The Newell Post

Music and summer have always gone hand in hand for me. Certain songs will bring me back to a summer day on Leland Avenue or a blanket on Orchard Beach. Going to a Yankee game and hearing Saturday In The Park is as evocative of a perfect summer’s day as seeing Jeter go from first to third on a single by Bernie.

All good movies have a great soundtrack, and my summer movie throughout the years had some beautiful songs, many of which our good friends on iTunes have made readily downloadable for a modest fee. I encourage you all to create your own Summertime Playlist.

For your general amusement, here is mine.

In no particular order:

Summertime, Summertime by the Jamies

Summer In The City by the Lovin Spoonful

Summer by War

A Summer Song by Chad and Jeremy

In The Summertime by Mungo Jerry

The Boys of Summer by Don Henley

Saturday In The Park by Chicago

Everybody’s Talkin by Harry Nilsson

Goin Back by The Byrds

The Girl From Ipanema by Astrud Gilberto, Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz

Good Morning Starshine by Oliver

HOT HOT HOT by Buster Poindexter and His Banshees of Blues

Had To Cry Today by Blind Faith

Kokomo by The Beach Boys

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band

Ride Captain Ride by Blues Image

A Salty Dog by Procol Harem

Jump Into The Fire by Harry Nilsson

Make Me Smile by Chicago

San Francisco Nights

See You In September by The Happenings

Spirit In The Sky by Norman Greenbaum

Sukiyaki by Kyu Sakamoto

Summer Wind by Frank

25 Or 6 To 4 by Chicago

96 Degrees In The Shade by Third World

Jamming by Bob Marley and The Wailers

My Cherie Amour by Stevie

John Barleycorn by Traffic

Spill The Wine by War and Eric Burden

In The Year 2525 by Zager and Evans

Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny

Well, that’s a good start. I will probably add songs as I hear them or remember them, Some like Sleepwalk go back a long time, most are from the 60s and 7,0s but all bring a smile to my face when I listen to them.

I would love to hear your suggestions for a summer playlist.

It’s been a long time since I experienced the first day of summer or the last day of school as a student. Nevertheless, the euphoria that I experienced, on those days when I was in grammar school or even high school, has never failed to be rekindled as I approach another “summer vacation.”

It seems funny to write about summer vacations now that I have been retired for three years, and the last time I was even a student, though not a child, was in 1990. I still love the first day of summer and the last day of school.

Sometimes the last day of school occurred on the first day of summer. I would feel extra jubilation, however, if the last day of school actually occurred the day before or two days before the first day of summer. You were already in vacation mode and were given another chance to celebrate your good fortune.

Ironically, summer vacation on Leland Avenue amounted to a little stickball, maybe softball at the park, and a few visits to Yankee and Shea Stadiums. No one really went on a vacation.

My parents would take us to Steeplechase Park in Coney Island or maybe Freedomland in the Bronx. Then there would be a few days up with my Aunt Catherine and Uncle Al up in Rosendale, NY.

But, for the most par,t it was on Leland Avenue where I spent my summers.

There was always someone with a transistor radio nearby so that we were awash with the latest summer hits and some golden oldies from the year before. I can hear some of those songs now, and I time travel back to Leland Avenue awaiting the Good Humor Man or the Bungalow Bar truck. In later years the chime of Mister Softee would resonate throughout the neighborhood.

I don’t know how many Spalding balls we would go through in a summer, but it would have to be quite a few. We used them to play stickball, of course, but also curb ball, stoop ball, Ace, King, Queen, box baseball, I Declare War, Triangle, and Off The Wall Baseball. Quite a lot of versatility for a $.25 investment.

The Fourth Of July was always special, and fireworks began exploding quite early in the day. Then in the evening, the skies were filled with rockets and helicopters. Soaring into the night sky and accompanied by a cacophony of aerial bombs that would rattle the windows of houses three blocks away.

