Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
I am a Minnesotan, I speak the language, it’s my home so dear and its name is a beacon bright and clear. I attended the University of Minnesota and majored in English, which prepared me for a career in valet parking. I wanted to be a writer so I drank heavily and tried out all the illicit drugs offered to me but the good stuff went to the coasts, and the Midwest got hashish that was less potent than used coffee grounds. I never got high until I had two wisdom teeth extracted and was anesthetized.
I went into treatment for naivete and it helped. Minnesota is a national headquarters for the recovery industry, where you’ll find enormous camps for drunks where they listen to lectures and break into small groups to talk about their emotionally unavailable parents who failed to vindicate their personhood. There are programs for people in grief at the loss of a pet, people who want to stop being Scandinavian, people suffering from traumatic taciturnity. I suffer from a fear of leaving food on my plate and scraping it into the garbage and I’m sure there is a group for me.
Read MoreI took a cab over to the East Side to see my surgeon Thursday, always an interesting experience to chat with a man who took a sharp blade and made a hole in me and messed around with internal things. I was unconscious at the time and it was only my shoulder, he wasn’t inside my skull where language is stored and the neurology that enables you to walk and be mannerly and remember the jokes and also the Beatitudes, but still.
My primary doc chose him because his doctor friends told him that Sam is the best shoulder man in New York and my primary man is very well connected. You don’t want to be looking through the Yellow Pages or googling, you want to get the inside scoop, and doctors gossip about each other and know who’s who. You don’t recommend a surgeon just because he’s a golf partner. This is one difference between medicine and politics: competence is expected. If Sam had been like the guys masterminding the war on Iran, he would’ve replaced my shoulder with my right ankle.
Read MoreI don’t want to make a big fuss about this but when somebody does something for me, such as the guy who opened the door for me at Trader Joe’s, and I said, “Thank you,” I wish he hadn’t said, “No problem.” Back in the day, he would’ve said, “You’re welcome,” which sounds more elegant to me, or even “My pleasure,” which is downright friendly, whereas “No problem” sounds dismissive, a shrug. He was in his twenties, I’m old enough to be his grandpa, and of course I am capable of opening a door and I know it wasn’t a problem for him — my gratitude was for his good manners. I am grateful for his respect. I could’ve opened the door for him and extended my hand, to say, “After you, please” and he might’ve said, “Thank you.” It’s mannerly, a simple way of indicating that we each belong here, we have a right to respect, are not opponents engaged in a struggle for dominance. We are not raccoons. If we don’t maintain our good manners, we may soon slide to the level of filthy savages who crap in our pants and shove each other aside and say, “Outta my way, scumbag loser, or I’ll kick the daylights outta you.”
Well, now I have made a big fuss about it, so I may as well continue. I was a shy kid who shrank from playground bullies so my third-grade teacher let me stay in the library during recess and I became a reader. I enjoyed Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, but I mostly loved history.
Read MoreA day of false summer last week, 80 degrees in Manhattan, and I headed to my physical therapy appointment to improve my busted left shoulder. The PT establishment is in a deep storefront with workout machines and padded tables along the sides, which brings back miserable memories of high school phy-ed, the chin-up bar and rope climb, the padded mats on the gym floor and the waist-high barrier that we were supposed to take a running dive over and somersault forward. Gymnastics, for me, was public humiliation. I’ve avoided gyms ever since.
But this is a commercial enterprise, so it’s a welcoming place, no chin-ups or diving. The therapists are young and trim, in black workout clothes, friendly, professional, and the clientele is older, all shapes and sizes, fatties, skinnies, the lame and hobbling, wizened geezers, folks in discomfort, complainers. The therapists say, “We’re going to get you back to better than ever,” and the clients think, “Why did this have to happen to me?”
Read MoreIt’s sort of a shock to suddenly find delight in these dreadful times, the grim news of war and destruction, the apprehension of worse things to come thanks to our adolescent president, but New York has many available wonders and one was a chamber music concert at Lincoln Center Sunday, solo violin pieces, six young players, all phenomenally gifted. I’m married to a violinist who could distinguish the voice of the Amati from the Guarneri, but even for me, the old fundamentalist, wow, what a show.
