Martin J. Kleinman's Blog, page 10

Rock On, Rocketman

This was quite a show, from what I remember, heh heh heh…

Elton John’s album, 11-17-70, was recorded live for a WPLJ-FM concert here in New York City. Just days later, me and my crew slapped on our Caswell-Massey patchouli, took the #4 train to 14th Street, and walked to the Fillmore East.

It wasn’t to see Elton, though.

We were Leon Russell fans and Elton was just icing on the cake. We heard the ‘PLJ concert and we were intrigued. The trio’s set list was far more energetic than the introspective tunes on his first album. In our heads, Elton and Bernie Taupin were decent, up-and-coming singer songwriters. Elton had a great voice and played well. We expected, you know, “Your Song.”

The acts that night were to be McKendree Spring, then Elton, then Leon Russell. Well. Elton comes out in a canary yellow tux and rocks out for WAY over his time limit, does multiple encores, and leaves the audience limp and exhausted for poor Leon, who had to race through his set. We were like, WHAT did we just see here?

We followed him through the years and rooted for him through his personal trials and tribulations. Financial disasters. Substance abuse. Shifting tectonic plates in the recording industry.

Fifty years later, guess who’s still standing. Elton. Bloodied but not broken.

Today, thinking about that WPLJ-FM concert, and the Fillmore East show, and Elton’s career evolution (and mine), I feel a sense of wistfulness. I know, the rains of November will do that to a person’s psyche.

What I do know is, his hard rocking songs are fun and showy, but his ballads — with Bernie’s lyric genius — are timeless.

And what I also know is, on this strange erev-Thanksgiving in The Time of Covid-19, this song of his springs to mind as his finest.

We’re lucky. We’re alive. We’re still healthy. We’re still standing! Stay safe and enjoy. See you on the other side, with a fridge full of leftovers.

But Not This Year

The Monday before Thanksgiving, the work in the Kleinman-Stolzenberg household usually begins.

But, not this year.

One of my masterful turkeys, roasted to perfection, from Broadyke Butchers on Dyckman Street in Inwood. But not this year…

I have a Thanksgiving folder with all our favorite family recipes: the turkey, the sage sausage stuffing, sweet potatoes, Boursin mashed potatoes, roasted Brussels Sprouts, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, silky butternut squash soup. This is what we made every year for up to 18 knuckleheads since the mid-90s.

But not this year.

Usually on Monday, I’d go down to the basement and bring up the folding chairs. But not this year.

Then we’d tussle about how much charcuterie to buy, for pre-dinner snacks. “We don’t need that much!” I’d say. “Stop being so cheap!” she’d say. “It’s not cheap — it’s wasteful!” I’d counter. She’d always win, and we had leftover triple creme and manchego for days.

But not this year.

On Tuesdays before the Turkey, we’d go shopping and panic when the store was out of control, brimming with clueless consumers arguing about the difference between a yam and a sweet potato, or consulting on cooking times, turkey sizes, and other holiday minutiae we had down cold.

But not this year.

The night before, we’d get to work on the pies and sides. But not this year.

Dan always made the pecan pie, with a healthy wallop of Maker’s Mark.



The Demon Child, hard at work on those pies.

The day-of, Ronni would do the table and it was always so festive. We used our special reddish tablecloth with a cool autumny centerpiece. But not this year.

Invariably, someone (usually my parents, or her mother, or sometimes BOTH), would come hours early. Ding-dong! We’d answer the doorbell, still vacuuming, in our sweatpants. Why? Who the eff knows? It was part of the ritual.

But not this year.

No, this year, we are going back to Brooklyn, just the two of us, to have a quiet session with Dan and Mo. We’ll bring lots of wine and a pie. Dee and Mo are doing all the rest. They are great hosts and master chefs. The food is going to be top shelf; they always go all-out.

Maybe this is the year the Thanksgiving baton is passed? No one is sure of anything anymore. It’s one day at a time, one foot in front of the other, like Phillippe Petite between the two World Trade Center towers. Whatever you do, don’t look down.

Not this year.

This year, whatever you do, don’t look down!









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Pizza Rat in the Time of Covid

Note: this is NOT a pineapple slice. NYC does not do pineapple pizza. Two, notice how people keep walking. That is correct. Just another day in paradise.

