I have a picture somewhere. It’s in black and white. I took it with a used Konica Auto S2 I got for fifty bucks when I was 16. I was shooting Tri-X at 400. The photo shows my dad sitting at the window of our apartment in the Bronx. It’s raining hard outside. My dad is in a white tee-shirt. He is smoking a Philip-Morris cigarette. A can of Schaefer is on the windowsill. You can see the therapy swimming pool of the Kingsbridge Vets Hospital across the street. Wild scallions are growing against the gate. My dad is looking at me, all grumble-y, like “WHAT? What is it?” I don’t know where the physical photo is. But it’s scanned, in deep storage, inside my brain.

Laura Nyro and I go way back.

She and I were Bronx kids. She was an older woman, born with music in her blood. I was a wannabe bad boy in crepe-soled Playboys, alpaca knit sweaters, sunglasses with dark blue lenses, and a Donnie Brasco-style leather car coat (with a half-pint of Bacardi Light in the side pocket). Laura studied in Athens and I went to Sparta. That is, she was a Music & Art grad. Me? I survived the all-boys (at the time), sports-oriented De Witt Clinton High School. After three years, I graduated at the tender age of 16 and enrolled in the leafy, coed Hunter College (soon to be renamed Lehman).

I soon learned that the self-destructive study habits I honed in high school (“real men don’t study — only ‘Poindexters’ study”) had no currency in college. I was overwhelmed by reading assignments and distracted by substances. In short order, I was well on the way to flunking out.

But that disaster was years away (and ultimately reversed). Soon after my arrival at Hunter, I learned that the college radio station was interviewing for DJs. I was a big fan of free-form FM, especially WOR-FM, which was soon supplanted by WNEW-FM, with its core four of all-stars: Rosko, Alison Steele, Jonathan Schwartz, and Scott Muni.

I auditioned. To my great surprise, I got a slot, 8 to 9 a.m. on Mondays. The station manager gave me these instructions. “OK, listen,” he said. “Just play records and don’t fuck up.” Fair enough. I played Paul Butterfield. Miles. Jimi. Johnny Winter. Wilson Pickett. Aretha, Cream, The Blues Project. Since Hunter was a commuter school, I’d pack up vinyl from my personal collection, take the LPs up to the studio, and awaken the school.

And I took requests. One morning, a teary-eyed student knocked at the studio door, with an album in her hands. “Please,” she sobbed, proffering the LP. “Play ‘And When I Die’.” I had heard some Laura Nyro on WNEW, but I was not yet a fan. I looked at the album cover, which had a photo of a dark-haired girl who looked like a prototypical, Bronx-born Hunter student. Over the photo: “More Than a New Discovery.” I wasn’t sure how I could weave it into my morning mix that day, but even the 16-year-old doofus that was me knew not to refuse a woman’s tearful request.

So OK, I played it. Whoa. Also on that album, “Stoney End” and “Wedding Bell Blues”. And so much more quality music was to follow. “Sweet Blindness”, “Eli’s Comin”, “Stoned Soul Picnic”, “Save the Country”, “Time and Love”. I was hooked. On the music, and on the Laura Nyro vibe.

Shortly thereafter, I befriended an older woman of eighteen in my English Lit class. She loved Coleridge. Me too! And she was a Nyro doppelganger. The hair, the eyes, the clothes. It didn’t work out, though. I was not yet in her league. I lived in a crappy central Bronx tenement. She lived with the swells, in the brand-new Co-Op City, where residents ran the a/c with reckless abandon. I was into music, sports, and cars. She loved noir films and could quote from them all. She drove a stick. She smoked Chesterfields. CHESTERFIELDS! To me, she was a female Ferrari while I was still a three-speed bike.

My ill-fated relationship’s coup de grace came after dinner at Seven Brothers, a joyless Greek Diner on Jerome Avenue. Doused in Caswell-Massey patchouli oil, I gazed into Ms. Chesterfield’s eyes, and then froze. A roach made its way from the banquette onto her fetching muslin blouse. What to do? I gallantly flicked the bug off her sultry shoulder and into the next booth.

“What the fuck?” she said, her caterpillar fur eyebrows furrowed as she dipped a French fry into a pool of Snider’s catsup.

“Nothing.”

“Marty???”

I told her. That was that.

But I least I knew the type of woman I was looking for. Strong. Self-assured. A fresh mouth. Up on the arts. Musically inclined. Great sense of style. And, like Laura Nyro, a gifted wordsmith. Seven years later, I met that very person and we are still together, so many decades later. She checked all the boxes, except one. And once I taught her, she loved driving a stick.

It’s a partnership precipitated by a chance meeting in a tiny radio studio with a Laura Nyro “early adapter.” And I remembered all this just the other day, as I worked on my new story about “the world’s littlest shrink” ™. I have The Littlest singing as she descended the stairs of her Brooklyn brownstone to her garden-level office.

As I wrote, I asked myself: what would she be singing? And three words popped into my head. “Sassafras and moonshine.” And that was it. My protagonist is into Laura Nyro.

Who isn’t?

I am getting my hair cut at Nelson’s, near 259th Street.

Newly renovated interior. Brick walls, recessed lighting, new comfy barber chairs (6), waiting area gallery of pleather & chrome Barcelona replica seats.

The eyes of the cutters are all intense as they tend to their clients, snipping and buzzing and shaving away. Latin ballads, duets mostly, on the sound system. With the start of every chorus, all the cutters begin to sing along with the song, in perfect pitch, while still intently cutting.

My haircutter, Mariana, smiles beatifically as they sing. She is old enough to be their mother. My high school Spanish strains, yet I can sense from their bantering between songs that they love and respect her and that she digs them as well.

I am at peace.