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Pull the Plug

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The Third Commandment got quite a workout today. Like any Catholic school survivor, I have grim memories of sour-faced nuns relentlessly drilling the Decalogue into my young, defenseless brain. I try to abide by them, but I confess there have been many slip-ups over the years, except, of course, for the Sixth Commandment, as I have not killed anybody... yet. Now, Rule No. 3 on God’s holy hit parade clearly states, “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.” Unfortunately, a series of unexpected circumstances this morning had me violating it all over town. Like so many of my freakouts, this latest debacle involved technology, specifically my new iPhone, which stubbornly and suddenly refused to charge this morning. I stared at the thing, waiting to hear the little beep and see the tiny green bar appear in the top left corner of my phone, but nothing happened. Panic set in quickly as I watched the power drain from this device that has pretty much commandeered my life. I d...
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Hop To It

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This was just what the doctor ordered. We had a busy weekend here in the Big Apple, with Halloween on Saturday night and the New York City Marathon kicking off on Sunday morning. I confess I've pretty much lost interest in the whole trick-or-treat schtick over the years. I love seeing the kids in their costumes going from house to house and getting so excited, but I'm not into dressing up myself. On Saturday, my sister and I met up with our cousin Jill for a night out in Chinatown, and after hitting a few places, we ended up at Wo-Hop's, a legendary eatery on Mott Street that has been the scene of many a late-night meal. I recall a midnight ride to Wo-Hop's in the Eighties with a bunch of friends as some of them sang "Let's Go to Wo-Hop's," a revised version of the hit song by Danny & the Juniors, which, like me, debuted in 1957. We started our evening a little earlier this time out. Wo-Hop's seemed a lot smaller than I recalled, ...
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Team Coverage

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"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"― Ernest Hemingway Every night I get into bed with mission control. I suffer from sleep apnea, a disorder characterized by intermittent reductions in breathing, including complete pauses that cause me to wake up in the middle of the night. I've tried meditation, sleep gummies, a special mouth guard, and now, for the second time in about eight years, a CPAP machine. CPAP, or Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, is a medical device that uses mild, steady air pressure to keep your airways open while you sleep. It is the most common and, supposedly, the most effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnea. You have to wear a nose guard or mask all night long and feed the thing a healthy supply of distilled water to keep it running. The National Sleep Foundation estimates that 8 to 10 million people in the United States regularly use a CPAP machine, the primary treatment...
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Spheres of Influence

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

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

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

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Somewhere in my apartment there is a photograph from the 1960s of me and my brother Peter dressed as altar boys. This wasn’t a Halloween party or some kind of irreverent prank. Peter and I were both very briefly altar boys while we were on vacation one summer at St. Mary of the Mount in Mount Pocono. We were staying at a nearby resort called Merrill’s Breezewood Lodge, a place our family absolutely loved. Apologies if I’ve written about this before, but we had such great times there. The property consisted of three houses spread out through the woods, and we would stay at either The Vacationer—a lovely white two story building—or The Hideaway, which was well named, as the gray house sat up on a steep hill and was virtually hidden from the rest of the world. The place had a swimming pool down by the main house where my siblings would swim and I’d flop around in the shallow end. At night, we’d all gather with the other guests around the pool to shoot the breeze and lo...
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