When I was still in grammar school, it was a common practice on Leland Avenue that families would set up a sitting area in front of their apartment buildings and provide food and snacks to the kids while the adults did what adults still do today, had a few cold adult beverages.

Those evenings were never immortalized by the likes of Norman Rockwell or Ray Bradbury as both, sadly, were deprived of the Bronx growing up experience. But they still would have enjoyed the sentiment and rejoiced for this special slice of Americana.

Because summer and the last day of school are uniquely joyous events common to all regardless of where you experienced them. The joy one feels thinking about those days is less dependent on where you experienced them than with whom.

So, on this first day of summer, remember the special first days of summer when you were a child. The beauty of that feeling is that you can still have it no matter how old you are.

Happy Summer!

I have been thinking about 1968 a lot recently. I remember talking to my mother on New Year’s Eve in 1968, remarking, “Thank God this year is over.”

It was a terrible year.

It began with the Tet Offensive in the Viet Nam, resulting in the death of thousands of brave and under-appreciated US soldiers.

Then in April, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

In June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California Democratic primary setting him up for the party’s nominee for President.

Hell broke out in the streets of America due to these great American tragedies.

It was hard to ignore what was going on in those days but not as hard as today.

In 1968, there was the evening news and the 11 o’clock news. That was it.

New York City still had a number of newspapers despite losing the Journal American and Mirror, which were two of the triumvirate Sunday papers that I would buy for my family at Hoch’s candy store on Saturday nights.

But, there was the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Post sill in operation so, there were print accounts readily available to complete your education of the horror going on outside of Leland Avenue.

I didn’t read those accounts.

I did, however, read everything I could about Joe Namath and the New York Jets.

The Jets were one of my top two distractions.

The other was the Beatles.

When I wasn’t reading about the Jets, I was listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour, and then of course, The White Album came for Christmas.

Then Hey Jude came out just in time for my entering as a freshman at St. John’s University.

1968 spanned two semesters and two school years for me, which also made it a mostly uninspiring year for me.

I wasn’t a student in the true sense either in high school or my first two years in college. I am not sure which caused what. Were 1968 and all the cultural mayhem responsible for my lackluster academic performance, or was my lackluster academic performance a contributing factor to my harsh recollections of 1968?

Principles of Full Disclosure require me to inform you that drinking may have also played a roll in my interpretations. Sadly, no such excuse can apply to 2020, as drinking is no longer a recreational activity that I often enjoy.

Too late for therapy this morning.

Notwithstanding my dire personal remembrances of this pivotal year in American history, I have come to an epiphany as to how to survive and thrive in such times.

As I mentioned earlier, back in ’68, we only had the evening news and the 11 o’clock news, so avoiding televised news was easy. Unlike today, where we have dueling, all-day cable news channels spinning their slants into willing viewers who already agree to believe anything that is broadcast into their living rooms, avoiding the news requires a little effort.

YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE CHANNEL OR TURN OFF YOUR TV!

This may be hard for most as, in the days of Corona, we are trapped in our homes, and TV has become our window on the world more than ever before. Still, limit your exposure to these deadly radiations that emanate from you HDTV.

In 1968 I was not much of a reader. I read (sometimes) the books that I was assigned in school, especially the Cliff Notes. It would be another two years before I had my first epiphany.

My first epiphany occurred due to the Kent State shooting when protestors were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard.

It was then that I became a student in the truest sense.

Another lesson in surviving bad times.

Cultural immersion.

For me, the arts are not only a distraction from the day’s events but a useful backdrop by which to evaluate what the significance of those events are.

If you don’t understand the Black Lives Matter movement, try reading about slavery, the Civil War, and the struggle blacks have faced in their American Experience.

The same is true regarding the immigrant question. Maybe read about the role immigration has played in US History, and you might even spend a few bucks and enroll in Ancestry.com.

How ’bout them Confederates?

