Happy Mother’s Day. OK, that’s out of the way. Here’s more important stuff.

I’m not a big poetry person. Maybe I’m not intelligent enough to read the writers’ tea leaves. Maybe I ask: why did they chop up the lines like that? It all could’ve been just one paragraph and c’est ca, you know?

But. I read Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss, a writer from nowhere’sville Michigan. Just like I’m from nowhere’sville, NYC. And I have to say: whoa!

Read this interview with her by my friend and uber-talented poet, William Lessard.

She reminds me: just keep writing. Full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes. It’s work. Hard work, and hard work is honorable.

A remembrance: one day I was old enough to earn my adult library card. I was a punk kid, but no longer confined to the tiny children’s book section of the shoebox that was the Jerome Park branch of the New York Public Library.

It was one flight up from a dry cleaning store on University Avenue and the place smelled like Perchloroethylene (PERC). This is the most common solvent used for dry cleaning in the United States. PERC is a reproductive toxicant, neurotoxicant, potential human carcinogen, and a persistent environmental pollutant. In other words, it’s poison.

I LOVED the scent of PERC. It was sweet and soft and I equated that sensation with the safety, warmth, and value the library afforded me, during my chaotic (ha! understatement of the year) early childhood.

And that first day, with my new adult library card, I — a pitzl — picked out the biggest, thickest, heaviest book — WITH NO PICTURES — and checked it out. When I got it home, I started reading it, and quickly realized I had no idea what it was about.

But I knew it must have been important, for it to warrant all that weight.

In time, I checked out more books, six at a clip — the maximum allowed by NYPL rules at the time — and began to digest the words. My brain was a python eating a goat. The process was slow, but it did happen.

I cherished the after-school time in that poisoned, PERC-scented, library. That space kept me safe. And provided a soft place to hear myself.

Yep, the rumors are true. My third short story collection, “When Paris Beckons”, is now available. Visit my website to get your copy. Just click through to your favorite online bookstore. http://www.martykleinman.com.

My seventeen new stories zero in on the societal stresses of the past few years. Covid, politics, the economy, immigrant issues, the new workday paradigm — it’s all here.

Spread the word, far and wide. I’ll do Zoom readings for your book club or worship group — just reach out and we’ll make it happen.

Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota, simultaneously shot her pup in a gravel pit and her political future in the butt. After she shot poor Cricket, she turned her shotgun on a male goat that won Kristi’s disfavor, somehow only wounded it and, as it lay in agony, strolled back to her truck to fetch another shell and put the screaming animal down.

Sad as that was, it was nothing compared to the impact on my seven-year old brain of the time Margie’s brother, Shirl, killed Tinkerbell. Tink was Margie’s fourteen-year old, rheumy-eyed toy poodle. Shirl slammed the poor thing’s head in the door of Margie’s fridge.

Alcohol may have been involved.

My mom told me the story over dinner one night back when I was a kid. We were having boiled “new” potatoes, Del Monte canned peas and carrots, and beef tongue, which I watched my mom prepare. First, she trimmed the thick, disgusting bottom part of the tongue, peeled off the outer membrane (“and the nicotine stains,” my dad “joked”), boiled the crap out of the grotesque, meaty mass with garlic and onions in a white enameled spaghetti pot and, finally, sliced it up (way too thickly, unlike the nearly transparent, silky smooth slices the counter guy proffered at Tower Deli on Kingsbridge Road). As a result, the lengua was repulsively chewy, saved only by smearing mounds of Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard over each rubbery slice. “Don’t complain,” my mother said. “If you’re hungry, you’ll eat.” (I’m teeing up a Mother’s Day post, as you can see.)

But I digress.

Yes, Margie’s brother was named Shirl. See, Margie came from Kentucky. My dad explained that Down South they still were fighting the Civil War and searching for newcomers’ “Jew Horns”. He said that parents Down South sometimes used girl’s names for their boys (see also: Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue” — and Lindsay “Ladybug” Graham, the latter being another story for another day).

