regulation D.

This fellow told me that Regulation D puts a monthly limit on the number of transfers you may make from your savings or money market accounts without your physical presence being required. This includes online transfers.

“It’s not just us,” he said, “it’s all banks. We send out two warning letters letting you know what’s going on.”

I don’t recall getting any warning letter, but then I get so much junk mail that I usually toss everything that doesn’t look like a statement.

Warning Track

I had no idea there was a limit to online transfers. I was just trying to be more tech savvy and avoid going out in the hideous weather. And now I couldn’t get my money.

As a result, the banker guy told me, my savings account was turned into checking account.

“Okay…” I said, somewhat in shock. “So can’t we switch it back?”

Apparently not. Regulation D is unforgiving and now the bank would have to create a whole new savings account for me. So the guy started clicking more buttons and then gave me a new ATM card.

“Let’s try your card to make sure it works,” he said, pointing to the bank of ATMs.

Well, we tried twice and it didn’t work. This young man and I walked back and forth across the bank floor like we were pulling sentry duty and finally he called tech support for some answers.

I’ve had bad experiences with tech support of all types and this wasn’t much better. The bank guy told me I’d have to wait 24-48 hours before the ATM card would work.

I couldn’t believe my ears. In this age of instant everything I’d have to wait up to two whole days before I could get to my money?

Well, ah, yes.

“But I need cash,” I whined. “I have to buy groceries.”

The guy offered to get take out some cash for me and I felt like a teen-ager asking his father for money.

“Ah, could I have $40?”

The banker disappeared for a few minutes and came back with my cash. I thanked him for his help.

“Let me know how that works out,” he told me.

“Oh, I sure will.” I said.

I stayed away from my bank for two days and held my breath when I went to my local branch. The ATM accepted my card without complaint and handed over the money.

When I got home I went through the mail and found a letter from my bank. It was the second letter warning me about Regulation D.

I tell you I got so mad I wanted to bite somebody.

Squirreled Away

2011-01-31T17:34:00.000-08:00

I was riding home on the R train the other night when a man came walking through my car playing “Quando, Quando, Quando” on the trumpet.

He was doing a pretty good job and I was impressed by the way he pushed his beat box with one hand and blew his horn with the other. I tossed him a dollar as he went by.

“Quando” means “when” in Italian and that seems like a fair question to ask at this time of the year, as in “when, when, when will this goddamn winter be over?”

There’s snow all around me. I’ve spent so much money on that de-icing crap I should buy stock in the company. I can’t step foot out of the house without putting on the parka and strapping on these Frankenstein clodhopper boots.

But then I’m hardly going out at all thanks to this hideous weather. Thank God for Netflix.

And now another storm is on the way…

These never-ending blizzards remind me of a story my father told us about a particularly harsh winter he experienced when he was a young man.

My father, who lived in Upper Manhattan, became concerned about the condition of the squirrels in Central Park. Yes, that’s right, the squirrels.

My dad was worried that the squirrels would be starving, given the rotten weather and cold temperatures. While I think that was very noble of him, I have to confess I’ve never given the squirrels much thought.

It’s nothing personal; it just that I always assumed that the squirrels manage somehow. You hear a lot of complaints about New York, but I’ve never heard anyone say, “hey, we’re running low on squirrels.”

My father was always trying to help someone, though; usually a total stranger and often someone who didn’t deserve or appreciate any help.

One time he gave a man a lift from New Jersey to Brooklyn. The man was Hispanic and when my father stopped the car to go into a store, he left the keys in the ignition to show that he wasn’t bigoted. And the guy promptly stole his car.

The car was a clunker and we were well rid of it. In fact, I was out driving with him a short time later and I pointed to a car in the next lane that looked a lot like the stolen one.

“Be quiet,” he said, “the guy might try to give it back.”

Yeah, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that my father wanted to help the furry little guys out. So one day he loaded up his pockets with nuts and chocolate bars and marched into the frozen wasteland of Central Park.

He found the squirrels, all right. Or rather they found him. It turned out that he was right; the squirrels were indeed very hungry. They were so hungry that scores of the ravenous critters came charging out of every corner of the park and headed straight for my father.

They ran up his arms and legs, tore into his pockets and bit him repeatedly in their desperate attempt to get at the goodies. They weren’t polite; they didn't line up in orderly fashion and say “please.” They just attacked.

“At one point,” my father said, “I looked up over a hill and saw even more squirrels galloping toward me.”

I’m trying to imagine what a herd of charging squirrels looks like. It sounds like something out of a Hitchcock movie.

My father decided this would be a good time to make his exit, which he did, quite rapidly, throwing the remaining nuts and candy bars over his shoulder.

He had to go to the hospital to be treated for the various bites he had suffered during the feeding frenzy. He recovered and I don’t think he ever tried to feed the squirrels again.

But he got a good story out of it and its nice to have something to laugh about while waiting for the snow to melt and the sun to shine.

Quando, quando, quando...

The Check is in the Mail

2011-01-24T19:17:00.000-08:00

Whoever said Sunday was a day of rest should have seen me yesterday.

I was leaving my house at about 10:30 AM, gym bag over my shoulder, sack of laundry in one hand, and a fistful of mail in the other. It was cold as hell and I was in a hurry—which I see now was the cause of all this grief.

My plan was to drop off the laundry, mail my letters, and head for the gym. That’s my usual Sunday routine, except that this time after I dropped off the laundry, I saw that one of my letters was missing.

And it wasn’t just any letter, oh, no: this was the one to my credit card company that contained a rather sizeable check.

I know, I know, why don’t I just pay my bills online? I’ve got no excuse except that I’m worried some hacking geek in a dank basement will clean me out with a few clicks off his keyboard.

I ran up and down the block a few times with my head down to the pavement like a bloodhound, looked around my house, and interrogated the laundry guy, who must’ve thought I’d gone through the rinse cycle a few too many times--no check and I was running late.

On the train I tried to calm down and come up with a plan. One of my themes for the new year is “solutions not surrender;” instead of throwing myself on the ground and wailing “what am I gonna do?!?” I’ll try and find a way out of this mess.

Okay, I got off at West Fourth Street, lurked in the subway stairwell, and call the credit card company.

Did you ever notice that when your stressed everybody else’s IQ seems to drop into the negative numbers? Every person you meet is suddenly slow-witted, inconsiderate and completely blocking your way.

Think of Something

At the laundry mat, hyper as I was, I held the door open for a woman who decided at that very moment to walk in slow motion.

“Are you coming in?” I muttered.

