Memo to the New York Yankees: What Have You Done LATELY?

Before anyone reads this posting, let it be known that I just hung a photograph on my bedroom wall of Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig sitting on the dugout bench together in 1938. "The Iron Man and the rookie."

This photograph was the only piece of baseball memorabilia that survived a horrific kitchen fire in a house my wife Valerie and I owned in Spokane Washington, on January 8, 2007. Everything else I had hung on the walls of that kitchen, including my mounted, autographed color picture of Nolan Ryan, taken on the night in 1989 when he threw his 5,000th strikeout, was destroyed. But while picking through the soaked, charred wreckage of the completely-gutted kitchen, I found this photo of DiMaggio and Gehrig, which I had given my late father as a Father's Day gift some years earlier, lying on the floor in a corner. It was badly covered with soot, but salvageable. I cleaned it up, framed it and hung it over my dresser.

Why would I, as dedicated a Yankee-hater as ever stepped into a ballpark, want a photograph of Gehrig and DiMaggio facing my bed? Not hard, as Robert Graves once said. It's right and morally proper to hate and despise evil empires. And as evil empires go, the Yankees rank right up there with the USSR, which squandered 55 percent of its GNP on military hardware. The GNP of the USSR was probably about the same size as the Yankees' payroll.

But hating evil, as personified by people like Stalin and George Steinbrenner, is one thing. Respecting great players is something entirely else. And Gehrig and DiMaggio were great players. DiMaggio, in fact, might qualify as the third greatest player of all time, behind Ruth and Cobb, or Cobb and Ruth, depending on which side of that argument you're on.

'Nuff said. On to the fun.

I've been driving around reading about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry for days, owing to the fact that I've been keeping Mike Vaccaro's marvelous book Emperors and Idiots, a history of that rivalry, in my car to give me something to do while waiting out Washington, D.C.'s innumerable (and endless) red lights.

While enduring page after page, chapter after chapter of Yankee strut and swagger and Red Sox agony, I started thinking about the unfortunate, and not terribly accurate overall impression this creates for the average reader who doesn't know much about baseball but who, bombarded with Yankee propaganda from predominantly New York-based news media, is bound to get the impression of the Yankees as a team of unbeatable champions who never lose.

Well, the humiliation that the Red Sox visited upon the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series aside, (and it was truly, madly, deeply a humiliation; not just a defeat, but a crushing of Goliath's testicles by an insolently merry and disrespectful David) and by the way, the bluster of simian Yankee fans who never shut up about the Pinstripes' 26 World Series titles also aside, one intractable fact remains, and I'll go to the mat for it.

The Yankees have spent most of my life in a slump.

I was born in October, 1955. The very year, in fact the very month, that the Brooklyn Dodgers finally managed to beat the New York Yankees in the World Series after all those years of failure. The 1950s were the Yankees' decade, no question about it. Fortunately, not having been born until '55, I pretty much missed out on their glory days.

But, despite the much-vaunted 1956 Yankee "revenge" victory over the Dodgers in the following year, (in which Don Larsen pitched the perfect game which would be the last perfect game pitched by a Yankee until Larsen's fellow alumnus of San Diego's Point Loma High School, David Wells, did it in 1998) The End for the Yankee Dynasty was already in sight.

A premonitory flicker of The End occurred in 1960, when the Pittsburgh Pirates took the World Series away from the Yankees on Bill Mazeroski's famous bottom-of-the-ninth home run in Game 7. It amazes me when I hear people like Billy Crystal, in Ken Burns' famous documentary film Baseball, talk about Mazeroski's home run as if it were somehow unjust, a case of lese-majeste against their eternally-entitled heroes. Au contraire. That was justice, Billy, not its opposite. That was those oh-so-reliable mills of the gods, grinding deliciously away at New York's trademark arrogance.

The Yankees did come back to win the World Series in 1962, against the Giants. That was the October I turned seven.

I took no notice of it. I was only seven, had just attained the biblical Age of Reason. I was even years away from even becoming a Yankee hater.

But that truly was The End, for a long time.

The Yankees would not win another World Series until 1977, the October I turned 22. 15 years. Not exactly a dynasty. In fact in 1966, the year I played shortstop for the South Bay Little League Shamrocks, the Yankees finished dead-last in the American League. Boston ended the season in next-to-last place, one game ahead of them.

The World Series of 1963 and '64, the first two October classics I was old enough to notice, framed the highly-just end of a Yankee dynasty that had begun in 1949, the year New York took the pennant away from Boston in a cliffhanger of a late season (see David Halberstam's Summer of '49, a truly great baseball book.) But by 1963 it was over. First the '63 Los Angeles Dodgers, with the deadly right-left pitching rotation of Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, throttled the Yankees in four games, and then the '64 Cardinals, fueled by the vicious right-hander Bob Gibson, vanquished them again. And then they were gone, the Yankees. Not to be seen again for a long time.

The Yankees would not even appear in another Series for 13 years.

They won the World Series in 1977, the year I turned 22. They won it again the following year when I turned 23.

They would not win the World Series again until the October I turned 41, 1996. In fact, the last Series in which they even appeared during that 18-year period was 1981, which they lost to the Dodgers.

From '81 to '96 they weren't even there. New York baseball in the 1980s and early '90s, as my book Three Flies Up points out, was all about the Mets. The Yankees were in the wilderness.

Under Joe Torre they had a flurry of successes in the final four years of the 20th century, winning four Series championships between 1996 and 2000. But do the math. I'm 53 now, and since I was seven, the Yankees have won the World Series eight times. Eight victories in 46 years. That's not a dynasty. That's not winning all the time. It isn't even winning most of the time. Yankee fans who gloat about 26 championships are mostly remembering the period from 1920 to 1962.

1962 was 47 years ago. John F. Kennedy was president in 1962. People were dancing the Twist in 1962. Women wore beehive hairdos in 1962.

1962 was a long time ago.

Now, let's move on and take a look at the 21st century, the only one that matters because it's the one we're living in now. The 20th century is history. Gone. Done. Ovah, as big-mouth, hot-air spewing New Yorkers say.

How many World Series titles have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?

Zip. Zero. None.

"What about 2000!!??" I hear Yankee fans screeching.

Sorry, no. Zero is not a positive integer. The new count begins with "1." The year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century, not the first year of the 21st.

Now that we've settled that, ahem. I ask, how many World Series championships have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?

Zip. Zero. None.

How many World Series championships have the Boston Red Sox won in the 21st century?

Two.

That's Red Sox two, Yankees nothing. And that's not the score from a Thursday night pitcher's duel, that's the score over eight years of the new century. The new century that wipes the slate clean. They say that after the last pitch of the World Series is thrown, everyone is in last place again until next spring.

Ditto when a century turns. When a century turns, the team that blustered and boasted its way through the previous century, buying pennants because it had more money than some countries, is rated exactly the same as all the other teams. On January 1, 2001, everybody in baseball was in last place. No 21st century World Series rings had been handed out yet.

Since then, Red Sox players have earned two. Yankee players, none.

2004 was the annus mirabilis of the 21st century. It will be hard to improve on from the standpoint of good historical precedents. Because it was the year New York's mouth was slammed shut.

And until the Yankees win a championship in this century, it had better stay shut.

Wagner in Steeltown, USA? Ausgeschlossen.

Today, for only the second time in my career as a concertgoer and opera fan, I walked out of an opera before it was over.

In fact I walked out before it was half over.

In fact I walked out at the end of Act I.

The opera was Wagner's Siegfried, the production that of Washington (D.C.) National Opera.

The last time I walked out of an opera was in March, 1986, when my pal Charlie Berigan and I took to our heels following the second act of Handel's Samson at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The staging was just so downright silly that we decided we'd had enough.

But that time we walked out of purely aesthetic considerations. This time was different. This time I was both disgusted and offended.

I bought my ticket for this matinee performance last September. I waited eight months to see it. Then, on the very morning of the day I was to go to the opera, someone from the Wagner Society of Washington circulated the New York Times' review, written by Anthony Thommasini. It begins like this:

"WASHINGTON — Like many companies, the Washington National Opera is presenting its new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in installments over several seasons. But financial setbacks, now everyday news in the performing arts, have forced the company to stretch out the schedule of its “Ring,” directed by Francesca Zambello in a co-production with the San Francisco Opera, much further than planned.

The company’s new “Siegfried,” the third opera in the cycle, opened at the Kennedy Center on May 2, three years after the first, “Das Rheingold.” The “Ring” will not be presented complete until 2013. But this “Siegfried,” seen here on Thursday night, was worth waiting for.

Ms. Zambello and her creative team, especially the set designer Michael Yeargan, are interpreting Wagner’s epic through the lens of American mythology and iconography. The “Ring” is presented as a class conflict between the haves and the have-nots."

Now, if I had seen this review in time, I would have put my ticket for this production up for sale on eBay. I go to the opera to hear music and experience drama, not to be preached at about politics. Especially not Marxist politics. Are these people kidding? There is nothing fresh, innovative or cutting-edge about loading up a Ring of the Nibelungs production with nonsense about "class struggle." It's been done before. Lots of times.

