Who Wants Yesterday's Papers?

It’s pouring at a slant and the raindrops on my Warby Parkers are making it impossible for me to see the small zipper that’s supposed to secure the side window of my Jeep. I take off the glasses and hurl them on the front seat and just then it occurs to me that I’m not going anywhere in this vehicle, because I’ve left the key home. I drove another vehicle, the one assigned to my daughter, to this parking lot in town this morning to leave for her when she gets off the train in Rye.

The slashing rain means it must be publication and delivery day. The usual delivery vehicle of preference will not help, so I reach for my phone to see if my wife can bring a key.

But, I left my phone home as well.

So, I go to the office to call, but, of course, the office keys are home with the you know what key. I ask to use the phone in the law office next door and realize that I actually do not know my own daughter's cell phone number; only my iPhone knows that number and it is home. I leave a message on my wife’s, the DG's, phone.

When in doubt, or just having a bad morning, might as well get a really good breakfast. This seldom means a really healthy breakfast, but one must indulge when the weather, your memory, and your rides let you down. So, over easy, bacon, home fries, and, wheat toast.

Things are beginning to look up, except at meal’s end I realize that I have only a few dollars in my pocket, having given most of my cash to my daughter last evening on the corner of Fifty-Third and First. That was just after parking the car in the wrong (expensive) garage, attending a party, having to leave early due to the DG not feeling well, sitting in the waiting room at Greenwich Hospital Emergency Room, leaving because the wait was too long (we later learned she was fine), waking up groggy and leaving my…well, you already know that part.

The ladies behind the counter at Poppy’s look dubious when I tell them of my cash shortage, like they’ve heard this one a million times before. I’m the Editor of the paper, I begin to explain, reaching for the new edition to show my name, except it isn’t there, because it’s pouring and the Jeep won’t move, and I don’t have keys and I left my phone home. And the ladies think I’m kind of dopey, and they may have something there.

The nice new law intern lets me make another call, and my understanding wife ( the DG has been through many of my off-days), promises to bring a Jeep key and tell my daughter where I’ve left her car key.

People around town often ask me about the future of print. They mean printed newspapers. The funny thing about print is that it really means papers delivered by truck, Jeep, car, foot, hand, maybe even bicycle still in some heavenly places. Except that, some days it’s really not that funny and saying that newspapers are “all dried up” couldn’t be further from the truth. Wet newsprint is nobody’s idea of fun; it’s hard to wash it out of your khakis and rain slicker, to say nothing of your hands.

People may be getting tired of my telling the story of how my first job at age thirteen was stacking and folding papers at Jack’s newsstand at the hyper-busy corner of Continental Avenue and Queens Boulevard; but I tell it anyway. By nine or ten o’clock on Saturday night, when the crowds were leaving both the Midway and Forest Hills movie theatres, my hands would be black with Sunday “News,”  “Times,”  “Trib,”  “Journal-American,”  “World Telegram & Sun,” and “Long Island Press," and I could never put the sections together fast enough for Jack or all those outreaching hands. All of those papers, but two, are long gone, but the print’s still on my hands: shades of Red Smith, Murray Kempton, Russell Baker, and all those sports section batting averages embedded under the skin.

As it happened, my day turned much better, I got that Jeep key, and later walked around town to deliver a few more papers, holding them under my slicker to keep them dry.

This morning, the rain is finally gone, I could see blue from my pillow, and got up, went downstairs to open the door and grabbed today’s paper before putting on the coffee.

A Foul, Foul Better Thing

A couple of years ago, during a downsizing move, I was mildly embarrassed to discover that, after encouraging family members to severely reduce the amount of accumulated clothing in their closets, I was the one with the most clothes left to move. My wife and daughters gloated; my son felt ashamed for me.

The reason I bring this up is that, during a recent downpour, I ran into a friend in town who complimented me on my classic yellow rain slicker. Actually, she referred to it as being “cute.”

Normally, I don’t do cute, however, needing all the compliments I can get, I simply said thanks. Then, I recalled the foul weather gear's pedigree.

I got it in Kennebunkport, Maine during one of a zillion trips to visit our children at camp. I distinctly remember one early hurricane there in 1996, and I most likely procured this “Charles River” model the next year, as a precaution. Naturally, since it is a quintessentially American piece of apparel, it was made in China.