Click on the link and see what I mean.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHs2S4RDAXL/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

A Thanksgiving Pastrami

Norman Rockwell’s take on traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

At first, I liked this newcomer, a new guy at a client’s company. He was roughly my age, he played the guitar; we liked the same music. Above the black Les Paul that hung on the wall of his suburban office in the Midwest was a big old bar sign of a man hoisting a mug of suds.  Beneath the man were the words: “Beer.  Helping ugly people have sex since 1862.”

I wanted to believe we were kindred spirits.  And at this phase of life, I’ll take all the new friends I can get.

But in the weeks that followed, this new fellow quickly got under my skin.  It wasn’t his “dontcha know?” Fargo accent, either.  Rather, it was the fact that he took every opportunity to break my chops about my regional accent. In his approximation of New Yawk-speak, I’d be treated to his lame “Yo, how’s it goin’?”

I supposed that is what passed for wit amongst his sunset-seating, walleye-eating crowd. His part of the world (deleted here, to protect the innocent) is a very nice place, of the sort where the locals consume king-cut prime rib by the roaring fireplace of The Double Muskie Pub, secure that their eight-eight percent white world would forever repel virtually all manner of “the other.”

And
at the risk of getting all “Sarah Vowell-ish,” it is instructive to note that taciturn
Europeans settled to the region’s wild prairies and virgin forests, via
emotionally reserved New England.  The
locals vamoosed out of Vermont as soon as the Erie Canal was complete and the
Blackhawk Wars were won. 

In short order, Yankee elites came to this guy’s home turf for “the waters” and the area was recast as the “Saratoga of the West” – that is, until the healthy, healing waters were befouled by radium pollution.

Groaning Geiger counters aside, Money Magazine ranked it as one of our “100 Best Places to Live.” 

Last
November, I sat at my desk in anticipation of my recent weekly client update
conference call.  Then the new guy, let’s
call him, oh, “John Smith,” called.

Midwesterners enjoy starting business calls with chitchat.  Generally, I’m ok with their “how’s the weather?” and “what are you doing this weekend?” opening gambits.  But this particular phone call caught me completely off-guard.

He actually started, in his New Yawk, put-on accent, with: “Yo, you havin’ pastrami and all the trimmings this Thanksgiving.”

A nice piece of pastrami is not on my Thanksgiving menu.

I was shocked.  Because he knew that I am Jewish, and he knew what he thought he could say, that is, get away with, since he was – after all – “the client”.

And, thus taken aback, I wanted to say:  “You know, my dad had the front of his head rubbed by southern boys when he was in basic training in Camp Van Dorn Mississippi.  They were looking for his Jew horns.”

And
I wanted to add: “And weeks before he
shipped out to fight Nazis, he got into a bar brawl at a local roadhouse, and
had his forehead split open by an MPs baton, because he dared to play Louis
Jordan and His Tympani Five on the juke box.

“And
the following winter, his foxhole buddy drawled, in the snow and sleet of the Bulge,
‘you a Jew?’”

And I felt my blood pressure build. And my gut said stomp on the gas, rev it up, Thelma and Louise, baby, screw the account, forget the money, damn my professional “reputation.” Just tell him to piss off, because after all the years, and all the BS, I’ve had it.  And now this?  “Yo…you havin’ pastrami for Thanksgiving?”  And he actually added: “With all the trimmings?”

But the adult me, thankfully, as befit the holiday, grabbed
back the steering wheel and I answered, flatly:

“Actually, I’m serving Oregon Pinot Noir, and we’re having roast turkey, and sage sausage dressing, cranberry sauce, pan roasted Brussels sprouts, candied yams, walnut bread, pumpkin and apple pie – you know, our usual, traditional fare…

“So, to look at our table, you’d never suspect that we were….”

And I stopped myself. And there was silence at the other end.  And we continued our update meeting.  As if nothing, at all, was wrong.

I See Dead People

Late September and I am tumbled, humbled, by the Ten Days of Awe. In hours, it will be Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Will I, or won’t I, be allowed to continue on this planet for another year? TBD, folks. For, as it is written:

On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed. And on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
How many shall die and how many shall be born
Who shall live and who shall die
Who at the measure of days and who before
Who by fire and who by water
Who by the sword and who by wild beasts
Who by hunger and who by thirst
Who by earthquake and who by plague
Who by strangling and who by stoning
Who shall have rest and who shall go wandering
Who will be tranquil and who shall be harassed
Who shall be at ease and who shall be afflicted
Who shall become poor and who shall become rich
Who shall be brought low and who shall be raised high.

