Remembering a Friend in Bushwick

Longing and passion on the streets of Brooklyn. Case Maclaim.

Until yesterday, I had not been to the Bushwick section of Brooklyn since February 1987. Both trips were work-related; each was very different.

In 1987... I was newly working in the PR department for New York Telephone, and an electrical fire in a central office on Bushwick Avenue had just knocked out phone service to 41,000 people in one of the poorest, most neglected neighborhoods in New York City.

A town car had whisked me late at night past police barricades to a makeshift "command center" -- a cramped RV, where I was to spend the next few days at the side of Robin Flowers.

Robin was a big man with a deep, infectious laugh. Everyone who knew Robin loved him. Working at his side -- as we answered calls from reporters and he filled me in about how our PR department worked and taught me a bit about telecommunications technology -- has always been a highlight of my career.

Robin spent only a year or two more at New York Telephone. He left us to work at AT&T, where he'd eventually become a PR vice president, but not before keeping a promise to take me out and get me good and drunk one night if we ever got out of Bushwick alive.

Robin in 2002.

I scared the hell out of my wife the way I stumbled home early one Saturday soon afterward, and she was subsequently a bit wary at the mere mention of Robin's name. Between that and the fact that he would soon be bound for even bigger things, and I lost touch with him a few years later.

Then one day in 2012, out of the blue, I heard the news that Robin had died, after and long and courageous battle with MS.

In 2016... I found myself unexpectedly back in Bushwick. Now working in the PR department for Verizon, the successor to New York Telephone's former parent company, I had met my colleagues at a private club in Chelsea to set off for a Friday of team-building and creative discovery. The agenda was a mystery.

A cramped party bus whisked us over the Manhattan Bridge -- and, suddenly, there I was in the same neighborhood where I first worked with Robin.

I thought of him immediately -- and yet everything else about Bushwick had changed. It wasn't dangerous. It was bathed in bright light, mixed with stray snowflakes. We were in the midst of the Bushwick Collective, an outdoor street gallery, with vibrant murals from some of the world's best street artists. 

I marveled, in particular, at a hyperrealistic work by Case Maclaim from Germany. He had painted a beautiful, faceless couple embracing each other. The image screams with longing and passion; the woman holds on so tight that her finger imprints the skin around the man's bicep.

I started wandering down one street, trying to take it all in... when people started following me. Most thought I was leading the way; someone who knows me a little better shouted from behind: "Hey, Bob! This is supposed to be a team-building exercise. You're not supposed to be wandering off!"

We were scheduled to meet Joseph Ficalora, the Bushwick Collective's "curator," for a group tour of the neighborhood, but Joseph was late. With nothing else to do, everyone started taking photos of the street art.

Joseph tells the Bushwick Collective story.

"One by one, we're just reducing the 'cool factor' of the neighborhood," joked one of my younger colleagues, as we gazed at the sight of about 20 corporate communications managers on the hipster streets taking selfies and us-ies and photos for Instagram.

Another younger colleague was creating a Snapchat story.

"I don't like Snapchat," I said. "Nothing about it lasts."

"That's the whole point," he replied.

Finally, another colleague wandered into a local bar -- and everyone followed her, to wait for Joseph there.

Everyone but me. I wandered away again. I ducked around the corner and found a patch of white outside the frame of another work of art. It was an inadvertent brush stroke near the sidewalk.

So I bent down...

I bent down because this is what art is all about. It's not about Snapchat; it's about durable pigments.

I bent down... and added my own mark. I dug my pen into the splash of white, and carved the initials R and F into the wall.

Remembering Robin Flowers. He made a difference, and I want people to know that. Forever.

PR 101: How to Train Your Dinosaur

There's a bit of Walter Mitty in everyone and, over the years, I've found that an appreciation for whimsy can be a useful thing. Even in business.

Especially in business.

I write "over the years" because a friend who retired from Verizon's PR department recently texted me this photo of something he had saved in his files since 1998:

It's pretty funny too -- except for the part where the dinosaur is actually named Bob. In PR, the visuals can kill you.

So I was contemplating the deeper meaning of a decades-old Gary Larson cartoon when I ran into a work colleague early this morning.

"You at CES last week?" he asked.

CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is held each January in Las Vegas. This year, it attracted 170,000 people, including the usual mix of marketing and PR professionals.

"No, I'm not allowed in Vegas," I joked.

In truth, because my job is focused on financial PR, there's little reason for me to attend. And in fact, don't tell anyone... after all, what's written in Jersey, stays in Jersey... I've never been to Las Vegas in my life.