Upon reflection, I must admit that I also have two more rain jackets and three raincoats:

2. Le Aigle: It’s been a dozen or more years, since we last visited my brother-in-law’s little house in southwest France in the department known as the Lot. On one of those trips, we visited a local hardware store to obtain some unremembered item, perhaps related to helping  “Unc” re-tile his roof. There, I spied my hooded, dark olive-green Aigle waterproof at what I considered to be a bargain price. Did my wife say, "But, what about your yellow slicker?” Maybe.

Aigle is one of France’s answer to Britain’s Barbour, and they make stylish outerware and wellies. While I love the Aigle’s fit and zip-pockets, it must be said that it does not breathe so well, and too much condensation may accumulate inside. Worn sparingly.

3. The Patagonia: Six years ago, I was invited to a conference-golf event in Half Moon Bay, California. The hotel and its course were situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific and the site of a major surfing beach. I needed a rain jacket to combat morning fog and mist, and still allow me to swing a club. The last part was most important, since I knew I’d be making more swings than anyone else on the course. I do better holding a racquet.

This model is a elongated in back, made of stretch fabric, and has a well-fitted hood. It holds up to a mighty downpour. The only thing not to like is the really unattractive “snowflake” lining. Use: often.

4. The Lands End Commuter Coat: I bought this versatile mid-length coat for about $100. With it’s lining, it acts as a winter parka; without, it’s a warm weather raincoat. It stands up to rain and cold very well and may be easily mistaken for a coat ten times more expensive. The main problem is that the pockets are all too shallow and slick, so it is very easy to have things fall out. Gotta have better pockets, which make it possible to carry enough stuff to leave a messenger bag home. Moderate use.

5. Jack Spade Brand Genuine MACINTOSH. I lobbied hard for this one as a present, since it was far too expensive for even me to just pick up on a rain-whim. It was, of course, made in Scotland, is a “rubberized" classic without a lining. Warm linings are considered a sin and are illegal in Scotland (and Wales). I first saw this model at the original Jack Spade shop on Greene Street, long before Liz Claiborne bought the brand and took away its randomness (somewhat replaced at Sleepy Jones, Andy Spade’s new venture). The coat has a pretty cool light-blue lining.

This mac is stiff and nearly useless as a travel coat. Also, it’s too heavy for use in summer months and too porous for winter, mainly due to its having no zipper so cold winds easily penetrate the chest area. It’s also best used in a light rain, since it is only moderately waterproof. Its most redeeming quality? It is a really cool looking mid-length coat. Use: whenever practical, according to temperature.

6. The Burberry: Technically, I’m only holding this for my son. It belonged to his maternal grandfather, who put his trademark Lucky Strike burn-hole near one pocket. Since he was six-four and I am five-nine, this is a full-length raincoat for me. There’s just something about a Burberry and we’re not just talking about the signature plaid lining.

I bought my own Burberry trench coat during the late Sixties in the old Abercrombie & Fitch store on Madison Ave. That is, my own maternal grandfather bought it for me. This was to make up for sending my London Fog  and other items to his Irish relatives after taking a trip to Kilkenny. He made the mistake of handing me a blank check; that Burberry with a zip-in lining cost $80-90, a shocking cost at the time even for my grandfather, who had closets and drawers filled with suits, shoes, hats, and and custom made shirts.

I kept that trench coat for over thirty years. Near its final days it was frayed and still smelled like every cigarette I had ever smoked and every train I’d ever ridden while wearing it. In a moment of weakness, I finally succumbed to my wife’s "suggestions" that I dispose of it. Use: almost never took it off and slept in it more often than I care to remember.

Island Abstracts

Blue

Pink

Blues

Birds? Clouds? Just A Wall!

Easter Messages

Some people keep things in drawers, others prefer shelves, attics, cellars or even safes. I keep so much stuff, according to certain members of my family, that I use all of those, but, mostly I keep "stuff" in a series of notebooks, begun more than twenty years ago.

Having just returned from a trip to our beloved Bahamian island of "Saint James" (name changed to protect its innocence), I spent this morning making finishing touches on one of the notebooks.

As Easter approaches, I wanted to share two entries with you.

One: Each morning on Saint James, I sit on the front porch watching the bay and the islanders walking to and fro. Some mornings, I get local news updates from Herman, my fisherman friend. I also read and write while rocking in a chair covered in many coats of white enamel.

On my first morning, I began reading "Narrow Road to the Interior" by perhaps the greatest Japanese haiku writer, Basho. The haiku at the end of the first chapter, which I copied into the notebook,  

read:

Even this grass hut
may be transformed
into a doll's house.

The name of our house on Bay Street is ...Doll House.

