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
A splendiferous snow fell on Manhattan a few days ago, seven inches, a new bright world, school was canceled and soon neighborhood children were hauling their sleds and saucers into Central Park to go sliding.
Sliding is something an old man avoids but I remember the pleasure of lubricity — tobogganing down a steep slope and out onto the Mississippi ice where we could skate upwind and then open our jackets for a sail and go flying home. We flooded a rink in a vacant lot and played hockey and somebody’s dad hauled an old chicken coop over with a woodstove in it for a warming house. And I may be idealizing now but I do remember a spirit of chumminess and good cheer in that warm house on bitter cold days. Bad kids chose to suppress their malevolent tendencies; subzero weather made them sort of sensible.
Read MoreJoe Biden came to Manhattan for a couple fundraisers last week, which gave the NYPD a fine excuse to close off as many streets as humanly possible, which is why some people go into law enforcement — for the chance to make civilians stand behind barriers — and there I stood, looking at York Avenue, abandoned except for a few cop cars, lights flashing. I’d crossed over from the West Side in a cab driven by a cabbie who’d been at it for 39 years and who was highly irritated by the blockages, also said the economy’s tanking, shops closing, people abandoning the city, crime up, Wall Street in trouble, but at the same time, he said, “It’s Number One, the greatest city in the world.”
New Yorkers have this ability, to express despair and municipal pride in the same sentence. I over-tipped him and hiked 12 blocks to my doctor who took my blood pressure and said it was excellent, so I owe Joe for getting me to exercise. I was so surprised though by his language describing his likely November opponent, which I read in a paper I won’t name, a two-word term, a participle of concupiscence modifying a word for a common human orifice. Joe, unlike the other guy, is a churchgoer and if my chest had a bazoom, I would clutch it, but it doesn’t, not yet. I just wonder, where are we headed?
Read MoreMy beloved and I live in a large co-op building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that I bought in 1987 and from our terrace we can look up to the apartment where Sinclair Lewis lived in his alcoholic distress before going away to die in Italy in 1951 and farther up is Faye Dunaway’s old apartment with panoramic views of the city. She resided there when she was having an affair with the Italian heartthrob Marcello Mastroianni — Marshmallow Macaroni, we used to call him — and where she, in a fit of fury because he wouldn’t marry her, threw his clothes off the 20th-floor balcony to sail down onto the brownstone roofs. A neighbor told me about it who’d gotten the scoop from a previous resident, since departed. Faye screamed a name at him and heaved two armloads of shirts and pants and they went fluttering down like a flock of dying butterflies. “It was a good thing he wasn’t in one of the shirts at the time or she would’ve heaved him over in person,” the neighbor said. “I went out and found a couple in the ramp going down to the garage and they are just my size, one orange, one green stripes, not exactly my style but they make me feel like a Somebody.”
So from our terrace, I look up and remind myself to stay off alcohol except for Communion and avoid the sadness of Lewis’s end. He kept cranking out novels in his old age but people had had enough of him especially as he got old and out of touch with the current scene and the work got more cartoonish.
Read MoreThe 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.
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