Sketchpad 2

Easter greetings from Mother and Father Blonde's family funny farm.
Actually, greetings from the Barnes and Noble near Mother and Father Blonde's where the teenager and I have sneaked off to in order to escape the inevitable clash of wills and cooking styles as the blonde, Sister Blonde, and Mother Blonde sqaure off in Mother Blonde's galley sized kitchen over the best way to prepare the ham while Father Blonde cowers behind the sports pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer bemoaning the Phillies' dismal 0 for 5 record and Ryan Howard's season-opening slump.
Left by himself to guard the asylum, the 11 year old's probably holed up in his bedroom with his comic books praying for the early arrival of his cousins to save him.

I don't feel guilty for making this escape. I'm keeping a promise to the teenager who looks forward to these father and son trips to B and N although as soon as we cross the threshold he disappears into the stacks not to be seen again until it's time to leave and I've gone searching for him and dug him out from under the stack of 20 or 30 books he's buried himself under in the most comfortable armchair he could find. Still, he regards these trips as precious moments of bonding and I am glad to play along.

Nothing like peace and tranquility will greet us when we return to the farm. The Blonde Family is nothing if not raucous and gregarious. But the ham will be on the table and all will be jollility and good fellowship.

I've lost track of how many hams Mother Blonde has served up over the many Easters we've been coming here. I look forward to our Easter visits, although I dread Easter mornings here as there is absolutely no getting out of going to church for me. A pew full of her children, their spouses, and her grandchildren is Mother Blonde's fondest dream on the big holidays and she never gets it as one or the other of her children's families is always elsewhere, so when we're visiting I always feel obligated to help give her as much of her dream as the four of us can manage to contribute.

Mass seemed to pass quickly and painlessly. I was told afterwards that the sermon was boring and the soloist with the choir was overloud and off-key. Didn't hear either myself.

I was too busy blogging, I guess.
Yep. Bless me, father, for I have sinned.

I blogged during Easter mass.
I've always done some of my best blogging in church. I can blog anywhere and everywhere.

In fact, I was blogging in church before there were blogs. I have the world's cheapest, quietest Blackberry---you can't hear me hitting the keys because it doesn't have keys---and I've been blogging away on it for years.
All mass long I was scribbling away and I wasn't bored by the sermon and didn't suffer the screechings of the off-key choirist.

The post I wrote isn't quite finished. Check back later tonight.
I did come back to earth a couple of times during mass and looked down the pew to see that the thirteen year old had his missal opened and was saying his prayers while the eleven year old yawned hugely and lookedbored to tears.

Both sights warmed my heart.
Regular readers know that I have a rather angry relationship with the Church these days and there's a bit of a cold wind blowing between me and God as well. In fact, He and I haven't been on speaking terms for a while now.

We've had falling outs before, but this time I've decided it's up to Him to patch things up. I'm tired of being the one who has to make the first move.
But I keep this to myself around the house.

I promised the blonde we would raise the kids Catholic and that's what we're doing, hopefully minus the guilt. The blonde is hardly ramming the catechism down their throats. Catholic is as Catholic does and there are plenty of papists who'd argue that the blonde isn't a good Catholic herself and boy would I love to see one of them say it to her face.

Nothing funnier than a Opus Dei would-be patriarch type lying on flat on his back with blossoming shiner closing up his eye and a look on his face that says, Anybody get the license on that truck?
At any rate, the boys have each seemed to reach their own conclusions about religion. The teenager's a believer and the eleven year old's an atheist, has been since first grade.

And oddly I'm glad for both of them.
The paths they've chosen for themselves each seems right for them.
The thirteen year old needs God and whatever help he thinks he gets from Him and it's for his sake I am impatient with anyone who dismisses religion as a crutch---we're all walking wounded and there's none of us who doesn't make use of something to lean on as we limp our painful ways along.

The eleven year old is of a skeptical and scientific bent. He doesn't see the point of asking questions that have no answers except Because and he's pretty sure that any question that has Because as the answer has been phrased wrong or the person answering it that way is talking through their hat. I'm hoping this attitude leads him into med school, but it might lead him into a courtroom, he'll be the one carrying the briefcase, thank you, or into a studio or onto a stage or just take him always around the riverbend to see what's there.

If there is a God, I believe there are two ways to get to him. One is the way of the saint. Very few of those around and almost none of them are on TV calling themselves Christians and professing to speak for God.

The other way is the way I think he must prefer since it's the way that makes the best use of the big brains He gave us.
If there's a God, I believe He gave us one commandment.
And there are only two types of people I see following that one as their vocation.

Artists and scientists.
Because if He's here to be found, He's here in the things He made and we're not going to find Him in them until we've figured them out, which we're a long way from doing.
Time to go back to the farm.

Ham must be about ready.
Happy Easter if today's Easter for you. Happy Passover if your holy days are continuing.

Jollility and good fellowship to all of you whatever today means to you.
The blonde stopped at the supermarket on her way home tonight to pick up something for dinner. The market is a different place on weeknights than it is on weekends when she usually shops there.

On weeknights, the blonde says, it's staffed by very timid and easily spooked clerks who startle and bolt like deer at the approach of a customer. Tracked down and cornered, a clerk at bay will freeze under a customer's glare as if jacklighted and forced to acknowledge a question will at first tremble all over and then answer by pointing or shaking their head. Take your eye off them a second and they leap a stack of canned goods and disappear down an aisle.

The weekend crew is a hardier, braver, friendlier, more helpful bunch.
This happens. I'm not sure how it happens, but it does.

Businesses, offices, stores---they have personalities. You go into one place and it's cheerful and welcoming, you go into another and it's angry, defensive, suspicious, hostile to your presence and uninterested in your money. Some places are tense, some are haughty, and some are burned-out and depressed.

You walk in to one video store in a chain and it just lifts your spirits, but a store belonging to the same chain the next town over has you hurrying in and hurrying out with your movie, anxious and vaguely unsatisfied, as if you're sure you made the wrong choice even though it's a movie you'd been looking forward to watching for a week. And these feelings come over you as soon as you cross the threshold, before you've spoken to a single clerk or secretary, waiter, cashier, or counterman.
Of course, when you do talk to someone who works there it usually turns out that they share the store's mood.

