The street was called Oswego. Native American name. The beach outside New York City where you could still find wampum in the sand if you knew where to look — the shell beads the Rockaway people used, the ones who were on that land before anyone else. As a kid you picked them up and understood without being told that the place had a longer memory than any of the people currently living on it.
The father read Greek mythology at bedtime and told Roman stories. Ancient gods, epic scale, the sense that the world was full of forces with names and intentions. On top of that, a beach that carried its original people in the street names, the shells in the sand, and the particular quality of light over the water at dusk.
Those stories had to get written eventually.
The Five Books
Red Fox Crosses the Marsh. Terrapin's Treasure. Thunderbird's Warning. Blue Shark's Secret. Whale Songs of Montauk.
Five animals, five Long Island coastal stories, written for elementary age readers. The fox in the dune grass. The terrapin taking the slow route and surviving because of it. The thunderbird carrying Native American spiritual weight over land that remembers being called something different. The blue shark holding fear and fascination in the same body. The whale off Montauk turning distance into a form of song.
The thunderbird is the honest acknowledgment that this land has a story older than the one most people tell about it. The Rockaway people were here. How magical that coast must have been before the Europeans arrived — the same marshes, the same birds, the same water, the same particular intelligence in the place. Writing about that land without acknowledging the older presence would have been a different kind of dishonesty.
The approach was not expertise. These are not anthropological texts. It was love for the land and respect for what it carried. That is what the books tried to hold.
The Generation That Actually Mixed
Growing up in New York in that era, the project was genuinely integration — not as a concept but as the actual texture of the neighborhood. Friends across every line. The city had decided, in that decade, that celebrating other cultures was the answer, and mostly it worked. The kids did not look at cultures and races the way the previous generation had.
As the years went by, the culture became much more careful about who gets to tell which stories. That sensitivity has real reasons behind it. But it sometimes makes it harder to say simply: I grew up on Rockaway land. I found their wampum on the beach. I lived on a street with their name. The place shaped me the same way it shaped everyone else who ever lived there, regardless of blood. That connection is real even when the lineage is not.
The thunderbird in these books comes from that. Not from a textbook. From the sense that the land already had a spiritual life before anyone put it in a story, and that life deserves acknowledgment — you name it, you treat it with care, you do not dress it up as your own tradition.
