April 2011
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When Manny Ramirez visited George Washington High School, his former baseball coach, Steve Mandl, asked hm to say something to his players about the art of hittiing. Ramirez, one of the most spectacular batters of all time (555 home runs, .585 slugging, .313 batting average), thought for a few moments and then pronounced "see the ball, hit the ball." From which…
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It's bad enough to be born into and involuntarily indoctrinated into a religion, but if a person has the good fortune to be born into a family of non-believers, why should he or she regress to dogma and doctrine and fantasies of the afterlife? But then, I'm tone deaf and colorblind to religion. Nevertheless (you can trust me…
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The foulest, most obscene word in the English language, at least as far as sound is concerned, is, by all odds, "kumquat." It's hard to say whether it's the "kum" or the "quat" that is more reprehensible, but the two together, o my goodness gracious! "Kum" is linked to Fr. "con" and ME (Middle English)…
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Yesterday I renewed my expired driver's license. I was worried about the eye exam because of the cataracts, but I passed easily. Believe me, the bar for visual acuity is not set very high. On my previous license, "hair" was "brown"; this time, it's "gray." The clerk asked, "Are you willing to be an organ…
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Her language consists mostly of nouns: "baby" — both herself and her beloved doll; "wawa" (water); "mommy"; "daddy"; "ayi" (Chinese for aunt); "didi" (Chinese jiějie, older sister); "paopao" (Chinese, grandmother); "pock" (pocket); "book"; "ball": "eye"; "nose" etc. Her words are occasionally less specified than they will soon become; for example, "duck" seems to mean "bird."…
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There's been a re-birth of nativism in the "give me your tired, your poor" land that I love. The right-wingers, who need someone to hate, have decided that anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim noise-making is just what our beleaguered country needs right now. All of which brought to mind a painful memory. Sometime in the 1970s, I…
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Telephone conversation with an eighty-two year old cousin. "Evreryone down here, all they ever talk about is their pains, their doctors, their diets, their diseases. Now I have something to talk about. For years I went to this doctor, maybe forty years, he's almost as old as I am Every time I go into see him, with…
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Yesterday's NYTimes reports that it's the 75th anniversary of the first publication of The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf. This brief novel about a pacific bull was the first book that I knew and loved. It was The Book of my first few years on earth and I've probably read it, to myself and to my children, twenty times more…