But you have to ask yourself. Does the store give it to the staff or the staff infuse it into the store? Is it management's fault.

..or management's great success?

Does the boss there have a knack for hiring people of the same temperament, for good or bad? The same managers who hired the weeknight staff at the supermarket hired the weekend crew. Maybe it's just a matter of who you can get to work when.

Maybe it's the location. Maybe it's the customers.
Pick a business you frequent.

Describe its character. Speculate why it is the way it is.
The blonde came home with a roasted chicken but without the macaroni and cheese the guys love.

She doesn't know if they were all out or if they no longer offer it at the deli.
She couldn't find anyone to ask.
She knew they were there though.

Hiding.
She could hear them breathing.
I always marvel at how big can get.

See one from a distance, browsing an open field or giving you the quick evil eye before disappearing into the trees in the woods, and you know they aren't petite creatures. But you can't get a sense of their actual size until you're right up on top of one, or three, say three, a foot away from your front bumper in the middle of a dark country road at one in the morning after they've wandered out into your path and jacklighted themselves in your oncoming headlights and caused you to burn out your brake linings in order to stop just in time to avoid filling your front grille and possibly front seat and lap with venison.
After they got it into their heads that neither they nor I wanted to spend the night admiring each other through my windshield and finished crossing the road, in no great hurry, and my heart started pumping again, I remembered one of my favorite poems.

It's by Lux is my second-favorite living American poet. My first favorite is It's about a moose-car encounter but it's still apropos, I think. It's called Wife Hits Moose.

his heavy, primordial jaw, dripping, from pondwater
and, without psychic struggle,
decides the day, for him, is done: time
to go somewhere else. Meanwhile, wife
drives one of those roads that cut straight north,
not yet fat enough for the paper companies.
to look both ways, steps
hits moose, hard,
at slight angle (brakes slammed, car
spinning) and moose rolls over hood, antlers --
as if diamond-tipped -- scratch windshield, car
on fender, hoof shatters headlight.

Annoyed moose lands on feet and walks away.
Wife is shaken, unhurt, amazed.
-- Does moose believe in a Supreme Intelligence?

Speaker does not know.
-- Does wife believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
being between the spirit and the human.

Does speaker believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Yes. Thank You.

Picking up from Saturnday night's post. Reason we were up in Albany over the weekend and were there to is that it was Scout Night at the Times Union Arena and we'd stopped in at the bookstore to kill time before a hockey game that night between the Albany River Rats and the Rochester Americans.
The (in the white jerseys) and the (in red) are AHL teams, minor league clubs but not exactly farm teams.

They have affiliations. Albany with the Carolina Hurricanes and Rochester with the Buffalo Sabres and the Florida Panthers. AHL teams can have dual affiliations.

I don't know how that works.
Rochester's in third place in their division, with a 37-24 record. The River Rats are 30-28 and in fifth place, but they still have play-off hopes and Saturday night they were playing to keep them alive.

Hockey's the one major sport I don't follow at all, so I'm no judge, but it looked like the quality of play was pretty close to the pros.
Took seven and a half minutes for the first fight to break out though.
Here's what I don't get.

How do they decide when to start a fight?
It's a bruising sport. It's played hard and it's played fast.

The players can't help knocking into each other. It's no wonder they get mad sometimes. But they're slamming up against the glass and up against each other all game long.

How do they decide that this time the offense can't be ignored?
By the end of the second period, there'd been five fights. That I saw.

I was out at the snack stand for the first ten minutes of the second. There were no fights in the third period. Either the players were too tired or somebody'd reminded them that they had a hockey game to worry about.

Something else I want to know? What are the refs thinking?
One of the fights went down this way.

It wasn't a general brawl. Two players, a River Rat and an American, threw down their sticks and their gloves, tossed aside their helmets, and squared off like boxers. And the refs did nothing.

They hung back by the boards and waited. The players feinted a bit, then one of them swung, and then the other---happened so fast I couldn't be sure which swung first---two roundhouses aimed at the jaw. Neither connected with any force.

Then they started slugging away. And only at that point did the refs move in to break it up. The River Rat was tossed from the game and the American sent to the penalty box.

My brother, Lyle Mannion, a Boston Bruins fan, told me later when I asked him that the reason the refs didn't step in right away is that it's easier and safer to separate the players once they're all tangled up. I wonder, though, if in this case the refs, having already decided to penalize them, were waiting to see which player would throw the first punch and make their decision about which to come down on harder for them.
But maybe they were just as flabbergasted and and amused as the rest of us to see two hockey players agree to fight like gentlemen according to Marquess of Queensbury rules.

I expected to see fights at a hockey game. I didn't expect to see cheerleaders.
Most hockey rinks aren't constructed with room for cheerleaders to strut their stuff.

The first rows of fans are up against the glass on every side. There are no sidelines out on the ice. The Albany cheerleaders---who are called the Ice Mice Dance Team---were broken up into two squads, each squad crammed into a small open space at the ends of aisles at the top corners of the rink.

Not a lot of elbow, leg, hip, or---and this is important, given what the Albany cheerleaders' costumes and routines are designed to emphasize---wiggle and jiggle room.
I know that most cheerleaders don't wear sweaters anymore, not even football cheerleaders. But the Ice Mice's costume doesn't even pretend.

It's a tight white T-shirt and tight little shorts and when they're all lined up they look like a bunch of girls gone wild on spring break in Fort Lauderdale waiting for someone to come along with the squirt bottles.
That's the Ice Mice in between periods, getting ready to lead the crowd in singing Y-M-C-A. I have to tell you, their hearts and bodies weren't into it.

The girls couldn't even coordinate on making the letters. The six year olds dancing in the aisles near us did a better job. Up until that point I had been giving the Ice Mice the benefit of the doubt.

Their routines during the game were uninspired, to say the least---step right, step left, stretch, clap, hop. Step right, step left, stretch, thrust, clap, hop.---and at least one girl was out of step every time, and always a different girl.

