My two sisters and I shared the one bedroom in the apartment. We were each five years apart. I was the youngest. My parents slept in the living room on a
Occasionally, we’d walk to City Island east of Throgs Neck surrounded by the Long Island Sound where restaurants served up fried oysters, clams, and eels. I thought the world consisted
Everywhere I heard different languages, the staccato Spanish of Puerto Ricans with the constant call to “Mira, mira”(look look). Then there was the richly embroidered Yiddish and Russian and Italian
I grew up counting bees and straining chunks of sandstone into empty soup cans. I watched cats play with dead mice and then run away up the block to an
As a young man in his twenties, my father wore a Stetson pulled down at an angle over his eyes. He was a thoughtful man who hid his complexity behind
At the end of June I witnessed a commotion outside my window—droves of orange specks flying in the air. Not one, but hundreds. What were they? For months before, there’d