Maybe director Francesca Zambello didn't get the memo, but this is the ninth year of the 21st century, not the 68th year of the 20th.

Evidently New York Times reviewer Thommasini didn't get the memo either, although it shouldn't surprise me that the relentlessly left-wing New York Times would respond to "Marxist" Wagner, even 50 years after "Marxist" Wagner was anything new, the way the New York Times responds to anything "Marxist:" by jumping up and down squealing and hyperventilating like an excited pom-pom girl at a Pop Warner football game.

I went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing Arts not knowing quite what to expect. But I had a ticket in my pocket for which I'd paid $102 last year, and I wasn't about to just waste it.

But when the curtain went up on Act I, my worst fears were realized.

God, I wish somebody, somehow would do something about snotty, self-important theatrical directors who feel compelled to take classic works of art and stage productions of them aimed at communicating some political or moral message that originated in the mind of the director, not the author. Some message the director wants the audience to get. Directors should tell people where to stand and whether or not to cry when they deliver their lines. They should not take the work in question and use it as a soapbox for their own political beliefs.

Hence, the set of Act I of Siegfried, a tale set in mythic times among dark forests, with Nordic heroes, gods and giants wielding magic swords and whatnot, resembled the set of the old NBC sitcom Sanford and Son. Mime, the dwarf who dreams of stealing the mythic ring and the hoard of gold that goes with it for himself, is depicted as living in some sort of east Los Angeles junkyard, littered with gas cans, lawn chairs, piles of scrap metal and the bombed-out trailer that he apparently sleeps in. There's an old gas stove in front of the trailer that he cooks on, a la life in a 1930s hobo jungle. (Steinbeck!) As if all of that detail didn't make the "message" heavy-handed enough, looming in the background were gigantic images of an electric power corridor. (Industry!)

How absurd to have Wagner's characters singing about forging swords and slaying dragons on a set that would more appropriately have accomodated rival street gangs going at each other with guns and knives.

As greasy hero Siegfried, and then the god Wotan disguised just as greasily as "The Wanderer," enter and exit during Act I, they repeatedly go to Mime's bombed-out trailer to get bottles of something, presumably good, proletarian beer, out of the refrigerator, from which they swig while they deliver their lines. All this scene needed was Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in his "wife-beater" shirt, yelling "Stella!"

Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski? As I watched this idiocy unfold, I kept thinking of the first night I attended the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. During the Soviet period of Russia's history, the stage of the Bolshoi Theater was crested, proudly and in full view for all to see, with a gigantic profile of Lenin and a just-as-gigantic red Soviet hammer-and-sickle. Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle have long since been removed from the Bolshoi, as they are no longer anything of what modern Russia is all about.

In terms of sheer subtlety, that picture of Lenin and that hammer-and-sickle were all this production lacked. Perhaps Ms. Zambello contacted the Bolshoi to see if she could borrow Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle, and, given how cutting edge her vision is, she was no doubt shocked and dismayed to find that they had been long since discarded. Too bad for her.

It is almost beyond belief how anyone in the 21st century could take seriously a "Marxist" spin on Wagner, or anything else for that matter that wasn't intended as "Marxist" to begin with. Pretty hard to keep a Bertolt Brecht play non-Marxist, which is probably why you don't see or hear too much of Brecht anymore, but Wagner? Sure, he was one of the 1848 revolutionaries, but that didn't make him a Marxist, and certainly not a Leninist. And it's no excuse at all for muddle-headed aging romantics (I call them "the bald-headed ponytail crowd") who just can't let go of their tie-dyed Che Guevara T-shirts, carte blanche to go on for decade after decade using the Ring to flog a horse that, whether they like it or not, is dead.

for Mr. Thommasini and Ms. Zambello and all of the others who didn't get the memo, the USSR rolled over and died nearly 20 years ago. Even the supposedly "communist" Chinese have embraced their own somewhat bizarre relationship with free-market capitalism. The whole notion of class struggle, of "haves" and "have nots" locked into a quantifiable and scientifically-scannable preordained fight-to-the-death is as hopelessly 19th century an idea as perpetual motion or phrenology. I repeat: are these people kidding? Does anyone, in the year 2009, seriously believe in Marxism anymore, an idea which is no longer even "last century," but now, "the-century-before?"

I'm all for updating Wagner. But while we're trying to be up-to-date, let's keep in mind that some things that seemed "up-to-date" when the Beatles were still making records are anything but up-to-date now. "Marxist" Wagner? This can only be about my fellow baby-boomers' nostalgia for the Woodstock era.

Oops, I've said it. Next we'll see a production of Der Rosenkavalier set at a 1960s hippie rock festival.

Hopefully I'll see the reviews before I waste my money on a seat.

People change

My choice of images with which to begin this blog posting was the basest kind of self-indulgence, rooted in the deepest nostalgia.

And I freely confess that nostalgia is a vice of mine, no less than alcohol, food and gambling are to some other people.

The image of Rod McKuen that appears above (and I realize that most of you don't remember Rod McKuen, which is the reason I'm writing this) is the cover of an album he made for Warner Brothers Records in 1969, Rod McKuen at Carnegie Hall. Billed as his "birthday concert," it was a live album of his songs and readings. Four sides, what was called a "double album" in those days.

For my 16th birthday on Oct. 12, 1971, I asked for, and received, this album. I still have it somewhere.

For that same birthday I was taken to a Rod McKuen concert at the San Diego Civic Theater. After the concert was over, I hung around among the Q&A crowd. Asked a question. He wasn't giving autographs, but I waited around the theater exit after that, and when he came out, I went up to him and shook his hand. I was newly-minted 16. "Mr. McKuen, I just want to thank you, because it was you who got me started writing poetry two years ago," I said to him.

"That's good, don't let anybody stop you," he replied.

He was a star. His fame was superlative. If you had given almost any American a word-association test in 1971 and said, "poet," the response would have been "Rod McKuen."

Women carried his books around in their purses. He was commissioned by popular magazines to write cycles of poems. People like Frank Sinatra recorded his songs.

And now almost nobody remembers who he is. He's in his late seventies now. He wears a beard, and looks a bit like George Carlin did just before he died. I hope that doesn't mean we're about to lose McKuen, even if the world forgot about him years ago, and I myself, by the time I was 17, no longer thought as much of his poetry as I did a year earlier. (By then I was hooked on Dylan Thomas.)

McKuen wrote many songs that were quite famous in their day, including Seasons In The Sun and Jean from the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Maggie Smith. Smith won an Oscar for her performance in that film. McKuen was nominated for an Oscar for the song, but lost out to Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, a song Burt Bacharach had written for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the same year.

One of McKuen's many songs was entitled People Change.

And here, in which you will re-read much of what I just wrote, is a preview of my own novel-in-progress. What follows is an excerpt from a telephone conversation between the protagonist of my new novel and his recently-ex girlfriend:


“People change,” Olga remarked.

McCarver laughed. “You know what you just said? You couldn’t possibly know. But you just gave me the title of a song by Rod McKuen, and it couldn’t have popped out of your mouth at a more appropriate time. McKuen wrote a song called People Change.”

“Who was he?”

“Yeah, almost nobody remembers him anymore. Hard to believe, but in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, his name was practically a household word. He was a singer—with a terrible voice, though, very gravelly—and a songwriter who also wrote this treacly free-verse poetry that was very easy to read because it didn’t try very hard to be poetry. It was just thoughts, meandering thoughts, usually about failed love affairs. Women were suckers for this stuff; they love ‘sensitive’ men. Housewives carried his books around in their purses. If you asked any American in the early seventies to name a poet, ‘Rod McKuen’ would probably be the name you’d hear. He was perfect for that blow-dried era. I used to have some of his books. Lonesome Cities. Fields of Wonder. Some of the books were actually based on his record albums. Lonesome Cities was also an LP record, released in 1968 I think. Magazines like Women’s Day commissioned McKuen to write poems for them. He wrote a song, Jean, which was featured in the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Maggie Smith. Jean was nominated for the Oscar in 1970 for Best Song, but was beaten out by Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head from the score that Burt Bacharach wrote for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. All of this is apropos of nothing of course, except when Wayne Breedlove and I were teenagers, Rod McKuen was our idol. I used to check the Lonesome Cities LP out of the public library and listen to it by the hour when I was, oh, 15. Believe it or not, my big birthday present for my 16th birthday was being taken to a Rod McKuen concert here in Baltimore. Wayne’s and my early poems sounded just like McKuen’s, as did those of every wannabe poet in the United States in those days. Now he’s almost completely forgotten. But he was plenty big in his time. I was with Wayne when I heard my first Rod McKuen album, The Single Man. Queasiest bunch of self-pity-fueled hogwash you ever heard. We loved it. We wanted to be just like him.”

We did, too.

Now, with that by way of introduction, I get down to my real subject, which is how people really do change.

What follows is a list of things about me that have changed during my life. I used to be this, used to be that, used to like this, used to eat that...don't anymore.

I'll bet you're the same way. Because people change.

Make your own list. Share with me. As the Greeks used to say, "Know thyself." I had an argument along these lines just the other day, with a friend who refused to see the usefulness of examining the past. Only the present matters, she insisted.

