Like the song “The Thrill Is Gone,” popularized by B.B. King in the month and year that I was born, the jobs that so many of our leaders alleged that they are holding onto for Americans are gone. Going, going, gone! Like a steroids-driven Barry Bonds home run into San Francisco Bay, the jobs that Americans have expected to be their birthright for the past six or seven decades no longer exist. For any American with less than a bachelor’s degree to expect to get a job paying more than $30,000 a year with limited job experience is foolhardy. For any undereducated American to expect a manufacturing job that pays enough to support a family of four (about $50,000) with a full slate of benefits needs to be committed!

About two weeks ago, I attended a studio taping of the AlJazeera program Faultlines with the topic of “The Color of Recession.” The premise — that the Obama Administration wasn’t doing enough to help Americans of color recover from the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. While that could be true, the panelists, especially talking heads like the Rev. Jesse “Keep-Hope-Alive” Jackson and Linda Chavez argued about the failures of the Bush 43 Administration to avert the crisis. It was a zoo, and the host of the show might as well been a tamer whose head was already in the lion’s mouth.

Besides ridiculous arguments about the overthrowing of capitalism by folks like ’08 Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate Rosa Clemente and counterarguments by Chavez about socialists not being patriotic, one thing clearly stood out. Jackson, Chavez, and even Clemente agreed on one thing. That jobs in the industrial sector ought to be saved for Americans, and that the Obama Administration could somehow play a role in saving them. That simple fact proved the one thing I’ve known about American politics since high school. That the distance between most Americans on the ideological scale is about the same as the distance from my right thumb to my right index finger.

But it also shows how significant the leadership deficit is in our great nation when folks who should know better spout rhetoric that hasn’t been true in places like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Indianapolis since ’84, and in places like Buffalo, Rochester, Camden, and Newark since the mid-60s. This is a post-industrial economy, one that is dependent on the Information Age. While there will always be some manufacturing jobs in the US — we still have a military-industrial complex, after all, not to mention Southern right-to-work states — the days of factories with a workforce of 50,000 and 100,000 people has long passed. Unless we can turn the clock back to about 1890, we will never again see the days of steel mills and auto plants that single-handedly provided work for an entire city or region.

With more than eighty percent of all new living-wage jobs produced in this country requiring the equivalent of an associate’s degree or some postsecondary credential, it’s time we stop lying to the public about how any government can protect certain kinds of jobs for their citizens. We need more nurses, teachers, radiologists, engineers and chemists, not more young folk who can’t even find their home state on a map. And that’s with the name of the state on the map! Bill Gates may well be right in saying that high schools as we know them today are obsolete. But that’s only true because our mentality about the kinds of jobs we can get after high school hasn’t changed with our ever-changing economy.

It’s a shame that our leadership can’t be more honest about where we are these days on the job front. Our official unemployment rate is 10.2 percent, meaning that in reality, it’s closer to 20 percent. Meaning that times are hard even for folks with at least a bachelor’s degree as an educational credential. But the vast majority of our educational haves will recover from this downturn, find work — mostly good paying work — and put their lives back together. Those whose lives were once or ever dependent on the manufacturing world are already a part of the have-nots.

I don’t care how many articles discuss the fact that there are people in this country who are making good money — and are even rich — and don’t possess a postsecondary degree or certificate of any sort. That group is a small and shrinking one. These days, your odds are better with Powerball or Mega Millions than they are venturing into the job market for a non-service industry (read “Rite-Aid,” “CVS” or “Walmart” here) job without a degree.

Bottom line: the sooner we as a people accept that the jobs of the past are gone, never to return, the sooner that we can get on to another central issues to jobs in education. We need to put pressure on our federal and state officials, nonprofit entities, and religious organizations to stop acting as if a high school education is the limit for most of America. We need to assume that most of us have the ability — if not the training — necessary to obtain some sort of postsecondary credential. We need to make our 15,000 school districts into ones that prepare our children for a twenty-first century, post-industrial economy. Without this pressure, we will expand our permanent underclass by the tens of millions in the next decade or two, weighing down our economy in the process. That America isn’t the one I want to get older in, nor is it one I want my son growing up in.

