Fifty-one years ago this week, I was lowered into the 1961 Yankee bullpen and shook hands with future Hall of Famers. This event blew my seven-year-old mind. In 2008, the New York Times published the story. What follows is the full version of the events of that day… The Boy in the Bullpen I barehanded… Read more »
Before air conditioning, I spent entire Yorkville summers with the lights out in our 517 East 83rd Street apartment. Mom could page through a calendar in the winter and start sweating when June, July, August flipped by, but Dad loved the heat. He slept under a pipe in the Navy. Made for nice conversation. One afternoon… Read more »
By the light the silvery moon, New York in June. Zero Mostel sang it best in the 1968 film The Producers. This past week, I experienced Manhattan in June. Pictured here is a cloud-swirled full moon over Washington Square; Gramercy Park balconies & ivy; Sheep Meadow squirrels; East River clouds, boats, lighthouses and bridges; the… Read more »
Yesterday, a hawk soared over Central Park’s Sailboat Lake (aka the Conservatory) for twenty minutes without a landing. The British were at the Band Shell celebrating the Olympics, charity, rugby, and the Queen’s 60th year on the throne. They also brought along a beautiful classic car just because. Near the statue of the Union soldier… Read more »
In the fall of 1997, on Long Beach Island in Jersey, my friends John, Jerome, and Freddy cautiously agreed to let me help them build a porch on Second Street in Beach Heaven. John knew I was mechanically challenged and still years away from memorizing and applying “lefty loosey, righty tighty” when turning a screw. Early in the affair,… Read more »
I lost both my hips. Their decline was due to poor genetic lotto and a thousand games played on concrete and asphalt. One stood out: Johnny on the Pony, a game of immense endurance and stupidity. The game’s strategy involved one team (“The Pony”) forming a long bent-over row like a Chinese New Year’s dragon, while the other… Read more »
“The royal ass has been wiped!” Mom would make this announcement from the bathroom as Rory and I drank Tang and ate burnt toast in the kitchen. We’d hear Dad moaning to himself in his bedroom. After Dad went to the bathroom each morning, Mom would examine how much toilet paper remained on the roll. Dad was… Read more »
“I used to ride in my father’s rumble seat,” Dad told me once while we sat at the bar in Loftus Tavern. As Dad drank a short beer and I sipped a coke, I wondered, What’s a rumble seat? I asked. He said, “It was a seat that hinged out of the back of the car. It felt like… Read more »
I’ve been overseas for the past few weeks, and the weather in Paris, Brittany, and Normandy went like this: rainy, cold and humid, windy, drizzly, a sun tease, rainy again followed by rapidly moving clouds, then a sudden dark sky, then a downpour. The “put a bullet in my head” weather, however, did not stop… Read more »
In 1969, desperate to escape my crappy job at a Daitch Shopwell supermarket, I secured a better crappy job in my Yorkville neighborhood. Ben’s Meat O’Mat was a mom and pop butcher/grocery store, except there was no Mom and no Pop, just two oafs named Pete and Harry. They weren’t twins, but they could have… Read more »
