I’m a big fan of Bruce Springsteen’s song, "Atlantic City." Not so crazy about his version, preferring instead Levon Helm’s interpretation of the song. I’m also a big fan of the movie, "Atlantic City," starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, and not just because Burt plays a guy named Lou and that he gets the girl in the end. There is something redemptive in both the Bruce song and the movie, although the two have nothing to do with each other.

I haven’t been to Atlantic City in forty

My youngest is a cat person. Loves them to death. My mermaid is not a cat person at all. Maybe it’s her fishy background that makes her shy away from the feline predators. So, when the youngest said—hey, let’s get a cat, she was met with an icy stare.

So, it was very interesting to me to find the Brooklyn Cat Café in Brooklyn Heights. In a historic building on Montague Street that was once home to a bucolic restaurant called, Friend of the Farmer. The Cat Café serves neither cats nor has cat

So taking the mermaid’s advice, we decided to spend some time in Florida this year to ward off the winter blues. She was in favor of a prolonged stay in one spot, but I couldn’t do that due to my inability to stay in one place for too long. So, we agreed on three separate trips to three different parts of Florida. The first one was more work than pleasure.

Hobe Sound was our destination and it is a little north of the Jupiter/West Palm area on the east coast of Florida. We flew into West Palm

How many of you remember mite boxes for charities as kids? I remember receiving the unfolded cardboard boxes, folding them into a box and then adding pennies, nickels and dimes to the boxes. I assume that each box could hold about ten dollars, and that each of the 500 kids in my grammar school did the same. That’s about five thousand dollars. If a hundred schools did the same, that would add up to almost half a million dollars! Where did that money go?

The mermaid and I went to Washington

I grew up at a time and in a neighborhood where little old ladies in black dresses waited on line at the local bank to get their interest stamped in their passbook savings accounts. The local bank, being smart about marketing to young people, worked with local schools to open savings accounts for kids. This taught some great lessons: the value of saving, how interest compounds, how a bank works, and most importantly—why those old neighbors made sure they got their interest stamped.

For a kid

In the 1966 Edward Albee play, “A Delicate Balance,” two neighbors come over to their friends’ house and ask to stay with them because they are frightened. They never explain what they are afraid of, but this fear permeates the whole play. It’s a very weird play in that respect and I never understood or appreciated it fully: except, I have found myself thinking about it often these days.

You might say to yourself, Lazer, you haven’t written in almost six months and when you come back, you