Josh was born in New York, and he loved the Yankees, Nathan’s hot dogs, and any game you could make up with a Spalding ball.

His father, Benjamin Zavin, was a playwright, and his mother, Theodora, was a lawyer and senior executive at the performing rights organization BMI for nearly 50 years (who somehow also managed to write and publish two books on law and two cookbooks).

He was a city boy at his core, growing up in Greenwich Village and attending P.S. 41 and Stuyvesant High school. He moved to Boston for college at Brandeis University (formally studying lit but primarily playing a lot of all-night poker and Risk) then, after graduation, waiting tables in Cambridge and writing the next great American novel. He lived for a short spell in San Francisco in the 70s, but eventually found his way back to New York, to an apartment nearly 10 blocks away from where he’d grown up.

He might have stayed in New York the rest of his life, but in the late 80s he met a woman named Joanne Colonna at a canoe carnival and fell in love. In 1989 he proposed by singing telegram (to the tune of “That’s Amore”) and in 1990, the city boy finally packed his bags and moved to the country (or, as it were, the Jersey suburbs).

With all this newly found space, he could finally indulge in collecting things: vintage toy soldiers, Chip Hilton books … But he loved Department 56 miniatures probably best, building his collection bigger and bigger over nearly three decades. Each winter, the Dickens village was erected: scores of buildings, hundreds of characters. For a few months each holiday season, it sprawled the entire footprint of his 300 square foot porch, a thousand tiny scenes of winter wonder, ringed with running, if temperamental, trains. The whole spectacle had gotten so enormous, so vast, that in his final year he suggested to his wife boring a hole through the wall into the family room so he could run trains through there as well. The plan was met with, as you might expect, some resistance.

In his 50s, he hung a sign over the stairs to the basement written in gold cursive “Chez Joshua” and converted the bottom floor of the house into some hybrid of a neighborhood speakeasy and the dream arcade of a teenage boy: Skee-ball, pool, slots, ping-pong, and in the corner, in front of a bookcase packed with Hemingway and Dostoevsky and Plutarch and Carlos Castaneda, he had his bar, where he’d concoct all sorts of magical cocktails, setting alcohol on fire and juggling it between glasses. He never missed a beat to remind people that he got his bartending degree from Harvard (a degree, at best, nominally connected to the famed university, and awarded to anyone willing to pay a few bucks and spend a couple Saturdays learning to make a bunch of cocktails and then drink them all). But he framed and hung the degree anyway, just to the left of the pinball machine and to the right of the popcorn maker.

Over the decades, Josh had amassed a mammoth record collection – a library of the best rock and jazz and showtunes – a comprehensive history of almost 50 years of music. In 2011, he added a jukebox to his basement “Arnold’s Drive-In” and the house that usually swayed to Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra came alive with Rock ‘n’ Roll. He was constantly changing the roster of the songs in the jukebox, from Frankie Avalon to The Grateful Dead to The Shangri-Las to Queen, so that every poker night, every party, every visit felt fresh.

He liked to say that “it takes a child to raise a village.” He always meant this as a joke, but deep down it speaks to a truth about Josh: he created all these things partly for the boy inside him, but more to bring out the child in everyone. He lived in a way to let everyone know that you could be an adult and still love to play. (A Christmas never passed without a MAD magazine curled into a stocking.)

He created these worlds for all of us to inhabit, a real-life village of wonder, where the bells are always ringing, the lights are always flashing, and the jukebox is always ready to spin up another song.

In his younger years he was a waiter and bartender (see above) and, for a time, a massage therapist. He was part of the prestigious BMI Musical Theater Workshop and wrote lyrics for musicals alongside Bobby Lopez and Jeff Marx who were developing Avenue Q at the time. But his true calling was psychology.

He graduated with his Ph.D. from the New School in 1988, and practiced until the day he died, working first as a senior psychologist for a substance abuse clinic in Queens, NY, and then for the majority of his career in private practice. He was immensely devoted to his patients, some of whom had been with him for almost the entirety of his professional life, over 30 years. He was a Founding Member and President of the International Integrative Psychotherapy Association (IIPA), as well as serving locally as President, Program Chair, and Membership Chair of the Morris County Psychological Association.

Josh believed profoundly in being there for people, especially when they were in need. He was liberal with his affection, open with his feelings, and ready to listen. He knew when the time was to bring comfort, to offer a soothing touch, or to make a joke when the room needed lightening. He believed in taking the important things seriously, while always reminding us that nothing should be too sacred that we couldn’t laugh about it too. He was a goofball with an intensely loving heart.

Joshua was actually his middle name. His first was Daniel and those who knew him longest sometimes still called him Danny. But it was in his middle name that he felt most comfortable, in the heart between his given name and family name, the midpoint between two poles. For those of us who loved him most, he was exactly that – the fulcrum of balance, the hub of patience, the loving center.

Our stoop-ball slugger, pinball wizard, lover of puns, master of the jukebox…

…our Josh.

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