December, my favorite month of the year. Usually. For most of my forty years, it has represented a time of sighing relief that another year was about to pass, another twelve months of imperfection gone, a chance to reconfigure and gain momentum to have a better next year. But Decembers at the end of decades have been of even more significance for me, because they represent the precipice of the start of a new decade not only on the calendar, but for my own life. Turning ten, twenty and thirty gave me more food for thought than I would normally have in a typical twelfth month. Now it’s happening again, as I officially turn forty (most of this year, I’ve forgotten that I’m still technically thirty-nine).

Ten years ago, I realized that I hadn’t planned to live past thirty when I was a teenager. I saw my life as such a tragic and fragile one when I was fourteen that the idea that marriage and parenting would be anywhere in my future would’ve been about the only thing to make me laugh out loud back then. My aim in life from about twelve and a half and twenty was to finish college, and from twenty to twenty-six was to go to grad school, finish those degrees, and publish my first book. Cars, houses, specific career aspirations, a wife and a son, none of those were in my plans. Heck, I didn’t even know who my true friends were until a December contemplation session in December ’89, much less love and marriage.

The sad truth is, I’ve achieved just about everything I intended to achieve ten and twenty Decembers ago. That’s good, but it also shows how limited the first visions for myself were. Being an assistant director of a social justice fellowship program and publishing a book on multiculturalism shouldn’t have been the only things that I hoped to achieve in the first seven years after finishing my doctorate. Getting married in ’00 was a major achievement, considering how many folks I grew up with thought of me as “asexual.” But staying married and making the marriage work is the real achievement and the real work, something I’ve learned this decade. Having Noah around is both a labor of love and really hard work, but actually not as hard as watching after my four younger siblings would’ve been twenty Decembers ago.

Even putting the finishing touches on Boy @ The Window, finding an agent and publisher, and then getting it published, as great an achievement as that will be, is a limited one in the end. Even in the worst case, the manuscript’s published before I hit my mid-forties. Even if the book hits the bestseller list, what do I do after that? Write more books about the imperial narcissism of everyday Americans, about the need for universal postsecondary education, about the lives of other, not-so-famous people? I know I’ll keep on writing, but that’s about all I know for sure.

So what will my life look like as I prepare for decade number five? Where do I want to be by December ’19? For starters, steadier and better paying employment would be a goal. Making sure that Noah’s education and quality of life stays on track so that he can get — but doesn’t necessarily need — an academic or athletic scholarship for college. Supporting Angelia as she finishes her master’s degree in interactive journalism, and in moving from there into a career of her own choosing and making. Freeing ourselves once and for all from debt. Those are goals, most or all of which should be met long before I can no longer jump high enough to dunk a basketball.

But what I really want in the end is a sense of happiness and peace that I’ve experienced only on rare occasions in my life to date. Some of that will come as some of the near-future goals get met. Still, I know even with a great job, an enviable savings account, a great kid and a wonderful wife that happiness and peace are forces that come from within. No amount of money, financial stability or independence can give me or anyone else real happiness and a sense that, no matter whatever else is going on, I’ll be fine. Some would say, only God can give us that.

I would say in response that this isn’t completely accurate, because we have to be willing to be happy, to be at peace, to be successful at not creating drama for ourselves and others. Or we could do what Bruce Springsteen says in his introspective “Tunnel of Love.” We’ve “got to learn to live with what [we] can’t rise above,” not only in marriage, but in all of our lives, for we aren’t perfect, and not every imperfection has a permanent cure. Maybe this is the thing I need to remember as I go through this end-of-the-decade December.

A few days ago, the BBC reported a sickening fact on one of the provisions of the the Kyoto protocols from ’97. Of the developed countries that did agree to them — the US being the great exception — one provision was for them to contribute to a fund for developing countries in order to help them with environmental cleanup and to make the adjustments necessary to combat climate change. According to the BBC, a fund that should have $1.6 billion in it by now only has $260 million in contributions. Mouthpieces for the developed world apparently said in response that, well, “we given money and helped in other ways,” just not through this fund.