Two: This morning, as I was pasting some loose items into the notebook and reviewing some older entries, I noticed a curious thing about my 2012 Opening Day Mets ticket, which had been printed on recycled copy paper:

      -THIS IS YOUR TICKET-
please call me if you have any questions

Jesus



Happy Easter.

Two Conversations: Coach Jack Curran

Molloy/St. Annes

One afternoon, late last fall, I recognized Coach Jack Curran in The Smoke Shop in Rye as he chatted with Peggy. Later, when I saw him ambling up Purchase Street in his Archbishop Molloy athletic togs, I introduced myself, mentioning that we had met, briefly fifty years earlier, in spring 1962.

He didn’t know who I was, of course, and probably had had a zillion people like me tell him that they’d met him, but, as always, he was very polite, and seemed immediately interested in what I was saying. Curran had lived in Rye for many years, since 1958, I think, but our paths had not crossed during my thirty years there until that afternoon.

When I was thirteen, in eigth grade, I was invited to tryout for him at Molloy’s gym, pretty hallowed ground as far as Queens basketball went. I’d just completed a great run with our CYO team at a tournament at Holy Child in Richmond Hill. Through his extensive grapevine, he’d apparently heard I was worth watching, along with a dozen other boys. Or, maybe he just read the CYO box scores in the Long Island Press or World Telegram & Sun.

As it happened, everything I did that day worked; I played well above my head. Afterwards, he asked if I’d applied to Molloy. When I said I’d been accepted, he encouraged me to attend. Too late, I told him, I was headed to Xavier. Then, he asked for my permission to call my parents about it. He was completely respectful about that, saying he’d make sure I played, if I came to his school, but there was no pressure at all.

But, I knew what the answer was going to be and should have been. I was going to play tennis at Xavier under Pat Rooney (of US Open ball boy fame), and, as my mother told Coach Curran, Molloy had no tennis team.

Fifty years later, we stood chatting about all of that on Purchase Street. “McDermott,” he said, ”Quick hands, right?” That was Jack Curran. He had no idea, but had figured that a short guy like me, who had interested him must have had to be able to do something well.

He reminded me that Molloy later built their tennis team around Vitas Gerulaitis, with whom I’d played a little (amazing, but true). Then, we chatted a little about how he had finally given up teaching English, but was still coaching basketball and baseball to some extent.

When I looked into writing a profile of him, I learned that he had been ill for a while and recently had some trouble. Maybe in the spring, I thought, around Little League opening.

It was not to be.

Coach Curran had two brief conversations with me, among thousands of others in my life, and I do not presume to have known him well. But, I remember both conversations well, not because of what he said, but because he listened in such an attentive, focused, the way a player he had coached might launch a jumper from twenty feet, or make a perfect peg to the cutoff man.

There was only one Jack Curran; we can only hope to have learned a little from him while he was here coaching us.

iLost & iFound

Author's New Phone Cover

I’ve read that the president plans to put the full weight of the executive branch behind an idea whose time has finally come: a long, in-depth study of the human brain.

We’re not talking about Freud, Jung, or Helen Gurley Brown-type speculative thinking here, we’re talking about really knowing the truth about what makes us tick and, by extension, what we could do to make us start ticking better, or, I guess, worse, which is a hard concept to grasp.

The whole thing has shades of Elsa Lanchester in “Bride of Frankenstein.”

I, for one, am not sure I want to know the truth about my brain. Why start now? I have Google’s search brain, Wikipedia, and Google Maps at my fingertips; I tend to use my own brain for little things like figuring out why college tuition is so expensive and parsing the Affordable (sic) Care Act.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

I recently attended a funeral, arriving a half-hour before it began since I failed to closely check the information sent to me. So, I decided to use the time to catch up on my texts and emails, while waiting in my Jeep in the New Rochelle parking lot.

But I could not find my iPhone. Must have left it in the office, I thought, but later it was not there either. So, I emailed my wife, known here as the DG*, in a mild panic from my laptop to see if I’d left the phone at home; I had not.

Now, the human brain can conjure up some real and imagined scary things, but leaving home without your phone these days is one of the Big Boogies. Managing in our new mobile global world without a phone makes us feel useless, like a lamp with no bulb.

Somehow (landline, laptop, dictionary, atlas) I made it through the day. That evening, I began an intense search at home: in my upstairs office, downstairs studio, and bedroom, all the while interrogating DG about the places where she had not yet found it.

I had her call my iPhone a few times as I roamed the house listening for a buzz or ring. The result was iSilence.

