John Fritze, a friend and fellow journalist who started as a Times Union intern in the mid-1990s before going on to an impressive career that now has him covering the U.S. Supreme Court for USA Today, sent me a note the other day after happening upon a slideshow of Capital Region restaurants that are closed but still fondly remembered.
The photo that walloped Fritze with nostalgia was of Aleph Ashline and Tess Collins, longtime servers at the former Justin’s in Albany, where Fritze and I ate regularly during his internship and the years following as he finished his degree at the University at Albany. Among my preferred dishes was jerk chicken, introduced at Justin’s by Ric Orlando when he was the head chef there before going on to found New World Home Cooking in Saugerties in 1993. He later returned to Albany at New World Bistro Bar, where the jerk chicken was still as good as when I first tried it, almost 20 years before. The second photo in the gallery above is a 2020 version of the dish that accompanies Orlando’s online recipe.Â
I recently turned 55. What nobody ever told me, or I didn’t understand, is that you don’t necessarily feel advancing age, but signifiers of it rudely slap you into recognizing you’re no longer young. It is inconceivable to me that Fritze and I started dining together at Justin’s more than 25 years ago. He was in his late teens, me a decade older and in my first years at the Times Union. This July, I will have been at the paper for 27 years.
It’s not that being undeniably in my mid-50s bothers me. After all, I can’t do anything about it. It’s that the age doesn’t make sense to me as I think of me. More bothersome is the thought of how many fewer writing years remain ahead of me than behind me. I plan to write until my body or brain prevent me from doing so. I plan for that to be at the Times Union for as long as they’ll have me. And I am…
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