This may be true, but this isn’t much different from what my father once said to me when I confronted him about twenty-three years ago about his overall lack of child support. “I giv’ ya money every week,” he said. It was true. But only because I went through a Friday night or Saturday morning ritual for nearly five years to collect $50, $60, $100, or even $200 from him at a time. In all, Jimme have given me, my brother Darren and my family at 616 (indirectly, of course) about $3,500 between October ’82 and August ’87. If he had paid his proper share in terms of child support (at least twenty percent of income), in those years alone, the child support payments would’ve been about $25,000.

No, neither I nor Darren lived with him. Still, my father had an obligation because he was our biological father and therefore was part of the reason we existed at all. It’s not much different when it comes to international issues like environmental protection, alternative energy and climate change. The developed world eats up most of the world’s energy resources, had exploited the resources of the developing world so that they could be developed, advanced nations. And has used the developing world and the oceans to dump much of its waste. It’s only fair that the developed world should bear the brunt of paying for all of these things that the world as a whole must face.

This kind of talk makes me sound like a socialist I suppose. Not really. More like a social democrat. It’s a shame that Western Europe, China, Japan, India and the US have yet to formally agree to reduce emissions substantially, to bring online new energy platforms on a massive scale, to clean up the messes made around the world. The geopolitics of this situation is like watching my six-year-old son Noah try to negotiate his way out of doing the right thing, because sometimes he can only see his own needs and wants. So much of what our world does is about looking out for self and only self, knowing full well that this deliberate ignorance hurts us all.

Of course, the US is the worldwide leader in narcissism. We act as if taxes are like cyanide pills laced with traces of plutonium, especially for the wealthy. We talk as if the progressive income tax is a penalty for success, and that the poor are poor only because they’re dumb and lazy. Yet it wasn’t all that long ago when the system actually worked, when government could be trusted (for the most part) to do the right thing with public funds and revenues.

And yes, after the Nixon, Reagan and Bush (both) years — not to mention the flaws of JFK, LBJ, Carter and Clinton — we have good reason not to trust our government to invest our tax dollars properly. But it’s not as if the rich are going to employ people to fix the US’s roads, bridges and rails. Or that the affluent will build a new power grid, solar collection stations, provide incentives for building cars that run on hydrogen, or create a system of postsecondary education and healthcare that is truly universal. That’s what our government is for. This is why we pay taxes.

Yet all neocons and others of a selfish nature somehow still believe after all of these years that it’s every man, woman and child for themselves. That taxes are bad, that giving more and more tax cuts to richest five percent will create an atmosphere of investment rather than one of greed. Didn’t we already go through this in the 1920s and 1930s? Isn’t this why the New Deal had to happen in the first place? To have a government that responds to all the people, and not just the ones with the ability to line politicians’ pockets with checks and cash?

In the end, we get the government that we deserve because sit in stewing envy and awe over the richest folk in our country while those folk have the ears of our leadership. We need to force the government to do its job of raising all boats, of holding politicians feet to the fire, of sharing and spreading the wealth of the nation so that even the poor actually have real opportunities to rise out of poverty. Only if we make our government care about these issues will those with major means actually care to share in tax dollars.

Ironically, by insisting on more loopholes and tax cuts, the rich in many ways are working against their own interests. As they should know, they can’t — or at least shouldn’t — take their riches with them when they’re dead. And as average folk, we need to pay our fair share as well. After all, to those of us who have reason to give thanks, we also have reason to share what we have for our own — as well as others’ — benefit.

I experienced a series of firsts the weekend and Monday before Thanksgiving ’87. I got blitzed, I took my first airplane trip, and I felt completely disillusioned about my life as a college student and a Black man. It was the worst of times, or so I thought at the time. Homelessness at the beginning of my sophomore year kind of trumped the travails of my freshman year at Pitt.

