“Rebecca Rose felt about Park Slope the same way she felt about her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Abbie: basic unconditional love mixed with frequent spurts of uncontrollable rage.” Amy Sohn, Prospect Park West.

“I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you.”  Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York.

“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible.

“At the start of the twentieth century, death by electricity was a relatively recent form of capital punishment.” Harold Schechter, The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century.

“The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in crêpe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.” Ian McEwan, Atonement.

“Shortly after midnight on July 18, the great bell high in the campanile of the church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 115^th Street announced to East Harlem that the day of festa had begun.” Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115^th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950.

“When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug.” Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis.

“After graduating college, I worked downtown in the immense shadows of the World Trade Center, and as part of my freewheeling, four-hour daily lunch break I would eat and drink my way past these two giants, up Broadway, down Fulton Street, and over to the Strand Book Annex.” Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure: A Memoir.

“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome.

“Once upon a time, the Flatiron Building was a member of my family.” Alice Sparberg Alexiou, The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City that Arose with It.

“It is a little remarkable that—although disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.

The man jumps out of the truck that he has used to mow down bicyclists and says “Allahu akbar,” “God is great” in Arabic. Therefore, this killer is a terrorist, which somehow makes him different from those who mow down others with close equivalents of machine guns but who do not utter in that foreign language. Often the first reaction to the mum murderers, as long as they have an “American name,” is that they are crazy.

That assumption is generally not correct. According to a recent article in the New York Times, while the incidence of a diagnosable mental illness is higher among mass murderers than in the general population, only about twenty percent of those killers had such a mental illness. Most before the killings would not have come on to the psychiatric radar.  But still, most of us believe that to kill as they have must mean, whatever a psychiatric diagnosis would have shown, that they were crazy.

The crazy label does a number of things. It allows for a certain understanding of the murderers. We may all know people who are, in our lay terms, at least a little crazy, and perhaps that we ourselves have had some crazy thoughts. The crazy designation, however, does more than just give us a certain understanding—a crazy person did it. The label also allows us to accept our passivity about these events. We are not surprised that crazy people will on occasion do crazy things, and while perhaps more should be done with the mentally ill, we will always have crazy people. By labeling the mass killer as crazy, we tacitly accept the inevitability of a certain level of mass killings.

The Arabic-spouting murderer, however, is seen differently. He, of course, could be labeled crazy, but instead he is seen as a terrorist who is an adherent of a religion that turns out terrorists. We know it is crazy to kill the churchgoers because of mother-in-law problems, but still, such stuff is going to happen from time to time. Killing in the name of religion, in the name of God, however, is incomprehensible.  We can imagine the crazy person killing, but we can’t even imagine how a true religion can lead to terroristic slaughter? Mass murder is part of our fabric, but religious terrorism is so foreign, so un-American, it must be stopped.

Of course, many have killed in the name of Christianity, but the examples are often different from those killing to glorify Allah. The Christian inquisitors, in their views, for example, killed to save souls. If the victim confessed his faith to God as the inquisitor saw God, then the victim would be saved from eternal damnation even if his temporal life ended. The religious wars in Europe and the Crusades, too, were partly about bringing souls to Christ, but also had the traditional war goal of controlling territory. Similarly, the Irish troubles and the Bosnia war had mixed religious, ethnic, and territorial and government control components.

The religious terrorism of today seems different. Mowing down people in a bicycle lane or on a Nice walkway cannot save those victims’ souls, and it is not a struggle for territory or government control. These slaughters in the name of religion makes no sense to us. We ask, “What kind of religion is it that leads to this?”

A few hours after the terror attack on the bike path in New York City, I happened to finish to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven, the book upon which the classic movie is based, so the issue of religion and violence were fresh in my mind. In both the book and the movie, bandits, who claim to be federal officers, confront three miners who have worked hard to collect a bit of gold. (And the famous line is in both: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”) In the book, however, we learn more about the bandits preceding this confrontation.

A sizeable group of bandits had boarded a train. Without warning, the bandits bring out hidden guns, kill all the soldiers on board, and then start killing passengers. Traven writes, “Women were on their knees, some praying to the Holy Virgin. . . . Those with children held them up against the bandits, begging for mercy in the name of all the saints and offering, by the eternal grace of Our Lady of Guadalupe, their own lives in exchange for those of their babies.”

