August Body

(Originally published 8/13/14)

Among my favorite scenes in the musical 1776 is when the Second Continental Congress debates the verbiage of Thomas Jefferson’s just completed “Declaration of Independence.” Suggestions for changes and deletions are bandied about in rapid fire. One member suggests eliminating a line that he feels unnecessarily takes to task the esteemed British Parliament. “Do you think it wise to alienate such an august body?” he asks. To which John Adams replies: “This is a revolution, dammit! We’re going to have to offend somebody!”

Anyway, this is my August body in blog form—reflections on happenings this month and in prior Augusts. Looking on the bright side of things, the summertime weather for both July and August has been as tolerable as I’ve ever experienced. Largely bearable temperatures and reasonable levels of humidity have ruled. Often New York City summers are brutal with seemingly endless dog days of disagreeable heat, humidity, and stagnant greenish-yellow air.

This year, a historical August anniversary was duly noted. Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal. I was a mere lad when he exited the Washington scene—eleven years old—but I remember where I was on the night of his resignation speech. I was in Bangor, Pennsylvania. While my grandmother was away visiting relatives, my mother looked after my grandfather. After our new president, Gerald Ford, was sworn in, my mom informed her dad that the pair resembled one another. There was a bit of resemblance, I suppose. In August 1974, my grandfather also tasted lentil soup for the first time—my mother’s homemade version—and offered his opinion on the fare. “I’ve tasted worser soups,” he said.

Suffice it to say, August 1974 was a tad different than its progeny: August 2014. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but kids don’t seem to play much anymore. My every youthful waking hour was spent outdoors in those bygone summers. Now, who’s playing Wiffle ball, which I loved doing more than anything else as a young boy? Though there was no such thing, I think I imagined one day being a professional Wiffle ball player. Then stickball came along. In fact, we played every conceivable version of baseball from box baseball to punch ball to curb ball. The boxes on the concrete sidewalks and the curbsides are still around, but one would be hard-pressed to find a solitary soul utilizing them for sport anymore.

We’ve become a zombie-like society. I see mothers pushing their children in strollers who are completely preoccupied with their iPhones, even when crossing busy streets. Fathers are equally oblivious. What, pray tell, are these folks checking out every single moment in time? That’s what I’d like to know. It’s at once creepy and dispiriting. Exactly how is this sort of behavior going to impact the future? Despite having lived through a “national nightmare,” as newly sworn in President Ford dubbed it in his first speech to the nation, I had a lot of fun in August 1974. I didn't get sidetracked—even for a minute—during that protracted nightmare and afterwards. I was too busy playing Wiffle ball.

(Photo 1 from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Come to the Front Desk Please

(Originally published 4/10/25)

Once upon a time, I was summoned to jury service. Like clockwork every two years. I never shirked my civic responsibility and sat as a juror in a criminal trial. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Bronx County jury-duty experience was somewhat different from today’s, I discovered, when I received a summons—my first in three decades—last month. For starters, twenty-first century technology didn’t exist back then. Clerks weren’t behind bullet-proof glass with laptops and scanners at their disposal. Fittingly, my recent service played out in a newer building—the glass-paneled “Hall of Justice”—and not the aging, main county courthouse on the Grand Concourse. The latter, where I previously served faithfully, is still operational, but no longer directly behind the since demolished and rebuilt Yankee Stadium. Changes on many fronts.

So, not only was I in a more modern location for jury duty, but I was subject to a more modern orientation. Thirty years ago, prospective jurors were lectured—hectored even—that jury duty was in fact a duty. Employers were not obligated to pay their employees while serving—and don’t you forget it! Accept the responsibility and be responsible, including showing up on time. There was zero tolerance for tardiness. “You’ll be turned around and sent home,” the jury clerk intoned. “And marked absent and absent for the entire day.” Fast forward to the present and lateness, it seems, is no big deal. People were checking in more than an hour late without penalty.

Nowadays, when entering any government-related building, the first thing that leaps out at you is the pre-entry screening process: metal detectors and the wand. My prior jury-duty date—before this year—was in April 1993, when folks came and went as they pleased at the courthouse. No metal detection required. A memorable line from yesteryear’s orientation was “Anyone carrying a gun, come to the front desk please.” This command never failed to elicit chuckles from prospective jurors. The orientation of the past, too, was devoid of contemporary identity gibberish and sans—believe or not—any mention of “non-binary.” The current male-female bathroom situations in the “Hall of Justice” mirror the times, I suppose—i.e., one can call on whichever biffy aligns with his/her/preferred pronoun “gender identity.” What could possibly go wrong?

