Death Be Not Proud...in the Twenty-first Century

Prior to the new millennium, I didn’t give that much thought to serious illness, medical matters, and the possibility of shuffling off this mortal coil in the blink of an eye. The only time I had called on a doctor in my adult life up to the age of forty, and somewhat beyond that, was for waxy build-up in an ear. A summer vacation's sea water compounded the problem, which I made considerably worse with my repeated attempts to clear out the thing. The ought years, however, altered my thinking patterns on the subject of life and death, and not just because of what happened to me but to so many others as well.

We should all have living wills. Perhaps I will make one someday. We should also make absolutely clear whether we wish to be waked at a funeral parlor at quite an expense, and have all too many people feel obliged to send costly flower arrangements that will find their way into the undertaker's trash in under twenty-four hours. I should, too, attend to this matter.

But right now, I’m more interested in the phone call or Internet announcement of my death. One of the most difficult things for family members and friends to do upon a death of a loved one is to notify others of the passing. Obviously, certain folks merit notification that a close relation, or good friend, is no longer among the living. This is not something the human species enjoys doing as a rule, and I was thinking of those who might someday have to pass along this final word vis-à-vis me.

So, here’s my proposal in this technological age of ours with iPhones, Flip Cams, and social media outlets like Facebook, to make everyone’s life a whole lot easier. Why don’t we all—in addition to preparing our living wills, etc.—record our “I’ve just died” or “I’m dead” YouTube and such videos right now, so that others in our lives can place them on social media sites, or use the audio portions to make robo-telephone calls to those who really and truly merit one. This would not only benefit the living compelled to both sorrowfully and awkwardly announce a dearly departed’s death, but also add a special touch, too—from you and from me. Now that it’s so possible, we should, in fact, be the ones who announce we are dead as a doornail—and not somebody else. I, for one, will be recording my “I am dead” proclamation and I hope you will join me.

Goodbye, Mr. Fence

Some four decades ago, a family moved into the old neighborhood. They purchased a Tudor-style single-family house. It bordered on the extended communal backyard of three-family homes where I grew up and where I played wiffle ball, catch, and touch football.

The new family on the block was an odd one. The parents were older and so were their three sons. There were thus no tailor-made bonds between them and us. The patriarch of the family was actually kind of scary. I think he liked to drink a little more than he should have, and also suspect he was a bit off. It seemed the man’s abiding obsession was tending to the fence at the end of our shared backyards, so that no one could even look into—never mind enter—his. He was constantly patching it up. In those days in the Bronx’s Kingsbridge, patchwork fences were pretty commonplace. Aesthetic appeal took a back seat to utilitarianism almost every time. Still, it just couldn't be helped. Our various spaldeens, hockey pucks, and rubber hard balls from our lengthy concrete play land often pelted his revered fence and the fence owner did not like it—not one bit.

The ten-year-old me assigned our mysterious neighbor the moniker: “Mr. Fence.” The family was so detached and secretive that most of us on the block didn’t even know their surname. So, some of the locals came to believe the family’s last name was actually “Fence.” I recall overhearing an elderly neighbor of mine saying that she saw “Mr. Fence” at Sunday Mass, and the little me felt sort of proud at having infused this almost-sinister local character with, if you will, character.

Mrs. Fence, on the other hand, mostly stayed indoors. Eventually, she made a friend with another standoffish neighbor, who gleefully reported to one and all how Mrs. Fence believed what an unfriendly neighborhood, with very unfriendly people, we lived in. At some point in time, my brother and I were peddling on our front stoop smooth-looking rocks that we had amassed —I think along the Jersey Shore where we vacationed—and painted, adding slogans to a few of them like “New York, the Big Apple.”

When Mr. Fence plucked down a quarter for a “New York, the Big Apple” rock, I never again saw him in quite the same negative light. I was certain he didn’t really want a not especially special stone with the words “New York, the Big Apple” scrawled on it with magic markers. The man went out in style. I will thus remember my customer, Mr. Fence, and not the guy who had the trunk of his car searched by the police for a gun—that some Exxon gas station attendant down the block had reported seeing during a routine inspection. Goodbye, Mr. Fence…and thank you for the business.

Revenge of the Formerly Young Person...

Some time ago in the Internet’s infancy, and before the advent of social media, I was walking along the streets of the old neighborhood with an old friend from the old neighborhood. And when a generic, run-of-the-mill middle-aged man walked past the two of us, I thought nothing of it, but my friend paused and reflected on what he had just beheld. He turned to me and said, “I think that was a formerly young person” who just passed by.

He didn’t know exactly who it was, or even the person’s surname, but somehow he was certain it was someone from the neighborhood who was, once upon a time, a young person—a kid just like we were. And really, this is largely the way it was before the World Wide Web and things like Facebook. Formerly young persons were rare sightings—chance encounters, usually, with fellow formerly young persons. And it was the way we thought it would always be.

Conversation of the past went like this: “Do you remember that kid Billy Schmidt, who we went to school with? I wonder whatever happened to him? He was a bit off.” And, for the most part, Billy Schmidt from the old neighborhood and the old grammar school—well—his life and times beyond that brief window of youth would remain in perpetuity, with countless others, a blank entry in a “Whatever Became of?" This sort of anonymity had its place, too. It maintained a certain illusion of all that was that could not in the least be sullied by what is. It, in many ways, froze time and even turned back the clock in the best possible way.

