It's Mother's Day

This is my mother.

I am the man I am today because I'm her son. Further, I am the man I am today because I'm one of her seven kids.

I'm sure she didn't know the scale of the adventure that was coming when she married this guy.

But she embraced it with everything she had.

I come back to the thought all the time that I am the man I am because I'm this woman's son. It's my mother who taught me to love reading. It's my mother who taught me to love art. It's my mother who taught me to remember my ancestors. It's my mother who taught me to keep plugging away no matter what.

My mother taught me to respect the natural world, she taught me that the unusual and foreign aren't bad automatically. Her inquisitiveness infected me from an early age and has left me with an enthusiasm for learning that's sustained me for 46 years.

There was a needlepoint sampler hanging in the living room of the house where I grew up. It read something along the lines of "The best gift parents can give their children are roots and wings."

I got that in spades. Thanks to my mother, I know where I come from and I know there's nothing I can't do.

I'm not alone in that. There are six other people in the world who are armed with those same roots and wings.

It doesn't stop with us though. My mother's embrace of adventure and novelty extends through her kids and into her grandkids and great-grandkids. We're testaments to the little girl who stood for a photographer against a fence in the 1930s. Every time any of us embarks on an adventure we're channeling you, the girl from Christy Park who believed the handsome guy who promised her the world.

You are deeply loved Mom. You brought me into the world sure enough, and what you did more than anything is gave me life and I can never thank you enough.

In unity there is strength

My title today is the translation from the Old Dutch Een Draght Mackt Maght. Een Draght Mackt Maght is the motto of the Borough of Brooklyn, the second-most populous of New York's five boroughs. Brooklyn was an independent city from its founding in 1646 until 1898 when the five boroughs consolidated to form modern New York. Even though it's part of New York City, it's still its own county, Kings.

One of the main thoroughfares through Brooklyn is Flatbush Avenue. Flatbush is an anglicization of the Dutch phrase vlacke bos and it means "wooded flatlands." I took a walk along modern day vlack bos, Flatbush Avenue, and one of its many neighborhoods, Prospect Lefferts Gardens yesterday morning.

The area where I took my morning constitutional was founded by a Dutch family in 1660. By 1893 it was a single estate that was owned by James Lefferts. Lefferts divided his holdings into 600 lots and sold them to developers.

The neighborhood where these photos were taken were built between the late 19th Century and the 1950s. It's the center of Caribbean culture in Brooklyn and it has a charm and wonder I can't quite describe.

Ahhhh, would that I were a good photographer. Hah! Even so, I saw a side to New York last weekend I'd never seen before and I learned the lesson so many before me have learned, that there's life beyond the Isle O' Manhattan.

It doesn't just get better

No, it doesn't just get better. It gets GREAT! But it only gets to great when you tell yourself that it's great. Tell yourself it's great and believe it.





Thank you Google for this TV spot and thanks for getting behind Dan Savage's project. If you haven't done so already, download and use Google Chrome.

Woke up it was a Brooklyn morning and the first thing that I heard

Apologies to the great Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins. I did wake up to a Brooklyn morning this morning and I've woken up to one since the end of last week. I have a couple more of these Brooklyn mornings to go before I trade them in for my usual St. Pete mornings.

I'm up here because the amazing Saxon Henry offered me the use of her sofa bed in exchange for sitting on a panel of experts in a panel discussion about using social media effectively at the annual conclave of the American Society of Journalists and Authors yesterday. I sat next to no less than Dominique Browning. Joining us were Michael Cannell and David Farley. We had an overflow crowd of enthusiastic writers who wanted to hear what we had to say. It was a peak experience. There were people in the audience I've been reading for years and being taken seriously by a room full of the smartest people on the planet is something I'll never forget. I am the most fortunate man on the planet, I swear.

After the ASJA was over yesterday, Saxon, Rich Holshuh and I went to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central to suck down bivalves and decompress.

I've known Rich through Twitter for the last few years but we'd never met in person before. A couple of years ago I wrote a profile of Rich on this blog. Apartment Therapy scraped my content and essentially re-ran my post. They kept the link back to me even if they removed all of my polysyllabic words. That act of content scraping made Rich a household name and I can't think of anyone more deserving. Anyhow, it was really great to have the chance to meet and get to know Rich these last few days.

With the ASJA out of the way and before I dedicate my next two days to more shameless self-promotion in front of the New York public relations and advertising industries, I took a day for me yesterday.

