My 14-Year-Old Self Came in the Mail

Should I Open?

A large brown envelope arrived recently in snail mail from Ashtabula, Ohio. It contained copies of letters I wrote to a young woman named Mary when we were 14. We met in the northeastern Ohio township, and decided to keep in touch when my summer vacation ended.

I found her on Facebook, and we got in touch after four decades. When she realized I’d become a writer, she mentioned my letters in a box in her attic. Would I like copies? What could I have possible said in those letters to a relative stranger 300 miles away? And why would she save them into this millennium?

“They’re about what you’d expect a 14 year old to write about,” she said.

Would I like to meet myself at 14? Not that I could go back and talk some sense into my head, but what I think about those times now and what I was actually saying at the time, well, they’re mountains apart.

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Time to Change the Air Conditioner

Every year here in New Jersey when we change our clocks to save time, there's another chore around our house. About the last week of April when we spring ahead, it's time to break out the window air conditioners from their closet hibernation In October, it's time to rip off the sealing tape and bring in the units without dropping them on an innocent foot or to the pavement below.

In storage.

The two bedroom air conditioners need only cross from the closet to the window. It's the monster dining room air conditioner that has been stored in the basement that elicits the most grunts and groans as it travels up a flight of stairs, through the kitchen to rest and catch its breath in front of the window.

It wasn't always like this. When I grew up in the second floor cold water flat upstairs from grandma, we didn't even have screens outside our windows. We had these sliding screens that adjusted to the width of the window and let in a hot summer breeze through about ten inches of metal panels.

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Riding Under the PATH Train

We are gliding under the Witt Penn Bridge in Jersey City. There on the north side naked trestles await the next generation bridge. The thunder we hear riding under the PATH train bridge! We are clear soon enough to see the commuter train exit the bridge heading west to Harrison and Newark.

PATH commuter train travels parallel to the Passaic River in northern New Jersey.Anthony Buccino 

How many times have I been on that PATH train while we stopped as the bridges were drawn to let some tall masted ship pass by? 

From where we stood, sardine-like, in the tin can rail car, we could only ever guess at the holdup outside. 

How many times have riders looked north from those trains and guessed at the real name of Fraternity Rock rising from the swamps.

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Vacuuming My Way into Clarity

By Anthony Buccino

It's a big yard and someone has to  mow it.

It’s the same story every week: “Ant, the house is all dusted. You can vacuum when you’re ready.”

“Aw, I got to vacuum the whole house,” I mutter under my breath.

When I’m ready, I grab the vacuum from the upstairs closet, plug it in and click it on. While the noise drowns out the rest of the world, I focus on specks of dust and lint challenging me to a duel they will lose.

Before I know it, my head is cleared of everyday life. My mind is fogged by memories of Mom and her Electrolux that slid on metal blades across our old rug in the four-room cold water flat.

There was that time when the neighborhood version of “Benny Miller-from-Cucamonga” tried to sell Mom a new vacuum. “Would you let your eight-year-old son pick up a handful of dirt outside and eat it?”

“Of course NOT!”

“But, Mrs. Buccino,” he said, “the rug inside your house is much worse than the dirt outside.”

Hey, I was eight. I wouldn’t eat dirt in the yard. Anymore. What was this guy talking about? ...

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This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter

This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter
By Anthony Buccino

In Print and ebook

If you ever commuted to work, you'll enjoy your ride reading Anthony Buccino's latest collection "This Seat Taken? Notes of a HaplessCommuter" about the joys and follies of getting to and from work in the city using public transit.

Buccino's bus and rail commuting tales and observations are collected in this new 224-page book which is available in print, on Amazon and Nook.

Buccino spent 12 years editing business news copy at Dow Jones & Co. for the Ticker, NewsPlus and The Wall Street Journal professional web pages in Jersey City and later at the NewsCorp building in the Times Square district of mid-town Manhattan.

For his first year working in Jersey City, Buccino actually drove the 12 miles each way to work and home. An average commute would take 20 minutes to reach the city and at least another 20 minutes to cross the city to his parking lot near the Hudson River. It wasn't long before the crosstown traffic and the monthly parking fee, nearly enough for a car payment, persuaded the author to use mass transportation to get to work for the first time ever.

For 11 of those dozen years, he rode public transportation including NJ Transit buses, Newark City Subway, Port Authority Trans Hudson's PATH trains, the occasional NYC subway and DeCamp buses.

For five years, Buccino wrote about commuting and transit in metro New York-New Jersey for NJ.com. His transit blog on NJ.com earned the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award. Many of those blurbs are gathered in this collection.

A Commuter Tale (From Home)

BY ANTHONY BUCCINO

“Left a good job in the city … la-di-da-dah.” 

I wonder if Fogerty had to wait ten minutes for a bus, take a 45-minute ride – on a good day – and then walk uptown for about 15 minutes from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan dodging hundreds of early-rising tourists looking for the line in the skyline in Times Square from W. 42nd Street to W. 48th Street and Avenue of the Americas?

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This Seat Taken? Notes of a hapless commuter, by Anthony Buccino

THIS SEAT TAKEN? Notes of a Hapless Commuter

If you ever commuted to work, you'll enjoy this ride reading Anthony Buccino's latest collection "THIS SEAT TAKEN? Notes of a Hapless Commuter" about the joys and follies of getting to and from work in the city using public transit.

For five years, Buccino wrote about commuting and transit in metro New York-New Jersey for NJ.com. His transit blog on NJ.com earned the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award for a Media Affiliated blog. Many of those blurbs are gathered in this collection.

Commuters who knew he wrote for NJ.com would seek him out and tell him their commuter tales of woe. Often they would simply commiserate and try to see who had a worse ride in that day. But more than once, Buccino was button-holed after a scathing piece on, say, homeless people using subway stairwells as bathrooms, and told that it was cleaned up within hours of his writing about it online.

Available soon.

Remembering a Summer, and the Girl Who Had My Heart

It started innocently, as all these stories do. I was on an open-ended summer vacation at Lake Erie. In September, I’d return to New Jersey and my junior year of high school. I’d count the days until I got my driver’s license, and could return to this summer place.

That day, my buddy drove us in his VW Bug to a new shopping center in Mentor where the stores were connected and under one roof. It was the biggest thing to hit northeastern Ohio in 1970 since practically ever....

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