You are currently viewing the stories for “January 2008.”
I spent a good nine months of my life dedicated to Paul Newman. I wasn’t training to eat eggs, or living a strict Newman’s Own diet. I was developing and writing a screenplay that had roles for not only Paul, but his wife, Joanne Woodward, and long-time cohort, Robert Redford. It was a far-fetched idea with high stakes, but few [...]
He kneels on the gray-black slate in front of the Jefferson Market, rendering blue eyes in pastels on the sidewalk, the magazine cover of Paul Newman under his left knee--only the eyes done after several hours. I had passed by at 10. He was just starting, no eyes yet, only the box of pastels dumped onto the sidewalk, a few [...]
We always arrived at least a half hour early to the hot concrete schoolyard with its two sad hoops. There were loads of us, boys and girls from six to the teens, waiting for PS 154 vacation playground to open and its counselors to throw out the softballs and bats, the volleyballs and pink spaldeens for the games that would [...]
The visible landscape of Brooklyn Heights is much the same as it was in my childhood, which is a large part of why I moved back to the neighborhood after almost twenty years. Every so often, someone stops me on Clark Street to ask directions to the subway station. It always takes me a second or two to understand that, [...]
I return from my break to hear Vince screaming in Maltese. It seems two women, a real estate broker and her client, had been getting a little impatient waiting for the elevator and gave the button several long pushes. This would infuriate the most mild-mannered of elevator operators. Vince is not mild-mannered. “Who the fuck you are?! You wait like [...]
The Ansonia Hotel was not your usual hotel. But we were not your usual family. By the time I was born in 1945, the Ansonia had suffered years of neglect. The live seals that once frolicked in the lobby fountain were long gone. So was the fountain when I lived there as a child with my mother and father. Many [...]
There has always been something about the change in seasons, something that has stirred me to make changes in my life. I was married in winter and divorced in the spring, started a new job in fall and quit in the summer. That’s probably why it was in the beginning of winter when I decided that I had finally had [...]
It was the first perfect day of spring; the air silky with warmth. People, like the daffodils, were blooming all over Washington Square Park: Bicyclists, street musicians, bag-lunchers, in-line skaters, mothers with strollers. Those who were just standing around, others who were walking—they flew into the air like handkerchiefs tossed by the breeze when the car hit them. I was [...]
In the hiatus between semesters during my years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, I often decamped to New York City, ostensibly to find a job during the break, but really an inducement to be somewhere—anywhere—else. One hot summer day while plodding along the sidewalk of MacDougal Street south of Bleecker, I noticed the open door of [...]
After our engagement my family had decided that I would be allowed to talk to Fatmir on the phone. When my niece was engaged she had to make secret phone calls, but my family was modern. In anticipation for the phone call Asllan and Behare went out and took Sokol’s three boys. My Mom and Sokol’s wife were at their [...]
I am standing on the F train platform, my toes just over the yellow line. I lean toward the darkness of the train tunnel. In the distance I can see the faint, low-lit squares of train windows passing through the darkness. Then there is the hollow rumble of the F train approaching from in between stops and the shine of [...]
Having grown up in the City my entire life, I should have had my guard on and my extra sixth sense alert for the criminally suspicious. But I had just come off an awkward date, and I was still reflecting on its minute details, and otherwise pondering the futility of finding love in this hard-worn City, so I was not [...]
It was me, the girl standing in front of the Krusq, the wedding party, wearing a wedding dress. How did it happen? What went wrong? I had asked God to change things. I didn’t like the man I was going to marry -- but I had no choice. “On the day you were born God wrote on your forehead who [...]
One of the pleasures of living in a ranch style home is that I can clean all of the outside windows while standing firmly on the ground. Here is why that’s important to me. 219 Audubon Avenue Once each season in my growing up years in the 1940s and 50s, my mother would wash the outside windows of our Manhattan [...]
A few years ago in my father’s eighty-first year, my brother Patrick and I went to his house to spend Thanksgiving. My father lived in the Bronx at that time. We are the only children in the family still living in New York. Neither of us particularly wanted to spend the day in my father’s unkempt, dusty place, but he [...]
Driving along the West Side Highway in New York City, there is a sign that reads: Intrepid Museum returning Fall 2008. And every time I’ve seen it these past two years, I think, “By the time the Intrepid returns, my book will be finished.” I first saw the USS Intrepid in 1999, not as part of a historical tour of [...]
The trip from Greensboro, North Carolina to New York will be safe and superfast in our little plane. I climb in, pleased to find I have a seat alone. An elegant young couple sits across from me - they have a small, silent beagle in a carry-on case. The man’s probably thirty and has a voice only barely tinged with [...]
please amend your story about The Fool of Abingdon Square Park. If you would like to be accurate about the facts mentioned in your story, please consider changing that Abingdon Square Park was restored under the auspices of the Greenstreets Program. It was actually funded by the city council in reaction to a petition delivered in 2001 by a trio [...]