This go-round, I was summoned for one voir dere, where the judge and respective lawyers ask questions of prospective jurors. A panel of sixty or so men and women was brought to a courtroom in pre-trial of a fellow charged with murder in the first degree. What was conspicuously at odds from past voir dere’s, I thought, was the initial query posed to the assembled: Is there anyone who would find it impossible to sit for an approximate one-month trial? Save for twelve individuals, including yours truly, the remaining players raised their hands and were excused no questions asked. This was once a pause-button matter. On a case-by-case basis, it necessitated approaching the bench and conferring in private with often unsympathetic judges and attorneys.

But that was then and this is now. After thinning the herd, the twelve of us were questioned—with the aid of a shared Ronco cordless microphone—for possible selection to the jury. In the end—out of approximately five-dozen people called for the panel—not a solitary soul was selected. We were all dismissed, too, after serving two days on jury duty and wouldn’t be summoned again in the Bronx for at least six years. At least that’s what the powers-that-be said.

What, pray tell, has changed? The numbers don’t add up. Two days’ service, mass dismissals without a fuss, and see you in six years. I served for nine days and sat through five voir deres—never picked for an actual jury—in my first jury-duty tour, then five days after that and three days after that. Lastly, I sat through a week-long trial as a juror. Pay was $14/day plus carfare back then. Today, it’s $40/day, no carfare, and the bathroom of your choice. And did I mention the big screen TVs in the jury assembly room? I hadn’t seen a Family Feud episode since Richard Dawson hosted.

Sailing...Take Me Away

(Originally published 7/5/14)

During the summer of America’s bicentennial year, 1976, everybody in the environs of New York City was talking about “Operation Sail.” This special Fourth of July celebration slowly but surely got rolling in the weeks leading up to Independence Day. Hundreds of tall sailing vessels—throwbacks to a bygone age—navigated their way to New York Harbor and the Hudson River.

I was thirteen years old that summer and, as I recall, “Operation Sail” was a big deal. An aunt of mine, younger brother, and I hiked over to the Henry Hudson Bridge, which connects Northern Manhattan with the Northwest Bronx at the confluence of the Harlem River Ship Canal and Hudson River. In this rare instance—the only time in my memory—the bridge closed to traffic so that one and all could congregate on its span and feast their eyes on some of the ships on the river. It was quite a spectacle with New Jersey’s Palisades supplying a picture-perfect backdrop. Bicentennial fever raged in the heat and humidity of this memorable New York summer.

Perhaps the biggest difference with today’s Fourth of July festivities—as compared to the past in my old Bronx neighborhood—is the almost complete absence of firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and their various offshoots. These things were all illegal when I was a kid, but it seems that anybody who wanted them could get hold of them in Chinatown or someplace else. The police, for the most part, turned a blind eye to the possession of fireworks. Firecrackers popped weeks before the Fourth, and the day itself was one big bang. The morning after found the local streets covered with spent everything. I remember combing through the street debris for the occasional unused firecracker.

Can people even buy a box of Sparklers nowadays? Despite setting the family garbage can on fire by prematurely discarding one, they were generally harmless fun. It’s a good thing garbage cans in those days were made of metal and not plastic. The garbage men who had to lug those heavy things around are no doubt better off today, but those venerable cans survived Sparkler fires and lived to tell.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Summer Daze

(Originally published on 6/23/17)

Once upon a time, I relished summer days and nights. The heat and humidity one-two punch didn’t faze me in the least. No temperature or relative clamminess was too high to prevent a stickball game. In fact, playing on searing asphalt during a scorcher—sans water—was par for the course. There was no such thing as individual bottled water in the 1970s! Sure, the gang could have brought along a cooler, thermos, or canteen to games, but it just wasn’t on our radars. Looking back, we sometimes played doubleheaders in ninety-five-degree heat without liquid pick-me-ups. After game two, we were a parched lot in a mad-dash search for a non-contaminated watering hole—tap water from the kitchen sink or powdered iced tea. What American TV western didn’t feature its protagonists short of water and in a do-or-die hunt for it in super-dry desert climes?

Ah, but summer days just aren’t what they once were to me. It's more like summer daze. This week, the calendar officially noted that it was indeed summer with the longest days of the year upon us. As a youth in the third week of June, I was uber-active in the great outdoors until the last sliver of daylight disappeared. Now, I spend well-lit summer evenings inside and do all that I can to circumvent the infamous New York City heat and humidity. Air conditioning certainly has its place. For me, there is no more stoop sitting and chewing the fat with neighbors on poor Air Quality Index (AQI) days and nights. I don't recall whether the AQI was calculated in the good old days. However, I can say that the air quality in the 1970s was considerably fouler than it is today.

