I was on my stomach with elbows propped on the ground. I could maintain the right height, or I guess “elevation” is the correct word, but I could not hold the sights steady. They moved slowly and laterally over the target. I decided that the best I could do was judge the rapidity of the movement and fire right before the bull’s-eye was in the sights. I was on the firing range at a Boy Scout camp, although I think I was only a Cub Scout, and it was the first time I had shot a real gun—it was a rifle and I assume a .22. We had received some sort of instruction, but I had learned long before from countless western and war movies and TV shows—don’t pull the trigger; squeeze it. The targets were collected, and I was eager to see how I had done.  I had scored well—very well. (Unlike in archery, where I sucked.) This was fun.

In my first and only week at a sleepaway camp, I went back to the rifle range whenever I could. I was quite pleased with my marksmanship as were the instructors. Toward the end of the week I went again to the range. This time I went wearing shoes but no socks. In those days, apparently, no respectable human being went sockless. The instructor was shocked at my cavalier dismissal of the conventional attire and said, “No one is allowed here unless they are wearing socks.” I disregarded the grammatical lapse, but I did feel anger. What did socks have to do with firing a rifle safely? I could not see the connection, and although only twelve, my emerging anti-authoritarian streak was fueled. Further, although we had been given many rules at our time at camp, this was not one of them. This guy was just making it up on spot. (Of course, maybe, there had never before been a need for such a rule since everyone else wore socks to the range.) I don’t remember whether I put socks on, but I did not go back to the range. This experience added to my doubts about my suitability for scouting and soon I left the organization. You might also say that I was ahead of my time in being offended by senseless regulations.

We did not have guns in our house growing up. Guns in those days meant hunting, and my father did not hunt. He did fish and took the family to local lakes. We used casting rods, and I still remember the thrill of a strike and the landing of what I was assured was a very large smallmouth bass. But no hunting, although this was Wisconsin, and, of course, many people went hunting for geese and ducks and deer. In autumn, I would often see a buck tied to the hood of a car as it was driven to the butcher. Deer were killed not just for the thrill of the hunt, but also to be eaten. I found the sight of the dead deer simultaneously disgusting and exhilarating, and I sometimes benefited from the deer-killing. A destination for hunters was the butcher shop attached to the grocery store where my mother clerked. The butchers turned the scraps of the deer meat into summer sausage. The butchers could not legally sell any of the hunters’ kill, but they would often give some of the venison sausage to my mother, and I would happily eat it.

I am certain that many of my friends had guns in their houses, but this was not a topic of conversation. No one bragged about their arsenal or insisted they were safer because of the firearms stashed in the basement or closet. No one owned guns as status symbols. It was just accepted that if someone in the family was a hunter, there were rifles or shotguns in the house.

One of these friends was Greg, and during a high school summer, he suggested that he, Steve, and I go out shooting. Although I had not held a rifle since my scouting days, I agreed. We went to a farm outside of town that must have been owned by a relative of Greg’s and, like cowboys in a movie, we set up bottles and cans on fence posts. Being a timid, adolescent boy, I was worried about embarrassing myself and let the others shoot first. The first targets were easy, and we moved further and further away. Finally, I felt like I could hardly see the bottle on the post. Greg and Steve missed. I took aim with the one gun we had and as the “Schlitz” I could not read but knew was there wandered in and out of the sights, I again timed my waverings as well as I could, squeezed the trigger, and saw the bottle explode.

I did not gloat. (Never have in my entire life. I swear.) But certainly my face and body showed a certain satisfaction. Greg got angry. It was his gun. He was the shooter. He had to be better at this than Steve or I. Greg fumed and pointed up at a reasonably distant tree. “If you are so good, hit that bird up there.” This was a rifle, not a shotgun, and I thought, “No way.” But I aimed and fired. The bird fell in pieces to the ground, and I felt sick to my stomach. I had senselessly killed something because of a dare, and I never wanted to shoot a gun again.

(To be continued.)

