We used to laugh when we were kids and heard this old fart, Jimmy Durante, sing “September Song”. So maudlin. So trite.

But, really, so scary.

For the song, written by Durante (known to us only from his likeness on Saturday morning cartoons!) prodded us to think that, one day, our parents would die.

One day, WE would die. GULP!

So we laughed (past the graveyard, yuk yuk) at the song. But the grim reaper always has the last laugh.

I sit on my terrace and watch my two kittens at play. They are a bonded band of brothers. They roll around and alternately bite each others’ necks and then hug it out. My mind spins. I think about my sister. We are estranged. That is a polite way of saying we gave up trying to maintain a relationship. I’m sure she has her fairytales about me. I certainly feel as if I gave her every opportunity to be in my life, only to have her nuke each and every moment with inappropriate — no, check that: gratuitously hurtful — behavior. Whatever. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

On with the show. No longer a slave to client-facing assignments, I spend my days immersed in my passions. Writing stories. Learning music. Reading and watching my favorite old movies and seeing new ones.

Oh, and then there’s this: I ordered a new piano. It is coming next week. Here’s a photo:

When I was a kid, we didn’t have the space or money for such a magical instrument. Now, while there’s time, I’m ready to live “the life of Riley” (a reference to an old radio and TV show). I’ll be honest. I cried a little when I finally pulled the trigger on this purchase. It took so long for the fulfillment of this dream.

On the terrace, Felix and Oscar now swish their tails and pretend to hunt birdies as I ruminate on past glories and failures. What was, and what could-have-been. I think about my family’s story arc. I consider the many dreams deferred. I explore the myriad relationships ruined, but I am warmed by the new families and friendships I’ve kindled in recent years.

Just the other day, the parents of my son’s new wife (and, wow, she’s the best) wished us a happy New Year. Some people have class. Some people are just plain shtunks. You know what I’m talking about, right?

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” That’s the last line in “The Great Gatsby”. And you know what they say here in the Bronx: Pa’lante! ONWARD!

I mean, really…what choice do we have?

Bongos sound great. I love the evocative tone, which is a bit exotic, even dangerous. Bongos and congas and timbales get you up and moving. Sheila E.! I mean, c’mon.

But. (There’s always a “but”, n’est-ce pas?) In my early days, getting bongos was code for a sad second choice. See, when I was a kid in the Bronxy part of the Bronx, we lived in a rent-controlled apartment with a pain in the ass super and pain in the ass neighbors. And, alas, we lived paycheck to paycheck. No money for cool stuff.

I wanted to play a musical instrument. First choice: PIANO!!!! Oh please please please??? NO!!!

I want to play drums. Oh please please please please??? NO!!! Just a snare drum??? NO!!!

So I thumbed through the Lafayette catalog’s musical instruments section and picked out a snare and cymbal set and showed it to my dad. NO!!!

But. (There’s always a “but”.) One day he came home with a package and handed it to me. Open it up, it’s for you, he said. It’s bongos. Tunable bongos.

Well I loved bongos, and howled when I heard them used on various Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

But jeez, I really wanted to learn a musical instrument and thought I’d really be good at it.

Fast forward to 2001. I’m making some money, finally. It’s summer. I pass the newsstand on Brooklyn’s Seventh Avenue and Union Street. There’s a take-one flier for guitar lessons. First lesson, in your home, free. I call. I start. I learn. It kept me sane in those horrible months after 9/11. My boxer (doggie) would lie on my bed as I strummed chords to “Flying Shoes”, the song that most matched my mood.

But still no piano.

After 25 years in Brooklyn, we moved to a part of the Bronx my parents made fun of when I was a kid. They made fun of it because they could never in a million years afford it.

I met a guy who was a BFD at Juilliard. Just for shits and giggles, one day I asked him if he knew anyone willing to teach an old dog like me some new tricks. That is, teach me how to play piano.

Turns out, he sure did. His prize doctoral student. My wife got me a Yamaha 88-key electronic piano. Every week for two years, I met him at the school and he signed me in and I learned theory and scales and flips and sight-reading on Hamburg-build Steinway grand pianos.

