Tag: New York City

Learning to Drive

13 May 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Dr. Nancy J Rennert

Daddy picked me up outside my cousin’s apartment building in New York City for the drive home to Long Island. Our car crawled in the rush-hour traffic.

As darkness approached, Daddy weaved back and forth over the line separating the driving lanes, his neck craned toward the windshield, eyes darting back and forth. His left foot came off the recently installed left gas pedal as he depressed the brake, then returned to the gas pedal. His right artificial leg, no longer attached to his body, was splayed on the front seat between us.

“I can’t see the lines…”, he said, his shoulders sagging. His advancing diabetes was slowly eroding his eyesight.

“I’m pulling over. You drive.”

At seventeen, I’d passed the written test to get my learner’s permit. I could stop at a stop sign, make a right turn and drive slowly on local streets with my instructor in the car. I wasn’t legally allowed to drive in New York City with my learner’s permit.

“But, Daddy, I can’t drive legally without…” I began.

Daddy interrupted by wrenching the steering wheel to the right. The car careened off the highway and then skidded to a stop, on the shoulder.

I tried to breathe, my heart’s lub dubs pounding against my chest. Usually, I accepted a challenge, but this was so risky. I knew we could get hurt, even die. I wanted to run away fast and disappear. But there was nowhere to go.

“You have to drive. I’ll talk you through it.” Daddy said. I heaved myself out of the front seat and watched as Daddy slid his right stump into the artificial leg. I didn’t want to drive but he was already out of the driver’s seat. He leaned on the car door with all his weight, stood and then hobbled around the front hood, holding on until he reached the passenger side door. I held him under his arm so he could ease down into the passenger seat.

Daddy had diabetes for as long as I can remember. About five years before the drive, he started to gradually lose his eyesight. Six months before the drive, when an infection took his right leg below the knee, my mother, my three brothers, and I visited him in the rehabilitation hospital and it was the first time I saw him cry.

After a few months of physical therapy, he walked with the artificial leg, and then he wanted to drive. A gas pedal was installed to the left of the brake in his car, which he operated with his remaining foot. The right pedal still worked in case someone else needed to drive his car.

The two gas pedals scared me. I’d never driven on a highway, let alone in a car with two gas pedals. Still, I moved the seat forward, adjusted the side and rearview mirrors and checked the dashboard, just like in driver’s ed class. Engine off, I moved my right foot from the right accelerator to the brake for practice. I kept my left foot as far away from the extra gas pedal as I could.

“Start the engine, and put on the left turn signal,” Daddy said.

Can he hear my heart pounding against my chest?

“Look for an opening, then give it some gas and get into the right lane. Keep your eye on the white line and follow it.” Hands trembling, I put the left turn signal on, but there was no opening to merge.

“I’ll tell you when… I’ll say NOW and then you turn the steering wheel to the left slightly and push on the gas pedal. You can do it – you have to – ease your way in.”

I gripped the steering wheel; my body hunched, and my jaws clenched.

“NOW” he said. I pressed on the accelerator and edged the car into traffic.

“Damn yes!” Daddy said.

On the drive, Daddy repeated “You can do it” so many times, I began to believe it. A shot of adrenaline surged through my body, recharging me. I focused intensely on the road, concentrating on following the lane lines, as honking cars whooshed past us.

“Just drive slow if you want. Who cares if they honk at you. Screw ’em,” Daddy advised. The next passerby gave me the finger. Same to you buddy! Get out of my way, I thought.

I’m driving!

When we neared home, the traffic let up, and Daddy began to tell jokes, which I had heard before, but they still made me smile. The one about his friend who was pleased with his new hearing aid. Dad asked, “What kind is it?” and the friend replied, “about 11:30.” Daddy also had some great one liners! If someone repeated a story, he would say “This is where I came in.” – and that was that. Conversation over. Humor was his way of coping, his shield against adversity.

About twenty minutes later, I parked the car in our driveway and stumbled out of the driver’s seat. Exhausted and triumphant. We had made it home. “I knew you could do it”, Daddy said softly, with tears in his eyes.

We shared a hug in the car. We weren’t very close, but this drive had brought us together. As we entered the house, Mom was upstairs, and my brothers were watching TV and finishing homework. I went straight to my room, plopped on my bed and thought about my fear, my accomplishment and my newfound power.

I’d been terrified of driving, but Daddy pushed me to do it. He believed in me and helped me believe in myself. Somehow, I found my strength.

