My Favorite Scene In All The Movies

Today's question is directed at all of my fellow old-movie buffs out there:

Do you have a scene from the movies that you love so much you just wish you could somehow have been in it?

I'm going to take a shot here at guessing what are probably the highest-rated movie scenes of all time. My guess would be that the list begins with something like this:

1. The final scene of Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman, "Here's looking at you, kid," just before she gets on the plane with Paul Henreid and leaves Bogey forever.

2. The scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

3. The scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Paul Newman and Robert Redford are stranded on a cliff about 150 feet above a river, with a posse closing in on them and no way of escape, and they get into an argument about whether or not they should jump into the river. After they go back and forth about it, Redford finally bursts out with "I can't swim!" Whereupon Newman goes into a laughing fit and replies, "What are you, crazy? The FALL'll probably kill you!" And over they go.

Let's analyze each of these.

Casablanca is probably the "date flick" all of all time. Made in 1942, it's one of those movies that finds a perfect "blend," and I don't mean only in the flawless casting. The character Rick Blaine in this movie, played by Humphrey Bogart, is every heterosexual woman's dream man, by which I mean he is 50 percent macho tough guy and 50 percent sensitive, hurt creature who needs healing. Rick anticipates that treacly Alan Alda "sensitive guy" persona by 30 years, but manages not to be so queasily ... sensitive.

For the three people out there who don't know the plot, most of it is back-story. As the film opens, World War II is underway, and Rick is running a cafe in Casablanca, in German-occupied French Morocco. It's the most popular evening spot in a town filled with war-displaced refugees from Europe, trying to get to America. One night Ilse, played by Ingrid Bergman, walks in with her husband Victor Lazslo, played by Paul Henreid.

Bogey then utters my favorite line in all the movies: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

It turns out that Bogey and Bergman had been lovers in Paris, just as the war was starting. But she was harboring a secret, that she was already married to Henreid, a famous resistance-fighter against the Nazis who was reputed to have perished in a concentration camp. Only he hadn't. It turned out that he was alive and had been brought, wounded and sick, back to Paris. Discovering that her husband was not dead after all, Ilse had abandoned Rick without explaining anything, just as they were to leave Paris together. We find out later that she thought she was protecting him, knowing that if he knew the truth, he would refuse to leave and the Germans would surely apprehend him, since he had been active before the war in the anti-fascist cause.

Bogey's character, Rick, has been sitting in Casablanca licking his wounds ever since. Ilse broke Rick's heart, and he's bitter and angry. Then she shows up in his cafe. As the movie spins out, Bogey gradually learns the truth about Ilse and his anger and bitterness turns to deep, intense conflict. He still loves her, and she, as it turns out, still loves him as well. But now he has to decide which is more important, his love for Ilse or Lazslo's need for her in the face of the tremendous anti-Nazi resistance movement of which he's part.

It's the perfect private-desire-versus-public-duty conflict. Rick eventually surprises Ilse (and possibly himself) by deciding to do the unselfish thing and send Ilse away with her husband to America, despite his love for her, to continue fighting the good fight. And everyone knows how the film ends: Bogey and Claude Rains, the corrupt French police official who has been his friend throughout the film, walk off into the fog together as the "Marseillaise" swells on the soundtrack.

Great stuff. No wonder that last scene inspired Woody Allen to write his own tribute to the film in Play it Again, Sam.

When Harry Met Sally, directed by Rob Reiner in 1989, is the ultimate postfeminist romantic comedy, by which I mean its plot revolves around a guy (Billy Crystal) who is very arrogant about his sexual potency, and who gets his comeuppance in the form of Meg Ryan, with whom he develops a prickly friendship over the decades that doesn't turn into romance until the very end of the film. When this film first came out it was, and on DVD still is, what my friend Kathleen Parker would call "a huge bonding agent" for women. In one scene after another Billy Crystal gets that comeuppance that must tickle women so: Meg Ryan puts him down with snappy comebacks, and then his wife dumps him, and there's that scene every woman loves, in which Meg Ryan gives him the humiliation of all time by showing him, in the middle of a crowded restaurant, how easy it is for a woman to fake an orgasm. She does so, loudly, at the table, drawing everyone's attention, giving millions of women out there in movie-land the satisfaction of imagining Billy Crystal's dick shrinking to the size of a bloodworm.

Of course the scene does have a funny punchline, as everyone knows. When Meg is through bucking and moaning and panting in her chair, an old lady in a neighboring booth (who I understand was Rob Reiner's real-life mother) points to her and says, "I'll have what she's having." This is all good old Jewish-American gagwriting of course, but it's a classic, if somewhat mean-spirited moment. And to Marilu Henner, whom I saw chortling over this scene in a TV Land special, and all her feminist pals out there who relish this scene because it humiliates men, I invite you all to go fake orgasms with each other. I'll watch the World Series, thank you.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (1969) is a classic of another kind, the "buddy" genre. A lot of critics disliked it for the same reason they disliked Bonnie and Clyde two years earlier: it takes a couple of criminals and makes them likable. This was part of that whole 1960s "anti-establishment" thing: Hollywood decided to chuck out the hero-vs.-villain paradigm and pitch "moral relativity," which promptly led to something called an "anti-hero," as exemplified by the character Jack Nicholson played in Five Easy Pieces (1970). What makes the formula entertaining, and the scene on the cliff so unforgettable, is the way Newman and Redford managed to interact in this western as a vaudeville team. Newman got the laughs; Redford was the straight man. He played the Sundance Kid as a macho dimwit who had that one talent going for him: he was a lightning-fast, deadly shot with a gun. Beyond that he's essentially clueless, and one gets the impression that if the character played by Katharine Ross weren't already his girlfriend, he might have trouble with women once they'd gotten past his good looks because there isn't much beyond his good looks except his prowess with a six-shooter. He follows Butch like the dumb cat follows the smart cat in a cartoon. ("When are we gonna catch the mouse, George?") When they get cornered on that cliff, the repartee starts going back and forth machine-gun quick. Butch isn't that much smarter than Sundance, but he's more glib ("You just keep thinkin' Butch, what's what you're good at!" "Man, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals!" -- This after Butch has just hatched a scheme for the two of them to go off and rob banks in Bolivia, a country whose location he isn't even sure about.) Of course the "punchline" of this scene is not so much Butch's ridicule of Sundance's fear of drowning, when they're facing much worse danger on the way down, but Sundance's eloquent response: "Oh, oh, oh, SSHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTT!" As he launches himself off the cliff and into the river below.

But my favorite scene in all of the movies is the "Doc, we gotta make some scotch" scene from Joshua's Logan's Mister Roberts (1955.) Mr. Roberts is just about my favorite film anyway; when my wife Valerie and I were engaged and I came to Washington for a visit, she took me out for a big treat: a revival at the Kennedy Center of Thomas Heggen's 1948 Broadway play on which the movie was based.

