Bronco Layne just died. Well, really Ty Hardin died. He was the star of the TV show “Bronco,” which was aired at the time JFK was President. Well, really Orison Whipple Hungerford died. That was Hardin’s name until a studio changed it. His obituary contained some other interesting information. He played football under Bear Bryant at Texas A&M. He worked as an acoustical research engineer for Douglas Aircraft until a talent scout discovered him, and a screen test led to a contract.

Hardin did not have many big or successful acting jobs after “Bronco,” a not uncommon situation for many who star on TV, but there were other noteworthy things in his life. For example, his first seven marriages ended in divorce. Perhaps this had some connection to his conflict with the I.R.S. for nonpayment of taxes. What really struck me, however,  is that, according to the obit in the New York Times, “while living in Prescott, Ariz., he formed an anti-tax, anti-government protest group that evolved into the Arizona Patriots militia movement, which was accused in 1986 of planning to blow-up an I.R.S. complex in Utah.”

This reference to the bombing plans by the Arizona Patriots, who were linked to white supremacists, came a few days after a different bombing story. An explosive device was recently tossed into a mosque near Minneapolis. The two stories again reminded me that Americans bombing Americans in America is as American as shrimp and grits.

A few bombings have been memorable enough to make it into history books: the Haymarket affair of 1886 in Chicago; the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910; the Preparedness Day Bombing in 1916 in San Francisco; the thirty-six bombs mailed in 1919 to prominent people with another eight bombs detonated nearly simultaneously around the country; or the explosion killing 30 people outside the J.P. Morgan building on Wall Street in 1920.

Bombings continued on beyond those time. Many were triggered by labor disputes, most of which are now forgotten.  For example, in 1933 there were more than thirty dynamite bombings in the coal area of Pennsylvania with homes of both mining and union officials destroyed.

Political disputes have led to explosions. For example, protesters of the Vietnam War bombed a University of Wisconsin research facility and the United States Capitol. And, of course, there was Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols’ Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

But perhaps the greatest number of bombings in America were acts of racial intimidation. The most memorable was the 1963 Birmingham church bombing which killed four little girls, but many other similar bombings no longer stick in our memories. For example, in 1962 and 1963 there were over a dozen racially-motivated bombings in Birmingham alone, with many more throughout the south. But many, many similar bombings preceded the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and continued on afterwards, and they were not confined to the South.

I know of no comprehensive listing of all the bombings in this country, but in the twentieth century the number had to be well into the thousands. A few bombings have been done by crazy people for idiosyncratic reasons (George Metesky, for example) or perhaps because of personal or domestic disputes, but the vast majority have been acts of terrorism.

Of course, in addition to the bombings we have also had racially-motivated lynchings, arsons, murders, shootings, and beatings. Other terrorism has come with the imprimatur of law, for there have been many statutes, convictions, sentences, and police actions that have had the same racially-motivated messages as the bombings and lynchings, that is, to terrorize those with different skin colors.

We have had many acts of terrorism in this country. Their frequency suggests that they are as American as pork barbecue on white bread with sides of cole slaw and baked beans. And most often they have not been done by aliens or foreigners. They have been done by the native born. They have been done by whites.

A major fact of American history has been white terrorism, and perhaps we should study that more than we do. Ty Hardin perhaps was a white supremacist. He may have conspired to plant bombs. If so, he was an all-American boy.

“From the moment he lit it, in the doorway of the apartment house on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, Maigret savored his pipe with greater enjoyment than on other mornings.” Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Spinster.

“Trees, and the shade they cast, have often been seen as the bane of gardeners, but they don’t have to be.” Brooklyn Botanic Garden (C. Colston Burrell, Guest Editor), Woodland Gardens.

“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” Henry James, Portrait of a Lady.

“I grew up with a proper reverence for cocktails.” Anne Taintor, I’m So Happy It’s Happy Hour: Sinfully Delicious Cocktails for any Occasion.

