Newark Penn Station, Saturday, 8 p.m.

The game up the hill behind them, but the next train more than 30 minutes ahead of them, the basketball fans settled inside the bar in the lobby of Newark Penn Station. A couple wearing blue strode in quietly and found stools in the back of the bar, across from a group of loud men wearing red. In the corner, a man wearing blue punched his jacket, out of frustration or anger.

The bartender did her best to take care of her patrons, quickly drafting beers into frosty glasses and occasionally mixing drinks. The blue-clad couple ordered glasses of wine.

“The bartender reminds me of Sharmila,” the man sipping wine said. “Look at her and listen to her accent. I bet you she’s from Trinidad.”

“I thought she was Hispanic,” his lady companion replied.

More people entered the bar. Most were dressed in red and seemed happy at their team’s improbable win, a victory that was insignificant to them from a practical perspective. The loss by their in-state rival, however, was potentially damaging to the team’s post-season prospects. Three 60ish-year old men in blue, one of whom looked tall enough to have played college basketball in the late 1960s, talked softly among themselves.

The lone African-American man at the bar stepped out, probably to use the bathroom across the hall. He returned a few minutes later and reclaimed his seat among the red-clad white men. As improbable as it could be for a black man in Newark, New Jersey, he stood out inside the bar with his black leather jacket and black leather hat in a sea of red, blue and white.

A few minutes later a thin man with sandy-colored hair and stubby growth on his ruddy face shuffled into the bar. Seeing him, the bartender drafted a glass of beer.

“Jimmy, sit here, not there,” she said, pointing to a corner of the bar with a few empty stools. He didn’t seem to hear her as he slowly made his way to a nearby spot.

“Sit here, not there,” she repeated, holding the frosty beer of glass. He sat where she didn’t want him to anyway. She sighed, and put the beer in front of him.

Within a few more moments, the bar was full. A group of young women, not dressed in red or blue but looking as if they could have just graduated from one of the rival colleges, made their way to the back and stood by patiently.

“In a few minutes the train is going to come and this bar will be nearly empty,” the woman sipping wine said. “She’s finally going to get a chance to slow down and catch her breath.”

As most people around the bar began finishing their drinks, the couple in blue took their last sips of wine and quietly made their way past the men in red and out the door.

Eulogy for my mom, Elena

The following is an excerpt from the eulogy Charley delivered today for his mother, Elena Bruns, who passed away on January 15, 2012, in a New York hospital after complications from heart surgery.

By many standards, my mother was considered an ordinary woman. By some, she was considered extraordinary. To me, of course, she was a very special, unique person.

She was born into an ordinary middle class family in Cuba, and received a normal education for girls growing up there in the 1940s. She did not possess the kinds of special talent or skills that were in particular demand in return for a strong livelihood. Her jobs included being a clerk and a cashier. Despite her passion for pictures, she struggled with a digital camera, and never learned to use a computer.
 
But she was extraordinary in other ways. My mother’s father passed away when she was four years old, and she joined her mother in this country as a teenager, several years before the Cuban revolution forced thousands of her compatriots to flee the island. She settled in the Upper West Side of Manhattan along with some other Cubans from the Mambo Kings era. She certainly wasn’t wild and crazy – she never drank alcohol or smoked anything – but she sure could dance. After her divorce, I remember how she would practice dancing with new boyfriends in our apartment living room. If her boyfriend didn’t cut it on a dance floor, a second date was unlikely. That made Roy very special. He wasn’t a particularly nimble dancer, but they had a second date and then some.

My mom studied hard to learn English, insisting that my brother and I speak it at home so that we could all become fluent. And she succeeded to the point that, by the end of her life, I think she spoke it as well or better than Spanish, despite her strong accent.

My mom also had the extraordinary ability of squeezing 15 or 20 cents out of every dime she had. Growing up, we somehow managed to obtain everything we needed because she always got items at a steep discount or for free. Absolutely nothing, including food and clothes, was wasted in our home. Her way with money was a major reason why she and my dad were able to enjoy having two new houses built for them.
 
My mom was unique. She may not have seemed the warm, bubbly type of Cuban that my grandmother, my aunt, and other women I knew in the family while growing up appeared to be. But, I never doubted her love for me, or how special she made me feel. I will always remember when on her birthday, not mine, she took me, my big brother and her little brother to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. She always managed to find the gifts I wanted most for Christmas, to get a good spot on Central Park West to watch the Thanksgiving Day parade, and buy some tickets to see the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall.