“Who by plague?” Play this song by Leonard Cohen.

At this time of the year, I think about “big deaths” I have known. There was my dad, Big Mort, an August death eight years ago. Robert Brands, my business collaborator and friend, died in October four years ago. My brother-in-law, David, died one horrible August, forty years ago.

For them, inscription in the Book of Life wasn’t to be. Yes, Dad was old. He survived military combat, lived a long life, but finally succumbed to the ravages of age.

Robert was middle-aged, with years to go, at least one would think. Played hard; worked hard. And his accidental death — taken from this world while in the throes of familial exuberance — a quad-runner crash — was tragic.

David’s death was a slow-motion shit show. Over four years, a horrid and relentless illness kneecapped his promising medical career at thirty-three. His family never recovered from this cruel loss.

Every day since mid-April, I think about David’s mother, my MIL, who died last spring from the “hoax”. That is, Coronavirus. Such an inglorious way to die, alone, in a state of slow suffocation, separated from loved ones.

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I take not an hour for granted. I want to grow wiser, and fill my life, every day. We do not know what awaits us around the next corner. “Punch it, Chewy”; step on the gas.

I have this hourglass tattooed on my right arm.

Don’t waste time. Read, learn, help, PUSH!!!!

May you have an easy fast.

David, right, in happier times.



Robert, at our book launch in Florida.



Dad, left, at 19.



My MIL, Mimi, always reading.

GUNS

News Item: Tish James, NYS AG, Sues NRA!



Actual ad for Daisy BB guns targeting kids, in publications such as Boys’ Life, the official magazine for the Boy Scouts of America.

(Note: an earlier version of this updated article was originally published in www.ThisistheBronx.info on March 17, 2018)

When I was a Bronx-bound kid, me and all my friends played with toy guns. I had a toy M-1, a toy flintlock pistol, a toy .45 revolver, a toy snub-nosed .38, and a variety of water pistols shaped like Lugers, Tommy guns, .22 automatics – even a “space” gun molded with Flash Gordon-like lightning bolts around its cherry-red plastic body.

When I was a kid, we played war with tiny toy plastic soldiers. We had Civil War soldiers, World War I soldiers, and World War II soldiers, and all their field accessories for each conflict: horses, wagons, troop carriers, Jeeps, field artillery, tanks, and more. We played in the dirt across the street from our University Heights apartment house, or in the backyard, on top of the crumbling stone-and-concrete retaining wall that separated our building from the apartment building next door.

When I was a kid, I joined the Boy Scouts. We read “Boys’ Life”, the BSA’s official publication. It was packed with outdoors lore. Fishing, camping, marksmanship. It was monthly manna for us city kids.

When I was a kid, I begged for a BB gun, specifically the Daisy Red Ryder. It was advertised in “Boys’ Life” and, to me, was the epitome of little kid fire power.

“No,” my father would say. “It’s against New York City law. If we lived in Westchester, it would be a different story.”

“No,” my mother would say. “You know, your grandmother got shot in the leg with a BB gun on Vyse Avenue, back when they were still legal.”

“But…

“NO!!!” she screamed. “YOU COULD LOSE AN EYE!!!”

When I was a kid, we had guns in the house. My dad’s job in the 135th Ordnance MM Company during World War II was field fixes on firearms up to .50 caliber. He somehow came home from the war alive, and with four functional weapons: a .22 LR Walther single shot sporting rifle with gorgeous hand-checkered stock, a German Luger 7.65x21mm Parabellum, a .25 automatic pistol (an “assassin’s pistol” — that’s how my parents described it to the four-year old me) and a .45 automatic.

When I was a kid, my dad
taught me the manual of arms. He had me marching around the house with my
wooden toy M1. Ten-HUT. Present ARMS. Right FACE. Left FACE. About FACE.
Forward MARCH.

Soon afterward, my mother
made my father sell his pistols, which he was loathe to do. Family folklore
says he unwillingly sold them to a gleeful co-worker for a grand total of $100.

