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 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.
Read MoreI had a dramatic dream last week, a dream about a man in a white suit twisting my damaged left arm, the one I’m still carrying in a sling after breaking the shoulder, and in the dream he was causing excruciating pain as I cried out in agony and he sneered at me, “How’s that? Does that hurt? Do you want more?” and in the background I heard cruel childish laughter, taunting, insulting, calling me a Baby, urging the tormentor on.
It was a primal dream about ordinary cruelty. I was tormented by other children, so were you. It’s part of childhood. And then my daughter Maia came into the dream and he vanished. I’d been looking at pictures of her that day on my laptop, joyful pictures, grinning, eyes alight, with her beloved aunts and nannies, Jenny her mom, her grandmothers, me.
Read MoreHave I told you about my recent shoulder replacement surgery? Or in my concern about declining math scores did I forget to mention it?
I busted the shoulder in a fall: the force of gravity — you think you’ve got it figured out and you’re distracted by something and suddenly it’s the farce of gravity, you become a physics experiment.
Read MoreI grew up in the Fifties, during the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, a man admired by my father and uncles, a Kansan, a victorious general, and it’s hard to imagine Eisenhower holding up funding for a crucial rail tunnel under the Hudson unless Penn Station be renamed for him. Or sending his son-in-law on diplomatic missions to Middle East sovereignties in which he is deeply invested. Or masked men in military gear conducting dragnets in American cities, rounding up whomever they wish without warrants. This is a considerable change from then until now and it’s not about electronics. It’s about e-t-h-i-c-s.
But the Current Guy says, “Nobody cares about that.” So one can imagine him deciding the November elections are unreliable and postponing them until 2028 or sometime when his party can be certain of the outcome. Look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself that he won’t and see if you believe it.
Read MoreOnce, years ago, a person awoke and came in the kitchen where perhaps one person was eager to engage with you, your spouse, better half, paramour, soulmate, main squeeze. Words were exchanged. A newspaper lay on the table and you read the headline, Talks Resume in Effort to Reach Settlement. Eventually, offspring would appear, the mood would darken, conflicts arise and then subside. The phone hung on the wall and it did not ring. Social interactions developed within familiar confines.
This has now changed, thanks to electronics. The laptop contains numerous newspapers, enough to engage you until noon, and also search engines to serve your random curiosity so you can read about Stephen Miller and Joseph Goebbels and The House of Seven Gables and you look up and it’s 2 p.m. and you’ve missed your Zoom meeting and you can’t remember what you’ve been reading for five hours.
Read MoreI am enjoying being 83 more than I expected to and I’m not sure why. Happiness with no discernible cause. Maybe it’s caused by sobriety, maybe it’s a signal of dementia, maybe it’s the realization that, despite my wayward ways, God loves me and I am finally profoundly grateful.
When I was a kid and feeling oppressed, misunderstood, cheated of life’s pleasures, uninvited to cool kids’ parties, my mother liked to say to me, “What’s the matter? Did the dog pee on your cinnamon toast?” And it always made me happy. Still does.
Read MoreI’m an old man with a busted shoulder carried in a sling, and a shut-in, and the news is bad what with Minnesota, my home state, occupied by foreign mercenaries given license by our government to kill civilians in broad daylight and say it didn’t happen, so I’m feeling depressed, but probably it’s self-pity creeping in, which is disgusting so I called my cousin Betty who deals with a serious autoimmune disorder and also is managing a rural aid program in Uganda that runs a women’s health system and breeds imported goats that are immune, with native goats that are worm-resistant, and I told her, “I have no right to feel down compared to all you have to deal with,” and she said, “Suffering is not comparative.”
That’s a beautiful thing about Betty: she can come up with a crisp declarative sentence that clarifies everything.
Read MoreI am a very fortunate man of 83, deeply indebted to American medicine, still in possession of the marbles I need even though two weeks ago I took a bad fall in a hotel room in Nevada, wrecking my left shoulder and becoming a one-armed man in need of assistance to pull on my socks and zip my jeans, and the beauty of this is: gratitude — profound gratitude for the lunch at Docks restaurant in Manhattan in 1992 with Jenny Lind Nilsson who is still with me 34 years later.
Gratitude is highly appropriate at 83. I’ve been to see an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery and he plans to replace the shoulder next week and promises that with therapy it’ll work better than the old one. But mainly I am grateful for the love of this woman. I am keenly aware of it every day as she hovers over me. I was aware of it last Wednesday evening as she guided me up the steps of Carnegie Hall to a concert of symphonies by Mozart and Shostakovich by the Cleveland Orchestra.
Read MoreI’m a lucky man; born in 1942, early enough to hear stories about the Great Depression, my mother selling peanut butter sandwiches door to door, to know the Great Generation that defeated fascism, early enough to get in on the Family Farm with chickens and cows and plow horses, before farming got industrialized, early enough to hear rock ’n’ roll when it was about cars and girls and surf, before it took itself seriously, and born late enough to take advantage of open-heart surgery and blood thinners and anti-seizure meds, which have given me a couple bonus decades.
And now here I am, having fallen two weeks ago and crunched my left shoulder and become a one-armed man, and I am scheduled for minimally invasive replacement surgery in New York by Dr. Samuel Taylor who showed me, with a video on his cellphone, how this will give me ten to fifteen years of usefulness.
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