The Luna Park Gazette

I ran into Anthony, my mother’s former hairdresser, on Thanksgiving Eve and greeted him with the old standby “how’s business?” And he told me. “I sold the building,” he said. “I’m retiring.” I couldn’t believe it. Another familiar place disappearing? Anthony has been running the beauty salon on Fifth Avenue for as long as I can remember. He can’t just close up shop. Anthony said he’s not leaving Brooklyn. I thought he might head off to someplace like Florida, but he dismissed that idea. “Maybe I’ll go to Key West for a couple of weeks,” he said, “but I don’t want to boil down there—especially in the summer.” Anthony was one of the few people who actually loved his job. “I couldn’t wait to get to work,” he said. “It was never really work for me.” Not too many people in this world can make that claim. One of my earliest memories of Anthony was coming home with my brother from grocery shopping when we were kids. We had gotten caught in a terrible downpour that soaked...

We pulled into the funeral home parking lot just after 8 pm, found a spot, and waited for the cops to show up. It was June 1988. I had just started working as a reporter for the Pocono Record , moving to Pennsylvania from Brooklyn a month earlier, and on this night I was handling the police beat. Frances Cox, one of our photographers, was sitting next to me in the passenger seat and we were waiting to get a picture of a man named Jerry Burgos, a New York transplant like myself, who was inside the attending his wife’s viewing. Nilsa Burgos had been discovered in the couple’s burning home a few days earlier. Her death had been ruled a homicide after an autopsy found no trace of smoke in lungs, meaning she was dead before the fire started. She was seven months pregnant. The paper had been running stories about the killing for days and then one of the reporters had gotten a tip that the state police would pick up Burgos at the funeral home and charge him with his wife’s murder. Fr...

A decade ago, while working as a reporter in Connecticut, I was driving through some small town on my way to some forgettable assignment and listening to the news on the radio. The Yankees had won the World Series and New York was going to give them a ticker tape parade that very afternoon. I’m not much of a sports fan, and I usually root for the Mets when it comes to baseball, but it just killed me to be sputtering around the back roads of East Deer Tick when my hometown was throwing such a huge bash. "What am I doing here?" I whined within my old Toyota. "I should be back there ." Well, today, I got a second chance to see the Yankees parade down the Canyon of Heroes. And it was certainly worth the wait. My office is on Broadway, overlooking the parade route and, after a little hustling, I got to see a good portion of the show without facing the cold or the crowd. And the crowd was unbelievable. I know it’s New York, the Big Apple, and, yes, Toto, I know I’m not in...

There once was a time when I looked forward to the sign of peace. That’s the part of the mass where you shake hands with everybody around you. It's kind of like a spiritual version of the seventh inning stretch. We started doing the sign of peace in the Catholic Church when I was in grammar school and I remember how one of my classmates once grabbed another kid’s hand during mass and said “hey, how’s the wife and kids?” Fortunately for him, none of the brothers caught him in the act for they would have no doubt sent him to meet his maker right there in church. It’s a much shorter trip. I’ve been attending services at Trinity Church for a few years now and I’ve gotten to enjoy this little hand-to-hand routine. I greet my regular buddies and new arrivals and next to the sermon, it is—or was —my favorite part of the mass. But that was before the H1N1 virus and all its attendant hysteria came to town. Now my church has a hand-sanitizing android stationed in the vestibule ready to spew ...

I finally found peace this week. No, not serenity, calm, stillness or tranquility—don’t be ridiculous. I’m still as neurotic as ever. I’m talking about a novel called Peace by Richard Bausch, a gift from my brother which I thought I had lost somewhere between my house and the New York City subway system. I had just made up my mind to read that particular book after looking through the stacks of paperbacks around here. I brought it to work, kept it in a brown plastic bag to protect the cover, but when I got home that night and looked in my bag, I found that I had been seperated from Peace . I looked all over my house, peeked into the garbage can, I even checked out the re-freaking-frigerator--nothing. I tried the Zen thing of letting go and the book apparently returned the favor because I couldn't find it anywhere. At breakfast the next morning I because convinced— convinced —that I had tossed the book in the trash can. Seconds later I heard the garbage truck pulling up in front of...

I was doing my evening shopping the other night when I heard a familiar song on the radio. I had trouble making out the tune because of the noise around me, but I knew I’d heard this song before. As I put my groceries down in front of the cashier, I listened carefully and tried to figure out the words. It was from the eighties, one of my favorite decades for music. And I could tell it was a woman singing. Then there was a sudden gust of silence around me and I was able to name that tune. It was “Papa Don’t Preach” by Madonna. Okay, well, if you just ring me up, I'll be on my way. Please, for the love of God, ring me up. As soon I got my change, I bid farewell to the Material Girl and bounced down to the corner drug store for some additional shopping. At first I wasn’t paying too much attention to the piped-in music, but as I roamed the aisles in a futile search for whatever the hell it was that I wanted, I started to listen to the song pouring out of the sound system—and wished I h...

"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Matthew 5:44 For the last few days I’ve been trying to remember where I was standing on 9/11 when the planes hit the World Trade Center. I pass by Ground Zero every day on my way to work and as the anniversary drew closer, I'd walk by the Brooks Brothers store on Church Street and see if I could find my exact location on that most hideous day. I had to imagine that the towers were still there and try and recall if I was closer to Church Street or Liberty Street when I watched smoke pour out the North Tower and when the South Tower exploded into flames as the second plane hit the building. I had just come from my gym near City Hall and was on my way to my office, which back then was at Liberty Plaza—right across the street from the Trade Center. That was my father's 80th birthday; my mother was at Lutheran M...