A few weeks later, Daddy went to the eye doctor hoping he could have more laser treatments to improve his vision, but the doctor told him he was legally blind.

He hired a driver that day.

I passed my driving test the next month. From then on, I only drove my mother’s car.

Dr. Nancy J Rennert is a deaf physician, Chief Endocrinologist at Norwalk Hospital, CT. She is exploring creative nonfiction writing focusing on medicine, disability, family and the intersection of all three domains. Prior publications in Cool Beans Lit and Pulse–Voices from the Heart of Medicine.

The Big Dipper

1 September 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Lana Hechtman Ayers

This unseasonably tropic night in Oregon in June, fir and spruce trees
so thickly interwoven, barely enough space between branches
for shadow, let alone the glass teeth of stars, and I am orbited back
to one lime Jell-O and orange cream popsicle summer,
another unseasonable June, air thick as guttural slurs,
when everyone in all five boroughs flipped on their air conditioners
at once, sucking the power dry as thistle, lights dowsed in the great
28-hour black out, and New York City became a meadow again,
a pristine prairie, the streetlamp and skyscraper bruised sky
brighter than the red and green blinking signals of jet planes
that thunder-growled low over us from nearby JFK every night,
brighter than the scarce fireflies already flickering on extinction,
my daddy and me sweating and swatting mosquitoes
on the two-chair porch, he teaching me about the stars,
his hands spread above us thumb-to-thumb,
the rest of his fingers upright to frame the constellations,
and there he hung the Big Dipper for me,
the Big Dipper with its long ladle handle and rectangular bowl,
and perceiving this mystical silhouette for the first time
was a kind of epiphany, with my daddy retelling the many sagas
of the Great Bear Ursa Major from indigenous cultures
around the world, chronicling the true accounts
of how in our own nation this constellation
saved the lives of many slaves
who followed its stars north to freedom,
and I understood how our stories,
back to the beginning of man,
are made of such fragile connections,
dot to dot to dot, twinkling beacons of meaning,
how imagination is part dream,
part real-life experience,
that we can all slake our thirsts from this well,
dipperful by dipperful,
so that each time I spy the Big Dipper in the sky now
it is also the tender tale of a father and a daughter,
his patience and our laughter,
so much laughter I still feel its pulse
orbiting the fatherless galaxy of my heart.

Lana Hechtman Ayers, architect of the “Severed Sonnet,” has shepherded over a hundred poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Her ninth collection is The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024).

Farewell, in black and white

1 September 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Cheryl Sadowski

We rode the Central Park carousel all summer. By winter, the painted horses and gilded carriages stood still. To be part of B’s life in the suburbs is what mattered more than anything now. Arrangements were made, boxes packed, and on a dishwater day in January, the moving truck rolled down West 58th Street with my meager belongings.

I spent the last night in my empty apartment alone, lying on an air mattress staring at electric outlets. I listened for the familiar, persistent clang of the trash chute, the groan of pipes. Oddly, nothing. Only black silence and the dim glow of barren white walls. New York City seemed intent upon my leaving without a nod. Across the courtyard rows of windows darkened and blurred, and eventually I fell asleep.

Snow fell all night, thick and gauzy as cotton candy. I woke in the mauve morning light to find the windows frosted over. I threw on clothes and boots, grabbed my coat, and stomped through meringue drifts toward Central Park. Inside the park, sienna tree limbs bowed beneath white icing and black streetlamps tipped their tall, snow top hats. This was no cold, curt goodbye, but farewell on the most elegant and grandiose scale. The city had seen me after all, and she made sure I knew.

I spun around, eyes watering, and cleared off a park bench to sit down. Life with B. could wait an hour, or two.

Cheryl Sadowski writes about art, books, landscape, and nature. Her essays, reviews, and short fiction have been published in Oyster River Pages, The Ekphrastic Review, Vita Poetica, After the Art, and other publications. Cheryl holds a Master in Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Northern Virginia.

Washington Heights

1 June 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

Two weeks ago, Aaron moved out of our house and into his first apartment. It is 20 minutes away in Washington Heights. He is 25 years old, and this is a milestone I should be proud of.

When he was born, I gazed at his pale skin and dark hair. I felt like I had been given a prize, or I had won the Olympics, or I was as strong as a woman from the Amazon.

I also couldn’t stop crying. My sister, Debi, didn’t understand. “You are a mother,” she cooed. But I cried because I loved Aaron so much. The loving was an ache. I could not live if anything happened to him. When someone else carried him, I leaned closer, hovering.