Fast forward to the present and ever advancing technologically has undeniably let the cat out of the bag. We have little choice now but to acknowledge that the Revenge of the Formerly Young Person is at hand. As formerly young person myself, I must therefore welcome what this new technology has wrought, and accept the good, the bad, and the ugly of knowing what so many formerly young persons—just like me—have been up to over the last thirty or more years. And while this surfeit of information on people from my past is occasionally depressing, sometimes uplifting, but more often than not interesting, the formerly young person nonetheless lives. He is now eternal. She is now eternal. And this is worth celebrating…isn't it?

Rudy and Me

It’s been about a year and a half now since I at long last jettisoned everything and anything remotely attached to what, once upon a time, was called a “phone company.” I took possession of a new “phone” number—via the local cable—and bid adieu to over-priced bills for Verizon local service and ridiculously high long-distance tabs from AT&T. For a couple of years at the tail-end of my Jurassic Park days, I actually followed John Stamos’s lead and dialed 10-10-987 to save me a few cents on long-distance calls.

I have, not only saved a lot of money now, but gotten to know a man named Rudolph. I won’t reveal his last name, but this poor fellow has probably gotten as many calls as I have since I took receipt of my new number. What I definitely know about Rudolph is that he owes a fair share of money to a fair share of entities. I empathize with him on this count. I truly feel for Rudolph, who, I surmise, was the former owner of my number or one very close to it.

On a couple of occasions, I’ve picked up the phone and informed collection agents hunting down Rudolph that I was not, in fact, Rudolph. Further, I told them I didn't know Rudolph in any way, shape, or form, and therefore couldn't supply them with any leads as to where to find him. They told me in return that, by law, they must remove my number from their call lists in perpetuity, and wouldn’t be bothering me ever again.

I got the feeling, however, that these collection agents working for companies with names like American Credit, Credit Central, and Credit House International didn’t quite believe I wasn’t Rudolph or, at the very least, Rudolph's next of kin. Some of them no doubt thought old Rudy was sitting across the room from me on my futon as I lied to them, or perhaps in the adjoining kitchen making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But, really, I don’t personally know this Rudolph guy. We have become intertwined in some numerological twist of fate. Perhaps it's God's plan...anything's possible.

A New Year...a New Focus?

In the fledgling days of the New Year, 1973, Sister Therese went up and down the rows of students in her fifth-grade religion class, asking each of us to name our favorite Christmas present. I remember telling her, “walkie-talkies,” only because she repeated what I had said, slowly and syllabically, as if walkie-talkies were, maybe, instruments of the devil or, more likely, something completely unfamiliar to her.

At the top of my Christmas list, 1972, were walkie-talkies, and when old St. Nick didn’t deliver the goods, I looked to a New Year’s Eve miracle as my last best hope. The ten-year-old me prayed that the walkie-talkies gift idea had been passed on to my godmother, who turned up on New Year’s Eve every year—an annual tradition—and actually bought me real presents. She was both a generous and kindly woman, and her husband was an incredibly nice man, too—born in Germany with a thick German accent. He couldn’t be my godfather because he wasn’t Catholic, which I thought was silly then as a little boy and even sillier now. He should have been my godfather. Two years later, though, he was gone. A freak accident, and an even more freakish blood clot, took his life at the age of forty-two. Both a good man and a New Year’s Eve tradition ended without fair warning.

Since that time—almost four decades ago—I’ve found New Year’s Eve more depressing than not. As a kid, it underscored that Christmas was over and, worse than that, Christmas vacation was nearing an end, too. There was nothing more disheartening than returning to school after a Christmas vacation. What was there to look forward to anyway? I know what—a long stretch of school days in the bitterly cold depths of wintertime.

So, another year is gone and I am a year closer to the end than the beginning. This is, in fact, the essence of the New Year. But then again, it is also—as this far-sighted manager I once knew at a place I once worked said—“a New Year, a New Focus.” Perhaps he was on to something there! Happy New Year!

Christmas Eve in My Home Town

Only seconds ago, I heard "the first lady of song" Kate Smith belting out Christmas Eve in My Home Town on one of my cable's Music Choice stations. While my personal "Christmas Eve in My Home Town" of the Bronx memories weren't nearly as bucolic or as syrupy special, they faithfully adhered to a venerable tradition—one that merits a mention and maybe even a song of its own someday.

For me, Christmas Eve has forever been rooted in the Italian’s “Feast of the Seven Fishes” dinner—assorted fish dishes served alongside spaghetti with garlic and olive oil (aglio e olio)—although I don’t think we've ever quite made it to the seven-fish mark. When my paternal grandmother was the culinary impresario of this evening, the fish were, without exception, baccalà (salted cod fish), calamari (squid), eels, and shrimp. She came from a mountain town called Castelmezzano in Southern Italy, where fish of any kind were rare birds indeed. Because it was salted to death, baccalà was the only fish product this impoverished sliver of geography—sans electricity and refrigeration—knew, with the one exception being fresh-water minnows of some kind that ran in the mountain streams after heavy rains and melting winter snows.

Ironically, my grandmother didn’t much like fish. Outside of Christmas Eve dinner, the only fish I ever remember her cooking were fried scallops, and not very often at that. Because they maintained somewhat more appeal to me than did eels and squid, I had long wished these rarely prepared scallops of hers would be added to the holiday menu. But, in the big picture, the specific fishes really didn’t matter. The one-night-a-year tradition trumped all else—even taste. My grandmother's spaghetti alone was always ace and enough for me. So what if the eels and squid were a far cry from roast beef at the Ritz.

