AD's Journal 2024

   I can't recall exactly the last time I came here before 2010 for sure since the library was still a library then this aside from our magical mystery tour last year when we paid this part of the planet a visit though Paulie with long gone by then Back the last time I came here, when Paulie was still alive, he was still director though he no longer lived in the house on the lake We came for Memorial Day at the firehouse in 2002 when he, John and Garrick played and then again two years later for the picnic outdoors with a full band -- that later played the gig at the grasshopper in cedar Grove before the band broke up again for the last time as it turned out This building, the old library,   when it's still served as the town's library, also served as a police station in a town that has since outgrown the old library and old police station, still small when Pauly moved to this neck of the woods in 1985 A tiny building that at the time with Police department on t...

   It got warm again, though the perpetual environmental chicken littles are predicting polar vortexes from the upcoming year. I’m planning a walk out to the waterfront while the warm weather prevails, rain predicted for later so as to drench the poor souls crowding into Times Square to greet the New Year. I used to sum up the happenings of the previous year on this day in previous journals, which I won’t do here. Sometimes, it’s just better to let the past fade away and not dwell on what was or could have been. As I read things about former President Carter, the more I like him, especially his tendency to criticize other former presidents – a man in the unique position to tell it like it is, even when other people do not want to hear it. A man after my own heart. All of this is a flash back to the 1970s when we all (the Garley gang) held out hope for a future that did not for the most part materialize, and though that decade was among the most painful in my life, ...

  The death of Jimmy Carter struck me harder than I might have expected, especially considering most people believed he had been on death’s door for years. Some people call him one of the most ineffective presidents in history, an unfair assessment considering all that he had to deal with in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, and Nixon’s forced resignation. I call him the accidental president because he might not have been elected without a number of other factors. Gerald Ford had pardoned Nixon, guaranteeing he would get no progressive vote. Ronald Reagan had come close to unseating Ford as the candidate and divided the GOP. On top of all that the United States had fled Vietnam, something that would be repeated in Afghanistan under Biden four decades later. People seemed unwilling to vote for an inside the beltway candidate, and so found in Carter the ultimate outsider, a nice man, who media mocked as a peanut farmer, and whose brother Billy came across as a country...

   Burger King John is dead – I think How long ago, I don’t know. My last conversation with him was about a month ago; He was in too big a hurry to get his meal at the nursing home to speak for more than a moment. From a previous call a month or so previously to that, I learned about his dire circumstances. He and his common-law wife, Elaine, had settled into separate nursing homes after John became too ill to continue caring for her. She had a debilitating disease that caused her to blow up like a balloon. In the end, she could not leave her bed and John attended to her needs as if a nurse until diabetes caused him to lose one of his legs. During that conversation, he told me they were outfitting him with an artificial limb, although he also indicated his overall health was failing, forcing him into a less-than-adequate nursing home, while Elaine, a former teacher in Newark, had ended up in an upscale facility elsewhere. The two continued to communicate via cellph...

     Went back to Seaside Heights for the first time since just after Sandy, reliving a series of memories that go back far into my childhood. My grandfather built many of the bungalows in Toms River, which became a regular summer retreat, and we often crossed the bridge over the bay to take in the carnival like offerings Seaside offered. In the 1940s, my aunt, Alice, worked as a hostess at the Stewarts Root Beer stand on Route 37, which was still standing in 2012, but gone during this trip. There are two such resorts side by side, Seaside Heights – a mecca for teenagers, and Seaside Park, a more affluent community. While my family went to Seaside Heights, the family of the local doctor took up summer residence in Seaside Park, something my childhood friend at the time (the son of the doctor) never let me forget (nor did he let me forget the private school he attended while I went to a more mundane Catholic school). I actually made two trips to both seaside comm...

   Today is Garrick’s birthday, the last of three best friends with whom I’ve shared a majority of my life, all born the December, although in different years. Garrick, born in 1949, was Pauly’s earliest friend, having met him as kids in what was then called West Paterson, a love-hate relationship that continued right up until Pauly’s death in 2020. Garrick, a burly, somewhat laid back character, whose family moved around a lot when he was a kid, used to brag about that moment at midnight when he and Pauly were the same age – Pauly born on Dec. 28, 1948, and Garrick, Dec. 27, 1949. The two boys met on the street the bordered West Paterson and Paterson, when Garrick found Pauly sitting on the curb playing with toy soldiers. It was a moment that would define the rest of their lives since Pauly soon learned that Garrick had a portable radio and a full set of Hardy Boys books, both of which Pauly borrowed, returning the radio later broken. He never returned the books. ...