"But didn't I see you there last year?" my colleague replied, confused.

A routine response would have been, "No, not me. You must be thinking of someone else." Then sulk about who he could have mistaken me for.

But, over the years, I've learned that not taking yourself too seriously can keep your inner dinosaur at bay. I simply looked bemused.

"Not allowed in Vegas?" he repeated. "I swear I saw you there last year."

I finally offered a faint, fleeting smile.

"Precisely," I said.

Bob Varettoni, inscrutable to the last.

A Year in Review, According to Instagram

A new online tool allows you to see your most-liked Instagram posts in 2015.

If I can identify a pattern in my posts, it's a feeling of isolation and looking into the distance. Interestingly, the photo of Nancy taking a photo from a scenic overlook was more popular than the photo of a Daily News photographer taking a photo of Pope Francis right before my 15 seconds of fame.

Most of the most-liked posts were taken toward the end of the year -- one that has been blessedly eventful. When I look back on some images from early in the year, I can't believe they are really from 2015. It already seems like years ago.

Here's to an eventful, and happy, 2016. I hope to record many more things here in the years to come.

You haven't seen anything yet.

Surrounded by Angels

Every year, on Christmas Eve, I hear my uncle tell the story of an angel appearing to a man named Joseph in a dream.

It's the Gospel reading for the Christmas Vigil Mass. Ever since my dad died a decade ago, my own small family always travels with my mom to visit his older brother, a retired Catholic priest... and we celebrate Mass together, with the same readings, every Christmas Eve.

And every year, I identify with Joseph. When my uncle reads the Gospel, I see angels all around the small dining room table of his childhood home.

I see where dad used to sit when I was a boy. I see the chalice where my grandmother always placed the salt shaker, just out of reach from my grandfather. From where I sit, I still see his outstretched arm, and I still see my grandmother in the kitchen, still secretly stifling a laugh.

Mass ends, and we joke about the lack of a homily and the lack of a collection -- and my uncle turns a bit wistful about the lack of music.

We may be too bashful to sing, but I sometimes want to tell my uncle that, every year, I still hear his own uncle -- my grandmother's talented brother -- playing piano in the living room.

Found in NJ: Greetings From Asbury Park

Asbury Park's abandoned carousel pavilion.

Few places in my home state are as haunted by the passage of time as Asbury Park.

Years ago, when my wife was editor of her high school yearbook, she arranged a trip there so the staff could have their photo taken on the town's famous carousel.

Today, the pavilion is gutted. All the entrances are chained, but you can still poke your cell phone through the iron bars to take a photo of where 72 fiberglass animals used to spin. Against the black back wall, a New York street artist, Harif Guzman, has painted a bold mural of a crowd of stylized faces outlined in white.

Images from Asbury Park, Dec. 13, 2015.

With Asbury Park's rich and sentimental history, its scars of hurricane damage, and its odd mix of abandonment and rebirth in close proximity, I felt something of New Orleans in the air when I visited there last weekend.

Since then, I've been caught in the undertow of this small city by the Jersey shore. I haven't been able to stop thinking about its sights and sounds (thank you, Stone Pony) and boyhood memories (thank you, Mom and Dad).

It's no surprise to me that Asbury Park is home to a diverse collection of photographers, artists and writers. This past Sunday, I met some of these talented people at The Collective Art Tank on Bangs Avenue, a co-op where "creative minds can learn art, teach art, talk art and live art…collectively."

I participated in a writing workshop sponsored by @jerseycollective, an Instagram account that's a collaboration among NJ photographers (hello, @suzanne_ap, @joepartusch, @toxictinsgallery and friends). As Jersey Collective described on Tumblr, "We thought it would be fun to try something new and have an event centered on a different form of creativity besides photography... We started off with a warm-up: we all wrote for three minutes using one of the photographs from our gallery show as the inspiration. Then we talked a little bit about how we approached the exercise."

I found the writing easy to do. That's me at the bottom of the photo below, jotting a quick few lines about the warmup exercise photo by @crunchygirl: "Feet first... toes out of water... I tried to walk, but fell on my back."

I was more introspective during the main exercise, choosing to write about a black-and-white photo by @robsociety.

I wrote:

I've never once, in my entire life, put a quarter into a public pair of binoculars to see a better view. I think, after all, this is one my character flaws. I'm not adventurous enough. 