When Aaron was two-and-a-half and a big brother to five-month-old Oliver, his father and I separated and eventually divorced. Val would take both children for the weekend, and I spent hours panicking that they weren’t within reach. I was wretched; I couldn’t stand to be alone in my apartment without them.

Every mother thinks her child is beautiful, but Aaron really was. At four, his eyelashes were full, with eyebrows that defined his round face, lips that were heart-shaped and impossibly red. Whenever he laughed, you could see a space between his two front teeth.

When he was six, his father moved back in with us. We were living in a rental building in Queens. Aaron wore red Pumas and jumped in the air to show Val how high his new sneakers made him go. When he was eleven, he and Oliver watched as a judge married us for the second time in our living room, and then we all went out for breakfast. Our boys were the only witnesses.

At 16, tall, thin, with thick wavy hair, he said he wanted to go away to college. I prepared myself, thinking I would come undone when he left, but he was so happy when we dropped him off in Albany that I was okay.

Shortly before he graduated, we moved again, to a house in New Rochelle, and we got a dog. “Why are you getting a dog?” he said. “I’ll be gone soon.” I had to explain that the dog was not for him.

Then the pandemic happened. Aaron moved back home. His graduation was on Zoom. He wore a borrowed cap and a gown that was too short. I baked a pound cake, and we toasted him in our backyard.

The only job he could get was at a supermarket, behind the deli counter. He was cold, his feet hurt, and he was berated daily. After that he had three more jobs that were backbreaking or demeaning. Finally he found a job he liked and a girlfriend he loved. He saved the money I told him he needed to go out on his own. It took four years longer than he had planned. I was grateful for this bonus time, to have him under my roof a little longer.

I’m glad he has moved out – it is as it should be. But I will miss having coffee with him in the mornings and lunch together a few hours later. I will miss hearing his voice as he talked on his phone in his room. I will miss the times he asked me to shave the back of his neck. Or the walks we took together on the wooded trail near our house as the dog ran between us.

Since he left, I have found reasons to go into his old bedroom. I changed the sheets, mopped the floor, discovered his lost slippers in the back of his closet, and dusted his model cars.

The day he moved out he came back to New Rochelle to drop off the rental truck, and then we decided to have dinner together. The next night he came over for Hannukah and presented me with a card and a gift. Two days later I went to his apartment because he forgot to pack his medication. The next day we dropped off a piece of furniture and then had pizza in his neighborhood. Later that week he came home to see Oliver, who had returned from his semester in Italy. That night he slept in our house, and the two boys were together the following day, laughing the way they did when they were little and so happy to see each other. A few days after that we all went to eat Persian food at Ravagh in the city for Val’s birthday. The next day we met in Queens for another birthday party at my sister’s apartment. I know there will be countless more soccer games to watch on TV with Val and Oliver. And dinners of zucchini souffle, majedra, and macaroni au gratin.

“Aaron,” I said, “I see you more than ever!”

“I miss you,” he said.

I didn’t lose him. He just doesn’t live with me anymore.

Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, Tangled Locks, Koukash Review, and others. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Read Hell’s Kitchen, a companion piece to this essay published in The Bluebird Word in March.

City Sounds

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ginny Bartolone

March. Manhattan tumbles into silence. I hover by the window, inhale a wave of city air, and listen to the door of the 1 train close. Descending major third. Helicopters, sirens, stand clear of the closing doors, DING-dong, and then nothing.

I loop the Natural History Museum. Frigid humidity slips through my coat. It’s colder than it should be. St. Patrick’s Day decorations slip off their windows as condensation separates the tape from the glass. I cross Columbus without looking both ways. No one’s coming.

White poster board taped to a window on the corner reads “Stay the f* home.” A singer warms up his voice. For what? Juilliard-perfected arpeggios now reserved for his neighbors.

I seek hints of progress—stores reopening, bodegas with toilet paper, someone sitting in the park. I spot a family of raccoons. One hangs on a branch with its paws flopping over the icy bark.

The pub on the corner—the one where John the bartender welcomed us the night we moved to the neighborhood—sits dark. A sign on the door reads, “We are sad to announce the passing of…” A picture of a line cook in his apron.

I head home. Cuomo talks at 11:30.

Ben barges in with a sighting. There was a man sitting at the bar of the pub. Inside. Drinking a beer. But the restaurants aren’t open. It’s only May. He was alone, Ben explained. No bartender. Just a man sitting alone drinking a beer.

