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Dear Long Island

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

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

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If you only could watch one movie for the rest of your life, what would it be? In the 1971 dystopian science fiction film The Omega Man , Charlton Heston is stranded in a shattered world where just about everybody else is either dead or been turned into a nocturnal psychopath. Civilization has been destroyed, so Heston gets his entertainment by sitting in an empty theater and watching Woodstock so often that he can recite all the lines in the famed documentary. I’ve never seen Woodstock , but I’ve been wondering what movie I would want to watch for the rest of my days. As a diehard movie fan, I have so many candidates—Johnny Belinda, The Thief of Baghdad, High Noon—how could I possibly decide? God forbid that would ever I have to make such a choice, but I recently realized that I may have a candidate. Glengarry Glen Ross was a 1992 film adaptation of David Mamet’s Pulitizer Prize winning play. Directed by James Foley—who was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, just like you...
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Banish Ghosts and Goblins

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When I was a kid, I just loved monster movies. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, I couldn’t get enough of all the old Universal Studios horror contingent--much to my father's dismay. And then there was Godzilla and all the massive Japanese creatures stomping their way through Tokyo on a regular basis. But then horror flicks got gorier and I got older and, even though I still enjoy a good monster story, there’s a cynical side of me that believes these movies are giving humanity an undeserved break. Pick up a newspaper or switch on the TV and you’ll find countless examples of monstrous acts happening all over this world every single day—with no supernatural forces to blame. Last week, I sat down to watch Sinners , Ryan Coogler’s horror spectacular and while I do have some complaints, there is a sequence in the film that one of the most brilliant things I’ve seen in ages. The story takes place in the 1930s and concerns twin brothers—both portrayed by Micha...
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Year of the Fire Horse

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Okay, so let’s try that again. The new year got off to a decidedly rocky start for me when I got a nasty cold just five days into 2026. As if that didn’t suck enough on its own, the torment was compounded by the fact that I had been sick just a month ago in early December. Nobody likes being sick, but I’ve had health problems for most of my adult life, so getting hammered by back-to-back illnesses really rocks my world. I have been absolutely miserable for the last several days, wallowing in a rancid stew of resentment, regret and rage. My subconscious mind has been working extra hard to replay all my mistakes and missteps in glorious technicolor. It started last Monday with a series of seemingly endless sneezing fits. I was hoping I was having some kind of allergy attack, but I had to finally throw in the tissue and admit that was I sick once again. I had been so high on starting the new year on the right foot and now I could barely stand up. I wound up taking two days o...
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Sole Survivor

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I limped through the snow with the words of Rudyard Kipling rolling through my skull. “ Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again! ” The poem, which was first published in the 1903 collection The Five Nations , imagines the repetitive thoughts of a British Army infantryman marching in South Africa during the Second Boer War. The 1915 spoken word recording of the poem by American actor Taylor Holmes has been used for its psychological effect in U.S. military Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape schools. That recording also makes an appearance in the horror film 28 Years Later and I can tell you from firsthand experience that it was as creepy as hell. And “Boots” came to mind last week when my family visited the New York Botanic Gardens to see the annual holiday train show. The event, which is more than 30 years old, features model trains navigating through miniatures of New York City’s most famous building made entirely out of plant parts. The display inclu...
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If the Fates Allow

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Everybody took their seats at my kitchen table on Christmas Eve as I lit up the holiday candle. I looked around at my dinner guests: my parents, my Uncle Joe and my brother Peter. They have all died—Peter and Joe both this year, actually--but that didn’t slow down the proceedings. Years ago, my shrink introduced me to the concept of chair work therapy as a way of processing grief. The idea is that you imagine a deceased person “sitting” in an empty chair and speak to them as if they are alive. The empty chair technique was popularized by Gestalt therapists, but it was first developed and demonstrated by Jacob Levy Moreno, a student of Sigmund Freud’s, in 1921. Some possible positive effects of the method include reducing harmful thoughts toward yourself, experiencing greater insight into your own feelings and finding peace and acceptance. “Engaging in an empty chair session can often be emotionally intense,” according to PsychCentral , an online resource for health and...
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