First Love

I know that I have probably loved cars since I first realized what they were! My Mom tells stories of standing on a corner with me when I was five and of me naming the cars as they passed. I remember the first car our family had was a very used 1946 Dodge 4 door sedan. I recall standing up in the front seat between my Mom and Dad as we drove down the road! The package shelf in front of the back window on that old Dodge was huge, and there were times when I'd nap up there. Seat belts, child safety seats, automatic door locks? Never heard of any of them back then. My God, we are lucky that any of us that were born in the 50s even made it to adulthood!! As I grew up, I continued to love cars and couldn't get enough of them. I remember that during the summers of 1964 and 1965, when my friends David, Richard and I would head to the NY World's Fair, the first place we'd go to would be the transportation area. We were really in our glory riding in a new convertible on the Ford Magic Skyway (even better if it was a brand new Mustang), or traveling to the future of transportation at the GM Futurama, or looking at Chrysler's take on the future..the Chrysler Turbine! The great thing all these pavilions had in common was at the end of the ride, you got to look at, sit in and generally ingest that manufacture's 1964 line of cars! Wow…what could be better for three teenage boys! Sometimes I think that the first sixteen years of my life were just the buildup to that magical day when I could start Driver's Ed! I remember going down to the DMV the first time to take the learner's permit test. I'm sure I had worn out the study book, as I would fall asleep reading through it. By the time I took the test, I could quote from memory the distance one needed to keep from the back of the car in front of you at any speed. The test was a breeze, and then it was just a wait till my first class in the car, so I could get my hands on the wheel. I think it was only shortly after that first class that I convinced my Mom to take me out for a little practice. We lived in Jackson Heights at the time, and the relatively undeveloped area around LaGuardia Airport was the perfect place – I thought. That was until I made a turn on an unfamiliar road and suddenly discovered that I was on the entrance ramp of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway! I'd probably spent a total of twenty minutes behind the wheel of a car, and here I was trying to merge with traffic that seemed to be flying by – a real baptism of fire! I survived that first session, and ended up being the first one in my Driver's Ed Class to pass the road test. I even remember the date – December 17, 1966! The only problem was my 17th birthday wasn't till January, but living in NYC, the only way I'd get a regular license was with a Driver's Ed Blue Card, and the class didn't end till February! That was a real long two month wait, and because I had my junior license, I didn't want to drive at all and jeopardize getting my full fledged license so the only time I got behind the wheel of a car was the 10-15 minutes a week in Driver's Ed. Painful! I learned to drive on my folks' new 1966 Ford Galaxie 500 4-door hardtop, and loved the way the 390 V/8 got that big car pickup. As with all new drivers, I'd find any excuse to get behind the wheel, and was always the one driving to and from any family outing or errand that came about. Then the moment came to get my own car, and frankly it was about as different from the Galaxie as a car could be and still have 4 wheels! My first car was a 1955 Chevrolet BelAir 2-door sedan. Today, that would be a prized vehicle to an old Chevy collector, but in 1967 it was just an old car. The car was a bilious two-tone green, had a stove bold 6 cylinder engine, a three speed manual transmission on the column, and power nothing! I bought it from friends of my folks for $50, and had to pick it up at their house in New Rochelle. For a cocky 17 year old who had been driving legally for only a couple of months and thought he knew everything, (yes, back in the dark ages when we were teenagers, we too thought we knew everything) driving my first stick shift car from Westchester to Queens was a humbling experience. Starting, slowing, and ultimately stopping a three speed stick shift car was nothing like what I'd imagined, and was an endeavor I was ill prepared for! I managed to make it home in one piece, but stopped as little as possible (like for the toll on the Whitestone Bridge). For the next three weeks I worked on my car and tried to make it look as good as possible. I compounded and waxed the car (at one spot down to bare metal), but I couldn't make the two tone green look any better than bilious. In an attempt to make it look "sporty," I even put a $20 racing stripe on from the trunk to the hood, but the stove bolt 6 was still a boat anchor. I did, however, get much better at the operation of the stick shift, and by the end of that three week period, I could even start from a stop on a hill in a pretty efficient manner. You may notice that I've used the term three weeks several times, and may wonder how, all these years later, I remember exactly how long it took for me to get comfortable with my new car. Well, it wasn't a measurement of reaching a comfort level…it was it's life span. Three weeks after picking the Chevy up, while on the way to work at Alexander's Department Store in Rego Park, I ended her life. It was early on a summer morning, and as my friend Richard and I drove down 34th Avenue in Corona, Queens, and with the morning sun shining in my eyes, I plowed my '55 Chevy into a '52 Chevy that was sitting dead in the road! What was the likelihood that two old cars (one 15 years old and the other 12 years old) would meet in this way on a summer's morning? I hit him hard (pushed him a half a block), hit my mouth on the huge steering wheel (about 5 stitches later in the day), and pretty much ripped the trunk off the '52, while doing a hell of a job on the front end of my car. If I live to be 100, I will always remember that the gentleman's name I hit was Lemberg Nelson, and as he got out of his car after the accident, the first words he spoke were, "Oh my neck". That was the end of my first car, and even now, over 43 years later, I still remember the events of that day better than I remember what I did at work last Friday! The end of a first love is always hard, especially if it gets ended in a traumatic way. For a car nut, the end of your first car is a memorable occasion, and it my case, the fact that it was a short term relationship made it even worse. There have been lots of cars since that Chevy, and I've had them all much longer than that first car, but that's how my first ownership adventure went.