I was a kid in the proverbial candy store. That is, until the school went into lockdown. Undaunted, we continued lessons on FaceTime. We continue to this very day.

But the keyboard wasn’t an acoustic piano. It was good. It served the purpose. But it was bongo-adjacent.

Fast forward to this very day. My research was complete. I road tested a bunch of pianos. Made of spruce, mahogany, steel, brass. I made a decision.

This bad boy is coming to my home in the weeks ahead. It took a long time. But it happened. No more sad second choices, not at this stage of life. Oh please please please, I begged myself when I reasoned that it was too expensive, too big, too this, too that.

OK, I told my inner little kid. OK, you can have it. And after many decades, I gave myself permission to birth my dream.

Ah, liverwurst. Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

No more Boar’s Head liverwurst. They brought it on themselves. There’s no place for lousy quality control, and that Virginia plant deserved to be closed. Nevertheless, liverwurst has a flavor profile that can’t be beat. (Full disclosure: my last liverwurst sandwich was probably a good five years ago. But still…)

Even The New York Times’ Dan Barry wrote about this loss. Who needs madeleines! The Proust is in the pantry, alongside the onions, and hearty horseradish-infused mustard. Sometimes you just need that luncheon meat fix.

Think about this: McSorley’s. Many beers, light and dark. Liverwurst with raw onion and lots of mustard. LOTS of mustard. More beer. That’s all you need to know.

Except for when you (ok, ME) have a hankering for: olive loaf. Spiced ham. Bologna and American on a hero with mustard. LOTS of mustard. And, when the weather cools: pickled herring, with lots of onions, and black bread with really good butter. Kielbasa, with sauteed apples and caraway seeds. German potato salad, peppered with celery seeds. And mustard. LOTS of mustard.

And a bottle of Jever, or six.

We (mostly) eat healthier now. That’s why we’re not dropping dead of MI’s at age 55 as some of my friends’ dads did back in the day. We exercise, watch the carbs, swallow our statins, like good little boys and girls. But sometimes you want to go off-road. Remember the flavors and joys of our early years, when a lunchbox packed with luncheon meat sandwiches and some Pecan Sandies or Lorna Doone shortbread cookies were a welcome respite from learning about pints and quarts? (Which my idiot sister never quite mastered, but that’s another story for another day).

I hit the gym every other day, and work out with a personal trainer. I look better and feel better. Yet I know: “no one here gets out alive.” Sometimes, ya gotta live a little.

Because: everything in moderation, INCLUDING moderation. Where is the lie?

McSorley’s Old Ale House is on East 7th Street. They still have liverwurst on the menu ($6!!!). And Schaller & Weber? Second Avenue just south of 86th Street. They have Braunschweiger Liverwurst, horseradish mustard, and more.

Just add:

Trust me, you can’t go wrong.

Summer wanes. The days are still hot, but the nights turn deliciously cool. Windows remain open and air conditioners are finally unplugged.

In the heat of the day, a verdant vista remains. Not a tree has turned to blaze yet, not a-one. The school year, though, has begun, and my mind turns to yesteryear.

You’re a kid, in the old days of NYC. It’s hot and humid and you have no a/c, because your apartment is wired for 60 amp service. Fifteen amp glass fuses blow with great regularity. Plus, who has money for a/c?

Your dad is working late, your mom is working too, and your sister? Who the hell knows where she is.

Homework is done. It’s dinner time, but there’s no dinner. So you go to the arctic a/c of Pizza Haven, on Kingsbridge Road, your local pizza place, and order four slices to stay, very hot, and a large orange drink. This is a beverage that has as much in common with real fruit as Spam has with a porterhouse steak. But it’s cold, it’s sweet, and it tastes great, and: you’re a little kid, so what do you know from nutrition?

Gino, the pizzeria owner, slides your slices from a countertop “house pie” onto his scarred wooden peel and slips them into his Baker’s Pride oven. He gives them a nudge and flips the oven door closed. It will take a while. Your sweat will turn to icicles. It’s a 65-degree meat locker in there.

Your stomach growls.