Shirl came up to The Bronx after a frantic phone call from his sister. He immediately landed a job in a diner as a $90/week dishwasher, which even the seven-year old me knew was chump change for a grown man. But our building’s men-folk thought Shirl was cool. He drove a beat-up white Ford Galaxie 500 with the 427 engine mated to a four-on-the-floor manual transmission. In the glovebox, he had a scuffed .38 revolver, a pint of Rebel Yell, and a small stack of two-ounce Dixie cups.

So the guys would hang out across the street from our apartment building, listen to the ballgame over the Galaxie’s AM radio, and knock back bourbon shots. One time, Shirl let me load and unload his pistol. My dad took it from me when I sighted it at a white and red No Parking sign.

Margie, being from, yes, Down South, had a heavy twang. She chain-smoked Newports, and didn’t so much “walk” as “sashay”, in a way that clearly grabbed the attention of the dads in our building. “She’s got that southern sway,” my pop would say, as his pal, Charlie Cohen, who toiled in a corrugated box factory, smiled, ever- appreciative of a well-turned ankle.

Margie was married to a connected guy. That kind of connected. He was a very quiet, dark haired sort who barely made eye contact as he slithered down the street, scanning ahead for trouble. He would disappear for long stretches and, in time, I learned that his absences meant he was “away”. “Upstate”.

“Guys are following me,” Margie, highball in hand, confided to my mom as she put up pot roast for dinner. “I’m afraid.”

My parents were a lot of things, but savvy to the world of wise guys they were not. “Don’t be paranoid, Marge,” my mom said, dispensing all the worldly wisdom a forty-something outer-borough woman still dominated by her Vilna-born mother could muster. “Don’t go into orbit. No one’s out to get you.”

They were, though. Out to get her, that is. It had to do with her hubby’s line of work. My dad laughed and said Margie’s husband was in “import-export”.

So Shirl’s role was to act as a two-legged pit bull while her husband — oh, let’s call him “Silent Sam” — was doing his latest bit “upstate”.

Now Margie had a flock of drop-kick toy poodles, who yipped all day and apparently screwed all night, for there were always puppies aplenty roaming her ground floor flat, enough to support her booming puppy mill business. Red-rimmed eyes watering, they’d cluster around the fridge whenever Shirl went to get another Schlitz. They surrounded him, barked, and begged for grub. The pack leader was a fourteen-year old bitch named Tinkerbell who yipped her bloody heart out.

Shirl’s presence kept the bad guys at bay, at least for awhile, for his pheromones served the same purpose as a house cat brought in to walk around a rodent infested apartment. That is, solely for its scent, which kept mice away.

The downside was that Shirl was, shall we say, erratic. Today, he’d be called neuro-diverse. Back then, he was considered a good natured, nutty, drunk. He wandered about the neighborhood in his white tee-shirts and rumpled chinos, cadging drinks and smokes off day drinkers in the myriad Fordham Road bars.

He was able to do this because within days of starting his new job, he missed shifts and was unceremoniously canned after just two weeks, Not a fan of alternate side parking, he amassed a thicket of tickets and crammed each one into the Galaxie’s glovebox, just under his pistol.

One sleepy dusty summer day, Shirl weaved into Margie’s kitchen for a breakfast brew. There, behind a bowl of egg salad-gone-iridescent, was a solitary can of Schlitz.

One Schlitz wouldn’t do, for Shirl was nursing a hangover bigger than Mandingo. What to do? Shirl leaned hard on the open fridge door, unshaven and unwashed, an insult to unmade beds. His head throbbed as a herd of yip dogs yelped in a key that made Bernard Herrmann’s shower scene score in Psycho sound as soothing as Swan Lake.

As always, the leader of the pack was Tinkerbell.

“Tinkerbell,” Shirl screamed, “Knock it the hell off, girl!” Tinkerbell’s response was to yip faster, louder, and in a higher key. Shirl reached for the last can of beer.

As he did, Tinkerbell’s tiny jaws locked up on Shirl’s shin with the ferocity of a seven-pound pit bull. “Dang!” Shirl cried, simultaneously slugging Schlitz and wagging his foot in a futile attempt at dislodging Tink’s tiny teeth.