The bandits ignore these appeals and instead shout out the equivalent of the Muslim’s “Allahu akbar” as they killed and robbed. “With their war-cry: ‘Viva maestro rey Cristo! Long live our King Jesus!’ the bandits had started the slaughter. With the same cry, the signal was given to begin plundering.” They moved to the next car and “triumphantly the murderers shouted their ‘Viva maestro rey Cristo!’”

This seems to make no sense. How can these bandits slaughter innocent people in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace? Traven explains: “The bandits in this case made it quite clear that they were fighting for their king, Jesus. Fighting on behalf of the Roman Catholic church, for religious liberty.” The bandits, however, had little idea of who Christ was. “The Roman Catholic church during its four hundred years of rule in Latin America, of which three hundred and fifty were an absolute rule, has been more interested in purely material gains for the treasuries and coffers in Rome than in educating its subjects in the true Christian spirit.”

The author describes the tortures the bandits used and says they were trained in this by their religion. “Their churches are filled with paintings and statues representing every possible torture white men, Christians, inquisitors, and bishops could think of. These are the proper paintings and statues for churches in a country in which the most powerful church on earth wanted to demonstrate how deep in subjection all human beings can be kept for centuries if there exists no other aim than the enlargement of the splendor and the riches of the rulers.”

Church followers, according to Traven, don’t question the origin of the church’s wealth. The bandits were not blameworthy but “doing and thinking only what they had been taught. Instead of being shown the beauty of this religion, they had been shown only the cruelest and the bloodiest and the most repulsive parts of it. These abhorrent parts of the religion were presented as the most important, so as to make it feared and respected not through faith or love, but through sheer terror and the most abominable superstitions.”

As I read this, I wondered if Traven was giving me a better understanding of today’s religious terrorists.

Christmas decorations went up over the streets before Halloween. And I used to find it offensive that they went up right before Thanksgiving.

I learned this week that many people consider it somewhat creepy for a man well past his teen-age years to hang out at the mall to chat up fifteen-year-old girls. But maybe you already knew that.

Fifteen of us were on a section of the platform waiting for the morning subway. Fourteen were scrolling through phones. I was reading a paperback. Perhaps this should have made me feel old, but it made me feel a tad superior.

“I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the clichés and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the clichés and conventions of the young.” Michael Chabon, Moonglow.

What’s in a word? So much talk about whether the campaign “colluded” with the Russians. Then a pushback from some conservatives saying that only in the antitrust statutes is collusion against the law. The implication apparently is that colluding with Putin minions would have been ok if it happened. I pull out a dictionary that tells me “collusion” is a “conspiracy to commit fraud.” Will it make everyone happier if we ask, “Did the campaign conspire with the Russians?” There are many statutes and legal doctrines that make conspiracy against the law.

“From his dealings with his mother, Smitty had learned the following truth: the person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.” John Lanchester, Capital.

Do you know what “extreme vetting” is? Could you explain it to me? I am told that national security and my personal security requires more extreme vetting, but it is never explained what that entails. How does it differ from vetting? (Are there other stations on the vetting path? Is there “severe vetting” or “enhanced vetting” that are more than vetting but fall short of extreme vetting?) Do we, for example, when vetting ask the potential immigrant, “Who was James Monroe?” And in extreme vetting, if the applicant has answered, “He was the fifth President of the United States,” do we then ask, “Who was Monroe’s vice-president?” (The true sentimentalist should recognize that this is a reference to Miracle on 34^th Street.) Or does extreme vetting have innovative uses of waterboards and electrodes? Why is extreme vetting never explained in a way so that I see it is not just a slogan—dare we say, a new politically-correct slogan—and I and everyone else can assess whether it actually guarantees us a safer world?

What were they thinking? The day after the election mail comes to my house asking me to vote for a candidate.

The baby was fussing. “What’s the matter” asked the father pushing the stroller. He continued, “You didn’t have enough of a nap today, Buddy.” I said, “Me neither.” The father laughed. The baby still fussed.

[Note. There will be two postings per week until December.]

A decade or more ago, I was reading Thinks, a book written by David Lodge. As with other Lodge novels, it was set in an academic institution. One day as I was coming home from work on the subway I got to the part of the book where the chief character, a cognitive scientist, is showing a novelist the science building, which has a mural inside with scenes that relate to consciousness. One portion of the painting depicted bats. The novelist is puzzled by this, and the scientist explains that the philosopher Thomas Nagel had posited that no one could know what it was like to be a bat, a thought experiment to show how difficult it is to understand consciousness.