Which is the same as saying that a room at night looks better with the lights off. Sure it looks better with the lights off; You're not looking at anything. I won't quote that wheezy saw of George Santayana's about how those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them, but I think there is more to be learned from the past than just remembering where you got the cuts and bruises. Wordsworth said the child is father to the man; what better way to know the man, or woman, than to remember the child?

What better way to know thyself than to reflect on how different your today self is from the self you used to know? (Or, as another of McKuen's songs had it, The World I Used To Know?)

Here are some ways in which I have changed over the years. Make your own list and share.

1. When I was 25 I was a big fan of Bruce Springsteen's. I can't stand him anymore. I think if I saw him coming down the street now, I'd go the other way.

2. When I was eight, I loved ketchup on scrambled eggs. Not now.

3. I was a bed-wetter as a child. God, I hope that doesn't come back in old age. It did to my father.

4. Like all baby boomers, I grew up watching television. Thousands of hours of it. You couldn't pay me to watch TV now.

5. When I was in college, I thought Japanese women were the most beautiful women in the world. I haven't necessarily abandoned them, but they've been supplanted by Russian women. (That could be because I've never lived in Japan, but I have lived in Russia.)

6. When I was 12 years old I dreamed of being an astronomer. By the time I was 15 I had realized that someone who can just barely manage long division is not going to be an astronomer. That ambition deflated quickly.

7. At ten I bridled at being told to go to bed. Now I don't have to be told.

8. Like most novice drinkers, when I was 19 I thought rum-and-coke was a great drink. Kids like alcohol, but they like it sweet. The thought of drinking rum-and-coke now is almost enough to make me heave.

9. In high school I thought that T.S. Eliot was a great poet, and that W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats were jokes. After one semester of college I had reversed that judgement 180 degrees.

10. At 20 I had a thick, full head of hair. At 53 I look like Arnold Schoenberg.

11. When I was a child, any and all talk of lawns, gardens and that sort of junk on the part of adults would make my eyes glaze over. Now I'm thinking about when I should plant my tomatoes. (Hint: next week.)

12. At 15 I used to sit up at night worrying about death. Now I just take another drink and go to sleep. As the guy said in the movie Manhattan, "I'm alive, I'm alive. When I'm dead, I'm dead."

13. As a youngster I was bored silly by jazz. I love it now.

14. I used to be afraid of girls. Now I'm afraid of women. (Probably more than I am of death, come to think of it.) Now, don't start screeching "misogynist," all you "feminists" out there. We all fear what we don't understand, and I gave up on understanding women years ago.

15. The exception that proves the rule: at 10 I used to get in trouble for reading library books when I was supposed to be doing my arithmetic. Stuff like that still happens -- I will still shirk what I'm supposed to be doing in favor of what I like to be doing.

16. When I was a teenager I loved the short days of fall and hated the spring. Now I love the spring and, although I still rather like the short days of fall, now they make me think of mortality more than what they used to make me think of, e.g. the holidays.

17. I used to love to go to the movies. When I was a kid, 50 cents got you a feature film on a big screen, and a cartoon. Now $11 gets you a feature film on a screen the size of someone's garage door, preceded by 15 minutes of commercials. Pass.

18. When I was young a snootful of alcohol would prompt me to call someone on the phone and bend their ear. Now, with each successive drink I take, the telephone becomes a repellent, not an attraction.

19. I used to love the play Inherit The Wind, in fact I did a cutting from its courtroom scene for speech tournaments when I was on the speech squad in high school. Now I regard it as simplistic, two-dimensional, manipulative and generally second-rate.

20. I was raised, like a lot of Americans are, sort of nominally Protestant. My parents' attitude was, any church more-or-less is okay as long as it isn't Catholic. In fact my parents (neither of whom went further than high school) encouraged me to despise and look down my nose at Catholics. When I was 19 I became Catholic. I haven't been anywhere near a church in years now, Protestant or Catholic, but I don't look down my nose at anyone (except New York Yankee fans.)

And now.......before I sign off, let me leave you with this thought, something to ponder the next time your local surplus store is having a special on gas masks:

A few years ago one of my doctors told me (and I don't know where he heard it) that when you sit down on the toilet to have a bowel movement, most of what you pass is not, in fact, food waste.

Most of it is stuff you have inhaled.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

Aujourd'hui le déluge

Pictured at right is one of Washington, D.C.'s tourist attractions, the D.C. Duck. Half-bus and half-boat, You can ride around town on it, and then right across the tidal basin.

If things don't ease up here soon, however, the D.C. Duck might become a mode of commuter transport.

In fact, if things don't ease up here soon, we may all develop webbed feet. WE'LL be the D.C. Ducks.

If you were to visit the nation's capital now, I swear you'd think you were in Seattle. You know, good old rainy Seattle, where they see the sun so seldom that Bill Cosby once commented that when the sun does come out, people look at each other guiltily and ask, "What did we DO?"

Today is Thursday, and I don't think we've seen the sun since last Friday. In the meantime it's been either pissing down or pouring rain down rain steadily. Rain to annoy you a bit, like that persistent dribble that forces you to set your windshield wipers on "every-ten-seconds," and then all of a sudden whoosh--it's coming down like the proverbial cow pissing on a rock.

Last night my wife Valerie was busy in the garage, sorting out things for a neighborhood yard sale this weekend. She wanted me to get my three bicycles out of the way. I put them in the backyard for temporary storage, but was afraid they'd get rained on, so I rummaged in the basement until I came up with the only thing I could find to cover them with -- the drop cloth I use when I paint. Not the best thing, because it's only canvas, with no plastic on either side. But better than nothing. I threw it over the bikes where they leaned up against the back fence.

A few minutes later Valerie came up to me with an old used shower curtain she had found. "Here, this is plastic, it'll cover those bikes better than that canvas drop cloth," she said.

I went out and threw the shower curtain over the bikes. And not a moment too soon, either, because less than five minutes later here it came again, another downpour like something out of the ninth chapter of Genesis.

What is going on here? If this had happened in January and all of this precipitation we've been getting this week had been snow instead of rain, the government would have shut down completely. I'm not kidding. I have lived here in D.C. off and on for years. At the first sign of a winter snowflake, government offices empty out. It looks like the crowd fleeing Godzilla in a Japanese monster movie.

Come to think of it, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, would it? D.C.'s horrific commuter traffic would get to take a holiday, as would the rampant waste of your tax money on things like invisible sneakers and studies of why fish don't watch television.

I'll tell you one thing, though. All joking about the government aside, this relentless storm system is playing hell with us suburban crabgrass farmers. We have a particularly aggressive species of bluegrass that grows around here. When this stuff takes a nap in the winter, it's just harboring its energies for spring. The grass in my backyard grows so fast that the place looks like the Guatemelan jungle if I fail to mow at least once a week. Now, add all of this rain to that and you have a situation where the grass is growing so fast it looks like it's threatening to overthrow the city.

Remember that Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon about the Pottsylvania Creeper, Bullwinkle's prize-winning flower that grew to monstrous size in minutes...and then started eating people? I think I have something like that on my hands.

So does my next-door neighbor Ted, who came over here last night just as he was preparing to launch a lawnmower assault on his own lawn one more time. He had a great idea.

"I'm gonna buy some goats," he said. "How many goats do you want?"

"I'll take three," I told him. Do I have to provide them with rain slickers?

Ha-ha, of course not.

But I might have to call the D.C. Duck to come rescue them -- and me -- from off the roof if this doesn't end soon.

Sales Resistance 1A

Okay, everybody. Here's yet another chance for all of you to benefit hugely from old K.D.'s extensive experience in the wonderful world of getting ripped off.

When dealing with anyone trying to sell you anything, I offer the following stars to steer by. I guarantee that they will bring you safely into port, and you, the fool, will not be parted from your money:


1. If it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.

2. Internet web sites that promise you riches and then ask for a credit card number are always scams.

3. The following Q&A may be a cliché, but you’ll never go wrong keeping it in mind: “When is a salesman lying? When his mouth is moving.”

4. And by the way, things really do break the day after the warranties expire. That’s not your imagination.

5. Never make eye contact with anyone carrying a stack of anything.

6. Ditto anyone carrying a stack of anything who is obviously trying to make eye contact with you.

7. If you see a sign on something that says it’s for sale “as-is,” don’t buy it unless you’re sure you know how to fix it.

8. If you answer the phone and there’s a long silence at the other end, hang up. It’s a telemarketer or a bill collector—the long silence means that the computer which automatically dialed your number is disengaging and they’re getting ready to the put the telemarketer or bill collector through to you. Hang up!

9. Related to #8, caller ID is an essential in the modern world. If you don’t have it, get it.

10. Nobody legitimate sells anything door-to-door anymore. If someone rings your doorbell and tries to sell you something, assume he or she is a crook. Or it might just be the Jehovah’s Witnesses—they still go door to door. But they're usually nice people and at least they’re not going to ask you for a credit card number. Your call.

11. If you put your resume on Craigslist in search of employment, be advised that scammers are actively farming Craigslist for e-mail addresses. If you get an e-mail that purports to be from a recruiter looking to match you up with a job, be very wary. Legitimate recruiters will almost always contact you by phone. E-mail usually means it’s someone trying to recruit sales people or sell you an iPhone.