As a result of Hurricane Irma, a Florida nursing home lost power to its cooling system, and eight of the home’s residents died. A few days later, Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced a new rule that nursing homes and assisted-living facilities must have generators to maintain reasonable temperatures for four days if power fails. Apparently at least some of the time, a conservative like Scott, feels that governmental regulation is a good thing, even if the regulation imposes a cost on private industry. Now, Governor Scott, can we talk about global warming?

Often when a football player injures one leg, people from the sideline help him to stand up, and the player then puts his arm around one of those helpers and the player limps off. The helping person is often, not surprisingly, much smaller than the player, and the player often can’t put much weight on the helper, and the two often have trouble syncing their walk. Instead, the teams ought to keep canes on the sidelines. The player would be able to get off the field better with a cane than with his arm around another. But I guess the cane would undercut the image of manly youthfulness, or is it youthful manliness?

A tall, young man sat down next to me on the subway. He was cradling a basketball with large letters inked onto it. I asked, “Are you any good?” When he got over his surprise that someone was speaking to him, he stated, “I’m ok.” “Are you being modest?” After a pause, “Yes, I am being humble. I play professionally.” He went on to say that he had played in Colombia, Europe, and next year in Toronto. I asked if he still had the hope of playing in the U.S., and he said, “The dream is still alive, but if I don’t make it, I am earning a good living now and enjoying life.”

On a different subway ride, the man next to me home was reading Tropic of Cancer.  I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t figure what.

Liberals have gotten one rhetorical label correct when they called them “Dreamers.”

Remember when President Trump was standing during the national anthem was his arms at his sides, and Melania whispered in his ear apparently saying that he should put his hand over his heart, which he then did?

Yet another doomsday, end-of-the world prediction has circulated recently. How many such predictions have been made in the last century or two?  In your lifetime? How many of them have been accurate?

Reading Al Franken’s latest book, Giant of the Senate, I realized that it was better being a satirist before becoming a politician than being a joke after being elected.

She saw the brace on my left wrist and asked if I had had carpal tunnel surgery. I said that it was just a sprain, but I thought that she had asked was nice. Until she went on at length about her carpal tunnel surgery. (But now I am going to have carpal tunnel surgery on my right wrist. Would you like to hear about in some detail?)

It is always moving when the audience stands before the opera begins and sings the national anthem. My patriotism overflows when the movie is paused at the two-thirds mark to allow us to sing “God Bless America.” And it is thrilling that every outdoor bluegrass concert I have attended starts with an adrenalin-boosting flyover by Air Force jets.

Of course these things don’t happen, but why not when such performances and displays are routine occurrences at sporting events?  Why is it that nationalism is a part of baseball, football, and NASCAR, but not “cultural” performances? Is it thought that operagoers differ in patriotic fervor from a Minnesota Vikings crowd? If the cultural audience cares less about our country, isn’t that all the more reason to have “The Star Spangled Banner” before Lohengrin in hopes of increasing national identity? And if the opera audience is already patriotic, surely they would want to sing the national anthem.

I have never researched the history of the national anthem at sporting events, but a law professor of mine, Harry Kalven, a devoted Chicago Cubs fan even during the decades when you had to be a bit meshugganah to be a Cubs follower, said that it started during World War II. That seems likely, and I guess that once a patriotic ritual starts, it seems unpatriotic for it to end. Thus, we continue to hear the Anthem before the first pitch and now at every sporting event.  (In the trivia question department: How many times did Pat Pieper hear “The Star Spangled Banner”? How many of those days did the Cubbies lose? I don’t know the answer to either question, other than to say, many, many, many times.)

The national anthem may have been played at sporting events since WWII, but its performance style has changed. Once we had only straightforward renditions that zipped right along. For example, for years “The Star Spangled Banner” was performed by Robert Merrill at Yankee Stadium—sometimes live and sometimes on a recording (occasionally nowadays a Merrill recording is still used). It clocked in at under two minutes. Now we regularly have versions that seem to be in a contest to see how slowly and with what added emotion the anthem can be sung. Soulful interpretations of the song have been traced back to a particular moment—Marvin Gaye’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. Since then we have had many take-your-time idiosyncratic versions of it. (Gaye’s version was over two-and-a-half minutes long.) For me, however, it really started with Jose Feliciano at the fifth game of the 1968 World Series. I thought his version was moving and made me hear the song anew, but to many it was offensive because this dark-skinned, blind guy had the nerve to sing it with a fresh insight and in a non-standard style.