I had gone home only to change my clothes, and within a short time I was driving across town to play tennis. In those days, I regularly listened to audio books in addition to reading “real” books, and in the car that evening I was listening to John Banville’s The Sea. Banville’s narrator said that he liked birds as a boy, but not to identify them. Instead, he found their nests and imagined what it was like to be a bird. Then, although not using Nagel’s name, he referred to the same bat story that was in Lodge’s book, with the narrator’s point being that if anyone could have understood what a bat was like, he could have as a boy.

I was struck at the unlikelihood of perceiving two references to this same thought experiment in an hour when I had never heard of it before. A couple days later, I said something about this to a friend, who knew many things I did not. Harry was not surprised in the least by the references to bat consciousness. He was well aware of Nagel’s assertion, and in the nicest way possible indicated that Nagel’s thought experiment was quite famous. And once again I learned some of the deficiencies in my education.

This came back to me when over drinks recently I started to tell a different friend about a different thought experiment I had just read about. Before I finished relating it, I could tell that she was already familiar with the hypothetical. Again, I realized that I was not well versed in thought experiments, even when they were famous to others. But maybe you are like me in that regard, which gives me the chance to outline this particular thought experiment.

Assume you are operating a runaway train that went out of control through no fault of yours. If you do nothing, the train will kill five people who are on the track ahead of the train. If you divert the train to a siding, which you can do, the train will not kill the five but will kill only the one person who is on the siding. In one case you are passive and five die. In the other, you take an action that kills someone. What is the just and fair (or defensible) course of conduct?

Apparently, most people who are asked about this thought experiment say to divert the train. But now change the hypothetical. Instead of operating the train, assume that you are on an overpass witnessing the runaway train and you see the five people that will be killed if the train does not change course. Next to you on the overpass is a very large man leaning over the parapet, and you see that if you push him off the overpass he will fall on the tracks and be killed, but his body will divert the train and save the five. Would it be just and fair if you took this action?

Perhaps you have already pondered this thought experiment, thought it completely through, and come to your conclusions. I am still working on it.

[Note. There will be two postings a week until December.]

“The date was April 14, 1912, a sinister day in maritime history, but of course the man in Suite 63-65, shelter deck C, did not yet know that.” Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.

“I have never been what you’d call a crying man.” Stephen King, 11/22/63.

“Words are not only tools; they are also weapons.” Peter Bowler, A Superior Person’s Book of Words.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye.

“From warm, turquoise waves, red, oozing magma, and dripping cloud forests, to awe-inspiring churches and bustling markets that come alive with the colors of tropical fruit and bright, hand-painted oxcarts, Costa Rica, a haven of peace and stability in Latin America, offers endless opportunities to experience and explore.” Costa Rica: A Let’s Go Travel Guide.

“I have no reason to answer the door so I answer the door.” Dave Eggers, What is The What.

“Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who their prime minister is.” Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country.

“There was a white horse, on a quiet winter morning when snow covered the streets gently and was not deep, and the sky was swept with vibrant stars, except in the east, where dawn was beginning in a light blue flood.” Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale.

“When I was small, I didn’t even know that I was a kid with special needs.” Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump.

“There are some places about which we have strong impressions that when we finally go there they seem familiar, as if we had known them forever.” Cecily McMillan, The Charleston, Savannah & Coastal Islands Book.

“Mother performed in starlight.” Karen Russell, Swamplandia!.

“In the spring of 1841, when John Tyler was President, a Kentucky farmer named Solomon Young and his red-haired wife, Harriet Louisa Young, packed their belongs and with two small children started for the Far West.” David McCullough, Truman.

[Note. There will be two postings a week until December.]

I pivoted. First a pain in my right knee. Then a pain in my right hip as it slammed into the macadam of the Dean Street schoolyard basketball court. The knee had given way in my first time back to basketball after the surgery.

My knee had been operated on months before after it had been torn up in a basketball game at the local Y. A competitor had fallen on me like a football clip. Ligaments and the meniscus were torn, but the methods of repair and rehabilitation were not as good as they would later become. I now had the scar of a large incision on my knee and had spent a month or more with crutches and an immobilized leg. This was my first time after the surgery trying basketball again, but as I lay on the schoolyard “floor,” as the local Brooklyn kids called it, I knew that my basketball days were over.

