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St. John’s Water Bottle

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I guess this was bound to happen. I had this tacit agreement with my gym, where I routinely forget my water bottle and they give it to me the next time I come in. I’m not a fan of this routine; in fact, it scares the screaming bejesus out of me since I’m a senior citizen and extremely concerned about the old memory banks going on the fritz. I liked to joke that the gym staff should find a special shelf for the damn thing so I could leave it there and fill it up every time I work out. Well, my luck finally ran out. Last week I left that water bottle somewhere in the gym—perhaps by the Stairmaster?—and when I got home, I went through the routine of calling to ask them to set it aside for me. Only this time nobody turned it in. I’m so used to the receptionists reaching under the counter and coming up with the water bottle that I was surprised when they told me they hadn’t seen it. It’s was pretty nice, too, which makes me wonder why I wasn’t more careful with it. I ...
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Keep it Brief

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So, where did I leave that briefcase? I lay in bed obscenely early one recent morning trying to remember where I had left my attaché case. I was so upset. How the hell could I lose something so important? God knows what I had in there, but it must have been vital or I wouldn’t have put it in the briefcase in the first place. And now it was gone. It took a few minutes for me to realize that the attaché case I was so attached to didn’t exist, and that it was, in fact, the stuff that dreams are made of. I haven't worked in an office in years and even then I didn't feel the need to use a briefcase. Why would I dream about one now? My mother bought me an attaché case for my birthday—or was it Christmas? —many years ago, when I first started working. It occurs to me that I haven’t laid eyes on that thing in years. I’m reasonably sure that it is somewhere in my house, I’m just not sure where. But this was not the briefcase in my dream. I had this delusion a fe...
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Slice of Life

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