“It is after midnight on one of those Friday nights when the guests have all gone home and the host and hostess are left in their drunkenness to try and put things right again.” A.M. Homes, Music for Torching.

“Good cooking, in the final analysis, depends on two things: common sense and good taste.” Simon Hopkinson, Roast Chicken and Other Stories.

“By dawn at least half of the members of the Kelly gang were badly wounded and it was then the creature appeared behind police lines.” Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang.

“After the solemnity of the church service and the finality of the grave, the people of the Mississippi Delta are just dying to get to the house of the bereaved for the reception.” Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.

“Florida’s beauty creates the illusion of civilization.” Tim Dorsey, Hammerhead Ranch Motel.

“This book is about an uncomfortable truth: It takes government–a lot of government—for advanced societies to flourish.” Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper.

“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are not just family estates of the Buonopartes.” Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.

“I have been, as the physicist Victor Weisskopf once said of himself, a happy man in a terrible century.” Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist.

“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

“There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule.” Hope Jahren, Lab Girl.

The spouse politely listens when I mention some sporting event, but she is not much of a sports fan. She was for a brief span. She rooted for the Knicks decades ago in their glory years when they won championships. Since she had not been raised as a sports fan, she did not grasp that watching your team win championships was not the norm. She found it too painful to watch the losses when, as was inevitable, the Knicks slipped. Since then, while she has a pretty good understanding of the sports scene, she has not truly been a fan of any team.

Through the years, however, we have gone to a some baseball games, a few of them memorable, at least to me, including the one Reggie Jackson said was his second most exciting performance, where he hit a walk-off home run against the Red Sox. The game that may bring back the most memories to the spouse, however, was one that was a fiasco.

Marty, who had started working in the same lab where the spouse did, said that she had never attended a major league baseball game and would like to. The spouse might have accompanied Marty as a friend in any event, but the spouse became more enthusiastic when she discovered that after a particular Mets game the Grucci brothers were putting  on a fireworks display. She was a fireworks fan and the Grucci brothers to her were the Baryshnikovs of artistic aerial displays. She was excited.

We drove to the game, and, to our surprise, after a lengthy search, we found that the parking lot was filled. The spouse said that I should go into the stadium while she looked for a spot because she did not care about the game. I found Marty and her husband already there in our seats in the second row of the upper deck almost behind home plate. The spouse did not arrive until the third inning. She did not then have a handicap parking permit, but she had spied a lot attendant and showed him her disability, and she proudly announced that she was parked in some special slot right next to the stadium.

We shared and ate the sandwiches and treats we had brought, and then it started. It wasn’t much of a rain, perhaps not even a drizzle, something just slightly more than a mist. Our excellent seats now were not so good. We had no protection from the dampness. Fifth inning, sixth, seventh it persisted. Marty and husband had had enough and headed for the subway. We persisted. The spouse wanted to see those fireworks. In exasperation, she said, (perhaps you might say whine, but she never whines), “Why don’t they call the game?” The field was getting sloppier but still passable, and I explained, “They won’t simply end the game. Instead they will announce a rain delay to see if it stops, and it can take an hour or more before they call the game off.”

We stuck it out. The game ended. And then the announcement. Because of the wet weather, there would be no fireworks. “Disappointment” would not be the right word for the spouse’s reaction. Anger, maybe, but more like rage. (Ok, I will succumb to saying it.) Madder than a wet hen.

We headed for the car. It was right next to the stadium. Good for getting to the seats. Bad for getting out of the lot. We were last in line for the exit, and whoever had designed the parking, had not had a plan for efficient egress. Now I was saying, “Idiot” (preceded by expletives).Perhaps forty-five minutes to get beyond the gates, but the stadium crowd and the holiday weekend traffic meant only bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic on the expressway. Ninety minutes after the game ended we were inching along the Grand Central Parkway still in sight of the stadium behind us when we heard BOOM. Then a moment later, another BOOM. We looked out of the rear view mirrors.  Fireworks over Shea.