While I was in the subway station talking on the phone, this yo-yo sneaks up behind me and runs his Metrocard through the indicator to see how much money he’s got left. (In all fairness, I was probably in his way, but this is my story, not his.)

The first loser I spoke to said he’d be glad to help me. All I have to do is sign up for some security program for $12.95 a month.

This was particularly irritating. I had a real problem here and this clown was trying to sell me something. They really ought to train their people better.

“I’m in a freezing subway station,” I shouted to this fellow, who was, no doubt, in some steamy location on the other side of the globe. “I’ll get back to you!”

I got to my gym and called my bank—while some clown crept up next to me and opened up a locker. When did I become so freaking popular?

After several bad connections and language breakdowns, I learned I was screwed. I didn’t have any of the necessary information with me. Fine. I worked out and then ran up to my auntie’s place and helped her shop.

It took me a while to calm down, but I finally did. I stayed at my aunt’s place for supper and then rode home on the R train determined to solve this mess. I’ll pay online, I thought, get a new credit card, and cancel the check. It’ll be a pain, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.

As I fumbled for the key to my front door, I looked in my mailbox and there was my credit card bill. One of my neighbors must have found it on the ground and very kindly put it in the box for me.

So I didn’t have to cancel the card or the check, I didn’t have to deal with customer service or tech support or some nitwit trying to peddle stuff I didn’t need. I was off the hook.

This morning I carried the letter with two hands and dropped it into the mail. No more rushing around for me, no more multitasking.

I’m going to pay my bills online like the rest of the world. And after that I’m going look into this texting business.

Snow Drift

2011-01-18T18:16:00.000-08:00

I was walking through Washington Square Park on Sunday when I saw a young man playing a piano.

It was freezing cold, there were piles of snow all over the place and here was this guy hitting the keys like he was making his debut at Carnegie Hall.

I was pretty tired, but I was reasonably certain that I was not hallucinating.

Musicians are hardly an unusual sight here when the weather is warm. On a summer weekend you have your pick of performers, along with the jugglers, magicians, sword swallowers, capoeiristas, comedians, and the guys who pose like famous sculptures.

But tickling the ivories outdoors in January? That takes nerve.

The guy had a decent crowd around him, too, considering the rotten weather. Maybe he was out there now because he didn’t want to compete with other musicians.

In fact the only thing resembling a rival for the small group of gawkers that I could see was a fellow sitting on a nearby park bench with several pigeons balanced on his head and arms. A few people were taking his picture, but I don’t know if the guy was doing an animal act or just happened to be partial to pigeons.

This is my least favorite time of year. Christmas and New Year’s Day have come and gone, the resolutions are already starting to crumble and I feel like curling up with my remote until April. I think bears might be onto something with that hibernation business.

My uncle in California told me that it was 80 degrees in L.A. on Sunday—80 degrees! He sounded almost apologetic, but I didn’t take it too badly. It gave me an excuse to make my annual vow that this will be the last--no kidding, I really mean it—last winter I will ever spend in New York.

This has been a yearly occurrence with me since the Carter Administration and I still haven’t done it yet. But one year I may surprise myself.

Meanwhile I had to get up early the other day to shovel away the latest snowfall. It was still dark out, so I thought I’d be alone, but my neighbor, this lovely elderly Chinese lady, was out there shoveling her walk.

This lady had been hospitalized last year for open heart surgery, so naturally I freaked when I saw her with a shovel in her hands.

“Get back in the house!” I cried, even though I know she speaks very little English. “Get back in the house!”

I pointed to her front door and gestured that I would shovel her walk. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She shoveled some more and then started spreading ice melting pellets in front of my house.

Now I keep a huge bag of that stuff in my porch all winter long, so I didn’t need any of hers. But that’s pretty hard to say in pantomime.

I got out my own de-icing stuff and got to work. I thought I had convinced my friend that I had the situation under control, but then I turned around and there she was—no coat on this time—spreading more of that crap around behind me.

I knew I had been beaten, so I gave her a loving pat on the head and went inside.

I’m very lucky to have this woman as a neighbor. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories from friends and family about creepy people next door, so I thank God I’ve got somebody so nice, considerate, and quiet. If I do go to California maybe I’ll take her with me.

I hung around Washington Square listening to the piano player for a little while, but I had places to go. I made a point of dropping a dollar into this large pail he had set up near his piano as I walked by.

He gave me some hope that someday all this crap will melt, and there will be warmth and green again and the jugglers and sword swallowers will return.

I think that’s worth a buck.

Date Night

2011-01-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

When I was reporter working at newspapers in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, I would come back to Brooklyn most weekends and stay at my parents’ house.

I wanted to see my folks, escape the small towns I was working in, and enjoy New York like a tourist.

We had this little routine where, on the night before I had to back to work, we’d rent a movie from a local video store and watch it after dinner. Since I was the guest I had the honor of picking the flick.

One day I took out an old movie called Johnny Belinda. I can’t say why I happened to chose this 1948 film. I had heard of the movie, but I didn’t know much about it besides the title. But I like old movies, as did my parents, so I thought it would be a good choice.

When I got home from the video store and announced this week’s movie, my mother immediately turned to my dad and gave him a sharp look.

“Do you know this movie?” she demanded.

“Yes,” my father said quickly, “yes, I do.”

It turns out that my parents had seen Johnny Belinda on their first date. And luckily for him, my father remembered this important little detail.

Of all the movies I could have picked to watch, I chose the one that had helped bring my parents together. I guess you could say my siblings and I are here largely because of this picture.

Based on a stage play by Elmer Harris, Johnny Belinda takes place in a fishing village on Cape Breton Island, which is located off the coast of Nova Scotia.

Lew Ayers plays a doctor who has recently moved to the island and Jane Wyman, who won an Oscar for her performance, stars as Belinda, a deaf mute girl whom everybody, her family included, assume is stupid. Her own father refers to her as “the Dummy.”

The doctor sees that Belinda is anything but stupid. He points out to the father that his daughter pretty much runs the family mill, but the old man still doesn’t think anyone can help this young woman. The father, portrayed by Charles Bickford, is actually a decent man, but he’s gone through some tough times.

The doctor begins teaching Belinda sign language and she learns to communicate. There’s a heart-breaking scene when Belinda faces her dad and signs the word for “father.” The look of shock on the old man’s face is priceless.

“That’s the first time she’s ever called me that,” he says in amazement.

It brought tears to my eyes, which probably isn’t saying much since I cry at movies all the time, but there you are.

The story is deceptively simple and while it does eventually slide into a courtroom melodrama towards the end, it has many good scenes and, as with all these old movies, a talented cast.

