There was a deli on the hill. At the top of the hill on Halstead Avenue, diagonal to the beverage center.
(We were actually up a higher hill at 16 Fremont Street¹).

We didn’t own a house growing up. Nothing was really ours in the town/village of Harrison, NY², where so many people just assumed you owned what was yours³. So for the first 7 years of my life, we bounced between a few rentals in multi-family houses. Each of those homes came with a nearby deli. The Deli was the corner store, the bodega, the candy shop, a place to grab a quick lunch, a sandwich, it was a convenience store. La Vigna’s was our Deli.

I hear Mom to my sisters:
Where ya goin, girls?
Goin’ ta La Vigna’s, Ma!
Don’t forget milk!

In these memories, I’m outwardly mute. Barely articulate… but the internal monologue and sensory memories are rich. D and T are 6 and 8 years older than me, respectively. Adolescents. They did the things girls their age did. I was an only child with two older sisters.
So Dad would take me on ride-alongs.
“C’mon, Cap, let’s get Mom a sandwich….”

Get Mom a sandwich. It was a ritual.
Mom worked 4-to-12s on the 3rd Floor Infirmary at The Retirement Home for most of my childhood. When I was just settling in after a day of perplexedly trying to figure out how and why I’m supposed to care about the zeitgeist presented to me at my elementary school (initials, I’m not kidding, PMS), Mom would be putting on the starched whites of a nurse in the early 1980s.

Get Mom a sandwich was Dad’s love language. Every day, he’d pick up a sandwich of lovingly made Italian coldcuts from La Vigna’s (or DelMac’s, or Mike’s, or Capasso’s, or Joe’s… or one of a thousand other names and even the names we called them weren’t accurate because if they changed ownership and names, you still called them what you used to call them…). An oily hunk of bread and roast beef, peppers, tomatoes, and onions swaddled in butcher’s parchment, wrapped in a brown paper bag, and handed over the counter while I looked up from the rack in front of me.
C’mon, Cap.
I look up from the rack of candy bars, mints, gum, chocolate, Starbursts, Skittles, Hubbabubba, M&Ms, Hershey, Three Musketeers…. Can I..?
He usually got me something.

Or the walks up the hill with my sisters to get snacks for Friday night TV. Benson, Bosom Buddies, The Facts of Life, MTV, HBO…. I mean, Fridays were prime viewing.
There was good.
There was bad.
If you took them both, well, there you had it.⁴
I don’t know what days of the week were Solid Gold or Dance Fever with Denney Terrio, but those were events in need of celebratory sustenance.
Hold Tommy’s hand when you cross the…
YES MOM-UH! (That 1980s adolescent tendency to end a bark of reluctant compliance with an emphatic exhalation).
We’d come back with Pepsi, Onion Rings, Ruffles, Cheese Doodles, Doritos…

La Vigna’s is where the mother of the family that owned the store gave me a stuffed airplane that played “The Impossible Dream” in a music-box style. She was a sweet old lady, I think she spoke broken English. She saw this little blonde boy, quiet, always with his dad or sisters… She handed me this toy. I can still see her smiling eyes. I still remember my heart filling at the recognition. People didn’t often see me.

Now I was a kid who didn’t speak much back then. I’m sure my family will beg to differ, but outside my immediate family’s comfort zone, I was quite shy. And what happens next is in no way an indictment of my sister’s character. In fact, it shows her diligently trying to teach her little brother the ways of social interaction. She’s also, at best, 11, 12, 13 years old, so please forgive her for the inadvertent lifelong trauma she engenders in little Tommy’s soul.

Touched that Mama La Vigna would give me (ME!?) a thoughtful gift, I say, Oh! Thank you! I have a little owl that plays…
TOMMY, IT’S RUDE TO SAY YOU ALREADY HAVE SOMETHING WHEN SOMEONE GIVES YOU A GIFT!!!! SAY YOU’RE SORRY!

I felt awful.
When we got home, I cried.
Later that night… or maybe even days later, my mother asked me why the little airplane that played “The Impossible Dream” made me cry and I told her and she looked at me and she said, You’re so sensitive.

Now I will hear a variation on those words trillions of times after Mom said that. But there was something about the way she said it that imprinted a truth on me, a bulwark against the slings and arrows of a world brainwashed into perceiving sensitivity as weakness. She said it with admiration. She said, You are wise beyond your years.
Mom validated that, even though this feeling in my chest could hurt sometimes, it was a strength to cherish.
That validation would be the everlasting protective veneer on a psyche bombarded with labels like too sensitive, too intense, or even weak.

All of this to talk about Synchronicity.

We were one of the last families to get cable TV (just like we were one of the last to get a VCR or a microwave). But when we finally got it, MTV was a revelation (as it was for millions of other Americans in the early-to-mid-1980s).
1983 is a year that sends surprising shockwaves through my consciousness in a way that transcends time and space.

Music videos on heavy rotation inculcate sensibilities, imprinting esthetics, ethics, and values on an impressionable, sensitive psyche. In one video, these three blonde dudes are dancing around to an exotic beat, smiling, playing… and then there’s this spooky black-and-white one with the guy playing a stand-up bass in the shadows.
And they’re called The Police.
The music even sounds blue. Later in my life, I’ll realize that artists, albums, and songs all have their own distinct color palette. For example, The Joshua Tree is brown and gold, whereas Achtung! Baby is cool blue and neon reds, while Zooropa is purple and yellow. The liner notes definitely influence this, but I think it’s even deeper than that.

The Police were Blue… Yellow… and Red.

