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Showing posts with label StatenIsland NY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label StatenIsland NY. Show all posts

Thursday, June 10, 2010

SELLING OUT THE PEOPLE ON STATEN ISLAND

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/selling-out-the-people-on.html
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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Any Staten Islanders reading this blog?

Vastly changed the last time I went back four years ago, I didn't get to see this. Maybe I would've felt better about my visit (although it couldn't have been better - I was there for a high school reunion and had a wonderful time).

My old neighborhood was run down and it was no longer safe. A block away the old shops are still there, but the pizza place and the German deli, the fruit and vegetable store, have been replaced by bodegas and Asian shops. I was cautioned not to walk up Castleton Avenue toward the projects on Broadway, but to the left to my grandmother's house, where my cousins live, was fine.

I came away with a visceral sadness.

I've been to the Conference House and to Richmondtown years before it was restored. That was a Sunday drive destination. I loved that place. The Staten Island Ferry was my ride into "the city" and home again for many years. It used to be a nickel, and as to it being "free" now, I think you have to get a transportation pass with an RFID chip to use public transportation.

I was there when the Verrazzano Bridge was built; visited the zoo with my father almost every Sunday, tramped around the woods which is now the green belt with my parents, picking blackberries in the summer.

It was safe and secure and it will always be the taproot of my life. There are just a few cousins left there, but many friends, as I learned at the reunion.

If you visit, please check out the St. George Theater. It is incredible, though I haven't been there since I was a teenager. But like Radio City Music Hall, it is absolutely beautiful.

The boardwalk was a place to get out of the sun. If you walked barefoot on it, you got your feet full of splinters. At the end of it was a brackish creek (we called it the "crick") where I learned to swim. There was sand road that went through the bullrushes dotted with fisherman's shanties. They are all gone now. Dad was a good teacher, and we all fished in the crick, with bait - shrimp and small calico crabs, killifish (killies) and spearing - we used to seine. We also dug blood and sandworms there.

There was time in the late 40s or 50s when we became aware of the polluted water and because of a polio epidemic, I wore a camphor bag pinned to my undershirt with a gold safety pin. We still swam, but even at that age I took notice of the tar balls, the floating objects, and rainbow stains of diesel fuel, oily carcasses of dead seabirds. But there were rewards, too. Like seaglass (pre-plastic), worn to a matte finish from rolling along the sand from who knows where, and shells of razor clams and horseshoe crabs.

Dad asked me to hold his rod so he could get something to eat one day, and I remember I had an inflatable turtle with me. It was light, so I held it under my arm and then the bass struck. I hooked it and I could barely crank the handle on the reel. By the time Dad came back to me, I almost had it beached. He was so proud of me. I never let go of the turtle!

The beaches have been cleaned up, and marine life and birds are thriving.

But I never had time to see this. And that's a shame.

Take a look here: http://oldstatenisland.tripod.com/
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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Amazon Shorts, I'm pleased to say...


has two of my stories up. "Paradise" and "The Last Striper".

Amazon Shorts are 49 cent downloads arrive in PDF format or in plain text in your email.

Both haven't received their covers yet, since I requested a friend's Red-tail Hawk images to be used for "Paradise", and an old snapshot of my father, the striped bass and Uncle John to be used for "The Last Striper".

If you download them and are pleased, I would appreciate a short review (or a long one). There are three more in process and many more to come from me.

On February 7, another Short was published. This one is pure Southern fiction (from a Yankee?). I had my friend's large, wild family to draw from in "The Strange Adventure of Vernal Page". About an old Florida Cracker and his neighbors. It's a fun read, and I enjoyed
thinking of Jean and her brothers and sisters, her little bitty Blackfoot grandmother, who whipped them with switches from a nearby tree if they got out of hand. Jean's a wonderful storyteller, and when she gets started, you can't stop laughing. By the way, she was a Page.
And I would expect Vernie Page to be as resourceful as her family.



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