The black and white photography is beautiful and it allowed the filmmakers to shoot in Monterey, Pebble Beach and other locations in California instead of Nova Scotia.

I never really thought about the movie much until a few years ago, after my mother had died and my father was suffering from dementia. I asked him about taking my mom to Johnny Belinda on their first date.

But this time he shook his head vigorously and said no, that was no true. Maybe I got it wrong, but I don’t think so. My aunt suggested that perhaps it was too painful for my dad to think about my mother, so he just rejected the memory entirely.

I don’t know if there’s anyone around who can set me straight on this. But until I hear otherwise, I’ll go on believing that I owe a lot to Johnny Belinda.

First Day

2011-01-01T18:22:00.001-08:00

“With the opening of the New Year, all the closed portals of limitations will be thrown open and I shall move through them to vaster fields, where my worthwhile dreams of life will be fulfilled.” -- Paramahansa Yogananda

It’s the first day of 2011 and I’m starting things off right with a new computer.

This has been a somewhat challenging holiday season, what with aborted travel plans, a wicked sinus infection, a busted computer, and a blizzard that had me wondering if penguins would come waddling down my block. There was a moment when I ready to declare this the worst Christmas of all time.

But I’m feeling better, the new machine is up and running, the snow is (sort of) melting, and I’ve been enjoying a seriously needed stay-cation. I lounged around the house, tossed my diet out the window, and watch hours of stunningly bad TV. It was great.

I’m trying to be realistically positive for this new year. I want to make changes but I’m willing to accept that they won’t happen in the first 24 hours of 2011. It may actually take a few days to totally transform my life.

I got a little bummed earlier this week when I was looking over my resolutions from last year and realized they were pretty much a carbon copy of the things I want to do for this year.

Eat better, be more positive, focus on the present, organize all the crap that I keep tripping over—yeah, I know all that and I still haven’t done most of these things. But New Year’s Day is a chance to try again and maybe get it right this time.

I think what I’d like to do most in 2011 is change my attitude toward the problems and difficulties that are bound to happen in this life. Right now I tend to freeze up and wail “what the hell am I going to do?!?” Believe it or not, this hasn't helped very much.

I would rather look for solutions instead of focusing on the misery, to repair rather than complain, and to move on rather than blow up.

It’s a good thing I have a year to work on this because I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it. And 2011 will probably give me plenty of chances to put this declaration to the test. But if I get it right I can move on to other resolutions next year.

'Is That You Santy Clause?'

2010-12-23T13:48:00.000-08:00

Now it can be told...

I was speaking with my niece in San Francisco the other day and she told me about an incident from her childhood that happened at Christmas time many years ago.

She was just a little girl--she's a teen-ager now--and her father/my brother decided to do the Santa-Claus-coming-down-chimney routine for her.

So he starts banging on the wall to make her think Old St. Nick is coming in for a landing.

The only problem with this plan, she tells me, was that she was terrified by the noise and ran crying into her room.

The next day she asked my brother who was making that awful racket.

"He told me it was Uncle Robert," she said.

Say what? How did I get left holding the Santa bag? I was 3,000 miles away minding my own business in Brooklyn and I have to take the rap for spooking small children?

Why couldn't you just blame Santa? The guy doesn't exist anyway--sorry, kids--so he doesn't have to worry about adorable little girls hating his guts. It's a wonder my niece ever spoke to me after that.

Apparently Victoria got over this episode and somehow managed to forgive me, which is good to know seeing as I didn't do anything.

I have to say Christmas has been a little tough this year. Both I and family members have been struggling with colds this season and I've been dodging coughers on the subway left and right. (Someone is coughing in this internet cafe as I write this. Oy!)

I haven't seen the trees at Rockefeller Center or at the Met, which is hands down my favorite Christmas tree. It's also indoors, so you can enjoy it without risking frostbite.

However, despite all the hassles, including a computer that is as dead as Jacob Marley, I intend to enjoy the holidays this year and I want you all to do the same.

And if someone starts banging on your wall on Christmas Eve, don't blame me.

Oh, Mother!

2010-12-20T07:27:00.001-08:00

My old Dell computer finally died on Saturday and as much I hated the damn thing, I have to admit I miss it.

It seems the mother board went south and now I finally have to get that new computer I’ve been threatening to buy for over a year.

The Dell had been giving me trouble for ages. There was a point where I was on the phone with tech support so often I could have run for prime minister of India. And that probably wouldn't have helped much.

They pretty much rebuilt the thing from scratch and repair people were coming to my house more often than the mailman. I even threatened to sue them at one point I was so furious.

On Friday I was uploading pictures from last Christmas when the thing crashed and refused to get back up.

So now the thing is dead, but my holiday plans are going to prevent me from getting a replacement until early in January. I don’t think it will be a Dell.

I went to an internet café in my neighborhood this weekend and it had this creepy kind of peep show feeling to it. The only thing missing was a few old guys in raincoats.

It's strange not being able to log on whenever I want to and look up something on the Internet. I lived a large part of my life without computers, but that is unthinkable now. When I was a kid, computers existed on Star Trek. Now we carry them around in our pockets.

But this experience has shown me that I spend--waste--far too much time on the web looking at one site or another.

I look at videos, movie trivia and, worst of all, I read the comment sections under legitimate news stories. Most of these comments are offensive, ignorant and downright stupid, but for some reason I keep reading them.

Maybe I can use this time away from the keyboard constructively, so that when I come back online, I'll use the computer only when I need it.

Today I also pulled the plug on our old home phone number. I haven’t been using that number and it was a waste to keep it, but it still hurt a little to have it disconnected. I was a teen-ager (or younger?) when we first got that 238 number and getting rid of it is yet another sign of time’s passing.

If you don’t hear from me for a while, don’t take it personally. I’ll be back online as soon as possible.

Have a great holiday!

'Fly from Evil'

2010-12-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

Dillinger died for this?

I finally got around to watching Manhattan Melodrama, an old movie I had recorded several weeks ago.

The 1934 film stars Clark Gable and William Powell as lifelong friends who wind up on opposite sides of the law--something that seems to happen a lot in old movies.

Myrna Loy plays the love interest and this is the first time she and Powell were paired up. The two would go on to make the "Thin Man" series, eventually starring in 14 movies together.

The film is hardly a classic. The plot is creaky and contrived, even allowing for the passage of time, but it’s got so many great people in it that you really don’t care.

But the reason that I really wanted to see this movie was because this was the last film that the infamous bank robber John Dillinger saw before being gunned down by FBI agents as he left the Biograph Theater in Chicago.

