I started working at Hunter College in December 1971, at the age of 21. Life was relatively uneventful and I guess you could say I stayed on a straight road for a while. I was making a decent wage for the time. I had already put behind me the accident in June that would eventually come back into my life.

    Instead, I was keeping myself active. I was playing softball in a league in Red Hook, not far from Park Slope where I was living (more later), and basketball at a rec center attached to Holy Family, the other parish I spoke about earlier. I was still living at home, although I wound up moving into the upstairs apartment my parents used to rent. I guess you could say life was pretty good. Then I got married in 1973.

    I don’t mean to imply that life was not good when I got married. That wouldn’t happen for a few years. In the beginning it was awesome. I was married to a gorgeous, long-legged, blonde knockout. At the time, that was all that mattered. We had a couple of other married and/or dating couples, and our life kind of reflected the Billy Joel song “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant.

    Note: As I was reviewing this, I was feeling a little reminiscent. And with access to the World Wide Web sitting right here on the same computer as where I was doing this, I could not resist stopping and listening to the above song. Nice. Substitute “Bottle of reds, bottle of whites” with a little bit of dark chocolate edibles, and I just had an enjoyable seven minutes.

    Getting back, after four years of taking the subway to high school and four years riding the subway to college, I was now traveling on the subway to work. When you think about it, from 1964 until 1987, when I left New York, I spent a helluva lot of time underground.

    Hunter was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, near Central Park. My friend, who said he would go to California on our road trip but bailed out, was going to school at Hunter at the time. He and I would occasionally walk up to the park and hang out when the weather permitted.

    Occasionally I would drive in, but I can attest to it as I lived through it, traffic going into Manhattan from Brooklyn in the morning was horrendous. I lived pretty near the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and the Brooklyn Bridge, but both were always backed up during rush hour. Then it was a pain finding a parking spot near Hunter. Either that or pay for parking. Still, I was enjoying the work and had made friends that would be around along some of my upcoming forks. One, in particular, would take me on my next fork.