After running uphill for what seemed like a mile, my breathing was labored, but my breath was only taken away when I stopped at the crest and looked around. I was on the walkway of the George Washington Bridge. I was high above the Hudson River looking south. The bright sun was reflecting on the water and mirroring off the windows of the Manhattan towers. Ships and boats and barges were working and playing on the river. I read the signs in New Jersey always looking somehow lonely and forlorn. I turned around and watched some of the fourteen lanes of traffic. I looked beyond the vehicles and saw the magnificent Hudson until it curved out of sight looking as if it went on forever.

I had seen the Bridge many times before and from different vantage points—highways, buildings, parks. Driving up Manhattan’s west side, it had curves silhouetted against the sky and the northern hills. It seemed like a majestic fortress separating New York City from the rest of America. Coming from the north, it was a harbinger of home. From a distance, it looked unchangeable. The Bridge has many vehicular approaches, and I had learned that each one made it seem as if I might be driving onto a different Bridge, but once on the Bridge it was always the same magnificent structure. I could never decide, however, whether it looked better during the day when all its intricacies could be seen, or at night when the lights improbably gave it a fairy tale aspect.

Le Corbusier wrote a prose poem homage to the George Washington Bridge in which he concluded that it “is the most beautiful bridge in the world. . . .It is blessed. It is the only seat of grace in the disordered city.” You don’t have to agree with all his extravagance to concede that it is a beauty, and to this should be coupled its utility. In a year’s time, more cars, truck, and buses cross this bridge than any other bridge in the world.

I had absorbed the GWB’s remarkableness many times over a long period when I finally thought, “I have no idea who built it.” That was not surprising, I realized, for I knew few of the architects of a structure or space that I admired, and I almost never knew who actually built them—the engineers. The rotunda of Grand Central Terminal is a perfect city space. I love to pause there to watch people streaming in and out and on their ways to offices and homes and tourist sites, making new patterns every moment, but somehow still always the same one under the high star-painted ceiling lit by commingled and artificial light. Someone or some group had created this room and space that makes me feel both purposeful and peaceful, but I had no idea who was responsible for it.  I could cite other examples, but my point is that I, and I am guessing that I am not alone, am often unaware of who was responsible for a building, space, or vista that has given me repeated pleasure.

Finally, I tried to relieve some of my ignorance and found that Othmar Ammann was the Chief Engineer for the George Washington Bridge. Before my research, I would swear that I had never heard of him.  And then I found he also was the designer for many other bridges around New York City, including the Triborough (I know that it has another name, but come on, it is still the Triborough), the Whitestone, the Throgs Neck, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridges. Shouldn’t all New Yorkers, at least, recognize his name?

For the non-New Yorkers, I am sure many of you feel there is some building or lobby or park space or view that gives you a sense of satisfaction regularly, but you do not know who is responsible for it. Consider it your necessary act of homage to find out who it was and memorize that name. I certainly am hoping that I will continue to remember Othmar Ammann.

Our immigration policies allow temporary laborers into the country as “guest workers.” Isn’t “guest workers” an oxymoron?

I was disappointed by the quick dispatch of Anthony Scaramucci. I was hoping that his tenure would bring cult showings of the movie “Scaramouche” starring Stewart Granger and this would bring a revival of the author Rafael Sabatini, who, of course, wrote the marvelous book, Scaramouche as well as the equally delightful Captain Blood and this would lead to cult double features of Granger’s “Scaramouche” and Errol Flynn’s “Captain Blood” and all this would lead to a revival of Baroness Orczy and her novel The Scarlet Pimpernel and this would lead to cult showings of “The Scarlet Pimpernel” starring Leslie Howard. Right now we seem to need some swashbuckling heroes.