12. Citigroup is especially aggressive this way, and they will contact you by phone. If you get a call from Citigroup offering you employment in some "management" position,, most likely the job will involve commission sales. Take the call at your own risk.

13. If you’re thinking about buying a new car but haven’t made up your mind yet, don’t just wander up on to a car dealer’s lot. Their salespeople will be on you like ugly on an ape, and your only defense will be flight. Have an escape route planned before you leave the safety of the sidewalk. I find the binoculars-from-across-the-street approach both helpful and safe.

14. If a “career counselor” hands you a service agreement to read and then leaves the room, assume that on the reverse side of it you will find his very hefty fee, not mentioned until that moment.

15. This one is strictly for my former colleagues in the U.S. State Department: never so much as give the so-called Bureau of Diplomatic Security the time of day unless there’s a lawyer present. Those people are looking for promotions, and they’re looking for promotions at your expense. Don’t trust them, ever.

16. If someone is talking to you and he uses your first name three times in one sentence, run for your life. He wants to sell you something.

17. Also, it’s a good idea to keep track of how often that same guy blinks. If he goes for a full minute without blinking, he’s either a crook or a nut. Thus trapped, my m.o. is to say, “Look! a naked lady!” Then when he turns to look, I run.

18. Ask to see the goods, up-front. Take nobody’s word for anything.

19. If you are in fact looking to buy a car, never buy one from a private individual. Always go to a dealer. Even if that Nissan you found on Craigslist looks wonderful, it might have been sitting at the curb or in the guy’s driveway for six months and all of its gizmos and gasmos have deteriorated to the point where it’s just waiting to die.

20. There is no such thing as a legitimate "fat-off" pill. Any product in a bottle that promises to melt fat off you is fake. Some products might indeed suppress your appetite and help you that way, but anything called "Super Fat Magnet" or something of that nature is fake, fake, fake. There is no easy substitute for jogging and meal-replacement shakes.

21. Ronald Reagan said “Trust, but verify.” Well, he had it close. My advice is “Don’t trust to begin with, then you won't have to bother verifying.”

22. If you get an e-mail purporting to offer you a job, and they have the word "Employment" spelled wrong, e.g. "Employement," I'd say that's a safe bet for deletion.

The Angel of Death Strikes Again

Sometimes I get the willies.

Last Friday I was sitting here blogging away, and I happened to mention Beatrice Arthur, who played Maude on TV in the 1970s and later, Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls in the 1980s and early '90s.

She died on Sunday.

Okay, she was 86. Still...

Folks, you are reading the words of the Angel of Death. That's me. I kill celebrities. I don't mean to do it, and as Garfield the Cat once said, I don't know how I does it, I jez' does it.

I have blogged on this subject before. Do a blog search on Eek, I Did It Again, and you will be taken to something I wrote back in the summer of 2006. I was driving on Interstate 90 between Spokane, Washington and Post Falls, Idaho on a standard booze run (the state liquor stores in Idaho have cheaper prices than those in Washington owing to fewer taxes), and I had the radio on in the car. I was listening to a program of popular songs from the World War II era. I began thinking about June Allyson, the petite little blonde movie star of the WWII period of whom they said she was the girl "every boy wanted to bring home to his family." I always thought my Aunt Jessie, my mother's sister, looked a little bit like June Allyson.

The next day I read her obituary in the newspaper. June Allyson's, that is, not my Aunt Jessie. My aunt had already died by then. But Aunt Jessie wasn't famous, just wonderful, so I can't be blamed for that.

You're not convinced. Ha, you're saying. Coincidence. Big deal.

As the French say, uh-uh. Search my blog again: It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Guy Dies. How about him? Mitchell Rupe, on death row for murder, in Washington state. I haven't thought about this loser in years, not since reading a newspaper story in 1994 about how he had eaten himself off death row. He intentionally got himself so fat that his lawyer sold a Washington state judge the notion that hanging him would be cruel and inhuman punishment. He was so fat, you see, that hanging him might result in decapitation, which would be "cruel and inhuman." Great legal victory for Rupe.

But then I step in. I remember Rupe and his story one morning in 2006 while driving my car across Chula Vista, California ... an hour later I see his obituary in the paper.

This has happened over and over in my life. I'll start thinking about some famous person...and then I find out they quit breathing just about the same moment I was thinking about them.

My friend Diane thinks I have a form of extrasensory perception. I don't know. My own speculation has been that maybe the fillings in my teeth somehow enable me to pick up radio or television signals that go directly into my head, bypassing my ears. (This might explain my ability to recite lines from old reruns of The Andy Griffith Show endlessly.) TV Land broadcasts it; I pick up the signal somehow.

You think I'm crazy? Again, you think it's just coincidence, and that all of these old people are about to die anyway?

Check this out: Marilyn Chambers, the great porn star of the 1970s and former Ivory Soap girl, died on April 12 at age 56. She was a true classic, an American original. I'll never forget the afternoon some of my newspaper buddies and I crowded around the VCR in Vacaville, CA to share in the wonder of her Oscar-worthy performance in the classic '70s porno film Insatiable ("How lovely to have you back in London, my dear!") My journal records that on April 10 I was wondering whatever became of her. Two days later she was found dead in Los Angeles. And 56 ain't that old. I'm 53.

If you're in any way famous, you want to steer clear of me. I have the Evil Eye somehow when it comes to celebrities.

In light of this gruesome talent I seem to have, all of you Barack Obama fans out there ought to be grateful that I'm trying as hard as I can NOT to think about him. I haven't looked at a newspaper in nearly six months. That's why I go out to Dead-or-alive-info.org every couple of weeks or so, just to find out if anyone famous or once-famous has died lately.

By the way, has anyone seen Fess Parker around?

Miscellany

I had my first encounter with evil when I was 15.

It was the summer of 1971. I was visiting a friend in Spokane, Washington.

We were walking around late at night and we stepped into a public restroom.

Somebody had written the following graffiti on the wall:

"A little bird with yellow bill
Perched upon my windowsill.
I lured him in with crumbs of bread,
and then I crushed his fucking head."

Some low-life dirtball apparently thought that was funny. (You know the type of person I'm talking about: the kind who writes on restroom walls.)

I hope he's dead, and I hope his death hurt a lot. I'm putting the world on notice: anybody, and I mean anybody, who thinks cruelty to animals is funny should have his belly torn open and his entrails set on fire before his eyes.

...

I attended a meeting of Washington, D.C.'s Advisory Neighborhood Commission for Ward 5 last night. Councilmember Harry Thomas addressed the gathering. Let it be known that when my neighbor Donald L. Williams asked why the D.C. police are flouting the city's no-cellphone-use-while-driving law, (along with everybody else) he could not get a straight answer out of Councilmember Thomas.

I met Commmissioner Robert King at that same meeting. He looks like James Earl Jones and he's a brother Mason. Good to meet you, Bob.

...

I saw something on the street in downtown Washington, D.C. on Monday that made me wish I'd had my camera with me. It would have been a fabulous photo. A guy was lying flat on his stomach in the middle of the street at the corner of 14th and F NW, half his body down inside an open manhole. The only things sticking out of the manhole were his legs and feet. Apparently he was talking to someone down inside that manhole. God, what a great photo that would have made!

...

This time of year I always kind of miss being in California. May is coming up, just about the best time of year in San Diego. There's nothing quite like a bright, breezy day in May out there on the west coast. I used to love sitting on the porch of my family's ancestral home in Chula Vista on an afternoon in May, the Padres' game on the radio (usually they were losing) and the gentle May breeze ringing the wind-chime that my father fashioned out of an empty wine jug many years ago. Once May is over, though, things get pretty grim. Come June, the area is enveloped almost daily in a persistent marine layer that keeps the sky quite gray. You can set your calendar by it: San Diegans call it "the June gloom."

...

I got an e-mail this morning from Roxanne at Roxanne's Artiques Gallery near the Brookland/CUA Metro station here in D.C. The same Donald L. Williams who couldn't get a straight answer out of Councilman Thomas about cellphone use by cops approached Roxanne yesterday on behalf of yours truly. You see, in addition to all of the other wild n' crazy things in my quiver, I'm also a sometime painter. Donald thought that Roxanne might be interested in displaying some of my art work in her gallery. I e-mailed her digital photos of a few of my canvases, and she inquired as to the media I used. I combine oil-and-acrylic on canvas with pastiche, a sop to the fact that I can't draw worth a damn. And no, I don't do Elvis on black velvet or dogs shooting pool.

...

I was at the Brookland/CUA Metro station the other day, wearing my Boston Red Sox cap. I saw another guy on the platform wearing a Red Sox cap, so I gave him the "Go Sox" countersign. He returned it, then rolled up his sleeve and showed me the beautifully-executed Red Sox team logo that he had tattooed on his left arm. "Red Sox Nation is just amazing," I told him. Later that same day, Donald L. Williams and I got into a whimsical discussion of how we might manage as roommates, should we ever be forced by circumstances (we're both basically destitute) to share space. Answer: Felix and Oscar writ large. "Now, THAT would be a mixed marriage," I said in all seriousness. And it's not because I'm white and Donald's black. There are more serious issues than race here. I mean, can you imagine a Red Sox fan and a Yankees fan living under the same roof? As the Germans say, Ausgeschlossen.*

...

