Margaret, the girl who knocked me off my skates eventually dropped out of high school and got married and her drug addict husband moved in with them. One day she sent him to the store to buy bologna. He came walking down the block with a small brown bag in his hand. He had that glazed look on his face, it was obvious that he had gone to shoot up, probably with the butcher’s sons. He went to light his cigarette and the bag in his hand caught on fire, and he didn’t even realize it. He went to hand her the bag and she started yelling at him, calling him an idiot.

Luckily they only had one child, he was an evil little thing, real tiny and bad to the bone. As a little kid he used to steal everyone’s mail and sell whatever he could to some of the older guys who would use the credit cards, and whatever else they could. He became a crack head and died as a teenager, I am not sure exactly how though.

The neighborhood butcher had two sons, both were heroin addicts. One of them we called “blue boy” because he used to overdose all the time and stop breathing and turn blue. Luckily his brother learned how to do CPR so he would revive him and there usually was no need to call an ambulance. I had only seen it happened once, I was pretty amazed at how blue he turned.

I had another neighbor who was a drug addict. He was chemistry major in college until he dropped out and began cooking up angel dust in his basement. He had a beautiful white husky named Snow, and he talked to that dog just like it was a person. There’s nothing wrong with that except for the time he tried to teach it how to drive. You see he knew that he was too messed up to drive, so he figured he would do the responsible thing and let Snow drive, since he wasn’t high, but no matter how hard he tried, the dog just couldn’t get the hang of it.

It was hysterical to watch him try though, he died a few years later of AIDS.

When I was a kid I loved my roller skates. In those days skates were metal and you used a skate key to adjust them after you put them on over your shoes.

It was always best to skate in the street where the asphalt was smooth, the sidewalk was too bumpy and the cracks got in the way. The street I lived on was full of pot holes, plus there was a lot of traffic, so we used to go around the corner to skate.

There was an elderly woman who lived around the corner and she was very cranky. I don’t know how old she was but my father told me that she was a cranky old woman when he was a kid also.

She used to come out of her house and chase us with a broom if we played in the street in front of her house. She told one of the mothers that she didn’t like the white marks that the metal skate wheels left on the black asphalt. What a ridiculous excuse. I think she was just mean.

When I first learned to ride a two wheeler she came outside and chased us with her broom and I fell. I got really scared and ran home and my cousin had to go back for my bike. For a long time after that I was afraid to play over there.

I was basically a coward when I was a kid. There was a girl named Margaret who was two years older than I was. Whenever I was outside skating she used to come over and push me to try and knock me down. After falling a number of times, I used to just sit on the curb when she came around, and if she didn’t leave I would take off my skates.

One spring day I had just finished putting on my skates when she came over to try to knock me down, so I sat down and took off my skates as she taunted me. Then I stood up and was going to go home when I noticed that something was different. Apparently I had grown over the winter and she was no longer bigger than me. Two years of being knocked down and scared had built up and I had finally had enough. I yelled “you’re gonna get it” and picked up one of the metal skates and chased her. She ran all the way home and I chased her up her stairs and just when she had no where else to run, her aunt came out and started yelling at us for running in the hallway. So it turn out good for both of us because I was so mad I think I would have bashed her face in.

And she never bothered me again.

Does anyone else remember these old skates?

Isaac Asimov, novelist, short story author, essayist, historian, biochemist, textbook writer, and humorist was born on Jan. 2. 1920. He was best known as one of the world’s greatest science fiction writer’s.He died nine years after contracting AIDS from contaminated blood during a bypass operation. Upon his death at age 72, he had written more than 470 published books, covering every category in the Dewey Decimal System, fiction and nonfiction. His family was Jewish, but he was an Atheist, here are some of his thoughts on religion:

"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived"

"I must say that I stand amazed at the highly intelligent people who have taken so much of the Bible so seriously"

"Nobody but a dedicated Christian could possibly read the gospels and not see them as a tissue of nonsense"

"I would not be satisfied to have my kids choose to be religious without trying to argue them out of it, just as I would not be satisfied to have them decide to smoke regularly or engage in any other practice I considered detrimental to mind or body"

"I am prejudiced against religion because I know the history of religion, and it is the history of human misery and of black crimes"

 A few more of his quotes:

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."

" The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing."

I was thinking that this past year has been very uneventful for me, and that nothing either really good or really bad happened to me.

Then it dawned on me...I found Blogstream in 2006 and that is the best thing that happened to me in a long time. I love getting up in the morning and checking my e-mail, and then going around to visit all your blogs and catching up on your latest news.

So thank you to all my Blogstream friends, I wish you all a happy and healthy New Year.

I got a phone call from my sister yesterday.

My father’s sister, who is my favorite aunt worked for many years in a supermarket deli, and her husband was a subway conductor. They lived in a nice house in Long Island, and they 2 sons. The older son, served in the military, got married, bought a house, worked hard and opened up his own business, but he died of cancer in his 40’s. After that his wife sold the house and moved to FL to be near her parents.

The younger son bounced form job to job, always getting fired. He got married and had 4 children, they bought a house but didn’t make the payments and it was foreclosed on.

So my aunt let them move in with her. They had the whole upstairs and she lived in 2 small rooms in the basement. Her house was paid off but she agreed to take out a mortgage because her son needed money so they put the rest of the money in a joint bank account.

A few weeks ago she went out to get the mail and her 21 year old grandson ran out and grabbed it right out of her hand, and wouldn’t give it back, he told her his father wanted to see all the mail first. She had seen that it was from the mortgage company, so she called my cousin Angela to ask her to check into it.

Angela made some phone calls and found out that she no longer owns the house. The other day my aunt had a big fight with her son and his wife and she called my cousin Angela who heard them screaming and cursing at her. So my cousin decided to drive out and get her. Meanwhile my aunt wanted to go to the bank to withdraw the money from the joint account she had with her son and put it into her own account.

Her son physically tried to stop her from going, he grabbed her and she fell on the ground screaming and he tried to drag her back into the house. The neighbors came out and told him to stop it or they would call the cops. This woman is in her 80’s and has had open heart surgery. They left her alone and so she walked to the bank to transfer the money and her son, his wife and his son all showed up, yelling and cursing and making a scene, so the bank threatened to call the police if they didn’t leave.

Now my aunt is staying with my cousin in Brooklyn, my brother who is a lawyer is going to go over and talk to her son and see what situation what the house is, but it looks like it was foreclosed on and her son spent all the money from her account instead of using it to make the monthly payments.

Luckily we have a large family and will all do what we can to help my aunt out, by now her son and his family may have moved out and taken all her furniture.