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
The great debate continues over Flaco the eagle-owl spotted recently flying around our home on New York’s Upper West Side, a year after he got loose from the Central Park Zoo: should he continue to roam the city freely, feeding on rats, or should he be put back in captivity for his own welfare?
He’s a big bird, six-foot wingspan, bright orange eyes, and he’s gained a considerable fan base, most of whom are rooting for him to be free. Some renowned owlologists, however, feel the bird is in danger, primarily from rat poison but also from vehicular birdicide, and needs to be rescued from his urban habitat.
Read MoreAging is a beautiful natural process, the wisdom gained, the growing sense of gratitude, the amusement of seeing young people make your same dumb mistakes, but one thing that bothers me is the difficulty of putting on underpants while standing and not leaning against a doorpost. It’s a graceful moment, left leg held high and poked through the hole, then the right, freestanding, no wobbling, which I’ve done since I was a kid, and now at 81 I can sometimes still perform the trick, but then comes a bad experience — the left foot catches the underpants crotch and you lose your balance and suddenly you’re headed for a tragic accident.
I do not want my obit to read “The author died at home of a concussion, while trying to pull on his briefs. No foul play was suspected.” And so after a near fall, I sit down on the bed and practice safety, but still there is a sense of loss. Trousers are easier but not without risk.
Read MoreIt’s good to know what true misery is as opposed to irritation, frustration, or annoyance, and now, thanks to influenza B, I am clued in. It hit suddenly last week, fever, chills, chest congestion, a hard dry cough, shivering, shaking, and a profound fatigue such that I grabbed a cane to assist me to the bathroom. Suddenly I was 98 years old. I felt I was at death’s door. I put on a sweater and lay shivering under a quilt. I slept in an upright chair to ease the coughing. I tried to order chicken soup from a deli to be delivered but they needed me to do it through PayPal, which meant creating a new PIN number to add to the twenty I already have, so I declined. Tylenol helped with the fever so I could sleep a little and in the morning I headed for the doctor’s.
I looked so pathetic that the cabdriver got out of the front seat and helped me in the back. The doctor could see I was suffering badly. A blood test revealed influenza B, and I headed home with the prescription. All in all, that’s what I call pure misery.
Read MoreI was riding home from the cardiologist’s in a taxi and heard a woman on the radio say that if you see a bird lying on the sidewalk, you shouldn’t ignore it, you should pick it up gently and move its legs — if the bird reacts, it’s alive, and may recover, so you might put it in a paper sack and carry it to a warm place and if it’s wounded, you could take it to a wild bird shelter.
I had never heard this advice before and I was impressed. The cab was wending through heavy traffic in Manhattan and the thought of someone stopping to give first aid to a bird seems unlikely to me. Maybe in a children’s book, but in New York, no. I say this as someone who’s fallen three times in New York, tripped on a curb once, hit a low-hanging limb once, tripped on uneven pavement, and each time, within three seconds, strangers rushed to my side, asked if I was okay, offered a hand. God has His Eye on the sparrow so I believe He watches over you and me, but New Yorkers are busy people with a lot on their minds.
Read MoreWinter can hit a person hard and when we drop down to zero and below and the wind is out of the north, I walk the deserted streets, no sign of civilization, just blinking red lights, and come home and see in the window the reflection of a wreck of a man, and I think, “Nobody knows you when it’s ten below. I am old and I am tired and my credit cards are all expired. Got no friends who I can call, and the doctor says, No alcohol.”
I walked into a nice restaurant in Minneapolis last week, full of people drinking novelty cocktails and eating expensive food, and the music coming out of the ceiling was all metallic percussion and persistent repetitive unmusical phrases, it was like eating dinner in a machine shop, and I felt like all of American culture is headed toward trash and corruption. And then you read the poll that shows that one-fourth of all Americans believe that the FBI was responsible for the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, and you think the stupidification of America is maybe a conspiracy of foreign-born otolaryngologists who examine the larynx by threading a thin scope up your nostril and what’s to prevent them from injecting a dumbing drug into your brain? You go to their office suffering from sinus problems and you come out believing that electric dishwashers cause erectile dysfunction.
Read MoreIt is disconcerting to watch our blessed country tear itself apart and to see so many public figures, both left and right, committed to permanent dread and dismay, but I did feel that the January cold snap was a very good thing. Our autumnal December was disorienting and then I was in Kansas to do a show when the polar blast hit, a bracing Antarctic chill, and I felt the wind off the prairie — like being whacked by a two-by-four. It was a moment of reality and one is grateful for that. It was as if the planet was saying, “I’ve heard enough of your bellyaching about politics and the price of gasoline and social media and the state of public education — let me show you what actual suffering is like.” A warm van was waiting to take me back to the hotel. I was profoundly grateful.