This scene is a perfectly wonderful example of mini-ensemble acting. Henry Fonda, William Powell and the very young Jack Lemmon are here, interacting as three officers on a rusty Navy cargo ship doing its dull, boring job in a safe area of the South Pacific during the waning days of World War II. Henry Fonda is Mr. Roberts, an idealistic young man who quit medical school to join the Navy and participate in the great crusade against fascism, only to find himself stuck on a sorry old bucket, The U.S.S. Reluctant, hauling toothpaste and toilet paper around in non-combat areas, and bullied by a tyrannical captain played by James Cagney on top of that. William Powell is the ship's doctor, an older and wiser source of dry wit and wisdom, and Jack Lemmon is Ensign Frank Thurlow Pulver, a shiftless, lazy and above all lecherous young man who's trying to get through the war without leaving his bunk.

In this scene, Henry's Fonda's character has decided he's going to try and get liberty for the crew. "You gotta get these men a liberty, Mr. Roberts! They're goin' asiatic!" cries an exasperated chief played by Ward Bond after breaking up a nasty fight. The problem of course is the captain. The mean old bastard won't let the crew have a liberty because...well, just because he's a mean old bastard.

Roberts decides to do an end-run around the captain. When he learns that the port director of the island where they've been rotting in the sunny harbor for God-knows-how-long used to be a big scotch drinker before the war, Roberts takes a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label that he's been hoarding in a shoebox to celebrate the day he gets off that rustbucket of a cargo ship, and gives it to the port director, "compliments of the captain," in order to get the port director to send the Reluctant to Elysium island, which is known as a great liberty port.

Pulver, meanwhile, has learned that a planeload of nurses just arrived the night before at the island's hospital. With that for incentive, he pries himself out of his bunk and goes ashore on an errand to pick up aspirin for Doc as an excuse to check out the chicks. He hits on one of them and lures her out to the ship with the promise of some of Doug Roberts' scotch, only to return and find out that Roberts has already used the bottle of whiskey for another purpose. The following dialogue ensues:

Pulver: You didn't give that shoebox to that
port director?


Roberts: I did, compliments of the Captain.



Doc: You've been hoarding a quart of scotch
in a shoebox?



Roberts: I was gonna break it out
the day l get off this ship. Resurrection day!



Pulver: You wasted that bottle of scotch
On a……on a man?



Roberts: Will you name me another sex
within 5000 miles? What's eating you anyway, Frank?



Doc: Well, look at the fancy pillows! Somebody expecting company?


Roberts: Good Lord! '' Toujours l'amour.'' ''Souvenir of San Diego.''
''Oh, you kid! '' ''Tonight or never.' ''Compliments of
the American Harvester Company.'' ''We plow deep while others sleep.'' Doc, that new hospital hasn't got nurses, has it?



Doc: It didn't have yesterday.



Pulver: It has today.



Roberts: How did you find out that they were there?



Pulver: It just came to me all of a sudden. I was lying on my bunk here
this morning, thinking. And there wasn't a breath of air. All of a sudden a funny thing happened. A little breeze came up. I took a big deep breath and said to myself: ''Pulver boy, there's women on that island!

Roberts: Doc, you know a thing like that could make
a bird dog real self-conscious.


Pulver: They flew in last night. Knockouts! And one big blonde especially. Of course, she went for me right away. Naturally.So I started to turn on the old personality,and I said: ''Will nothing make you come out to the ship with me?'
And she said, ''Yes, there is one thing and one thing only: ''A good stiff drink of scotch! ''


Roberts: I'm sorry, Frank. l'm really sorry. Your first assignment in a year.

Roberts and Doc proceed to try and make amends with Pulver, and aid him in his romantic pursuit, by making a bottle of fake "scotch." Rummaging around for whatever they can find, they come up with clear grain alcohol, to which they add Coca-Cola for color, iodine for flavor and hair tonic for aging. Then they taste it. Pulling a horrible face, Roberts says, "You know, Doc? It does taste a little like scotch."

I won't spoil the ending. Get the DVD. Enjoy.

More Points to Ponder

Greetings, woolgatherers...

Today we're going to play another round of that fun game, "Questions to which there are probably no good answers."

Ever wonder about this (I have, which gives you an indication of how much time I often have on my hands) Why is it that big shots in the FBI and CIA so often go by names that begin with an initial? Count 'em: J. Edgar Hoover. L. Patrick Gray. W. Mark Felts (aka Deep Throat.) E. Howard Hunt. G Gordon Liddy. What's up with that, anyway?

And while we're on the subject of initials, why don't we call presidents by their initials any more? We had FDR, JFK and LBJ, but since then we haven't had any ABCs, M&Ms or PDQs (Although we've had plenty of SOBs.) And by the way, who decided in those days which presidents would get "initial" designation and which wouldn't? FDR was always FDR. But his successor, Harry Truman, was rarely if ever referred to as "HST," and no one ever called Eisenhower DDE, although in his case, they'd already been using "Ike" for years. Clinton might have been "WFJ," although the Democratic party bosses might just as easily have nixed that for sounding too much like "WFB," the common moniker of the late, great William F. Buckley Jr., who generally had little praise for Democrats. As for Bush the younger, I'd be just as welling to bet that the media would not go along with "GWB," since around Washington, "GW" implies "George Washington," as in "GWU," and you can just bet the media wouldn't want people associating Dubya with the Father of His Country.

The lids on German beer steins are a pretty decoration, but what function do they serve? To keep the beer warm? Maybe in Great Britain, where they like their beer warm, but as far as I know they don't use them there.

Bumpers on cars used to be made of metal. That was to protect you in the case of a collision. What bloody good do plastic bumpers do anybody?

Some of my friends in radio will send me flaming e-mails for saying this, but what function do disc jockeys actually serve? Most people I know who turn on the radio to listen to music want to listen to music, not some moron hyperventilating between the tunes. If you want to listen to hyperventilating, go over to AM and tune in talkity-talk radio. At least over there, they're hyperventilating about something.

Whenever I attend a symphony concert, I always find myself wondering why anyone would want to become a professional bassoon player. Percussionists have fun, and double-bass players can work night jobs in jazz clubs, but what's the attraction of the bassoon? I'd think double-reed players would gravitate toward something a little sexier. Even the oboe once appeared in a Sonny and Cher song.(Remember? "Babe...Mmmp-ahh-ahh-mmp-ahh-ahh-mmp-ahh-ahh-mmp-ahh-ahh...I got you, babe!" Those "Mmp-aah-ahhs" were made by an oboe.)

I think Andy Rooney asked this one once, but why do the makers of bathroom fixtures construct bathtub-shower combinations in such a way that the built-in soap dish is directly in the line of fire of the shower nozzle? The water cascades directly down on to the soap, drastically shortening its soap-life.

Speaking of manufacturing, I can understand why automobile manufacturers would equip the dashboards of cars with gauges showing your speed and engine temperature. You need to know how fast you're going, and anyone would want to know if their car was getting ready to overheat. But why do they include a separate gauge for RPMs? When was the last time you worried about your RPMs? I suspect this is a sop to us guys, made on the assumption that we're all fantasising as we drive about being Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Tony Kanaan. Not me, guys. I'm fantasising about retirement and my dream life as an aging surfer dude on the coast of Baja California.