I suppose what has long been unique about these Christmas Eve feeds of ours is that they consisted of fishy things few among us would—or even could for that matter—order in a restaurant. My fishmonger friend, and a longtime neighbor of mine, stocks and sells eels only at this time of year. Why is that? Foodies, I guess, just aren’t clamoring for eel appetizers, but then that’s okay. I have sampled eels through the years and they've typically been quasi-edible, creamy, and surprisingly bland. However, they've always been extremely fishy to touch. Still, I’ve watched relations of mine attack the scant meat on these slithering and bony creatures of the sea like they would spareribs.

Flash forward to the new millennium and fish cakes, fillet of sole, and—at long last—scallops, too, have been added to our Christmas Eve tradition. Without question, these are more palatable and benign fish dishes with appeal to a wider audience. Somehow, though, the Christmas Eves of yesteryear—with my grandmother doing the cooking—tasted a whole lot better to me.

A Christmas in New York Story

As I exited the subway at 66th Street and Lincoln Center on this very cold morning, classy Christmas decor surrounded me. Strolling south and then east to Columbus Circle and the southern entrance to Central Park, I laid eyes on more than a few humongous Christmas trees in corporate giants’ lobbies—holiday eye candy for sure.

When I reached my destination, I noticed the park’s entrance was glutted with peddlers of interesting things. There were shoppers aplenty in this tented holiday village, including many tourists. They seem enamored most of all with snapping pictures across busy and crowded sidewalks, and taking a very long time in getting it right. I was meeting someone at this location and had much too much time to kill. In the meantime, I didn’t browse these temporary, make-shift shops because that would have violated two critical life rules of mine: I don’t browse when I don’t intend to buy anything, and I don’t wade through crowds under any circumstances, and especially when I don’t intend on buying anything.

I couldn’t help but notice, too, that intermingled in all of this urban festiveness was a decidedly less appealing side of Christmas in New York. Perhaps I’m painting with a broad brush here, but tourist-dependent “special rides” of any kind seem to be operated by a smarmy lot. Observing unctuous pitchmen trying to ensnare tourists to ride in their hansom cabs, bicycle carts, and tour buses was painful. Their boorishness stood in sharp contrast with the local wealthy sophisticates just passing through with their Starbucks coffees, or whatever it is that outfit calls its five-dollar cups of headache-inducing sludge.

The piece-de-résistance of this Christmas in New York Story is the strange place I ended up in. When I finally met the individual whom I was patiently waiting for, he informed me that he needed to get something to eat in order to take a high blood pressure medication. The irony was not lost on him that we were headed to McDonald’s to fulfill this task. We patronized a McCafé actually. I hadn’t been to a McDonald’s of any name in quite a while, and for a very good reason. I have long been leery of this international hamburger conglomerate, which seems incapable of serving its staple hamburgers with nothing on them. It always seemed to me that, logically, preparing plain hamburgers would be the quintessential piece of cake in the burger business...but not at McDonald’s.

Anyway, I ordered a six-piece Chicken McNugget, which was the last main course I recall sampling at a McDonald’s, with French fries and a drink—and the bill totaled $8.35! I was remiss, I guess, in not searching hard enough for a special deal. But, for starters, I found reading the menu board difficult because it was both crammed with stuff and required 20/10 vision to decipher. I didn’t have 20/10 vision in my youth, and certainly don’t have it now. In the final analysis, I think my Chicken McNuggets cost me more than .60 a piece. This is my Christmas in New York Story, 2011.

A Christmas Rowe-Manse

Twenty years ago on the afternoon of December 24th, I plunked a blank tape into my radio-cassette-turntable combo player, which, by the way, I still have and occasionally use. Employing the finest technology of the time, I arbitrarily taped a radio program on WPAT “Easy 93,” and repeated this act several more times during the ensuing thirty-six hours. Beginning on Christmas Eve at noontime and lasting throughout the entire Christmas day, this AM and FM easy-listening radio station in the New York City metropolitan area furnished listeners with—yes—thirty-six of hours of commercial-free Christmas music every year. My intentions were to record this music for posterity. I reasoned that it would be nice to have tapes of this diverse Christmas music selection to play during times other than Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I sensed, too, that WPAT, its easy-listening format, and annual Christmas presentation just might not be around forever. And, as it turned out, I was right.

The station dubbed this longtime holiday tradition of theirs “The Spirit of Christmas,” and featured mostly instrumental versions of familiar seasonal favorites, and some completely unfamiliar. During these yearly music marathons, a deejay’s voice would periodically intone between tracks, “Our gift to you…thirty-six hours of your favorite holiday sounds on WPAT…Easy 93.” And mere words cannot do justice to the bona fide easiness of Easy 93. The only other occasional, and very brief, interruptions to this Christmas music extravaganza involved the station thanking its very generous sponsors—those who made “The Spirit of Christmas” possible.

Well, with the holiday season officially underway, I thought it high time for me to dust off these twenty-year-old cassette tapes of mine and start listening to them. Yes, I still play tapes but, sadly, a couple of my WPAT “Spirit of Christmas” recordings have self-destructed with the passage of time. Still, when I heard the dulcet tones of a WPAT announcer thanking, among others, Mr. Carmen Maggio of the “Romance Emporium” in Clifton, New Jersey for making the 1991 edition of “The Spirit of Christmas” possible—something I had heard hundreds of times while listening to these tapes—I paused and typed in the man's name in a Google search whim. Foremost, I wondered if the “Romance Emporium” was still in business. I had for a very long time assumed it was an independent  Victoria's Secret kind of place, and was sort of surprised it took me so many years to wonder enough about this business to check it out.