But November ’87 was still painful and shameful. The downward spiral of my first semester started with a burglary. While I took a bathroom break at my computer lab job in the Cathedral of Learning, someone stole my Calculus textbook. I felt violated, especially since it happened at work. It made me more distrustful of the people I worked with and of Pitt students in general.

Crush #2’s response to my letter to her about her emasculating comments about me back in the summer made matters worse. Her letter, dated November 2, was in purple ink, with heart-shapes and circles for dots over “i”s. Reading her letter was like reading the liner notes off of a Prince album in those days. Like the song “I Would Die 4 U,” Crush # 2 had decided to limit her English skills to the ’80s equivalent of text messaging, a real revolution on both their parts. I remember she started, “Thank U 4 your card 2day,” an insult to my intelligence. She wrote indirectly that she did like me at one point in time, but added “but we’re in college now . . . around lots of nu people” She admitted that I was her and her sister’s topic of conversation back in July, but “I needed 2 get over that.” She hinted that I shouldn’t write her again, and that was it. No apologies, no attempt to understand how I felt.

After Crush #2’s wonderful, text-message-like response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed most of my classes the month of November, only showing up for exams or if my mood had let up long enough to allow me to function like my more typical self. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the Pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans. After getting Mike to get us the cases, we went back to Aaron’s room and started drinking. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch.” Anytime anyone mentioned Crush #2’s name, or any woman’s name for that matter, and one of us said the B-word, we drank some beer. I was drunk, but not so drunk I didn’t know what was going on around me. That night, my geeky acquaintances started calling me “Don” and “Don Ho,” since I was the life of that illegal party.

I barely recovered from my bender in time to go home for Thanksgiving that Monday, November 23. I was in a fog. I still managed a few firsts. That trip back home was my first on an airplane. I took a Continental flight from the old and decrepit blue hangar that was Pittsburgh Airport into Newark, with the late Craig “Ironhead” Hayward on the flight sitting in first-class. He was a senior and the starting running back for the Pitt Panthers. Besides being a great player, he was a bit of a party animal and had gotten into fights with Pitt Police. I remember the student newspaper having him in their police blotter, allegedly body-slamming a patron at the O while being arrested for a being a disorderly drunk. Yet in his sober, not-with-his-peeps state, he was a normal guy who knew how to be polite, even on this flight.

I also missed my first flight, and ended up waiting six hours at Newark for another seat. That was my first time in first-class, and it was wonderful. I also went to my first college basketball game at the old Fitzgerald Fieldhouse. With Charles Smith, Jerome Lane and Demetrius Gore, they were a really good team with a really unimaginative coach. I still blame Smith for causing my Knicks to lose to the Chicago Bulls in the ’93 Eastern Conference Finals with his hiccups at the end of Game 5.

It was the first series of events in which I couldn’t use music, sports or my imagination to escape. I hadn’t realized that I was attempting to escape myself, not just my immediate past or Mount Vernon. I spent the last three weeks of that semester depressed, as if draped in a fog, unable to face the world. Still, I fully understood that I couldn’t drink my way out of my problems. I was obsessed with a woman that felt sorry for me, had friends at Pitt who weren’t really my friends, and was homesick for a place that really wasn’t mine to call home.

Most of all, after five years of hiding my emotions and opinions, I no longer knew how to be me. As a result, I didn’t know how to be the man I should’ve been, even at the ripe old age of eighteen. I finished up the year wondering how to find myself, how to not spend the rest of my time at Pitt sullen and sober, as if I lived in a war-torn state. Luckily, thinking about Crush #2 as a “triflin’ ass” was, for better and worse, a good start toward recovery for me. That allowed me to find a place for all of my rage and sadness, to get back to being a good student again. That temporary turn to the dark side was another first for me.

On a beautiful Monday afternoon, I decided to take advantage of the unusually warm November weather to shoot around, run a lay-up drill, work on my mid-range jumper, to pretend that I still have the athletic skills of a twenty-seven-year-old. I left our flat and walked the couple of blocks to the court on Spring Street and Georgia in Silver Spring.

