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.

The enemy is isolation. Take a walk.

I have said this before and I’ll keep saying it: isolation is dangerous, we need close contact with our fellow humanity to keep us sane, and that was the weird thing about the pandemic and now the yellowish air from Canadian wildfires and the scary bulletins to Stay Indoors, Windows Closed. I live in New York because there always are people around and it’s comforting to know that if you fall down, people will rush to your side. I know, it’s happened. Back home, downtown Minneapolis is so deserted that nobody’d notice except maybe a passenger in a passing car and he’d figure you were drunk and decide not to get involved.

A bad play lets you see you have a good life

I had my first bratwurst of the year Friday evening, during a thunderstorm on 48th Street and Seventh Avenue, heading for a play, rain pouring down, the Broadway marquees lit up, billboards flashing, lightning overhead, and I stopped at a hot dog stand on the sidewalk, my sweetie holding an umbrella over my head, eight bucks for the brat.

It was an impulse, triggered by my watching my Minnesota Twins on TV the night before beat the Cleveland Guardians in the bottom of the ninth and the Twins ballpark is where I always have a Kramarczuk’s brat and it was important we beat Cleveland because “Guardians” is the dumbest nickname in sports.

A backward glance at the fatherland

Milady and I are trying to sell our apartment in Minneapolis and become full-time New Yorkers, which is hard for an old Minnesotan such as I, but so be it, time to delete and disperse and join the Minnesota diaspora in Manhattan. People have walked up to me there and said, “I’m from Minnesota, too!” and it’s instant friendship. This never happens to me in Minneapolis.

It’s fascinating to come back home and observe the tides of change. Rural Minnesota is still Lake Wobegon except more fiercely so, more defensive, as they watch Democratic socialists take over Minneapolis, which Republicans call “woke” and dismiss out of hand, but it’s the young overthrowing the old, and there’s a sort of inevitability about it.
They take a dim view of corporate interests just as I did when I was their age, back when I was broke and IRA to me meant “Irish Republican Army.” I was a writer and dressed like a revolutionary though I was, and still am, a confirmed coward, but then people bought my books and I was shoved into the middle class. So here I am.

O Frabjous Day! Callooh, Callay!

The debt limit deal takes an enormous load off my mind, weeks of worrying about what we’d do when the economy crashed and we lose everything and live on the street near a soup kitchen, but now apparently the ship will not sink, and as I understand the deal, the Republicans will raise the debt limit if the Ten Commandments are inscribed on every dollar bill, Disney will make no movies that portray fairies, the southern border will be sealed tight except for food deliveries and migrant farmworkers, all nouns will have the gender of the person speaking, and the word “gay” will simply go away.

I’m willing to give them that. I’m a lib they don’t own. There are other words for “gay” such as “frisky,” “vivacious,” “spiffy,” and “effervescent.” I’ll bet Governor DeSantis has had his effervescent days when he wore bright colors and said frolicsome things, though this has not been evident so far in his campaign for the White House. As for the Current Leading Candidate for the Republican nomination, gaiety seems quite alien. Fulmination is his style. I don’t recall ever seeing a photograph of him petting a dog or hugging a small child or even holding hands with his current wife. So sad, but of course that’s his business, not mine.

Thou shalt not be dumber than dirt

The bill in the Texas legislature to require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom means that teachers may need to explain to small children what “adultery” means and also “take the Lord’s name in vain” but the real problem is the commandment to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. A great many public schools send athletic teams to compete in weekend tournaments that make it hard for players to make it home for the Sabbath, especially if they’re Jewish. In Texas, a conflict between football and religious faith is not going to turn out well for religion. And taking the Lord’s name in vain is inextricably intertwined with sports. Golf, especially.

I grew up among devout Christians who did not say “gosh” or “darn it” because they took euphemisms seriously. My mother would say, “Oh fudge” but more likely, “Oh for pity’s sake.” I’m an old man and cursing still feels unnatural to me; I’ll bet plenty of Texas legislators who voted for the T.C. bill curse up a storm.

Manhattan man living in the past

I was a big shot at one time, which I knew because when I went to work at the office, twelve people suddenly got very busy. I had a popular radio show and I pulled the plug on it not wanting to become a living legend, a last connection to broadcasting’s past when music came on big black vinyl discs and everyone had an ashtray on their desk.

I left Minnesota because there were so many middle-aged people there who loathed the sight of me because they’d been forced by their parents to listen to my show on long car trips and I was afraid one of them might throttle me so I moved to Manhattan where I felt very safe. Now my office is my kitchen and it’s just me and the coffeemaker and the toaster, and eventually my sweetie walks in and says, “What are you doing up so early?”