Sadly, the “Romance Emporium” is no more. Foremost, my search unearthed Mr. Maggio’s 2010 obituary and, it seems, I had gotten it wrong. It wasn’t the “Romance Emporium” after all, but the “Rowe-Manse Emporium,” a neat play on words. It also wasn't a Victoria's Secret-like outfit, but a specialty department store. The place fell by the wayside in the early aughts, a casualty of both big-box discount retailers, the Internet, and ever-changing tastes, I suppose. Rowe-Manse Emporium-type stores are pretty hard to come by nowadays, and Christmas shopping is indisputably less interesting and less exciting without them around. Once upon a time these little big retailers exhibited both heart and incredible uniqueness, something that's in short supply in the aisles of Wal-Mart and Target.

The Very Powerful Tool Meets the Squat Thrust

Some guy I know pretty well recently remarked how the “mind is a very powerful tool.” Now, call me cynical if you must, but I didn’t consider this particular proclamation anything close to profound. It was not one of those moments when I took a step back and exclaimed, “Yeah…yeah…man, that’s powerful.” Nevertheless, as I was talking the streets of the Bronx today, this very powerful tool of mine saw something that reminded him of something else…and the floodgates opened.

It all happened so innocently. After purchasing powdered iced-tea mix and Drain-o at a Rite Aid drug store—and receiving a three-foot cashier's receipt along the way—I stepped out into the mean streets and immediately spotted a man working on his car. Something was clearly amiss, so he decided to have a look-see underneath the vehicle. It was what he did next, in bringing his entire body down to the asphalt grounds, that greased the skids of that very powerful tool of a mine. Somehow his movements resurrected the squat thrust in my brain—a high school gym exercise I performed faithfully from 1976 through 1980. One, by the way, I have never executed since. In fact, I have never even heard the phrase "squat thrust" mentioned. Funny, but in the high school years, I always thought the exercise’s moniker a bit odd, and maybe even slightly suggestive of things beyond physical fitness, but then that was then and this is now.

Anyway, as I continued on my journey away from Rite Aid and their mostly high prices and uber-long receipts, the squat-thrust exercise, courtesy of that very powerful tool, was indelibly stamped on my brain. I heard now a certain gym teacher’s voice in my head counting out that infernal exercise: one, two, three, four...one, two, three, four...one, two, three, four. Everything it seemed in high school physical education was four-count. But it was that final four-count of what were usually ten repetitions of an exercise, including the squat thrust, which was particularly special and memorable to me. It went something like this: one, two, three, four...one, two, three, four...one, two, three, four...until the culmination—that number ten—one, two, three, FOOUUURRR! Galootish and ear piercing, the mettle of a gym teacher. That mind…that very powerful tool…can it ever take us places.

The Number 1 Looks Just Like You

When I checked the MTA website first thing yesterday morning, I was positively ecstatic. The Number 1 train was running through my neck of the woods without interruption. For the last year or so, it seems weekend service of this venerable subway line has been screwed over big time due to seemingly endless track work and station repairs. And so, Saturday began on a high note.

But when I requested a six-dollar addition to my MetroCard, the clerk at my local subway station couldn’t read it. He scanned it, scanned it again, and nothing. He even tried to bring it back to life with a spritz of some fluid and a Handi Wipe, but nothing. No problem, I’ll take a new card, I said. This very agreeable and helpful transit employee then informed me of the available options vis-à-vis my unreadable MetroCard. I told him I didn’t think there was much monetary value left on it anyway, so it didn’t really matter to me. In other words, I had no intention of taking the card to the transit authority’s version of a higher authority—wherever and whatever that was. I briefly considered trashing this old and unreadable card on the spot, but for some reason decided against it and put it back in my pocket.

After paying my fare with a new and workable six-dollar card, I walked to the far end of this Northwest Bronx subway station. A southbound train heading into Manhattan pulled in a few minutes later. I entered the first car that, when push comes to shove, is frequently the least crowded one for a trip's duration. This very special car is often spared the urban onslaught, even when trains are packed like the proverbial sardines in a can.

No such luck yesterday morning. The lead car, too, filled up rather quickly, and so there were a lot of my fellow New Yorkers and tourists, too, hovering over and sitting very close to me for much of the ride. A man with not the best hygiene in the world sat right beside me. He exuded not quite the forlorn homeless man smell, which subway riders are accustomed to, but a level or two below that on the odor-ometer. In other words, I wasn’t literally gagging, and his ill aroma didn’t make me nauseous. But I’d say it was one of those fine-line moments. That is, I didn't dare dwell too much on the olfactory nerves and what they were absorbing, because nauseousness wasn't out of the question.

Sitting directly across from me from the start of my journey was a businesswoman. She initially plopped down and placed her laptop bag on the seat beside her. This was okay at the get-go, when the subway car was mostly empty, but when it filled up to standing room only, she made no effort to place her laptop bag under the seat and let somebody sit down next to her. She actually pulled out a book during the subway ride and started reading. The title had something to do with making a small fortune—and rather effortlessly at that. No doubt, I surmised, at the expense of those standing above and around her who had been denied a seat. Oh, yeah, and then there was this father and young son tag-team combo. The subway milieu as a classroom setting for parent teaching child about the wonders of urban life in is pretty commonplace. Occasionally, they are precious moments; often they are embarrassing and intrusive. If we were living in the 1970s, I would describe this particular father and son's interplay as “Annoying City!” If the Herman Cain lookalike's facial expressions were any indicator, he seemed to be on my wavelength. But then he might have been more annoyed by the dead ringer for Madonna, who was constantly blowing her runny nose from 168th Street to Times Square—six miles or so—and was sitting nearer to him than me.

To end on an upbeat note: the MetroCard I very nearly tossed away…well, I tried it one more time on my trip home…and it not only scanned, but had a fare left on it and then some. There must be some New Age meaning to all of this…but what pray tell?