I was on the porch reading before the Fourth of July festivities. A father was talking to a son, perhaps three or four, as they walked by some angle-parked cars. “When you walk by cars like this you should  be careful. Look to see if there is a driver. Look to see if the car’s lights are on. Stop well away from the cars if there is a driver or lights. They can back up and not see you.” “Yes, Daddy.” Then I heard trucks coming down the little street and then the boy’s high voice an excited octave higher: “Daddy, Daddy, look fire trucks!” (The trucks were on their way to the tiny Independence Day parade’s staging area.) The boy’s excitement and pleasure made me smile. It also convinced me that he did not live in Brooklyn.

It was a remarkable sight, the man wearing sweatpants held up by suspenders.

Trump can do the impossible: He has almost made me feel sorry for Jeff Sessions.

When you see bikers with the big arms and leather vests on one of those three-wheelers, do you think “Cool,” or are you a little sad?

The announcer pompously intoned, “That was a wonderful golf shot he just hit.” The guy was playing golf. What other kind of shot was he going to hit?

Why isn’t the plural eggsplant?

After Trump, citing healthcare costs, announced a ban in the military on transgender people, we learned that the armed forces spends millions upon millions on erectile dysfunction drugs. Make up your own joke about military members.

The newspaper headline read: “Is There a Religious Way to Get Angry?” My reaction: “You’re goddamn right there is!”

“Though America in its greatness is singular, it resembles the rest of the world in its failures.” Paul Theroux, Deep South.

The very conservative are currently in control the national government. One of the reasons for this is that the very conservative control many state governments. The state domination did not happen overnight but came in increments. Religion and sex helped start it.

A generation ago fundamentalists were concerned with godless evolution being taught to their schoolchildren. That same group and others thought that schools should not have sex education, except perhaps for a curriculum that explained nothing useful about sex but also made it clear that teenagers should not have anything to do with it. The fundamentalists on evolution and sex sought to do something about these horrors by doing what few had done before—taking school board elections seriously. They organized and campaigned and ran for school boards to have evolution removed from the curriculum, and failing that, to have creationism taught along with evolution, and to eliminate any teaching about sex. Because only a small portion of the electorate vote in these elections, a committed group that actually voted could control the outcomes. The successes at these most local levels almost naturally expanded into elections for the state legislatures. Evangelicals may have only cared about one or two issues, but they were passionate about them. And they voted. And they learned that a committed group could often control the outcome of the elections.

At the same time, the NRA became a greater force. While more of a top-down movement than the anti-evolutionists, the NRA was similar in turning out voters who insisted that elected officials be uncompromising on certain narrow issues.

The evangelicals’ goal was to elect legislators who honored certain “values.” They have been successful,  and many states have made it increasingly difficult not only to get abortions, or even reliable family planning information. (It is a story for another day how some religious groups have turned from a strict separation of church and state towards having the government adopt their views.) And, of course, the NRA-influenced voters have elected not candidates that bloc new, and rollback existing,  gun control measures.

But the conservative movement in the states has been about more than sex, the Bible, and guns. As controls on election spending lessened or disappeared, business interests, often disguised within organizations not required to indicate the sources of their funds, could funnel more money into state elections.

The result has been that states increasingly passed conservative legislation on many fronts. Many of us pay less attention to what happens on the state than the national level. Thus, the conservatives often had had something of a free run in the state legislatures. Organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council drafted legislation which was adopted in many states, and ALEC is, as one of its leaders once said, very, very conservative. Few voters were aware of who truly initiated the bills.

As part of the state conservative legislation, conservatives passed laws that would further entrench conservative control. Thus, voter identification laws and other measures were passed that make voting more difficult for some. The groups most affected are, of course, not conservatives.

Conservatives passed legislation that would harm the already declining unions. This, of course, served business interests, but it simultaneously entrenched hard right power by helping to weaken forces that often opposed conservatives.