Here’s a thought: Robert E. Lee was a bigger traitor than Benedict Arnold.

The Confederates make the looters in the recent demonstrators look like choir boys.

Will we erect statues of the Looters or name military bases after them?

Ok, no more polemic ranting.

Simply try to evade the hate and learn to seek information that is helpful and enjoyable to experience. For me, I still listen to the Beatles and other music, and I do read. Quite honestly, I am reading science fiction right now, but I have read more serious and personally educational books as recommended by my daughter. I also will resume re-reading Harry Potter.

Music and reading can be informative as well as calming, and we need both in our lives if we are going to survive 2020.

1968 was a year of great strife and division in this country, and 2020 is playing out the same way. The good news is we survived 1968. But we didn’t have the pandemic of a virus just one of hate.

Today we struggle with both.

We have no control of the Corona and must trust our scientists to discover a treatment or cure.

But, no one can eliminate the hate that rips us apart.

This one is on us.

We have the cure if only we wish to apply it.

For the last couple of years, since I have been living in Florida, I have been going up to the Bronx for my birthday. I would go to a Yankee game, last year I got to two. Last year Sean and Jeannine and York took me out to Frankie and Johnnies for dinner, and I am still stuffed.

This year I, sadly, won’t be able to travel for my birthday.

No surprise as this year is a monumental birthday for me, and they usually don’t go as planned.

The last monumental birthday that went well was in 1990 when I turned forty. It coincided with graduating from law school, and Eileen staged a wham-bam surprise party that was just terrific.

Ten years later, when I turned fifty, I had a physical that discovered that I had leukemia.

Feeling cheated out of a celebration, when I turned sixty in 2000, I planned a JIMBORY. It was going to be my own surprise party.

But just after my sixtieth birthday, Eileen was diagnosed with breast cancer.

From then on, I wanted nothing to do with having a big celebration for my birthday, it was just not worth fretting over the “What next?”

So, this year, I will be seventy and, with all that has been going on with Corona and the strife that our country is dealing with, who has a reason to celebrate?

The answer is you do!

You see, Jeannine and York have provided the joy that has been hard to come by these last few months. They will be the proud parents of Eileen and my first grandchild.

So, we will be having a HAPPY MONUMENTAL BIRTHDAY after all, but it will be in December.

Eileen and I are delirious and already learning our new roles.

Having shared in all the joy which with the Newells et al. have been blessed, I know you can appreciate how delighted and excited we are.

I was diagnosed with leukemia, specifically Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, nearly twenty years ago.

Fortunately, the health care and medical treatment that I had access to during those twenty years has given me the opportunity of surviving these twenty years.

There have been great advances made in the variety and effectiveness of cancer treatments during the time of my illness that have kept me alive. (For that reason, I am very confident that there will one day, if not this year then in the next, that we will have a cure for the coronavirus).

However, there is a cancer that will never have a cure.

It is a cancer that has ravaged this nation since its inception over two hundred and forty years ago.

You won’t find this particular type of cancer listed in the PDR, and, unfortunately, no researcher is working on a cure. There is no incentive to find a cure as there is more money to be made with the cancer than with the cure.

Hatred is the cancer.

We have always had hatred in this country. It is entombed and enshrined in our own Constitution, one of our most revered documents.

We hate people who are different in color, who talk differently than the white majority, who may be from a country that is deemed inferior, and we have instutionalized this hatred.

We have done this to many different groups of people for all sorts of reasons. We hated the Irish because they dared to be Catholic and poor; we hated the Jews because they were Jews; we hated Italians because they were Catholic, didn’t speak English, and were poor. We hated the Chinese because they looked different than whites. We put Japanese Americans in internment camps during WWII because they looked more like Japanese than Americans.

What our nation did to blacks and what it continues to do to blacks is a moral obscenity.

I really thought that there would be a great awakening after this terrible coronavirus had been eliminated. I really thought we as a nation would begin to address the ongoing problem of homelessness, poverty, and economic inequality.