There's a stretch of South Dakota Avenue in Northeast D.C., a residential area, where the average motorist averages 70 mph. The police department keeps records of this stuff. It's the reason they're installing cameras on South Dakota Avenue. I hate these cameras, especially after getting nailed by one myself, trying to beat a red light on Rhode Island Avenue a few months ago. But in a neighborhood where there's a playground, people should not drive 70 mph. Sorry, I'm just an old stick-in-the-mud that way. And I don't even have any children.

...

My pal Chris down in North Carolina gave up bread for lent. He says he's lost 25 pounds. I haven't seen him lately so I'll have to take his word for it. But now that lent is over, I hope he hasn't gone back to the baguettes and the dinner rolls. Chris has a new girlfriend; maybe that will help his resolve. You know the old saying: behind every man successfully losing weight there's either a trainer in a smelly sweatsuit waving a six-foot bullwhip, or a woman reminding him of what wonders weight loss will do for his...uh, stamina.

...

We are now a mere six weeks and change from the Tour de Cure in Reston, Virginia, a cycling event for the American Diabetes Association in which I am slated to ride a "metric century," e.g. 63 miles. I have been steadfastly in training since February, and have received $340 in donations from my friends, which has been generous and for which I am grateful. However some of my other friends who promised donations months ago have NOT coughed up and are steadfastly ignoring my repeated e-mail pleas for redemption. I'm about to give up on this crowd, but let me do so with the immortal words of Beatrice Arthur when she was playing that old bag Maude on CBS television back in the 1970s: "God will get you for that."

...

(Drum roll.) Millions of people have started writing novels; a few thousand actually finish writing them. I'm at work on a novel that I began last June 15 when the aforementioned bread-avoider, Chris, and I returned from attending the 13th International Hemingway Conference in Kansas City. I have given myself a deadline of this coming June 15 to complete this novel. I'm going to meet that deadline, folks. I have written 136,000 words as of yesterday. Meanwhile my pal Tony out in California, who has been working on a novel for about the last four years when he isn't out doing contracting work, has about 200,000 done on his. That's already too long, and Tony knows it. He and I have an interesting reciprocal deal in place, though. I'm a good editor, and when Tony's finished with his manuscript I'm going to cut Fastglass (that's the title) down to size. In return, Tony, an on-again, off-again writer for movies, is going to adapt my first novel, Tower-102 (iUniverse, 2000) as a screenplay.


*Ausgeschlossen--"Extremely unlikely."

Otras cincuenta cosas sobre mí

Serendipity: A faculty for making fortunate discoveries. (Bobrow, Edwin. The Complete Idiot's Guide to New Product Development, New York: Alpha Books, 1997.)

A few months ago I posted a laundry list in this space of trivia facts about myself. 100 of them.

My pal Sasha looked at that this week and thought, hey, there's something that might be useful in introducing myself to my customers. (Sasha is an entrepreneur in Moscow.)He e-mailed me and told me so.

Now, it never would have occurred to me that anything so trivial as personal trivia could have any utility, so to speak. Not unless you're Justin Timberlake or Tyra Banks, and can therefore reasonably expect that some no-life pinhead out there who lives vicariously through celebrity magazines will be interested in what color coffee cup you use in the morning. (Speaking of coffee cups, the photograph above was taken a few years ago in of all places, Croatia. I was vacationing with my then-girlfriend Nadya on the Adriatic Sea. I liked the way they spelled out the word "Caffe" on the surface of my coffee.)

Anyway, I decided to add to the list of supremely uninteresting factoids about my sometimes-august, usually not-very-interesting self. Not 100 factoids this time; I have too much to do today. I'm going to shoot for 50, and see if I can get this done in the next 20 minutes. I have a project for which someone is actually paying me money, and it has to be finished by three O'clock this afternoon.

1. I just bought a baseball bat. Spring is here. I'm going to ask my friend Donald if he wants to go to the park and shag flies. I'm 53; Donald is 61. He has a glove, and now I have the bat. I have a baseball around here somewhere.

2. There are two bumper stickers on my 2006 PT Cruiser. Neither has anything to do with politics. One reads "Would You Drive Any Better With That Cellphone Up Your Ass?" The other speaks a cosmic truth: "Mozart Is God."

3. I shave the "old fashioned" way, with a stainless steel safety razor. Cheap disposable plastic razors are as much a hazard to your skin as they are to the environment. Also, I shave with lather worked up in a mug with a brush, not that mostly-air crap that comes out of a can. Ask any barber: lather actually worked up on someone's face gives you a closer shave than lather from a can.

4. My favorite brand of single-malt Scotch is Glenlivet. It's creamy-smooth, with a slight honey flavor. Delicious.

5. I have a ticket to see Richard Wagner's Siegfried at the Washington National Opera next month. I'm going alone. Nobody I know within the D.C. Metro area is as "into" Wagner as I am. (I'd love to see the whole Ring cycle sometime, but who has that kind of money?)

6. I have a scar on my throat from where I had the beginnings of a "turkey wattle" that I inherited from my father liposuctioned off two months ago.

7. I am now entering my sixth month of refusing to look at newspapers, watch newscasts or listen to newscasts. Whatever Obama and his little Politboro of Trotskyites are up to out there, I don't want to know. And it's working. Last week my sister mentioned somebody named Napolitano to me, and I had no idea who that was. Also last week, at Borders Books, one of the clerks said something to me about Slum Dog Millionaire and I gave her a blank stare. Turns out that's the movie that won Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards show. Who cares? I'm immersed in Proust, and will be until the Trotskyites are gone.

8. I have a tiger-striped tabby cat named Rageuneau who, I suspect, thinks I'm his mother. He slipped out into the rain yesterday, got frightened because he couldn't get back in the house, and began to cry. He wouldn't come to my wife Valerie, but he came to me.

9. I just became a Notary Public. Want to see my stamp?

10. Baseball season only started the day before yesterday, and I've already given up on the San Diego Padres for this year.

11. I have an unfinished novel-in-progress, with a self-imposed June 15 deadline for completion of first draft. This ain't no pipe-dream, folks. 125,000 words is not your average head-start. I'm about 75 percent finished with this thing.

12. First thing in the morning I take my coffee black. Later in the day I take it with hot milk, European-style. Of course, most Europeans do it the other way around, but I have a contrarian streak in me.

13. Of all the places I lived overseas during my 14 years in the State Department, Bad Godesburg, Germany was my favorite. Imagine waking up every morning just a stone's throw from the Rhine.

14. I'm in training to ride a Metric Century (100 kilometers or 63 miles) on my bicycle for the American Diabetes Association, in June. This event will coincide with the completion of my novel-in-progress. Go on line at www.tour.diabetes.org and contribute!!

15. I don't care what kind of wall-smashing sound it puts out, the Bose Acoustic Sound System is one ugly piece of machinery. I think it looks more like an espresso machine than a stereo.

16. The older I get, the better Frank Sinatra sounds.

17. I don't play golf. I could never get interested in it. I have two friends who are hopeless golf addicts, but I never did see the attraction.

18. Everyone who has read my blog, or my book Three Flies Up, knows that I'm a baseball fan. What fewer know is that I also follow IndyCar racing. Not NASCAR, Indycar. Aside from the World Series, the Indianapolis 500 is the only other sporting event in the whole year that I never like to miss.

19. One of the greatest cultural contributions my French ancestors made to the world was establishing which wines go best with which foods. Now if I could just get it straight...

20. There are few combinations on this earth that match that of a good cup of espresso and a really good cigar.

21. I have read all three books of Dante's Divine Comedy. Someday I want to read them in Italian.

22. Speaking of languages, Rosetta Stone (French) is on my birthday wish list. I have always wanted to learn French, and recently I had Rosetta Stone demonstrated to me. It works. I picked up several new words in the five minutes I stood there.

23. If I succeed with French, I'm going to take a shot at Greek. I have a slight leg up there -- I have studied Russian, and the Greek and Russian alphabets share certain similarities for the screamingly obvious reason that the Russian alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet.

24. I can make a delicious quiche out of just about whatever I find in the refrigerator.

25. I've been a Catholic for going on 35 years, but have scarcely been near a church in more than 25. I've been contemplating a return for three or so years now. If I only didn't have to unload a quarter-century's worth of confession! Can you imagine the kind of mischief a guy gets up to between the ages of 27 and 53, particularly if he has a contrarian streak in him to begin with?

26. Generally speaking, although April means the opening of the baseball season, I prefer March to April. March has an excuse for being chilly. It's March. April is supposed to be warmer, and I feel cheated when it isn't.

27. I seldom if ever write in longhand. It's not that I'm a high-tech geek or anything like that, and I appreciate the beautiful craftsmanship of a fine fountain pen. But I hate the sight of my own handwriting. (For all of his shortcomings, by the way, my father had beautiful handwriting. His was the last generation to be taught penmanship in school.)