The conservative successes in the states does more than affect the states; it has also shaped our national politics. The country’s electorate has not become conservative, even though the composition of state legislatures might make it seem that way. National elections for President indicate that the country is not conservative.  In only one of the last seven Presidential elections has the more conservative candidate gotten the highest percentage of the popular vote. Conservative voters do not dominate the country as a whole, but conservatives have increasingly dominated the national legislature, Congress.

Part of the explanation for this anomaly  is that conservatives control more and more states, and states control the boundaries for congressional districts. This power, since the beginning of the Republic, has led to gerrymandering, but new data interpretation tools have made the skewing of districts easier and a brazenness has made it more common. With Republican control of state legislatures, gerrymandering today has overwhelmingly aided conservatives. You might think that with 435 seats in the House of Representatives, each party’s percentage of the seats in the house would be close to the percentage of votes it garnered in the country, but over the last four national elections for the House, the Republicans in each election have gotten a higher percentage of seats than votes nationwide. Thus, in 2012 Democrats got more than a million more votes for the House than Republicans did, but Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the House by 234 to 201. The “bonus” seats came from gerrymandering in the states. For example, in North Carolina the Democratic House candidates got 51% of the vote in 2012, but North Carolina was represented in the House by four Democrats and nine Republicans.  In 2016, Democratic candidates got 44% of the statewide vote for the House in North Carolina, but won only three, or 23%, of the seats.

My semi-conservative friend would say that both sides gerrymander. They may, but Republicans do it more and do it better. This has given them secure control of the House.

Republican domination in the states has led to more and more safe Republican seats in Congress. In such a district, a Republican has little concern about the general election. The candidate knows that if he or she has the Republican nomination, he or she will win the general election. He does not have to attract centrist or liberal voters. The important election is not the general election, but the primary. Give the evangelicals and the gun people and other hard righters their due: They vote in the primaries. Thus, all too often, the only way for a Republican to get in or to stay in Congress is to appeal to the hard right, and consequently, the Republican Party has been pushed further and further from the center. They have been pushed away from compromise. They have been pushed away from working with any but those who share hard right views.

If you care about national politics and don’t like their present trend, you can’t just put efforts and money into a Presidential election every four years. You need also to care about state and local politics, and by that I mean more than just a concern about the elections in your state for the House and the Senate. You need to be involved in the state legislative and local elections, not only because these races often breed candidates for higher office, but also because it is the states that set the election districts and can pass laws that make it more difficult for some people to vote.

But here’s a more radical suggestion: A movement should be started to have Democrats and Independents, especially in states and districts that are safely Republican, to change their registrations to Republican. The Republican primaries are where the action is in these places.  If liberals and centrists voted in these elections, more centrist Republicans candidates might emerge and win. Perhaps this could start to moderate the Republican Party.

The Republican Party will not change overnight. It has taken decades for that party to get where it is. If the conservative hold is going to be broken, it, too, has to be a long-term game. That game cannot be just to focus on Presidential elections; instead, a chief goal has to be to weaken conservative influence at the state and local level. So, if you are a Democrat or an Independent, be bold! Change your registration! Vote Republican!

I was walking in Manhattan miles from my home. A man approached me and in the friendliest fashion said hello. I nodded, thought “panhandler” even though he was not shabbily dressed, and continued on. He turned to walk with me and said with companionable incredulity, “You don’t remember me?” I perhaps took my first real look at him, pondered, and said no. “We met at your place.” I studied him again and hesitated. “My sister works for you, and we met when I came over to see her one day.” He almost sounded hurt. Perhaps I should have walked away at this point. I knew it was a con. A woman did work for us, but her siblings were sisters. I, however, was not hurrying anywhere and was intrigued. “Oh,” I said.

He then continued, “We met when you were coming home from work, I think.” I don’t remember my precise replies, but anything specific I said he would weave into his patter–not immediately, but after a sentence or two. If I had said that I usually got to Brooklyn about six, he would find a way to mention Brooklyn as my home as if he had always known that, and so on. Only when the talk lasted long enough to seem as if we were reunited long-lost buddies did the pitch come. This was the familiar one about the car trouble. Only rarely do I give money to panhandlers, but I did give him something. I often stop to watch street performers and drop a bill or two into their cap when I especially like them, and I thought this guy was a very good street performer of a sort. (I don’t remember the name he ascribed to himself, but he told me something as he sought mine trying to build a bond.)

