The week after Thanksgiving 1959, my mother left my brother, Rory, off at my grandparents on York Avenue and picked me up at P.S. 77 after kindergarten dismissal. Together we walked over to the 86thStreet cross-town bus just pulling up to the corner. Mom dropped a Mercury dime (I loved coins my grandmother and father… Read more »
So I walk into the house, I’m 10, and the first thing I see is a pair of bare legs on the inside of a closed window and the rest of the body isn’t in the apartment. I’m praying to God whoever it is doesn’t fall, the soapy glass prevents a clean identification of the… Read more »
On Friday, November 22, 1963, after lunch the St. Stephen of Hungary’s student body assembled in the auditorium for our once in a blue moon movie. That day our feature was “The Yearling.” A kid adopts a baby deer and his father played by Gregory Peck gives him the business. I was happy and not… Read more »
Only good part to getting older is how I pop up in the early morning like a Reverse Vampire. Makes it easy to get outside when the light’s right. This past Saturday, I rode my bicycle to Central Park and arrived at Bow Bridge on The Lake at 6:45. The colors in the park slowly… Read more »
I used to ride in my father’s rumble seat,” Dad told me 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 you… Read more »
As a boy in the early 1960s, I’d go up my grandparents’ second floor apartment on York Avenue several times a week. Their hallway was lit by one low watt exposed bulb. The dark hall frightened me. Sometimes my fear was compounded when I’d hear fuzzy radio sounds coming from the usually locked basement. I… Read more »
Last weekend, I wrote and worked on a park bench near Sailboat Lake. I saw a few trees that looked familiar and thought back. As a boy, I’d climb trees all over Central Park, never looking down, go up as far as I could, then I’d look down. My heart would relocate to the outside… Read more »