Diner Elegy

It’s been three weeks now since the sun, which held sway over my neighborhood solar system for a very long time, quietly passed from the scene. As I walked the surrounding streets this morning, where a small diner—the most special of greasy spoons—endured for some thirty-five years, I conceived this analogy. You see, every time I was in the area—alone or with family members or friends—the diner, even when not eating there, was the epicenter. It was a comforting constant in a sea of change.

For twenty years, I patronized this place. In fact, it had a different name for part of the time, and a very brief span when somebody else took over—the man responsible for the name change. But imagine, if you will, a diner in New York City run—more or less—by the same handful of people for decades. The owner of the place, who shouted a greeting when you entered, cooked your food, and then said good-bye was there for almost every single minute the place was open, which was seven days a week. The diner closed only on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.

Others who worked there were equally familiar and longstanding employees, including a waiter who would see you coming from across the street and have a piping hot cup of coffee on the table before you even walked in the door. And the bottomless cup of coffee was truly bottomless here from beginning to end, even when business was down. And when business was especially brisk, you never felt rushed. You could sit there all day, if that is what you desired, because that’s how regular customers were treated.

The reasons my all-time favorite diner, which will never again be replicated, shut down are multifold. It’s the kind of place that existed in New York City in the past, but cannot anymore. So much of what made New York great—what made it a wholly unique metropolis—just can’t happen in this day and age. The city now is both insanely expensive and intensely bureaucratic. It caters—above all else— to wealthy landlords and to wealth itself.

But, still, it’s the memories that endure of this extraordinary diner milieu, which are over-powering in so many ways I cannot chronicle here. Good food, good times, and all of those characters on both sides of the counter, including me. Along the way, a healthy share of bad things happened to one and all. But at least we had the diner—and the good people who ran it—as a life comfort station of sorts, which is irreplaceable.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

King for a Day

The richest 1% of Americans own 40% of the nation’s wealth; the least well-off 80%, a mere 7%. This disparity in income is the widest since the eve of the Great Depression. So, what exactly is wrong with this picture? Well, a local gourmet market, which practically everybody raves about in the neighborhood—mostly folks among the unwashed 80%, by the way—was charging $7 for a basket of strawberries today. And I could cite a few more examples…but I won’t.

I’d rather bask in the glow—of my one brief shining moment—when I was among that illustrious 1%. A couple of weeks ago, I deposited a $150 check in a local branch of a really, really big bank. To make a long story short, I needed to check my bank balance. I had to see if that aforementioned $150 check had cleared, and whether some checks I had written had been cashed. I feared there might very well be a close call or two between deposits made and checks paid out, and very possibly a humiliating $32 overdraft charge—which I believe is the current fee—for me coming up an inch short and not beating the clearance clock.

Anyway, when the statement of my last five transactions appeared on the ATM machine screen before me, my $150 deposit was listed as $15,000,000—that’s, if you're keeping score, five more zeroes. My available balance also had five more zeroes attached to it. I became jelly-legged while poring over this astonishing visual. And, no, I didn’t go into the bank proper and withdraw a couple of million dollars—and not because it was closed for the day. In retrospect, I should have at least printed out a copy of my statement.

I felt, for some strange reason, guilty—like I had done something wrong—as I scurried out of the bank’s ATM alcove a very rich man. I returned the next morning to see if I had been relegated to pauper. I had indeed. Okay, so I didn’t have to go into the bank and inform them the $15,000,0000 was all a mistake…but not my mistake. I always wondered whether the bank would have given me a reward for my honesty. You know…like no overdraft fees for a year.

Food for Thought...Thought for Food

When folks from the old neighborhood gather together—in the cozy confines of virtual reality—to share their memories of all that transpired once upon a time, a heaping helping of food for thought is quite often the by-product. In fact, I’ve learned that more than a few former neighbors of mine, who worked in local eateries a long time ago, did some rather unsanitary, and occasionally downright disgusting things. For starters, they dropped food on floors, put it back on plates, and served it to customers.

That teenagers working in not especially well paying and largely unpleasant work environments will do such things is hardly surprising. My family rarely dined out while I was a boy. Foremost, there wasn’t sufficient surplus disposable income to make a habit of it—with five mouths to feed—and, too, it was considered positively sacrilege to waste money by paying through the nose for meals, when there were competent cooks at-the-ready on the home front. With respect to restaurants and take-out joints, from Chinese to fast-food burgers to pizza places, it was drummed into us all: “You don’t know what goes on behind the scenes and in their kitchens!” I must admit this homespun wisdom had a certain bite to it—food for thought then as well as now.

My one beef with this self-evident truism was that home kitchens, and the cooks therein, sometimes were as a bad, or even worse, in the Sanitary Department than even the nastiest restaurant transgressions reported on by this cross-section of primary sources—on the memory boards—and, too, from my first-hand experiences.

Okay, so my favorite pizza guy for so many years cleaned out his oven with the very same mop he used on the floors of his shop. In his defense, he claimed the extreme heat of the oven destroyed any and all germs and bacteria. I had heard about this mopping thing while I was a regular patron of the place. I just chose to accept my pizza guy's science. We had roaches in our Bronx apartment kitchen back in the 1960s and 1970s—a lot of them as a matter of fact. They were ubiquitous in the old neighborhood. Mice even found their way through a gas pipe into our kitchen stove—where my mother stored cereals and snacks—on one occasion. We never went hungry, though, and the kitchen stayed open. No city bureaucrat showed up to close it down.