I went back to the surgeon. I said that I wanted—no, that I needed, to be active. He noted that there were activities other than basketball and suggested running. I instinctively recoiled. I had never really run just to run. Running was to get somewhere in a hurry. Running was a part of other sports–to get back on defense or to round first to get to second for a double. Running was not an end in itself. It was, as many had thought before and after me, boring.

But soon I was doing it. At first, I would run a hundred steps, which I mentally counted. Then I would walk a hundred. Then run a hundred again. After a bit, I could run two hundred steps followed by walking one hundred and soon it was all running.

I did not think of myself enjoying it, but as the distances increased, I did feel a sense of accomplishment. Finally, I was able to run from our apartment to the end of a park and back without stopping, perhaps a two-mile distance, and I felt pride that I was able to run that far.

I began realizing that running fitted parts of my personality. It gave me welcome solitude. I ran alone, something that I almost always did even after I was running much longer distances and regularly running races. When someone suggested that we run together, I almost always found a reason not to.

Running also got me outdoors at times I would not otherwise have been out, and I found I liked that. I would come home after work and, before I took up running, I would have stayed in. Now I put on the running gear and went out. I found that I liked being in the New York twilight, the cold, even a little drizzle.

I also appreciated that I could do this activity on my own schedule. I did not have to have an appointment or a set time. I did not have to wait for others to gather as I did for a basketball game.

And I found my competitive instinct was kicking in. This drive was not to run faster or further than other people, but to see if I could better what I already had done. It was competition with myself. I was in my mid-thirties, and it was satisfying to have a physical activity in which I could get better, and I was getting better.

Lou, a work colleague who said he ran, heard I was now running and urged me time and again to try a Central Park race. I finally signed up for one and went up to the race with Lou and a friend of his, who drove. I quickly sensed that the friend was a jerk, which was confirmed when we were caught in traffic near the park. He honked his horn when there was no point to it, and the cabbie in front of us got out of his car, came back to us, and angrily berated Lou’s friend. The friend, looking scared, stammered, “It wasn’t me on the horn, but the car behind us.”

We got to the race, which was a 10K. I don’t remember my time, but I know that I was pleased with my performance. On the way to the race, the jerk had talked almost continuously about how many races he had run and how good he was, but it turned out that I had run my first race in a significantly faster time than he had. I could see that he was a bit pissed by that.

That gave me pleasure. And a step on the road to a marathon was taken.

All sports fans learn that players and teams fail, and perhaps other boys my age were also too optimistic about race because sports were integrated, but the Milwaukee Braves also brought home to me another lesson not confronted by all sports fans. I encountered it when I was in college, that time when adulthood was supposed to be upon me but aspects of boyhood still clung.

At my college in those days, baseball was not cool. Few of my classmates indicated an attachment to a team. I did not broadcast that I was a Braves fan, but every day I sought out the box scores from the previous evening to see how the Braves, and more particularly, Henry Aaron had done. This often took some effort because the school got early editions of New York City newspapers, and they often did not have the box scores from games not played on the East Coast. This would keep me scrambling to find later and later editions. Until I could find out what happened the night before, I felt something like I do now when I have not had my regular quotient of morning coffee.

Then it changed. A Chicago-based group bought the Braves, and they determined that they could make more money if they moved the team to Atlanta. In what increasingly became the norm for sports and many other things in this country, television and radio were the controlling factors. While attendance in Milwaukee had dropped off since the Braves early days there, when it was spectacular, the crowds were still respectable. The Braves’ broadcast market, however, was limited largely to Wisconsin with no way to grow, and this was a fraction of the market available to an Atlanta team that could hope to capture fans, and ears and eyeballs, throughout the South.

I had assumed without really thinking about it that I would be a Milwaukee Braves fan all my life and this would always bring back the joys and agonies of my boyish summers. Of course, I knew that money was involved in the game. Players got paid; admission got charged. The essence of baseball, however, was competition, the matchup of pitcher and batter, sunshine, cool evenings, radio voices, a community of fans.  Now I saw it differently. A community may have seen the Braves as their team, but they were wrong. It was not the community’s team. Ownership and money triumphed over community.

A court order required the Braves to stay in Milwaukee one more year, and I kept hoping that the move would not happen. I went to some games in that forlorn year and got some more baseball memories. I saw Don Drysdale hit Mike de la Hoz in the chest, producing a crack like a pistol shot. I watched Maury Wills get picked off first base twice in an afternoon. But it was all sadness, and at the end of the season the Braves decamped.

