The Luna Park Gazette

I wonder what made me think of Raymond last week. Every so often a name from my past will slide across my mind for no discernible reason. I’ll start to wonder, “whatever happened to…?” and then it’s off to Google to find out what this particular individual has been up to for the last few decades. The latest search was for a kid named Raymond whom I went to high school with in 1971 and have not seen—or thought about--since. Richard Nixon was president then. A gallon of gas cost 40 cents a gallon, a movie ticket went for a buck-fifty, and the average cost of a new house was $25,250. I was 14 years old, a graduate of Our Lady of Angels Catholic School in Bay Ridge, and starting freshman year of high school. There was no internet, of course, so you couldn’t Google someone’s history, and no smart phones to distract us, so I had to find other ways to avoid studying. And we didn’t have to wear masks and gloves because Covid-19 wouldn’t show up in our lives for another 50 years.

At least we have the guns. I ran into a man I know from the neighborhood a few weeks ago just as the quarantine was getting underway. He’s a nice enough guy, but he’s a bit of a right winger, which I am not, and, like a lot of right wingers, he likes to inject unsolicited editorial comments into the conversation. So, for example, when he told me he was out of work because his job had been shut down, he felt compelled to proudly inform me that he did not apply for unemployment benefits. Okay, so…what are you saying, exactly? That you’re not going to accept money that is rightfully yours because you don’t want no stinking government handout? Fine, give me your tax refund and then you can really feel good about yourself. And then he told me about the guns. “I moved my guns from my place in summer place,” he says. “I’ve got over 200 guns.” I knew he was a collector who liked to call himself “a gun guy,” but I was appalled at the size of his arsenal. I know he’s a collector,

When I woke up this morning, things were lookin' bad, Seem like total silence was the only friend I had…” --John Prine The text message I received this morning caught me completely by surprise. “Happy Easter,” it said. Those two words made no sense to me. Happy what? And what's with the cartoon rabbit image? And then I remembered: today is Easter Sunday. The text was from a woman I’ve been dating—or had been dating pre-pandemic. It was very thoughtful of her to contact me, especially since she’s Jewish. So, eight years of Catholic school, where I was terrorized into memorizing the Catechism under the threat of eternal damnation and a smack on the head, and I had somehow forgotten the most important day in the Christian calendar and had to be brought up to speed by somebody outside the church? I could almost hear my fifth-grade nun, Sister Frances, climbing out of her grave and heading toward my house with a ruler in her hand. Of course, in my defense

“The irony of life is that those who wear masks often tell us more truths than those with open faces.” ― Marie Lu When I was a child, my mother always warned me to bundle up in cold weather. “You don’t want to get the misery in the chest,” she’d say. My mother was talking about colds and the flu, of course, but today a much deadlier kind of misery has gripped the world in the form of Covid-19, a.k.a. the coronavirus. New York City remains the nation’s epicenter for this plague and life as we used to know it has pretty much evaporated. Today is Palm Sunday, usually a time of joy, as we look forward to Easter and its promise of hope and rebirth. But now we’re all wearing masks and gloves and the U.S. Surgeon General warned that “this will be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives.” God help us. I did another early morning shopping run yesterday, even earlier than last week’s sojourn. As I cruised the nearly empty aisles, I saw a young masked man holding his