With over forty million unemployed, it seemed to be a no-brainer that a new world order would be necessary to bring America out of this despicable time and into the twenty-first century.

Sadly, instead, we have lapsed back into the eighteenth century.

I don’t know what kind of hatred made that cop kill George Floyd. I only know that we have to do something about it.

Removing this hatred from our country is never going to result from a government law or program. For one thing, our government rather enjoys and benefits from the existing hatred and has absolutely no reason to end it.

No, we are on our own to stop the hatred.

Removing this type of disease requires another form of social distancing.

We can no longer be silent.

We can no longer accept sentiments expressed in our presence that propagates this type of disease.

I am embarrassed to write that I have been too complacent in this regard. Not wishing to create a scene or to start an uncomfortable conversation, I have taken the silent approach. No more.

I will remove myself from all hate speech.

Just walk away.

Block on Twitter.

Delete on Facebook.

I sincerely hope that if I offend anyone on these media that they do the same.

We don’t need each other if we cannot agree that Hatred is the New Cancer.

It’s bad enough trying to keep track of the days of the week when you are retired. Not working gives a whole new perspective of the week. There is no longer a feel to any of the days.
My work week would begin on Sunday afternoons. We all got that Sunday Angst just thinking about Monday and the week that lies ahead. I wouldn’t call it depression, but it had a bummer feel to it all the same.

Of course, Monday came and brought with it a little taste of horror. I had to get into commuter mode and jump into my routine. Get up at 5:30, leave the house at 6:00, zip into the deli for a cup of coffee, race to the Speonk LIRR station, wait for the train, and climb on board, and disembark in Brooklyn in a little under two and a half hours after a relatively short subway ride.

It was exhausting.

But the day got underway, and by noon you couldn’t tell that you had been off the previous two days.

Tuesday was worse.

For some reason, when I got to Tuesday, it always made me feel that the week was long, that the road to Friday was inescapably fraught with delays and hazards, making the prospect of getting there more formidable than it appeared the day before.
Maybe I was just tired from Monday.

Wednesday came, and with it came a little bit of hope. People started to call Wednesday, Hump Day. This seemed a little too sexual in nature for me. It seems a bit ridiculous to me now, after all, who has sex on Wednesday?

Thursday was Super Day to me. It was almost better than Friday. It was my weekly Christmas Eve. You weren’t getting any presents, but it was all ok to have a dram or two of Holiday Cheer.

Friday was here at last, and everyone you met on the train had a smile, and everyone at work was a little less tense, and even a two-hour mid-morning meeting couldn’t dampen their spirits.

The day absolutely flew by, which, in a way, was a little sad. I always wanted to savor the feeling of Friday and make it last longer.
Even agnostics and atheists subscribed to TGIF.

But not I am retired.

But now we have Carona.

Both have conspired to remove all feelings and sensibilities about time and the days of the week.

Everyday is Sunday or Friday or Tuesday.

It doesn’t matter.

I get up. I make coffee. I catch up on the news. I read the paper. I do the crossword puzzle. I take a dip. I read my book. I drink lots of water. I have lunch. I set the table for dinner. I BBQ or Eileen and I will cook (well, Eileen really) something inside. We eat. I clear off the table. I load the dishwasher. I go into the den and watch Netflix, Prime, or YouTube. I go to bed.

I don’t mean to sound like I am complaining. I have no right to complain, considering what other people have endured and continue to suffer. My life has been impacted only in the loss of proximity to the people I love.

Flying up to NY to watch Opening Day with Sean was quickly scratched.

Then the trip up to NY to see all three of our children this summer was scratched too.

But when you see that our total of deaths due to Carona is approaching 102,000, these trivial inconveniences don’t deserve mentioning. Still, they are essential to me, and I imagine many of you share the same sentiments.

It isn’t a contest.

