A private word from me to Joe

Joe Biden came to our apartment building for a fundraiser last week and the lobby was full of men in dark suits and sunglasses and I never got the chance to tell him that he needs to find a good recreational activity that will endear him to the millions of Americans who get their news from pictures rather than reading text. Standing at a lectern reading a speech is not enough. A candidate for president needs to look good while having fun, preferably in the great outdoors.

John F. Kennedy was a sailor and that image of him, at the helm of a boat steering into the Atlantic waves, was our first and lasting impression of him. He looked great with the wind in his face. Ronald Reagan looked terrific on horseback, thanks to his acting experience. He easily defeated Jimmy Carter who, against the advice of advisors, ran in a six-mile race and collapsed and the Secret Service had to carry him away, looking pale and sweaty and semi-conscious, not a good look for the Leader of the Free World.

Love that well which won’t last long

I’m an octogenarian from the days of the party-line telephone, back when we loved singing murder ballads in the third grade and were proud of our cursive writing but I come back to reality by reading Elizabeth Kolbert who writes scary nonfiction about the future.

She’s an excellent writer — The Sixth Extinction, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future — and her current piece in The New Yorker, “How Plastics Are Poisoning Us,” is one that Exxon and Shell and Coca-Cola and Nestlé are praying you won’t read and doing their best to extinguish any meaningful measures in Congress, meanwhile science is trying to send us a message: plastic is everywhere, the sea is full of it, it’s found in human placentas, Americans go through some 500 pounds of it per person per year, it is not really recyclable, some of it is known to be carcinogenic, according to objective scholarly peer-reviewed data assembled by those nerdy kids who sat in the front of the chemistry classroom and did all the assignments.

A few minute on a hilltop in Concord

I made a trip last week I’ve been meaning to take for decades and finally got to Concord, Mass., and found Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which is vast — I’d hesitate to live in a town with so much mortality — and climbed the hill to Henry Thoreau’s grave marked with a stone the size of a pencil box that simply says “Henry” and thanked him for his work and also expressed my regret that he never got entangled in romance with a woman, which would’ve made his writing livelier, had there been a double bed in his cabin at Walden Pond and someone to disagree with him when he wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The desperation could’ve been relieved by someone putting her hands on his shoulders and kissing the back of his neck.

In photographs, Thoreau is as ugly as a mud fence but that’s because he hated cameras. My grandma did too. She scowled when someone got out a Brownie and so her descendants who never met her think of her as severe, which she was not. She was a teacher, as Henry tried to be, and she had high expectations of people.

Molly Malone

Why I won’t be playing golf in Oman

I had blurry vision for a couple years and found it hard to read the newspaper and then an ophthalmologist at Mayo did a three-minute painless laser procedure and a few days later I could read the paper, no problem, clear as day, and also watch a ball game on TV and keep track of the triple as it caromed off the right field wall. Literacy does have its drawbacks, of course. You get more tangled up in the details of malfeasance and depravity than you would like to be. I come from evangelical people who read Scripture and didn’t linger on Cain’s murder of Abel or David seeing the naked Bathsheba and sending her husband off to war. So the thump-thump-thump of the Donald is tiring, though it’s also impressive to read about how the other 1/1000ths of one percent do business, such as the story about the multibillion-dollar golf course and hotel development on the coast of Oman where migrant workers are laboring in 103-degree heat for $340/month on a project where villas will sell for up to $13 million, a project financed by Saudi and Omani money, in which a managing sweetheart partner who put no money down will be the guy who’s the victim of the biggest and most vicious witch hunt in the history of the United States.

The ethics issues are dizzying. The guy was once Leader of the Free World and intends to resume the position, which is his by right. As such, he deals in foreign policy in behalf of the people of the United States. Their interests are not identical to those of oil trillionaires. Clearly, the gentleman is steering us into uncharted waters, as he has so assiduously done for many years. He occupies a realm previously belonging to fiction.

The speech I wrote and didn’t get to give

I was eager to deliver a commencement address this spring and had one prepared but nobody invited me, which is a shame, because mine is more practical than 78% of the ones the Class of 2023 had to sit still for. It is a speech in favor of not rushing ahead to confront injustice and correct wrongs but to encourage other people to do it and then see what happens to them.

Everyone is in favor of courage and standing up to authority but there are advantages to cowardice too and a person should consider all options before picking up your bright sword and charging forth into the breach. I’m thinking of my classmates who went out for football and got dinged for the glory of the Maroon and Gray and now they’re unable to multiply fractions or recite “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote,” or tell the difference between a subjunctive mood and an introspective one, and when they shake their head No, I hear dinging. I’m thinking of idealistic friends who went to work for the Federated Organization of Associations thinking they’d reform it and they became executive vice presidents of artificial intelligence and lost their ability to speak genuine English.

A lovely lunch last week in New Haven

I had lunch last week with a woman who is two months away from motherhood and it was sweet to watch her caressing the basketball under her blouse, patting it, lifting it slightly, mindful of this modest freight that will, she knows, change her life, though thankfully she can’t know how much. She and her man were married on my terrace in New York five years ago and when my wife and I sit out there, we sometimes think of them. A Korean man, a Portuguese woman, who met in Paris, married by our friend Judge Ira Globerman who grew up Jewish in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, so there was some diversity going on. He presided as a favor since they’d arrived from France and needed to be a legal couple before the visa ran out. They lived in Brooklyn and then wended up to a town in Connecticut. Her parents will come from Portugal for the birth.

It’s easy for me to romanticize pregnancy since I’ve never gone through it personally except from the inside when I was an embryo. I never walked around with a tenant inside me. So I look at her and am awestruck to think that we all come into the world exactly this way, our thoughtful mother patting her abdomen as she eats like a farmhand. Family is family: when my grandma lay dying in 1964, she was faithfully tended by her daughters, not hospital staff. I came down the chute in 1942 in a big house on Ferry Street in Anoka, Minnesota, not long before my dad went into the Army. As a toddler, I was proud of him in his uniform and I guarded his chair at the dinner table and wouldn’t let anyone sit in it. “Daddy’s chair,” I said.

I am no lawyer but nonetheless

I like the word “weaponization,” and I am looking for an opportunity to use it if, say, a cop pulled me over for making an illegal left turn (but I don’t drive anymore) or when a waiter puts silverware on the table — say, “Don’t weaponize that fork” — (but that would be awkward) or yell it at the e-bikes that race through red lights but they’re going so fast, they wouldn’t hear it.

I don’t recall that Richard Nixon used the word during Watergate or Bill Clinton when he was impeached for perjuring himself but I don’t think it will carry much weight now because the federal indictment was brought by Jack Smith, which is a great name for a prosecutor. It’s right out of a Dick Tracy comic. The name “Merrick Garland” sounds a little fruity to me, but I imagine DOJ looking down the list of prosecutorial names and eliminating the ones that ended with a vowel or a “ski” or “ovich,” until they found “Jack Smith” and yelled, “That’s it! Weaponize him!”

Bob Douglas (April 22, 1948 – December 1, 2022)

Bob Douglas (April 22, 1948 – December 1, 2022)

Honoring the men who went ashore

I was an infant when Allied forces crossed the Channel and landed at Normandy in 1944 and none of my uncles were there, the only D-Day vet I knew was my high school biology teacher Lyle Bradley who dove into a foxhole under enemy fire and two men fell on top of him, both dead, who shielded him from a nearby mortar explosion, but he never told me about it until he was an old man and so my first knowledge of it came from A.J. Liebling’s accounts in The New Yorker, which I read as a college kid and reread last week on the anniversary. Reading them the first time made me want to be a writer and the rereading was no less stunning.