Finally, Tink’s jaws released. But the forward force of Shirl’s leg swing propelled the geriatric doggie head-first, into the fridge. Out of pain, rage, and sheer animal instinct, Shirl slammed the fridge door shut.

All Shirl heard was a high-pitched “ERP!” All the other doggies stopped yelping and slunk away, heads turned back for one last look at their fallen den mother, dead as a doornail on the linoleum floored kitchen of Margie’s flat.

From a highly reputable source, the super’s son (my bestie), I learned that Shirl wrapped Tink in doubled-up plastic bags from Merit Farms on Fordham Road, and dumped the critter in the garbage, where it was incinerated along with Mrs. Waloshin’s frayed old brassieres and Mrs. Gibney’s Sunday dinner chicken carcasses.

I further learned, as we ate our dinner of beef tongue and new potatoes, that Margie saw a white Eldorado tailing her that very day and was in such a state that she never said a word about poor Tinkerbell.

Dinner finished, we did the dishes and went back outside to catch fireflies and light punks with our dads’ Zippo lighters. The very thought of Shirl’s deed chilled my soul and I hugged my doggie, Topper, tightly. He snarled at me, so I let him go play with his soup bone. I remember the seven-year old me thinking this: Topper knows I would never slam his head with a refrigerator door. He is a cool dog and bit only one person that I know of, but it was Norman’s fault anyhow. At least that what dad said.

And all this was largely forgotten, locked in my memory’s hard drive, until news of Kristi Noem’s heartless execution of Cricket and the goat broke just a few days ago. Amazing how the mind works.

(Oh, and by the way, at least 90 percent of the stuff in this story is true.)

One month ago, we rescued two four-month old kittens. The rescue lady gave them funky names and we immediately renamed them. “We dub thee: Felix and Oscar.”

They are indeed an odd couple. The local rescue lady found them in back of a Target store on 225th Street in the Bronx. They were dumpster divers. Who knows what dangers they had to flee to stay alive just four months. “What kind of food do they eat?” we asked the rescue lady, wondering wet vs. dry, chicken vs. seafood, “pate” vs. chunky.

“They’ll eat anything,” she said. “Give them good stuff, but as for flavors and textures, they are not picky.”

She was right. When it’s mealtime, I bang on the food dishes with a spoon and they gallop behind me to their feeding spot, bury their noggins in their grub, and chow down.

They play-fight all night, like two ten-year old boys on a sleepover. They run through the house with reckless abandon. They play with toys. They kiss each other and fall asleep. An hour later, they’re at it again, swiping and swatting and being healthy kittens.

They take care of each other. We have a big apartment and they don’t have the run of the entire place. Not yet. So we keep the doors to some rooms closed. Off-limits to Felix and Oscar.

The other day, Oscar came over to me and snuggled. I petted him and he walked five yards away, and returned for petting. Rinse, repeat. Four times. It occurred to me: I haven’s seen Felix in awhile. Uh-oh…

I got up. Oscar led the way, tail straight up. I heard desperate kitten meowing, high pitched and pathetic. Hmmm. Where was Felix? He wasn’t in the hall closet. Maybe the powder room? Nope. Maybe the master bedroom? Nope. My office? Nope. Meowwwwwww. I opened the door to my wife’s office.

MEOWWWWW. There he was. Felix was lost and scared. How he got in there, I’ll never know. And they ain’t talking. This is the Bronx. Snitches get stitches.

Oscar knew, though. He looked out for his red-headed brother, and enlisted my aid.

And I became sad. So I had to do a deep dive to figure out what was bothering me. Didn’t take long. My sister and I are estranged. We once were besties, but that was a long, long time ago. We were dumpster divers in the central Bronx. We ate anything. I was found, but not my sister. Her life’s been tough and her struggles turned her bitter and dangerous to me. I tried. I really tried, to make the relationship work. No bueno. Time and time again she kneecapped me. Dirty deeds. Inappropriate behavior. I just couldn’t anymore.