She was very proud of delivering four children into this world. Her youngest child, and only daughter, was born while I was a sophomore in high school. My mom was beaming the day she left the hospital holding my sister. I remember my classmates asking me for weeks, “Hey Charley, was that your mother who just had a baby?” “Yeah,” I admitted, “that was my mom who just had a little girl.”

My mom was fortunate to learn how to cook traditional Cuban food from her mother. Our family could never figure out how she made her yellow rice and chicken look and taste perfect. She went through much trouble to get the right ingredients to cook with red beans. The taste of her black beans could not be beat although, fortunately for me, she was able to teach my wife how to prepare them just right.
 
After my grandmother passed away 20 years ago, my mom had a big void in her life. She missed her mother very much, and rarely went long without talking about her. Just recently she said to me, “Do you realize Belen would’ve been 100 years old this year?” Ironically, it was exactly 100 years ago today that her mom was born.

Now it’s my turn to have a big void in my life. But, just as my mom made sure I never forgot all the great qualities of her mom and the special times we shared together, I am determined to make sure my family, including my dad, my brothers, sister, children, nephews and niece, never forget her great qualities and the special times we shared together with her.

NYC Christmas images

Chestnuts roasting in the food cart on the southeast corner of 43rd Street and 6th Avenue. Not quite on an open fire, but with the same aroma many people associate with the Christmas holidays.

A child in a stroller excitedly points to an object above the southwest corner of 44th Street and 5th Avenue. The woman pushing him acknowledges his words, saying with a foreign accent, "Clock. Yes, clock!"

People, some of them dressed up and walking quickly, others dressed down and moving slowly, hold bags of gifts.

Men greet each other with handshakes and begin talking. Women hug good-bye after a meal.

A guy steps out of a taxi in front of the Met Life Building on 45th Street and squeezes a $5 bill into the red bucket next to a Salvation Army worker who breaks the rhythm of his bells only for a second to say "Thank you." A few feet away, a newspaper vendor sits quietly, with few customers.

On 5th Avenue near 48th Street, a man walks past a deformed woman sitting on the sidewalk, then turns around to give her money. Several blocks uptown, a guy pulls out a pack of chips from a lunch bag and gives it to a beggar.

Two New York Police Department officers, one a man the other a woman, smile while posing for pictures with tourists, the Times Square crowd behind them.

Digital cameras capture image after image of the bright lights of Times Square, the big tree at Rockefeller Center, the marquee outside Radio City Music Hall, the skaters at Bryant Park, the elegant white lights of the Chrysler Building and the colorful lighting on the Empire State Building.

Sometimes, though, it's minds that capture images of Christmas in New York City and digitizes them in words.

Santacon comes to town

The timing could not have been more ironic. On Friday night, Yes, Virgina, an animated Christmas special set in New York in 1897, aired on network television. On Saturday, Santacon, an excuse for as many as 1400 characters in Santa Claus suits to party, played out across New York City’s bars and streets.

I realized something strange was afoot when I saw a tall guy dressed like Santa Claus walking in Penn Station. He looked like he could stuff a bag of toys down a chimney just by standing on the tips of his toes. Instead, he dutifully purchased a ticket back to Long Island, presumably en route to the North Pole where elves and reindeer are finalizing preparations for another Christmas Eve.

Moments later, I saw groups of red-suited white-bearded people on subway cars. Sightings of Santas, some of them women with very short skirts under their short red and white coats, continued on the East Side in the early evening. Riding a cab along Second Avenue hours later, I saw groups of Santa Claus lookalikes hanging outside a number of bars.

According to its web site, the New York City Santacon event “is a non-denominational, non-commercial, non-political and non-sensical Santa Claus convention that occurs once a year for absolutely no reason.” There was some revelry around town, for sure, but no Santa arrests, according to a newspaper report. A tweet stated, though, that police prevented Santas from occupying the red bleachers in Times Square, saying, “You can’t stay here.”

Santa is not Superman, however, and some of the red-suited characters I saw at Penn Station as midnight approached seemed ready to turn into pumpkins. They sat on the floor, glazed eyes half-shut, slumped by their companions, as if they were thinking, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

If an 8-year-old child witnessed the Santacon spectacle, what would they say? If a newspaper editor was challenged by a child to explain whether Santa Claus is real, what would they write? “Yes, Virginia, there is a…Santacon.”

