Okay, I know I shouldn’t be drinking this early in the morning but if I only did the things I should do and avoided all the things I shouldn’t do, I wouldn’t have done half the things I did do, which, some people in my life, my brother Johnny being one of them, would probably say that’s just the point.

Anyway, here I am having just finished a spinach pie for breakfast and yes, having a cup of spiked coffee and a glass of red wine to wash it down, and thinking I have no one to answer to for the things I do or don’t do so what the hell. I mean, it’s Easter Sunday back in my old world which is actually the new world but my old world while I sit here in my sweatpants and fleece-lined slippers in my new world which is actually the old world but it’s all pretty relative, isn’t it?

So my point being it is morning here in my new world but still evening, late evening, in my old world where I would be if I was going to celebrate Easter Sunday properly with my brothers, with Rita, with Steve, too, now that his sister lives in Florida and though he’s Jewish, he never passes up a holiday dinner, any holiday dinner, with people he loves, at George’s house where there’d be Robert’s tomato sauce with meatballs that rival our mother’s and hot and sweet sausage, broccoli with garlic and lemon, probably some fried pork George’s in-laws will bring from Chinatown on the way out to the Island, and Cecelia’s cheesecake for dessert, several bottles of red wine because they know I’ll be there and the kids watching Disney movies in the living room while we all bad mouth the Republicans and discuss healthcare and the Mets.

But I’m not there, but here, where it’s just another Sunday morning, a bit overcast, but I’m not going anywhere, and plan to spend the day rereading No One Writes To The Colonel because, you know, Marquez died on Thursday and I thought it appropriate to revisit him today, and then watch a few movies, maybe In The Heat Of The Night or Inside Man or the original Taking Of Pelham 123 because they’re so NY (the last two, not the Sidney Poitier film) and I sort of miss NY today having read an email from Rita thanking me for the flowers but mentioning the opera and wishing I was there and well, it’s mornings like this, when it should be Easter Sunday but isn’t that I do miss NY more than a little bit.

So I’ll drink my wine with coffee if I want to, eat some more hazelnuts, play some Miles Davis on the stereo in the living room and maybe, just maybe forget where I am, where I’ve been, and only think about where I’m going.

And that’s really what Easter is about, isn’t it? Rebirth. Like a phoenix, one rises from the ashes and flies once again.