Bad air notwithstanding, the summers of my youth found the Good Humor man turning up every night at around the same time. Good Humor’s cola-flavored Italian ice—a favorite—was a rock-solid frozen block. In attempting to sliver off pieces of the ice with the tongue-depressor spoon supplied, its paper cup would get punctured beyond recognition. The only cola taste—if you could call it that—of their watery Italian ices was found at the bottom of the paper cups, which by then were sorry casualties of war. But what did we expect for twenty cents? They were worth every penny.

Summertime also meant a vacation on the seashore of New Jersey or Long Island. It meant day trips to the happening hot spots incessantly advertised on the New York City metropolitan area airwaves, like the Brigantine Castle—a haunted fortress on the Atlantic in Brigantine, New Jersey. A three-hour drive from the Bronx to the Brigantine Castle was a memorable summertime adventure. The equivalent for my peers’ kids and grandkids today—on the satisfaction front, I'd wager—would be two weeks in the South of France or Swiss Alps.

A final summertime footnote and memory from forty years ago. It’s a solitary snapshot kind not associated with anything monumental. I had completed a high school final exam during my freshman year. It was an afternoon in mid-June 1977. I was on my way home alone via mass transit—from the East Bronx to the West Bronx. Standing at a bus stop on Jerome Avenue across the street from two of the ugliest-looking buildings in the borough—Tracey Towers—I patiently waited for the BX1, which would take me on the last leg of my journey home. It was overcast, dreadfully humid, and I distinctly remember seeing lightning on the distant horizon—heat lightning, I think. This far-away hot flash nonetheless signified a lot to me—school’s end, summer, and a couple of months of incredible bliss. Enjoy it while you can!

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Charting Cars in the Bronx

(Originally published 4/10/21)

Once upon a time, I charted car comings-and-goings on individual pieces of construction paper. Sometime in the mid-1970s the teenage me plopped down on my front stoop, and occasionally at the front window, and recorded the manufacturers of the automobiles that passed me by. What an interesting boy I was. Back then, I knew car makes and models—be they Dodge Darts, Chevy Impalas, Buick Centuries, and most everything in between—because they were respectively unique and readily identifiable.

In those simpler times in the old neighborhood, everybody knew a whole lot more of their neighbors than city folk do nowadays, including the specific kinds and colors of the cars they drove. Locals distinguished themselves with their choice of vehicles and couldn’t, therefore, come and go incognito. Currently—with some notable exceptions, of course—what is parked along the streets, and in area garages, look blandly similar, despite all the amazing technological advances therein.

Automobile hues in the 1970s were also in sync with the fads and fashions of that groovy snapshot in time. Danny drove a dark-brown Ford LTD; Cathy, a pale-yellow Volkswagen "bug." Jack “elbows” had a sky-blue Plymouth Duster, and Jimmy and Desi next door, a bright-red AMC Rebel. There were folks who drove gas-guzzling “boats,” as my friends and I called them back then. Arthur’s father parked a metallic gold-colored Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight on the street that was the size of a stretch limousine Others sought out economy cars that were simultaneously affordable and fuel efficient in an age of increasingly high gas prices and, sometimes, outright shortages, courtesy of that awful cartel in its heavy-handedness heyday.

My father owned a 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne for fourteen years. It had an interior smell—a car-seat vinyl meets gassy residue kind of scent—that inspired carsickness, particularly without something called air conditioning. In fact, one member of my family would puke his guts out at the mere notion of getting into the thing—yards away from it—before every road trip long or short. The Biscayne was at long last retired in 1973 and we thereafter rode in style in a second-hand Buick Skylark, purchased from a guy on the next block. It was a set of wheels with the creature comforts of air-conditioning and a kneeling-bus quality before there was such a thing. A decade later, somebody convinced my father to get with the program and purchase a Chevy Chevette, a car that drove so many “people happy” with its incredible gas mileage. It had a stick shift, the back windows could only go down halfway, and no air conditioning. Sure, it got decent gas mileage, but there was no turning back. We were a spoiled clan by then.

Chevrolet, by the way, won the gold medal in my 1970s car-charting Bronx survey—by a considerable margin if memory serves. There were foreign cars around then, but they were foreign to most drivers who often were loyal to one American manufacturer or another. Times change and stoop statisticians—sad to say—have gone the way of the typewriter and countless classic automobiles with style.

Catching the June Bug

(Originally published 6/5/22)

Once upon a time, the month of June shined. It embodied a heaping helping of good: long days, the school year's end, backyard barbecues, baseball in its many incarnations, and imminent summer vacations in exotic locales like the Jersey Shore and the North Fork of Long Island. Thirty years ago in June, I regularly attended a poetry open mic at a now defunct eatery and gin mill called Sidekicks Café. A poet named Ron—who was especially entertaining and the exception to the rule—recited his original verse in a soothing Southern accent, a muted cadence not typically heard in the Bronx. One particular poem of his repeatedly referenced the “June bug.” It vividly brought to life this clumsy insect of the night. Listeners visualized the bumbling creature careening toward a light source, while crashing into windows, screen doors, and human heads in the process.