Feliciano’s version did not inspire copycats, however, because his career was damaged by it. For incomprehensible reasons, his rendition got him labeled unpatriotic and disrespectful, and many radio stations refused to play any of his songs after that. (Question for your history discussion: Is there more division and hate in the country now, or was there more in 1968?) Feliciano’s version, while slower than Merrill’s, was faster than Gaye’s at a little over two minutes. (A joke my father told me which was not stale back then.  A Latino boy new to the United States made his way to the stadium for a game. The only seat he could get was in the distant centerfield bleachers under the American flag. He knew no one and was feeling lonely, but he felt welcomed when everyone before the game began, stood, looked at him, and sang, “Jose, can you see?”) What was shocking, outrageous in 1968 is accepted or at least tolerated today, and now we have all these “modern” arrangements of our patriotic hymn. (What does it mean about the connection between patriotism and sporting events that you can place bets on how long the national anthem will take at the Super Bowl? Perhaps to the surprise of many, the under has won the majority of times in the last ten years.)

And now at baseball games we get “God Bless America.” This started in the aftermath of 9/11. I went with the daughter to a Yankee game not too much after the attacks, and that was the first time I heard it, in the recorded performance by Kate Smith, during the seventh inning. (I wonder how many there recognized her voice. You have to be my age to remember her fifteen-minute TV show.) That made perfect sense then, as did the delay of a different ball game that autumn to hear a speech by President Bush. And, as I said, once started, it is hard to stop a patriotic ritual.

I probably object more than most to “God Bless America.” Baseball games drag on long enough without the song, which does hamper the between-inning routines of the game. Of course, they could get rid of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” which comes right after the patriotic song, but since I go to the park for baseball rituals, I want to hear “Root, root, root for the home team.” (Never, never, never get rid of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” which plays at a different time in the game. Love it.) Perhaps I would object less if I did not find “God Bless America” so insipid. The best I can say is that it is a step up from the Kars for Kids song, but not much. (Have you ever wondered why the Kars for Kids folks don’t tell us what the money is for?) As a kid, well before I understood its left-wing political implications, I thought “This Land Is Your Land” was a much better song (still do), and I would be happier if at least some of the time, it were to be performed in the seventh inning. (Kudos to the Baltimore Orioles.)

This, of course, is nothing compared to what happens at the Super Bowl. I was only paying partial attention to the run-up to that game as I was preparing dinner for the wife and the daughter (I am a modern guy), but I heard portions of what seemed like a five minute narration by Johnny Cash about the flag, and there was a trio singing, I think, “America the Beautiful,” and then a sprightly version of the national anthem, followed by the flyover when military jets fly in close formation low over the stadium just as the national anthem ends.

I have no idea when the flyover ritual started. I am always amazed by it. How can the timing be so precise? My most memorable flyover was combined with another patriotic display, the flight of Challenger. This Challenger is a bald eagle, and I have seen him in action a number of times at Yankee Stadium. My memory is that the bird was originally released outside the stadium during the national anthem and would fly to the pitcher’s mound or home plate where he would land on his handler’s wrist. As time went on, Challenger would be released from right in front of the center field fence for his flight to the infield. It is magnificent seeing an eagle fly in the wild, and I always found Challenger’s flight nearly as thrilling. The last time I saw him (I say “him,” but I don’t know if the eagle is male or female), however, was different. It was a playoff or World Series game because the rosters of both teams had been announced and were lined up on the first and third baselines. Challenger was flying in from the outfield as the National Anthem was concluding, and then the flyover came. This time the planes flew really low. I was in the fourth row of the upper deck, and my knees buckled a bit from the vibrations. (How do the residents of the Bronx respond to this patriotic display? Many must not know it’s coming, and perhaps think New York City is under attack again.) Challenger was not prepared for this. He had been about to land on his handler’s wrist, but the jets seemed to almost knock him out of the air. It was as if he hit an air pocket, and he dropped like a stone for ten feet. He then seemed disoriented. He flew around the lower deck and returned to the playing field where he had Derek Jeter and other players ducking out of his way. He did not land on his handler. He finally just settled on the infield grass and appeared very sad and discombobulated. His handler had to walk over and collect him.