FBI agents had staked out the theater, but they didn’t want to move in on Dillinger until the film was over. My first reaction upon seeing it was that they should have nailed him before he saw this thing. But that's a little harsh.

Manhattan Melodrama opens with the young heroes Blackie and Jim, (portrayed by Mickey Rooney and Jimmy Butler) on board the General Slocum, which caught fire on June 15, 1904.

An estimated 1,021 were killed that day, making this the New York area's worst disaster in terms of loss of life until September 11.

The ship had been chartered by St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Little Germany district in the lower East Side of Manhattan.

I once took a historical walking tour of that area and our guide told us how the husbands of the victims had come home from work that day to learn they had lost their wives and children. The German neighborhood pretty much disappeared after the fire as people moved away in an attempt to escape all that grief.

Blackie and Jim are orphaned in the fire, but they are adopted by kindly Mr. Rosen, who lost his son in the blaze as well.

This relationship, however, doesn’t last very long, as Mr. Rosen is trampled by a police wagon during a riot and the hard-lucked duo is orphaned once again. No one attempts to adopt the boys this time, perhaps fearing a grisly death. When they called this thing a melodrama, they weren’t kidding.

It’s intriguing to note that Mickey Rooney went on to have a long career in the movie business, but Jimmy Butler, who played the younger version of William Powell, was killed in World War II. He was 23 years old.

The boys grow up and Blackie becomes a racketeer while Jim becomes the district attorney and eventually the governor. Throughout the film we see shots of a clock tower bearing the words “Observe the time, young man, and fly from evil.” Blackie never gets the message. And neither did Dillinger.

The two buddies meet again for the first time in years as they are going to see Jack Dempsey fight Louis Firpo.

The fight took place in the Polo Grounds on September 14, 1923 and Firpo knocked Dempsey through the ropes toward the end of the first round, inspiring the George Bellows painting. Dempsey came back in the second round to knock Firpo out.

Gable and Powell don’t actually see the fight, however, since they spend so much time catching up that the fight ends before they take their seats.

Blackie ultimately winds up on death row, thanks to Jim’s superior courtroom skills. Both men suffer great losses and by the end of the film—spoiler alert—Blackie walks the last mile while Jim tries to put his life back together.

Dillinger unknowingly walked his last mile, too, as he left the Biograph. Outside Melvin Purvis and a team of FBI agents were waiting for him and the "Woman in Red," a madam who had tipped off the police in the vain hope of avoiding deportation back to her native Romania.

When Purvis saw Dillinger leaving the theater, he signaled to the other agents by lighting his cigar. Dillinger ran into an alley, where he was shot to death and people were supposedly dipping their hankerchiefs in his spilled blood.

Dillinger has been portrayed countless times in the movies, but my favorite version of his story was Michael Man’s Public Enemies with Johnny Depp portraying Dillinger.

I never bothered seeing this film in the theater and it took me a long time to rent it because I didn't think there was much anyone could do with the gangster genre in general and the Dillinger story in particular. How many blazing tommy gun battles can we stand?

However, I called that one wrong. Public Enemies was a blast in ever sense of the word.

One of the final scenes of the picture has Johnny Depp sitting in the Biograph watching Manhattan Melodrama.

Book Mark

2010-12-05T18:15:00.001-08:00

The thing about buying a used book is that sometimes you can get two stories in one.

The first, of course, is the book itself; the thousands of words the author has pulled together in an effort to enlighten, amuse, outrage, or otherwise entertain us.

But another story--or at least traces of one--can come from the book’s previous owner—inscriptions, notes, doodles, and even the underlined sections that someone has put on the pages before they belonged to you.

They are incredibly small pieces of other lives and that’s probably why I enjoy them so much. It's fun to imagine who these people were and what they were thinking when they decided to write in their book.

A few years ago I picked up a copy of the “Spiritual Diary,” a book of a yoga master's inspirational sayings, at a used book stand on the Upper West Side.

An inscription by the previous owner, dated Jan. 1, 2001, read “As an art journal of sorts…all soul, babe, Love, D.” It’s followed by something I can’t begin to make out.

Whoever “Babe” is, his birthday is apparently January 13 because there is a heart-shaped photo of a woman holding up a sign reading “Happy Birthday” stapled to that particular page.

The November 4 page has a cut-off image of a diving woman in a bathing cap all tucked in and ready to hit the water. The book seems like a nice gift, but for whatever reason, Babe decided to part company with it.

I’d love to reverse the book’s history, learn more about Babe and D and why this gift ended up on book stand on Columbus Avenue.

Things got a little more personal last month when I ordered a paperback copy of “The Pistoleer,” a novel by James Carlos Blake. The book, which tells the story of the notorious gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, had received good reviews, so I decided to go online and get a used copy.

I haven’t started reading the novel yet, but when I first opened it, I saw there was an inscription on the inside of the cover page: “Merry Christmas, DAD. Love ya.” I can’t make out the signature, but I think the name is “Christine.”

So who is Christine? Where does she live? Why did she give this book to her father? And why was this book--with its very personal message--put up for sale?

Part of me fears the worst. Maybe the father died and Christine found the book to be a painful reminder of his loss.

Perhaps he didn’t have room for the book in his house—I know that story—and decided to let someone else have it. I hope the father and daughter didn’t have a falling out and the book was sold in anger. But that's just me fearing the worst again.

Looking at that inscription got me thinking about my relationship with my own father. I don’t think I ever told him I loved him, at least not as an adult.

I must have said it to my mother thousands of time, but it was different with my father. I think it’s different for a lot of sons and theirs fathers. You don’t really do the “I love you, man” thing.

I bought plenty of books for my father over the years, but I never wrote any kind of inscription in them; it never even occurred to me to do something like that. I guess I thought I would be defacing the book if I wrote in it--especially with my handwriting.

Once on his birthday I got my father an autobiography of Paddy Chayefsky, author of “Marty,” “Network,” and several other great movies. My father had grown up with Chayefsky—back when he was called “Sid”—and he told me he had gotten such a charge out of reading the book and remembering his youth.

He seemed so moved that I wish now I had written something in that book. I see that it’s a stealth way of getting your message across without blurting out your feelings and embarrassing everyone. I could have told my father that I loved him and only he and I would have known about it.

And if that book ever ended up being sold, the person who bought it would know, too--which would be just fine with me, babe.

Earning The Bird

2010-11-28T12:51:00.000-08:00

Each year before I stuff myself on Thanksgiving Day I go to the gym and try to “earn the bird.”