For 40 years now I've been looking at the disclaimers on boxes of cereal and crackers
that say, "This package is sold by weight, not by volume. If it does not appear full when opened, it is because the contents have settled during shipping and handling." Well, duh. When was the last time you saw someone in the check-out line at Safeway yelling that the box of Triscuits they bought yesterday wasn't full? I think this controversy was laid to rest during the Kennedy Administration, guys. Can we move on?

Has anyone ever really looked up the word "Aardvark" in the dictionary? Or its opposite number, "Zymosan?"

How come the idea of a universal remote control has yet to catch on? It seems like a no-brainer to me. Wouldn't you rather have one remote control in your family room than 52 of the goddamn things?

Here's one I have pondered on the telephone with my good friend Holly, who is raising teenagers. Why is that we adults tend to slow down at the end of the day, while kids seem to start revving up at sundown?

iPods are well and good if you're talking about listening to some tunes while you're running on the treadmill at the gym, but what kind of nitwit would want to watch a Bruce Willis movie on a two-inch screen? Never mind, I think I just answered that one.

Cold air goes down. Warm air goes up. So why is my heating unit in the attic and my air conditioner outside on the lawn?

Whenever I go to Starbucks (which I seldom do) I see all those pretty little ceramic espresso cups lined up behind the counter. Does anyone ever get to use them? They always hand me my coffee in a cardboard cup.

Speaking of a/c, Congress used to take off the whole month of August because Washington was unbearable in August with its heat and humidity. But every federal building in this town is air-conditioned now. Why do we still let Congress take August off?

Does anyone really CARE that Reese Witherspoon's new boyfriend has MOVED IN WITH HER, pant, pant pant? Geeze.

The Germans pioneered lots of things, from counterpoint in music to ballistic missile technology. Why can't they make a toilet? I spent four years in Germany, and anyone who's been there knows what I'm talking about. German toilets come in two models. I call them the ski-slope and the shelf. The ski slope requires scrubbing every time you use it because the water forms a little pool at the bottom and what gets dumped into it tends to stick to the sides. As for the shelf, well, as the kids are saying now, we won't go there.

Why are used cars no longer called used cars? Now they're all "pre-owned." It's the same thing, isn't it? Calling a spade a diamond doesn't make it a diamond, and a lemon by any other name...

Why don't Americans take siestas after lunch? I've lived and worked in countries where they do, including Brazil and Ivory Coast. It's a wonderful custom, but goes against the old Protestant work ethic, I guess. When I was a federal employee, I used to take a siesta every afternoon, sometimes right at my desk, and nobody noticed. That was probably the greatest thing about being a federal employee.

And finally, why do the newspapers make a big deal about a total solar eclipse when it's only going to be visible in Chile, Lesotho or Inner Mongolia? I don't get that.

If anyone has answers to any of these queries, post 'em here.

The Obsolesence Olympics

Somebody remind me to buy an old-fashioned can opener, will you?

Some of you will know what I'm talking about: the old-fashioned "church key" can opener that beer drinkers used to use before they invented pull-tabs. It was about four inches long. At one end it had a rounded do-hickey, a hole the size of a bottle cap with a little nub underneath for popping the tops off soda bottles. At the other end it had a curved, pointed end, also with a nub underneath for grabbing the lip of a can while you poked a hole in it.

Yes, I know they stopped making the kind of beer cans that require a "church key" in 1963 or so. (That's in America, by the way. When I was in Brazil, from 1988 to 1991, you needed one in order to open cans of Antarctica and Brahma, the local brews.)

But there are other beverages out there besides beer, you know, and I have found that technology has left the beverage industry behind. I went to open a can of grapefruit juice this morning and found that I had completely forgotten what happened the last time I went to open a can of grapefruit juice, which was that I had to go and find a hammer and a phillips screwdriver and pound two holes in the top of the can so I could get some grapefruit juice out of it.

Why does industry do this to people? I mean, it's a given that once we get used to a certain product they'll stop making it. That never fails. But what is this business with the Pied Piper of Progress tootling his way merrily down the road and completely ignoring whether or not the consumer-rats are keeping up with him?

Take Bill Gates for example. (Please!) I wanted to cold-cock that s.o.b. when I heard he had announced that Microsoft was no longer going to include floppy-disc drives on its computers. Why? "They're obsolete," we were informed from on high.

Maybe for you, Mr. Haircut-that-looks-like-it-was-performed-with-a-$30-hedge-trimmer, but not for me. Not only was I accustomed to using them, but I happen to have boxes and boxes of floppy discs to which I have been archiving important files for years. What do you suggest I do, ask Martha Stewart how to turn them into a decorative wall-hanging? What would have been the harm in just leaving the damn floppy drives in place? People who don't want to use them don't have to.

I tell you, it's nothing but an abuse of power. Gates threw millions of computer-users a Jim Palmer Slurveball just because he could.

I have something in my basement of which I would not be the slightest bit surprised to learn that you have the counterpart in yours: I call it the Kelley Dupuis Memorial Power Supply Collection, AKA the AC/DC graveyard. It's an entire cardboard box filled with power supplies for computers, monitors, cell phones, boomboxes, digital cameras and whathaveyou, all of which are totally useless. Why? Because the manufacturers of all those computers, monitors, cellphones, boomboxes, digital cameras and whathaveyou, do NOT want you to be able to use their power supply with any other appliance. They want you to have to go buy a new one, so every last one of these damn things is proprietary, the male end of the Sony model just a zillionth of a millimeter too small for the female end of your Canon digital camera.

I can tell you what's going to happen: one of these days everyone's going to start throwing these things out because they can't use them anymore, and we're going to have city councils across the land passing emergency ordinances forbidding the placement of used, obsolete power supplies in your trash.

Now everyone's being told that if you haven't yet gone out and bought a digital TV set, come February, 2009 you're going to be basically S.O.L. I'm not getting too excited about this myself, since we already have a flat-screen digital TV at our house, and even if we didn't, I never watch the damn thing anyway. But it's the same story as with the power supplies. Americans have been watching analogue-style, curved-screen TV sets for more than fifty years. There must be millions of them in attics, basements and guest rooms all over the country. And it's not going to be the way it was when television supplanted radio in the 1950s. Old radios could still be used, after all, people were watching Jack Benny now instead of listening to him, but radio itself was still out there. Even today, collecting old radios is a popular hobby. You can fix them up and listen to them. Who's going to collect old TV sets if they're nothing but big doorstops?

Occasionally there's a healthy backlash against all of this "progress." Last week I spotted an article in the Washington Express about a group calling itself the Vinyl Preservation Society of Idaho. This is a gathering of audiophiles who have awakened to the fact that the 40-or-so-years of the vinyl LP era in the recording industry had yielded countless treasures which had more-or-less gotten shoved off the poop deck and into the drink when Compact Discs and then downloads came along and took over the recording industry. As a dedicated lover of vinyl (as opposed to a dedicated follower of fashion) I fired off an e-mail to these guys, applauding their efforts and inquiring as to how one might start one's own chapter of vinyl-preservers. Just as immediately, I posted a message on Washington, D.C. Craigslist seeking other vinyl-LP buffs out there who might be interested in joining up with the cause.

I got a mighty blast of silence in reply.