At first I thought they were just hemmed in by the too small space they had to perform in. But when they moved down to the box and could spread out they showed that few of them had been chosen for the squad for their athletic abilities and talents as dancers.
Not that I'm complaining, except that I am a fan of real cheerleading squads, the college football kind that includes men and usually features very small, very brave girls being tossed ten or fifteen feet into the air, and cheerleaders who are there just as eye candy give the real cheerleaders a bad name and rob me of the excuse that I'm just watching them all game long because I'm impressed by their athleticism.

Maybe the Ice Mice were all having an off-night, but it sure seemed that the first and...

ahem...

foremost qualification for making the squad is being able to fill out the t-shirt.
And if you think I'm just being a dirty old man here, take a look at on the webpage and tell me that they don't look like the she's just a regular girl shots that introduce the photo spreads in the lads' magazines.
After the game, we had dinner at a bar inside the arena's superstructure, Broadway Joe's of Albany, which is not to be confused with of New York City, but it was nice enough for our purposes Saturday night.

While we were waiting for our burgers to come up, a group of college-aged women and an older couple who turned out to be one of the girls' parents, sat down at the table next to ours.
The girls were all Ice Mice.
Sorry.

All but one of them were Ice Mice. I'll get to the one who wasn't in a minute.
Up close and out of costume none of them was traditional cheerleader wholesome, they all seemed to have taken their hair and makeup cues from Christine Aguillera's album covers, but they looked and sounded like nice girls.

They were all in college and under questioning from the one girl's parents revealed that they had serious career plans for when they graduated. The girl who wasn't an Ice Mouse works for the River Rats public relations office and is a member of the Rat Pack---she goes around the rink with the giant rat, Rowdy, who's the team mascot and helps him with his comedy routines and promotional give-aways and makes sure he doesn't trip on his tail---has a second part-time job as an EMT and wants to be a doctor. She's been wait-listed at two med schools.

The parents were a pleasant-looking couple in their early or mid-forties. The mother, a perky blonde with a headband, looked more like a cheerleader than the cheerleaders. The father was the type of amiably good-looking, decent, interested type that often draws the attentions of young women with daddy issues, so I wondered about something that happened.

One of the girls, a wide-mouthed brunette with a perfectly even all-over tan that either came out of a bottle or was carefully acquired in a tanning booth, was wearing a spaghetti strapped top with a plunging neckline and large orange polka dots, two of which she realized, rather dramatically, were rather too strategically placed.
Apparently talking to the girl across the table from her, but speaking in a voice just loud enough to catch the attention of the parents and the other girls and cause them to stop talking, she called her friend's attention to the fashion faux pas she claimed to have just noticed. I guess this was the first time she'd worn the top out in public.

Her friend didn't see the problem right away, so the brunette drew her a picture, literally. She drew circles in the air around the two prominent polka dots and said, bending forward a bit for emphasis, Hello, these are my friends!
The other girls giggled at which point the brunette looked up in embarrassment, apparently realizing that the whole table had heard what she thought was just between her and the one friend.

The parents were sitting there with sheepish smiles, the father's the more sheepish, I think, and the brunette, blushing through her perfect tan, apologized gushingly, as if they were bound to have been offended, and actually put both her hands over her cleavage.
Then she whispered something to her friend and the two of them hurried off to the ladies' room, from which the brunette didn't return while we were still in the bar.
The River Rats by the way.

Final score was 6-4, but Albany had had a 4-1 lead in the second period. The Americans had made it 5-4 in the last minutes of the game and with a minute left they pulled their goalie and tried to power their way to a tie.
They came close.

They kept the River Rats' goalie working hard but in the last seconds an Albany player recovered the puck and took off for Rochester's undefended goal, scoring with less than a second left on the clock.
Both teams' goalies earned their pay Saturday night. Lots of blocked shots.

And this reminded me of one of the funniest lines and David Issacs wrote for Cheers.
It was the episode in which Carla's ex-hockey player husband, Eddie LeBec, is killed saving a fellow member of the ice show from a runaway zamboni. The gang's sitting around the bar, remembering Eddie and:
Sam: A lot of people just remember Eddie as a big, fat, waddling penguin in the ice show, but I'll tell you, before that he was quite a goalie.

Norm: Oh, yeah, Sam!. I remember that night against the Maple Leafs, he stopped like forty, fifty shots on goal.

(Beat) I mean, counting the ten that got by him, that's one night's work!
And, appropriately, at Eddie's wake, attended by his old hockey buddies, a fight breaks out.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 in , | I hate my dreams.

I'm jealous of people who have visually poetic and phantasmagoric dreams, dreams of Freudian import, dreams full of Jungian symbolism and Dali-esque imagery, dreams of past lives and future loves and present adventures.
My dreams are boring. I have what I call peeling potatoes dreams, because I have, and I'm not kidding, often dreamed I'm peeling potatoes, and in these dreams that's what I do.

I peel potatoes. One at a time. One after another.

On and on. I dream the act of peeling each and every potato. These are very realistic dreams.

I can feel and smell each potato. I can feel the peeler in my hand and the tension in my wrist as I peel each potato. And while I'm at it I dream my thoughts, the kind of thoughts anyone with a hundred potatoes to peel would have.

Boy, this is boring, I dream myself thinking. That's ten down, I dream myself thinking, Ninety more to go, and God, I hate potatoes. Whose idea was it to have potatoes for dinner anyway.

I don't always dream about peeling potatoes, naturally, but all my dreams are that mundane, that detailed, and that dull.
Last night I dreamed I met Robert Redford and we became friends.
But did we meet at No.

Did we meet on the set of one of his movies? No. Did we meet on Cape Cod where in real life both he and I vacation in the same town and could actually meet sometime, although so far he's managed to avoid me?

Nope.
We met at his office where he wanted to talk to me about something important.
His office was in a nondescript building on the campus of a community college.

The something he wanted to talk to me about was his new hobby. He didn't want to pass along any good gossip from Sundance. Didn't want to talk about what it was like to work with Jane Fonda or Meryl Streep.

Didn't want to let me in on any secrets about his friendship with Natalie Wood. He had no good stories to tell about the jokes he and his pal Paul Newman played on each other, like the time after Redford had his driver's license suspended---he had a bad habit of speeding when he was younger---and Newman had his Porsche towed away in the night, crushed, and returned in a block the size of a coffee table. Nope.