“It’s probably in the Jeep,” she calmly said. So, I looked there with a flashlight, twice, front and back, under the seats and my SF Giants batting helmet. No iPhone. iPhone gone. Life as I’d known it had ceased. iPhone lost/dead as a doornail. I was paralyzed with fear and commenced looking in all the same spaces again.

The Red Jeep

“It’s in the Jeep,” said DG with total serenity upon my return to HQ, while she pan-seared the tuna and tossed the arugula for supper, while also managing to talk a client out of committing hari-kari over the wrong shade of white on her newly-painted living room wall.

Then, I remembered iCloud, another kind of digital brain, which came with a Find My Phone app. So, I went to my iPad, put in my Apple ID six times without luck. As usual, it worked on the seventh try (don’t iAsk). Sure enough, it showed two small green dots at my home address: the iPad and my iPhone!

Although iCloud had located the phone, there was no brainy Siri-voice to say, “The phone is under the white chair by the fireplace,” or “The phone is on the shelf in the coat closet, where you left it while grabbing your gloves.” It just showed the two green spots.

“One spot looks like it’s in the house, the other looks like it’s nearby, but outside. Like maybe in the Jeep,” my wife said.

By now, any reader who has been married or in a serious relationship for a while will understand that finding my phone had become less important to me than finding it anywhere but in that Jeep. Actually, and here’s a hint about why I’m not so keen on this scientific brain project, losing the phone forever, and having to pay to replace it, was beginning to seem like a more acceptable outcome than finding it in a certain four-wheel drive vehicle, AKA, the Jeep.

But, there I was, slowly walking down the path outside our home to the stairway that led to the garage, dressed in dark clothing and wearing a watch cap with a flashlight in one hand to light the ground before me, and my iPad in the other to keep track of the green dots. I was praying that the neighbors would not see me and ask what I was up to or call the police to report an alien in their garden.

As I approached the stairway, I pressed the Find My Phone button that would cause my lost device to emit a sound. And, miraculously, I thought I could hear a feint beeping. At the bottom of the stairs it was getting a little louder. Slight right turn towards our garage, louder still. Open this red door. Really loud now. Gotchya!

In the red Jeep.

You want to know about the human brain? In the hundred-foot walk back to the house, I began to analyze all the possible ways to explain why I knew the phone had been there all along.

Instead, I just said, “It was in the Jeep.”

“I know,” a voice said, “Have some tuna, it’s delicious.”

Why mess with the brain. Scientists might learn a whole lot more about how things really get done or not done by studying marriage more closely. Marriage is still a killer app in more ways than one.

But, I don’t think I want to know the whole truth about that either.

* Ed Note: Darling Girl

Standing Guard

En Garde! This weekend's WSJ and T magazines go head to head, cover to cover, headline to headline. Take that! No, you take that!
Pure Elegance all in white v. True Elegance in black. Young Russian model Kati Nescher v. Lee Radziwill.

Coincidence, you say? Hah! My guess is that both WSJ's new-ish editor Kristina O'Neill and savvy T chief Deborah Needleman have their spies. Who's the aggressor? Not clear, but this competition could get very interesting.

Old Guard: My inbox was filled with messages regarding Time Warner's apparent interest in finally spinning off Time Inc. in a deal with Iowa-based Meredith. All reports noted that TW namesake Time, Fortune, and SI would be exempt from the deal, with various lame reasons given for that move.

WLGD4U

The real reason: TW head Jeff Bewkes is an HBO grad and has never  been enamored of the magazine unit. But, even he does not want to be the one to raise a royal media stink by letting Rupert Murdock get his mitts on political weekly Time, business bible Fortune, or swimsuit cash cow SI. Another possibility? Get the Right Guard out and convince Bloomberg to take on Time and Fortune. Could poor SI be tossed underwater to ESPN? That would be a fate worst than depth for them.

Laggard: While picking up my WSJ/Off Duty this morning, I overheard the patron in front of me ask the value of PowerBall. Upon hearing it was only $60 million, he scoffed and said he'd wait. I seem to live in an area where $60 mill isn't quite good enough. I bought two tickets and man would I like to be the laggard with one of the winning tickets instead of the toad who spurned it.

Fort Mason Market, SFO

Guarding the Fort: Spent last weekend in San Francisco (full report soon), where even Dumplings Get The Blues at the market in Fort Mason. Never saw a cloud in four days. I've given up comparing SFO to other cities, especially NYC. It's unique, and, although it drives many tried and true New Yorkers crazy with its Zen-like demeanor, it is the country's most dramatically beautiful city.