Is there truly a connection between such patriotic rituals and the sports events that follow? This question brings back a memory of Rocky Graziano, who won and lost the middleweight championship within a year during the heyday of boxing. After retiring he wrote an autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me, which appealed to my schoolboy fantasies and was made into a successful movie starring Paul Newman. Later, he did the talk show circuit regularly telling amusing stories in heavy Brooklynese. On one of them he said that he hated “The Star Spangled Banner.” Merv Griffiin or Mike Douglas or whoever looked at him incredulously and said, “Why?” Graziano replied quite logically, “I knew that whenever the national anthem was over, someone was going to try to knock me unconscious.”

(Continued from last post.)

Leaks can cause harm, but we also need to understand that secrecy also damages the country in a number of ways. One of those is that secrecy leads to claims of conspiracy. If we have classified information about the Roswell incident, an almost inevitable result will be assertions about UFOs and aliens. If everything is not disclosed about the investigation into JFK’s death, conspiratorial claims about the assassination proliferate. You might think you are above that kind of thing, but what was your response when you found out that Jared Kushner, during the Presidential campaign, had a secret meeting with the Russians? Doesn’t at least part of you think something nefarious must have gone on?

And once information has been kept from the public, simply disclosing it does not cure the conspiratorial problem. If the government claims that every bit of stuff about Roswell has been disclosed, many will not trust that pronouncement. If they hid something once, I think, why should I trust that they are not hiding something now? Secrecy leads to a distrust of government, and the country is harmed when the government is not trusted.

Government secrecy, in a subtle and insidious way, tends to corrupt the holder of the secrets. The official with a secret feels powerful. The secret becomes a form of currency, a coin that can be held for ego purposes—I know more than you do—even if information should be exchanged, or spent to enhance the prestige of the leaker or to gain an advantage in an internal government dispute.

Secret information presents another danger. Because access to the information is limited, it cannot be analyzed by all those who might have useful insights about it.  Our country has had notable intelligence lapses. Our intelligence agencies, for example, were not aware of the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union or of the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Shah. We cannot know, but it is possible, that the analyses would have been different if more of the classified information had been available to academics, businessmen, NGO representatives, and others who knew or had studied Russia and Iran. Certainly Sen. Patrick Moynihan believed that the demise of the Soviet Union would have been forecast if the intelligence agencies had kept less information to themselves. Moynihan also maintained that the United States significantly overspent on military budgets because excessive secrecy allowed intelligence agencies to overestimate Soviet military strength.

There is a related danger. Policy makers who have already decided on a course of action can pick and choose classified information to disclose to support their predetermined path. With other information remaining secret that might undercut the chosen course, the proposed policy cannot be properly examined or challenged. In other words, Hello, Iraq!

Another aspect of human nature also comes into play. Information that is secret must be especially valuable. Why else would it be secret? Where secrecy predominates, what is not secret is too easily disregarded or dismissed.

And, of course, we can never really trust a leak. Not only does the leaker have some sort of motive for disclosing the particular information and for not disclosing something more, there is a natural inclination to make his own additions to the leaked material. Or at least this is a normal impulse if Seneca is right when he said, “Nobody will keep the thing he hears to himself and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more.”

We hear about leaks with the complainer wanting us to assume that the disclosure has endangered the country. We should challenge that assumption. The dangers should not be accepted merely because someone in government asserts it. And even though making some government information public can be harmful, we should never lose sight of the fact that secrecy harms our nation in many different ways. We should start from the position that a culture of secrecy is un-American.

But if we are really going to look for the source of leaks that government officials often maintain we must do, we should remember what John F. Kennedy said, “The Ship of State is the only ship that leaks from the top.”

The President demands Investigations into governmental leaks. The Attorney-General and other officials say, or sometimes leak, that they are investigating leaks. The statements, however, use one broad term—“leaks”—to cover all sorts of releases informing the public about its government. The government officials railing against the disclosure seem to imply that all leaks are an existential threat to the country.