He wanted to talk all about how much fun it was for him to build and restore Renaissance era Nativity scenes.
He had one in his office. It took up the whole of the top of a desk in the corner.

It was very intricate and realistic and beautifully crafted and it included a three dimensional backdrop of the town of Bethlehem, which looked liked a walled Medieval city in an early Renaissance painting. Redford explained to me how he got the texture of the walls just right.
That was it.

That was my dream. I dreamed I was sitting in a dingy office like the kind that crushes the soul out of your average adjunct professor at a third-rate junior college listening to a deranged hobbyist who happened to look like a movie star go on and on and on about how to coat cardboard with plaster.
Happened to wander into a bookstore in Albany this afternoon where William Kennedy was reading and talking about his books.

It's been said that Kennedy's been doing to Albany in his novels what Faulkner did with his little postage stamp sized piece of Mississippi in his. Kennedy is the author of Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Roscoe, The Flaming Corsage, and one of the greatest American novels published since World War II, .
Kennedy is also a former teacher and sometime penpal of my brother, Luke Mannion, which gave the blonde and I something to talk about with him after the reading.
One thing leads to another.

We told him where we were living these days and it turned out he's familiar with our local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record.
Not because he reads it.
Because, once upon a time, when the world was young, the paper fired his pal, Hunter S.

Thompson.
In fact, that's how Kennedy and Thompson became friends. Kennedy was editing a newspaper down in Puerto Rico and Thompson, finding himself out of work for in the Record's breakroom, applied for a job as sportswriter for Kennedy's paper.

He wrote me a very arrogant letter, Kennedy said. So I wrote him an arrogant letter back. He wrote me a threatening letter back.

Kennedy replied to Thompson's threatening letter with a funny letter. They were friends ever after.
It's hard to imagine the two of them, Kennedy and Thompson, friends.

It's like imagining a friendship between an old sheepdog and a rabid squirrel or between Thompson and a normal, completely unself-medicated human being.
No point to this, and the reason I didn't title this post Fear and Loathing in an Albany Bookstore or Hunter S. Thompson's Greatest Game is the story Kennedy told about his cameo appearance in which starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep as the former ballplayer, Francis Phelan, and his lady friend, Helen, a former nightclub singer, on the bum in Depression era Albany.

In the movie, and the book, there's a scene in a bar in which Helen imagines her glory days as a singer have returned. She starts signing to a small group of fellow down and outers in voice shot to hell by drink and bad health and in her head she blossoms into her old self with her old voice wowing a crowd of swells in a swanky joint like the kind she used to play. When they were filming the movie on location in Albany, the director stuck Kennedy and his wife in the scene as extras to fill out the bowled over crowd of Helen's imagination.

Streep sang her own song, in both voices, the broken and the restored. The scene was mostly one long shot, following Helen through the crowd as she sang. They did 17 takes.

That was to be a wrap. Streep asked for one more. This time, take 18, she let loose with something extra.

And she truly wowed the crowd on the set. Wowed herself too, a bit. The look of pride on Helen's face when she finishes her song and the crowd goes wild is perfectly in character, but it may be Streep breaking character too, revealing her own pride in her own singing.

You can look for yourself and try to judge which it is, if it's not both, because that's the take that made it into the movie, take 18.
Streep followed a slightly different path through the tables on that take too. She finished up at the table where Kennedy was sitting with his wife.

And when she was done and while the crowd was going nuts she leaned down and grabbed Kennedy and pulled his face up to hers and gave him a great big kiss.
That made it into the movie too.
When he finished telling the story, Kennedy grinned with a mixture of shyness and slyness and said, I think that's the whole reason she wanted to do one more take.

She wanted to give me a smooch.
Saturday, March 10, 2007 in , | There are twelve days of Christmas. Think the tree's looking a little peaked.

May not make it to Little Christmas. Swear to God, though,it won't be one of those poor trees stripped, taken down, tossed out into the gutter like a dead mobster rolled out of a speeding car in front of his boss's doorstep as a warning.
The twelve days of Christmas begin on Dec.

25. This means that any Christmas cards, presents, or company that arrive between then and January 5 are not late. So, if you're on the Mannion family Christmas card list and you're wondering what happened this year, watch your mailboxes next week.

Finally, there's a present under the tree.
Use the comments to explain why Santa made a mistake. Mac users can just write yadda yadda.

Thanks to all who've contributed to the Mannion Family New Computer Fund, espeically the anonymous donor who left a very generous bit of Hanukkah gelt the other day. Much appreciated.
Donations are still being gratefully accepted.

Remember, the very best way to contribute to this blog is by joining the Lance Mannion This month's installment, Romance of the City Auditor, is a Christmas story and has something unusual for a Lance Mannion original---a happy ending.
Another good way to help is by shopping through Plenty of time to buy gifts. Don't forget.

There are twelve days of Christmas.
Two trips to New York in three days last week. Saturday, after a quiet and enjoyable lunch at the and an insane half-hour inside Toys R Us, the Mannions hoofed it up to Grand Central Station where we caught the Number 6 train up Lexington Avenue, aiming for the
When we got off at 77th Street, the ten year old declared himself an official New Yorker.

Because I've ridden the subway now.
The thirteen year old had declared himself an official country boy back in Times Square when the first wave of pedestrians coming his direction swept him up and carried him backwards half a block from the rest of us.
From that moment on he was officially having a miserable time and he began counting the minutes until we would be getting in the car to go home, which turned out to be 420 minutes later.

This was too bad, because he'd been looking forward to the trip. He'd wanted to see the Christmas decorations, visit St Patrick's, watch the ice skaters, re-visit the museum to see and that he had loved on a class trip two years ago. But his last two trips into New York had been drive-in-drive-outs, the school bus depositing him at the front steps of the Metropolitian and our car delivering him into the basement parking garage of the
He'd hadn't been in the City either time.

I felt, and feel, guilty about his having such an unfun time of it, because I should have known and planned accordingly.
He is hardwired to be allergic to big cities.
Since he was small, noise and confusion have overwhelmed him faster and more thoroughly than they do most kids.

