Thanks, Joseph. I had a very exciting trip to NY. Very impressed by everything I saw there. I too haven’t really heard much of that New York accent that’s depicted in this story. But then I haven’t met that many local New Yorkers either. :-)

Funny reading about your trip to the city in the middle of the night now. Sometime in the morning I’m hoping to arrange the latest installment of an annual pilgrimage I take into Brooklyn with my father and a buddy of mine. We usually do it in early September, a day or two after Labor Day often enough. Generally we’ll cruise in on the Long Island Expressway to the Grand Central and then the Belt. We’ll take that around following the coast past Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan Beach, Brighton Beach (that area now a kind of little Moscow, and where I went to high school many years ago), past Coney Island, and around to the south, swinging up into Park Slope and the old neighborhood.

I always drive thru looking at the old apartment house I grew up in, looking for a face I’ll remember, when the truth is people are either dead or at work on a weekday morning. And I’m not to sure I really want to recognize anyone anyway. But it seems like the thing to do: look for a familiar face on the street.

Sometimes we’ll detour thru Green-Wood Cemetery, overlooking the street I grew up on and the streets I played ball on years ago. The corners I played cards on, too. The cemetery’s so cool to me now. I recognize the history there. (The guy who invented the soda fountain’s buried there. And there’s a section for vets of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.) Parklike, Green-Wood was designed by the same guy who designed Central and Prospect Parks. It’s got, I think, two or three lakes, tho’ we make a point of stopping by only one. (I remember going to school at the Catholic school, St. John the Evangelist, the story of a kid who played hooky from the school one day and went ice skating on one of the lakes–the one visible from Fifth Avenue (this is Brooklyn now, remember, not Manhattan’s toney Fifth Avenue) and, like, 37th or 28th Street, if I’m remembering correctly. And that story ended with the ice breaking, the kid falling thru and drowning. Tho’ I usually get a look at the old school, opposite the church, once a year now, I still stop to see it in the Adam Sandler movie, Big Daddy anytime it’s on TV. No longer a school–it may actually be apartments now, I don’t know for sure–they used it for the set of Sandler’s apartment in that silly movie. It was actually on in the background a year or two ago when I was working at home, and I immediately recognized something about the room the scene was in. Don’t even know whether it was a converted classroom, the old auditorium or what. But it registered and it took a sec for me to figure it out. But then I caught a shot of the outside.

Sometimes we’ll cruise my father’s old neighborhood in what I guess is now Cobble Hill and head up from what was the Navy Yard thru Fort Greene, now an internationally-flavored neighborhood where some of my dad’s family lived–and, indeed where I spent the first year or two of my life, I’m told; at the time we exited the city for the suburbs over 35 years ago now, Fort Greene was considered “changed” and “dangerous”.

And we end up by stopping in Coney Island, at the original Nathan’s Famous for stuff I’ll no-longer eat but for this trip: a hot dog and their great French fries. What I used to like there as a kid, tho, was a kind of Roumanian roast beef (called “BBQ,” back then), the frog’s legs (I swear; but only once in a blue moon), and he craziest thing: chow mein on a bun.

We delayed the trip this year because my buddy Charlie, a reired cop, has been under the weather. F—-ay, I hope he’s up to the trip in a day or two.