David S. Goldman

As a kid growing up, I had always taken our democracy for granted. Our schools certainly inculcated the absolute viability of our form of government, nestled safely upon the hallowed foundation of the ancient Greeks. I guess I forgot to remember that the Athenian democracy lasted only two hundred years and ended from internal upheaval not external pressure. It then took over two thousand years for the American democracy to be born; we are now only two-hundred thirty-eight years old, or about the same age…

“Are you sad about Jeter leaving?” I was asked. I thought about the first time I entered Yankee Stadium at the age of nine with my Dad and some friends. Most of us guys at that age secretly believed we had a shot at playing for the Yankees, a dream that died very hard in a few short years. My saddest Yankee day came only five years ago when they started demolishing the old Stadium, re-pulverizing my old dreams with bulldozers and wrecking balls, trampling the impossibly green grass that once beckoned to us…

Sometimes I like taking an old 78rpm record from its sleeve, smelling its musty odor, placing it on the platter with the great anticipation of opening a grand door to another time and place, just as my grandparents played them and conjured up the lost worlds of their childhoods in the old country. The crackling sounds are like specks of dust on an old sepia photo of homesick immigrants standing together in front of their tenements on the lower east side. If you look closely in their eyes you can almost…