I take things at face value and accept them blindly. I'm afraid to put my eye against the lens and turn the dial for a clearer view. 

I think, perhaps, if I did put my eye to the lens... that the world would be looking into me. That I would be the one under the microscope. How many others, I wonder, have fallen victim to this trick? How many inner secrets do these binoculars know? 

So I prefer this uneasy truce: I won't put a quarter into you... if you turn a blind metallic eye and keep my secrets too.

Again, I found this easy to do -- which was a bit disappointing. As I've grown older, I fear I may have become a bit of a hack. One of my life's goals is to write something that might always be remembered. And I simply can't do with an off-handed wave of my pen.

Like Asbury Park, I find myself haunted by the passage of time. Someday it may be too late to create something of lasting value. But I intend to keep trying.


Here's one last reflection on a photo, the one where I'm taking a selfie in the mirror at The Collective Art Tank:

Time is closing in all around me, but I refuse to be trapped. 

I was born and raised in New Jersey. 

I know my way to water.

This is the first post in a series that spotlights interesting locations in New Jersey.

Found in NJ: Fairmount Cemetery

On a gentle bluff overlooking sometimes un-trafficked Route 517 in Tewskbury, this cemetery is thrice removed from any easy Internet search. For one thing, there's a much larger Fairmount Cemetery in Newark. For another, even this site is different than the Fairmount Presbyterian Church graveyard, just across the street. And finally, even the church across the street is often confused with another church -- currently up for sale -- just up the road at an intersection with a traffic light.

When I visited yesterday, I said a prayer at a gravestone etched with the image of a soldier, Brian Varsalone, who died before his 26th birthday in 1992. An hour later, Google hauntingly sent me a message that it had auto-edited the photo I took there.

The gravestone read, "I am home in heaven, oh so happy and so bright. There is perfect joy and beauty in this everlasting light..."

View other photos I took of Fairmount Cemetery here.

Morning in New Jersey

This morning, seemingly in the blink of an eye, the trees were already bare in my hometown.

Just one week earlier, their branches had been ablaze in contrasting shades of red, yellow and brown. But as Election Day dawned, only streams of toilet paper remained on the tree outside the polling place at the library.

This particular tree had been teepeed in the tradition of Goosey Night (or Mischief Night, if you're not from Passaic County), the night before Halloween. There's no longer any widespread evidence of Goosey Night pranks in litigious 2015, however; just neighborhoods letting their children playfully mark their own property.

Seasons change; times change -- yet inside the library I was greeted by the same group of Election Day volunteers who I see year after year. None were young more than 20 years ago, when I first moved here, but none seem to have aged in the meantime.

It's as if people who volunteer at the polls have somehow managed to suspend time -- the same way the waiting list never seems to winnow at a nearby nursing home where a relative hopes to soon reside. In New Jersey, if you want to live forever, just get your name on the waiting list for Marian Manor.

After voting, I noticed pagan and Christian images competing with each other on a nearby street. An elaborate Halloween lawn display has been set in the shadows of Ascension Church.

This is New Jersey. Nowhere else in America are so many contrasts in such close proximity to each other. My home state is a land where rural, suburban and urban extremes coexist almost side by side. It's also a land of paradox, where everything changes quickly and nothing changes at all.

On Instagram (@bvarphotos) and Tumblr, I explore and document my love for the state, and I invite you to follow me there.

Meanwhile, another morning in New Jersey has come and gone. It leaves me hopeful, because I know things can change in an instant here and there's something unexpected around the next corner.

As our poet-laureate sings, "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night."

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Let's Eat, Drink and Be Merry... and Celebrate All Souls

Two photos, years apart, on Varettoni Place, named after Dad's brother.

With apologies to my life coach, Crash Davis, I’d like to point out that All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, is boring. Besides that, it’s fascist.

All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, is democratic. It’s the liturgical Festivus for the rest of us.

Like people in other cultures, I believe that the spirits of my dead ancestors are always surrounding me. Which probably explains why I need a life coach.

It also explains all my odd family customs around food and drink.

For example, this past Oct. 9 – on what would have been John Lennon’s 75th birthday – my family had hot dogs and beans for dinner, with fudge marble cake for dessert.

Dessert on Oct. 9.

That’s because Oct. 9, 2015, also marked what would have been Patrick Cullinane’s 55th birthday. He’s my wife’s brother, the nicest guy I’ve ever known. He died of cancer 16 years ago, and this was his favorite meal.