The next morning I sat eating generic scrambled eggs and sausage and fell into convivial conversation with a couple from Oklahoma who were in Kansas for a friend’s wedding. I believe conviviality is more common when the temperature drops into single digits: total strangers drawn to each other by mutual suffering. “Traumatic bonding” it’s called. The two of them were hunters and gun-lovers. “Praise the Lord,” I thought. My friendship demographic has gotten awfully narrow as I careen into old age — I know too many English majors, no farmers or truck drivers — and it had been ages since I last conversed with gun-lovers: we don’t have many on the West Side of Manhattan. I enjoyed meeting them. They were very very nice people. She has an arthritic right shoulder and likes the AR-15 because it doesn’t have the recoil of other rifles. He is mechanically minded and loves the weapon’s design and precision. I put my oar in and mentioned that I feel safer in New York City with its large number of Unitarians and Reform Jews, all of them unarmed, than in Minnesota, and that I miss the old days before public schools became fortresses. They nodded. They hunt because it provides them with excellent meat with no nitrites or other additives, which they like. We parted on friendly terms.
Read MoreYou only live once and once is enough if you do it right. I told myself this the other morning as I decided to have a piece of toast with orange marmalade because when I warmed up my coffee and put the milk carton back in the fridge, there was the marmalade looking at me, a high-grade marmalade as I could see by the fact it had a French name and had bits of citrus in it and I reached for it thanks to fond associations going back to my childhood. Grandpa was from the tenements of Glasgow and for him orange marmalade was a luxury of the privileged classes and so eating it was to rise above your assigned station in life if only for a few minutes.
I put the bread in the toaster and now I wonder who invented this fabulous little ordinary machine so I google it and the toaster, it turns out, was developed in stages by several men between 1893 and 1919 when a Minnesotan named Charles Strite came up with the pop-up toaster. And so the toast pops up and I butter it and spread marmalade on it, not Walmart marmalade but imported, such as royalty would expect to be served at Windsor Castle, and instantly, my day brightens.
Read MoreI don’t listen to the radio or watch TV except for baseball and even then I turn the sound off because the aging mind is so susceptible to irritability and who needs to go around in a state of irk. My favorite medium is the telephone and the comedy routine of talking with old friends. As the body falls apart, people get funnier and funnier. I also like the scraps of phone talk overheard on walks, the woman walking into Walgreens who said, “Jesus, where are you?” and the woman who said, “I know what you said, I’m not deaf.” I cherish these things. “Jesus, where are you?” has become a part of my life.
But on New Year’s Eve, I walked by a party and I heard the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and days later I rode in an Uber and heard Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” and they’re up in my head, and I can disperse them with a Chopin étude or a Bach chorale, but they come back, and for some reason, so does “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,” and this is very irritating when a man is trying to write a novel.
Read MoreI walked into the neighborhood bank the other day and there in the lobby, loading the ATM machines, were two guys with fistfuls of money, bricks of $100s, $50s $20s, a sight I’d never seen before, perhaps a signal from alternative reality that my chance at bank robbery was here, but then I saw the third man, his hand on the pistol in his holster, and so instead I walked up to the cashier’s window and asked for a couple grand so I can make New Year’s gifts to doormen at our building and Mitch the plumber and our cleaning lady and also to some deserving children.
I know it’s pitifully small-minded of me but I enjoy walking around with a $100 bill in my pocket. It’s a token of good luck. A silver dollar used to be a token but luck has undergone inflation. I’m old enough to remember when I picked radishes at Schreiber’s truck farm for a nickel a bunch, I remember it whenever I eat a radish. I was a dishwasher for $1.35/hour and a parking lot attendant for slightly more. In 1969, I sold a small humorous piece of writing to a magazine and got $500 for it and that settled me on a writing career. It wasn’t a matter of talent; it was about money. I chose radio because I could write for it and it paid better than radishes.
Read MoreYou never know when happiness will strike or what form it may take but I believe we who come from a strict religious upbringing are at an advantage over you heathens because even slight pleasure makes us dizzy and actual joy blows our minds. A coal miner appreciates a field of tulips more than a florist does. I get a thrill every time my wife of 28 years casually puts her hand on my shoulder in wordless affection. This is due to the fact that I didn’t kiss a girl until I was 22 years old. I was Brethren. I stared, I fantasized, I sat near some girls, but our lips never met. And when they did, I burst into verse.
I get pleasure from words, which is surely due to coming from taciturn people, so when I happen upon a seed catalogue and look through the beans (Scarlet Runner, Provider, Contender, Gold Rush, Blue Lake, Tenderette Green) and the corn (Bodacious, Ambrosia Hybrid, Sugar Buns, Abundance) and the tomatoes (Early Girl, Better Boy, Beefsteak, Sweetie, Big Boy, Sunset’s Red Horizon, Jubilee, Juliet, Moneymaker, Aunt Ruby’s, Boy Oh Boy, Nebraska Wedding, Calypso, Abe Lincoln) it’s a garden of poetry.
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