So now, I see how our rescue kittens, Felix and Oscar, two tabbies, interact. They have a great chemistry. Two completely different personalities, but buds nevertheless. They have each other’s backs. One lies, and the other swears to it.

Sometimes the Kryptonite leaches out. I think about what might have been. Ah well. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

“Through thick and through thin,
All out or all in.
And whether it’s win, place or show.
With you for me and me for you,
We’ll muddle through whatever we do.
Together, wherever we go.”

Yesterday my wife and I got into our blue time machine — ok, it’s a Subaru, but whatever — and hurtled back 40 years.

We drove 15 miles to Jackson Heights, a lovely bedroom community in Queens, NY.

Ah, the old sod. We lived there from 1977 to 1985. We were kids.

We bit the bullet and moved to a lovely Jackson Heights “junior four” from our one bedroom on West 21st Street, because our Manhattan landlord jacked our rent to a lofty $275 a month.

We hated it there back in the bad old days of rampant NYC crime. It was affordable, but dull, and not particularly safe. Plus, all our friends lived in “the city”. In the late seventies, Brooklyn was still a dicey backwater. We figured we’d save money for a few years, and move back to where most of our friends lived. We figured wrong.

We lived in Jackson Heights at the time of Son of Sam, and so we called our apartment building (“The Berkeley”) The Berkowitz. My wife would wrap her red hoodie around her head when we walked back to our apartment at night. Why? “It’s my Son of Sam helmet,” she’d explain to perplexed guests.

There were shell casings on the glass-strewn courts where I played pick-up b-ball. There were cocaine gang shoot-’em-ups. There was gay-bashing.

Our apartment was gorgeous (sunken living room, roomy eat-in kitchen, so many closets that many were just empty). Our block was leafy. But it wasn’t “the city”.

One day the super plopped a document at our doorstep. It was a red-herring. I was a kid and had no idea what that meant. But I soon understood it was our ticket out of Jackson Heights. A few years later we flipped the apartment and moved to Park Slope, which was, as they say, “on the come.” It was 1985. The crack epidemic was just around the corner. But we survived and the neighborhood thrived, to the point where it became the butt of jokes, a place where tykes were allowed to run amok in restaurants, boutiques, and even bars.

But I digress.

Only one thing tied us to Jackson Heights over the ensuing years: our safety deposit box at Queens Community Bank on Northern Boulevard. They kept “our family jewels” (actually just “important papers”) because no Brooklyn bank near us had a vault.

From time to time, we pulled important family papers out of the vault. There was hardly anything left in our runty Box 141. Fast forward forty years. I received a letter from the bank. It was sold. The bank was scheduled for renovation. I was asked to remove the remaining contents of my box.

Hence the time machine back to our youth.

We drove around the old sod. There stood The Berkowitz. It was beautifully maintained, as ever. But New York City is all about change, and this neighborhood had changes aplenty. All for the better.

I thought about the old sod in recent years, whenever I read of the morgue trucks that backed up Elmhurst General, just blocks from our door. Jackson Heights was ravaged by Covid. The Grim Reaper had a field day. But our sense was the neighborhood turned the corner.

The Arepa Lady (who started her business with a cart under the Roosevelt Avenue EL trestles) had a real retail space right around the corner from The Berkowitz! A cool espresso shop replaced the crummy one-chair barber just down the street. The old basketball courts with Mobius strips for rims were transformed into a kiddie-park green-space that was a wonderland for tykes. A French bakery rivalling anything on Rue Saint-Honore sold masterful macarons.

There was a Greenstreets, bikes-and-pedestrians-only initiative on 34th Avenue! And restaurants galore!

Back in the day, my wife and I would repair to the Mark Twain Diner on Northern Boulevard for standard chee-burgee fare. It was a bit down-at-the-heels, but affordable and nearby. Now? It’s the Jax Inn Diner, and we’re here to report that it was hopping and VERY good.

We ate our breakfast and, for a brief moment, we were in our late twenties again. It was a time of crazy parties and lots of laughter, for the lion’s share of our lives lie ahead. We worked hard, and played hard.

