Tis Bitter Cold and I Am Sick of January

(Originally published 1/15/18)

January has long been my least favorite month. It's thirty-one days, on the cold side, and sometimes snowy. It's also the month when the Christmas decorations come down and countless sorry-looking trees end up at the curbside. Returning to school after the New Year and Christmas vacation was, as I recall, psychologically grueling. It was a powerful one-two punch: the party's over locking arms with an extended stretch of nothingness. The school year's "mid-winter recess" or "winter vacation" wasn't until mid-February, and that always seemed like a long way away in early January. As a youth, the snow possibility was about the only thing that recommended this time of year. But now an adult long removed from even a second childhood, snowfall is the stake through the heart of January. 

Blizzard-like conditions still supply a great visual. But I make that statement on a conditional basis.

After their time has come and gone, Christmas decorations are sad sights indeed.

Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of  delivering Amazon Prime packages.

For more than a quarter of a century, my father worked at the mega-post office with the unofficial postal motto emblazoned on its facade. He, in fact, worked the four-to-midnight shift, coming home on the subway in the "gloom of night."

I can't think of anyone more deserving of being a canine chew toy.

If you don't demand the best and will settle for okay, this is the place for you...

On Manhattan's other Restaurant Row...

In the vicinity of Times Square on New Year's Day, the garbage cans were closed but the barbershops were open.

If you can't throw your trash in a can, a non-working, dinosaur telephone booth is the next best thing.

If you've ever wanted to visit a DVD, take down that address.

Price Harry's favorite place for a sandwich and a smoothie when he's in town.

Donald Trump has been wont to refer to 9-11 in speeches as "7-Eleven." This is perhaps why.

Yesterday I ate lunch at a place with this sign on the wall.

And here it is...

The January saga...a picture is worth a thousand words.

I wonder what the "souvenir" is?

An abandoned women's prison? No, a permanently locked subway bathroom.

As a kid I always associated New York City steam pipes with Christmastime and a good kind of cold. Times change.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Poet for a Day...In May

(Originally published 5/1/13)

Thirty-two years ago in the waning days of my freshman year in college, I wrote a short poem entitled, “School’s Out.” What’s memorable to me about this piece is not that I got an “A,” but that I made the cut and landed on my esteemed English professor’s august mimeograph sheet. After each and every one of our poetry assignments were turned in, he would select what he considered the best works from his two freshman-year poetry classes. Previously, I had found myself on the mimeograph sheet—uncredited this time—with a poem the professor used as Exhibit A to point out glaring errors in execution or some such thing. And I actually liked that one better.

With the honor of being on the mimeograph sheet came—unfortunately from where I sat—a live reading. The poem’s author was asked to read his or her poem aloud in class, unrehearsed, and await a critique. I somehow pulled it off on this day in May. When my professor said, “Mr. Nigro, you read that very well,” I beamed internally in my guise as “Poet for a Day.”

As I further thumbed through my college ephemera on a recent trip down Memory Lane, I was struck, foremost, by the general pedestrian quality of my writing—largely uninspiring and very unmemorable. And I got the sinking feeling I wasn’t always giving it my best shot. Although I look back fondly on my collegiate years at Manhattan College, I nonetheless wrote a poem about being happy when the school year ended. The punch line: “Three cheers for this day…In May.” On the other hand, I was not in the least bit fond of my high school days, but, I suspect, “Three cheers for this day…In June” would not have gotten me on that prestigious mimeograph sheet. A great honor, but no poetry anthology forthcoming.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Make Like a Tree and Leave

(Originally published 5/4/13)

Barbara Walters once famously asked legendary actress Katharine Hepburn, “What kind of a tree are you?” She was subsequently mocked for posing such a juvenile question and its ridiculousness became the stuff of legend, even before things went viral. But now the rest of the story: Walters’ tree query was actually a follow-up to Hepburn saying how she was a tree or some such thing. And naturally, she was a very strong, very pretty oak tree. What else?

I thought about this blast from the past only because I stumbled upon an article about human beings and trees. Specifically, about how we can live on in our next incarnation as a tree or perennial plant of some sort. Yes, I can become a tree after I pass by having my cremated ashes placed in a biodegradable urn made of coconut shells. After adding the appropriate seed, compacted peat, and whatever other growing materials are required—Voilia!—I am a tree in the making as the nutrients of my ashes are absorbed into all of the above.

So, I can be eternal after all. Well, not quite. Said tree, first of all, has got to take root and grow. And if it does, the Tree Me will ultimately die at some point in the future. Pests might do me in, wild and woolly weather, or old age if I'm fortunate. It is nonetheless life after death—and a rather uplifting one at that—even if it is fleeting under the best of circumstances.

Now I can ponder Barbara Walters’ question for real and make like a tree and leave. This leafy green way to go—and the only avenue I know to live on for a little while at least—is certainly better than a boring tombstone, which hardly anyone will come to visit anyway. And I think I’d like to be—when all is said and done—a Weeping Willow, even if the species has little appeal to Walters. A tree grows in the Bronx. Who knows? Maybe someone will carve their initials in me.