My goal is to work out like a psycho—more so than usual—so I’ll be able to enjoy a guilt-free holiday meal.

It’s ridiculous, of course. The idea of me being free of guilt is kind of like an opera being free of music. Where's the fun in that?

But I did my best this week and then I headed out to Long Island with my sister and auntie to have dinner with my cousin and her husband.

There were relatively few glitches, even though I (naturally) worried about all sorts of mayhem, like miss train connections, psychotic parade-goes, runaway floats, terrorist elves. etc.

We had one minor incident when we mistakenly got off a packed train at Jamaica Station only to learn that we didn’t have to switch trains.

We charged back onto the train expecting to stand for the duration of our trip, but the three lovely people who had taken our seats immediately got up and insisted we sit back down. A few days have gone by since then and I still can’t believe they did that.

When we arrived at our destination, we ate, socialized, and ate some more and headed back toward home. I was feeling pretty good, despite being rather full and extremely tired.

As the N train pulled into 14th Street I happened to look out the window and there was a homeless man sitting on a bench, a shopping cart filled bottles nearby and mounds of plastic bags on either side of him.

He had a full beard and he was clutching a two-liter bottle of 7-Up. On this day that celebrated family, togetherness and being thankful, here was a man who had no place to go and no one to be with.

It was one of the sights that can make me feel pretty small when I complain about what I think are serious problems.

Earlier in the week I learned that a woman at my company who was being treated for cancer had died from heart failure.

I never met this woman; I never even spoke to her on the phone. I only knew her from the emails she would occasionally send me.

I don’t know how old she was but she had a seven-year-old daughter and obviously a lot to live for. I had no idea she was even ill until her supervisor sent out an email announcing the terrible news.

I have a few days off before I have to work to work and I made the usual to-do list of projects. But I think I should put being grateful at the top of the list and keep it there even when the holidays are over.

Recalling that homeless man at Union Square and my co-worker who didn’t live to see Thanksgiving makes me think that there’s a lot more to “earning the bird” than just working up a sweat at the gym.

It also can mean being thankful for what you have, helping people out, and giving up your seat on a crowded train.

Fire Fight

2010-11-21T12:22:00.000-08:00

Illustration by Greg Bellamy

One of the first things a reporter does when arriving at a major fire scene is find the guy in the white helmet.

That’ll be the fire chief and he’s the one who will help you make some sense out of all the mayhem. Or at least you hope he will.

I covered many fires during my five years as a police reporter in Pennsylvania.

There were blazes where people died, where there was nothing left of the building but the foundation; one time a gas explosion destroyed an entire church in Stroudsburg.

But I think the biggest fire I ever covered in all those years chasing sirens was the blaze that destroyed the Salvation Army Thrift Center in East Stroudsburg nearly 20 years ago.

The building was huge and it was filled with old clothes, furniture and other second hand items. One night all of that stuff quiet literally went up in flames—and I was right there.

Many of the fires I wrote about happened in some distant part of my coverage area. Often by the time I arrived the firefighters had brought the fire under control—“knocked it down,” as they liked to say.

Sometimes the fires broke out in the dead of night when I was home in bed, so the only thing I saw on the morning after was smoking rubble.

But the Salvation Army fire was only a five-minute drive from my office and it broke out shortly after I returned from my dinner break.

Things had been quiet all day—I believe it was a Saturday and there were only a few people in the newsroom. I was hoping it would stay quiet so I could go the hell home.

But then the fire alarm in East Stroudsburg went off and it kept going and going. It went on for so long that people were calling the paper to find out what was happening. By that time I was driving down Lower Main Street and heading over the Interborough Bridge to East Stroudsburg.

A crowd had already formed across the street from the thrift center and firefighters from Acme Hose No. 1 were setting up equipment around the building.

No flames were visible yet, but a heavy stream of smoke was pouring out of the thrift center like a runaway smokestack. I figured things were bad, but I had no idea how bad they were going to get.

The crowd was actually in a pretty good mood. Sure the fire was terrible, but this was event, a break from the routine. There was almost a carnival feeling in the air.

The building had four large windows and as I stood with the crowd I watched each of them slowly turn black from the soot forming on the opposite side of the glass as the fire intensified.

And then the windows started to explode—crack! crack!-one right after the other, and a wave of heat, like a force field, surged out of the building and rolled right into the crowd.

Everyone suddenly fell silent and people seemed to take one unified step backward. This thing was for real.

Flames started to break through the roof and some of the volunteers climbed up on a new platform truck so they could attack the fire without having to stand on the burning building.

Acme Hose had recently acquired this massive piece of equipment and tonight it was making its debut.

The volunteers were hosing down the thrift center from the platform truck when the flames suddenly jumped up like a wild animal breaking out its cage. The firefighters staggered down the ladder to escape the incredible heat and I remember thinking, Jesus, even these guys are backing away from this thing.

Bill Miller was the chief of the Acme Hose Co. at that time and he was there with his white helmet and fire coat. I saw him standing with a group of his top men, “the sole figure in white,” I later wrote. He looked like a general conferring with his officers in the middle of an intense battle.

The flames climbed straight into the sky and from where I was standing I could see one fire truck after another racing over the bridge as fire companies from the surrounding area sent reinforcements.

The Salvation Army canteen, a kind of rolling kitchen, always responded to disasters and this night was no different. Even though they were losing a valuable piece of property and a source of revenue, they were out there doing whatever they could to help the firefighters. I interviewed the man in charge of the canteen right there while their building burned.

The volunteers eventually got the blaze under control, knocked it down, but the building was a total loss. I ran back to the paper and banged out the story so quickly I couldn’t believe it.

I had seen so much of what had happened that I didn’t feel the need to get a lot of quotes from witnesses. I was a witness myself.

The state police fire marshal later ruled the fire had been caused by some problem with the building’s electrical system.

I haven’t been back that way in years, but I understand the Salvation Army has a new thrift center at that spot. I’m a business reporter now, so I don’t cover fires anymore and I no longer search for the man in the white helmet.

Roll The Credits

2010-11-14T19:38:00.000-08:00

I’ve been a film addict ever since I saw “The Men Who Made the Movies” on PBS nearly 40 years ago.

I can’t begin to guess how many hours—years—of my life I’ve spent in movie theaters. I like to think I have a variety of interests, but there’s something about film that just gets hold of me.

I’ve always loved those few seconds when the lights go dim and the movie is just about to start. There's no drug in the world that can match that feeling of anticipation.

When I was in high school and college, I used to plot my weekends around the movies. I was either going to see the latest foreign flick, or catching a classic at revival houses like the Elgin Theater or Carnegie Hall Cinema.