Upon my arrival, there it was. A court still wet nearly three days after the last rain storm. Shredded and matted fall leaves were everywhere. Apparently a crew had cleaned off the piles of leaves that had been there the week before. But I guess it would’ve been too much trouble to sweep the court clean of the debris that they helped create by using shovels without brooms and rakes. It made the court dangerous, if not downright unplayable. I was fuming, and not just because of the court’s condition that day.

I think that Montgomery County Parks and Recreation has a bias against basketball courts and the people whom the workers think use them most often. I’ve used courts all over the county over the past decade, and the problem is usually the same. Lots of dirt and other debris. Torn nets that haven’t been fixed in months or no nets at all. Crooked rims and poles set at ten and a half or eleven feet off the ground. No gates or other obstructions to keep balls from flying off the court into a parking lot or into the street. It’s as if they don’t want the residents of Montgomery County playing b-ball.

Even when renovated, the county has skimped on the quality of its repairs. Take the revamped court at Jessup Blair Park on the DC-Silver Spring border. They closed the field used for football and soccer for a full year to let the trampled area heal, to put new sod and grass down. The tennis court got a new gate and nets and so on. They took away surface area for the basketball courts in the process, with only one full-sized court now. They raised the height of the hoops. Presumably to keep some ball hog who’s only five-seven from ripping the twine, because they probably can’t jump high enough to dunk on a regulation hoop. They even made the b-ball surface the same as the tennis court’s which looks nice, but itself now needs repair.

I guess I should be used to the short-shrift given to basketball in many communities because of “the element” it could attract — you know, White guys who think they can hang because their hip-hop language skills are better than mine. Pittsburgh did a lousy job with its basketball courts, too. But then again, Pittsburgh did a poor job on all of its park and recreation facilities. Montgomery County, to say the least, isn’t the ‘Burgh. With higher local taxes and property taxes, the least they can do is to keep the courts clean and safe so that I don’t drive for a lay-up on wet pieces of leaves with broken glass hidden underneath.

What they really ought to do is what they do for the tennis courts and soccer fields. Set the courts to the correct dimensions, replace the nets regularly, clean when necessary. It would also help if they fenced in the courts. It would be nice if I didn’t have to run through a Brier patch or gouge my eye on a tree branch to keep a ball from bounding into a parking lot. My goodness, even DC Parks and Recreation can afford to do that, and they haven’t had any money for years!

All I’m asking is that Montgomery County maintains and repairs its basketball courts the same way it does the other parts of its parks. It would be nice to see my tax dollars at work on something I use at least forty times a years. Or, I guess, the county could wait until someone gets hurt because of shoddy work. Maybe then they’ll do the right thing.

Two people who’ve had some influence in my life celebrate birthdays today. Well, maybe celebrate isn’t the best word. The once-great Dwight Gooden turns forty-five today. And a friend and former grad school classmate at Carnegie Mellon turns the big four-oh today. Two different stories, two different messages taken from two people born on the same day in November.

Gooden’s story is fairly well known, one of supreme promise and potential, but killed by the Mets leadership and by his own problems with cocaine and alcohol. It’s a sad story, only tempered by the fact that for a brief moment, Gooden was the best pitcher in major-league baseball. Period.

It’s a story all too common, of too much too soon with too many expectations from too many people. Gooden turned the perennially mediocre New York Mets into a yearly playoff contender. In ’85, Gooden’s streak of sixteen straight victories kept my Mets in a playoff run with the more talented St. Louis Cardinals. I should know. My ears were hooked to the radio, and when they weren’t, my eyes to the TV as he won game after game after game. All on the way to a 24-4 record, 1.53 ERA, with something like eight shutouts and sixteen complete games. Oh yeah, he also struck out 268 batters in 276 innings pitched. No one, except save Bob Gibson, had a year that was so dominant and so intimidating. And all at the age of twenty years old.