New Orleans: characters welcome

There are probably more characters per capita in New Orleans than any other American city, even New York. With almost a third of its population gone since the devastation from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans’ characters seem more visible these days. This appears to further add to the unique character of this special American city.

There was the man with the full white beard, sunglasses, red hat, Hawaiian shirt, red shorts, and red hi-top shoes who slowly but merrily made his way up Bourbon Street one evening, not to be outdone by another overweight man who wore nothing more than a genie- or showgirl-type costume while dancing to recorded music a few blocks away on Bourbon Street.

Then there was Ann, who led a demonstration at the New Orleans School of Cooking while entertaining tourists with her take on the city’s history and quirks, including accents of inhabitants like the woman behind the desk at Le Richelieu, who sounded if she spent a lot of time in both Louisiana and Brooklyn.

Other interesting workers included a tour bus driver, who remarked, “It’s a long way from New Jersey. Y’all here on that witness protection program?” The swamp tour guide discussed changes on the bayou before and after Katrina, and said, “Bubba Gump is the only New Orleans restaurant that doesn’t serve gulf shrimp.” There was the highly educated and very talkative waitress at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, and the warm and cheery man at the entrance to Pat O’Brien’s with a name tag that appropriately read “Love.”

Of course, there were many and varied entertainers in Jackson Square and on Bourbon and Royal Streets, including a violin and guitar duo who segued seamlessly from Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved” to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven.” The next day, they were joined by a vocalist on “Summertime.” Even some of the many young people walking around with pit bulls stopped to listen.

All kinds of interesting men seem to spend time on the streets, from the very kind old gentleman in the Garden District who stopped to talk with two middle-age tourists and voluntarily pointed out the Manning family home, to the bicyclist riding down Chartres Street one night cheerily singing “Don’t know much about history…” to Heath, the word busker on Frenchmen Street who recited the following poem he wrote on a manual typewriter in less than 15 minutes:

DISNEYLAND FOR ADULTS

The Swamp tour ran into
The haunted vampire tour
Its bus lateral, sidewalk careening
Into the enebriated crowd

blindly following
some gothic guy
his red, satin cloak
covering his pimply face
as plastic, hand grenade containers
explode into air
and the loudspeaker on the bus
shouts out
“To the left, how about them vampire,
swamp gators?”

People stare, looking through –
Steamly cracked windows
for viewers of the cypress swamp.

New Orleans remains a city with many characters, and a lot of character. It’s been that way for almost 300 years, through French rule, Spanish rule, French control again and, after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, under US control. Through all the change and turmoil over the years, its music, food, drink and architecture have remained unique among American cities. So has its diverse mix of people, who continue to give the city its own very special character.

To see more photos of the people and places Charley saw while on vacation in New Orleans recently, click the link below.

Kodak Gallery: Charles's Gallery

The downtown edge

It's true: lower Manhattan has a different vibe, a different energy and edge, compared to midtown. I tasted it first-hand while spending a few days last week working, eating, sleeping and walking around Soho, Chinatown and Little Italy, by Tribeca.

Walking down Canal Street, which hasn't seemed to change at all over the years, I was asked more than once about my interest in buying a Rolex watch. I stopped to ask a cop if the distinct structure a few blocks south was the municipal building. Seemingly unsure, she said it was "down there a few blocks." As I walked across a courtyard full of cars at the Manhattan Detention Center, a man walked out of a building and into the waiting arms of a woman who seemed thrilled to see him.

Back on Canal Street, I walked past a seafood store with its front open to the sidewalk, from where all kinds of people, young, old, middle age; black, white, yellow; men, women, undetermined; seemed determined to find the best value among all kinds of sea fare, some of which looked more appetizing than others.

Continuing past groups of tourists and other out-of-towners, I made my way down Mulberry Street and into what remains of Little Italy, which certainly seems smaller than it was a generation or two ago. By Grand Street, a white-haired man in a white t-shirt lowered and dangled a pink shopping bag on a string from the second floor window of an old apartment building. He beckoned a lady below to "get it." After protesting loudly, she eventually took something from inside the bag and entered the building. Minutes later, the guy in the t-shirt was still by his window, now shut, seeming to stare at blank space between his apartment and the street below.