We left Jackson Heights in 1985 and began our quarter-century Brooklyn residency. We had long, rewarding careers, got out of the NYC-native’s provincial mindset, and thrived in a much wider world. Our co-workers and clients were, indeed, some of the best and brightest. We raised our son in a glorious neighborhood.

But yesterday, forty years on, we were back to a time when we had to take a step down in order to get ahead. We thought about those days, equal parts struggle and hope, as we paid the check at the Jax Inn, got back in our time machine-slash-Subaru, drove down Northern Boulevard to 69th Street, turned right onto on the BQE, and headed home. But it won’t be long before we’re back, because I have a hankering for the roast chicken at Pio Pio on Northern Boulevard and 85th Street. And maybe some dumplings at Phayul on 74th Street, and….and…

Once, I loved so many of them. Retailers! I’m talking stores, here!

“To all the stores I’ve loved before
I traveled in and out your doors
I’m glad they came along
I dedicate this song (I dedicate this song)
To all the stores I’ve loved before.”

Ah, Rabsons. On the north side of 57th Street, across from Scandinavian Ski, and the upstairs hair salon where I sat patiently waiting for an apprentice stylist to cut my hair for free (for I was un hombre pobre once upon a time). Rabsons had the finest stereo equipment, and knowledgeable staff. There, I bought BIC cassette players, Thorens turntables, KLH speakers. It was a major step up from Lafayette’s, where I got my start in stereo component equipment.

Joe’s Army Navy...le sigh!!! My Fordham Road favorite! Once I started working at the NYPL on Marion Avenue as a 15-year old, I was rolling in dough, for I made $1/hour as a page. I bought my own shirts, jeans, Li’l Abner work boots, and sweatshirts at Joe’s. I spent hours in front of their windows near Jerome Avenue, planning my next purchases before buying new screens for my pipe at the cigar store on the corner. It was never the same for me, though, after the big fire. Although my dad bought fire-sale sneakers there for $1/pair, and wore them even though they smelled like ashes.

Eagle Provisions…be still, my foolish heart. This palace of Polish provisions gave me so much. Kielbasa. Kabonosy. Zywiec beer!!! Chrusciki! How many shirts did I ruin with your powdered sugar goodness? Where the grandpa would rub the buzz cut of my three year old son as I wheeled the kid around the narrow aisles of this Brooklyn mainstay on Fifth Avenue @18th Street. The family sold the building and I hear it’s now a condo. With an acai bar on the ground floor. WTAF!!!! Jaka szkoda, indeed. What a shame!

Uptown, it’s Alexander’s! I saved the best for last. Alexander’s was where I bought my recorded music, as a teen. Albums stamped “C” were $2.99. D’s were $3.49. E’s (usually double albums) were $3.99. The record department was in the basement. I entered through the 190th Street doors, heavy glass barriers to the world o’retail within. There was a certain solemnity to entering this sacred space. The vestibule had a scent of carpet off-gas. Or, maybe they piped in oxygen to energize the customer experience, as they do in Vegas casinos. For music, though, this was the place, along with Spinning Disc, Music Makers, and Cousin’s (where I got my German-made K55; another story for another day). George Farkas, Brooklyn native, opened this particular store in 1933. All the stores were closed by ’92.

I’ve loved many stores. These are but a few. Now, stores are quaint. Streets are blocked with UPS, FedX, Amazon, Fresh Direct, and Pea Pod trucks — and so many more. The goods come to you. Get them, return them, get new ones, return those…it’s as regular as the tides.

Feh!

“The winds of change are always blowing (blowing)
And ev’ry time I tried to stay (try to stay)
The winds of change continued blowing
And they just carried me a way (carried me away)”

My two cents: there’s a new breed of “silent majority” citizen in the U.S.

I am in this group. We don’t jump at the bait when we’re trolled. We don’t flap our arms and shake our heads in dismay. We lie low. We know the difference between right and wrong.

We are good people, helpful, kind, generous and observant. We’ve watched Trump turn over the years, like a quart of buttermilk in the August sun. Rancid. We are ITCHING to vote in November.