Few street performers I have seen play on race, a troupe I have seen several times on the Central Park Mall does. They are six or so young black men who do tumbling and acrobatic passes to the background of music with a heavy beat coming from boom boxes. They ask a few of the audience members where they are from. The majority seem to be tourists, and what could be a better New York experience than to be in Central Park watching this group perform?  You don’t see that back home. They have a patter that is as honed as a vaudeville act, and it plays up race and subtly plays on racial fears. As one starts his run for a tumbling pass, another says, “That is as fast as you will see a black man run not being chased by a cop.” “If we weren’t here getting donations from you, we would be breaking into your homes.”

My guy who approached me, however, used race in a more subtle way. His incredulity at not being recognized was a great play on white guilt. Don’t many of us secretly worry that we fall into that group that think so many black men do look sort of alike? And not wanting to be rude to a black man then tends to make us stop and at least briefly hear what he has to say.

I wondered how often he had to approach men like me for his sister line to succeed. Does one of every five, ten, or twenty white men walking in a Manhattan neighborhood have a black woman working for him at home? Surely in five or ten minutes he could encounter some such person. And, of course, the odds would be good that this person would have a brother. In any event, probably few of the white men know much about the lives of the women that work in their home. (I was different from many because I worked at home for about half the time and chatted with people who cleaned or helped take care of the daughter.)

The guy, however, was good beyond getting me to stop and listen a bit. Besides the line about his sister, he said nothing that could seem wrong and send up flags. Instead he was skillful in trying to get me to say things that he could use to make it seem as if he already knew me. He was good at his craft.

After I gave him some money, I wanted to stop him and tell him I knew it was a con and ask him how he had developed his line, how often it worked, and how much he made. But, just like insisting on finding out how a magician does his tricks, it would have destroyed the moment.

“’I believe there is much happiness in people who are born where good wines are to be found,’ said Leonardo da Vinci.” Julian More, Views From a Tuscan Vineyard.

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

“Medical examiners are the only doctors whose patients are dead and therefore silent.” Michael M. Baden, M.D., Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner.

“This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.” Paul Beatty, The Sellout.

“Amidst the grand panoply that is the English language, largest on this Earth, tongue of Shakespeare, Byron, and Melville, there are a puzzling number of words that mean ‘to spray with shit.’” Peter Novokatzky and Ammon Shea, Depraved and Insulting English.

“When August came, thick as dream of falling timbers, Dawes Williams and his mother would pick Simpson up at his office, and they would all drive west, all evening, the sun before them dying like the insides of a stone melon, split and watery, halving with blood.”  Dow Mossman, The Stones of Summer.

“That the word intelligence describes something real and that it varies from person to person is as universal and ancient as any understanding about the state of being human.” Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

“A person had to be pretty desperate to want to go on jury duty, Libby Winslow decided, but given the state of her life, it seemed like the best game in town.” Laura van Wormer, Jury Duty.

“It is often forgotten that the document which we know as the Declaration of Independence is not the official act by which the Continental Congress voted in favor of separation from Great Britain.” Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas.

“I told you last night that I might be gone sometimes, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.” Marilynne Robinson,  Gilead.

“I was born in the house I built myself with my own two hands.” Al Franken, Giant of the Senate.