But I'm not giving up. The Idaho society is going to send me its start-up kit, and by hook or by crook I'm going to find some like-mided souls here in the mid-Atlantic region. I know they're out there. They have to be. Because just as I know there are boatloads of soon-to-be-obsolete TV sets out there, I'm also aware that in the dusty alcoves of homes all over the land there are cardboard boxes tucked away containing everything from an out-of-print pressing of Die Goetterdaemerung from the 1954 Bayreuth Wagner Festival to Boots Randolph Plays Guy Lombardo.

Oops. Here's the hammer and screwdriver I was looking for. I think I'll go make a grapefruit daiquiri.

Miscellany

If you're among those old enough to remember when LIFE magazine came out every week, (our ranks are thinning) you might recall that every week LIFE published a final-page photo feature entitled "Miscellany." It was usually a funny picture someone had taken of someone doing something either silly or out-of-the-ordinary.

In the tradition of LIFE magazine's old "Miscellany" page, I offer the following bits and pieces for this Monday morning:

It occurred to me that up until a certain age, say, 16, boys' fantasies tend to revolve around cars. From 16 to oh, maybe 50, their fantasies revolve around girls, then women. After age 50 it's back to cars.

Speaking of boys, girls, men and women, I'll bet you didn't know that the song My Boyfriend's Back, recorded in 1963 by The Angels, was actually written by three guys.

Does anybody really believe that those "tests of the emergency broadcast system," which invariably interrupt your favorite song on the radio, really serve any purpose other than fulfilling one more stupid government regulation on broadcasting?

Why do automakers bother equipping cars with "high beam" headlights? When was the last time you actually used them?

While I'm on the subject of automakers, whose stupid idea was it to start equipping new cars with a spare tire just about big enough for a "My Little Pony" tricycle?

There's an old song by Dire Straits called Expresso Love. It has a line in it that goes like this: "I was made to go with that girl/Just like a saxophone was made to go with the night." It's kind of a clumsy line, but I've always liked it because of its truth: for some reason jazz never sounds better than it does late at night.

A long time ago I turned to my friend Debbie Therrien, whose name was Debbie Wells in those days, and I said to her, "You know what I hate?" And she replied, "Practically everything!" Well, that's just not true. I may hate practically everyone, but I don't hate practically everything.

Which leads me to some recent encounters with people that buck the trend:

(1) On July 2 I interviewed author and columnist Kathleen Parker, who just published a book entitled Save The Males: Why Men Matter/Why Women Should Care. Kathleen and I were on the phone for about 45 minutes, and while she's probably getting tired of hearing me say this, as we were talking I fell in love with her at least four times, the same amount of times I fell in love with her while reading her book.

(2) Earlier this summer, after having moved back to Washington, D.C. last year, I tracked down my old friend Holly Inder, whose name was Holly Brayton when we first met four presidential administrations ago. Holly's and my encounters in this old life have been few and far between. When we were both much younger than we are now, we dated for about two weeks, then went our separate ways, literally. She went to Africa and I went to Europe. We both married other people, on different continents but on the same day. Now she's raising three kids in Virginia. I haven't seen her since 1994 and we're still trying to arrange a get-together, but she has one of those telephone voices that lifts your heart. I can't wait to see her again. Viva Holly.

(3) I've been working out at Bally's gym in Hyattsville for a year now, and I just made my first friend there. His name is Rob and he works in the music business. He looks like someone who just failed an audition to fill in for ailing Ronnie Wood on the next Rolling Stones Tour. We're already talking about hitting an Indian buffet after the gym one of these noontimes.

(4) I love the way black women past a certain age here in D.C. tend to address me as "Baby." I offered my seat on the Metro to a fiftyish African-American lady the other day, and she replied, "No thank you, baby. I'm just getting ready to get off." I like that.

(5) Seven years ago I met a woman on Match.com named Tanya. We dated through the summer that led up to 9/11. She was living in Glen Burnie, MD at the time, and I was living in Towson. Shortly after 9/11 she dumped me. My guess is that she met someone else on Match.com whom she liked better. Doesn't matter. I just found out that she's currently living about four miles from where I live. We're meeting for a beer tonight. No hard feelings, but I am planning to punch her in the mouth. If she sticks around after that, I'm willing to kiss and call it even. And I'll pay for the beer.

(6) One of my favorite people in the world is a guy named Doug Parker. I think there's only one thing in the world we disagree on: he likes the San Francisco Giants and I like the San Diego Padres. Other than that we're pretty much of one mind on most things. I've known Doug even longer than I've known Holly, and have gone even longer without seeing him; I last saw Doug in California in 1985, a few months before I came east and met Holly. Doug and I roomed together for a while when we were two starving radio-station guys, he a disc jockey and I a newscaster. He lives in Reno, Nevada, where what's left of my family is having a reunion in October which by the way will coincide with my birthday on Oct. 12. I'm going to stay with Doug. It will be the first time we've slept under the same roof since we shared the "Quick-95 Refugee Camp" in 1984. Set the giggle-and-twitch meter on 12; we have a lot of catching up to do, Doug and I.

Okay, there you have six happy "people" stories. Clearly I don't hate everyone. Meanwhile, Debbie Therrien is now telling me she hates everyone. Live and learn.

Why is it so easy to get married and so hard to get divorced? It ought to be the other way around. If you consider that most people go through life taking the route of least resistance, I'm sure there would be a lot less divorce if it were.

I always laugh when people claim that the CIA is secretly running America, or controlling other governments. I was a federal employee for more than a dozen years. I didn't work for the CIA, but I knew plenty of people who did, and I handled lots and lots of classified documents in my job. What people don't seem to understand about the CIA is that, in the final analysis, it's just another bureaucracy. I wouldn't trust the CIA to deliver a pizza. It would wind up on the wrong continent.

Has anyone bothered to notice that the Jews and Muslims slaughtering each other in the Middle East are actually the same people? There's no feud like a family feud.

I got an e-mail last week from Michael Burgess in California, which I knew was going to be both foul-mouthed and insulting, so I deleted it without reading it. I told him I hadn't bothered reading it. He replied to that and I deleted his message. I told him I hadn't bothered reading his reply. He replied to that and I deleted his message. I told him to save his breath and quit flaming me because I wasn't reading his flamers. He replied to that and I deleted his message. Finally, just to shut him up, I quit telling him to shut up. Now I have just one question: Michael is 51 years old and I'm wondering what he wants to be when he grows up.

Starting late Saturday evening and then concluding on Sunday morning, I watched the movie Summer of '42 one more time. This little film is always going to have a special place on my shelf of favorite movies, because it concerns a 15 year-old boy with a terrible crush on a 22 year-old girl (once was the time I would have written "22 year-old woman," but I've reached the age when 22 year-old women look like girls to me.) I first saw this movie the year it came out, 1971. I myself was 15 then, and the story really hit home. For that reason it still does. But what mostly struck me on the re-watch this weekend was the performance of Jennifer O'Neill. Yes, of course she was dazzlingly beautiful at the time, but there's more to it than that. Her acting talents weren't exactly overburdened by the role, but she infused it with a combination of fresh-as-a-daisy and vulnerable-as-a-rose that simply shimmers. You can't take your eyes off her, and in the next-to-last scene when the film's ironic climax (no pun intended) takes place, the poetry is perfect. Up until this moment the whole teen-introduction-to-sex thing has been pure slapstick; now all of a sudden it's heartbreaking. It's perfect and she's perfect. I have to say that the book Herman Raucher based on his screenplay was much funnier than the movie because you get to hear the narrator making smartass comments to himself. But the film has its funny moments. Still, it's odd; when I read the book I thought the most heart-rending line was its very last sentence. I guess that's partly because there was no way Raucher could render in words alone the incredible visual poetry of Hermie and Dorothy's silent embrace. I'll be watching this movie again, and maybe weeping.