My pain is still my pain even though there are so many with more pain, life-altering pain.

I just deleted a few paragraphs that I wrote regarding current events.
I want to keep this observation a little more hopeful for a return to normal living.

I do have faith in science and medicine.

Nearly twenty years ago, I was diagnosed with leukemia.
That was a scary word to me, it still is, but here I am twenty years later.
So, medicine has been very good to me (if I may paraphrase Garret Morris on SNL).

Therefore, I believe medicine and pharmacology will once again come up with a treatment if not a cure.

In the meantime, I will have to adapt my daily feelings and get over it as has been suggested to me time and time again regarding a host of other vexing issues in my life.

We are well, and we are strong, and that is something I am not taking for granted.

My only prayer is that you are as well.

The Coronavirus has illustrated the ongoing tension existing between science and reality.

Here’s what I mean. Science is a system of observation of facts and reality, for many, consists only of feelings.

Scientists tell us that global warming is a fact. However, many of us feel it’s another anti-capitalism hoax.

Corona, to many, is little more than a common flu. Pointing out that thousands die every year from the flu, these people feel that bodies piling up in funeral homes and hospitals being overwhelmed with gravely ill patients is nothing more than a bad common cold.

Science has even attacked our diets.

I don’t know about you but there is no way I am sticking to a Paleolithic diet when there are honest to goodness American Hot Dogs to be grilled this Memorial Day weekend. Besides, if the Paleolithic Diet is so great, how come there are no cave men around or dinosaurs?

I’ll tell you why! When you complement a Paleolithic Diet with a huge asteroid hitting the Earth, it can be absolutely lethal to your longevity.

Remember what George Orville taught us, “Who controls the past, controls the future.”

A spinoff of this is who controls the present controls the past and the future if they can get people to drink the KoolAid.

In the next decade it has been estimated that information will double every two years. My only question is:

WILL ANY OF IT BE TRUE?

I am having a hard enough time sifting through all the misinformation we have now. There are so many doubts that haunt me in the still hours of the morning.

Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?

Did we actually land on the moon?

Did Jose Altuve where a buzzer under his jersey?

And with all of this you’re telling me that there will be even more information to doubt in the coming ten years?

It’s getting so that belief in anything takes a leap of faith more dubious than anything religion offers for consideration. Even watching Netflix can be excruciating on that score.

I started a series about UFOs indicating that many of our most recent presidents (except the current one) believe in UFOs with several having had a personal experience.

Spoiler alert. In one instance Richard Nixon is said to have brought Jackie Gleason to a Florida (of course) air base where they saw aliens just lying there, lifeless. It is said that Gleason was so unerved that he was unable to eat for days.

Now, if you can’t believe Richard Nixon and Ralph Kramden, who can you believe?

Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, “The medium is the message.” How information was delivered or shared was more important than the information itself. You only have to visit Twitter and Facebook to understand that it is the intimacy that we have in the new global electronic village that trumps what is actually shared for our viewing pleasure.

Whether any of the information is true or not, there will be millions who will swear that what, “I read on Facebook about…” was as true as John’s Gospel.

I remember when a common thing you would here back in the day was that ,”You can’t believe everything you read in newspapers.” People didn’t call it fake news but there was a healthy skepticism about certain stories.

Today, I am learning not to believe anything I read on Facebook or Twitter unless of course I want to.

After all, we determine for ourselves what is truth.

We should remember that Memorial Day started off as Decoration Day. It originated on a small scale in the years after the Civil War. It was a day when America’s soldiers who were killed were specially remembered and their graves decorated to show respect and appreciation for their sacrifice.

Here we are at the start of the Memorial Day weekend. It’s sure to be a strange one, that’s for sure.

The name was later changed from Decoration Day to Memorial Day, much as Armistice Day morphed into Veterans Day. Americans like to celebrate its soldiers, both living and dead.