It’s really all relative, I suppose. Fifteen or so years ago, my brother and I were in our all-time favorite diner for breakfast. And when he poured his maple syrup, from the small pitcher brought to him, onto three slices of French toast, several dead roaches peacefully floated atop them. They had evidently gone for an evening swim in the sugary Shangri-La, we surmised, and, alas, drowned in the process. It was a shocker for sure—we were briefly stunned and in a state of suspended animation—but since the place meant so much to us, it didn’t much matter in the bigger picture. We returned for another day—for a second act—and the syrupy-special roaches became part and parcel of a richer lore.

The moral of this story—if there is one—is that we make all kinds of allowances in this thing called life. I’ve always found it interesting that so many people in the kitchens of home sweet home pass judgment on eateries for both their real and, sometimes imagined, lack of cleanliness, but choose never to look in their own mirrors and their own pantries. All I can say is that with the NYC Health Department unleashed as it is today—inspecting with abandon and dispensing A, B, and C grades to food businesses one and all—I can’t help but wonder how many of my favorite cooks’ kitchens in homes and apartments, and countless others throughout the five boroughs of New York, would pass muster. I suspect many of them would be shut down for being downright unsanitary and outright health hazards.

The Foster Child

Almost thirty years ago, which is somewhat alarming to entertain, I experienced one brief shining moment of pure, unadulterated bliss. You see, my team, the New York Mets, had been down and out for several years, a laughingstock in Major League Baseball, and, worst of all, playing second banana to George Steinbrenner’s Yankees—the quintessential Wall Street sports organization then as well as now. The parsimonious and increasingly incompetent Mets’ upper-management of the mid- and late-1970s had, in essence, killed the goose that laid the golden egg. So, when the old ownership at long last unloaded the team to individuals who intended on restoring the Mets to their former pluck, we fans heaved a sigh of relief and dreamed of better days ahead.

Show us, don’t tell us, was all that we asked of the new ownership. And in the winter of 1982, they did just that by trading for, and then signing to an incredibly lucrative long-term contract for its day, a slugger named George Foster—the last man in to have hit fifty or more home runs in either the American or National League.

When Foster accomplished this feat in 1977, it was a bona fide achievement. All one had to do was look at the guy. He was razor-thin but incredibly muscular with Popeye forearms. Foster’s Herculean deed was realized without performance-enhancing drugs and that ubiquitous, modern-day fat head so familiar on the mega-millionaire celebrities who play today’s game. It was a time when such grand successes weren’t even remotely suspect and records actually meant something.

For Met fans, the Foster trade and his subsequent signing to a long-term deal were big—really big. It was a moment of true ecstasy for me. But, alas, as is the case with moments of ecstasy in general, they are always just that—moments. In other words, they don’t last forever. Some, in fact, last for at least a measurable span of time, but most go up in smoke before you ever know what hit you—no pun intended. In the case of George Foster, the ecstasy moment was short-lived to say the least. It lasted until he took the field in a Mets’ uniform—or, to be fair, not very long after that. After a wretched 1982 season, and the sense that this fellow had not only seen better days as an athlete, but didn’t much care, the ecstasy moment seemed like a bad dream.

But what I wouldn’t give to feel the way I felt on that day some three decades ago—at the precise moment when I learned my beloved Mets had signed an All-Star slugger for a whopping sum of money. Sure, he would fast disappoint us all. Ecstasy, nevertheless, can be found in the strangest places. So, enjoy it wherever you find it...and while you can...because nothing lasts forever…nothing.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Hairy Junk Mail

An increasingly rare piece of junk mail arrived in my mailbox today—the old-fashioned kind delivered by a flesh and blood human being that can be handled, and eventually recycled and picked up by another flesh and blood human being on recycling day. It was a mass mailing from a hair replacement center—one that I’m familiar with, by the way, only because I’ve passed by it many times in my travels. I also knew a client of the place.

While I concede to qualifying as bald bait—their target audience—I did not request information on this business’s services. So, whether I landed on the mailing list as somebody’s not particularly funny joke, or some strange commercial coincidence, I couldn’t help but hark back to that acquaintance of mine who patronized this very hairpiece establishment. It seems that—when he put his John Hancock on the dotted line—he essentially took out a long-term mortgage on his scalp.

Fast balding on top at a relatively young age, this fellow looked perfectly fine when he went he went for broke on that fateful day. I recall the moment that, in a matter of a few hours, he went from being predominantly bald to having a luxurious head of hair. It was a peculiar metamorphosis to say the least. He promptly informed all who would listen of the satin pillows he now had to rest his weary head on—something about the unwanted effects of static—and the special shampoo lotions he had to use, which not surprisingly cost a pretty penny. This was all adding up to real money and real fast, I thought. Then, of course, there were the recurring readjustments—the $100 plus haircuts he had to endure every month. And, on top of all that, what remained of his real hair was still falling out. So, more and more of the horsehair—or whatever the hair replacement center employed—had to be added to the new weave.

Maybe it’s just me, but it all seemed like an awful lot to go through—even beyond the expense—to, at the end of the day, look like a guy wearing a hairpiece. This particular Manhattan outfit churns out a certain kind of rug, which I’ve seen on many others. Once upon a time a pizza place owner not too far away had a balding top, and he made a similar pact with the hair devil. The first thing a friend of mine, who hadn’t seen him in a while, said was: “When did the pizza guy get the rug?”

A favorite teacher of mine in high school—who simultaneously taught a senior year religion course and was dramatically thinning on top—once said of his hair: “I can’t cling to it.” I know there was some broader and connecting life point vis-à-vis the course’s subject matter, which I’ve long since forgotten after thirty years, but I’ve never lost sight of the big picture. No satin pillows, strange elixirs for the head, and regular haircuts that cost more than the gas and electric bill combined—and in perpetuity to boot—for me. I’d just assume not go broke in an effort to look like a pizza guy with bad hair. And, while I'm rooting for the post office to survive: Please, Mr. Hair Man, remove me from your mailing list.

