Every Memorial Day and every Veterans Day, people tell veterans, “Thank you for your service.”

The day passes. Their service is forgotten for six months. The armed forces go about their business carrying out the orders of the current commander in chief and…

There was a tavern on Utica Avenue that could be seen from the upstairs, rear bedroom windows of the house in Brooklyn where I lived as a boy. It was the custom in our neighborhood for parents to send a child to the tavern with a pail to get beer. No parent complained when the kid sampled the beer on the way…

My older brother, Beryl, had a way with girls that was a mystery to me. He teased them unmercifully. Yet he could win them over with a smile.

He had a stack of pornography that he hid from my parents and me. Presumable he viewed it on occasions when he practiced…

When Miles Berg was a little boy, he asked his mother Sarah a logical question to which she had no answer. He asked, “Mama, where was I before I was born?”

Unprepared for the question and not knowing how to answer she responded with the first thing that…

As Memorial Day approached each year, The Rest Place, where Stanley Israel lived, updated the poster displayed at the facility’s entry on Memorial and Veteran’s days. The poster held pictures of residents who had served in the country’s military and wartime commercial fleet. As older…