More in a moment.

Hooray for Tourists!

I live in the nation's capital, and I have never made any secret of the fact that there are places I would rather be, especially in the summer. No need to explain that to any resident of the D.C. Metro area; you all know what I'm talking about. When it's 95 degrees here in the great dismal swamp, and the humidity is almost the same as the temperature, when the paper towels in the bathroom come off the roll with a soggy slurp instead of a crisp tear, and the air conditioners are wheezing and sweating and dripping like melting popsicles on the sidewalk, I think we're all pretty much of one mind: whose stupid idea was it to put a city here, much less make it the headquarters of the U.S. government?

But there is one, if only one thing I like about summer in Washington. The city fills up with tourists.

What, I hear you cry? You LIKE that?? Tourists. Eeeww. They're so...touristy. Walking around in shorts and Nikes, herding their little pointy-headed kids around, slowing up left turns as they crowd the crosswalks, standing around scratching their heads on street corners, looking lost. Crowding the mall when you want to jog there.

But there's one thing I will say for tourists, and as far as I'm concerned it trumps all else. In the summertime, Washington fills up with nice people from the midwest, west, south and even Canada. People who will actually talk to you on the Metro as opposed to the D.C. locals, who have snottiness down to an art form. When I visited Washington for the first time, in 1980, I jotted down in my notebook, "The two national pastimes of the nation's capital seem to be jaywalking and rudeness."

Man, was I right on at age 24 or what?

Yesterday I went downtown to run an errand at Voice of America, where I work part-time as a contractor. I usually take Metro when I go downtown so I don't have to hassle with parking.

I had just changed from the Red Line to the Orange Line at Metro Center when a typical, stay-out-of-my-zone D.C. local pushed past me like I wasn't there, didn't bother apologizing for bumping into me, and went on her merry way to take her seat.

I made a face at her retreating back. A man who was obviously visiting town saw me do that and started laughing out loud. I went over to him and said, "I live here. You'd think I'd be used to it."

A bit later, when I had run my errand and was on my way home, once again I found myself riding with a family of visitors, on their way, as visitors so often are, to the Smithsonian museum. The father, sitting next to his son, look down at a copy of the Washington Express sports page lying on the floor and I heard him say to his son, "That man went to the same college as Daddy. Yeah, see? University of Illinois."

I asked the man if he were from Illinois. He said yes, and we chatted a bit for two stops. When we reached Smithsonian station, he, his wife and their three children got up to get off. "Have fun," I said. "Watch your back and your wallet. The bottled water is $3 out there."

Back at Metro Center, switching back to the Red Line, I encountered a couple from Wisconsin. I figured out they were from Wisconsin because the guy was wearing a T-shirt advertising a Harley-Davidson dealer in that state. I chatted these people up too, as we walked to the platform. I drove through Wisconsin last year and noticed that there is a resort there called Chula Vista, which just happens to be the same name as that of the city in California where I grew up. They were as pleasant as could be. I described my overnight stay in Wisconsin last year, mentioning that the town my wife and I stayed in "Had a huge street full of amusement park rides and stuff like that." "That had to be Wisconsin Dells," the woman said. She was right; as soon as she mentioned the place, I remembered. I helped them get on the right train, promptly forgetting that it was also the train I was supposed to get on, and off it, and they went, without me.

When I realized that I had been brain-dead enough to skip my own train and walk over to the wrong side of the platform, I of course promptly went back and caught the next one. What do you know, I encountered yet another visiting family group, this one on its way to Union Station, probably for the food court since they weren't carrying luggage. What nice people! How refreshing to ride the Metro and get something other than the usual combination of cold shoulders, cell-phone blabber and looks intended to kill.

The train largely emptied out at Union Station. My stop is Brookland/CUA, three stops further along. With the train nearly empty now, I strolled along the aisle. I sometimes play a little game on the Metro, checking to see what people are reading. It’s usually either pulp junk or something obviously career-related, but every once in a while you get a surprise.

And I sure got a nice one. I noticed a man sitting near the front of the train and, glancing over his shoulder, I could see that what he was reading was obviously verse. Poetry. Poetry? On the Metro? This merited a closer look. The train was lurching, but I came closer closer and caught:

“O sweet everlasting voices be still;
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold…”

Religious verse, was my first thought. But then I caught a glance of the book’s dust jacket.

The man was reading Yeats. William Butler Yeats. On the METRO.

Tourist or local, I could have kissed him. Yeats. On the Metro. Not Dan Brown, not Danielle Steele, not How To Get Rich And Have Fun Stepping On People At The Same Time by Morally Q. Bankrupt; and not Securing Government Contracts The Virgil Poodinsky Way.

Yeats, my favorite poet of all time. I had to chat up this guy. And I did. We talked about poetry for the short way I had left to go. I recited some Yeats that I had memorized long ago. “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade…”

I’m always underestimating people. I assume they’re going to do, say, and on those rare occasions when they do read, read something stupid. Then I meet someone in the act of communion with something wonderful, and my faith in the human race is, if not restored, at least given an I.V. I left the train with a slight bounce in my step. On the way back to my car I passed a priest, going the other direction. “Morning, father!” I said. “Morning!” He replied. I couldn’t contain myself. I added, “I just saw a guy reading Yeats on the Metro! I think I’ll go home now and die happy!”

The priest might have thought I was crazy. Professor Harold Bloom, the nation’s premier literary critic, might also think so come this Thursday when he gets a note in the mail from me saying basically the same thing I said to the priest.

Yeats! On the Metro! There’s hope for humanity.

Hurray for tourists!

Sipping versus Gulping

As I was saying last week, it's never too late to learn stuff. I'm a veritable fountain of useless information, owing to the fact that I pick up little tidbits and they stay with me. Every now and then I come across a piece of trivia that becomes such an obsessive tic in my memory that I have to go and check out its truth or lack thereof.

A few years ago a copy of a book called The Catbird's Song fell into my hands. It's a collection of the short prose writings of American poet Richard Wilbur. One of the essays in this little book is the reproduction of a memorial address Wilbur delivered in November, 1986 at the National Institute of Arts and Letters, commemorating the passing of his friend and fellow poet John Ciardi. Wilbur said in that address that only once did he witness Ciardi "overestimate" human beings, that being when canned shaving lather was being introduced, in the late nineteen-forties. Ciardi predicted that canned shaving lather would not catch on. His godfather, who had been a barber, had told him that the only decent shaving lather is the type that's "worked up on the face." Wilbur noted that in this one case Ciardi had underestimated men's laziness and susceptibility to advertising. Canned shaving cream soon took over the market completely. Old-fashioned shaving mugs and brushes were relegated to the bottom shelf of your local drugstore's razor-and-cream section, if they appeared at all.

