“How you know it’s a real stoop is not so much what it looks like, but rather what happens on it. A stoop is a place to socialize. People hanging out, reading the paper, playing dominos or cards, talking and gossiping, smoking, eating a hero with the wax paper laid on their lap, playing congas, shooting craps, listening to the radio, rocking babies to sleep, playing with the dog…”

As Steve Bernstein comes of age in “Stories from the Stoop,” he describes the beating heart of the Bronx in the 1960s, the place where it all goes down. He wishes it was his, this small, safe world. But as a 14-year-old in a home wracked by addiction, the last thing he can do is relax.

Now 68, the first-time author is still wary of what sounds too good to be true. Four years ago, it didn’t seem real when an editor emailed to say her boss loved his self-published book, which had garnered 5-star reviews on Amazon. “Who are these bozos?” he thought. ”Fugettaboudit!” But when he looked up Skyhorse Publishing, sure enough they were legit. Soon the Granby-based author was on the Amtrak to Penn Station, with 4 of his own paperbacks in his backpack – in case, you know, he suddenly had to inscribe one – and a tin of Linzer cookies on his lap.

The introduction at Skyhorse couldn’t have been sweeter. “You know, I’m in the middle of Midtown and they’re so calm and nice,” he says. “I’m not used to that.”

After 20 minutes of chatting with editors, Tony Lyons strode into the room, grabbed one of the paperbacks and held it up before the author. “I love this book,” the publisher declared. Lyons knew all about childhood stoops, though his had been in Manhattan. “I never went up to the Bronx,” he confided in Bernstein. “I was too scared.” The author assured him he hadn’t even heard of Manhattan until he left New York. A brand-new, old-school partnership was born.

And then the pandemic hit. Though it would be a couple years until the fresh-jacketed hardcover launched, Bernstein wasn’t in any rush. After an adolescence defined by vigilance, his adulthood has been about taking his time.

Bernstein speaks slowly and deliberately; he is a practiced storyteller who understands that pacing enhances meaning. On the page, his many pauses are punctuated by commas and staccato sentences. He embraces his accent and it becomes an extension of his voice, which is conversational and clear.

Growing up, writing wasn’t really on his radar. After high school, he opened a successful plumbing business in Keene, New Hampshire. But people often inquired about his education. “Where’d you get your degree?” they’d ask. “Where’d you get your master’s?”

“What? My master plumber’s license?” he’d quip. “In the Bronx.”

As he describes in the book’s introduction, he was 40 when he took his first storytelling course at Antioch College, where his “signature” story poured out of him. “It set the stage for who I was going to be as a man,” Bernstein says of “Wolf,” now the book’s first chapter. Wolf is his first love, a menacing Alaskan Malamute who both defends and awakens him – who, for a summer, allows him to be a kid. They escape the violent streets and get lost in the New York Botanical Garden, where the air is clear and it is a joy to simply breathe. “He gave me hope that anything was possible,” he writes, and by the end of the story, the reader is devastated for him. In the real world, Bernstein became a lone wolf, ever guarded, his grief as spiky as Wolf’s choke collar at the end of a clenched leash.

More than anything, the book has been an exercise in letting go.

The other six stories shook loose in his early 60s, when he joined the Florence-based Writers in Progress and started taking classes at Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop. The hardcover officially came out in April.

It’s fitting that the final story, “Freedom Ride,” ends on a stoop that Bernstein has chosen. It’s shortly after 9/11, and he’s just returned from New York, a city that will never be the same. On the solitary steps that lead to his cabin in western Massachusetts, he is free to grieve now. And feeling, he realizes, is akin to living. “I’m here,” he writes. “I made it. I got life. I’m going to keep going.”

Purchase Stories from the Stoop at www.stevebernsteinauthor.com.

Melissa Karen Sances lives in Easthampton, where she writes meaningful human-interest stories and works on her own memoir. Reach her at melissaksances@gmail.com.

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