28. I'm a lifelong fan of Ernest Hemingway's work, but I don't consider him a great novelist. He was one of the best short story-writers of all time, but he was a sprint-runner, not a long-distance runner. His fiction at its best combines the genius of poetry with the verisimilitude of good journalism. Fine, but journalism doesn't work on a big canvas. His novels are mostly self-indulgences and read as such.

29. The two most beautiful places I've ever seen (and I've been all over the western world) are western Montana and the central California coast around Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo.

30. I'm down to my last $1000. After that, Je suis me suis cassé.

31. I will not tolerate humor that is based on cruelty, whether to animals or people. When I first saw the movie Carrie, in which Cissy Spacek's high-school classmates pull an appallingly mean practical joke on her, I cheered like crazy during the scene in which she takes horrible revenge on them, using the telekinetic powers that Stephen King gave her in his novel. For this same reason British humor, so much of which centers around laughing at people's misfortunes, is wasted on me. Stanley Kubrick, whom otherwise I have always admired, was said to have started giggling while filming the gang-rape scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971). The British are just ugly people. Ugly in every way that it's possible to be ugly. They have rotten teeth and they think cruelty is funny.

32. I once took a few surfing lessons in California, and I really would like to get back to learning how to surf. (If I could just get to the point where I could stand up on a wave without falling off my surfboard, I'd be happy.)

33. Because I am from California, for a long time I thought that I'd seen all the sunshine I wanted to see in my life, and I hankered for four-season climate instead. While I still would not want to live in the tropics, (too hot & sticky for a warm-blooded French Canadian like me) the older I get, the more I incline toward wanting to live on the beach. But only on the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic.

34. I love children, but I seldom if ever regret never having had any of my own. I've had enough trouble taking care of myself; I'd hate to think what a lousy provider for a family I would have been.

35. My all-time favorite performance by an actor in a movie is Henry Fonda's in Mister Roberts, directed by Joshua Logan in 1955, the year I was born.

36. I wish the Dodgers had never left Brooklyn. Not because I have any great love for Brooklyn, but if they were still in Brooklyn I wouldn't have to put up with my friend Doug, a Bay Area native, hating them for no better reason than the fact that they happen to play in Los Angeles. (For an explanation of this, see my book Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball and Me. Outskirts Press, 2008, pp. 85-86.)

37. The last book I read was the original scroll of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. I didn't much care for it. I love On The Road, but the original scroll (which Kerouac famously typed, in 1951, on one continuously-unrolling sheet of paper which, when he was finished, was 125 feet long)is a rough draft, and it reads like a rough draft. Not fun.

38. The Phil Silvers Show, aka Sgt. Bilko, which aired on CBS from 1955 to 1958, was the funniest sitcom of all time. The least funny sitcom of all time, and I don't give a shit what Jay McInerny says, was Seinfeld.

39. I love rainy days as long as I don't have to go outside. Nothing is more pleasant than a dark, wet, gray afternoon indoors, with a fire in the fireplace, a glass of red wine at your elbow and Haydn on the stereo.

40. The 1965 Ford Mustang was the most beautiful thing Detroit ever built. (Although I have a gut-level aversion to dark blue Mustangs, for reasons I'm going to keep to myself.)

41. I love to grind my own coffee, but as pianist Helene Grimaud accurately observed in Grammophone magazine not long ago, coffee never tastes as good as it smells.

42. Stat-for-stat, Stan Musial was a better ballplayer than Mickey Mantle. Mantle just got all the media attention because he played in New York, where all the media except CNN are headquartered, while Musial played in St. Louis, which was still considered the hinterland in the 1950s. (And CNN wasn't even created until after both Musial and Mantle had retired.) New York LOVES New York. Nobody else does.

43. The first time I saw Helen Mirren was in the lamentable 2010: The Year We Make Contact. She was playing, of all things, a Soviet colonel. I thought she was really cute. Still do. If I were at a cocktail party, with both Helen Mirren and Reese Witherspoon in attendance, Reese could wait. I'd go chat up Helen first. She'd probably have more interesting things to say anyway.

44. I love the music of Stan Getz. In the right mood, I could listen to Stan Getz recordings all day.

45. The paintings of Henri Matisse make me very happy.

46. All other things being equal, I'd rather see the sunrise after having had a good night's sleep than after having stayed up all night.

47. Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited is the greatest rock n' roll album of all time. Bar none.

48. I've always been a cat person, and never cared particularly for dogs until I married my wife Valerie, who has always had dogs. She brought two of them into our marriage, both miniature schnauzers: Jacques and Alexandra. I didn't get to know Jacques as well as I would have liked, because he died shortly after we were married. But oh boy, did I bond with Alexandra! She outlived Jacqui by almost three years, and when she died on July 30, 2008, after a horrible epileptic seizure, I cried my eyes out.

49. I hate basketball. A game played indoors, by men wearing knee-length shorts? Cable TV at its next-worst, after CSI and House.

50. As Henry Miller once said to the entire world....

Σ' αγαπώ ! (In English that's spelled, and pronounced, "S'agapo." It's Greek for "I love you." Miller had it scotch-taped to his door.)

Sweet hours of the spring

It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, Hey ding a ding, ding:
Sweet lovers love the spring.

This is the first verse of one of Shakespeare's most famous lyrics. It has been set to music countless times, my favorite being a setting for tenor and lute by Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Morley. (Elizabethan lute songs are one of my great weaknesses; I find them as irresistible as cashews.)

Shakespeare's lyric stands midway in a long tradition among English poets of celebrating the arrival of spring. From "Sumer is y-comen in, Lhude sing cuckoo," written around 1250 by that famous medieval English poet Anonymous, to Robert Herrick's famous Corrina's Going A-Maying and beyond, bards have been celebrating springtime as a joyous festival of renewal, flowers, birds, trees and fresh-air sex.

My own father, a great appreciator of fine art, oft-times told me of the sign he once encountered while driving along a rural back road somewhere north of Spokane, Washington: "Hurray, Hurray, the first of May! Outdoor screwin' starts today!" The poet exulted.

You can't get more eloquent than that.

I have to admit that for a long time I simply did not understand what all the fuss was about. I'm not talking specifically about love among the mosquitoes, but the larger issue of getting all excited about the spring. My feeling was, aside from the beginning of the baseball season, what's so bloody great about it?

This was because of my upbringing, of course. I grew up in southern California where it's pretty much warm all the time. When I was a kid I preferred the fall to the spring, excepting of course for that dreary business of having to return to school. Fall meant the shorter days which in turn led to my birthday (I was born in October) and then Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Once I got past the distasteful business of summer vacation being over with, the autumn was a procession of things to look forward to.

Spring? Eh. May in San Diego is pretty much like January in San Diego. Maybe three or four degrees warmer.

I got my first taste of spring euphoria, my first taste of what all those English and German poets were rhapsodizing about, when I was 13. The summer before my 13th birthday my family moved to the aforementioned Spokane, Washington. The year was 1968. We lived there for two years and then moved back to California. But when I went back to Spokane briefly, nearly 30 years later, to run a bed-and-breakfast, I found that if you asked people who had lived there all their lives whether they remembered the Great Winter of '68-'69, virtually all them did, and remembered it vividly.

It just so happened that the Dupuis moved to Spokane in the year when that part of the country saw its worst winter in 80 years. I, who had known little but sunshine since the second grade, found myself, now in the eighth grade, experiencing the kind of winter you would normally associate with a place like Minnesota. We were up to our asses in snow for almost four months. That stuff was on the ground from mid-December to early April. And between the snowplows and the shoveling, in some places it was piled up higher than I was tall. I came and went to and from school in it --fortunately we lived only one block from my school. The ice got so bad that I used to watch the bus drivers coming over the hill up the street from where we lived, locking their brakes and sliding the buses down the hill at a 45-degree angle in order not to lose control of them. I actually rode on a couple of those buses -- riding the bus to downtown Spokane was a regular "Saturday" thing we did -- and enjoyed the thrill of those wild rides. (The drivers didn't enjoy them, believe me.)

My mother got so disgusted with the winter that at one point she took all of the frozen food out of the freezer and threw it in the backyard as a form of protest that she had to be in Spokane at all. "If it's going to be ten below zero all winter, I might as well give the goddamn freezer a rest," she said. In April we were still finding frozen peas out there.

But in April it was still pretty cold. Spokane is at an elevation of over 2,000 feet and the chill can persist well into May. My dad took me and my friend Glenn out for the fishing opener that year on Fan Lake, between Spokane and the Canadian border. When we pushed our boat away from the dock that morning, it must have been 15 degrees on that lake. I was never so cold in my life.

And we didn't catch a single fish.

But it was ever-so-gradually warming up, and then came one weekend in May when the temperature spiked up into the sixties. Doesn't sound too warm, does it? Ask anyone from Wisconsin about this. When you've been walking around in temperatures ranging from 20 below to 35 above for three months, and all of a sudden a day comes along when it pokes up to 65, you think summer has arrived. You're ready to bust out the sunscreen and go sit in the yard with a daiquiri.

I was too young for a daiquiri, but believe me, I felt the intoxication. It was warm! I looked out the window and noticed that the trees had leaves on them again! The snow was gone! And, childhood being the festival of ever-ongoing anticipations that it is, my mind began wandering in the delicious direction of...summer vacation! (You thought I was going to say 'love,' didn't you?) I was 13, remember? Shelley sang, "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" Kids amend that to, "If spring comes, can the last day of school be far behind?"