Ed Lowe

Today's blog is an unabashed love letter to a man I have never met in real life but only through the printed word. His name is Ed Lowe and I first met Ed through the pages of Newsday. At the time we became acquainted, Ed's official title at Newsday was Columnist, and although that may work on a News Room organizational chart, it falls far short of really describing what he did. Let me use Ed's own words from the introduction of his 1993 book, Ed Lowe's Long Island: "I never wrote a column. I wrote stories." And what stories they were. Some of Ed's Stories would bring a tear to your eye, while others would start you laughing out loud. Ed's stories were of the human existence here on Long Island. They were heartstring pulling tales of trouble in people's lives, and of how they had overcome great obstacles. They were also silly tales of common human experiences, that as a fellow Long Islander you could identify with. More often than not, you didn't know the folks Ed was writing about, but they were Long Islanders, and you understood what their lives were like, and you could identify with them. Ed's columns pointed out his story telling ability. They also pointed out his fondness for "extended" lunch hours at local pups around Newsday's headquarters and the Long Island characters that populated them. I can only imagine what those lunches must have been like and the great stories that went back and forth. I know that over the years, lots of them ended up in his Newsday columns, but I'm sure that there were many more that were outside the bounds of what was publishable! God I would have loved to be sitting on a stool next to Ed Lowe at any bar on Long Island. Now that would be a lunch hour I bet you'd never forget! Shortly after our twins Krissi and Kenny were born in November of 1986, one of Ed's columns dealt with the tragic death of a newborn - his grandson. Being a father that at the time had two premature newborns in Winthrop Hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care unit, this was a story that really resonated with me, and I felt very connected to his story and the participants. I was so touched that I sat down and wrote him a letter at Newsday, drawing parallels between his family's story and ours, and passing along my sorrow at his sad tale. A couple of weeks later I got back a note from Ed thanking me for my good wishes and wishing Krissi and Kenny and our family good luck. I always thought that note said a lot about the kind of person Ed Lowe is, and I proudly still have that letter as a reminder that there are some great people in this world! As often happens in businesses, management changes, finances change, and the relationship one has with their bosses deteriorates. That is what happened between Ed Lowe and Newsday, and in 2004, and after almost 30 years of being a featured columnist for Newsday, Ed accepted "early retirement". Frankly, a loss that I don't think Newsday has ever recovered from… But Ed was not finished with his public career. He soon joined the Long Island Press writing columns for them and other Long Island weeklies, as well as continuing his participation in Telecare TV shows and speaking to various groups around Long Island. In a story in the December 14, 2004 edition of the Long Island Press announcing that he was joining the paper, Ed referred to himself as, "a recovering Irish Catholic, a recovering ex-husband, a recovering ex-teacher, grandfather, son, journalist, consumer, friend, automobile operator, dinner speaker and parent of teenagers." As an Ed Lowe reader, you knew about all those areas of his life and more because unlike a lot of journalists, Ed Lowe's life was never off limits in his story telling! He laughed at himself as much as he did at the folks he highlighted in his stories, and that always endeared him to me. I continued to read Ed in the Long Island Press, but after a few months, the paper got harder and harder to find and I was no longer getting my Ed Lowe fix. I often times wondered what he was up to, where he was, and if he was still writing. It was only earlier this year that I re-connected with Mr. Lowe and once again it was through the written word. I'm not sure how, but I discovered that Ed was writing a blog on a weekly basis called Ed Lowe, Himself (http://edlowehimself.blogspot.com). I also discovered that there had been an unfortunate turn in his life since last we had met. On January 5, 2008, while in Vermont waiting for his second daughter, Colleen, to read from her work at a triumphant close of a grueling course in Creative Writing, Ed Lowe said, "I think I am having a stroke." He was right. In reading the early blog entries from the fall of 2009, Ed recounted what the last year plus had been like for him. In typical Ed Lowe style, he laughed at himself even when much of what he was reporting was not funny at all. But while reading about the pain and the suffering he'd gone through, and his need to relearn how to do everything including using the English language, the Ed Lowe spirit still shined through. Some of the tales were painful to read about and the tasks he had to master were seemingly insurmountable, but as usual, Ed found a way to laugh at himself and to humanize even the worst of it. Can you imagine the pain of a man, who for all his life had used language the way he had, and to suddenly find he still had a mind full of ideas but had no way to communicate them to those around him? So I started to read the blog entries, and since I had such a backlog to catch up on, I gorged myself on Ed Lowe. I would spend a lot of time each day at the computer or my I-Pod Touch catching up with one of my favorite story tellers. As a wanna be writer myself, I'd always loved the way Ed crafted a story, and I found great inspiration in once again being able to read Ed's work and the story of the last 18 months of his life. In fact, here's what I said in my blog entry from September 1st of last year: "Anyway, I am reading Mr. Lowes' blog entries and I am loving it! Rather than having to wait hours or days or weeks for the next installment, here I had a compendium of his writing. Much like having the entire series of an