Memorial Day is often celebrated with a parade or other public display to mark the occasion. The entire weekend is special to us as it has served as the unofficial beginning of summer. Barbecues are prepared, guests are invited, beach passes are obtained, and frisbees and baseballs are tossed and caught.

It’s a great time to be an American.

This year, of course, under the pall of the coronavirus, Memorial Day may actually be more memorable than ever before, because none of those things will be happening.

You might have a barbecue, but it is doubtful that guests will be coming over.

You may be able to obtain a beach pass while practicing sufficient social distancing but will you chance it by going to the beach?

I won’t be tossing a baseball or frisbee as my three children cannot fly to Florida and I cannot fly to New York.

Quite honestly, I was scheduled to celebrate Memorial Day by flying home from London but the flight there never happened.

Still, Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer. That used to be such a big thing for me before I retired and moved to Florida. Nothing like looking forward to summer heat after a series of nor’easters and a spring that never broke seventy degrees. Now, however, summer doesn’t offer a break at all. What I now have to look forward to is a string of ninety degree days…one hundred and ten probably.

Winter can’t come soon enough.

Nevertheless, I do look forward to summer.

It’s a time to dust off my summer play list.

It’s a time to put a reading list together consisting of books I already read as a young college student.

There are also movies to be viewed, if Netflix has any left that I have not seen recently.

Summer also promises to be a time of hope.

We hope that the worst of the coronavirus is behind us.

We hope that we can once again visit with family and friends in the flesh and not as an avatar.

We hope that our country remembers what Memorial Day is supposed to be about and it is more than fitting to remember that Decoration Day was created as a tribute after the Civil War to honor ALL of America’s dead.

We hope that we will once be able to translate e pluribus unum and to inscribe that on our hearts.

God Bless America.

I could have ripped off a Harry Chapin tune and entitle this entry Sunday Morning Sunshine, but I am not sure where I will be heading, so Sunshine might have been misleading.

I have always been a big fan of sci-fi movies and books. I recently re-bought the Isaac Asimov Foundation trilogy for some of my summer reading. I will also re-read Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451.

Thinking about the future, about what will be has always attracted us. We make plans for our future. We go to school for our future. We diet and exercise to ensure that we have a future.

Last summer I was planning my future when I bought tickets for London and Ireland. I should be in London right now, probably not blogging. Sorry about that.

Instead, I am checking on today’s numbers to see if Florida has reacted at all to the governor’s breaking us out of lockdown.

The last two months have been like a few sci-fi movies I have seen over the years. On a trip to Disney, Eileen and I went to the movies on a rainy day. We saw a movie called Blindness. The Earth was affected by an epidemic of blindness.

It sounded far fetched and outlandish but still made an interesting plot for a movie.

Fast forward, and here we are with our own epidemic.

The similarities between life and fiction can be startling at times.

In the movie, chaos erupted as you might expect in a world suddenly gone blind.

Our current reality, despite all the calls for “We are stronger together,” and some such words of hope seems to be fraying on the edges.

We have seen armed rebels who despise the Michigan governor for continuing their lockdown besiege the state capital building. In Wisconsin, their highest court overthrew the lockdown order, and people are back at bars elbow to elbow.

While there are, of course, legitimate reasons to want to open up our country again, these decisions seem more concerned with politics than with safety and the economy.

Many states have decided to remove lockdown restrictions, and let’s hope we don’t see a rise in the number of infections and deaths. It hasn’t been easy staying at home and wondering if your family will be ok. It hasn’t been easy going through all the protocols of sanitizing and scrubbing your hands and looking oddly at people who get too close to you.

I was at the doctor’s office Friday for a monthly IVIG treatment to boost my immune system, and I almost took an elderly woman’s head off because she almost backed up into me. I didn’t, but it bothered me that it bothered me.

It also had me thinking about the future.

It’s doubtful that I will get to London before next year, maybe I won’t even get their next year.