“I yelled through the open window,” he goes on, “I asked ‘Are you reopening?’ And he answered, ‘I hope so!’” The man raised his glass in celebration.

“He must be the owner,” I add.

“I thought John was the owner, but maybe not? They’re still closed. So how else would he be inside?”

I sit on the roof for most of May. Nails, puddles, pigeons. Almost warm enough for the cockroaches. At 7 p.m., we cheer and bang on pots and pans. Cheering, helicopters, sirens, stand clear of the closing doors, silence.

The pub reopens in September, and we hurry through the hot autumn air toward to outdoor seating area still under construction. John appears.

“You’re here!”

“We are. Somehow,” he answers. I can’t think of what else to say.

“May we never go through something like this again,” comes out of my mouth. John pats me on the back while looking across the street toward nothing in particular.

Ben asks about the man sitting at the bar in May.

“Oh, I’m the owner,” John confirms, “That’s Mark. He’s usually here. When they locked down the city, he stopped leaving his apartment. Lost all muscle mass in his legs. Bunch of us started carrying him down the steps every few days for fresh air and a pint.”

They’re closing the restaurants again. One more night before the silence. Ben and I march up Amsterdam but an early blast of icy air has the city more on edge than usual.

A bundled man shuffles in jagged patterns behind us, and then next to us, and then in front of us. He turns his head—once, twice, again.

Ben whispers, “Let’s go into the pub, just to get off the street a minute.”

John stands behind the bar. Caution tape wraps up the stools.

“Still open for a drink?” We ask, “And food of course.” It’s illegal to get a drink without food.

“Or you know,” John says out of the side of his mouth, “You get a drink or two, you look at the menu, and oops, you can’t decide, and then you pay your bill and storm out without eating.” He shrugs with a laugh and a wink and we take a spot in the loft above the main floor.

It’s the first night of Hanukkah. The only other group sits in the far corner and sings songs and exchanges gifts. We order Manhattans.

“Cheers,” we toast with a clink.

We order another. We toast.

John carries a platter of shots around the room. We toast in the air and all drink.

We climb—stumble—down from the balcony, and line up at the cordoned-off caution-taped bar with shot glasses beside strangers. When was the last I talked to a stranger? Toast. Drink. My memory blurs.

“They just announced vaccines for under 40. Tomorrow,” I yell to Ben across the apartment. It’s March again.

We’ve been training for this. Open the NYC vaccine website. Hit refresh, hit back, hit refresh again. Don’t wait for the circle to stop spinning, just keep clicking. Grab any appointment that isn’t at the Aqueduct Racetrack. That’s too far. Two hours on a train full of a virus. We justify other neighborhoods an hour away. Are we taking slots from other people?

I holler, “I got one! Police station off the F at 7a.m.” Ben gets one for 2p.m. at the same police station.

My alarm chimes at 4:30. We’re told to get there an hour before our appointment. I leave at 5; the sun hasn’t risen. Clouds of roasting bread fill Broadway. My 1 train doors ding open—DING-dong. Descending major third. Sleeping essential workers rest with their heads against the metal poles. They lived a different pandemic. I change at Columbus Circle.

The sun rises as I crest the steps. The line around the station reaches an overgrown parking lot. It inches forward. A handwritten sign on the door comes into sight. “J&J.” I show my ID to a couple of cops at a folding table and wait. Sing a song in your head when you get a shot, that’s what I always learned. I sing “Start spreading the news,” and the shot is done.

The volume knob twists. Someone laughs. A car honks. The bass of a song thumps. As I leave the station, even the sun melting the soot-covered snowbanks makes a sound. I listen with my eyes closed and breathe in the city air.

Ginny Bartolone is a writer who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She’s been writing about travel and the creative process on her blog since 2011. Her fiction and nonfiction are published in literary journals such as The Closed Eye Open and Flumes.

Hell’s Kitchen

1 March 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

We were in my father’s car on Sixth Avenue driving uptown towards Central Park, or maybe we were on Third Avenue approaching the 59^th Street Bridge, when my father said, “Don’t marry him. I’ll take care of you.” After a long silence I said, “But Dad, I love him.”

My mother had died a few months before, and it was just my father and I in the house in Queens where I had grown up. I worried about him. I knew it was too soon to leave him alone. Val was living in New Jersey at the time. My father put his arm around Val’s shoulder and convinced him to move in with us. “After the wedding, you can look for an apartment together,” he said.