When I was a kid, the .22 Walther rifle was still in my Dad’s coat closet, in a green rifle bag. He kept a Hoppe’s rifle cleaning kit on a top shelf, behind his fedoras. It had a three-piece cleaning rod, various tips, tiny cotton cleaning patches, lubricating oil, and Hoppe’s No. 9 gun bore cleaner. It smelled so great, that bore cleaner, when I opened that kit. It smelled like excitement. It smelled like danger. It smelled like manliness. After all, it was Dad’s.

When I was a kid, my Dad never knew I knew where the rifle and accessories were.

When I was a kid, I went to Boy Scout camp at Ten Mile River one
year. This was north of Port Jervis, outside of Narrowsburg, in upstate New
York. The Delaware River separated New York from Pennsylvania. We swam, fished
and camped out in and around the river.

When I was a kid, one day our
camp leader asked if anyone wanted to go skeet shooting. I thought my heart
would blast through my chest. “Me me me me!!!” I gasped.

Minutes later, I had a real
.410 shotgun in my hands. I learned all the safety precautions, how to yell
“Pull!!!”, how to sight the gun, squeeze the trigger, and knock down those
flying clay pigeons. I never got less than four out of five. I was a natural.

It was SUCH FUN.

When I was a kid, I told my
dad about the skeet shooting. He took his .22 Walther out of the closet and
showed it to me. He taught me how to field strip it, clean it, reassemble it. I
felt as if I had arrived. I was accepted into Dad’s secret world.

Then he read me the riot act and taught me all about gun safety, and how to properly store and carry a gun in the field. “NEVER POINT A GUN AT ANYONE! ALWAYS ACT AS IF THE GUN IS LOADED!” he instructed. He then told me of how his group beat the living crap out of a guy in his barracks who accidentally fired his rifle and nearly killed someone. The bullet went clean through the top of the soldier’s helmet — while it was on his head.

When I was a kid, in my
twelfth year on the planet, my Dad said we were going to visit his family, in
Fairfield County, Connecticut, which back then was fairly rural. My cousins and
I would traipse about the woods behind the house.

This year proved very
different.

My Dad packed the .22. Off we went. The next day, my Dad and his
brother spoke in low tones. Then my uncle called all the surrounding neighbors.
Eavesdropping on his phone calls, I heard him say something about “shooting”
and “please keep the kids inside” and “thanks, just a half hour.”

We went down to their
basement, which opened out back and onto the woods. He unlocked a closet. Out
came a World War II Mauser. Out came a Luger. Out came a Ruger .44 Magnum.

Out came a bevy of empy cans
and Clorox bottles.

Dad pulled his .22 Walther from its green case. My cousin grinned as he set up the “targets” down in a ravine. We shot down into that little valley.

I fired everything except the .44, which was a nearly uncontrollable cannon for a pre-teen.

Best of all was the smell. The smell of gunpowder, to me, was even better than Dad’s Old Spice cologne. Better, even, than gasoline, which communicated cars…freedom…adulthood.

When I was a kid, I attended De Witt Clinton High School. Back then, in a sub-basement room, was a rifle range. A kid in my home room asked if I wanted to join him on the rifle team. “There’s a rifle team?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yep. Got a gun?”

Did I have a gun? Dad’s .22 Walther! As unbelievable as it sounds, I carried my book bag and the cased .22 to school, on the Woodlawn Road 4 train, with the rifle’s bolt and my ammo separately stashed in my coat pocket. People on the subway stared at me, a fourteen-year old (yep; I skipped twice) lugging a black plastic gym bag for my books in one hand, and a rifle in the other.

I asked my homeroom teacher
to please stash my gun in his locking coat closet until the end of my day. He
kept a straight face, blinked hard, and gingerly took the weapon from me. It
was safe and sound when I picked it up from him after the last period.

The rifle range was neat, but
the other fellas had super accurate, heavy, specialized target rifles with peep
sights. The Walther had open sights, and I did fine, but not varsity-level.

I never fired a gun again until decades later, when I led a team of reporters on an Alaskan junket for my client at the time, Audi automobiles. Our guide in the rugged, bush country, riddled with bears, wore a holstered Ruger .44 Magnum. The cannon.

One day, a woman reporter sheepishly asked the guide about the gun. Then another, this time a guy, and another, until the guide caught on.

“Who of you would like to
fire the pistol?” he asked.

Everyone’s hand went up.