He has a hard time sorting through visual stimuli and choosing what he needs to pay attention to. This has made him a great observer, because he sees everything. But there's a point at which there is just too much of everything to see.

Most of us just stop paying attention when our limit is reached. (For a lot of people that limit is one more thing than the thing right in front of their noses.) The teenager can't stop paying attention.

He just keeps taking it in until his head explodes.
One average New York City block has more to see in it than our whole town has to look at in a month. You can imagine what happened inside his head when he looked down Broadway and saw Times Square's electronic goulash of lights, giant flashing images, animated billboards, and all the other garish and ghastly apparations in that neon, open-air cabinet of wonders.

And walking, still the only sensible way to get around New York, although I haven't tried the bicycle taxis yet, is a trial for him. He has bad feet and is supposed to wear shoes that provide good support and I forgot to check on him before we set out. He was wearing his favorite pair of zip up sneaks.

As far as his arches were concerned, he'd have been better off in his bare feet.
Basically, then, we were torturing the kid by dragging him off for what was going to be for the rest of us a pleasant outing in the Big City.
We may get him back down there for a specific event, another trip to the museum, a ball game, a play, but he will want us to promise that that's all we're going to do, zip in, see the show, the exhibit, or the game, and zip out.

People change. Circumstances change. Life takes us places we never thought we'd go.

We learn how to deal and how to cope. Experience teaches us to adapt and how to adapt. We look closer and see other ways around.

We approach from different angles. Someday the teenager might find that New York is his destiny and he's up to the challenge.
But as things are now, if he has his druthers, he'll make his home in a small town far away from the noise and the crowds and the lights and the confusion.

I expect that he will know, however, not to boast about it.
People have a habit of doing that, boasting about lifestyle choices as if they were proofs of superior virtue, intelligence, class, taste, when it's often the case that their choices were quite literally a matter of taste..

.and smell and touch and sound and sight. We say that we like a thing or a place or an act, but in reality it's our bodies merely expressing a physical preference.

The music we listen to, the pictures we love, the movies we enjoy, the places we feel at home appeal to us sensually. That is, we sense them before we do anything about them. We say they touch something in us.

But they are touching us. We touch them. And if we don't like the way they feel we don't feel like we like them.

What we don't like, what we despise, look down upon, turn our noses up at, wave away with a lofty gesture expressive our good breeding and sophistication, are often only things we can't physically tolerate because of how we happen to be put together.
The main reason I bothered to write about last week was that it gave me a chance to express my skepticism for evolutionary psychology. The chance to dis Hitchens in the process was gravy.

It’s not that I don’t believe that evolution didn’t—doesn’t—play a role in our psychological make-up. It’s that I don’t think you can explain why people in America in the 21 st Century are the way they are by guessing what people were like as they hunted mammoths and gathered nuts along the retreating glacier’s edge at the end of the Pleistocene era.
My doubt increases whenever the guess tends to explain that the way the guesser behaves and wants to continue behaving is the way evolution designed people to be.

But the fact is we are biological phenomena. We are stuck inside bodies and can only be ourselves to the degree the bodies let us be.
More to the point, our self is what the body containing that self is.

I don’t know if we have a soul, but the mind that wonders about the soul’s existence is a pure product of a brain, an amazing contraption but unreliable, fragile, and so delicately calibrated that the slightest jar or tiniest chemical alteration will tilt it wildly out of whack.
We think therefore we are, but we think with brains and these brains depend on information gathered by eyes, noses, hands, ears, and mouths, and how well do those ever work?
About as well as the rest of the body they’re attached to.

“I don’t feel like myself today,” we’ll say when we’re coming down with something. Who do we feel like then? We feel like the person who inhabits the body that is sick.

We are that person. The us we were doesn’t exist anymore. We are a memory of a body that was in better health and a hope that the sick body that is now us will get better.

You are who you are because you have good digestion or you don’t, because you are allergic to this and that or you are not. Your skin is over-sensitive or you have a hide like a rhino’s. Your ear is too well-pitched or you’re tone deaf.

Your strength is as the strength of ten and so your heart is pure.
You are you and you like what you like and dislike what you dislike because that’s what the body you are is and likes and dislikes.
In other words, I wonder how many vegetarians really miss the taste of meat, how many nonsmokers have sinuses that are easily aggravated, how many city mice need the energy rush, how many country mice have sensory-integration disorders, and if you ever catch me making fun of people who like cats, remind me that not everybody’s allergic to them.

Whatever we are that isn’t an accident of nature is a result of nurture, but we got nurtured so long ago, at a time when we weren’t capable of understanding what was happening to us, that the only say we had in what our nurturers made of us was a purely physical reaction resulting from how compliantly or how reluctantly our bodies accepted and adapted to the nurturing.
All I’m saying is that self-knowledge is a tremendously difficult achievement. Self-discipline’s a struggle.

Self-improvement’s a dream. But not an impossible dream.
We can compensate for our weaknesses.

We can hone and refine our gifts and make the effort to use them for good and never for evil.
We can learn new tricks.
We can make allowances, for ourselves and for everybody else who’s stuck in a body and burdened by a past they can’t remember.

We can try to understand. And we can forgive.
Meanwhile, the ten year old is a city mouse and can’t wait to get back.

He’s up for it. He’s ready to go at a moment’s notice. We can take him anywhere.

Except to a farm.
I'm in line at the convenience store where we buy our milk, waiting to buy our milk. I'm a long way from the register.

Busy time of day. Five or six people ahead of me, buying their milk. Young manager working the counter alone and getting frazzled.

Man enters the store. Tall, broad-shouldered, middle-aged, but stooped, slumped, and looking elderly. Missing his front teeth.

A sad, unfocused, lightless look in his eyes. Goes to the coffee counter and lifts two large cups from the stacks. Holds them up high and calls to the manager in a voice meant to be friendly and cheerful but sounding cringing, apologetic, already expecting to be turned down.

Man: Can I take a couple of these?
The manager doesn't look up from ringing out a customer, but from the way his head and shoulders stiffened at the sound of the man's voice it's clear he knows him and knows what's coming.
Manager (discouragingly): What do you want them for?

