We fathers and mothers want our children to to be all the good things in us and cast aside the bad things in us.  Some of us parents want even more for our children. We want them not to have to learn the lessons we learned the hard way, instead we want them to learn from our experiences through our words.  

We want our children to know us beyond the grave and pass on what we embraced to be true in our lives in the hope that it could be true in their lives too.  Every now and again something from my ongoing memoirs seems more important than giving it to only my sons. 

Life is not a movie.  The nobility and pride in the movies we experience are hardly ever, if ever experienced in real life.  Real life is much tougher and the price for nobility comes at much higher toll in contrast to what is projected in a two hour time frame. Words are so easy, action comes at consequence.

No one ever wants to admit mistakes.  Certainly not the big ones. I must confess, I've made some big ones.   In some ways I feel like fate was setting me up for the ultimate big mistake. And from my biggest mistake, there was no movie moment to put it all in perspective.  There was just one big miss to clean up and it certainly wasn't resolved in two hours of film.

Today I’d like to pay homage to good pizza.   There is a lot of history behind pizza which I won’t bore you with but there is a type of pizza that is somewhat a dying breed.  It is the brick oven or coal oven pizza, not to be confused with wood oven pizza.   The lore of New Yorkers tells of a great pizza made in a small corner pizza shop in downtown Manhattan named Lombardi’s. 

Lombardi’s is a nice story too.  Located in Little Italy at 32nd and Spring Streets.  I first visited it back in 2005 when my son and I dropped in on the recommendation of my ex-wife.  She had eaten their prior and who knows how she came about the place. But in the end, she told me how great it was and I wanted to know if she was right.  I mean, I had to know if a Ukrainian woman really knew pizza! LOL  Turns out she did.   What she didn’t know to tell me was that I was going to what is rumored to be the oldest Pizza parlor in New York, and more specifically that I would be dining on “coal oven” pizza. 

Although Gennaro Lombardi wasn’t the actual maker (pizziolas) of the pizza at first (an employee at his grocery was selling it and it became popular) he did open Lombardi’s Pizza in 1905.  His employee later opened his own pizzeria on Coney Island.  Thus Anthoney Tontonno stepped out from under the shadow of Gennaro Lombardi to open his own Totonno’s.   While the Totonno’s location is still the original location opened in 1924, the Lombardi’s of today is not at its original location (not that either matters).  The original Lombardi’s was a block off of 32nd and Spring Street.  Totonno’s now has multiple ...   more »