Those theaters are gone now, thanks largely to VCRs and DVD players, and there are very few places that show old films—“retrospective cinemas,” as one of my film teachers called them in college--with a straight face no less.

And yet as I write this, I am struggling to remember the last time I actually went to the movies. I see films every weekend—probably too many--thanks to Netflix, the Sundance Channel, IFC, and Turner Movie Classics.

But as far as the last time I bought a ticket at the box office, handed it over to an usher, and sat down in an honest-to-God theater—I couldn't tell you.

This is unheard of for me. I am so used to reaching into that little change pocket in my jeans on a Sunday morning and pulling out the stub from the movie I saw the night before. But that hasn’t happened in a long, long time.

This isn’t entirely my fault. First of all, most movies just aren’t that good. Mindless explosions, lame plots, abysmal acting, sequels to sequels and worthless remakes don’t motivate me to get out of the house.

Tickets cost too damn much and now the bedbug scare in New York really makes theaters particularly unattractive.

But then you take these issues and factor in the knuckle-dragging morons who go to the movies nowadays—the ones who talk back to the screen, talk to each other, or talk to their imaginary friends from the coming attractions right until the ending credits and you have some of the best advertising for a DVD player that I’ve ever seen.

I love movies and I refuse to sit among people who don’t.

I don’t want to be around peabrains who are texting, who think that the theater is an extension of their living room, and who are genuinely stunned, shocked and surprised when you tell them to kindly shut their pieholes and watch the goddamn movie—you know, that thing on the big screen.

Honestly, people, it’s not like we’re asking for too much here. Just stop talking for about 90 minutes, that’s all. I’m sure your brilliant observations and scintillating conversation will keep until you get outside.

I remember going to see Apocalypse Now at a theater in Flatbush and while Robert Duvall was enjoying the smell of napalm in the morning, two guys a few rows down from me were all set to kill each other.

One had apparently told the other to shut up, prompting the first loser to jump to his feet and shout “Let’s go!”—as in “let’s hit each other in the head repeatedly and make total asses of ourselves in public.”

The horror, the horror...

The only grief I have to put up with at home is when some schmuck parks near my house and blasts his car stereo or revs his engine in some vehicular version of the great ape’s chest-thumping.

This usually happens at a critical time in the flick, but I can always rewind and watch the scene again when the idiot finally moves on. I don't have to pay inflated prices for soda or popcorn and I can go to the bathroom whenever I want without having to climb over half-a-dozen irate people in the dark.

Admittedly there are some films that should be seen in a theater. I truly regret not seeing Avatar in 3D, even when it came around for a second run. I enjoyed it so much, it’s a shame I didn’t see that movie in its original format.

Also, it can be fun to say you’ve seen the hot new movie of the day. Even though DVDs seem to be coming out faster and faster, the film is old news by the time it comes to me, having been replaced by the latest hot movie of the day. Still that’s not enough to get me to stand on line for God knows how long.

I haven’t written off theaters entirely and I know that sooner or later there will be some incredible flick coming out that I'll want to see on the wide screen. But for right now, there is really is no place like home.

A Guy Wakes Up in a Hospital…

2010-11-07T14:41:00.000-08:00

A guy wakes up in a hospital after suffering a serious injury to find the world that he knew has been destroyed and he must now struggle to survive in a hostile land.

Now does this describe the beginning of: (a) Day of the Triffids (b) 28 Days Later, or (c) The Walking Dead?

If you said a, b, and c, you are correct. All three films begin with some poor bastard regaining consciousness in a hospital room and learning that he has to fight for his life against invading aliens…or raging humanoids…or walking corpses.

Whatever the problem may be, it is so terrible that it makes the hero completely forget about the lousy hospital food.

Triffids, a British 1962 flick, got the whole hospital wake-up thing started--I think--when murderous plants invade Earth during a meteor shower that renders most of the earth’s population blind.

Our hero is a sailor recovering from eye surgery and is thus spared the loss of his vision.

It’s been years since I’ve seen this movie but I remember being especially creeped out by a scene where the sightless pilot of a commercial airliner keeps asking the air traffic people to talk him down, but gets no answer.

The passengers, who are also blind, are relatively calm until one little kid pipes up and asks “is the pilot blind, too?” And then everybody starts screaming. It’s the kind of scene that a man who is terrified of flying just loves to see. Stupid kid...

I was in bar in the Village a few years back and I was standing next to this large plant, which prompted a woman to warn me about the Triffids. I was impressed with her film knowledge and thought we might make beautiful music together, but it was not to be.

She had a New York Yankees logo tattooed on her lower back and, being desperate to keep the conversation going, I said “you must be a real Yankees fan.”

“Well,” she replied, “I’d have to be an idiot to do that and not be a Yankees fan.”

I was tempted to say that you’d have to be idiot in either case, but I didn’t want her to smash the Triffid over my head. So I kept my much shut and never saw her again.

The novel upon which the movie was based was written in 1951 by John Wyndham, who also wrote The Midwich Cuckoos, which was filmed as Village of the Damned, another excellent film.

In addition to the original movie, Triffids has inspired two mini-series and another film is supposedly due out in 2013. I wonder if every version begins the same way.

28 Days Later, a great flick that was just on the tube the other night, also starts with the hero waking up in a desolate hospital.

This guy is a messenger recovering from a traffic accident and he finds a large part of the people in England have been turned into murderous psychopaths by a virus.

And then finally we have AMC’s The Walking Dead, which just began its run on Halloween night. This time the hero, a sheriff’s deputy, has been shot in the line of duty, and, yes, wakes up in a hospital to find the world has been overrun with fleshing eating zombies.

I actually liked the first episode, though I am getting little tired of the whole zombie shtick. I was discussing the popularity of this sub-genre with a friend and he dismissed it as mindless entertainment for a mindless population.

“Bread and circuses,” he said disdainfully.

I thought the zombie film craze might be a commentary on society taking away our individuality, but I’ll go with the bread and circuses thing. Only zombies don’t eat bread and I wouldn’t try taking one to the circus.

I suppose the hospital room opening is the easiest way to have both the hero and the audience discover what’s going on at the same time.

But it’s me making a little nervous about going to the hospital. In addition to being worried about my health and the medical bills, I have to be on the lookout for all kinds of deadly freaks. How am I supposed to get better with all this aggravation?

Harry Belafonte did a variation on this isolation in a movie called The World, The Flesh and The Devil where he played a miner who is trapped during a cave-in and manages to miss a nuclear holocaust that wipes out just about everyone else on earth.

