No Mom No Dad

When I was about 13 I was seeing this girl named Mary. On this particular night we were in the vestibule of her apartment house doing some light kissing, all of a sudden her Dad appeared at the inner door, so I said a hastily bid good night and made my way out onto Wycoff Avenue. I decided that I’ll go to the poolroom about 15 blocks north of where I was. There were two ways to get there, one was by bus and the other by subway. I preferred the bus. I was wearing a rather distinct sports coat, one with beige patches on the elbows and one on the shoulder, it was supposed to look like a “hunters’ jacket”. As I made my way along Wycoff Avenue I looked about 5 blocks south where the bus would turn onto Wycoff, before that the bus wasn’t visible. I was getting close to the subway station and could hear a train approaching through the gratings on the street. I really wanted to take the bus, but I started running towards the train station. I kept turning around to see if the bus had made ...

Back then I was a kid we did our shopping at the local grocery store. Sure we had super markets like Bohack and A and P, but you only went there if you were going to buy a lot of groceries and that of course meant money. The local market was run by a strong, yet kind gentleman named John, John allowed you to have a "bill", a running tab for items you couldn't pay for at the time, and that was a life saver every month when funds were low. I remember a couple of things I absolutely loved getting at the store, one was ham with mustard on Italian bread with an ice cold bottle of Pepsi, and sour pickles. The pickles were in a big open wine barrel where the pickles floated in a sour liquid along with a fine assortment of flies. Never gave much mind to the flies, never got sick enjoying those pickles. To earn some pocket change I used to go grocery shopping for Mrs. Jennings, she lived in the next building over. One day she gave me her list of groceries to buy and $20. After p...

Having no Mom no Dad is definitely a doorway to poverty, but all is not lost because you'll experience things your peers will not. Case in mind is the issue of not having electricity, we just didn't have enough money to pay the bill. So instead I learned how to jumper the meter box to give us some electricity, eventually the electric company spotted the jumpers and put a lock box where the meter use to be. So we used kerosene lamps, luckily back then the hardware store had a pump to dispense kerosene. The lamps gave off a surprising amount of light and the fumes were mildly pleasant. Not having electricity meant no TV, no radio, but I did have a Crystal Radio. It didn't require any electricity, it got its power from the radio waves being transmitted by the strongest local radio station. The only problem was it only received a signal from a local classical radio station, I didn't much care for classical music back then. Not having any electricity meant there was no po...

All of us are on a journey, the journey through life. Where we journey depends on the strength of our keel and the winds in our sails. What ports we visit are not always of our choosing, each of us will decide what to do when we arrive. One day we will set sail never to return only leaving our legacy in our wake. This blog is dedicated to people who inspire others to envision a better life.

Like I said you need to make smart decisions at critical forks in the road of life. One thing I believe is that if you don't have a way to make a living life is going to be very hard. Not having a Mom or Dad usually means you probably have limited resources to improve your life like college. I realized a couple of things while in junior high school, this is a time where you begin to discover things. You're no longer a child so you start to think of and do different things. For me it was girls, I met a girl named Louise Fontana, she smoked, play poker like a pro and wore a blue mohair sweater that revealed a hint of breasts. I was mesmerized. The result was my grades began to fall, I played hooky and really didn't care much about how my behavior was going to affect my future. Then one day when it was getting close to moving onto high school, I realized that I wouldn't make anything of myself if I followed my friends and attended a commercial high school. I al...