As you wait for your dinner, you fish a dime out of your sweat soaked jeans and pop it into the juke box. You press buttons to make racks and racks of record titles flip over. A-side. B-side. You finally find your selection. G15. Press the white key for “G”, then another key for “15”. A small vinyl disc, a 45, flops over and slides into place. It’s a song you dream of playing someday, while on your first date with Felicia Abramoff, prettiest girl in the class, prettier even than the Mouseketeers’ Annette Funicello.

You tingle to the sound of the sexy saxes that herald the wall-of-sound introduction, and then nearly swoon with excitement when Little Eva beckons: “Everybody’s doin’ a brand new dance now-owww…”

At last, Gino calls you over to the counter. Your slices are placed on a battered aluminum pizza tray.

You sprinkle your dinner with a blizzard of garlic powder and hot pepper flakes. You reach for a straw from a dispenser on top of the glass counter. “Just take-a one,” Gino chides.

“Do it nice ‘n’ easy now and don’t lose control…a little bit of rhythm and a lotta soul….” Little Eva explains. You float back to your table on the wings of puppy love.

You sit down, fold your first slice, take a big bite of molten goodness, and sigh, for Little Eva is convincing: “There’s never been a dance that’s so easy to do. It even makes you happy when you’re feelin’ blue….”

Jeez, it’s fucking hot out there, you think. You hope that someday, life gets easier. For now, though, this is as good as it gets.

“When I was back there in seminary school….”

Oh, wait, wrong opening.

When I was a young dad, we rented a house in Bearsville, NY every summer. It was a cute little house on Pond Road, just off Wittenberg Road in Ulster County.

There, me, my wife and little son would frolic all summer. We’d fish in the Ashokan Reservoir. We’d swim in Wilson State Park. We’d eat huge pancakes at Sweet Sue’s in Phoenicia, and cook out in the backyard, and play with the neighbor, Doug, and his wife and kids and their doggie, Tio. Doug was a contractor and the kids were allowed to climb all over the heavy equipment, even the skidder.

We would take our son to Wonder Works on 375, where an amazing playground/fortress of wood decking material offered safe ways for him to climb, jump, play with other kids, and generally exhaust himself in the fresh air.

On crappy days, we’d have breakfast, play some rummy, and then agree: “MALL DAY!!!” We’d drive east on 28, and then head north, up to the Hudson Valley Mall. For a Brooklyn family, everything about the area was a novelty, from playing outdoors without a care, to shopping in big box stores, to walking around a real mall.

There was a multiplex with big seats and no gum on the floor, unlike the Plaza Twin on Flatbush, which was totally shkeevatz, albeit nearby. There was Sears. There was a food court. There was an arcade. SKEEBALL!!!! My son would roll doody-brown balls into little target-holes and, for his efforts, win hundreds of little paper tickets that he eagerly traded for wonderful prizes, like a big fat pencil with a cartoony large eraser. Such treasures!

Last week, my wife and I rented a lovely place near Cooper Lake, about three miles from our old summertime property. We celebrated our anniversary, had wonderful dinners out, swam in North/South Lake, barbecued and, when the weather got crappy, we looked at each other and said: “MALL DAY!!!”

We drove to the Hudson Valley Mall, expecting to relive those halcyon days of our child-rearing past.

Well, it wasn’t like it was “when I was back there in seminary school…” We’d never been to a dead mail before. Wow! There was a HUGE empty parking lot populated only by a fat young guy in trucker hat and sloppy shorts pulling a mule-train of shopping carts back to Target (pronounced Tar-JHAY by us sophisticated downstate New Yorkers), where one could buy everything from ice cream to hand towels ($2.50! All-cotton! Huzzah!)

But there was a behemoth — Sears — stripped of its signage, crabgrass growing on its front sidewalk, like a Mad Max or Escape From New York backlot set.

We expected to find a natty Rod Serling with Brylcreemed hair in front of those doors, holding a lit Lucky and intoning, “You are about to enter another dimension…a journey not only of sight and sound, but of mind…submitted for your approval, the end game of post-Covid, rogue capitalism gone awry…a hard lesson to be learned…in The Twilight Zone.”

Target was still doing business. There was a Dick’s Sporting Goods. And there was the multiplex.