“The village headman, a man of about fifty, sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, close to the coals burning in a hearth that was hollowed out of the floor; he was inspecting my violin.”  Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

“This whole Duct Shui thing started when our friend Roy Beckstrom lost his job as a pinsetter at Bob’s Beef and Bowl to automation.” Jim and Tim—The Duct Tape Guys, Duct Shui: A New Tape on an Ancient Philosophy

Miranda, who helped take care of the daughter, was upset, close to tears, visibly shaking when I got home. She started apologizing and apologizing. I barely held off the panic mode I felt closing in. Miranda then told me that it had nothing to do with the daughter. Instead, that afternoon someone rang the bell. When she answered, a young man asked for the ladder. He used my first name and stated that I had said he could borrow my ladder, an extra-tall one because of our high ceilings. Miranda hesitated. I had not told her that someone was going to use the ladder. He continued that he was working at a house under renovation, a few doors away. Miranda could see that its door was open. He repeated my name and said that he could get it from its storage space under the stoop where, indeed, it was kept. He said that he would bring it back in a half hour. She relented, and he dug out the ladder. She watched him carry it to the pointed-out house. The ladder was not returned in thirty minutes or even an hour. When an hour-and-a-half had elapsed, she went over to the neighbor’s house. Miranda asked about the man and the ladder. The workers there had no idea what she was talking about. They had plenty of their own ladders.

Miranda was, of course, upset because she had lost an employer’s property, but also because of the embarrassment we all have when we are taken. I was hardly concerned, however. I was relieved that it had nothing to do with the daughter, and I had a certain admiration for the con man. I had no idea who he might be. Somehow, however, he had learned my first name, which he could have heard sometime as I greeted a neighbor or workman, but he had also learned where I stored the ladder and that was more unusual and not easily-acquired knowledge.

I replaced the ladder. It may have cost $60 or $80, and I thought about that con man. I actually hoped that he had some use for the ladder–that he was renovating something or that he was doing work for others because I thought that if he had tried to sell it, he maybe got ten bucks for it. Hardly worth the risk, it would seem.

But by then, as Legal Aid attorney in New York City, I had represented many people charged with worse crimes, and seldom would I have thought that their risks were worth the rewards. I had represented many who had committed street corner robberies, muggers in other words. If they had a knife or a gun, this was an armed robbery with a potential punishment of twenty-five years in prison where routinely sentences were three, ten, fifteen years. Few people daring the streets where the muggers worked had much money and carried little of it. Seldom did the robbers get as much as $50. To make anything like real money, the mugger had to do it repeatedly with each robbery increasing the likelihood of an arrest until invariably prison resulted.

I learned that these were not really economic crimes. The mugger was not so much driven by the money as by the thrill of pulling a knife on a stranger on a darkened street corner with escape not entirely certain. It was about the adrenalin and the domination even more than about the dollars.

And for the con man who got my ladder, I am sure that it was more about the successful play and the feeling of superiority than it was about the object obtained.

Perhaps because I have little artistic creativity and even less performing talent, I am thrilled when I encounter genuine creative abilities. I am even more amazed when I find such talent in an obscure place. I should be a bit more blasé  about this because it happens with some regularity in New York.  I attend quite a few off-the-beaten-track plays when I am there in the winter. These tiny theaters in unlikely locations routinely display talented people and creative productions. For example, there was the ephemera trilogy, by Kimi Maeda.

This one-woman show was a cross between a performance piece and a play. The first two parts had shadow puppets moving to a recorded voiceover of Japanese fables that Maeda’s mother, an immigrant from Japan, told Maeda. The shadow puppets were cutouts through which a handheld light was projected casting shadows on a screen at the back of the performance space. I did not really follow the first fable, but I found the second, The Crane Wife, touching. A crane becomes a woman, and she, in isolation, weaves beautiful cloth. Her husband sells it to stave off the hunger that often stalks the family. But one night, although enjoined not to look in the weaving room, he does and sees not his wife, but a crane, which then disappears.  The story had interest, but the most touching part of this performance came when Maeda, who believed that this was an ancient tale, found out that the story was created or adapted during America’s post-World War II occupation of Japan, which gave new depths to the fable’s meaning.