But between Davey Johnson and Mel Stottlemyre, the drugs and the alcohol, Gooden’s overworked arm and inebriated mind began to fail him well before he could enter his prime years. Gooden had won well over 100 games in his first six seasons, but would never have the chance to build on that amazing record. At forty-five, Gooden is an example of what could’ve been but wasn’t, a cautionary tale of needing balance and meaning in one’s life outside of the thing that makes one a prodigy. No balance or meaning — Dwight Gooden. Balance. meaning and support — Tiger Woods.

My friend from my Carnegie Mellon days was a different case. A professor now at a school in the Chicagoland area, he had learned from the excesses of others long before our paths ever crossed. There were few people I spent more time to during my last two years of grad school. Our conversations were all over the place, from sports to music, from studies to social issues. That was how I found out that he shared the same birthday as Gooden. He was really one of maybe three White students at Carnegie Mellon that I could have a conversation with without having my guard up for something bigoted or self-serving. Or even as part of some nerdy scheme to one-up me in a class or with a professor.

That changed on October 3 of ’95. The day of the O.J. Simpson verdict was already a bizarre one for me. I honestly didn’t understand why there was such a mix of emotions between the elated Blacks in DC and angry Whites in L.A. I figured that despite the verdict, I could just walk to Carnegie Mellon — the land of lily-White conservatism — and not expect the subject to come up.

Well it did, and with the one person I didn’t expect it to. My friend went on for ten minutes about jury nullification and racial bias and Simpson’s abuse of his ex-wife, as if I had anything to do with the verdict or the outpouring of emotions that day. I found the whole thing, including this conversation, pretty much like a soap opera. I assumed that the only reason that he talked to me this way was because I was Black, and somehow ecstatic over the “Not Guilty” verdict. I only pointed out how badly the trial was handled, making things worse. I ended the conversation thinking that if this was what my friend could be like when he was emotional, then I didn’t want to talk with him anymore.

And in my last years in Pittsburgh, our conversations grew fewer and farther apart. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy talking with him. I realized that even as friends, there were certain lines that couldn’t be crossed. We never invited each other over to watch a game or hang out. We certainly never read each other’s research or other writings. And we never had another conversation about what happened in the History grad student bullpen that cloudy day in October ’95. If I learned anything from him and that incident, it was that we were friends, but not on any deep level, and that race and other issues remained barriers to a meaningful friendship, especially for him. Still, I hope that despite their problems and inner turmoil, that today was a good birthday for the two of them.

When I was ten, I dreamed of becoming a chef and the owner of my own restaurant. Every time me and my older brother Darren went out with my father Jimme, I’d bring home some of the leftover garbage and used it to turn my part of our room into a miniature city with local bistros and other eateries. I took my Matchbox cars — fifty in all — and pretended that my city was populated with the adult version of characters from Schulz’s Peanuts series. Yes, even Charlie Brown had his own upscale restaurant, with steaks and shrimp that almost all could afford to eat. For the less affluent, Burger King and Mickey D’s were at the other end of this eatin’ and disco-in’ side of town.

My dream, of course, was hunger induced. It was ’80, the first year that my mother income-to-inflation ration had declined so much that we didn’t always have food in the house. Cereal had become a luxury we couldn’t afford, so I almost always went to school with only a glass of milk to keep me going. I ate on the free and reduced lunch program at Holmes Elementary, and dinner had become our main meal. After my mother and then idiot stepfather Maurice separated for the first time that October, we had even less food to eat. For Maurice had taken half of the frozen meats my mother had ordered — beef, chicken, ham, and a whole leg of lamb — with him when he left. All while my mother was at work.

I had few dreams about what I wanted to do in life prior to sixth grade. I think I went through the police office/firefighter phase all during kindergarten and first grade. Then, nothing. Divorce, shacking up, second marriage and baby brother Maurice was my home life. With the occasional sprinkles of Jimme about one Saturday every five weeks between April ’79 and April ’81. We didn’t take vacations. So between the school year, holidays, summer day vacations at Darren’s Clearview School for the mentally retarded, and Jimme outings, there wasn’t much to our drab lives.

