Hello readers/viewers, and for those in the eastern half of the United States, thank you for checking in between trips to the supermarket to stock up for the coming Snowpocalypse. It is yet to be seen whether this one will one hit big or be another predicted “storm of the millennium!” that isn’t, in either event, I hope you and yours stay safe and warm.
“I don’t feel the cold,” my dad, pictured above, used to say, while blowing on the wet mittens of his daughter, who definitely did and does. “It’s mind of over matter.”
For those who read the most recent Night Nurse, you know my dad did not have it easy; that no one ever gave him a nickel; that he was an entirely self-made man who would go on to support his mother, two wives, and provide for his children and grandchild. He was not without fault - maybe sometime I’ll tell the story of his trying to walk out of a restaurant with a purloined steak knife in his sock (guess I just did) - but as far as showing up in a crisis, he was the man. If I have one bedrock principle, for myself and others, it’s showing up when you are needed; that you know you can call the person and say, “I need help” and they are going to get you help any way they can. That was my dad.
A clip from “The Fall”:
He played street hockey on Hudson Street, played basketball on the public courts on West Fourth. The Enola Gay dropped the first A-bomb on his 10th birthday. Wally Cox lived in a walk-up directly across the street on Barrow with his roommate Marlon Brando, who gave the neighborhood kids, including your dad, rides on his motorcycle. By age 15 your dad was the Boy Friday at the Cherry Lane Theater, taking the tickets and popping the popcorn and raising the curtain and sweeping up after. At 17, he got a scholarship to Fordham and became a starter on the basketball team. But he could not make enough money to support his mother and go to school. He dropped out. He became a bartender at the Blue Mill Tavern on Barrow and Commerce. Johnny Mathis was a regular. He met your mother they moved into the apartment building next door. The rent was $54 a month. A year later you are born at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Your parents did not have the money to get you home. An elderly neighbor named Manny loaned them the $50 to do so.
You do not know for sure but think this may be when your father promised himself that he would never be in that position again, would never have to rely on anyone else. He kept the promise. He put himself through night school at City College. He studied after midnight at a fold-down desk he made, a desk across from your crib in the smallest room of the railroad apartment. He will later tell you, many times, how he’d be mid-study when he’d feel your eyes on him, and when he turned, you’d be standing in your crib, making no sound, just watching him, and that every time he would have to pick you up out of your crib and walk you in a small circle and tell you all the good things that were going to happen.
You can read the rest here. Or watch me read (most of) it!
