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
Call me a fool but I just sent a hundred bucks to a guy named Trygve Hammer running as a Democrat for Congress in North Dakota, which is delusional like supporting an attempt to climb Niagara Falls, but the name Trygve tells me he’s Norwegian and he’s an ex-Marine and wasn’t the cellphone delusional at one time? You saw them in the comics, called walkie-talkies, and detectives had them and now every child five and older owns one and knows how to use all the apps including the one that locates the child’s parents and reads their texts.
I thought all the Democrats in North Dakota moved to Canada for the socialized medicine. The border wall is two strands of barbed wire. Lift one, put your foot on the other, you’re Canadian, you don’t have to pledge allegiance anymore or hit the high note on “free,” you just collect the government stipend that comes in the mail on the 15th.
Read MoreA sunny day in New York and we left the doors open to our balcony and suddenly I heard flapping, a sort of panic of wings, and a teenage robin was in the living room bumping off the ceiling. I guess he’d never experienced a ceiling before. We have mourning doves nesting on the balcony, the mama roosting on the nestlings, the papa out shopping for seeds, and a pair of mockingbirds has raised their young and flown off, but this was our first robin. I shut the doors to the dining room so the poor guy didn’t get lost in the maze and Jenny got a dish towel and a cellphone and got the app that does bird calls and she flapped the towel gently, trying to herd the bird toward the open doors, but he couldn’t get his bearings.
I had a moment like that myself last week, trying to find my way to the library on Amsterdam Avenue, which I thought was on 83rd but was not. My eyesight is fading and I have a hard time with signage and I hate the idea of using GPS to find my way around the neighborhood, and then a young guy in his 50s said, “Can I help you?” A kind New Yorker. The city is full of them. So he got out his cellphone and located the library on 81st and I thanked him, we shook hands, and he said, “You’ve done so much for me over the years, glad to return the favor.”
Read MoreOurs is a country with a great tradition of eccentrics and wackos from Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the devil and Carry Nation with her tavern-busting hatchet and the man who wrote a book with no punctuation and Hetty Green the Witch of Wall Street and the freak-show man P.T. Barnum down to our Current Occupant fascinated by tariffs and vengeance and putting his name on things and his Secretary of War and his Secretary of Health opposed to vaccination, etcetera and so forth.
What makes this eccentricity possible is the rational order of things that we count on in everyday life, such as last Friday when I rode a train into New York, racing through a tunnel to the underground railyard of Penn Station, which the Leader wants named for himself, and up an escalator, following correct signage, to the massive escalator up to Seventh Avenue to hail a licensed cab and ride uptown, in traffic directed by men and women in yellow vests, to the Weill Cornell medical center where a kind neurologist with diplomas on his office walls explained to me, a writer and citizen, the brain seizure that caused an episode of speaking gibberish a week before and how we shall prevent its recurrence by rational science-based methods, nothing involving reptile ovaries or magnetism or dancing in moonlight.
Read MoreThe skies are clear over New York, the smoke from Canadian forest fires has dissipated, so the End of the World has been postponed, and the 50,000 fans who packed the Great Lawn of Central Park to watch the World Cup final have left, and the mourning doves on our balcony are taking turns sitting on the nest where the eggs have opened, leaving the tiny fledglings blind, helpless, covered with light down, and needing to be sat on otherwise they will die.
My beloved and I are sitting on the loveseat, her beautiful feet on my lap, and we can see the leaves of the hedge move where the mama is perched on the nest; the papa is off in search of seeds. The mockingbirds who nested in our pine tree have left, their kids grown and flown, so we can use our own balcony again. The male mockingbird took a Pete Hegseth view of the balcony and if we ventured out there, flew maneuvers overhead, shrieking, cursing us, carrying fatherhood a little far, I thought, becoming a terrorist, but I’m an old liberal and I backed down.
Read MoreI come from studious people, Anglos, suspicious of dream merchants and rainbow salesmen, people who, if you put us on a beach at sunset with tubs of beer on ice and a steel drum band and a fabulous buffet of roast pork and fresh fruit and a hundred people dancing with hands over their heads, my people would get busy collecting trash and cleaning up. We aren’t party people. I wander around the periphery of parties and find a quiet corner to sit and surf the internet on my cellphone, looking up Uranus, the longevity of sea lions, the breeding habits of the praying mantis, and so on.