Man: I just want a couple.
Manager: I know. Why do you want them?

The manager plainly knows why. The man doesn't answer. He's trying to think of a plausible answer.

His eyes grow moist, like a little kid caught in a lie he didn't mean to tell.
Manager: You're going to pour your booze into them?
The man looks around him.

He's still holding up the two cups. He tries to speak again. Can't.

Goes to put them back. The manager isn't looking at him though. He's still too busy.

He seems to think the man's going to argue, or walk out with the cups anyway, because he sighs and shrugs.
Manager: Take them.
Manager: Take them and get out of here and go get drunk.

Man (pretending not to have heard the last part): Thank you! Thank you! God bless you.

Manager: Yeah, yeah.
The man leaves with his cups.
Manager (muttering half to himself): Take them and pour your beer into them and give one to your brother, that's what you usually do.

(Looks up at the rest of us standing in line. He's frustrated with himself. He thinks he's done the wrong thing but doesn't know what the right thing would have been.

He speaks to us as if we want to know, which we do, of course.) He and his brother, they'll sit down by the river, and get drunk until they get sick. That's what they do every day.

My turn comes. I buy my milk. The convenience store is right by the river and as I pull out of the parking lot I can see down to the riverbank where there's a picnic table under a tree.

Sure enough. Facing the river, two hunched, gray-haired figures sit on the table top, their feet on the bench, and one is passing a large white coffee cup to the other.
New York City.

Thursday night.
Cop directing traffic along 7th Ave. Car zips through a light behind him and squeals to a halt inches from the bumper of another car stopped at the far side of the intersection.

Cop punches the hood of the first car with his fist and points through the windshield at the driver and yells:
---What color red light were you waiting for?
Cop looked to be in his early 30s. If he's descended from a long line of cops, as so many are, I'll bet his great-grandfather used that line on somebody driving a Model A.

They probably teach it at the academy.
Striding towards me up W 44th, a lookalike, only dressed like a normal human being, cell phone pressed hard to the side of her head, indignantly assures whoever she's talking to:
---I would never do that! (The person on the other end doesn't agree fast enough.

She insists, her voice rising) Never! Never ever ever ever EVER do THAT!
Standing across West 51st from Radio City Music Hall, a short and extremely thin man in his fifties wearing a natty blazer with a plaid scarf under the lapels; his hair is a work of art---a tall pompadour rising four or five inches over his forehead and a ducktail.

He's hollering into his cell:
---I'm looking right at it! I'm standing right here! Where are you?

No, you're not. You're not! I'm looking right at it!

Right at it! I'm looking at it!
In the restaurant men's room before dinner: Two young men in suits, not yet defined by their jobs, the informality, good humor, and boisterousness of their college selves still clinging to them.

One is washing up at the sink, the other's on his cell---have I ever mentioned how much ?---finishing a call:
First guy: We're still at the restaurant. I'm in the rest room.

Just sharing an intimate moment with young Jason here.
He wraps up the call with a promise to be home soon.
Second guy: An intimate moment?

First guy: We're intimates.
Second guy: Was that Wendy who left early?
First guy: Yep.

Second guy: She looked like she'd had half a package.
First guy: She was pretty chubbed up.
Second guy: Someone taking her home?

First guy: I heard Sue talking to her. She asked her if she'd be ok, if she wanted a ride.
Second guy: She turned it down?

First guy: She'll be fine.
Second guy: She was feeling..

.She was pretty emotional.
First guy: She's like that.

(Pause.) She'll be fine.
And, said by people at our table:
---This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.

It should be thrown with great force.
---Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
---They say he rides as if he's part of the horse, but they don't say which part.

---That woman speaks eighteen languages and can't say 'no' in any of them.
---Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
---It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

---All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.
---I have no need of your God-damned sympathy. I only wish to be entertained by some of your grosser reminiscences.

---The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
Ok, so the people who said those things ate and drank regularly at our table
Dorothy Parker, Alexander Wolcott, Robert Sherwood, Robert Benchley, and the others made famous. We were just basking in their reflected glory and hoping for a little inspiration from their ghosts---there's a sort of shrine to them on a sideboard behind the famous table and I think if you order them in advance the waiters will bring you votive candles to light with the dessert, assuming your dessert is on fire.

Mine wasn't. I just had the cheesecake.
But our group included some pretty smart and witty people and I'm sure enough brilliant bon mots were dropped to keep the ghosts of the Algonquin wits from sneering too much at our presumption.

I didn't take notes, but I overheard a great many stories and jokes that had me smiling and laughing all night.
You don't need to have been there to enjoy my dinner mates' wit and insight. Just visit their blogs.

By the way, the Algonquin says that our table was the table, but I hung around after dinner long enough to watch the waiters and busboys clear and I checked when they removed the tablecloth.
None of the wits had carved their initials into it anywhere I could see.
But I was pulled away before I couldn't crawl underneath it.

I'll bet Dorothy Parker wrote something down there and probably something dirty. Maybe even this one:
---If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Monday, December 18, 2006 in , | Tree still standing.

All ornaments and lights back in place. Mini-light count stands at 400 bulbs at present. Not enough.

I'm adding another string of 100 today. That still might not do the trick. May need to go to 600.

Blonde hinting I'm obsessed and out of my mind. Waving electric bill around for some reason.
No presents under tree as yet.

Situation must be rectified with some online shopping tonight. Having trouble coming up with ideas for presents for the Blonde. She has pre-emptively rejected power tools, Mets tickets, sporting equipment, and anything I might have seen on the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show Tuesday night.

How did she know I watched it? She was already in bed asleep. Suspect somone's spying.

Have to keep guard up.
Hard to tell if she's done any shopping for me yet. She's cagey.

Don't know if she caught any hints I dropped about power tools, sporting equipment, or Mets tickets for myself.
Water level low in tree.
Refilling now.

I don't really want power tools for Christmas. I could use a new bow saw though. But what I'd really like Santa to bring me is a copy of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, , so I can join , which will be convening every Monday to discuss Against the Day, 25 pages or so at a time until it's done, which, considering how long it is, will be around the time Hillary Clinton's first term as President is winding down.
Quick update: A very generous reader turns out to be one of Santa's elves!

