You are currently viewing the stories for June, 2010

You Bet Your Life

by 06/19/2010
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

After work, my father usually went to the racetrack or played poker with his pals in the Ansonia Hotel, a few blocks from our pre-war apartment on West 76th Street, so my mother and I were surprised to see him home early one evening. It didn’t take him long to tell us why. “Turn on […]

Dad Shot Thumper

by 06/19/2010
Neighborhood: Yorkville

Dad used to hunt. He didn’t golf, so hunting was another made up reason to get out of the house. He never struck me as the hunting type, but once or twice a year, he’d be off upstate for a long weekend. It was a Yorkville man thing in the 1950s and 1960s. As he […]

Three Basketball Vignettes, 2001

by 06/03/2010
Neighborhood: Chelsea, West Village

1. March 25th, 2001 Basketball City Chelsea Piers There Were Horses A pick up game at Basketball city. Cold Sunday afternoon. The academy awards that night. Dreading them. Miserable but psyched about the game. We ended up playing four on four full court. On the other team were the guys I play with in my […]

The Last Day

by 06/03/2010
Neighborhood: Windsor Terrace

I always woke up early the last day of school. My eyes would jump open and I’d sit up and look toward the windows in my parents’ bedroom to see if morning slid through the thick wooden blinds and thin white curtains. I’d jab the bottom of the bunk bed above where my older brother […]

Covered Heads

by 06/03/2010
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

I have been to exactly one rabbinical student graduation party: Jewish Theological Seminary, class of 1998. The party was held outdoors on the rooftop of a pub on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and the balmy May night helped create the illusion that the bar was somewhere outside the city—a mountaintop perch under an oddly starless […]