AUGUST 18, 2000, FRIDAY:....:

Unbelievable deja vu on TV last night. I was watching the 10pm news and they announced a runaway cow in NYC. I waited to see it and it started running from the intersection of STEINWAY STREET AND DITMARS BOULEVARD!!!! That was the intersection I got off the bus at every morning in Junior High School 1961-1964. As it says in my bio for that era the kids always ganged up on me so I would ride one more stop than everyone else would and Id get off there all alone. Then I'd walk don that long, long silent block by myself and virtually never see another human being which was just what I wanted. It was a very weird block. First of all, it was VERY long. As long as two or three blocks. Secondly, it was a very wide, yet dead street. This was because the rest of Steinway Street was created to be a street for stores. And it had stores non-stop from Grand Central Parkway south for a couple of miles. A very busy street. But that all abruptly ended at the big parkway. On the north of the Parkway it stayed just as wide but there were the Hellaget Bridge railroad extension and fenced off areas until one got close to Ditmars Blvd. North of Ditmars, Steinway was for the UPPER-middle class. The houses there were weird because they, despite being still rowhouses, all had garages underneath them. And both the wide ramp down under the houses were recessed far from the curb. And athe houses themselves were all far back and way up. So as if it wasnt far enough across that weirdly wide street in a residential neighborhood, the homes were even farther back and way up in the air above pedestrians. So it was really a very loner type long block, just right for me at that age. ESPECIALLY, when the snow was coming down in early Jan 1964 as snow makes it even more placid and silent. And there it all was on TV: The showed the whole street as the cops chased the cow down the wide sidewalks northward. They were on the same side of the street I usually walked (East, away from the school) and were going the same way I did all those years. The cow kept going until it went to the concrete park up there farther north. Nice to see that everything looked exactly the same there. But the stores right at Ditmars/Steinway looked different. Real trip into the past. I was last there in Nov 1981, just before my mother died.

My father stubbornly refused to stand up from his lounge chair for five days and then fainted when the Visiting Nurse told him to. Now I have to work with him twice a day every day to get him moving again. So far he can barely make a few feet.