After a serious safety lesson, we all took turns firing a few
rounds at a carefully placed target our guide set up. I’m proud to report I was
the only one on the trip to hit the target, but man, that thing had recoil!

So what’s my point?

Safe, responsible gun ownership is OK. Firing a gun is not everyone’s idea of a good time, but target shooting can be fun. I’ve never hunted game, but I can understand the serious hunter, who respectfully kills, field dresses and eats his game. And, yes, I’ve eaten duck, and venison, courtesy of my hunter friends, and it tastes great.

What’s not OK, in my opinion,
are lax laws on background checks and ownership. In Iowa, legally blind people can own a gun.

What’s not OK, in my opinion,
is civilian ownership of military grade
semi-automatic weapons with high capacity magazines, which are
not for target shooting or hunting. They’re for the battlefield. They’re
readily available, and I think there is no place for that.

“Why not?” some will argue.
Well, why not own a bazooka? A stinger? A mortar? A tank? Where does one draw
the line? Is a 42-round AR-15 magazine
for less than $12 a wise thing to sell?

When I was a kid, we all played with toys guns, and dreamed of
firing the real thing. What we couldn’t imagine is the per capita civilian
ownership of firearms in this country, 89 per 100, which leads the world. The
runner-up is Yemen. The USA accounts for 48 percent of
the world’s civilian owned firearms.

When I was a kid, who could
imagine the rise in mass
shooting injuries over the years?

When I was a kid, who could imagine the gun-safety orientation of the NRA would give way to the political machine it is today? So, you go, Attorney General James, and clip the wings of that rotted, corrupt, organization.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/nra-corruption-lawsuit/

When I was a kid, it seemed
as if every Dad had been in the military, where gun safety was learned and
reinforced. Today, fewer than one
percent of all Americans serve in the military, versus about nine
percent in World War II.

When I was a kid, war was a
game we played, in the dirt across the street, and guns were the toys used in
that game. Then, we became adults, and parents, and we knew very well the
bitter cost of war.

Where has that attitude gone? That respect? Where are the adults in the room, to say “NO!”? If it takes a New York State lawsuit to finally put the brakes on the NRA, I say “go for it.”

Crop. Rotate. Lighten.

And lo, in these Days of Covid-19, with time on my hands one hot and humid summer day, I decided to do a deep dive into two milk carton crates jam-packed with old photos, slides, contact sheets and negs.

These fifty-plus years of memories sat in the dark recess of my home office closet ever since we moved here from Brooklyn. That was nearly ten years ago. I’d periodically open the closet doors to retrieve office supplies and see the boxes there, age-yellowed sleeves stuffed with prints. The images beckoned, but I resisted their siren song.

Someday I’ll take a look, I’d think. Someday.

I started my amateur photography journey back in 1970, when I bought a used Konica Auto S2 on 47th Street for the princely sum of $50. I still own it. But I haven’t shot film in nearly twenty years. My digital files are neatly stored in the cloud, ever at the ready. My camera now is a slick little Fuji that easily fits in the bellows pocket of my cargo pants. Grab shots are the province of my iPhone, which also hosts several post-production apps recommended by pro photographer friends of mine.

Last weekend? It was hot. I was bored. In the throes of lock-down fever, I cleared a space on the big dining room table. I opened the closet, held my breath, and yanked this bounty of memories from the shelf.

It was a big mistake, and in a number of ways.

The 28-year-old me, with my 12-speed Panasonic road bike, in Martha’s Vineyard.

There was a young, strong, happy me, a long professional career ahead, with my sleek road bike on a summer beach vacation. No aches or pains, no physical limitations. Just the vigor of youth. I stared at the me that was, and recalled how easy it was to wake up early and ride.

I opened other envelopes. There were co-workers from years gone by. Me in a natty business suit. Me at office parties. Me by the helicopter in Talkeetna.

I kept going. Apartments of the past: West Bronx. East Bronx. Chelsea. Jackson Heights. Park Slope top floor walk-up. Park Slope elevator building.

Me and Ronni, post-wedding relaxation, 1975

There were kitchen scenes with my wife of so many years, and my young son, such a joy. Being goofy in my son’s room. Being goofy with our beloved doggie. Being goofy. Yes, I remember that feeling, though it’s been quite awhile.

