Nearby Café Home > Food and Travel > Island Living
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Rudy Giuliani's official portrait Face it: even for his staunchest supporters, Rudy Giuliani’s unstable behavior over the past two years has become increasingly embarrassing. Let’s leave aside his doctrinal, knee-jerk support for any behavior toward citizens of color by any New York City policeman, no matter how lethal, excessive, or otherwise irresponsible. Let’s ignore […] Once again I’m coming back from Europe — this time from a stint in Swizerland and Austria, on a flight from Paris to Newark, finding myself seated, improbably, next to two other Staten Islanders, Cristina and her mother Alida, from Tottenville, who appear to have survived three and half weeks of up-close-and-personal mother-daugher and extended-family […] My house stands on Van Duzer Street between Targee Street and Court Street. From the desk where I’m writing this, I can look along Van Duzer toward its intersection with Court Street on the right and Smith Terrace on the left. Van Duzer bends sharply to the left just as those two streets join it, […] I’m not a joiner. But I am a founding member (and member in good standing) of the National Writers Union, which has for some years operated as a United Auto Workers affiliate. As one benefit of that affiliation, I get the UAW’s house organ, Solidarity, which provides me with a regular dose of the labor […] Back home now, Las Vegas behind me, the first official day of spring raw, chilly and wet here on Staten Island. Across the hills and valley out my back windows the branches of the trees remain bare, and the birds haven’t begun to nest and sing. But I have the green tips of bulbs forcing […] I’m writing this from Las Vegas, where I’m presently teaching at the University of Nevada and living in a faculty suite in a student dorm. Escaping the New York winter, for which my karma has substituted an unseasonably chilly period here — even rainy, overcast, gray some of the time. But still warmer than back […] For those of us who understand the base-10 mathematics on which western culture relies, the third millennium of the Common Era began not on January 1, 2000, but on January 1, 2001. New year, new century, new millennium: no one now living will ever see that confluence again. No equivalent this momentous New Year’s Eve […] My mother’s life spanned most of the twentieth century. It fell to me, as the writer in the immediate family, to draft her obituary. What a strange and solemn task — to sum up someone’s existence in a handful of words. Here’s what I wrote. […] Trudging up the steep hill in Golfe-Juan along which the Chemin de la Gabelle ran, there in the south of France last July, looking for a house I’d lived in briefly as a young boy, I began to doubt the wisdom of this pilgrimage. I hadn’t regained my full strength from the car crash in […] As I described in my last column, a car accident on Tompkins Avenue in Rosebank put me in St. Vincent’s Hospital here on Staten Island over the last Fourth of July weekend. That was my first experience with being hospitalized, but my second experience with a hospital named after St. Vincent dePaul. The first took […] |