"You Folks Farmers?"

A quarter of a century or so ago, I attended a breakfast buffet. It was in a farm building of some kind somewhere on the outskirts of Bangor, Pennsylvania. Accompanying me on this culinary adventure were my maternal grandmother, her long-time neighbor, and my two brothers. While the Bangor denizens were accustomed to these local get-togethers on farms and in churches and volunteer firehouses, the Bronx boys were not.

Such neighborly events in our neck of the woods were very rare. When they did occur, they bore little resemblance to the breakfasts and potluck suppers in the countryside. In fact, the one and only all-you-can-eat breakfast that I attended in my lifetime living in the big city served powdered eggs, which would be absolutely sacrilege in pastoral venues.

If memory serves, one also got a whole lot more bang for the buck out in the country, which is not really surprising. So what if I was repulsed by scrapple—a regional favorite and Spam-like product that consists of a mushy concoction of pork scraps—there was so much more to choose from, everything from pancakes to cornbread to home fries. We not only enjoyed the food but the hospitality, too, which was considerably more unfettered and more abundant in supply than what we were accustomed to on the mean streets of the Bronx.

As I sat down at a long lunch table with my breakfast plate brimming with bacon, eggs, sausage, and toast, a wizened old gentleman nearby turned to me and asked in his distinctive twang, “You folks farmers?” I informed him we weren’t and he smiled, returning to the business at hand—chomping down his hearty breakfast. This was the first and last time in my life that I was mistaken for a farmer. Just last week, though, somebody in a local diner thought I was a grease monkey from the nearby garage. I told him he must have me confused with someone else. He didn’t seem to believe me.

An "Out of Sight" Blog

A current writing project of mine finds me revisiting my personal favorite decade: the 1970s. While researching my subject matter, I decided to reacquaint myself with the lingo of the time, considering that more than three decades have passed, and I am no longer a teenager uttering, “Be there or be square” and “Take a chill pill.” Well, actually, I don’t think I ever spoke either of those two phrases. I was way too square for that. However, I know for a fact that I branded some people “chumps,” who were definitely worthy of the label, and I may possibly have even said “later,” as I parted with friends a time or two, which is embarrassing to admit.

I found a 1970s lingo listing—you can unearth virtually everything on the Internet—and noticed that “Who cut the cheese?” made the cut, if you will. This intriguing query resurrected a memory of a grammar school religion class taught by a hipster priest—and a very likeable fellow from my parish, I should add. He interrupted a lecture of his with that very question: “Who cut the cheese?” He just knew how to endear himself to seventh graders living amidst the grooviest snapshot in time ever recorded in the annals of history. However, I didn’t appreciate his follow-up query: “Nick, are you gagging?” As I recall, I wasn’t the guilty party. And as we know: Whoever smelt it dealt it.

Most of the 1970s slang on the list I remembered, even if I didn’t employ the majority of the cool jargon. “Far out” was John Denver’s thing. And I didn’t call cops “pigs” because I didn’t have a bone to pick with them and, too, Kojak was my favorite TV show. Even the “fuzz” was too pejorative for me. I may have said “fooey,” instead of “nonsense” at some point, and I’m certain I used the word “grody” to describe a variety of “disgusting” things in those days of yore. “Doofus,” well, I still like that word, and it is equally apropos in the twenty-first century, and I don’t plan on retiring it.

Yes, I recollect peers of mine being called “spaz” when they lacked athletic grace. And that’s really urban slang at its best, sounding like what it’s describing. I know some people said “you know” after many sentences in the 1970s when it was the hip thing to do. Now, some people say “you know” after many sentences when it’s not the hip thing to do. Many of the phrases that became the “rad” in the 1970s are hippie-inspired, and the hippies deserve their due for adding immeasurably to the English language. Wearing cool “threads” with no “bread” in their pockets had to be a real “bummer.” Do you catch my drift?

New York Really Is the City That Never Sleeps

This past Labor Day weekend—on an early Sunday morning—I noticed a meter maid walking around the neighborhood. Considering it was the day of the week that many New Yorkers call on their preferred houses of worship—and, too, that it was the "official end of summer" holiday—I thought it a very unusual time for a city employee to be roaming streets, checking up on parked cars’ registrations, and, of course, writing tickets. Perhaps the city fathers and mothers have the little guy and gal’s best interests at heart with this sort of thorough patrolling—after all, drivers should keep their automobiles’ registrations and car inspections up to date.

Forgive me, though, for being slightly cynical here. As part of my morning Internet ritual, I visit the website "EveryBlock" and search my zip code for local news items, which include the latest restaurant inspections in the area. It’s clear the city has both hired many more health inspectors and is making many more inspections of eateries, which is understandable considering rats and water bugs run amok on some of the richest real estate on the planet. However, some restaurants are being inspected every two to three months and racking up violation points that I presume are attached to considerable fines. While it’s a good thing that restaurants are being held to higher standards, forgive me—again—for being slightly cynical here.

Recently, I saw a man double park his car and get out to help a very elderly woman with her groceries as she exited a supermarket. He left his motor running and was only several yards away from his vehicle when a meter maid pounced and ticketed him. I believe this infraction comes attached to a $115 penalty nowadays. I know double-parking in overly congested metropolitan areas is a no-no, but once more: Forgive me for being slightly cynical here.

