You are currently browsing stories tagged with “In Search of Lost Time.”
Time really is the great leveler. The other night I went to BB King’s Blues Club and Grill to hear the Psychedelic Furs of all things. Or a better way to put it, in my case, would be that I went to hear the Furs at BB King’s of all places. Either way, you get the point. BB King’s, it [...]
The mysteries of 47th Street—men in oily black suits and beards the color of tar, swollen red noses and black eyes lined in soot, wiry eyebrows, faces half-hidden by coarse pepper-black hair, tallit dragging from the sweaty hems of their coats. Men with secrets. In their pockets, translucent wax paper folded and folded again like some ancient origami. Papers passed [...]
Every Tuesday when I was a small boy my mother would take me to visit a statue of Saint Anthony in Saint Francis Church on 31st Street in Manhattan. Saint Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of the poor. Curiously, he is invoked by those looking for lost things. Along with Saint Jude he is also sometimes called the [...]
I took Bobbi Zymanski to see "Airport '75" at the Holiday Showcase movie house near the airport in October of that same year. It was our first date and I thought the timeliness of seeing an "Airport" movie near an actual airport in the same year that was in the title would sort of sanctify our evening together. That night [...]
This is a love letter to you, New York, because I have been gone for four months and won’t be coming back for yet another one but I am counting the days, I am crossing off boxes on my calendar (wildlife scenes, pretty pictures of nature, which is what I am living in now and it is beautiful and harsh [...]
I hesitated before walking through the alleyway that led to my old backyard. I could see that my mother and father’s old fig tree was still there in the yard. It was late summer and there had just been a light rain. This would have been prime fig picking time back in the old days. I remembered that after a [...]
Herman the German waited for his prey. He turned a small Iron Cross over in one hand slowly measuring the length of each of its four silver edges. His quivering lip shook an inch long ash off his cigarette’s end. It fell onto the top of his Austrian sandals with the matching black socks. A loose thread sizzled. He didn’t [...]
It’s snowing outside the window, here in northern Michigan. A scattering of thick white flakes, puffs like breath escaping the warm cave of your mouth, swirls like white smoke exhaled slow back in the day when cigarettes were still glamorous. At night, when they fall, you look up into a sky that is seamlessly black, stars like change on a [...]
In the mid 1960’s it wasn’t easy for multi-sibling families like mine to get along well financially, but somehow my Mom and Dad made it work on the salary of my Dad, which wasn’t much. But there were times where budget cutting ideas may have went a little too far, like the "Save money on haircuts by doing it ourselves"initiative [...]
Early March 1954, in a Woodside apartment overlooking the # 7 Subway El and the Long Island Railroad station below it, two express trains crisscrossed, one rattling over the other. “Bob, please get me some food.” Patricia pleaded from the kitchen to the living room. “There’s plenty of food,” Bob answered as he played with the bunny ears antenna on [...]
I have three different nights confused in my mind. It was raining each night--a sentimental story. This is a sentimental story. I have been living in Vermont so long now that when I come back to the city its cleanliness and prosperity seem obscene to me. These nights were different--in my memory it was darker then, it was raining and [...]
“It’s not like I am going to die or anything.” My ten-year-old daughter Liza is begging me to let her walk alone to her school bus stop three streets from our Brooklyn apartment. She is as persistent as a lawyer in court, who, sensing that victory is at hand, refuses to let up on the line of questioning despite repeated [...]
Four of us had gathered for dinner in a room above a popular bar on University Place on a swampy and airless Manhattan night. We were all twentysomething professionals, friends from the business side of the music business. Hannah worked for a British artist management firm, and Dina managed PR for a small American record label. Sally was with an [...]
So I found myself on the corner of 45th St and 8th Ave, having arrived ten minutes ago in New York City, October 4th, 1986. I was pretty much sitting in the center of the biggest glut of seed you could find per square inch in any city in the world. Wide-eyed crack heads floated past after scoring at local [...]
“Seventy-eight years!” someone said, and there was that distinctive popping sound. I’d come for a tuna salad sandwich but now plastic cups of champagne were being poured and, in a democratic spirit, one was placed on the Formica counter in front of me. Before I could ask what was going on, the waitress came up and said they were out [...]
“Now, you know, when I was a young girl, before your Granddad came along, I lived in Chicago. And boy was that an experience.” My grandmother takes a sip off her still steaming coffee; black the only way she’ll take it. “It was a grand time. So much energy, so lively. And then we moved to Wichita, Kansas and I [...]
Hello. The 6th Anniversary of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is here, and the time has come to pay tribute to the site's past. So many pieces are coming in all the time, piling up on the surface of the site, that it's easy to forget how much terrific work has accumulated in the deeper layers of MBN's very own geological record. [...]
Of the big five, our sense of smell is supposedly the one most closely associated with our memories. And I buy that, because I’m always a little turned on when I smell Burberry perfume. I can’t really describe it, but I can always identify it when I smell it. My first college girlfriend wore Burberry perfume. And the sensation associated [...]