I shook myself out of the idyll of my Brooklyn morning and took the train back into Manhattan. My great friend Tom Miller and I had arranged to spend the afternoon meandering through Midtown and to take in the Pompeii Exhibit at the Discovery Expo Museum. Tom writes the incredible blog Daytonian in Manhattan and it is the last word in Manhattan historical architecture. No one knows the history of New York as well as Tom Miller does and to walk around that city with him is to experience the broad sweep of everything that's ever happened on that island crammed into what for most people is an afternoon walk.

I share Tom's love of church architecture and we walked through a good number of the notable churches in the middle of Midtown. He rattles off the names of gilded age architects the way I do mid-century industrial designers and we're a terrific counter balance to each other. If you have never read Tom's blog, stop here and click this link. Subscribe to that feed and you will never see New York the same way.

The Pompeii exhibit is worth seeing by the way. There were a couple of things I'd never seen before and there were more than a few things I learned today that I wouldn't have known had I not gone. Again, good call Tom.

I took the train back to Brooklyn to meet up with Saxon and Rich and the three of us met another one of my electronic pen pals for the first time, Demir Gjokaj.

Demir and I have the most unlikely of connections and knowing him proves to me yet again just how small the world is.

Three years ago, I stayed for a week in this villa in Sorrento.

Ten years ago, Demir was working to renovate it along with its owner Andrea Azzariti. Two years ago, Demir was back in the US and working to promote that amazing villa through a new website he'd produced and he wanted my help and advice. Hint: go to the website and watch Demir's video. Holy cow!

Demir and I struck up a friendship then that's continued until now and of all the odd, wonderful coincidences in the world, he and his girlfriend live a few blocks from Saxon in Brooklyn. It was really cool to sit in a Mexican restaurant on Lincoln Road and tell Mediterranean stories about a place half a world away.

That last morning I spent in Sorrento I stood at the railing of the villa's patio and stared across the Bay of Naples at Mount Vesuvius. I swore that I'd be back and that I'd stand on that same spot before my life was over.

Thanks to Demir and the power of the internet, it looks as if I'll be back there in the fall. As if that weren't enough, I'll be back there with Saxon and my beloved brother Steve. Again, I am the most fortunate man alive.

It's kind of a cliche to talk about New York as the crossroads of the world but if you spend any time here you know it's not a cliche. Everything that happens in the world has some connection to this great city.

I've been all over the place but there is no other city in the world that's so willing to make a stranger feel welcome or a visitor feel like a native. Everybody here is from somewhere else but the same thing's true in any world capital. New York has something else the others lack and I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

I come back here every couple of months to see if I can figure out what that something is and in the act of looking, I get my batteries recharged and my faith in the future renewed. Maybe that's what it is, everybody comes here to find that elusive something and since we're all looking for the same thing, maybe it's that shared quest that provides the welcoming bond.

Man I love this town. Where else can you start in Brooklyn, roll through St. Patrick's Cathedral a couple of hours later, wallow in the glories of Ancient Rome, jump back on a subway, eat Mexican food with friends, then plan an Amalfi get away, all in the same day? Everything is possible here.

This is my bridge

This is the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

It crosses the mouth of Tampa Bay and it separates the Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. The bridge connects St. Petersburg and Terra Ceia, the town immediately across the water from St. Pete.

The entire length of the bridge is five-and-a-half miles and I rely on my many crossings to serve as a kind of mini vacation. Mobile service cuts out about half way up the center span and doesn't kick back in until you cross to the Terra Ceia side. I used to find that to be irritating but these days it's one of my favorite things about that bridge. It's a five minute respite from being available.

It's the tallest thing around here and if memory serves, at 431 feet, it's the tallest bridge in Florida. As tall as it is, it's a singular thrill to be crossing it when a cruise ship squeezes underneath it.

Driving north and home to St. Pete never ceases to inspire me. It feels like I'm landing an airplane on the downside of the hump and no photo I've ever seen or taken has come close to capturing the azure-emerald clarity of the water of the south Bay. "I live in paradise" I say to myself every time I'm making that drive.

It's difficult to live here and be near the water and not see that bridge. It looms over everything and it serves as our visual anchor. No matter where you are on land, air or sea, seeing the Skyway is an automatic location beacon. It's the pivot point around which the entirety of south Pinellas and north Manatee counties rotate.

It frames the sunsets and reminds me of the vast expanse and possibility of the Gulf of Mexico on its west side. The whole world's out there, just waiting.

That steel and concrete can join together to form such sculptural utility gives me hope for humanity. It reminds me time and again that art can be anywhere and that beauty abounds, it's just a matter of taking the time to make it and to appreciate it.

More than just about any other feature of the the part of the country I call home, The Sunshine Skyway feels like it's mine. It feels like my retreat, my point of reference, my personal bridge. No matter what happens, no one can take that away from me.