How about this for a horror flick? A guy wakes up in a hospital after getting his Yankees logo tattoo removed and finds that Sarah Palin is president.

Come back, Triffids, all is forgiven.

Poster Boy

2010-10-31T13:47:00.000-07:00

There’s no such thing as time travel, but a trip to the International Vintage Poster Fair comes awfully close.

The event is really meant for serious collectors, which rules me out, but I enjoy looking at these fabulous images that can combine art, history, politics, and advertising all on a single sheet of paper.

This may be hard for young people to believe, but posters were a primary method of getting your message out back in the days before TV and the Internet. They’ve been called the "seven-second medium," since that's about all the time they had to catch the eye of a speeding pedestrian.

The artists who created these illustrations did so knowing that they wouldn’t last long. The posters would go up on a wall or fence where they might be stolen or defaced and eventually covered up by another poster. But that didn’t stop these people from doing great work.

I got interested in vintage posters a few years ago when I did a story for TheStreet.com.

The economy was booming way back in ‘06 and the site had a feature section called “The Good Life,” which ran stories about expensive activities that would allow people to dump their excess cash and have fun at the same time. It all seems like such a long time ago…

I really wanted to contribute to this section but I had trouble coming up an idea. Then one night I was on the elevator, looking at one of those TV monitors that so many elevators have now, and I saw a notice about the poster fair flashing across the screen.

So I went to the Metropolitan Pavilion on 18th Street, had a blast, and started interviewing vintage poster dealers all around the country.

“These posters weren’t meant for us,” a dealer in Hawaii told me, which was one of my favorite quotes in that story. No, he said, they were meant to be seen by people living 70, 80, or 100 years ago. The ones that survived give us a feel for day-to-day life in another era.

You can get some very nice posters for under $1,000, which is a lot cheaper than many paintings. But if you’ve got the money, you can easily spend thousands of dollars.

And you can choose any number of themes for your collection: travel, propaganda, film, or war, for example. You can also collect posters from a particular era or focus on the work of an individual artist.

The travel posters make you long for the days of great ships and railroads when the world seemed to be a more exotic place. Movie posters remind us that the classics we rent from Netflix were once playing in theaters and the actors we now consider icons were once living and breathing human beings.

It’s fun to view posters in other languages and try to figure out what is being advertised. I saw one poster advertising a performer named Miss Dore and a small dog known as “L'Inimitable Dick.”

A poster advertising a psychic showed the face of a man in a turban with a huge question mark behind him, and the words “Alexander: The Man Who Knows” running across the bottom. I don’t know what Alexander knew, but I do know he had a pretty cool poster.

One of the dealers was going through a pile of his stock and I saw a poster for the 1939 World’s Fair, which my father used to tell us about when we were kids. The very next poster advertised the 1964 World’s Fair--where my father took us when we were kids.

The posters from World War II were particularly memorable, largely because my father was a veteran of that conflict.

There were rousing messages calling upon people to be strong and to support our fighting men. Looking around at today’s toxic political environment, it’s hard to believe that Americans were ever so united.

Many posters warned people to keep their mouths shut—the old “loose lips sinks ships” theme. One of the most memorable was an image of a drowning serviceman pointing his finger directly at the viewer and bearing the words “Someone Talked!”

There were enemy posters as well. One Italian poster depicted a bombed out church being looted by an African-American soldier who was drawn to resemble a marauding ape. The message was quite clear: Evil black American soldiers are going to overrun our country.

The fair isn't the biggest event in town, but I hung around for a couple of hours enjoying all the artwork and collecting memories that will last a lot longer than seven seconds.

High Incident

2010-10-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

I came out of my house this afternoon to dump some trash and walked right into the middle of a neighborhood drama.

I had the day off from work and I thought I’d relax and enjoy the lovely weather. But things didn’t go according to plan.

I was about to go back into my house when I saw some people standing in a semi-circle around an Asian woman who was stretched out on the ground a few houses away from mine.

She was barefoot, clad in pajamas, and rolling her head from side to side, sobbing and moaning unintelligibly.

One of my neighbors told me that he had seen her walk up the block, sit down on the ground near his house and lay down on the pavement.

She continued to roll her head and wail, while one man dialed 911 and the rest of tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

I spoke to her softly to calm her down, but I don’t think she heard me. I wondered if she had gotten out of a mental hospital, given the pajamas and the lack of shoes. If she lived around here, then somebody should have been watching her.

I asked one Asian woman standing near me if she could speak with this lady and find out what the trouble was, but she informed me that she wasn’t Chinese. Hand me that dunce cap, if you please...

Another neighbor who did speak Chinese said the woman wasn't making any sense. Then somebody else heard her say something about her son…and then she mentioned a number, which we took to be an address on the block.

One of my neighbors—I don’t know anyone’s name—went to that particular house and told a young man who lived there what was happening.

The young fellow said this woman lived upstairs from him. He started asking her questions and we learned that her son and her husband had gotten into some kind of fight and that they had never gotten along. She wouldn’t stop crying or get up off the ground.

“She said she wants her son back,” he said.

We talked among ourselves while waiting for the ambulance to arrive and the group grew larger as people stopped to ask us what had happened.

An EMT from the Fire Department arrived and started asking questions, though it was slow going due to the language barrier and the woman’s condition. He called for help on his radio.

“You’re breaking up,” a static-filled voice said.

“Clean the shit out of your ears,” the EMT muttered as he took out his cell phone.

I helped him and the young neighbor get the woman to her feet in an effort to sit her down on a nearby stoop, but she wouldn’t cooperate, and we had to put her back down on the sidewalk. And then the poor woman started to vomit.

A police car and an ambulance arrived and we had a minor traffic jam happening on the block, complete with blaring horns. The woman continued to cry and moan and then she got to her knees and began bowing before the young translator. He took hold of her arms and made her stop.

I felt a little ghoulish standing there, but just walking away wouldn’t have been right either.

The police officers helped this woman down to her home, but there was no one inside. Finally two EMTs put her on a stretcher and wheeled her to the ambulance.

“The whole block is out,” one of them said to his partner.

It wasn’t the whole block, but, yes, there were a lot of people watcing them. To be honest, how often does this kind of thing happen?

And while this woman may live on my block, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before today. I doubt if I’ll ever find out the whole story here, but I hope she gets the help need she so clearly needs.

Bane There, Done That

2010-10-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

I was speaking with my aunt recently and I told her I had just rented The Wolfman, a remake of the old horror movie classic that our family had enjoyed for so many years.

“Why?” she asked me with gentle exasperation.