Is that right? Do all leaks harm national security? Should we really put into one basket a leak about clashes among White House advisors, a leak of our President’s conversation with his counterpart from Mexico, and a leak about troop movements during wartime? If you follow the news, in your lifetime you have learned about leaked information thousands, probably many, many thousands of times. Think back. How many of them have actually harmed the United States? Quick, name me ten. How about five?

Many politicians have an instinctual desire to keep hidden from the public all sorts of information even when it does not contain national security secrets. We should realize that a disclosure that embarrasses a government official is not the same as a disclosure that harms national security.  We should be skeptical of why such non-classified information is secreted.

But let’s talk about “official” secrets and the elaborate classification industry that keeps them hidden. The first reaction by many to the disclosure of classified information is that it is shameful, criminal, harmful, and unpatriotic, but we, especially those of us who proclaim to be conservative, should have another response to the classification industry. A generation ago, a commission studying government secrecy gave a perspective, which while true, is seldom considered. The commission stated, “Secrecy is a form of government regulation. Americans are familiar with the tendency to overregulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.”

If we saw every government secret as a regulation, if we saw the classification industry as a giant government bureaucracy, we might question secrecy more. Is it really possible that so much must be classified?  According to an annual report from the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives and Records Administration, over 55 million items were classified—mandated to be kept confidential–in whole or in part in Fiscal Year 2016 alone. If you believe that the federal government overregulates in other areas, surely you should think it also does so in the secrecy business. Commissions studying our classification regime have time and again found rampant overclassification, with some of the studies concluding that 50% to 90% of what is classified could safely be released. Perhaps the most striking fact about overclassification is that while we hear concerns about the disclosure of classified information, students of the classification industry have reported that they know of no instance when a government official has been disciplined for classifying information that should have been public.

Our most famous leak may have been of the Pentagon Papers. The government went into hyper-crisis mode. It tried to upend the First Amendment and suppress the Papers’ publication. It brought criminal charges against those who brought them into the public light. It, in essence, said that if ever a leak harmed national security and put the country into danger, this was it. After all we were then fighting the Vietnam War. Later, however, President Nixon’s Solicitor General confessed that the Papers were an example of “massive overclassification.”  The Papers’ were analyses of documents that had been written years before the Papers publication and posed “no trace of a threat to the national security.”

We do, however, pay a lot for this bureaucratic secrecy system. The Information Security Oversight Office estimates that the federal government spent over $16 billion on our classification system. But, wait. There’s more. The ISOO estimates that private industry spent an additional $1.27 billion because many defense contractors and other industries are part of the wide ranging secrecy business. (Why isn’t this regulatory, expensive bureaucracy a target of conservatives?)

I am hardly the first person to note what we all know: that secrets have a way of getting out; that keeping secrets has never been easy; that secrets are like organisms that find a way to get free. Centuries ago Dr. Samuel Johnson said what still remains true: “Secrets are so seldom kept, that it may be with some reason doubted whether a secret has not some volatility by which it escapes, imperceptibly, at the smallest vent, or some power of fermentation, by which it expands itself, so as to burst the heart that will not give it way.”

Because so much is labeled secret and because human nature apparently abhors secrecy, it is not surprising that classified information finds a way to escape. Now add to that that about 4.5 million people have access to classified information, it is hardly surprising that there are leaks of classified information. Indeed it is surprising that there are not more. And since so much of the information is needlessly labeled secret, it should not be surprising that even leaks of classified information will often not harm national security.

We should be concerned about disclosures that are harmful, but talking about the harm from leaks is not the right starting point. A foundation of a free and open society is that information about the government and its doings should be free and open. Openness should be the norm; secrecy should be the rare exception. If we are in a free and open society, we should expect information to be public. We should be regularly challenging governmental secrecy. That does not mean that the government cannot have information kept from the public, but there should be exceptional reasons for doing so, and we should be regularly examining whether the reasons given for hiding information are truly exceptional.

