The New York Times Book Review

I receive the reviews on Friday in my email box because I can't get them easily or at all in print form. This fact frustrates me and forces me to read for long periods of time on-line. But read it I must, and enjoy it I do.

Reading today but two of many reviews I found myself harkening back to the summer of 1960, the year I sat through two summer classes at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Mind, Erasmus was not my ordinary school but the school that offered me the opportunity to graduate one semester shy of eight from Midwood High School established more than one hundred fifty years later and a staunch competitor back then.

In that lazy summer of two classes, a long bus ride across Brooklyn and the introduction of jay-walking tickets, I received two "As" one for Creative Writing.

Why am I remembering this now?

I believe I took my pen to paper by carefully observing the brilliant writing in the New York Times Book Review section, and thus increasing my already well-established vocabulary, and re-enforcing my small but successful gift for writing better than average.

As I was admiring the first of the two reviews, I realized that none other than Joyce Carol Oates was speaking out to me years after I've lost track or touch with her words--words that in the past echoed into a large window-less room of my own unacknowledged childhood trauma.

Now as I continue to postpone and procrastinate my own writing, I find several of her words reverberating in my head: predilection and wry, just two of the many words she introduces into her review of "The American Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld.

I also had a flash back to crossing the large expansive Flatbush Avenue on which Erasmus fronted, in thought and not mindful of ongoing traffic, and a police presence.

As a result of my dreaming of words, my own and the writers of those reviews, I received the first registered jay-walking ticket in the City of New York.