I learned a lot from my grandpa, John Francis O'Brien, a native of Cork city (Ireland) and an immigrant to America. He used to always say that he was closest to God when he was connected to nature. Grandpa was quite an unusual character in our working class neighborhood on Detroit's West Side, just a few miles from the city's [...]
Oh man, he's going to die! I live 100 feet from Interstate 95 and from my living room window have an unobstructed view of this sea of vehicles. Having lived here many years the sounds of impending trouble are familiar. So when the horns started blaring it was a cue to look out the window and I did so, just [...]
Basketball has always been my favorite sport to play. I guess that came from living in an urban environment and not always having money. If you had anywhere from 2 to 10 guys, all you needed was one ball and at least one basket. It was a little more complicated in the winter. Fortunately, a local junior high, 204, had [...]
12 December 2005 It has been some time since I have written an update concerning New Orleans. In truth my delinquency is due to the fact that I have been extremely busy in the process of cleaning up. You know when I am busy when you do not receive a rambling of text ranting about the shortcomings of Government. Through [...]
I was still young enough to like am radio. I hadn't been exposed to the much cooler fm stations yet. Sometimes, when we drove into the city, my father listened to Bernard Meltzer's call-in advice show. It wasn't so psychology-based, just heavy on common sense and consumer advice. Women could find out how to get their husbands to pay them [...]
[The following was originally published in "Piece From Life's Crazy Quilt," a collection of personal essays about growing up in Detroit in the 1920's, 30s, and 40s by Marvin V. Arnett. The collection first appeared in 2000, as part of the University of Nebraska Press's "American Lives" series (Series Editor: Tobias Wolff), and the University of Nebraska Press has shown [...]
Wanting to see the new exhibits at Socrates Sculpture Park, I walked down Broadway from my Astoria apartment. I passed beneath the elevated subway station as an N or W train thundered through. Down past grungy supermarkets and massive discount stores, with their outdoor displays of toilet paper, sandals, fake Persian rugs, and baskets of brooms. The last time I [...]
“Kneel. Sit. Stand. Kneel. Sit. Stand. Kneel. Sit. Stand!” Sister Mary Angelina bellows these words to a congregation of frightened eighth graders at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in southwest Detroit sometime in the mid-1980’s. Almost twenty years later, those angry commands from the most powerful nun known to the class of 1985 have not been forgotten. They are engraved into [...]
My first after-school job was delivering the long-defunct Long Island Press but I really entered the working world when, at the age of seventeen, I started as a temporary summer worker at Gimbel's department store (my Dad knew someone there...lucky me). I eased my way into the good graces of the bosses until I got into the union. Ultimately, I [...]
Emil Schupp always sat on the same stool at the end of the counter in Artie's Luncheonette at 223 West 14th Street. Artie was my father and he let me help out at the grill one summer. Every morning, same time, same stool, same toast and tea and tomato juice, Emil sat there for exactly an hour, calculating bowling averages. [...]
Most of their music is on CD's but in the back of the store there is a wide selection of movie soundtracks, and these are mostly on vinyl. Most are old soundtracks, and therefore the back of Footlights doubles as record store and design showcase, because the cover art for these records invariably calls upon the poster art for the [...]
My father was a man of few words. Not because he was the strong silent type, but rather because, in the twenty-three years that we spent together, it was my mother who did most of the talking. He had few opinions, my father, which he mostly kept to himself, and my life was too full of other things to be [...]
My girlfriend, with whom I live in Brooklyn, was going to be out of town for a few days. And so it happened that I found myself in a grocery store, alone, deliberating between the advantages of a Swanson Hungry Man fried chicken dinner and a Banquet Salisbury steak. Each came with corn and mashed potatoes, but only the Hungry [...]
This is the first chapter of "How To Be a Man: Scenes From A Protracted Boyhood." (W.W. Norton) [35 years old] A little while ago I went to get my car and found that it was not where I had left it. The car is, or was, a huge, mint green 1977 Thunderbird; almost half of the car's considerable length [...]
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer in May of 1996, she was sent for treatment at the Hospital for Special Surgery. This gave my father and I a reason to trek to NYC almost every night to pay her a visit. I was thirteen and considerably naive at the time. Yet, now almost ten years later, I vividly recall [...]
It was the middle of a heavy, overcast day. I was eating lunch in Greenacre Park. Most of the patio chairs were leaning against the tables, draining off the earlier rainfall. Usually this vest-pocket park on 51st Street between Third and Second Avenues is Standing Room Only at lunchtime. But the weather had scared away the usual crowd. So there [...]
While studying piano in college in Mississippi in the mid-seventies, I discovered I could make money with my ability at the keyboard. I played the pipe organ at a church in Hazlehurst, where my parents still live, every Sunday morning. During the week I played the piano for singing lessons and ballet classes in Jackson where I went to a [...]
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