rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

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Immigration

Alley Pond Park, the Cousins’ Club, and the Loony Bin

I remember two things about Alley Pond Park from my early childhood in the 1950s. Neither was that it was the second biggest park in Queens County, one of the five boroughs of New York City, nestled at the far east borderline of Douglaston, Queens, just a stone’s throw from suburban Nassau County, where I grew up…. long before they built the east-west, Long Island Expressway right through the middle of Queens and Nassau. No, what I do remember vividly, is that Alley Pond Park was the green-grassed, red picnic-tabled immigrant park of my forefathers, where my helter-skelter Russian Jewish…

July 4th: Re-Discovering America Through Immigrant Eyes

Re-posted from The Huff Post, June 21, 2014 I brought my wife-to-be here to Los Angeles from Indonesia on August 3, 2001. We’d met on the magical island of Bali, “Island of the Gods”, a little over a year before in the early summer of 2000. After I’d returned to LA, we e-mailed each other for several months, she in “broken English”, after which I went back to visit her for almost a month around Christmas and New Years. We traveled across the island of Java together, taking night buses through the drenched green rain forests for 10 hours at…

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