A woman in a white Mercedes-Benz SL 500 pulled into a parking spot that a friend on the sidewalk seemed to somehow save for her. Down the street, two ladies made their way toward Canal Street slowly, almost aimlessly, passing Italian restaurants and various stores. "Everything in the store is under $10; bags, scarves," a man on the sidewalk told them. They paused, and walked on. For some reason, I began to think of a book I read more than once as a child, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss and Robert Carington - published in 1937, and still seeming to capture the neighborhood's fantasies.

Back on Canal Street, a young inter-racial couple walked leisurely, sharing some laughs. "You can't bite your nails," she said. "Why?" he asked. "Because I can't," she responded. Later that evening, on the sidewalk outside a Soho post office at Prince and Greene Streets, I spotted a tribute to Steve Jobs that can only be described as...very Soho, or downtown. The late Apple leader probably would've liked it. A middle-age guy who spends a lot of time in midtown photographed it and posted it on Twitter.

Elsewhere in Soho, the neighborhood's boutiques and other stores closed for the evening, smokers were hanging outside clubs. A hotel set up ropes outside its front doors in anticipation of a late night crowd trying to get into its bar. Two young professional ladies walked out, tapped furiously on their BlackBerrys, and jumped into a taxi for some dancing at another downtown spot.

If you look beyond technology, there's probably little that's changed in the vibe and energy of lower Manhattan during the past 100-200 years. According to historians, it's always had an edge, an edge that kept pushing the city's initial waves of elites north to midtown and beyond, to the orderliness of the grid designed by the Commissioners' Plan of 1811. Robert Moses threatened the neighborhood's edge with the Lower Manhattan Expressway over a century later, but the highway was never built, ensuring Soho and other neighborhoods below the grid were more than an area to drive quickly through. That was a good thing, because there are a lot of interesting things to stop and see in downtown.

“Irene, you were such an annoyance and inconvenience”

Hurricane Irene was kinder to me than it was to many people in the New Jersey/New York area. I didn’t sustain any damage or flooding. It just resulted in some annoyances and inconveniences.

Fearing that strong winds or a tornado might tear off the roof and blow out some windows, my wife and I decided to sleep in our living room rather than our bedroom Saturday night. When the power went out at 2:25 Sunday morning, our home’s security system began beeping annoyingly every half hour or so, ending any hope we had of a decent night’s sleep. We learned hours later the system’s backup battery was dead, so I had to open the control box with a screwdriver and disconnect the expired battery to stop the relentless beeping. Peace…for a little while.

Perhaps jealous at the attention the security system received, a smoke detector in the master bedroom decided to start beeping every few seconds. Of course, it was the only smoke detector we couldn’t reach with one of our ladders. After listening to it all of Sunday, hoping unsuccessfully it would wear itself out, my sons and I walked down the street to borrow a neighbor’s tall ladder. With the aid of a flashlight, we were able to replace the dead backup battery and stop its incessant chirping -- and, get a fair night’s sleep.

Of course, having no power in the house meant we had no working lights, microwave, toaster, home entertainment system, telephone, TV or – gasp – internet connection. Fortunately, since our cars worked, one of my sons and I were able to drive to a café that hadn’t lost power and get some work done while recharging our batteries (figuratively and literally).

Before leaving, realizing food in our refrigerators was on the verge of going bad, I decided to barbecue chicken on our outdoor grill. Why not – isn’t that a good post-hurricane breakfast in suburban New Jersey? One of my sons appreciated it that morning, and the rest of our family did for the rest of the week, until we just got plain tired of it and swore off eating chicken again any time soon.

Eventually, the remaining contents of our refrigerators had to be put in the garbage. Truthfully, some of it already belonged there. But, it was annoying to throw away yogurt, hummus, frozen vegetables and meats, including a beef loin butt tender marked at $50.77. I guess we should be grateful that our town had a special garbage pickup for spoiled food a few days later.

By the time power returned to our home at 3:15 AM Wednesday, our family gained a new appreciation for the value of sunlight and candles to our ancestors. We discovered how challenging it is to shower in darkness and even how difficult it is to read by candlelight. It was nice sitting around and talking to each other without electronic distractions for a while, but…enough is enough – we went to bed early every evening. Let people have the power, already!

Seeing the destruction and erosion it caused in parts of the Jersey Shore a few days later, I’m grateful Hurricane Irene was just an annoyance and inconvenience in my Mercer County neighborhood. I’ll file it away among my life experiences, alongside the November 9, 1965 blackout, which is the only time I recall seeing candles lit in my family’s New York City apartment. If I don’t have another experience like Irene for another 45 years, though, that will be just fine.