Reading Time: 7 minutes A year or so ago I had a strange dream. Of course, most dreams are strange. But this one was both beautiful and, perhaps, telling: A young man is standing with a young woman on the deck of a ship. They are looking at the vast night sky above them. He says to her, “When […]

Reading Time: 10 minutes I started smoking when I was about six years old.  My grandfather, Sam Adler, would frequently come to visit us on weekends from his brownstone home on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn. He’d sit comfortably in a chair as he assumed the coveted role of unpaid babysitter.  Grandpa was, perhaps, the best babysitter in the world. […]

Reading Time: 8 minutes I can’t be sure exactly when my interest in cartoons and the comic strips began, but I know that as a young boy growing up on Long Island, we’d get Newsday every day and I’d always read the comics page. It was the 1950s, and there certainly wasn’t anything else worth reading in the paper—for a kid, […]

Reading Time: 7 minutes “Where is my wife, and what have you done with her?” That was my immediate reply to the email I’d just gotten from Mexico. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I could see this would end badly. Someone had obviously abducted my wife and was now impersonating her. The response came quickly. “She’s very pretty, and […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes After some thought, I decided I need to insert a small disclaimer about the bullfight. But what to say? I’m not a spokesman for anything. This is a memoir story. If you know me, you are aware that I care for and respect virtually all living things, including spiders, snakes, and scorpions. (I’m not particularly […]

Reading Time: 6 minutes From the late 1980s through the middle of the Great Recession—a period of approximately 20 years—I was active as a professional bandleader. One simple definition of “professional” means you get paid. Period. But in many ways, I’d been a professional bandleader since my teenage years, when our going rate was $15 each. Once I started […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes “Listen up, you guys. Maynard’s in town.” It was 1963 and the three of us, each 16 years old—well, one of us was only 15—were sitting in Mr. Masciarelli’s tiny office off the band room at Wantagh High School. We would often go there instead of study hall. Some of us called him Mr. Masciarelli. The rest just […]

Reading Time: 7 minutes No one who knows me well would ever think of me as a dog person. Yet… My first dog-recollection is from early childhood. I was just a toddler, but recall that my mother had a black cocker spaniel. The only thing that I remember about this dog is that Mom would feed it scrambled eggs. […]