Quietly, we count the minutes.

It is said by men far wiser than me that one is alive as long as there is someone on Earth to remember that person.

Big Mort is very much alive, and it’s not just through me.

This rainy day I am behind my computer screen, plotting out my new story. My wife is watching the men’s finals of the Australian Open. It is Medvedev vs. Sinner. We think they’re both spectacular. I sort of like Daniil Medvedev a bit better, because he projects a certain Russian world-weariness that speaks to me. My bloodline runs through the Pale of Settlement, via Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and Romania.

As I write, I hear a scream from the living room. It’s from my five-foot one and three-quarter inch waif of a wife. She bellows: “gahd…DAMMIT!!!!”

After the better part of half a century together, she’s heard my reaction to strikeouts, dropped passes, missed free throws, blown calls. That is: “gahd-DAMMIT!!!”

See, the thing is, I got it from my father. Big Mort. Conerly throws an interception? “Gahd-DAMMIT!!!” He’d pound his chair, pace in front of the TV, and scream. My mom would feel his forehead. He’d be burning up. One time, the thermometer read 102.3 degrees during a Giants – Browns game.

So that’s where I got the “gahd-DAMMIT!!!”

And now, my tiny wife does the “gahd-DAMMIT!!!”

So in some small way, my emotionally distant, PTSD-ridden, sometimes violent father is still alive, now through the mouth of my wife, who was hardly a fan of Big Mort.

There’s a lot of screaming in the living room right now. Sinner just won in five sets. Medvedev is denied again.

“Gahd-DAMMIT!!!”

See you again soon, Dad.

The Les Paul and Mary Ford cover of “How High the Moon” came out in the year of my birth. It became a number-one hit.

I loved the song because Mary Ford’s overdubbed vocals made little-kid-me laugh. A whole lot. Which was important because my household wasn’t humor-driven. At all. Mine was a dark, Dickensian world, ruled by dour dullards.

No wonder I flipped over Mary Ford’s vocals. They sounded funny, in the way that “The Chipmunk Song” by Alvin and the Chipmunks would when I was a man-of-the-world second-grader in P.S. 86.

I also liked the lyrics to “How High”. This song first came out in 1940, and was a “serious” song, but for the little guy that was me, this version was “up” and aspirational:
“Somewhere there’s music / How faint the tune / Somewhere there’s heaven / How high the moon?”

I learned, however, that life is always one step forward/two steps back. As the Dead sang “…’cause when life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door…”

Still, I hoped that, somewhere, there might be a “heaven”: better things ahead, with music, and laughter, and love, and — dare I say it — FUN!

The mindless movies of the era told me that my teen years would be a hoot. Cars. Girls. Beer on the beach. Life told me otherwise. My teen years were marinated in “uh-oh-the-draft” Viet Nam panic. The sixties exploded, as I nearly did.

I held on tight to the thought that “somewhere there’s music, how faint the tune…” Every week, the Village Voice print ads — and radio spots on WNEW-FM — offered a smorgasbord of music. I feasted as best I could.

The Fillmore. Vanguard, Bottom Line, Sweet Basil, Cookery, Blue Note, Max’s, Cedar Tavern, West Boondocks, Schaefer Festival. (Never made it to Corso on 86th to see Hector Lavoe.)

The music was excellent, plentiful, and affordable. And logistically simple. For the Fillmore, and Schaefer concerts, I’d march down to Cousin’s on Fordham Road, and the clerk would pull a stack of printed tickets held by a thick red rubber-band from a counter drawer and peel off my ducats.

Live music was ubiquitous. It was fun. And it provided the sense of generational community that helped us hold it together during daunting periods of history. I think about those days now when ticket prices for the Stones at MetLife Stadium next spring start at $199 and reach $1,700 (plus fees). That would be $25 to $230 in 1970 dollars. My 1970 CSN&Y tickets were $5.50, no fees.