Val moved in three months before our wedding. We slept in separate rooms. He called my dad Mr. Lisbona.

We got married on a beautiful day in April. I invited my mom’s friend Beatrice to attend.

On my wedding day, my father said, “Can you stay with me a little longer?” When Val agreed, I thought he was so understanding; he was so nice about it. But then I noticed how well he got along with my father. They sat in the living room watching TV together and laughing at the same jokes. Val walked around on Sunday mornings in pajamas while my dad made coffee for them both, and on Sunday afternoons the two of them went food shopping on 108^th Street. If something needed fixing, Val was eager to do it. He started calling my father Leon. When I suggested a neighborhood that might be good for us to live in, Val didn’t show any interest. My father said, “Stay here and save some money,” and Val smiled conspiratorially.

We lived eight months as newlyweds in my father’s house.

Toward the end of that stretch, Beatrice came for an overnight visit. I noticed how happy my dad was, and then I spied them. It was just a moment, through a slice of door: She was on the bed, he was in his bathrobe; he leaned over her. I caught my breath and recoiled. I slinked down the stairs and hurried out of the house. I walked to the subway and felt the urge to squeeze my eyes shut, trying to unsee the image of my father and Beatrice that kept fluttering to my mind. By the time I got to the train platform, I realized that this was my chance to leave. The moment had presented itself like a gift.

Without telling Val, I found us an apartment on my lunchbreak. The one-bedroom was walking distance from my office building on Sixth Avenue. That evening, after kicking off my boots, I gathered Val and my father at the round table in the kitchen and announced that Val and I were moving. Val said, “We can never afford it,” and my father said, “A two-year lease?” and I said to Val, “We have five days to pack.” My father lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

A week later we took a few boxes of clothes and two rolled-up Persian rugs to the twentieth floor of 301 West 53^rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen. I liked the name of my new neighborhood. That first night, Val was working across the river in New Jersey. I was alone.

The apartment was bare. Our wedding presents, still in their unopened boxes, were scattered in our empty living room. Our only piece of furniture was our too-hard bed, which we had bought that day without thinking it through.

I lay in the bed and looked out the large plate-glass window to see the time and temperature flash atop a taller building. I listened to a bouncer arguing loudly with a patron at the back entrance of the Roseland Ballroom. I heard the trucks rumbling up 8^th Avenue and the horse and carriages ambling towards the stables. I wished Val were there on my first night away from home. Somehow, despite all the city sounds, I fell asleep.

One hour before I needed to wake up the next morning, my dad called, a pattern he took years to break. We chatted until I was sufficiently awake.

I put my feet on the Persian rug. I pulled out from a box something to wear to work. I walked two short blocks to my office and never wanted to set foot on the subway again.

In the evening, Val and I went to Central Park, walked to 9^th Avenue, and ate in a little restaurant. On the way home we stopped at Tower Records, our fingers interlocked. Val loved the spartan apartment and declared that we didn’t need any furniture. “Where will we eat?” I said. “In our hard bed,” he said, and we both laughed.

I loved him so much, and I was so happy.

A year later I was pregnant with Aaron, and my father remarried a woman who wasn’t Beatrice.

Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, Tangled Locks, Koukash Review, Metonym Journal, and Smoky Blue Literary. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Read Leslie’s earlier essay Taboule in The Bluebird Word.

gray train — Photo by Vinícius Pimenta on Pexels.com

Next Stop

23 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Alexis Pearson

I drop down into the
underneath of New York
City
where stairs wear toil
like magic tricks –

where devotion is absolved
of its commitment
to disaster
to us
to everything –

the men in suits,
women in long jackets
that tempt stained concrete
with their reaching
and the homeless man
hunched over
as if he must bear the
troubles of each passenger –

what do these skyscrapers know about
clouds
and salvation,

the dirt of the ground
and dimly lit newspaper
stands, the
quiet blue of stoplight
dwellings and crosswalks

the contemplativeness
manifested on strangers’ faces
as if there is too
much going on in city
windows to ever fully
understand what unfolds
along walls and
inside doorways,

but still we try –

the subway lurches,
people move
quickly on the concrete,
I forget that my feet,
too,
can take me places,
as I wonder
where they are all
going
and why.

Alexis Pearson lives in Minnesota where it’s cold most of the year – perfect writing weather. She enjoys a good cup of coffee and will read just about anything. She has been published in Upper Mississippi Harvest and Sonder Midwest, among others.