It was raining, so we went to the movies. Whoa. It was recently redecorated. Fancy, even. But so so empty. We asked the quartet of thumb-twiddling theater workers if the place was open. They nodded yes and we selected non-reclining seats for Deadpool and Wolverine. I noticed no other seats selected by other patrons when we chose our location on the check-in screen.

We ordered the medium popcorn. Medium! Ha! It was as big as a five-bottle wine bucket. A series of ads for local businesses — carpenters, dentists, realtors — ran, too loudly, and portrayed men and women in very uncool haircuts and apparel.

Some other patrons filed in to the enormous theater number two. The coming attractions offered a parade of action-adventure pictures. Lots of explosions and VFX.

I’m not an action adventure movie type, and I am not a Marvel aficionado. BUT: “Deadpool and Wolverine” was AMAZEBALLS. It was witty as a mofo, and the casting, cameos, dialogue, and SFX all served the entertainment. The ten or so patrons in #2 all laughed at the throwaway lines and myriad inside-baseball cultural references.

I loved it.

Maybe there is hope for us in our post-Covid, post-brick and mortar retail world. Maybe we’ll survive without H&Ms, and Sears, and crappy mall Asian and Italian food.

Maybe it’s really all about finding joy where you can get it, like finding salamanders on ferns after the summer rain, or helping grandma catch a big bass in the Ashokan, or playing soccer with your little son in the beautiful Boiceville high school field. Laughing your head off at a big-budget, funny as hell, blockbuster summer movie.

Or…sharing a smile, a tiny moment of joy, with the woman at an Interstate rest stop Starbucks who wore a sweatshirt that read: “My vice president is a black woman”.

She caught my gaze. “You may have to update that shirt in November,” I whispered.

“Thank you,” she said, with a wink.

So: “Submitted for your approval…a couple in (very) late middle age wander into the now-deserted mall of their memory, only to discover that there is still hope, and joy to be found, nurtured, and, yes, savored…even in the farthest reaches of The Twilight Zone…”

I played stickball on 190th Street, pitched pennies in back of my apartment house, bought folding knives at Cousins on Fordham Road, and went to NYC public schools at a time when subjects such as music, art, and literature were summarily dismissed as topics for “pussies”. (Full disclosure: to this very day, I really don’t know my flowers, trees, or birds.)

So how did I come to build a career based upon communications, with two published books on workplace innovation, three collections of short stories, and three ghost-written books under my belt? How did I come to learn guitar in middle age, and piano in (very) late middle-age?

I attribute my admittedly meager accomplishments to (a) sheer force of will, (b) some good friends and educators, and (c) free-form FM radio.

First, force of will. Maybe it was the challenge (“I’ll show YOU!”). Maybe it was my Eastern European genes, which triumphed over my humble Bronx tenement beginnings (my grandma came from Vilna, a center of learning and education, and there were rabbis in my family, back in the Ould Sod, which in my case was the Pale of Settlement). But the more my family and neighborhood buds said “no way”, the more determined I became.

Second, I lucked out with some chance meetings of new friends in high school, and some supportive teachers and professors. My friends Richie (of blessed memory) and Eric introduced me to the world’s of photography, music and electronics (and how I pored over those Lafayette catalogs back in the day), and literature. In junior high, Mr. Goldberg opened the classroom window and let the snow fly in, as he read to us from Dr. Zhivago. In high school, Mr. Halvey and Ms. Simon took Shakespeare’s prose (which had been impenetrable for me) and broke it down so I could see and feel the timeless emotions and behavioral patterns. In college, Mr. Charyn (just named to read at the upcoming Olympics), coaxed quality sentences out of me. Later, two writers from the Village Voice, Paul Cowan (of blessed memory) and Richard Goldstein, encouraged me, at NYU Continuing Education, to keep pushing with my writing, I was exhausted from long days of full-time work at a thankless, low-paying insurance job back then, and their words fueled my “when pig’s fly” flights of fancy.

Finally, free-form FM radio and, in particular, WOR-FM — which morphed into WNEW-FM. On my Lafayette component stereo ($147 for amp, tuner, Garrard turntable and KLH speakers, if memory serves), I listened to Rosko, Alison Steele, Scot Muni, Jonathan Schwartz, Dave Herman, and many others — the red tuner needle never moved from 102.7.