I’m standing near the counter-level freezer at La Vigna’s, looking at the Bomb Pops next to the lemon Italian ice, and some guy (probably in his teens or twenties) has on a shirt: The Police: Synchronicity.
I’m sounding out the word… “Sin-ch-ch-chro-nih…” I think I asked my mother or one of my sisters.
But it was the design. The Colors. Primarily, they primed an unconscious aquifer that has been silently conducting the convection of my conscious existence for 43 years.
Red.
Blue.
Yellow.
Red, blue, and yellow splashes of paint on a black and white background, those blonde dudes from the TV. That weird word.

When it comes to appreciating classic rock music, I was raised right. Those early music videos: Def Leppard, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Billy Idol…. and the records my sisters would play in the living room… Vinyl records with colorful covers, booklets, sleeves, pictures, mystery, artwork… Even the Jane Fonda workout record they would play… it had “Can You Feel It” by The Jacksons…. freaking banger. Certain songs just take me back to a certain living room at a certain spacetime coordinate….
…
I’m playing, I’m laying, I’m playing on the living room floor, mesmerized by the open gatefold of Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, fascinated, terrified, but awestruck at the universe unfolding in the unfolded cardboard
…
The family atlas, the giant Rand McNally under the couch, the object of my hyperfocus for hours on end, doubles as a surface for laying out the contents of the Beatles’ Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band my goodness it’s a visual cornucopia and my sister says there’s hidden symbols in these images… why is Paul facing backwards… and that other guy, remember that day when Mommy was crying? You were little, he was shot. He’s dead. But when they made this album, people were spreading a rumor that Paul was dead. Is it any wonder that when I got older, I was drawn to surrealists like Dali, Magritte? Or visionary artists like Alex Grey?

A day in the life contains myriad synchronicities.
I remember the Xmas about 10 years after Synchronicity when I asked for (and received) The Police’s Message In A Box, a boxed set with a blue cover that contained their entire discography.
Synchronicity, Synchronicity II, Every Breath You Take, King of Pain, Wrapped Around Your Finger…. Red, Blue, Yellow.

When I was Junger, so much Junger than today…

I’ve been feeling quite Jungian lately. If you’ve read anything I’ve written or spoken to me in the last few years, this will come as no surprise.
So, as I was enjoying my coffee and starting to write in my journal this morning, I wanted to put some music on. Choosing music is almost a ritual for me, but it can lead to some stressful decision fatigue. Hear me out… It’s a time commitment. You pick the wrong thing and you’ve wasted time and ruined your vibe. You know what Kendrick says about killing the vibe? Don’t.

I feel like listening to The Police. The beat, the textural guitar, lively but not too jarring…
And this is where my head does that thing where the impressions, the images, come before the words. I have an enticing white field with red, blue, and yellow splashes over black and white photographs in my mind’s eye, my visual cortex. I wanna hear that one…

I chuckle at how obtuse I can be sometimes, and how THE UNCONSCIOUS dispenses with all chill and bashes you over the head when you need to see.

If we share this nightmare
We can dream Spiritus Mundi

Many miles away… something crawls to the surface… contestants in a suicidal race….

It’s a cautionary tale, innit?

There’s a little black spot on the sun today.
It’s the same old thing as yesterday.

There’s a black cat caught in a high tree top…

Fossil trapped in a cliff wall, dead salmon frozen in a waterfall, butterfly caught in a spider’s web.
_{Is it my destiny to be the king of pain?}

Incidentally, I recently wrote about feeling like I’m a sin eater. I’m obsessed with a new song by Ed O’Brien called “Blue Morpho” as that butterfly becomes a totem, and like the chrysalis suspended from a branch, I’ve taken on the archetypal role of The Hanged Man.
_{“I will turn your face to alabaster when you find the servant is your master.”}

🦋Synchronicity🦋

I learned that during the COVID lockdowns, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien experienced a deep and crippling depression. He alchemized the lead of that experience into the gold of what may very well be his magnum opus. I’ve heard the first two tracks, and they are nothing short of magnificent. “Blue Morpho” came across my algorithm (makes sense with my tastes), and I pressed play expecting it to be good. I didn’t expect it to be so transcendent.
I dug deeper into the story of the album’s inception, and the synchronicities were undeniable — a sensitive creator experiencing a dark night of the soul and somehow, with the grace of karma, taking it as an opportunity to heal through creativity.

If it’s my destiny to be the king of pain, if I am, indeed, a sin eater, it is only because I’ve learned my superpower. I always read “King of Pain” pessimistically: I am destined to be a downer….
I see it differently now.
I see my sovereignty. Pain is something I have, will have. But it is mine.
I am the king of pain in that I accept it. It is mine.
Once I accept it, I can learn to live with it. I can redirect it.
I can sublimate it.

A bright blue butterfly, like the old Chrysalis Records logo, floats out of the sound hole of an upright bass, out of my Shadow, joins the red and yellow splashes of paint in my psyche as I listen to a shadow fall across the door of a cottage on the shore of a dark Scottish lake many miles away.

Many miles away.

1. Entire novels could be written about the plagues and pestilence that befell my family in those two short years at 16 Fremont Street. Perhaps they will. For now, I’ll leave it as a footnote. ↩︎
2. In case you care, and the good folks in the Town/Village think you might, a Town/Village is a thing. It’s a strange governmental designation they used to keep one hamlet from seceding from the union. The world will little note, nor long remember, the loophole they threaded to retain a lucrative tax base. ↩︎
3. We were renters in a town of owners. From the age of 7 onwards, we lived in a house that felt like ours because it was owned by the family that fostered my father. They were kind enough to let him rent it at a steep discount. ↩︎
4. Apologies to the late Alan Thicke ↩︎