The Braves had taught me about ups and downs, human failings and successes. They taught me about the optimism of waiting until next year. They taught me that to succeed one had to risk failure and that everyone fails some of the time. But now the Braves set me on another path of understanding. I began the lifelong search for understanding the power of money and ownership.

When I viewed the Braves not as a baseball team, but as a profit-driven corporation, it made me more sensitive to other corporate decisions, especially the decision to move a factory out of a town. On the one hand, such corporate moves have usually been done for a seemingly different reason from the reason given for the Braves move out of Wisconsin. The factory has been moved not to increase broadcast revenues, but because wages would be lower in the new place. And the moving of a plant does not dash the naïve fantasies of a boy, because few boys fantasize about the ups and downs of a factory. Nevertheless, the move of a factory, I came to realize, was quite similar to the move of a sports franchise. In both cases, those already with money, the owners of the team or business, want to improve their bottom line; they simply want to have more money. And just as a sports team produces a community, a factory also produces a community that includes those who work there, their relatives and dependents, and others who more indirectly depend on the factory workers, such as owners of diners, taverns, and grocery stores. The move of a factory so a few can make more money crushes a community.

But a lot has been written about the moves or retention of sports franchises; not enough has been written about the moves of other corporations, and their effects on communities.

The Braves left, but even so, memories of the Milwaukee Braves are still part of my boyhood reminiscences. Those thoughts, however, seem isolating because they are shared or even known by few. If I tell a baseball fan that the best lefthanded pitcher, perhaps simply the best pitcher, of my lifetime was Warren Spahn, I am likely to be met with a blank look. I can talk about Bob “Hurricane” Hazle, and the listener has no idea whom I am talking about. But the memories, even if not widely shared are still important to me. They are part of my life and development. When I look at that picture of Eddie Matthews and Henry Aaron on their last walk off the Milwaukee baseball field, I see the end of my childhood, but I also see that childhood. That white man and that black man walking off with their hips seemingly joined remind me of a hope and the many thrills those two men gave me. In case you did not know, the two still hold the career record for home runs hit by a pair of teammates.  They were a part of my life that I still cherish.

[Note: There will be two postings a week until December.]

A color photograph of a young me hangs above my desk.  I am sitting in profile at the L-shaped work area I once used.  Pens, matches, photocopies, a thesaurus are lying on the surfaces–some of the tools for my writing in those days. Seated on my lap is the two-year-old daughter.  While I look forward, she has turned towards the camera.  She has a proud, joyful smile as her finger is poised over the keyboard of a Selectric. The picture defines an era of her childhood for me.

Another photograph, this one in black and white, is to the left and above. It defines an era of my childhood.  Two men in old baseball uniforms–stirrups, baggy, no names, are walking with their backs to the camera in a narrow, concrete passageway with harsh lights in the ceiling.  “41” is on the left and “44” on the right. The caption to this picture, which I reproduced from a book, said it was Eddie Matthews and Henry Aaron’s last trip off the field as Milwaukee Braves from County Stadium.  The team would no longer exist.

The Milwaukee Braves were my childhood team.  Our radio, as were our neighbors’, was tuned to their games. I could walk down the street on a warm evening with everyone’s windows open and not miss a pitch. I knew not just the lineup but idiosyncrasies of all the players.  (I did not know as much as some did. At one of our family’s yearly outings to a game, two young women sat in front of us. One said to the other, ”Root for Frank Torre.”  Torre was the backup first baseman who sometimes came in as a defensive replacement, hardly the one with a large fan following. The woman went on, “He’s the only one who is single.”)

I learned early that the mythic figures on the ball field were actually human beings. I went to my first major league game with a youth group—Cardinals versus Braves.  We were in the right field bleachers where there was a low fence that we could stand next to.  There he was—Stan Musial.  I had heard his name on the radio a gazillion times. I knew that he was a baseball god, and I guess I expected a god-like figure or at least someone as heroic-looking as the good guy in a cowboy movie.  But as I stood a few yards away from him, my boyish eyes saw an old man in need of a shave. (It was low-scoring game, and I remember Musial hit a home run in the tenth inning to win the game.  I have never tried to look for the box score in case my memory is wrong.)