There, I dreamed of a wider world, for they’d mix Hendrix with Satie with James Brown (“good GOD!”) with Lady Day with Miles. When I heard cuts from Sketches of Spain segue to Judy Collins to Sgt. Pepper’s Day in the Life, my little Bronx pea-brain exploded and I knew, I just KNEW, there were bigger things for me out there, and that somehow there was a tunnel out of my early punch ball prison.

Ah, yes, tomorrow is Father’s Day. Dear old dad. I hope to hell I was a better dad to my son than my dad was to me.

I remember friends and acquaintances remarking on the relationship between me and Dee (my grown son). They’d smile as we played together when he was a small boy and we exploded in goofy laughter. “How’d you do it?” they’d ask.

“Easy,” I’d reply. “I just think of how my dad would respond or act in any given situation, and do 180-degrees the opposite.” It was a facile response, but not really that far off. I wrote about him, dear old dad, in my new collection, “When Paris Beckons” — here’s a reading of it:

https://soundcloud.com/user-305683472/39-bye-byes-in-order-61224?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1X0r9jd2iysOFj0V5sFU0sRjyzwoifAuT5Vr3QqciBvwTFItyMtTV07gA_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw

He was a piece of work, as was his brother, based on info from my cousin. To be honest, I can think of things I did with and to Dee that I wish I hadn’t done and I’m sure those stupid, hurtful actions are costing him big-time in shrink bills to this very day.

And I know I’m not alone. What is it about the toxic father/son dynamic, and that King Lear/Lion in Winter bullshit? I am reminded of two scenes in biopics that caused me to snot-cry right in the movie theater. One was “Walk the Line”, about Johnny Cash, and the other was Rocketman, about Elton John,

This scene shows the up-and-coming Johnny Cash getting the skin peeled off his nads by his jealous, small-man-of-a-dad. Check this out (and cue it up to about 1:30, because the sound is not great):

Now check this one out. where Elton goes to give his dad a gem-encrusted Chopard watch for a present, only to get grandly rebuffed.

In both cases, I wanted to reach into the movie screen and punch those dads’ lights out. It was as if a Weber chimney starter ignited in my guts. That’s how bad it was.

And then I remembered my own classic scene: the Brooks Brothers Picnic Set Incident.

It was a time when my career was on the ascent and I was making good money. My mom (another story for another day) said she was trying to get my dad to take her out more, maybe have a picnic in the park. You know, do something fun for a change. I had a flash.

I was working in 60 West 42nd Street, near all the big men’s retailers, and picked out a Brooks Brothers wicker picnic set for my dad’s birthday. I thought it would be perfect. It was quality, and complete, and first-rate. It was classy and I thought he’d appreciate that. And maybe that was the problem, for upon inspection of said gift, his face looked like he just opened a specimen box from Cologuard.

I found it all damp and moldy in their basement years later. It was never used once.

So, yeah, happy Father’s Day. We’ll see Dee and Mo and the whole mishpocha tomorrow. Hope it goes well.

There are those who say that listening to a certain song puts them right back into a particular place, like an aural time machine.

I believe that is true, but arguably more powerful is the sensation of certain scents — olifactory stimuli — that reel back the years. What are yours? Here are just a few of mine:

The Smell of Gasoline: I love the scent of gasoline. I immediately recall visits to the Texaco station with my dad in our ’53 Pontiac Super Chief. I can see him wearing navy blue canvas “camp shoes”. Dad is streaking up the windshield with the oily sponge-squeegee at the Bailey Avenue gas station, while Mike, the owner, checked the oil, tires, and filled ‘er up with high-test. “This is what a man does,” the four-year old me surmised. To this day, the smell of gasoline triggers a sense of excitement and “adventure”.

