Day to day

  It is the last day of a year I never thought I would live to see. Everything is reflection now, looking more in the rear view mirror than at the road ahead, knowing that many more miles lay behind than I can expect to tread. Everything is scattered – like the aftermath of the big bang as our lives spread out and separate from each other’s, in the end, each of us condemned to our own tiny place a vast universe, where rising and falling stars no longer apply, only that we still remain, traveling, though destined to burn out. I wake to darkness and cold, but not the frigid chill we might expect for New Years Day, but as if we have already arrived in early March and await blooming we know will not transpire for months to come, and yet hope for. I miss Pauly and Hank, even though they long ago faded from my universe and have their own place elsewhere in a space that is beyond mine at this moment, and only faith in the afterlife promises that we might meet again. This year, 202

   It's the eve of New Year's Eve. So naturally, I am sick again -- at a time when I usually consider my own mortality. None of us -- None of the Garley gang for sure -- thought we'd get to live this long despite Hanks one time prediction that we would all grow old on a porch somewhere in rocking chairs. For some reason, this year is particularly poignant-- perhaps because I've focused on Paulie too much and traveled to sites where he would have been had he lived. To say the world is going to hell in a handbasket is an understatement because it is clear that those people we always considered whackos in the past have now become the curators of this insane museum, nut cases who believe in man made climate change, UFOs and sexual identity confusion. we can all accept this as an outgrowth of the 1960s in which we all wanted to have our freedom to do anything we wanted to do and we did, and the result is a total destruction of those structures that keep society w

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    Today is Garrick’s 74th birthday. His is the middle birthday in a pack that had Hank on Christmas Eve, and Pauly’s on Dec. 28. Garrick used to kid Pauly about they being the same age on Midnight between the two days, although with Pauly’s passing almost four years ago, we have all caught up and passed him by, just as we passed Hank after his passing back in the winter of 1995. Garrick was forced to retire earlier this year when his company finally shut down a parts manufacturer for which he worked for nearly 30 years and had hoped to stretch this to a full 30 years before officially retiring. Oddly enough, his company remained functioning throughout the COVID pandemic, partly because it was seen as “essential” in an era when that word gets misused frequently, though the parts they made apparently were necessary in keeping certain other really essential industries operating. The fact that we have all worked for our respective companies for decades scares me a little bi

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  I should have remembered the address of where Pauly and Rick lived, during that decade after Pauly moved out of Passaic for the last time. The number and name so completely fitting Pauly’s magical life. If there was any place, I might find Pauly’s lingering ghost it would be on that island where he lived and in the now-abandoned library building where he worked for more than 25 years, cast out by new development and a new library building for which he was no qualified to serve as director. It struck me that we should visit that place only after we had already taken off to visit his last place of residence, where we went each time after his passing. That world around that lake changed dramatically as the town fathers began to realize they could profit from massive new development, especially on the island where the old amusement park once sat, increasing the population to the point where Pauly – because he lacked the degree in library science – would be put out of a job by som

  If all goes as planned, we’ll be off to see Pauly today, even though he will have been dead since January 2020. Perhaps thinking of Pauly made me take a tour of family gravesites yesterday, buying flowers for each just as a possible final gesture, since I’m one of the few family members who continue to visit them. I even bought flowers for Peggy’s site, putting them against the Teddy Bear that remains a fixture there despite many months of weather. In some ways, a trip to each of these is a trip into Pauly’s life, since many of my relatives (including my ex-girlfriend, Peggy) are buried near our old stomping grounds in Passaic. I drove to the florist first, knowing that for Christmas it would be open, even though for most of the year it is closed on Sunday. I brought five arrangements for each of the five graves, getting the florist to make up one to stick on the wall of my mother’s above ground tomb. Then, I crossed the street to the historic cemetery where my great grandfat

    She's out there somewhere, stalking me like she did when we first met, her indominable spirit carrying on despite all that she had gone through, all the dreamed forced to give up, all those lost souls she's needed to abandon in order to keep herself a live, a stranger who is not a stranger. I know as much about her as I know about myself, except for how she ticks -- after all this time and all I've read, all she has revealed, I still can't get inside her skin, in that shell she lives in this time after having left so many other shells behind, the husks of those who professed to love her, maybe who still think they love her when the shell they so admire, so carve for is as empty as a gravestone -- only bones beneath. 2023 menu email to Al Sullivan

      In a week heavily endowed with omens, I thought for certain seeing the funeral procession on our way to Asbury Park posed a dark day ahead. After the amazing omen from our Thanksgiving trip (the whales), I hoped for nothing to counter this positive vibe. The trip down went smoothly, with the except of a few whacko drivers pretending to be Indy 500 racers, and we parked in our usual spot near the top of Asbury where it interacts with Cookman and took our usual stroll, peering into the old merry-go-round house before passing the fake Christmas tree of lights, the Empress Hotel (with its rainbow street crossing) and down the board walk from the Casino to the Coliseum. Even though we had arrived late, the boardwalk was largely empty – although there were a few groups of people on the beach, foolishly standing on the slick jetty stones to pose for pictures. Even inside the coliseum, the only crowd was at the coffee shop, and even this was less well-attended than we expected