Baseball players were mortals, and I learned that they made mistakes and often failed. I heard a story that at a dinner honoring Stan Musial after he retired, Joe Garagiola said, “Stan was an all-time great. He batted .333 and got two thousand hits. (Pause.) Wait a minute. What are we doing honoring a man who made out four thousand times?” I learned that the best often failed, and that all players made errors, struck out at inopportune times, gave up home run pitches.

Individuals failed, and so did teams. Of course, the fan of any sports franchise learns that the season generally ends without winning the championship, but still some disappointments are larger than others. That was true for Milwaukee Braves fans. In a four year stretch of my childhood, the Braves finished one game out of first, won a world series, blew a world series, and ended up tied for the pennant but lost in a playoff.  Had a few outcomes been different in this stretch, the Braves would be seen as the dominant team of an era, one of the all-time great teams. Instead, those clubs, the teams of my youth, are mostly forgotten by anybody who was not a fan.

These are lessons any sports fan learns. Players often fail; teams seldom win championships. These lessons remain with me and seem to speak to more of life than just sports. But the Braves also gave me a false lesson, one that was situated in the particular era of my boyhood. The Braves presented me an overly optimistic picture of race in the country.

Major league baseball had been integrated a few years before the Braves moved to Milwaukee. The team arrived just as the United States Supreme Court held that segregation of public schools violated the Constitution. I am not sure when I heard about Brown v. Board of Education, but to this third grader, integration was an abstract issue since my town–fifty miles north of Milwaukee–was all white. Even so, I and seemingly everyone I knew, were adamant anti-segregationists.

It took a while to realize that the whole country did not feel that way. I think I came to that realization during the Little Rock school crisis. The hate on the faces screaming at that brave little girl in her simple dress filled me with fear and disgust. But I naïvely thought that such hatred could not last for long, and I thought that because of the Milwaukee Braves. How could you not want Henry Aaron–in my ten-year old (yet carefully-considered) opinion probably the greatest ever to play the game–to be in your neighborhood, in your school, in your home? Maybe there were some problems with integration now, but baseball seemed to be indicate that the hatred would disappear and all people would soon be treated according to their merits. That’s what happened on the ball field. That Lew Burdette was white and Billy Bruton was black was not an issue. What mattered was whether the Braves won. And, of course, I saw that the Braves all worked together for that goal. Surely these teammates were all friends. If that could happen on the ball field, surely it would soon happen everywhere. Right?

[To be continued.]

Monty Hall, host and co-creator of “Let’s Make a Deal,” died recently and this has led again to discussion of the “Monty Hall Problem.” At the end of his show, a contestant was offered a wonderful prize and two clinkers. They were hidden behind three doors. The contestant would pick a door. Hall, who knew what was behind each door, did not immediately open the selected door but would instead first open one of the two remaining doors to expose a booby prize. The contestant would then be allowed to keep his or her selected door or switch to the remaining door. Should the contestant switch? I remember reading Marilyn vos Savant’s column in Parade magazine where she demonstrated that the contestant’s odds of winning the big prize were two-thirds if the contestant changed the pick to the unselected door. The column caused a storm with many people, some highly educated, saying the odds were 50-50 no matter what the contestant did. But, of course, vos Savant was right.

The newspaper article indicated that the owner of the Dallas Cowboys professional football team had proclaimed that no Cowboy would play if he showed disrespect for the flag. Accompanying the article was a picture of the Cowboys lined up standing, many with hands over hearts, during the national anthem. In the foreground of the picture were several Cowboy cheerleaders in their famous outfits of short shorts and a skimpy top with a bare midriff. Question: Do those barely covered asses, as cute and delectable as they may be, show respect for the flag?

The client with the Italian surname, hardly more than a child but charged with serious robberies, asked me if I were Jewish. I asked why he wanted to know. He replied, “Because Jews make the best lawyers.” I replied, “No, I am not Jewish; I already have enough problems.” But I remained his lawyer.

“In nineteenth century-politics, as much as now, the side with the best metaphors often wins.” Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals, and the Making of Modern America.

I have a book in my hand. It seems permanent, not so much the physical object, but the content. And, of course, to some extent that is true. I have read books that were published a century, two centuries ago, but most books, even well-received ones, are quickly forgotten. Whenever I get a book out of the library, I look at the return dates stamped in the book. Most of the older ones have not been checked out in years. A physical book may still be on somebody’s shelves, but does it really exist if it is not read?