Simon and Garfunkel had a hit record that spring, a bit of silliness called Baby Driver. It's about a kid who is alternately under-supervised, over-horny and very fond of racing motorcycles. My sister had the 45-rpm version of it and was playing it all the time. Its brazen joyousness and bouncy rhythm came to symbolize that mighty, ravishing spring of '69 for me. To this day, whenever I hear Baby Driver, I think of that incredible weekend in my youth when springtime seemed to burst upon us all in one dizzy moment, on the heels of what had been a long, chilly and gray hibernation.

I would not experience anything similar until I was an adult. My family only lived in Spokane for one more winter, which was much, much milder than the first, and then we were back in California, where I lived through high school, college and right through my twenties.

But in 1985 I joined the Foreign Service, and that meant Washington, D.C. I had been to D.C. one previous time, about five years earlier, but it was a one-week vacation which moreover took place in the late summer. I was 30 years old now and had not really experienced winter since junior high school.

I arrived in Washington in November. It was unseasonably warm for the first few days, but then, in the words of one of the local TV weathercasters, Mother Nature "turned on the refrigrator," and I was glad for the warm overcoat I'd brought with me. My training group was quickly transplanted to Warrenton, Virginia, about 50 miles west of D.C., where the State Department trains its telecommunications people.

So there we all were, out in rural Fauquier County, VA. Horse country. And then it started to snow. We had a white Christmas. D.C. doesn't usually have severe winters, but the winter of '85-'86 was, if not severe by midwest or New England standards, sufficiently cold and snowy to make us feel that we were winter-bound, particularly those of us who hailed from places like California and Arizona, which several of us did.

In training that winter I met and briefly dated a beautiful girl, a few years my junior, named Holly Brayton. The dating was brief because we were both getting ready to leave the country and she was leaving first. But for two weeks or so we saw each other almost every evening, and I'll never forget those drives: here I was, a kid from California with very little experience of driving in snow, making that trek down snowy and icy Virginia county roads night after night, covering the 20 miles between Warrenton and Manassas Park, where Holly had a condo.

By then I had been handed my first overseas assignment, Frankfurt-am-Main, in what was in those days still called West Germany. Holly, by contrast, was on her way to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in perpetually-hot sub-Sarahan Africa. I would get my own taste of sub-Saharan Africa a few years later, when I was assigned to Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, just a hop to the right on the map from Liberia. But for now I was on my way to central Europe.

I was thrilled of course. I'd been wanting to visit Europe all my life, and now I was going there for a two-year tour of duty. I wouldn't have traded assignments with Holly for anything (though I secretly sighed that she wasn't coming to Germany with me.)

It was a chilly, gray day when I left Washington, and it was a chilly gray day when I arrived in Frankfurt.

Anyone who's ever lived in central Europe is familiar with what the Germans call Stark Bewoelkt. The term refers to Germany's stubborn, some would say perpetual overcast. The Austrian and Swiss alps which separate central Europe from Italy also separate it from much of southern Europe's famous sunshine, which is one of the reasons why Robert Browning had "Italy" tatooed over his heart, and I would not be surprised to learn that it was also one of the reasons that Goethe suddenly sprang from his bed in Weimar one night in 1786, jumped into a coach, pointed it south and stayed in Italy for the next two years.

The point is that Germany is what might be charitably called "misty." It sees gray skies more than blue ones. Consequently you see Germans anywhere and everywhere outside their own country where there's a beach. They're photophiles, the Germans, and anyone who has lived in their country knows why. I arrived in Frankfurt on March 13, 1986. For the first three days I was there we didn't see the sun at all. When it finally managed to poke through the cloud-ceiling, it wasn't much.

So there I was. It was mid-March and I had just segue'd directly from cold, gray Washington to chilly, gray Germany. What little sun I had seen for the previous three months had mostly generated uncomfortable glare from all of the icy streets and roads it was being reflected in, over which I was driving bundled up in coats and sweaters. I was, in short, experiencing the first genuine, unrelieved winter of my life since childhood.

Small wonder, then, that when the season of the poets returned, I noticed. You bet I did. During a breathtakingly short series of days in May, Frankfurt seemed to come back to life. Trees were suddenly full of leaves again. I awoke in the morning to hear birds twittering. Flowers bloomed. My neighbor Jack Robinson, a political officer whom I had never seen in anything but a suit and tie, was suddenly outside in rubber boots digging in the mud, preparing to plant something in the few square feet of dirt outside the apartment building. Frankfurt sits at a latitude roughly equivalent to that of Toronto, which means that when the days begin getting longer, they really begin getting longer. Suddenly you saw children playing outside until eight or nine O'clock at night.

And then there was the day when I decided to go out and ride my bicycle, just to enjoy the weather. The sun actually shone, a real treat in Germany, and it was warm enough to go outside without a jacket.

I rode my bicycle for a short distance in the general direction of the Frankfurt Zoo. On the way I encountered a little canal, on the other side of which someone had planted...strawberries!

If there's one smell that my mind associates unmistakeably with summer, it's the smell of strawberries. I stopped my bike dead on the dirt path alongside that little canal and just stood there for a minute, sniffing the strawberries and thinking of summer. It took me back inexorably to that wonderful afternoon when I was 13 and the sudden inrush of a spring day had me dreaming of summer vacation, which was now, after all, only a few weeks away.

So now I know what the poets meant. I also know what John Steinbeck meant when, in Travels with Charley, he wrote, "I've lived in climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I prefer weather." He then goes on to ask how anyone who lives in Florida can appreciate warmth, which is all they ever feel, or greenness, which is all they ever see. As a California native I can certainly relate to that. Steinbeck, who had lived in Mexico, knew what he was talking about.

You can't appreciate spring unless you've known winter. It's only March as I write these words and spring is only three days along, but you can feel things gradually picking up, even here in Washington.

By god, when the weather gets a little warmer still, maybe I'll get crazy and see if I can get my wife to go a-Maying.

Anybody know what the heck "a-Maying" is, anyway?*

Yeah, I know. Some smartass is going to say "Outdoor screwing."

Ole.

*Actually, my friend Dianne did some research and "outdoor screwing" isn't far off the mark. In Merrie England, "going a-Maying" was a delightful ritual wherein the boys would more-or-less persuade the girls to go out into the fields where the tall grass was and...Well, let's just say that a lot of weddings generally followed.

That enemy within

PICTURED ABOVE: First, proof that I once had hair: Me at age 17, giving my newborn niece Sarah her bottle. (Sarah now has three little boys of her own.)

Then, me in my salad days, e.g. age four.
(That's been one of my biggest problems in life:
after kindergarten it was all downhill.)



In the course of the past 10 years I have spent $6,738 undoing the damage my parents did.

Some of you who have known me for a while will probably argue that I didn't spend enough.

But I was screwed four ways at birth, and unlike members of previous generations, who tended to just accept their fates and move on, we baby boomers in our bottomless, fathomless self-regard have made a regular industry of self-improvement, defined as the resolute refusal to accept getting old.

Or to accept much of anything else, for that matter.

Hey, don't bug me. The philosopher Paul Tillich (or was it Liberace?) said "Always believe in the possible." It's a short leap from there to "Always believe in whatever you can persuade yourself is true."

As I was saying, I was screwed four ways at birth, three of them having to do with DNA. One had to do with a brain-fart on the part of my mother.

You just can't wait to hear what they were, can you?

Okay, we'll start with the brain-fart. When I was born, my mother stuck me with a first name which, if you think I'm going to tell you what it was, you have another think coming.

Actually, you can find out what it was fairly quickly, because I came out of the closet right here on the blog site a few months ago. Just search my blog for the title Growing Up With A Funny Name and read all about it. By the way, I should have dedicated that posting to my old friend Holly Inder, who spent most of an afternoon talking me into coming clean. Holly has known my secret for years. Way back when we were both much younger, Holly and I dated for a short time, and one night while we were dating, the sneaky little dickens got the secret of my horrible first name out of me by promising to reveal her supposedly just-as-horrible middle name. (She may also have been nibbling on my ear like Mata Hari. It was a long time ago.)

Holly's middle name turned out to be "Lynn." (What's known in the advertising industry as a bait-and-switch.)

Okay, on to the other three ways I was screwed at birth. All three of them were my father's fault. Mom 1, Dad 3.

I inherited my father's narrow, slightly receded lower jaw. No big deal, you say? Hah. If I'd had Arnold Schwarzenegger's jaw, two of my biggest embarrassments would not have to have been addressed.

Because I inherited my father's too-narrow jaw, I also inherited his mouthful of crooked teeth. The jaw was too narrow, so the teeth climbed all over each other, just as his had.

This is a common problem with kids, which is why orthodonists drive Jeep Cherokees. And my parents, to give them some credit anyway, had planned to do something about it. When I was 12 they laid the groundwork for having braces put on my teeth. My remaining baby teeth were pulled out, and when my adult teeth came in I was supposed to get braces. But as so often has been the case in my family, there was no follow-up. We moved, and somehow my teeth fell through a crack. My older sister Carla had a pretty serious weight problem, and since she was my mother's favorite, I have always suspected that her girth trumped my mouth. They dragged her off to a doctor to have her obesity treated and forgot all about my teeth.