Acoustic Guitars: Open a hard shell guitar case and inhale that heady scent of nitrocellulose, glue, and tone woods. Intoxicating. Wild. In the sense of an upscale cigar store. You immediately are perfumed with the magic of music yet to be made. The promise of fun, and of the exhilaration of creativity. You remember the famous Einstein quote, right? “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

Alexander’s Department Store (Fordham Road location): I can’t speak for the other stores, but this one? It had a particular scent, for sure. Was it the off-gassing from the 190th Street vestibule carpeting? Cleaning solvents? Rat poison? Scented O2 blasted through HVAC ducts to energize the patrons, like a Vegas casino? Whatever it was, it was unforgettable, a confluence of chemical scents that signaled the start of a deep dive into the world of consumer consumption, Bronx bargain-edition. Going to Alexander’s was like going to the beach, in the sense that the purchasing tides rolled in, and rolled out. You bought something, took it home, realized it was crap, brought it back, got a store credit, bought something else, rinse-repeat. Shopping there? It wasn’t a necessity. It was an activity.

“The Woods” (Pine Forest Edition): Nothing beats the smell of “the woods”, especially a pine forest. Understand this: I was never a deeply religious kid. Nevertheless my one time at a sleepaway summer camp, at age eleven or so, was the Boy Scout Ten-Mile River’s location for Jewish kids. It was on the border of NYS and Pennsylvania, not far from Port Jervis. Anyhoo: The days are hot and the nights are cool, for we are in the Catskill Mountains, 100 miles from the oppression of summer-in-the-city. It is my first Friday night at camp. I am told we will walk through the forest to the temple for Shabbat services. I am disappointed, for I am not observant and would rather be playing. The sun dips. The air cools. We ford streams and climb over mossy rocks, under a canopy of conifers. The air is perfumed with pine, enhanced by top notes of sunbaked wildflowers. Finally, my group, Troop 228, arrives at a hand-hewed outdoor temple. There are rows of benches in front of the ark. We file in, suddenly solemn, fallen pine cones and browned needles at our feet. The sun sits low. Fireflies flit. I breathe in, deeply. A woodpecker blasts into birch. I am tired from a day of fresh air exertion. I am calm, and at peace. And then, I look heavenward and think: “Oh, I ‘get it’ now!” For in my own roundabout way, I found religion.

Happy Mother’s Day. OK, that’s out of the way. Here’s more important stuff.

I’m not a big poetry person. Maybe I’m not intelligent enough to read the writers’ tea leaves. Maybe I ask: why did they chop up the lines like that? It all could’ve been just one paragraph and c’est ca, you know?

But. I read Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss, a writer from nowhere’sville Michigan. Just like I’m from nowhere’sville, NYC. And I have to say: whoa!

Read this interview with her by my friend and uber-talented poet, William Lessard.

She reminds me: just keep writing. Full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes. It’s work. Hard work, and hard work is honorable.

A remembrance: one day I was old enough to earn my adult library card. I was a punk kid, but no longer confined to the tiny children’s book section of the shoebox that was the Jerome Park branch of the New York Public Library.

It was one flight up from a dry cleaning store on University Avenue and the place smelled like Perchloroethylene (PERC). This is the most common solvent used for dry cleaning in the United States. PERC is a reproductive toxicant, neurotoxicant, potential human carcinogen, and a persistent environmental pollutant. In other words, it’s poison.

I LOVED the scent of PERC. It was sweet and soft and I equated that sensation with the safety, warmth, and value the library afforded me, during my chaotic (ha! understatement of the year) early childhood.

And that first day, with my new adult library card, I — a pitzl — picked out the biggest, thickest, heaviest book — WITH NO PICTURES — and checked it out. When I got it home, I started reading it, and quickly realized I had no idea what it was about.

But I knew it must have been important, for it to warrant all that weight.

In time, I checked out more books, six at a clip — the maximum allowed by NYPL rules at the time — and began to digest the words. My brain was a python eating a goat. The process was slow, but it did happen.

I cherished the after-school time in that poisoned, PERC-scented, library. That space kept me safe. And provided a soft place to hear myself.

Yep, the rumors are true. My third short story collection, “When Paris Beckons”, is now available. Visit my website to get your copy. Just click through to your favorite online bookstore. http://www.martykleinman.com.

My seventeen new stories zero in on the societal stresses of the past few years. Covid, politics, the economy, immigrant issues, the new workday paradigm — it’s all here.

Spread the word, far and wide. I’ll do Zoom readings for your book club or worship group — just reach out and we’ll make it happen.