As I was waiting for a prescription to be filled, a twenty-something woman made some purchases and asked Rose behind the counter, “Do you sell toilet brushes?” Rose said that the store did not. The young woman continued, “Do you know where I might buy one around here?” Rose shook her head. I then suggested a hardware store a few blocks away. The woman thanked me and said, “My parents are coming tomorrow. . . . They have high standards.”

The author’s autograph is inscribed right below his name on the title page. That struck me as a little sad because I had bought the novel at a used book store.

I find that paperbacks printed years ago often contain promotions on the inside covers or at the back for other books. I read this material to see how many of those books published back then or their authors I even recognize. They are sometimes the most entertaining part of the book. Take, for example, the ads in my oldest softcover book printed by the American News Company in 1895.

Bought for a buck or two at an art and antique show. I was attracted to it not because I was familiar with the title or author but because of the remarkable picture on the cover of the author, or as I am guessing she, Miss Laura Jean Libbey, might have called herself, the authoress. She is staring straight ahead. Her eyes are hypnotic, but it is almost impossible to concentrate on them because the gaze is drawn to the noteworthy hat that spreads wide over the head and has three visible plumes plus something else I cannot identify. The back cover shows a fuller, three-quarters view of the same picture, which shows that Libbey had an enviable bust and a waist, surely cinched in, that does not look humanly possible.

I was also drawn to the book because of its title—When His Love Grew Cold. Her other books that were advertised inside the covers showed that Libbey had a way with titles that at least attracted me: Miss Middleton’s Lover; or Parted on their Bridal Tour; A Forbidden Marriage; or in Love with a Handsome Spendthrift; He Loved, but was Lured Away; and Lovers Once, but Strangers Now. A couple of her titles at first glance were letdowns, but only until I read their descriptions. I learned about Olive’s Courtship that “the quiet title does not prepare you for the powerful story that follows. No living author has ever equaled it.” And the reader “will never lay down That Pretty Young Girl until you discover who killed the handsome, profligate Earl of Dunraven on his wedding night, and unravel the mystery which surrounds the beautiful, hapless Helen, whom to love—was fatal.”

Nearly as surprising as this body of work was to me was the conclusion of the preface. Libbey after teasing her readers, as she had apparently done before, with the suggestion that this would be her last book, not only gives her name, but her address: No. 916 President Street, Brooklyn—a house that in all probability still exists.

Other ads in my older paperbacks pique my interest. While I finished Libbey’s novel a whiIe ago, I am now reading in small doses The Sardonic Humor of Ambrose Bierce, which was printed in 1963 and published by Dover Books. It has an eight-page catalog of other Dover Books at the back of the volume. Three of those pages are for art books, including the intriguinng Foot-High Letters: A Guide to Lettering (A Practical Syllabus for Teachers).

I only recognize a few of the authors in the “Entertainments, Humor” section. A book I am not familiar with, however, facinates me: The Bear that Wasn’t by Frank Tashlin. Its description: “What does it mean? Is it simply delightful wry humor, or a charming story of a bear who wakes up in the midst of a factory, or a satire on Big Business, or an existential cartoon-story of the human condition, or a symbolization of the struggle between conformity and the individual?” Sounds like quite a book.

I recognize more of the authors in “Fiction,” but not always the listed books. I have read Tarzan, and take certain pride that Tarzan has a Wisconsin connection. But should I now read Three Martian Novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs? Or the other Mars novels by Burroughs that are listed? Further down in “Fiction” I found the listing for Five Great Dog Novels and tried to think of five dog novels, period. Maybe you will recognize more than the only one I did: Call of the Wild by Jack London; Rab and his Friends by John Brown; Bob, Son of Battle, by Alfred Ollivant; Beautiful Joe by Marshall Saunders; and A Dog of Flanders by Ouida. Who knew?

My favorite, however, was the last listing: Gesta Romanorum, translated by Charles Swan and edited by Wynnard Hooper. “181 tales of Greeks, Roman, Britons, Biblical characters, comprise one of (sic) greatest medieval story collections, source of plots for writers including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Gower, etc. Imaginative tales of wars, incest, thwarted love, magic, fantasy, allegory, humor, tell about kings, prostitutes, philosophers, fair damsels, knights, Noah, pirates, all walks, stations of life.” I feel as if my education is sorely lacking for never having heard of this book. Surely, it has everything, and if I had read it, I would not have to read anything else ever again. Five hundred pages, and the list price: $1.85. Where can I find this?