Is it possible the mayor and his dedicated bureaucratic army are foremost interested in adding money to the city’s coffers, even if it means fleecing the little people for more and more and more when they can least afford it? Perish the thought. What was I thinking? I know, of course, that he and his are looking out for me in the City That Doesn’t Sleep—just ask the meter maids and health inspectors.

A Parable: the Minister, Tree Branch, and Me

I share something in common with a certain man of the cloth. It seems we both reside in street-level bachelor pads in private homes on the same block. And that is the long and short of our common ground, I suspect. Everything else I know about this man is limited to our encounters—for lack of a better description—which have been numerous the past couple of years. When I see him in the early morning hours—presumably before he goes to work, if that is the right word—he’s always walking a very small dog, puffing on a cigarette, and sporting a Roman collar.

I have always assumed he is an Episcopal minister. Having experienced a Catholic upbringing and education, I just never knew a priest who lived in a basement apartment, which doesn’t mean such living arrangements are unprecedented. The priests in my past always called hearth and home a parish, or resided somewhere on the school grounds where they taught. But then again, a friend of mine worked with a Catholic priest in a Barnes & Noble store. The guy needed the money and had to both locate, and pay for out of his own pocket, his accommodations. These are hard times for all.

Anyway, today—post-Hurricane Irene day one—I was outside and picking up scattered debris, including a large tree branch that I dragged to the curbside. With my back unintentionally turned away from this approaching holy man, I heard him—quite uncharacteristically—say something. I swiveled around and momentarily considered asking, “You talkin’ to me?” As per the norm, however, he was staring straight ahead, cigarette in one hand, and dog leash in the other, fulfilling his morning ritual. I surmised he was speaking to his little canine friend, because I never saw a Bluetooth, or any comparable technological device, in his ear. This man is old school and, for that matter, pretty old.

But then I spied that the tree branch I had moved was jutting out a foot or so onto the sidewalk proper. Had I noticed this before, I would never have placed it in such a precarious position, and I immediately moved it out of harm’s way. I proceeded to do something of a double take at that point, realizing that this neighbor of mine, who always does his best not to make eye contact with anyone—and, by osmosis, speak to anybody—had indeed addressed me. In fact, as soon as I laid eyes on the branch partially on the sidewalk, my brain—without any prompting on my part—replayed the previous moment. Yes, this mystery servant of the Lord, whose holy threads no doubt reek of nicotine, had chided me. Considering that I was cleaning up a big mess, the scolding was both unnecessary and unappreciated.

Harking back to my boyhood, I was always turned off by the unpleasantness and sometimes-outright nastiness of a fair share of religious sorts. The more innocent and less cynical child quite often cuts to the chase. How could some of these men and women who purport to do God’s bidding and adhere to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth be so disagreeable? I was never impressed with autocratic “good businessmen” known for running parishes with an iron fist and Wal-Mart bottom line efficiency. It seemed so incongruous to me then, just as it does to me now. I was literally both frightened and horrified by the fact that a Sister Lorraine character actually passed nun muster and was permitted to teach children. She sported both a habit and a burgeoning mustache some four decades ago when she threw my friend Johnny down to the rock-hard pavement at the altar’s edge in church. It was during First Holy Communion practice, and he received this body slam courtesy of a chewed up hot lunch straw in his shirt pocket. There’s something wrong with this picture.

Happily, Sister Lorraine was gone the following year—from my school at least. Where she ended up after that, I don’t know. Hopefully, she joined the Teamsters, or maybe was discovered by a talent scout for the WWF. While I am the antithesis of a cheerleader on the God Squad, if you will, I still prefer religious folk to be godly—hopeless romantic that I remain—even in adulthood.

River, Take Me Away in Your Sunshine

According to a newspaper story I just read, several candidates aspiring for the highest office in the land want to gut—if not entirely disembowel—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They claim the agency’s myriad strictures are—in the big picture—job killers. One would-be president more or less believes businesses can regulate themselves vis-à-vis pollutants—just as big banks and investment houses, I suppose, are looking out for, first and foremost, you and me.

When my father was a boy in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, the family and some friends would regularly hop on the Number 1 train during summertime for a short ride up to Inwood Hill Park. Upon their arrival, they would hike through the area’s primordial woodlands—on Manhattan Island still—to an off-the-beaten trail leading to a tiny snatch of sandy beach at the scenic confluence of the Harlem River Ship Canal and the Hudson River. The older generation of Italian men always brought their homemade wines along with them and placed the bottles in an icy cold freshwater spring, which trickled down through the hills. The Henry Hudson Bridge, opened in 1936, loomed like a colossus directly above this Shangri-La.

Provided one didn’t venture out too far, the waters off this obscure snippet of shoreline were shallow enough. My father vividly remembered these beach visits and—most of all—wading through waters awash in, among other things, human excrement, which frequently had to be pushed aside while frolicking in the drink. Granted, this couldn’t have been the healthiest of recreational activities, but it was the late 1930s and early 1940s, when raw sewerage was poured into the local waters.

Flash forward thirty years and I recall being at water’s edge in New York Harbor. The wafting breeze was a curious mix of sea salt and sewer, and flotsam in the Hudson was the rule. The cleanliness of the river in those days—in these parts—was a standard joke punch line. But a funny thing happened over the last three decades. The river’s gotten cleaner—dramatically so. There’s even talk of a public beach on Manhattan’s West Side. And not very far to the north of the city, Hudson River beaches are open for business.

The EPA was the brainchild of the Nixon Administration, circa 1970. And as for swimming in poop in the future, I think would be wise to Just Say No. We’ve been there and done that—and we’re not going back.