My family was not a household that was enamored with the power of reading to enrich one’s life. My mother Vivienne believed that high school and college were places that existed mainly in 1930’s movie depictions of school as an institution replete with gaiety and frivolity. There was no actual…

“My father’s house shines hard and brightIt stands like a beacon calling me in the nightCalling and calling so cold and aloneShining ‘cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned,”Bruce Springsteen, “My Father’s House”The mobile home at the edge of town, just beyond the lights of Fargo, swayed, moving…

“My father’s house shines hard and brightIt stands like a beacon calling me in the nightCalling and calling so cold and aloneShining ‘cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned,” Bruce Springsteen, “My Father’s House” The mobile home at the edge of town, just beyond the lights of Fargo…

Trying to strike a New Yorker pose in Midtown Prologue-Originally this piece was part of a larger one about my love affair with New York City and my adopted neighborhoods of Inwood and Washington Heights. One day I was reading the “ New York Times,” Readers Write Section. Me…in the…

“I stood arrow straight Unencumbered by the weight Of all those hustlers And their schemes I stood tall Above it all I still believed in my dreams Like a rock I was strong as I could be Like a rock Nothing ever got to me Like a rock I was something to see Like a rock. . .” Bob Seger-“Like a Rock” “Like a…

The Pinehurst Stairs Washington Heights NYC The west wind was blowing off the Hudson River from New Jersey and was just starting to chase away the heat and humidity that is late July New York City. I was somewhat irritated and more than aware of the irony that I had come to the…

I grew up in an unusual world filled to the brim with eccentrics. At the time I bemoaned the fact I was not living life on the set of Ozzie and Harriet. I craved normal but it was not to be had. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton I was more or…

Music is everywhere in New York City. The air is perpetually alive with the rhythms of hip hop, reggae, salsa, doo-wop, folk, hard rock, punk and anything else a fertile imagination could conjure up. Each neighborhood has its own soundtrack, a barely perceptible cadence that people unconsciously move to. My first…

This one is for JB who set me on the path and my teacher Anna Marti, who showed me the purpose of the journey. I never intended to become a wrestler. To begin with my overly protective, doting, Norwegian grandmother had been the one who was mostly responsible for my…