A lifetime of being a fan, with apologies to Mr. Boone At the end, in the hospital, my father didn’t know what was happening to him or why he couldn’t go home. He frowned at the gauze wrapped around his hands, tugged at the tubing running up his leg and…

By Jeanne Albanese Patience was never my father’s thing, as anyone who ever sat in traffic, stood on line at the grocery store or suffered through a Yankee loss with him can attest. That’s what makes his tomatoes all the more spectacular. His post-retirement annual bounty of juicy red tomatoes…

Open or Closed? Closed I think you’re in there Open I know you’re not

One Last Shot Before You Go By Jeanne Albanese I recently and quite obsessively poured through more than 45,000 photographs to curate a life time of school memories for my soon-to-be high school graduate. I scanned folders and sub folders and folders within subfolders. I cross-referenced laptop albums with those stored on Shutterfly, Amazon, Google and icloud and triple…

Five parades, one childhood UPDATE: I wrote this piece two years ago, when Angelina was in second grade. I pulled it out last Flag Day and now on the night before her very last, after much debate, I decided to post it again with an update. With so much heavy…

By Jeanne Albanese I had to go to Cherry Road School this morning to pick something up. I pulled into one of the parking spots in front, sat in the car and looked at the school. …

By Jeanne Albanese One half of my heart remains rooted within the five boroughs of New York city. My parents live on Staten Island. There’s one quarter. My brother lives in Manhattan, the American epicenter of COVID-19. Another quarter. And the math won’t work, but let’s throw in a couple…

By Jeanne Albanese I feel like a ping pong ball these days. Not the pre-COVID-19 kind, pinging and dinging from commitment to errand to chore to work to commitment to errand to chore to work and back again. I’m an emotional ping pong ball. (And fear the trajectory of this…

By Jeanne Albanese When I left Staten Island for college in Syracuse in the fall of 1987, I never really looked back. Sure, I still call it home and have many fond memories of growing up there, but it just wasn’t the place for me (no offense intended to my…