A copy of Against the Day is on the way to me now. Wow! Thank you very much, generous reader elf.

By the way, the Siren's started it off in the comments. What do you want from Santa this year? Remember, elves are paying attention here.

Cut down our tree this afternoon.
Douglas fir.
Looks good.

So far it's only fallen over once.
Of course it waited until we had all the lights and decorations on it.
Just two ornaments died in the disaster.

It's back up.
Updates with each subsequent crash.
I immediately thought of the patrician airs, the cigarette holder, the cape, the exaggerated aristocratic voice with the drawn out vowels and Britished R’s, and said to myself, Well, sure, because it was all an act.

Roosevelt was a showman. He was performing for an audience and he knew his audience. He knew the act played.

If he was a young politician running for office today he’d develop a different act, one that played to contemporary sensibilities, one that worked on television.
It wouldn’t have been that phony Man of the People act we’re told the people want, because the genius of FDR’s performance was that it was essentially true. He was playing himself only more so.

And whatever version of himself he presented today, it would still be essentially true, and it would exude hope, confidence, and good cheer, just as the cape and the cigarette holder signified back then—but above all it would be Presidential.
Prancing about in military uniforms, rolling up your shirtsleeves and pretending to drive nails, moseying along in your jeans on the ranch you bought just so you could say you own a ranch—Karl Rove forgot that none of these images are in fact Presidential.
He might as well have put Bush in a cardigan.

Of course it helps you look Presidential if you are actually being Presidential by doing a good job as President.
So, sure, we’d elect someone like FDR today and I would have told the ranger so except he was already talking again, making it clear that he was referring to FDR’s being in a wheelchair.
He was leading up to the Splendid Deception, to the lengths Roosevelt went to hide his paralyzed legs from the voters and the help he got from the press—the ranger said that reporters would knock the camera out of the hands of any photographer who tried to take a picture of FDR in his wheelchair.

The ranger said that he still encountered people on the tours he led who didn’t know until they saw the actual wheelchairs in the house that FDR couldn’t walk.
Then I remembered. The cape, the crushed hat with the turned up brim, the cigarette holder, the jutting jaw, the grin---all part of the act, sure.

But all calling attention to the upper half of his body, drawing eyes to the great, handsome head, away from the withered, useless legs.
But I've often wondered how much of the deception was an actual deception, as opposed to an unspoken agreement between Roosevelt and the voters not to notice. After all, it was known that he'd been stricken with polio and everybody was familiar enough with that disease to know what it did to people.

What's more, while FDR didn't want to be photographed in his wheelchair, he wanted people to see him walk, and anyone who saw him do this would know that it wasn't Roosevelt's legs carrying him forward, it was his mind ordering his upper body to heave his legs along.
With his heavy metal and leather braces---each one weighing over seven pounds---locked at the knees, he walked like the Tin Man when he was still rusty in every joint, and he still needed to lean on two canes. So I wonder if in allowing themselves to be deceived people were unconsciously helping Roosevelt deceive himself.

For a long time, FDR was convinced that through willpower and hard exercise he would regain the use of his legs.
Roosevelt was stricken in 1921, when he was 39 years old. The paralysis moved quickly, taking first one leg, then the other, then moving up his torso to his chest.

At the beginning it looked as though he'd be bedridden for life. An iron lung loomed ominously in his family's and doctors' thoughts.
Eventually the paralysis in his upper body subsided.

He was weak but he could move. And he was sure it was in part because he'd willed his muscles to come back to life for him. He set to work regaining all his former strength and reclaiming the use of his legs.

He built himself up through exercise---everybody knows how he loved to swim. He taught other patients how to swim at the polio clinic he established at Warm Springs. He taught them hope and confidence and determination too.

His chest, his shoulders, his arms grew powerful. Boxing great Jack Dempsey stopped by one time. Came away impressed.

Said from the waist up FDR had the build and strength of a heavyweight champ.
But his legs refused to respond.
He didn't give up.

The ranger told us how FDR used to strap on his braces and set out to walk the length of the tree-lined driveway up to the main house at Springwood. I didn't pace it off, but it looked to be at least a mile to me. Roosevelt's goal was to walk the whole way.

He never made it. But he kept trying. He'd drag himself and push himself and heave himself forward until he exhausted himself and collapsed.

Servants and bodyguards would carry him into the house.
Too many people were there. Too many people saw.

Even if the press was united in keeping the secret out of the papers, there would have been too much talk. Word did get around. Pop Mannion told me it was a surprise to him to learn, as an adult, that it was a national secret.

He said he knew at the time, and he was just a kid.
And he was governor of New York before he was President, and his legs were done before he became governor. Governors aren't given the same deference as Presidents.

And he had far too many enemies. Far too many people hated him and wanted him to fail. If letting the cat out of the bag about the wheelchair really could have hurt him politically, a million hands would have reached for the knot to untie it.

No, I've got to think that everybody knew, but I think people's pretending not to know, pretending not to notice, pretending not to care, their not caring, was politeness, was their way of helping, was their way of rooting for him and for rooting for themselves.
It wasn't a deception, it was an mutually agreed upon dream. The people conspired with FDR to make him and his struggle the living symbol of all of us.

We're down. We're flat on our back. Our strength has been stolen from us.

But we're like him. We're not done. We're not finished.

We're fighting back. We're getting strong again. He's going to walk again and so will we.

They didn't look away from the wheelchair, they looked up from it. They looked up at the cape, and the hat, and the cigarette holder, and the jutting jaw, and the grin..

.
And they grinned too.
Eleanor and Franklin are buried on the grounds of Springwood.

Buried near them are two of their dogs, one of whom is Fala.
According to the ranger, Fala's reputation as a beloved national icon is undeserved. He was a nasty little dog.

Nobody liked him except FDR. Nobody. The Secret Service especially hated him.

They called him the Informer.
This is why.
FDR usually travelled by train.

Fala went with him, of course. Every hour or so Fala needed a walk. The train would have to be stopped so that a Secret Service man could get off and walk the dog.

