Here are twelve stories, told with poignancy and humor, reflecting life, both coming-of-age and adult, in New York in the 1960s. A mix of fiction and memoir, these stories root themselves in a working-class neighborhood, on the dividing line between East New York, Brooklyn and Ozone Park, Queens, in the years between 1962 and 1969. At the perimeter of the stories is the all-consuming environment that "shapes lives regardless." At the core are the lives, the people, who populate this world. It is their stories that hold front and center within the pages of this book. Collectively, the stories celebrate a time and place, a culture, and a spectrum of people who, in their smallness, reveal something larger than themselves: the human struggle for survival and meaning.