The final part of the ephemera trilogy was about Maeda’s father, a Nissei, who at the age of nine was taken with his family to an Arizona detention camp during World War II. The screen from the first two acts remained, but now there were different kinds of images on it.  Sand was dribbled and dumped on the floor, and it was raked, swept, and spread about. This activity was projected onto the screen, and these images were interspersed with archival films and photos of the camp and other aspects of the father’s life, which ended in a battle against dementia. Kimi Maeda “painted” in the sand, creating faces and transforming them with hands and feet and various tools. She constructed villages with blocks and other pieces of wood in the sand. She rearranged the grains often, and I felt as if I were watching again and again the creation of a miniature zen garden.

This was creative. And touching. I was amazed by that and also that it was being performed for an audience of fourteen in a theater with a capacity of fifty. And that I had paid but $9.

Recently I saw another amazing talent, in a place obscure to most of us, as part of a small audience. I and some friends had gone to see Carole J. Bufford. (I don’t know what the “J” stands for, or why it is used. Are there other Carole Buffords I don’t know about?) I have seen Bufford before, most recently at 54 Below, which is not an obscure place, but one of the hottest music venues in Manhattan. This time, however, she was performing at The Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania.

I, like most of you I am guessing, had never been to The Deer Head Inn, which has a reputation for presenting  high-quality jazz four nights a week. I have been told that many excellent jazz musicians live in the vicinity of Delaware Water Gap. This may come as a shock to you, but housing prices are apparently less there than New York City, and after a late night performance in midtown Manhattan, the drive to Water Gap, just over the Delaware River from New Jersey, is a relatively tolerable trip. Whatever the reasons, The Deer Head Inn has been presenting jazz for quite some time and many knowledgeable enthusiasts know it. But this summer it was branching out and presenting monthly performances of cabaret singers. Carole J. Bufford was the first.

We saw her perform three different sets over three hours. After the first one, she chatted with audience members and put on her playlist for the second set some songs suggested by us.  And she was good. Very good. Very, very good. Amazing. A friend of mine who was there and seeing Bufford for the first time told me that he has seen just about every fabled cabaret and saloon singer over the last fifty years, and she was the best of all.

But wait there’s more. She was accompanied by Jon Weber on the piano, who is the musical director for the monthly performances. His playing was breathtaking. The two of them had not performed together before, and in a break between sets I asked how they had rehearsed or prepared for the evening. He told me that was only done on the drive out from New York. And yet their coordination seemed effortless.

The three hours felt intimate because there were so few of us there, less than two dozen. After the first set, a man came over to our table, introduced himself—Rich Jenkins–and said that he was the producer of the monthly series. After working hard to publicize the event, he was disappointed in the turnout, and I was, too.  We know that in NYC Bufford has what you might call groupies, and we only found out about The Deer Head performance because one of them saw the performance listed on Bufford’s website. Those who have seen her become fans, but not that many people know about her. She is recording her first album, and until that is finished and gets play, she is largely dependent on word of mouth for her audiences. So here is my first suggestion: Get on her website. She is about to start a tour. Learn where she is performing. Go. CaroleJBufford.com.

Jon Weber was so good that I am guessing that if he is part of the performance, it will be outstanding. So my second suggestion is to go to his website: jonwebermusic.com.

Now the third suggestion. Check out The Deer Head Inn for music. Perhaps for the jazz. Rich Jenkins, I now know and have seen, has a quartet in which he plays a splendid guitar and does jazz vocals. But if our evening with Carole was any indication and you like singers doing the Great American Songbook, you should come out for the other two evenings this summer in the cabaret series, August 20 and September 17. The cover charge, not surprisingly, is about half of what you would pay in New York City. Moreover, while I expect bad or at least incredibly overpriced food and drink in a music venue, I had a $4 beer, the spouse an $8 martini, and we both had really good food.  (Robert, the chef, whom I met, cares about the food, and he is also quite the artist, as is thirteen-year old daughter, whose art blew me away.) The Deer Head is a beehive of creativity. Go and be amazed.