In the beetle family, the June bug was not a sight for sore eyes. And still isn't! Contrarily, its nighttime companion, the lightning bug, was a welcome summer visitor. Flashing on and off as the fledgling summer days of June grew dark, few insects could compete with its dazzling light show. Meanwhile, the June bug blundered along. I don’t imagine it was dangerous—not a carrier of malaria or sporting a lethal stinger—but it was ugly as all hell. Come to think of it: While the lightning bugs were impressive on warm summer nights, human contact was not recommended. Their inevitable calling cards: a nasty, lingering odor not easily scrubbed away. And, too, in the bright light of day, they were rather gruesome looking.

June was the ultimate anticipatory month, a time to get the summer ball rolling. We had the June bug, as it were, and it impacted all ages—from those of us who waited patiently for the Good Humor man to make his daily evening rounds to the adult set who commenced with their nightly stoop-sitting gossip-fests. Spanning generations, stoop sitting was an urban art form. It’s still practiced, but not as extensively as when I was a boy. Stoop sitting supplied a ringside seat for both the expected and unexpected. Like the time a new neighbor and homeowner was seen chasing his sister down the street while uttering a litany of profanities. I wonder what that was all about? Footnote: The man lived in the same house for fifty years before passing away last year. I don’t know whatever became of his sister, if she inherited his property, or if she's even among the living.

Just as Good Humor retired its fleet of trucks and became exclusively a supermarket brand, so many of those who caught the June bug along with me have gone the way of a funeral parlor’s laminated prayer card. It would be fair to say that I’m not quite as enamored with June as I once was. Still, the June bug endures in nature and in countless memories as well. I’ll have a grape-lemon-flavored Bon Joy Swirl please.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Braking Bad

(Originally published 3/9/20)

Governor Cuomo has officially advised his considerable and diverse constituency to avoid “crowded spaces,” like the subway. This is no small order, especially for New York City’s nine million inhabitants, many of whom use mass transit daily. Well, despite my esteemed governor’s counsel, I opted to venture out this weekend and descend into the underground—and so did a lot of other people by the looks of things! Without them, yesterday’s ride wouldn’t have risen to the level of a “crowded space.”

While I fully appreciate that the coronavirus is not to be taken lightly, I couldn’t help but reflect on the recurring electronic announcements in subway stations, which instructed riders to frequently wash their hands for at least twenty seconds and sneeze or cough—should the need arise—into their elbows. Surprisingly, I didn’t spy a solitary soul wearing a mask in my travels but did see a discarded one on the sidewalk.

The highlight of my downtown train ride was not the stuff of sneezing and coughing in a subway car. It was idly sitting for about twenty-five minutes at the 191st Street station. The reason: Somebody—or somebodies, actually—activated the emergency brakes on the two trains ahead of the one in which I was a passenger. Now, that doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me. I know there are times when these mysterious brakes are pulled in real emergencies. In my personal experience, though, the braking was courtesy of a lunatic, punk, or some combination of the two.

Anyway, after finally reaching my destination, I ventured out into the great outdoors—on a pleasant post-clock change morning—and encountered an incredibly angry man on his phone. He was informing a passerby of the wind beneath the wings of his rage. What was all the fuss, you ask? His civil rights were "violated,” he said, by a mall security guard with, naturally, no “proper cause.” And this fellow wanted to “press charges.”

I suppose the guy called 9-1-1, because New York’s Finest materialized in short order. Initially, two officers spoke with him for several minutes. At one point an officer got into the man’s face. This made me happy for some reason. Honestly, the complainant sounded to me like an annoying whiner—a victim poseur. From what little I could glean, the security guard wanted to look inside a shopping bag of his from another store, which can be humiliating, I know, if you’re an innocent party. But making such a big stink about it…

Eventually, the two policemen went inside the building where the violation occurred. They came out a couple of minutes later with some security detail, who watched with interest further interaction between the police officers and the aggrieved party. This tête-à-tête went on for more than a half hour, and a couple of more officers even joined in the conversation. But nobody on the scene took out a pad or notebook and wrote anything down. They were more than likely trying to convince the fussbudget to forgettaboutit. Less paperwork for them and, honestly, civil rights violations and pressing charges should—when push comes to shove—be the real thing or nothing. Of course, I’m only guessing here and filling in the blanks. Perhaps I’m violating this crybaby’s civil rights by reporting what I saw and what I didn’t see. I just don’t know.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)