I am reminded of the New York music scene and its power by today’s edition of Lucian Truscott Newsletter, https://luciantruscott.substack.com/. I urge you to check it out and subscribe. Lucian is the man.

Music is more important than ever, especially in these times of tension. It’s too bad that live performance tix for major artists are so pricey.

The good news is that so much quality music, by uber-talented though lesser-known acts, is available at intimate venues. My 2024 hope is to get out more and thrill to the sound of the snare and bass just before the leader counts down and the fun begins. GOOSEBUMPS!!!

Les Paul and Mary Ford were right: “Somewhere there’s music/How faint the tune/Somewhere there’s heaven/How high the moon” .

The young couple moved into our tired apartment house off Fordham Road one humid Bronx summer, just about the time the twelve-year old me and my friend Larry started worshipping the publicity still of Sophia Loren in “Boy On a Dolphin”.

The husband of this couple was a trim, pleasant-enough guy in the Dick York-as-Darrin-in-“Bewitched” mode. But his wife! THAT WIFE!

Larry and I fell in love with this juicy peach of a person. The woman had fire in her eyes, wore fishnet stockings, high heeled pumps and tight skirts. A beehive hairdo completed her look. We were very confused: what was a woman LIKE THAT doing with a nothing like HIM????

She was our queen. We were two goobers ever-eager to please her. We held the door for her and smiled. We held her groceries as she fumbled for her keys. We looked at each other after she closed her apartment door behind her and widened our eyes. Did you see what she was wearing today??? OH MY GOD!!!

By Thanksgiving we saw her baby bump. The entire building was enthralled. A new neighbor was coming! By Easter the couple was wheeling their baby boy around the neighborhood. Yes, she was now a mommy. But “Darrin’s” wife still was our heartthrob.

By summer there was another baby bump. Then, another kid. Then, another baby bump. Then, another kid. One of the building’s wits said she wasn’t raising a family, she was feeding her litter. By the time I was a freshman in college, there were five or them. Or, was it six? It became hard to keep count, especially since I was distracted by my seventeen-credit course load.

Fast forward to New Year’s Day of my senior year. I hadn’t seen that “new couple” and their brood for what seemed like years. And I was never a fan of this time of the year — “the holidays” — and the pressure to spend extravagantly on over-priced, forced “gaiety”. That year, money was especially tight, since I was saving for my big move out of that west Bronx dump.

There I was, in front of the private house just south of my old apartment building, washing and waxing my very used, Earl Scheib-painted, ’66 VW Karmann-Ghia. I wore a sweatshirt, for the temperature had moderated to the low fifties, and all of the Bronx’s yellow and poop-studded snow had melted. Perfect car washing weather.

I paused to admire my work. There, trudging up the hill from the Jerome Avenue EL train, was the “new couple”. Clearly, they had had a rough night, but…my pre-teen heart-throb was not looking too good. It was like she’d aged fifty years since I’d last seen her. Oh my darling, what has become of you? Can six kids in less than eight years do that to a person? I guess so!

He, “Darrin”, forced a nod of acknowledgement as he passed. She, on the other hand, recognized the college-aged, now-athletic me and gave me a big wide smile. I gave her a big smile and a “happy New Year, guys!” But my heart sank. What happened to my dream girl? Her ravaged teeth, her complexion, her figure — how could this be?

I continued to detail my car and thought about how Larry and I once long ago carried on about our dream girl, in-between furtive glances at Sophia Loren’s poster taped to my friend’s bedroom wall. The promise of the new year and a new apartment stabilized my wobbling interior gyroscope, set off-kilter by the sight of the once-glamorous woman staggering into the building.

I vowed then and there, as I polished the chromed VW hubcaps, that should I be lucky enough to woo a woman like THAT, I would make darn sure that she was treated right, not — as the building’s super later commented — “like a horse ridden hard and put away wet.”

My work that day was finished, and my local drinking establishment — Durty Nellie’s, on Kingsbridge Road — awaited. Life goes on, I learned, as it will two weeks from now, when a new generation of revelers — or, alternatively, car washers — makes stories of their own to tell, and retell.

Wishing you all better things for 2024!