This little factoid, if you even want to call it that, buzzed around in my head like a fly for several years. For much of my adult life I have worn a beard, so shaving was not high on my list of concerns unless you meant trimming around my beard so as not to look like some derelict who just crawled out from under a park bench and is now in search of a long drink of wine.

Recently, for no apparent reason except a desire to do something different, (plus the fact that my beard turned gray some time around my 40th birthday) I decided to go back to being clean-shaven. My wife Valerie is after me to grow the beard back out, and I probably will eventually, but for the time being I'm back to shaving every morning.

This, I decided, was as good a time as any to put the poet's theory to the test. For years, whenever I was shaving, I shaved the way most other guys do: grab the Barbasol, squirt and smear, then reach for the disposable Gillette (10 to a pack), scrape off the barnacles and go.

Now, I'm going to steer clear of any long homilies about our regrettably disposable modern consumer society, in which even cameras are now made to be used and thrown away, because enough has been written about that already. But having decided to give Ciardi's opinion about canned lather versus brushed lather a try, I went to a web site called Classic Shaving.com and found some really neat stuff. Not just shaving mugs and soap, but old-fashioned safety razors, racks you can hang shaving stuff on, even old-fashioned straight razors and strops to sharpen them with.

I once asked my brother-in-law Bill if he had ever tried shaving with a straight razor. "Once," he replied. "I looked like I'd been in a knife fight."

By itself that would deter me from trying an old-fashioned straight razor. But there's also their expense. For a decent one you'll shell out $200 or more. Pass.

But I went ahead and ordered a little kit that consisted of a Burma Shave mug, a brush and a cake of shaving soap. And while since I was on the site anyway and am frequently a victim of the shopping bug, I decided to go three-quarters of the way if not all the way to old-fashioned shaving and I ordered a beautiful nickel-plated safety razor of the sort my father used when I was a kid.

When all of this stuff came in the mail, I couldn't wait until the next morning to give it a try.

Morning came. I went into the bathroom and contemplated my new toys. The razor was a special pleasure; it had heft, unlike those plastic things you use a dozen times and then throw in the garbage. Gently so as not to slice my fingers open, I eased a safety blade into it and screwed it shut. Then I ran some hot water, doused my face with it, put the cake of shaving soap into the mug, ran in a little hot water and went at it with the brush until I had whipped up a mugful of satisfying, thick foam. I then daubed this lather all over my face with the brush and, hefty razor in hand, shaved.

Ciardi was absolutely correct. I never had a closer shave in my life. In fact, as I toweled off my face and splashed on a little aftershave once I was finished, it occurred to me that I had just turned what is normally an unconsidered daily personal-care chore into something of an aesthetic experience.

I'm taking it to the next level: I've already ordered some special bay rum-scented shaving soap, and come my birthday I'm thinking of asking my wife for one of those special shaving-equipment racks and maybe even a beautiful safety razor with a blue ceramic handle or something.

In other words, I've begun to treat shaving as a hobby, not a chore. And you what? I like it. I look forward to shaving now.

Naturally this got me thinking about some other quality-of-life issues, as the pop psychologists and copycat journalists like to call them nowadays. Some years ago my dad and I were sitting on the porch doing our Statler and Waldorf routine, (if you remember the two old geezers from The Muppet Show) when Dad asked me for the time. That day I happened to be carrying a pocket watch, not wearing a wristwatch. I pulled it out of my pocket and flipped it open. "It's 1:15," I told him. That got him started on what an aeshetic experience (he didn't use the word "aesthetic" but I knew what he meant) was even asking for the time in the old days when he was growing up. Wristwatches didn't begin to supplant pocket watches until World War I, about the time my father was born. In his youth if you asked somebody the time, there followed the leisurely ritual of reaching into the pocket and pulling out what was as often as not a lovely thing to behold, a watch that was a work of art, perhaps engraved; perhaps encased in gold or silver. Then, if it was the kind of watch with a cover, there was the deliciously satisfying moment of watching (and hearing) it click open, then to reveal what was as often as not a lovely face and carefully-designed hands meant to convey beauty, charm and grace as well as the fact that it was 1:15.

Nowadays, I'm told, the younger generation has dispensed with watches entirely. You want to know the time, you whip out your cell phone and it tells you in a nice, sterile digital readout. It's certainly efficient to be able to talk, type, take pictures, access the Internet and get the time all from one little device, but it seems to me that something has also been lost along the way somewhere.

And of course nobody writes letters any more. E-mail. Texting. And why not? they're instantaneous and therefore deliver instant gratification. They've also given us a world in which everybody under thirty communicates like this: "OMG! Brandons here & wr going out fr latte's! CUL."

Now, as the Bush-haters have been telling us for four years now, if you don't see that something's wrong, you're not paying attention.

And it isn't just that we're sinking into a moronic morass of babbling stoopidness, although that case can and has been made. My rediscovery of old-fashioned shaving brought with it a realization that what could, and once was, one of life's pleasures had been reduced by efficiency into something perfunctory and sterile. The same with checking what time it is.

And what about sitting down at a real desk made of wood, with a clean-shiny surface, extracting a fine sheet of stationery from a box elegantly-designed to convey a sense pleasing to the eye and touch, and slowly writing a message to a friend with a fountain pen, filled with satisfying dark-blue ink and itself designed to please the eye as well as the hand, and then slipping that message into an envelope, putting a stamp on it and walking down to the mailbox? This could get us into that whole debate about whether or not gift cards are acceptable presents, but somehow when I receive a written letter (which I almost never do any more) I feel gratified to an extent that I don't feel when an e-mail pops into my inbox. Someone actually went to the trouble of getting out pen-and-paper for me, then turning the result over to the United States Postal Service to be delivered to my door? How flattering. And isn't that sad? We once took such things as much for granted as we now do text-messaging, but in this wired-up world of nanosecond-quick communication, a genuine letter, dissed in current American patois as "snailmail," has become an event to be appreciated.

The personal touch. Remember that? I think this afternoon I'm going to bust out the old Montblanc I got for Christmas many years ago. I still have some ink for it somewhere. If I can't think of anyone else to write to, well then, maybe I'll sit right down and write myself a letter. And pretend it came from you.

Hurry Sundown

It's never too late to learn stuff. I'm 52 and I just figured out how to fold a shirt.

For the benefit of you feminists out there, no, I was not taught the proper way to fold a shirt by a woman. I figured it out myself. See, you buy enough shirts, and UN-fold them, sooner or later you're going to figure out that the proper way to fold a shirt is to do that backwards. It took me until I was 52 because I never considered it worth thinking about before. Take your shirts out of the laundry, stuff 'em in the drawer. But I have so many shirts now, T-shirts, polo shirts, dress shirts, whathaveyou, that I'm acquiring a storage problem. Neatly-folded shirts stack better, So now I have a drawerful of neatly-folded shirts. And I folded them myself. My wife stays out of my laundry and I stay out of hers.

