Growing up in Brooklyn was, and continues to be, a great experience. I was originally born in Boro Park, but my parents moved to Long Island when I was a newborn. Then they changed their mind and moved back to Brooklyn to get a more “urban-feel”.

I lived in an apartment building in Boro Park, a mostly Jewish neighborhood, for the first seven years of my life. When my brother was born we moved to a red house with a stoup and a white house directly adjacent to it. I would tell people coming to my house “It’s the one right next to the White House” as a joke.

I went to a private school for the first eleven years of my life. It was a 20 minute drive to school every day and I would just look out the windows. I would notice all the different types of stores. Stores that included a ma-and-pa shoe store, music store, a bunch of fast food restaurants and so on. To this day I have a mental image of how to get from my home to the school. Some of the stores have changed, but the path remains the same.

My grandmother lived/lives on Cortelyou Rd. I would visit often and be spoiled like any grandchild. I have good memories of watching videos on my grandmother’s old giant TV and eating macaroni and cheese.

My father was/is an OBGYN. He had and continues to have an office at Avenue X. I used to go there to see my father  and look at all the pictures of babies on the wall. My father would also take me to his office and show me the renovations he was doing. Construction was a hobby for him. I remember him fixing the walls, the roof and even putting in the floor. There was just a plank and a big hole in the floor in the beginning.

After private school, I went to middle school for a short time and then high school. My high school was located in the downtown area right next to Brooklyn Hospital, which is the oldest hospital in Brooklyn. My father would sometimes have patients in the hospital and periodically he would take me through the hospital. Sometimes I would have breakfast with him and then walk across the street to my high school.

My high school was Brooklyn Technical High School, the biggest high school in the country. It had over 5000 students. I remember, especially in high school, that there were many people speaking more than one language, and very few students were from America.

In my junior and senior year, I would go and play billiards with a friend at Brown Stone Billiard’s at 7th Avenue. We would play and just talk about life. My commute from home to school was only 40 minutes by subway and roughly the same time in the car with my father.

Sometimes my family and I would go to Coney Island and ride on the rides in the summer. The bumper cars would always have the sound insanely loud and they kept repeating the phrase “BUMP-BUMP-YOUR-ASS-OFF!!!”. Afterwards me, my brother and my uncle would play games at the arcades and try to get as much tickets as we could.