“As the captain of the Yale swimming team stood besides the pool, still dripping after his laps, and listened to Bob Moses, the team’s second-best freestyler, he didn’t know what shocked him more—the suggestion or the fact that it was Moses who was making it.” Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

“Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in His Labyrinth.

“Not long after they heard the first clink of iron, the boys and girls in the cornfield would have been able to smell the grownups’ bodies, perhaps even before they saw the double line coming around the bend.” Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can.” Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1.

“People’s lives—their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences—begin at different times.” Stephen King, The Dark Half.

“From far-northwest Greenland to the southernmost tip of Patagonia, people hail the new moon—a time for singing and praying, eating and drinking.” Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know his World and Himself.

“All parents keep secrets from their children.” Scott Turow, Ordinary Heroes.

“Among the most rewarding traits of perennials is the fact that they come up unprompted year after year to offer the garden masses and highlight of color in uninterrupted but ever-changing patterns from April to November.” James Underwood Crockett, Perennials.

“Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a  hollow iron bar.” Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman.

“In the early 1980s, two physicists at Arizona State University wanted to know whether a typical introductory physics course, with its traditional emphasis on Newton’s laws of motion, changed the way students thought about motion.” Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do.

“Death is my beat.” Michael Connelly, The Poet.

Our house has two front entrances. A stoop goes from the sidewalk up ten steps to a magnificent double set of ten-foot walnut doors. To the left of the stoop a wrought-iron, four-foot fence with a gate encloses an area three steps down from the sidewalk. This area is where we New York row-house people keep the trash containers.

When we first moved into this house, sanitation workers would enter this area and take and empty the garbage cans, leaving them on the sidewalk to be collected by the owners or custodians. Then one day, although the rest of the block had the trash removed, we did not.  And then it happened again and again.

I finally waited for the telltale sound of the sanitation truck, headed to the street, and approached the driver. I asked, “How come you haven’t been picking up my garbage?” He replied, “Our rules are that we are not supposed to go down three steps to get the cans.” I said, “But you get all the other containers on the street from in front of the houses.” Looking at me as if it were self-evident, he noted, “The other houses have at most two steps!” (My later reconnoitering showed that he was right.) I pleaded, “What am I supposed to do?” With a tone that indicated that that was not really his problem, he announced, “I guess you will have to put the cans at the curb on collection day.”

The pick-ups often come early in the morning, and I started putting the cans out the night before. I was embarrassed by this. The block was hardly pristine, but we were the only house with garbage cans waiting on the sidewalk. I wondered if the neighbors thought we were bringing down the quality of our street, and I wanted to tell everyone why we had no choice in doing this, but, then again, this was Brooklyn, and I only knew a smattering of those neighbors.

The cans awaiting collection were especially unsightly because they were not covered. Once again, this was Brooklyn, and it is a well known fact of life here that garbage can covers in  this borough tend to disappear if they are in reach of those passing by. (Many owners then chained the covers to the fences in the recessed areas in front of the houses.) Indeed, one of the mysteries of urban life is what happens to all those covers. I can’t imagine a use for all that go missing.

I got into the routine of putting the cans on the curb on the appropriate evenings. It irked me, but I lived with it until the day a piece of paper was attached to the front door–a sanitation violation because of uncovered cans on the sidewalk with garbage in them. The violation carried a fine.

I was now in the land of Catch-22. If I didn’t put the cans out, I would not have a garbage pickup. If I did, the tops would disappear, and I would get a fine.

The sanitation violation carried a notice of a hearing if one was desired. The hearing time was during working hours and on a date that I could not make, so the spouse, who then had a more flexible schedule, went. When our violation was called, the hearing officer looked at our distinctive name on the records, and then asked the spouse whether she knew me. She replied that she was married to me, and officer indicated that he knew me from my work at the Legal Aid Society, but if it was ok with her, he would still hear the case. She assented and explained the situation, but the officer said that there was nothing he could do and the fine would have to be paid. Then, when the hearing was over, he subtly waved her forward and leaned over and explained to her how New York works. He said, I kid you not, “Just pay the sanitation workers a ‘gratuity,’ and they will pick up your garbage.” He was careful not to utter “bribe.”