I've been writing since I was 13. I think I'm just now starting to get the hang of it. I also think it was the Japanese painter Hokusai who said he never painted a thing worth looking at until he was at least 70. That's a long apprenticeship. But there are two ways of looking at it. One is that he wasted a lot of time painting stuff that wasn't so good. The other is to invoke the analogy of winemaking and figure that the longer the wine was aged, the better it got. Or to put it another way, quoting another source, remember Robert Duvall in Lonesome Dove saying, "The older the violin, the sweeter the music?"

A couple of months ago I published a memoir, Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball and Me. (Outskirts Press: $15.95, available at all major bookselling web sites.) No, this blog posting isn't a marketing effort for my book (buy it! buy it!) but there's a tie-in. One of the major threads to my narrative in that book is how I came, by chance or choice or fate or Kismet or Hand of God whatever you want to call it, to play the role of my father's primary caregiver during the last year of his
life. I won't spoil the story for you, but this much I'll share before you've clicked over to Amazon.com to get my book (go! go!): my father spent the last two years of his life slowly being sucked down into the quicksand of dementia, what we used to call "senility" before political correctness came along and decided that "manic-depressive" should become "bipolar," "handicapped" should become "physically challenged" and "bum" should become "homeless person." But of the attempt to make bad things disappear by changing their names another time.

I think one of the main reasons my father sank into that particular patch of quicksand (and my older sister, a nurse who specializes in geriatric care, agrees with me) was that the old man stubbornly and perversely persisted, after his retirement, in having no interests to speak of. Oh, he liked to go fishing, but that's not exactly an exercise in mental gymnastics, and anyway, he only went fishing every now and then. And he liked baseball, but as much as I love baseball myself, sports are, let's face it, a branch of the entertainment industry. And being entertained isn't mental gymnastics, either. You sit there and let yourself be acted upon. Nothing wrong with that, but surely if it were to have played a role in keeping my father alert, his participation in it should have been more participatory, like one of those people who go to ball games and, clipboard on lap, write their own box score. Or one of those obsessive but occasionally useful bores who memorizes every statistic in the record book and whips them out at parties.

My dad didn't do any of that. Maybe it was because of the generation he sprang from, or his cultural background, or both. My father was born in 1914, the same year as Joe DiMaggio. But he grew up poor in rural Massachusetts and never got much formal education. Whatever were the notions with which he was inculcated while he was growing up, I doubt very much if he questioned any of them. A couple of decades back, former NFL star Alex Karras, in an interview, told of how he had come to the realization that some of the macho attitudes of his older Greek-American male relatives weren't so healthy. He said something along the lines of, "They assumed that if you lived long enough, you retired and went down to Florida to breathe oxygen out of a bottle." Something like that. In any case, Karras decided not to follow suit and took a different path, a healthier one. I wouldn't be surprised if he's still out there somewhere, enjoying life, although I haven't seen him on TV in a long time, which should surprise no one as I don't watch TV.

No, my father, who had little enough to stimulate his brain in 30 years with the U.S. Immigration Service or in the handful of years that he worked at various jobs after retiring from INS, hung up his spurs in 1981 for good. And after that...after that...well, there were his grandchildren, of which the first came along the year he hung up his spurs. He was only too happy to play babysitter and shuttle driver for the next decade and a half until the kids no longer needed constant attention. He read voraciously, but intentionally avoided anything that might challenge his preconceived ideas or introduce him to new ones. Like my mother, he read solely for entertainment. Every week she would bring home books from the library for both of them to read, and it was always the same thing: the latest crop of light novels from the "new releases" shelf.

In fact my father's response to anything that smacked of the esoteric, like his response to anything else he found alien, strange or serving to remind him of his own lack of formal education, was usually hostile. One day when I was home visiting, I happened to have with me a copy of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. I was trying to get through it myself. But I made the mistake one morning of leaving it in the kitchen. My father picked it up and thumbed through it, immediately ascertained that he was looking at something that was probably "over his head," and then I listened from the next room as he bellowed at my mother that by-God if a thing like that were written today, nobody would read it! With that, he marched out the back door, confidence restored, like a dog that's just barked at a basketball.

My point here is that my dad not only didn't engage his mind very much, but he deliberately avoided engaging it. He would have nothing to do with hobbies. He regarded that sort of thing as frivolous, and anyway, had he indulged himself in something like philately or oil painting, it would have meant forfeiting his most cherished role, that of the self-inflicted sufferer who denies himself for the sake of those around him. In other words, seeking to make the family in general feel guilty for his own relentless unhappiness, my father perversely avoided indulging himself in nearly any way. He loved baseball, but there was no question of season tickets -- that would have smacked of self-indulgence. He stayed home and watched on TV. And getting back for a moment to the subject of books, the older he got, the narrower his reading got, until shortly before his mind leaked away to the point where he could no longer read at all, he was reading nothing but large-print pulp westerns with titles like Canyon Of the Gun and A Noose For The Marshal.

He liked gardening and did a good job taking care of the place. But again, this, and other favored activities like sweeping the driveway, were automatic exercises, the sorts of things a lot of people do to keep themselves from thinking. I don't mean to run down gardening; I have friends who assure me that it can be very therapeutic. But it's also kind of a zen activity, centered around things that stand still and not requiring much in the way of abstract thought.

So my dad ran down, over a period of a few years, like a clock that someone forgot to wind. I suppose it's a fate that awaits many of us, perhaps me. Phenomena like Stanley Kunitz, who wrote poetry until he was 100 years old, or George Burns, who made his last public appearance at 99, or Arthur Rubinstein, who was still playing the piano in his nineties, are more the exception than the rule.

But exception or not, they are object lessons, and there are many, many others. All three of these guys stayed clear until the end because they stayed engaged. Rubinstein didn't stop performing at the piano until his eyesight went. Burns continued to tell his wonderful stories to audiences even when he had to do it sitting down. Kunitz, well, Kunitz was a poet. Poetry is a calling that requires you to use your brain, and it doesn't leave you. T.S. Eliot gave up writing poetry after publishing his Four Quartets in 1948, but he had other things to occupy his mind by then, like criticizing other peoples' poetry. Rimbaud quit writing poetry, but he was emotionally unstable to begin with. Most poets, once they get the bug, don't lose it. And of course creative activity of any kind keeps the mind engaged.

I hope senility -- er, pardon me, dementia -- doesn't get me the way it did my dad. I watched him gradually turn back into a baby, and it was a painful thing to watch, despite the fact that he and I spent most of my life anyway mad at each other for a variety of reasons which, if you're curious about them, BUY MY BOOK! But now, at age 52, all I can offer as a hedge against my father's fate is that I intend to learn from the object lesson of his benighted life and, from here on out, stay with my interests. I buy books all the time, (to my wife's chagrin) and actually try to find time to read them. And I try to buy books on a wide variety of subjects, so that I'm not just reprocessing the same material over and over but picking up new things. And of course the act of writing is an engaged activity which, fortunately for me, you can do sitting down.

My father ended his days calling me "Bill." It's my profoundest hope that, should I live to be 91 as he did, on the last day of my life I'll remember that his name was Joe.