There was a dizzying bravado Richard Strauss sonata and a dozen or so little pieces, some sweet melodic things and a series of showstoppers, fantastic technique, big swoops and flourishes and fast chops and perfect elegant finishes that made the audience whoop and yell, and then two Fritz Kreisler pieces for string octet, so utterly sentimental it was amazing to hear them played in this day and age but they were done perfectly, with the air of old Vienna and ladies and gents swaying at the ball, champagne and apple strudel in the air. And what, I ask you, is the matter with sentimentality? Especially when sitting elbow to elbow with the woman you love.
Read MoreSpring crept in Saturday on its little cat feet, the temp hit 50 where I was, time to open the windows and let in the hopeful breeze and blow away the stale air of regret and dismay, time to make time to go out and see the world, which is out there, pleading to be seen.
Baseball season opens March 25, the Yankees in San Francisco, and I hope I can see four or five games this year, and I’d love to make it to Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway in Boston, plus Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. I never made it to the old one, the House That Ruth Built, but the new one is a classic too.
Read MoreLife is good, spring is on the way, and we must keep reminding ourselves of this since it isn’t reported in the newspapers, just as they don’t bother to point out that Canada is to the north and a brisk walk is good for you and you shouldn’t stick a fork into the toaster to pry loose a slice that’s stuck. You’re supposed to know this.
Yes, there is sadness and confusion. Yes, a person can descend into the insanity of passwords and PIN numbers that makes you want to go back to the paper tablet and No. 2 pencil. Yes, there is the misery of instruction manuals written by technical whizzes for other whizzes but for the rest of us may as well be in Urdu.
Read MoreThere’s an awkward pause that occurs when uninvited people come to visit you for no good reason, when everything has been said that anyone can think of, but nobody gets up to leave — it feels like the Valley of the Shadow of Death — so farewell sounds need to be made such as “Okay then” and “Yes, sir” and “Very good” — and we have now reached this point with the Trump era. Everything has been said twice: Democrats are traitors, judges are fools, the country was in ruins and now is No. 1 again, and the Incumbent is the greatest president in our history. Time for the guests to go home.
That was the beauty of the blizzard that transformed New York City. It was real and it had nothing to do with him and for two whole days he disappeared from our collective consciousness. Airports closed, sanitation workers put in 12-hour days. Twenty inches fell in Central Park Sunday, so Monday was called a holiday, and the Park was packed with celebrants, sliding, skiing, hiking, dog-walking, and the snow was perfect snowman snow and impressive ten-foot ones appeared here and there, and snowballs were thrown though in a big city you need to think before tossing. But nobody said it was caused by Chinese satellites, or that it made it even more necessary to take Greenland. It was just a great blizzard that changed how everyone went about their business. We were all in it together. All of the various pronouns became one: We. Us. Ours. He/him/his didn’t matter much. Our brief experiment with monarchy was over.
Read MoreI am fond of facts, even ones I don’t fully comprehend, such as the fact that curling stones are made from a heavy form of granite from magma expelled by an ancient volcano on an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland, this stone and this stone alone is what curlers slide down the ice as the sweepers run alongside sweeping. I read this in the Fake News but it has the ring of truth and if you can prove otherwise, I will buy you all the haggis your heart desires.
The mind is flighty, easily distracted and this is why, as I scroll down the Fake News from the New York Times on my cellphone, every few inches there’s an ad for American Express to remind me that they’re not about abstract expressionism or overnight mail or nonstop bus service but they do credit cards, okay? Get that?
Read MoreI sort of miss having Greenland in the news every day, a land I’ve sometimes wanted to visit when I get sick of summer. Face it, nature can get tedious at a certain point and Greenland has less greenery than any other land I can think of. I’m from Minnesota, which has a long winter so when spring rolls around people expect you to be all giddy and excited and do things, have picnics, play softball, go camping. I went camping when I was in Scouts. I did it. It’s done.
Hiking sounds nice, walking, conversing, but inevitably the persons who go hiking with me know a great deal about trees and plants and enjoy expounding and explaining about herbaceousness and deciduosity and I’m sorry but plant life is immobile and lacks communication skills and isn’t that interesting.
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