Struck for answer, I reverted to my standard adolescent response.

“Uh…I don’t know.”

Actually, I did know. I was hoping for an easy night at the movies where I could sit back and relax with some enjoyable junk cinema. As it turned out, the only thing I got right was the “junk” part.

This wolf was a dog and the enjoyment for me came when I dumped the DVD into the mailbox and shipped it back to Netflix.

What was I thinking? That today’s filmmakers could actually create something that would rival the old 1941 Universal creepy starring Lon Chaney, Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi, and the incredible Maria Ouspenskaya?

No one could top Ouspenskaya when she intones “the way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end…”

Sure, it’s a load of crap, but it’s really great crap. Just like all those other old Universal horror flicks—Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and God knows how many more that made my Saturday nights when I was a kid.

Cheesy dialog, flimsy sets, and plots as creaky as the hinges on Dracula’s coffin—I couldn’t get enough of them. At least these movies were fun, which is more than I can say about most of today’s gore-filled, CGI-crammed retreads.

I don’t care for remakes on principle, the notable exception being The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, which was actually the third time around for Hammett’s novel.

For the most part, however, remakes to me come off as a low rent way to may a fast buck off of established material.

The new version stars two actors I like— Benicio Del Toro as the tortured title character and Anthony Hopkins as his father—but that didn’t help any.

In addition to being much bloodier than the original—what a surprise!—the remake puts an Oedipal/edible slant on the proceedings that leads to an embarrassing monster-on-monster showdown.

I much prefer the pairing of Lon Chaney Jr. and Claude Rains, one of the more unlikely father and son matchups in movie history. We were asked to believe that this slight, dapper English was the father of the towering, rather doofy-looking American.

I had an easier time believing that a man could turn into a wolf than accepting that these two were related. But it didn’t bother me in the least. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I enjoy the movie so much.

The original was written by Curt Siodmak, author of the novel Donovan’s Brain, and the scripts for such gems as I Walk With a Zombie, The Beast With Five Fingers, and--one of my favorites—Non-Stop New York.

Siodmak came up with the little ditty about a man turning into a wolf even though he’s “pure of heart,” which was repeated in all the other Universal werewolf movies.

And there was always a scene in these movies where Chaney, in attempt to protect the general public, would hide away in a remote inn. Just before turning in for the night, he’d whirl around with his eyes rolling and shout to the innkeeper, “Lock me in! And whatever you hear, don’t open the door!”

I used to wonder why the innkeepers didn’t boot Chaney out on his ass the moment they heard that. But no, they went along, although they often peeked into the room when the howling started. Big mistake, as any horror movie will tell you.

I guess it’s too much to ask for movie studios to leave the classics alone. No, for as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so will my tears run as directors continue to feast on the remains of old horror films.

Hey, that sounds like an idea for a movie…

The Whole Tooth

2010-10-03T19:54:00.000-07:00

I’m always a little surprised when I walk into my dentist’s office and see that computer on his desk.

He’s had the thing for years, of course, but I don’t go to the dentist as often as I should, so it takes me a while to get used to changes around the office.

I was in Dr. Cohen’s office on Saturday for this tooth ache that was lighting up whenever I drank cold liquids.

I decided to break with my tradition of letting problems go until they mutate into irreversible catastrophes and actually do something about this particular issue right in the here and now.

As I walked into his office I started thinking about how long I've been his patient. I was literally a child, a grammar school student, when I first came here. Back then the only place you could find desk top computers was on Star Trek.

I believe I was an eighth grader when I had my first appointment with Dr. Cohen. I went straight from class at Our Lady of Angeles to his office a few blocks away.

Naturally, I was a nervous wreck, convinced I would be facing an afternoon of unbearable torture. It didn’t seem fair. Wasn’t going to Catholic school punishment enough?

I also had been having some bad luck with dentists. Before Dr. Cohen there was one guy who used to insert three of his fingers in your mouth while he was putting in the filings. He never wore gloves and seemed decidedly indifferent to your discomfort.

I suspect he was a horse doctor before he made the switch over to homo sapiens.

There was another guy who used to make obnoxious remarks and even yelled at me one time—as if as a child in a dentist’s chair, I didn’t have enough to worry about. I’m kind of sorry I never bit that guy’s finger.

I don’t know how we found Dr. Cohen, but I’m very glad we did. I recall that first day when I filled out the dental form and handed it back to Mabel, Dr. Cohen’s assistant. She looked it over and gave me this lovely smile.

“You have a birthday coming up soon,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it--somebody actually smiling in a dentist’s office? I thought they only smiled when the patients were screaming.

That must have been close to 40 years ago and I’ve been going to Dr. Cohen ever since. There were some gaps—no pun intended—when I was living in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, but it never occurred to me to find a more conveniently located dentist. I just made sure to see him whenever I was back in Brooklyn.

Shortly after I graduated from college, I looked into getting a job as an English tutor in Japan.

I mentioned this to Dr. Cohen and he told me about a trip he took to Mount Fuji when he was in the service. And then he scheduled several appointments for me just in case I got the job.

That didn’t happen, but if I had moved to the Land of the Rising Sun, I’d still probably make yearly pilgrimages to Dr. Cohen’s office.

I have long since given up the candy and sugary sodas I used to live for back when I was in grade school. I remember Dr. Cohen giving this bit of advice to get me away from the sweet stuff.

“A cow lives on grass,” he said. “But if I try to eat nothing but grass, I’d die. It’s the same with cavities. Bacteria lives on sugar; no sugar, the bacteria dies.”

Nearly every one in my family went to Dr. Cohen and most of them still do. My mother always spoke so highly of him, how nice and polite he always was. And I actually lost my fear of dentists.

We also lost some of loved ones along the way. My mother’s gone now, along with my dad. Dr. Cohen lost his father and Mabel, that sweet lady whose smile took away all my fear, died several years ago.

In addition to the computer, the equipment has gone all modern. No more paper files; it's all digital. And the water fountain is environmentally correct, requiring the patient to fill the cup by pushing a button instead of filling up automatically.

It turned out on Saturday that I didn’t have any cavities, thank the Lord. So Dr. Cohen gave me cleaning along with a mini-toothbrush and a recommendation to buy a special kind of toothpaste, which I have yet to do.

We talked about the old days while he updated my chart on that computer. He was sitting in Mabel’s old seat and I looked up to see a photograph of her on the wall.
It’s almost like she was still there.

I shook hands with Dr. Cohen and wished him well. I was glad I had come to see him, not only for my tooth, but for the memories as well. When think of all the years I've been coming to this man, I just have to smile.