author's novels on hand so you can end one and start the next, I can finish one column and start the next (Mr. Lowe is at a very interesting place in his life and along with the stories of others, you also get a very good look at what he is going through. Rather than even attempt to share that with you, I suggest you sit back and let him take you along with him. He will do it with much more humor and insight than I could ever provide.). So while I am in the middle of becoming reacquainted with Ed Lowe and his work, an idea hits me...why don't I get one of these blogs and see if I can find the commitment to write something on a regular basis?" So that's just what I did. Having now caught up with my Ed Lowe backlog, and only able to read new installments when they came out, I started this blog. I was pretty good at keeping up the routine of writing as I've read too many times to count that the only way to get good at it is to keep doing it. I also have to say that I unabashedly stole the format I was going to use from Ed Lowe (hey, if you're going to steal you steal from the best, right?). I based the blog entries on things that moved me in my life. I wrote about our children, the 1964 NY World's Fair, people's attitudes, and memories from my life. My sincere desire was that one day, when I had managed to keep up with my routine for a reasonable amount of time, I was going to send an email to Mr. Lowe and show him what I'd done and thank him for the inspiration to buckle down to the task. Each time I finished reading a new entry from the Ed Lowe, Himself blog I'd learned a little more about Mr. Lowe's current situation or the folks who touched his life, was saddened that my current dose of Ed Lowe was done, inspired to write some more in my blog, and anxious for the week to pass till the next entry appeared. That was until his blog entry of October 8, 2010 entitled "Liver". As was typical for Mr. Lowe, this started off with a recitation of his relationship with liver and how it had changed since his childhood days when he hated it, to the day it was almost forced on him by a bartender at a watering hole on the night that it was the dinner special. As I said, all typical Ed Lowe, until about a third of the way through the piece, when these words jumped off the computer screen at me: "It seems I have liver cancer. I found out two-and-a-half-years after a massive stroke failed for some reason to kill me. And, my liver cancer appears to have nothing to do with my old habits, chief among which was the volume consumption of beer." Honestly, I had to read those words three or four times before I was really sure that they said what I thought they said. It was hard to finish reading the piece, but as sad as I was at Ed's situation, I found myself chuckling at his words as I finished the piece. Then I stopped and thought, "Oh my God, hasn't this man suffered enough??" Here was a man for whom speaking and writing had been his life. He has a massive stroke, looses the ability to do both. and through sheer guts and determination, he doesn't give up…he fights back and he re-learns both of them! How incredible a story is that alone, but now he has liver cancer?? How much is one person supposed to take??? The first comment posted that day on the blog was from Mr. Lowe and it went as follows: "This runs in The Neighbor next Tuesday. Surgery is scheduled for that day. In the unlikely event I don't make it, I want you to know that I enjoyed my relationship with you more than you can know, each and every one of you. See ya all of a sudden." With those words, my contact with Ed Lowe ended for what I hopped would be a brief period. I kept checking his blog for any updates and even found him on Facebook and sent a friend request. When a week or two later my friend request was accepted, I hoped that meant that he was on the mend and would be back with us soon. I kept checking both the blog and the Facebook page, and although there were no added words from Mr. Lowe, new friends were being accepted every week, so I hoped he was doing better and was, at the very least, still with us! That was till this past Wednesday afternoon when I found this new status update on his Facebook page: " Send a cheer for Ed as he finishes his last paragraph! He said I should write something clever about his departure, but there is nothing really cleaver about cancer. It's got him. He sends all his love and appreciation to all of you. Please send him your blessings xoxoxoxo. Coleen" Even reading those words now, I am overwhelmed with the sadness I feel for him, his family and friends, and for us, his huge base of friends who only knew him through his words. I obviously was not alone with these feelings, as hundreds upon hundreds of people have posted comments on his page telling him how much he has meant to us over the years. It's really rather incredible, and if you have even a slight memory of Mr. Lowe and his work, I would recommend that you read the eloquent words. By in large, these are not the words of professional writers, but they are the words of folks who loved Ed Lowe's words. Who loved his choices of stories and the way he crafted his works. Who loved the words he chose, his openness in discussing his own life, and the way he'd made us laugh and cry over the years. I was not alone in feeling that he was a friend; even though I'd never met him. I knew all I needed to know about Ed Lowe through his words. He was my friend that I'd never met, but who had communicated with me for years. He was a man I'd always hoped to meet, or to at least have an email correspondence with one day, but as with so many things in life that you think there's still time for, that will never happen. So I hope you'll join me in wishing my friend Ed Lowe and his family well in this very difficult time. We love you Ed, and we will miss you and your work, and wish there was a way to change fate. Thanks for the great memories and introducing us to so many wonderful people through the stories of the island we all call home. Long Island is a better place because Ed Lowe was a part of it. Godspeed my friend…hope to finally meet you one day down the road in a better place.