So I grew up with a mouthful of crooked teeth. I did figure out some ways to have fun with them. Sometimes I'd bite ever-so-lightly into a slice of cheddar cheese and admire the weird pattern they made in its surface. Corn on the cob was also an interesting experience -- somehow the cob never came completely clean because my teeth tore the kernels off unevenly.

Then came adulthood and the Dies Irae: my wisdom teeth started to come in and my narrow jaw didn't have room for the lower ones. After two nights of excruciating pain, I went to the same dental surgeon who had pulled out my baby teeth ten years earlier in preparation for the braces I never got, and he dug out and removed my lower wizzies. (Marine that I am, I insisted on a general anesthetic for this procedure.)

So there you have Items One and Two. My mother stuck with me a first name that made me sound like I had emigrated to the earth from the Planet Zorgon, and my father gave me his lousy teeth. But they weren't finished. (My parents, that is. Not my teeth.)

My father was also bald. In fact I don't think he ever had a full head of hair. I can't find a photo of him in any family album in which his hairline is doing anything but receding. I mean, I have seen pictures of him that were taken when he was in the Coast Guard. This was way back in 1935 -- he was only 21 -- and he's already balding.

Until I was about 20 I had a gorgeous, luxuriant head of hair. I'm not kidding. When I was in high school my hair was so thick that when I washed it I had to wring it out like a towel. Then, just about the time of my 20th birthday in 1975, I was over at my friend Charlie Berigan's house and his father remarked, "Kelley, you're losing your hair."

"I am not."

"The heck you're not." Mr. Berigan had spotted a spot -- you know the spot. It's on top of your head at the back, guys. That's where The Spot begins. And The Spot grows. And grows. And grows. Until you look like Richard Deacon, Mel Cooley on the old Dick Van Dyke Show. You know, the poor billiard-domed schmuck that Morey Amsterdam was always giving a bad time, calling him "Goldilocks" and such.

My father took me out to dinner on my 20th birthday and we talked about this. "I'm gonna be bald because you're bald," I said in an accusing tone.

"No, no, no," he said reassuringly. "You don't have my hair; you have your mother's hair." (This was the night I realized my father could have had a career as a con man.)

Yeah, right. If I had my mother's hair, I left it someplace. You could find me by following the trail of "my mother's hair."

I've learned to live with it. When I was posted at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia during my Foreign Service career, I was issued an I.D. badge to get me past the Marine guards and into the building. Where it said "hair color" I wrote down "bald." The FSNs didn't catch that, and so that's what my I.D. badge said for three years.

Hey, I'm not bitter.

And finally, when my father's parents were assembling him, they placed his chin just a little bit too close to his neck. Jay Leno my father was not. Perhaps to get even with them, he turned around and did the same thing to me. Again, no big deal? Well, for the first 30 years or so of my life it wasn't. But believe me, your genes are a ticking time bomb. They're gonna get you sooner or later. For most of his adult life my father had a wattle under his chin that made him resemble, ever-so-slightly, a pelican. By the time he was in his seventies he could have carried the mail in it. Don't take my word for it, ask his grandchildren. By the time Dad was in his seventies, my nephew Ricky used to enjoy climbing in his grandpa's lap and batting at that wattle, you know, like a kitten with a ball of yarn. Wattle, wattle, wattle. Yech.

Picture a bald pelican with crooked teeth. Now picture his son. You're getting a picture of me.

Now, men of my father's generation were fatalistic. You played in the uniform you were issued, you died and then you went to the crematorium. End of story. Name changes were strictly for criminals dodging the law. Cosmetic surgery was for sissies, and orthodonture was only for kids.

We boomers. We're such fighters.

In 1999 I finally got around to doing what I had to do as far as finding a remedy for my parents' first treachery. I went to the courthouse in Arlington, VA, paid a $38 filing fee and then a $2 notary fee, after which a judge stamped a piece of paper and suddenly my name was "Alexander Kelley Dupuis."

I only use the "Alexander" part for legal documents. To friends and family I've been "Kelley" since I was 15, and that's fine with me. I just wanted to get that horrible moniker off my Social Security card and driver's license once and for all.

I had always wanted to get my teeth fixed, but there was never the money for it. Then, in 2005 my father died. The family house in California was sold and I was sent my share of the proceeds: roughly $100,000. I gave most of it to my wife Valerie. Really, I did. She went through it paying bills and now I'm penniless again, and she keeps telling me to go out and get a job at McDonald's.

But when I got that money I decided there were three things I was going to do with it before handing the lion's share of it to Valerie: (1) Buy Valerie a diamond ring, since I hadn't been able to afford one when we were married. (2) Buy myself a really nice road bike (I'm a cycling buff) and (3) Get my teeth fixed, at last.

At age 50 I went to an orthodontist and dropped $4,000 having braces put on my teeth. Once I got them off, I found that for the first time since I was ten years old, I wasn't self-conscious about smiling. Now just give me something to smile about.

I wrote a poem about all of this, how I had braces put on my teeth at the same age that my father was having most of his pulled out. Poorly educated, my dad assumed that at some point he was going to lose his teeth anyway, so he decided to head nature off at the pass, so to speak, and spent the rest of his life suffering with an upper plate. Smart, Dad.

But about this time, I could see my father's genes preparing to launch another attack. That's right...the turkey wattle. When I was young I was able to control it with diet and exercise. It was merely a tendency toward a "double chin" that I had to fight like you'd fight any other kind of fat. But eventually Dat ol' Debbil DNA started to get the upper hand: no amount of jogging or cottage cheese was going to keep my father's turkey wattle off my chin.

Bravely, I leapt into the breach again. Just this month I hied myself off to Lifestyle Lift in Reston VA and paid them $2,700 to Cut Away. A young punk of a doctor who looked like he spent more time playing racquetball than working got under my chin with a scalpel, a syringe, sutures and an assistant. Within 30 minutes they had cut an incision, gone in there, liposuctioned off some fat, snipped away some skin and then sewed me up. It didn't hurt much, really, and the small amount of pain involved was a small price to pay for not looking like my dad.

For now, anyway. In five years I might be back there for a "tune up."

Now, I told my wife, the next step is to saddle up and head off to the Hair Club for Men and get fitted with one of those super-convincing toupees that fool everybody. I figure with straight, white teeth, no turkey wattle and a full head of hair I'll be able to pass for 35 again. That's a boomer's definition of Nirvana. Or Shangri-La, anyway.

Ha! You thought I was serious, didn't you? No, there's a place where even I will draw the line, and wearing a rug is it. After all, lots of cool guys were bald. Yul Brynner was very cool. So were Henry Miller, Sergei Prokofiev, Julius Caesar and Richard Deacon.

Well, four out of five ain't bad.

The Soundtrack Of My Life

If life were one long movie and I were the star, this would be the music of my life.

You come up with a similar list for yours, and share.

Opening Credits: The Language of Love -- Dan Fogelberg

Waking Up Scene: Dawn on the Moscow River -- Mussorgsky

Car Driving Scene: Green Onions -- Booker T. & the MGs.

High School Flashback Scene: Dies Irae from the Requiem -- Verdi (I didn't have a particularly good time in high school.)

High School Love/Crush Scene: Slow movement of the Emperor Concerto -- Beethoven.

Nostalgic Scene: September Song -- Kurt Weill

Bitter, Angry Scene: Hit Me With Your Best Shot -- Pat Benatar

Break-up Scene: Answer Me, My Love -- Nat King Cole

Regret Scene: The Shadow of Your Smile -- Tony Bennett

Nightclub/Bar Scene: Let's Cool One--Thelonius Monk, segue'ing into Jeru -- Miles Davis

Fight/Action Scene: Street Fighting Man -- The Rolling Stones

Lawn Mowing Scene: Opening of The Plow That Broke The Plains -- Virgil Thomson

Sad, breakdown scene: Sunflower -- Mason Williams. (Now there's an obscurity!)

Death Scene: Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin -- Wagner

Funeral Scene: The Lone Pilgrim, as sung by Bob Dylan

Mellow/Pot-smoking/Drunk scene: Sleepwalk -- Santo and Johnny

Dreaming About Someone Scene: If You Are But A Dream -- Frank Sinatra (and she knows who she is.)

Seeing your significant other Scene: As Time Goes By from Casablanca.

Sex Scene: Chicago Transit Authority's cover of Steve Winwood's I'm A Man. (The lyric isn't much, but I always thought that the savage, pounding beat of this track, underscored by the bass and the drums, would the perfect accompaniment for a vigorous sex scene, you know, the kind with sweat flying every which way.)

Contemplation Scene: Adagio for Strings -- Samuel Barber

Chase Scene: Last movement of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5

Happy Love Scene: You Make Me Feel So Young - Frank Sinatra

Happy Friend Scene: Stompin' at the Savoy-- Glenn Miller

Closing Credits: Slow movement of Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor. (Yes, I know this runs over the closing credits of Amadeus; that's where I got the idea! Hey, if it's good enough for Milos Forman...)