A Glorious Fourth? Well...

This year, as I perused my special preview edition of Indycar magazine in preparation for the 92nd running of the Indianapolis 500, the one sporting event aside from the baseball season that attracts my attention at all, I noted one glaring fact:

They listed the birth date of each driver. And I could tell you where I was and what I was doing when each and every one of them was born.

But I won't do that.

Still, I am here this morning to discuss one of those subjects that you have to have a few years on you to be able to discuss, to wit: something many of you out there in blogland are just too damn young to remember.

This week the Sally Forth comic strip has had the two main characters, Sally and Ted Forth, reminiscing for the benefit of their daughter Hillary about the Great Bicentennial Bash, America's 200th birthday celebration: July 4, 1976.

Presumably the Forths and their cartoonist creator, whose name I won't give here because I suspect it's a nom-de-plume, were little children in that bicentennial year. They talk of where their parents took them that day.

My parents didn't take me anywhere. I don't even know where they were. My journal entry for July 4, 1976 indicates that at suppertime I was alone in the house.

That is correct. I've been keeping a journal for more than 35 years, since I was in my early teens. It enables me to bore people to death with exercises like this one. I have at my left elbow a tattered, falling-apart Stuart Hall wirebound 100-page theme book on whose blue cardboard cover is scrawled "Journals, 1976."

In the summer of 1976 I was preparing to start my senior year of college. I would turn 21 in another three months or so. Hence, my being alone in the house was no big deal. I was a legal adult, if just barely.

And for the Forths, and all who were children then, or for those who were not even children yet and are hearing about what a great bash that party was, I can toss a little salad dressing on your heads.

For me, anyway, it wasn't such a great day. My day began at 8:30 that morning when I rose late; I seem to have spent most of it alone, and it concluded before midnight with a buddy and me, bored out of our skulls, sitting on the beach drinking beer in the dark.

And my journal records that I was already getting pretty sick of all the hoopla.

For those of you who remember...Beginning on July 4, 1974, precisely two years before the Big Day, the Shell Oil Company sponsored the first of its "Bicentennial Minutes." Each night, around 8 p.m., some celebrity would appear in a one-minute spot brought to you by Shell, in which that celebrity would detail, as fife music played in the background, some event that occurred on that date 200 years earlier which helped lead up to the American Revolution.

This went on 365 nights a year for two years. By the time the Big Day was drawing near, the Bicentennial Minutes had gotten to be kind of a national running joke. On one episode of All In The Family, after Archie Bunker had just concluded one of his high-volume bigoted rants and then bolted the room with his usual concluding words, "Get away from me, all of youse!" Mike Stivic, his left-wing son-in-law with the droopy mustache turned to those remaining in the room and said, "I think we just heard Archie Bunker's Bicentennial Minute."

Okay, I did bust a gut laughing at that, but it pointed up an essential truth: that enough was getting to be enough. Here, as written evidence, is how my journal entry for July 5, 1976 begins:

"Yesterday was the Bicentennial Bash. The biggie, July 4, 1976. I remember how, two years ago when I was taking History 19A (American history) in summer school, I planned to go to Boston this year and be with Uncle Louie [my dad's brother] yesterday. Well, since July 4, 1974, when they televised the first Bicentennial Minute, I have had a chance to get plenty sick of all of it, and probably wouldn't have gone to Boston this summer even if I'd had the chance."

Yes, at 20 I was having Bicentennial Burnout. And I'm sure I wasn't alone.

My diary goes on to record that after rising late, I made myself a huge pancake breakfast and then, at 11:15, went to Mass. Catholics are expected to attend church on July 4. Presumably I wasn't planning to take communion, since I ate breakfast.

I spent the shank of that exciting afternoon in front of the tube, watching a special July 4 presentation of the movie Patton starring George C. Scott. It was presented on Channel 100, which in the mid-1970s was San Diego County's forerunner to HBO.

Even at 20 I was concerned with getting exercise, and my journal records that when the movie was over I went out to the family garage where I had some weight-lifting equipment, lifted weights a little bit and then went out for a constitutional (no pun intended) spin on my bicycle, as I recall a burgundy-red Schwinn Continental (again, no pun intended) that I had bought out of my wages while pumping gas back in high school.

While riding my bicycle around Chula Vista, I bumped into my old pal Mike Baker, driving aimlessly around in his Plymouth Challenger, an exemplar of that wondrous era when you often saw such "muscle cars" on the street, gas at that time costing about 50 cents a gallon. Michael worked at the local Sav-On drugstore in those days, a job he had slid into directly after his own high-school graduation. He was also a volunteer police reservist; his ambition, never realized, was to become a policeman. This detail will become relevant shortly. Michael and I had been friends for a handful of years; about 18 months before this Fourth of July street encounter, he had had his heart seriously broken by my younger sister Lynn, and he hadn't fully recovered yet. Fortunately that didn't affect our friendship, Michael's and mine. Michael and Lynn are both dead now.

Michael and I agreed to get together later in the evening. Our half-baked plan was to drive out to Coronado and watch the fireworks display over the San Diego Bay. My diary then records that I went home, drank three-Scotch-and-waters (I don't know where I got the Scotch, since I was three months short of being old enough to buy it for myself) ate canned chili con carne for supper which later gave me heartburn, and went back to watching the bicentennial whoopee stuff on TV.

Michael showed up on the porch about 8:30 p.m. We got in his Challenger and headed for Coronado. But halfway out the Silver Strand we came across an automobile accident: two cars that had hit each other, two police patrol cars, Navy ambulance, flares all over the place and the usual crowd of rubberneckers. Now, we could have just driven on, but Michael took his obligations as a police reservist seriously, and he insisted on pulling over and volunteering to help direct traffic. I was left in the car to listen to the radio for about half an hour.

But he finally came back and we headed on up and into Coronado. We went to a liquor store where Michael bought a six-pack of Schlitz. (Schlitz was his brand in those days because he had seen Clint Eastwood drinking it in one of the Dirty Harry movies. I'm serious.) We took our six pack and trudged, in the dark, out to the middle of Coronado Beach, right in front of the Hotel del Coronado. There we plunked ourselves down in the sand and sat there on our asses, drinking beer, while Michael poured out his romantic woes to me (he had just started up again with an old girlfriend, but was still talking about my sister a lot) and all around us, lovers canoodled and occasional fireworks went off.

After drinking three cans of beer each, we went to Burger King to use the john. Michael was hungry and bought himself a burger and fries. I had heartburn.

I was in bed before midnight.

And you know something? I live in Washington, D.C. now, and I really don't expect that this Fourth of July is going to be all that much different. The Fourth also happens to be my wife Valerie's birthday, and I had invited some friends over for a cookout, but you know how it is...even with gas at $4.50 a gallon, most of them had already made plans to go out of town. Well, one thing's for certain, we won't run short of food. I bought enough spareribs for six or seven people, and it looks like it's just going to be the two of us and maybe one guest.

Oh, well. Maybe Patton will be on. Yeah, I've seen it a hundred times since 1976, but I know one thing about it: it's long enough to kill a dull afternoon.