People along the route between Washington and Hyde Park knew what to look for. Whenever they saw a train stopped along the tracks and a large man carrying a tommy gun and holding a little dog by the leash they knew the President was in their neighborhood.
The Secret Service felt this compromised security.

I think they thought Fala was in the pay of the enemy.
At the time of his death, FDR had over 20,000 books in his personal library---half of them written by Eleanor, I think.
He had essentially donated all of them to the nation while he was still President.

One of the buildings on the grounds at Springwood is his FDR oversaw the building of it himself. He intended to use it as his office, headquarters, and study when he retired to private life. He did get to use it while he was President.

He is the only sitting President who ever got to work in his Presidential Library while he was still in office.
Most of the library is actually museum. Books and documents are out of sight.

The rooms are full of memorobilia and large photographs. There's one large room, practically a whole wing, devoted just to Eleanor.
The opposite wing houses a rotating series of exhitibtions devoted to specific aspects of the Roosevelts' lives and times.

The exhibtion there now focuses on FDR's role as Commander in Chief during the War.
Too much to get into here. One of my favorite items, though, was a poem Eleanor kept in her wallet when she traveled on behalf of the war effort.

It's in the case with the blue Red Cross uniform she wore when she visited hospitals and military bases.
Dear Lord,
Lest I continue
My complacent way
Help me to remember that somewhere, somehow out there,
A Man died for me today.
As long as there be war,
I then must ask and answer,
Am I worth dying for?

FDR's voice fills the exhibit. Recordings of his speeches and his play over the loudspeakers, but on your way out, in the last room, there are other voices, the voices of the people who loved him. I don't mean his friends and family.

I mean his friends. The people.
On one of the walls are facisimiles of condolence letters Eleanor received when he died.

They are all from nobody we ever heard of, but they all felt that the Roosevelts heard them. One is from an accountant in East Chicago, Indiana, who typed up a poem of his own on company letterhead. He was inspired, he told Eleanor, when he heard someone in his office announcng FDR's death by saying, The friend of the working man is gone.

Another poem was written by a woman, Ethel M. Vernam, of Portland, Oregon, who identified herself as just a mother. Her poem included these lines, I loved his smile.

..the flip of his head And twinkling eyes When something was said.

I loved his friendly voice...

his firm chin...

Always longed for his words to begin.
The one that got to me most though is from Gerd Landaur, a boy who'd been born in..

.Germany. Dear Mrs Roosevelt, it begins, I am just an ordinary student in a New York school.

...

I wonder where Gerd is now.
That last room was filled with recorded voices too. People who lived through the 30s and 40s remembering what FDR meant to them.

One woman talked about how terrified she was listening to the broadcasts from Germany just before the war.
You'd hear these great roaring crowds, she said, This screaming voice saying Seig! and thousands and thousands of voices screaming back, Heil!

Seig!
Heil!
You could hear in her voice the remembered fear that the world was going insane.

And then, she said, On the other side of the ocean, you would turn on the radio and this one, warm, comforting voice would come on to talk to us...

Driving into New York along the West Side Highway the other evening, I passed the old aircraft carrier, the Intrepid, which is
I had some time so I pulled over to see if I could help.
I walked out onto the pier and up to the young jg and a couple of SPs who were guarding the gate. I told them how the ten year old and I had visited the Intrepid last year and how much I enjoyed the scene in where Nicolas Cage escapes from the FBI by jumping off the Intrepid's stern into the river, so I felt I knew the ship pretty well and had a personal stake in getting her down to dry dock in Bayonne where she's scheduled for overhaul.

I got an idea how to get her unstuck, I said.
The jg said that the Navy had tried everything and was pretty much resigned to leaving the ship there for the December tides to lift, but if I had any good suggestions he'd be glad to take it up with his CO.
Have you tried giving it a push?

I said.
The officer and the SPs looked at each other and then at me. I thought their looks seemed skeptical.

A really good push, I said. You know, really put your shoulders into it..

.Well, yes, I know it's in the water. I don't mean you personally.

You get a couple of frogmen in there...

I suppose you're right, it would be hard for them to get traction. How about this? You know those deep sea diving suits?

With the big round helmets and the weighted boots, like the little guys in fishtanks wear? The Navy still have some of those lying around? They do, huh?

Good. Say you put three guys in the deep sea diving suits out there, and they stand on each other's shoulders, the biggest guy on the bottom. The top guy's pushing right up against the keel.

..You don't think that will do it.

You say it's stuck really good. Huh..

.How about this? You try rocking it?

Like when your car's stuck in the snow. What do you call the guy up in the bridge who handles the controls? The helmsman?

See, if your helmsman guns the engine, and then quickly shifts into reverse, then...

Oh. The engines don't run anymore. No fuel.

You took the propellers off? How's she ever supposed to get up to battle speed then? Oh.

The Intrepid's just a museum piece these days. Well, yes, I knew it was a Like I said, I was here with the Cub Scouts, but I thought..

.What if New York's ever attacked by the Japanese? How.

..Yes, I do watch a lot of movies.

No. No. I'm not on any medication.

I just thought...

Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do have somewhere I need to be. I'm live blogging the Democrats' Victory Party at the Sheraton tonight. What?

Yes, I'm wearing my pajamas underneath. That's very funny, lieutenant. No, I hadn't heard that one before.

Yeah. Yeah. My cat's in the car.

Another good one. What's time do I..

.About eight o'clock. Yes, you're right, I guess I should get there a little early to set up.

Thanks for reminding me. I'll get going. If you're sure you don't need.

..I'm sure on it.

Ok, well, I just wanted to help. You're welcome. I try to be a good American, yes.

Good night, lieutenant. Say, one more thing occurs to me. You got any two by fours?

Really long ones. You could shove them down underneath and..

..
Gang of us headed down to Virgil's for a quick dinner before at the Victory Party Tuesday night.

Virgil's is on West 44th, ten blocks down Seventh Avenue from the Sheraton, and half a block in from the heart of Times Square.
When I was a more freqeunt visitor to the City, and Times Square wasn't much more than the name of a part of town I somehow managed to walk around even when I was uptown and near it. I can only remember going there two times in my bohemian days.