It’s doubtful that we are “stronger together.” I am filled with angst about our future as a country. There is so much division, and when politicians prey on prejudice and hatred, well, it sounds dreadfully familiar.

Today is Sunday, and on a normal Sunday morning, millions of Americans would be attending some type of religious service.

Catholics would be going to mass. I will probably listen to a radio broadcast of mass from  Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in a few minutes. More important than praying for a quick cure for this dreaded Caronavirus, I will be praying for a cure for our hatred, a cure for our division, a cure that will restore “UNITY” to the UNITED States Of America.

Life’s experiences should provide lessons, and we have learned so much due to this experience with the virus. I think we should all try to think about what we have learned, and maybe the future will be a better place to be.

This is about a day I had with my mother when I was thirteen years old.

My brother Johnny always did something special during the Christmas holiday for my mother and me. In 1963, when I was in the eighth grade, and the rifle shot from the Dallas Text Book Depository still echoed our ears, Johnny got us tickets for Radio City.

Now, this is something that we had done a few times over the years, but I was thirteen and going to see a movie, and the Rockettes was not something a teenager wanted to do with his mother…or so I thought.

Anyway, the night before our big date my mother reminded me that we were going tomorrow and maybe I made an “Oh NO!” face?

So, the next morning when I got up, I was acting a little out of sorts. My mother knew exactly what was up. When she saw me creep into the kitchen, she immediately asked, “What’s the matter, Luv aren’t you feeling well?”

Of course, I took the bait and said that my stomach was a little upset. My mother then took the bait I offered and said, “Ah, well then, maybe you don’t want to be going to Radio City seeing as your tummy hurts”?

This was too easy…or was it?

She kept looking at me as I ate my breakfast, you know the looks mothers can give?

She was so silent, just looking. The quiet and stillness of our kitchen on Leland Avenue was only interrupted by the snap, crackle. pop of my cereal.

I began to get the guilts.

The Church would do well to get lessons from my mother. You don’t need any fire and brimstone sermons with promises of eternal fire in hell to get people to feel guilty.

So, I cracked.

My mother asked me if I was feeling better, and I told her I was. Then she said. “Well, then maybe you’ll be well enough to go to Radio City?” I answered that I was.

So, I finished my breakfast, got dressed, and we headed over to the Parckchester Number 6 train for our journey downtown.

We walked over 51st Street from Lexington Avenue, taking in all the Christmas sites New York had to offer. Nowhere is better than New York at Christmas.

We made our way to Radio City and got to our seats in no time, as having tickets already helped us avoid a block-long line.

There would be a movie first and then the Christmas Spectacular with the Rockettes and a great Nativity show.

The movie was more spectacular than the Christmas Spectacular. It featured Audrey Hepburn and Carey Grant in Charade.

(It is one of my favorite movies, and Eileen and I and Jeannine try to watch it together at least once a year…during which I re-tell this story.)

We were a half-hour into the movie, and my mother looked over at me, and we both nodded, indicating that this was a great movie but even more a great day.

When the movie was over, I got up as the credits were rolling down the screen and started to put on my jacket. My mother said, “Luv don’t you want to see the Rockettes”?

I was so taken in by the movie and the moment that I forgot, and when I told my mother, “Oh, I forgot,” she shook her head and knew I understood the importance of that day.

We did see the Rockettes and the Nativity, and they were as spectacular as promised. The Rockettes” legs glowed in the dark at on point!

When the show ended, and we headed out of the theater, we both said it had been a terrific day. It was also a memorable day.

As we headed down Fifth Avenue and made a stop in to say a prayer at St Patrick’s Cathedral and admired all the sights of a bustling city, I realized this was a day that I would always remember and also one that I was so glad that I didn’t ruin by not going.

But the day got better.

As always, when we are in the city, my mother and I made our way to Horn and Hardart’s and had a pot pie…it might have been beef that day!

Happy Mother’s Day Mom

XOXOXOX