You are currently viewing the stories for July, 2020
A Song of Love
by Steven Goldleaf 07/26/2020Neighborhood: Bensonhurst
(for ELG) My dad, who served as an MP in Okinawa just after the war, had strong views on inter-racial dating, because of all the mixed-race babies he saw there, half-breed bastards, he called them, rejected by the Okinawans, and ignored by the American GIs who’d fathered them. As his teenaged son in the […]
Haunted House
by Susan Volchok 07/19/2020Neighborhood: Flushing
In the beginning, it was an ordinary house on an ordinary street in Flushing, Queens, just around the corner from ours. There was an older girl, Mary Ann, who was our sometime babysitter, and a younger boy, Johnny, who was several years older than I. A cherished childhood memory of mine concerns an afternoon (though […]
We Stand Together
by Angel Eduardo 07/12/2020Neighborhood: Astoria
As I approached Astoria Park, I was struck by a wave of incongruities. It was a gorgeous day—the trees lush with leaves, a nascent summer sun beaming from a clear blue sky—but I had to keep it at a distance. I wore a mask for protection from the pandemic, which still loomed despite it being […]
Michael Jackson’s Father
by Susan T. Landry 07/04/2020Neighborhood: Bowery
When my son and I moved to the Bowery in the late 1970s, we took our place alongside the slow-marching parade of men and women who moved through those streets like ghosts. Some were devoid of identity and shape and earthbound spirit; others were vivid and sublime. A black man, a vagabond who trolled the […]