I used to blame my evangelical upbringing for this deficiency but once you pass 30, you have to cut the folks a break and take responsibility for your life. I never developed social skills because I never had to deal with people face to face. I made a career in radio broadcasting where you simply impersonate friendliness; it’s a one-way street. It’s sad. I’m 84 and I don’t have the charm to make a successful shoe salesman.
Read MoreIt’s a shock to realize I’m the same age as Mitch McConnell the ancient turtle-faced senator who gave us the Supremes and the Second Coming of Trump and I am 13 years older than the late Lindsey Graham the joyful senator who told Trump to go to hell and then became such an intimate pal that the Leader seemed to express actual human feeling at his passing, at least he made an attempt to.
It goes to show what drudgery public service is that it ages people so severely. I am bouncing around telling jokes and singing duets and poor Mitch needs help to get to the toilet. Some people thought the photo of him in the hospital was fake but that’s what politics does, it artificializes a person.
Read MoreOne beautiful aspect of the digital age is its advancement of democracy. Back in the newsprint age, you had William Safire, Maureen Dowd, George Will, Russell Baker, Molly Ivins, and if you wanted to tell them how dense and dim-witted they were, you had to put pen to paper and address the envelope and put a stamp on it and drop it in a mailbox and weeks later it might appear in Letters To The Editor, which nobody read anyway. Now the big shots speak and the peasants get to post comments immediately and often the comments are the best part.
Check out an interview Chad Smith the CEO of the Boston Symphony gave WGBH not long ago after he got in hot water for dismissing the popular conductor Andris Nelsons because he was not in “alignment” with the BSO’s need “to serve our communities more expansively and inclusively” in deciding “whose voices get to be heard, whose stories get to be told.” The BSO, he said, was at a “pivotal moment” and needed “broad alignment” to “address the issues” and Maestro Nelsons was not in alignment.
Read MoreIt started with an episode of lightheadedness that caught me off-balance but I ignored it and later felt really lightheaded and a little dizzy and went around the corner to Urgent Care and my blood pressure was a little high so the doctor called my doctor who suggested I go to an ER on the East Side and so I did.
A New York ER is another world from the one I live in. It’s obliged to deal with all who ask for treatment and this afternoon it was packed with people lying on gurneys or sitting on benches, mostly elderly, some with companions, and a cacophony of dinging bells and beepers and pages and people in white or blue with badges tending to business.
Read MoreA hot summer day comes to a lovely end as we sit on the porch at dusk looking out at a cove on the Connecticut River and she puts her bare feet on my lap and sips her white wine and a boat goes by and she looks at the Weather app on her phone and says that a thunderstorm is heading our way. I enjoy storms, she does not, so this puts me in the role of male protector, which I don’t get to perform often.
I think of my parents, how my mother liked to put her feet on his lap, the affection between them. I knew from when I was tiny that they loved each other. They came of age during the Depression, knew hard times, and she canned vegetables and darned socks and mended pants and bought day-old bread, but they were sweet to each other.
Read MoreI had an appointment last week for a checkup with my surgeon who repaired my busted left shoulder and I was dreading having to confess that I hadn’t done the exercises, but I did — a person should not lie to your doctor — and he was okay with that. I can lift my computer case up and into the overhead on a plane and I can shampoo with both hands and put on a jacket. The shoulder doesn’t hurt. He said, “If you’re happy, I’m happy.” He is a perfectionist, as you expect your surgeon to be, not a hobbyist, but he also knows that allowances must be made. Past the age of 75, a person has to make their own choices. I’m a writer, not a mountain climber. Modern medicine took care of a congenital heart problem that tends to kill people off around age 59 and I am almost 84. My left shoulder shrugs. I’m happy.
I’ve been wrestling with a book for a year and a half. I want it to be good because it’ll be the last book I write. The world has heard enough out of me, time for an Old White Male to dump his stack of unfinished work, the screenplays, three novels, a musical, files full of promising beginnings that petered out, and use his remaining time to take long walks and see the world. There are historic sites in New York I’ve never visited: the Stock Exchange, Trinity Church, the Tenement Museum, the Morgan Library, Macy’s, the Brooklyn Bridge, which I’ve never walked across, Yankee Stadium. There are books I should read, such as Proust’s. I wrote a limerick about him but never read his stuff, which strikes me as ungracious.
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