On Oct. 24, 2015, on the 10th anniversary of my Dad’s death, I sat down at Dad’s favorite diner, the Tick Tock in Clifton, NJ (not far from Varettoni Place). I ordered his favorite meal: eggs over with sausage, home fries, rye toast and coffee.

The older I get, the more I can taste the past.

I can’t take a bite of black licorice without thinking of Dad’s father, whom I called Nonno. My grandfather was a great fan of the New York Mets in the 1960s, and I have fond memories of him in his easy chair while watching baseball on TV.

Breakfast on Oct. 24.

My wife is also a longtime Mets fan, and she sometimes inadvertently pantomimes him – and her own grandfather – when she gets angry while watching Mets games on TV because no ballplayer these days knows how to lay down a sacrifice bunt.

Her airing of grievances – in imitation of Nonno – proves that honoring the dead has nothing to do with heredity. Instead, it is inextricably linked to our salvation.

Let me explain.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of my Dad’s death, my Mom had a Mass said in his name at St. James parish in Totowa, NJ. My sister took a red-eye flight from California to attend – and we had both ordered eggs over with sausage, home fries, rye toast and coffee at the Tick Tock Diner that morning.

During the homily at the memorial Mass, a priest claimed the Gospel passage contained proof of Jesus’ historical existence: The fact that the beggar who approached Jesus had a name, and even referenced his father by name, was the kind of significant detail that had the ring of truth.

Later, at the same Mass, there were more important words that brought home a larger truth to me.

The priest raised the host at the moment of consecration and said, “Take this, all of you, and eat it... Do this in memory of me.”

So let's eat and drink and celebrate to honor our dead.

With both joy and sadness in my heart, I offer an All Souls’ toast to Dad and Uncle Pat, Nonno and Nonna, my Mom’s brothers and sisters, and all the dearly departed in my life.

Although they would never presume to call themselves saints, I know that – as long as I am alive – they will never die.

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10 Poems and Passages to Learn by Heart

Here’s the full text of the poem.

I owe my love of poetry to a lawyer -- and today, National Poetry Day 2015, I'd like to thank him.

Mr. Sullivan (he insisted his first name was “Mister”) was my first high school English teacher in Wayne, New Jersey.

To pass his one and only test one semester, you were required to stand in front of the entire class and flawlessly, and without notes, recite William Cullen Bryant’s long poem about death, “Thanatopsis.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Sullivan (a lawyer by trade, who taught only this one class) would sit behind his desk, dispassionately reading the day’s newspaper, which he had extracted from his ever-present black briefcase.

Dressed like a Blues Brother in skinny tie, white shirt and dark-colored suit, Mr. Sullivan – on non-test days – was boyishly irreverent and sharply funny. He was constantly brushing a stray shock of grey hair from his forehead, as if impersonating Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce.

He insisted that learning such a long poem by rote would teach us mental discipline, and that standing proverbially naked in front of our jeering peers at such a tender age would teach us confidence and presentation skills.

He claimed not to care a whit about the poem itself.

But that only made me care all the more. And the memorization – and seeing and hearing the interpretation of each of my classmates – forever changed something in my internal wiring.

To clever Mr. Sullivan… to him who in the love of nature holds communion with her visible forms… I owe undying gratitude.

So, without further ado, here's my recommended list of 10 poems and prose passages to learn by heart:

1. Sailing to Byzantium -W.B. Yeats
2. Daddy -Sylvia Plath
3. somewhere i have never travelled  -E.E. Cummings
4. I Hear an Army -James Joyce
5. Annabel Lee (with audio) -Edgar Allan Poe
6. Dover Beach -Matthew Arnold
7. To His Coy Mistress -Andrew Marvell
8. Vladimir Nabokov’s first paragraphs of “Lolita”
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last paragraphs of “The Great Gatsby” (video)
10. Harper Lee describing Maycomb, Alabama, in “To Kill a Mockingbird”

Keep this handy. It may someday – like Walt Whitman said about baseball – repair your losses and be a blessing to you.

Many years after high school, I used to recite “Annabel Lee” to my young daughters to get them to go to sleep. Yes, I may have subliminally altered their psyches – but, like Mr. Sullivan, I may also have imprinted on them an everlasting love of our beautiful language along the way.

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Update: in March 2019, I posted a few of my own poems to commemorate World Poetry Day and in 2021, I followed prompts to create poems throughout April. More recently, I posted "2 Poems: Experiments in Creativity for Fun, Not Profit" and updated "The Evolution of a Poem, Decades Apart."