Poetry Journal 1 Nov. 17, 2023


 


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The more things change Dec. 11, 2023

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    The rain came in spurts as I made my way to Secaucus for my usual Sunday laundry. I don’t always go to Secaucus, sometimes returning to the old neighborhood in Passaic -- as I will likely do next Sunday when I visit the grave of Peggy, and the graves of my ancestors in the other Lodi cemeteries, dating back to John the Baptist Sarti, who arrived here just after the Civil War. But most weeks, I don’t want to travel that far as was the case yesterday, when I parked near the laundromat, put my laundry into the machines, then headed off to the Dunkin a block away for coffee, a Dukin I briefly worked for after I got fired from the Garfield Dunkin just before my wedding in October 1990 (a time when I had four part time jobs, three of them at different Dunkins, and a fourth as a cleaner for a firm that manufactured elixirs straight out of the 1800s. My history with Secaucus goes back to the 1960s when Hank and I used to pass through it on our way to New York City, at a time when the
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Plagiarism strikes again Wednesday, November 15, 2023

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    I made a mistake. I didn’t copy the link or download the content when I saw the reporter from the local daily had plagiarized by column. I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it, but it irked me that a journalist that has published throughout the nation should have stolen something a small town reporter like me wrote. Someone said I should be complemented. I was annoyed. Still, I hadn’t intended to complain about it, yet the more I thought the more irritated I got. I reached out to the person who posted my column and asked him to make contact with the reporter or her editor to make sure it never happened again. But finally, I decided to reach out to her editors myself, one editor sending me to the main editor, who took a whole day to get back to me and when he did, he demanded proof, as if he didn’t have the copy himself to look at (he has to edit her work and it would not get onto the internet without him). At which point, perhaps two days after the original post, I c
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Positive omens? Dec. 24, 2023

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      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
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