The next collection day I waited for that telltale sound of the coming trucks and approached the driver, who was a different one from my last encounter. I explained our predicament, and I heard the driver tell the other workers in what I regarded as a false tone, “Can you imagine? They get a violation if they leave the cans at the curb!” This was new territory for me. I did not know what was the appropriate amount, but I took out some bills hoping it was enough but not way too much and started to hand it to him. Apprehension flashed across his face while he said that I could not hand him money like that. Then it dawned on this yokel what he meant. I sprinted back to the house, put the money in the folds of a newspaper, rushed back, and handed him The New York Times for his reading pleasure.

This solved the problem. Our cans, like those of our neighbors, got picked up in front of the house until some time later when in labor negotiations the sanitation workers got a raise in exchange for reducing the number of workers in each crew. After that, everyone on our block had to put the receptacles at the curb, and miraculously, no one then got a sanitation violation for uncovered garbage cans on the street.

The spouse likes to lead book groups. She works very hard at it. She reads the book two or three times. I often read the book that will be discussed, too, and she will bounce her ideas that she might raise with the group off me. I have never participated in one of her book discussions. We have decided that my presence would make her too nervous, but I am confident that she does an excellent job.

Some find it surprising that she is so good at it. After all, she was a scientist—a research neuroimmunologist–and those who are not familiar with science, which includes all too many of us, often think scientists are generally isolated in a tiny world of esoterica.

The spouse was not always a scientist. While she took some science courses in college, she majored in English. She then went on to get a master’s in English at the University of Chicago. We came to New York, and she kicked around some publishing houses. She found her advancement there hampered by being a “girl,” but she also realized that she had always really wanted to be a biologist. Working part-time, she went to New York’s City College to get science credits, including organic chemistry, that she needed to get into graduate school. She then was accepted into Cornell Medical School, where she got a Ph.D.

The road to being a scientist is a long one—graduate school, and then years of a post-doctoral fellowship, and finally, if one is lucky, a lab of one’s own, which she got and ran until she recently retired. But during all that time, she continued to read detective stories, classic literature, bestsellers, history. She is not alone. Her best scientific friend also reads.

I don’t find this surprising. Of course, many scientists such as C.P. Snow, Richard Feynmann, Lewis Thomas, and E.O. Wilson have been outstanding writers. (Freud wrote some interesting books, but only under the most generous definition can he be labeled a “scientist.”) While those extraordinary scientist-writers just might be regarded as exceptional, there is actually a systemic connection between good writers and good scientists.

Successful scientists are curious about the world. They want to understand nature and the universe and set out to explore the unknown. A relative once said to me that the spouse and I led such safe, ordinary, unadventurous lives. I, not surprisingly bristled, and wanted to lash back with all the James Bondish things in my life (if I could have thought of any), but mostly I was offended on behalf of the spouse. I replied, “She is a scientist, and she goes off to work each day trying to see and understand things that have never been seen or understood before with no guarantee that that will happen. Few things could be more adventuresome or daring than that!”

Research scientists are always seeking what has not been found before, and they do it with a wonder about the world. On some level, every scientist I know thinks nature is marvelous and feels a certain glee when something new is discovered about it.

The good writer also sets out to find what has not been found before, but in the writer’s case, it is a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a character, or a story. The writer, too, has to have a wonder about the world and observe it and learn from it. He or she must be able to see and remember what the rest of us cannot. They are part of the intelligent people that Blaise Pascal  described: “The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in men. Ordinary people see no difference between men.” The good writer often sees distinctions and distinctiveness where others all see the same, not only in other people, but in many facets of the world. The good writer can describe or explain what many of us fail to see. As a result, our world expands. The scientist, who also seeks a greater understanding of the world, I think, can especially appreciate what a good writer has done.

Of course, the truths articulated by the scientist and the good writer are not the same. Perhaps this is too often a one-way street; while the scientist can understand the fresh insights or observations of the good writer, the scientist’s findings are often not understood outside the scientific community. But in their seeking of the previously unknown, both the good scientist and the good writer add to an understanding of the world.  As Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd say in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, “If you can trace the neural pathways of criminality, do you know more about criminals than Dostoyevsky knows? No, you know something different.”