Daniel holding his new puppy, circa 1998.

More. Relatives, dead and gone. My in-laws, dead and gone. My parents, one dead and the other gone from my sight and out of mind for a good eight years.

Manhattan Skyline, taken from the roof of 37 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn, NY (circa 1999)

I was not even one-quarter through this morass of memories when I stopped the search.

What was the point? What did I hope to achieve?

The more photo sleeves I opened, the more I remembered. There were fun times, but that life I’ve lived? It has been tough. A lot of body blows, and cuffs to the head, metaphorically speaking. I was never “working with a net” — never had emotional or financial back-up. Anything my wife and I got, we clawed our way there.

I looked at those photos and remembered where I was in life, mentally and physically, at each stage: Disease. Bad jobs. Worse bosses. Firings. Screaming relatives. Early deaths. Accidents, injuries, and operations. Miserable neighbors. More disease.

Or, in other words, I looked at those photos, saw fifty years of my earlier, knockabout life, and decided this:

I choose to live in the present.

I choose to hope for the future.

The past happened, and I’m glad it did; I wouldn’t change a thing. But the old saw holds true: “life’s a bitch. And then, you die.”

I returned all the images to their milk cartons and back to my home office closet they went. I know what is in there. I really do. Those days are all stored away in my mind.

Rather than view them IRL (in real life), I’ll retrieve them as-needed from my mental “cloud” and modify them as I see fit.

Crop. Rotate. Lighten.

Digital image: Me and Ronni, beach vacation, circa 2017.

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“Getting Hit”

My latest story (see the link below) addresses the personal toll of child abuse. Were you hit? Do you hit your kids? Please take a look at my story, called “Getting Hit”, and post your comments below. Share it if you like it.

http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/journal/blazevox20-spring-2020/?fbclid=IwAR3XO-sllAPeBKerhnTgZkae5-lDZVcbi3qWeGRZvIVB9stGsMDHL4rWDTc

Serenity Now: Jerry Stiller Dead at 92

Jerry Stiller, classically trained actor, successful stand-up comedy partner with his wife, the late Anne Meara, beloved sitcom actor renowned for his unhinged anger, and father of showbiz’s Ben Stiller and Amy Stiller, has died at 92.

I remember seeing him on Broadway and 84th Street, waiting for the downtown bus, in the late 70s. Back then, I worked at a newsletter publishing company on the third floor of 2315 Broadway. I’d see him there at lunchtime, smile, and give him his space, as Real New Yorkers do with bold-faced names.

As a kid, I marveled at his easy repartee with Anne Meara, as they — daringly for the early 60s — introduced Ed Sullivan Show viewers to the love and tension of a mixed-religion marriage. I remember thinking: these guys are GREAT. They make it look so easy.

As a young father and grown son of a man with major anger issues, I again marveled at Stiller’s portrayal of George Costanza’s dad, creator of the manziere and Festivus. “The airing of grievances” was a key component of the Festivus celebration he devised. Talk about something that resonated.

It was his character’s anger eruptions that most-captured my attention. “You wanna piece of me! YOU WANNA PIECE OF ME!!!!!!!! YOU GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” he snarled, with a vicious lunge at the equally-feisty, five-foot nothing Elaine. NOTE: YOU MUST CLICK ON THIS LINK NOW!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DuAF4KOnQM

Jerry grew up in Brooklyn, as did his wife Anne, who died in 2015 at 85. He went to Seward Park H.S., fought in WWII, went to college on the G.I. Bill. He was a Real New Yorker.

I’ll miss you, Jerry. You were like part of the family.

Serenity now.

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Pandemic Report: May 9th

Pre-pandemic, maskless city dwellers.

I miss the noise.

I remember, as a kid, leaving hot, sweaty NYC for summers in the Catskills and not being able to fall asleep, because it was so freaky quiet. No police sirens. No breaking glass. No rumble from the elevated IRT. Just the croak of frogs and the cacophony of crickets.

It scared the wee out of me.

Now, ostensibly an adult, I live in the city all year round. And the quiet of these last months is unnerving. No rumble of trucks on metal plates over roadwork. No jackhammers. No school kids shrieking at recess — little perpetual motion machines that they are.

Night time is worse. Just the occasional sound of auto tires over the road. And ambulance sirens. They pierce the solitude.

It scares the wee out of me.