Except for the rare time out on The Avenue (Fourth Avenue between West 1st and West 3rd Streets, a strip of shops, delis, a bodega or two and small eateries) or even rarer times in the city, that was my life. But when I did get out, the things I remembered the most were the sights, smells and sizzles of food. Eating at Papa Wong’s restaurant on Gramatan Avenue was a real treat for me even at seven or eight. They had great egg rolls, pork, shrimp and chicken fried rice. I loved the place. It smelled the way I thought a Chinese restaurant ought to smell. Ginger, sesame, soy, onions, scallions and garlic. It’s too bad the restaurant burned down suspiciously in ’82, with nothing to replace it with but a parking lot for nearly a decade afterward.

Or eating at Arthur Treatcher’s Fish & Chips on Prospect and Park before it closed down that corner for two years at the end of ’82. I loved their crispy chicken medallions with the chips — splendid! Carvel’s Ice Cream shop a block west on Prospect was also a good place to eat, even if the customer service sucked more times than not. I think I drove myself to lactose intolerance about five years early because of that place. Man, I miss those chocolate-on-vanilla ice cream sandwiches!

But nothing for my precious few dollars topped Clover Donuts. If you could take a Krispy Kreme glazed and genetically cross it with a Dunkin Donuts glazed, you’d end up with the best glazed donut ever! And that’s exactly what Clover Donuts sold. Not to mention those juicy, grilled and amazing Sabrett Hot Dogs. It was all a “kick in da head” for me growing up. On almost every visit I made after high school, I made a stop there for a glazed donut, their nuggety yet soft chocolate glazed donuts, and a hot dog. I might’ve not liked many things about Mount Vernon, but Clover Donuts was one thing I really enjoyed.

But by the time I hit my mid-teens, I realized that Mount Vernon’s food had changed, and not for the better. Papa Wong’s was long gone, and so was Arthur Treatcher’s. My home life at 616 meant that most of my shopping time was spent in Pelham at C-Town or in one of their inferior eateries. The pizzerias made slices that varied from sucky to pretty good, but were common and unimaginative enough that they blended together for me. At Mount Vernon High School, the deli in nearby Chester Heights easily surpassed anything I’d eaten sandwich-wise outside of the city.

Speaking of, going down to 241st in the Bronx, and then to Manhattan, changed my view of food for good. My years working with Jimme and Darren in Midtown, on the Upper East and Upper West Side, near Spanish Harlem on 90th and around Lincoln Center introduced me to great delis and bodegas. As well as a glimpse of what real upscale restaurants looked like. The best deli food I ever had from one at the crossroads between Broadway and Columbus between 65 and 66th Street, across from Lincoln Center. The smell of pastrami sizzling on the grill, the thick cuts of turkey and corned beef, the interracializing of cookies, my first taste of a blondie. It all happened there for me in ’84 and ’85, and sorry to say, I was spoiled by that food. Not to mention a place with a great Cuban pork sandwich, pizzerias with sauces that would make me want to bite the lower right corner of my lip, they were that good.

It’s safe to say that these experiences had have as much influence on what I eat and what I like to cook as growing up with a great cook in my mother at 616. From veal or lamb stew to matzo ball soup, from beef and broccoli to empanadas and Jamaican beef patties, and from fried chicken and corn bread to duck a l’orange to fettuccine alfredo with shrimp and chicken. I love it all, so it’s a good thing I work out and/or run three to four times a week.

Unfortunately, restaurants and eateries aren’t the same everywhere. It took me almost a decade to find the best deli, pizzeria and Chinese restaurant in Pittsburgh, and we moved two years later. It’s been ten years in the DC area, and Hollywood East Cafe — easily the best Chinese we’ve had down here — has been closed for almost six months. In this case, I can’t even go home again. But, I do have a skillet, a spatula and a mixing bowl!