We should not be surprised that scientists appreciate good literature and insightful history, or at least I am not surprised that the spouse does. You can ask her about microglia and the like, but if you want to think more deeply about The Gentleman from Moscow, The Sound and The Fury, or The Children Act, she has some questions for you.

The second song the DJ played was “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Is that appropriate for a wedding reception?

I was on a park bench. Off to my left a man was ranting. Police were around the apparently mentally ill person dealing with him patiently. On the next park bench to my right were people who begged in the park and seemed to know the ranter. One of the them looked at the police, saw a blonde woman, and said, “Look at her. She doesn’t look like a cop. Why did she become a cop? She should have been, uh, uh, uh, a chemist, or something.”

I hope it was for a law firm, but it did not say so. The billboard read: “Medical malpractice is all we do.”

I went to a butterfly release. It was a fundraiser for a county Women’s Resources Center that aids abused women. (It is shocking how many women this center aids each year.) For every $15 given to the center, the donor got to release a butterfly. I had never thought about how butterflies might get released. They come from the grower in an insulated container with an icepack. The cold, but not freezing temperature, keeps the butterflies—monarchs in this case—dormant. Each butterfly is individually wrapped in a triangular envelope. The envelopes are taken out of the container to allow the butterflies to warm up and become more active. At the appointed time, a flap on the envelop is opened and the butterfly comes out. In our case, since it was cool evening, they needed some coaxing to start flying.

I think it was a typo. The New York City Department of Transportation sent me an email about upcoming street closures. It said that various thoroughfares around Central Park would be closed “for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Curve.”

I watched some men’s doubles at the U.S. Open. I knew nothing about any of the players, but the men on one team were identically dressed in black shirts and shorts with skulls as decorations. The players sported tattoos, infrequently seen on professional tennis players. I expected them to play heavy metal on the changeovers. They were trying to look as if they were the bad boys of tennis. The image was undercut, however, when they lost in straight sets of the first round.

At a recent dinner party, a guest mispronounced a word. Other people at the table, either out of ignorance or out of politeness, pronounced the word in the same wrong way. I avoided using the word. What should one do in such a circumstance?

“Shish kebab. Sugarloaf. Sheboygan. Whenever life called for foul language, Aughenbaugh broke into a reserve of quaint Midwestern euphemisms.” Michael Chabon, Moonglow.

A once magnificent hotel had become decrepit and was torn down. I and others were touring the grounds to see if they could be turned into a park. A flagpole had been left standing. Two of my colleagues were looking up and commented that the donated flag was too small for the height of the pole. They were right. It reminded me of the President when he holds his hands up.

“Wasn’t history supposed to end in 1991?” David Greene, Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia.

“Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the windows, and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was.”  Owen Wister, The Virginian.

“My wife and I were both born without whatever brain part it is that enables people to decorate their homes.”  Dave Barry, Dave Barry’s Bad Habits: A 100% Fact-free Book.

“In planning your wedding, remember that this is above all a sacred and personal occasion.” Jordan Marsh, Wedding Embassy Yearbook.

“Down to the last day, even the last hour now, I’m an old man, lonely and unloved, sick and hurting and tired of living.” John Grisham, The Testament.

“To write is to talk to strangers.” Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.

“The day my wife left me she gave me a list of what I was.” Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker.

“We were never born to read.” Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

“He knew that it was wrong, and that he was going to get caught.”  Scott Turow, Personal Injuries.

“Two hours before my mother killed herself, I noticed she had put on makeup.” Betty Rollins, Last Wish.

“Standing before the kitchen sink and regarding the bright brass faucets that gleamed so far away, each with a bead of water at its nose, slowly swelling, falling, David again became aware that this world had been created without thought of him.” Henry Roth, Call It Sleep.

“I was in the washtub naked.” Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography.

“America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp.” Sam Lipsyte, The Ask.

“About 17,000 years ago a great sheet of ice one thousand feet thick covering eastern North America from the Canadian Arctic all the way to Staten Island began to melt and retreat.”  City of New York Parks & Recreation, New York City Trees: A Field Guide for the Metropolitan Area.

“Fame requires every kind of excess.”  Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street.