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To Swim. Perchance to Breathe

This year I am not even going to make the promise to myself that I have broken many times in the past.

I am not a great swimmer. I blame Lake Michigan partially for that. I learned to take my first strokes in Lake Michigan off the beach of my Wisconsin birthplace. I am no expert on the currents of Lake Michigan, but I gather the lake’s water moves in several circular flows. As a result, the water temperature near the 1,600 miles of shorelines varies considerably. I know there are many places along the Lake where people swim comfortably and happily. However, while many people used the soft sand Lake Michigan beach of my hometown for games and sunbathing, not many people ventured into the water, or at least not for long. The water was almost always cold. At least in my memory, even in the hottest summers, the lake’s waters did not get above the low sixties.

It did not much matter that Lake Michigan was not a swimmer’s paradise. Wisconsin is filled with lakes of all sorts—big ones, small ones, ones with mucky bottoms, ones with rocky bottoms, ones with sandy bottoms, and like that. A half dozen or more “inland” lakes are within a thirty- or forty-minute drive from my boyhood home. There were plenty of places to go summer swimming.

Perhaps because there were many nearby opportunities to swim, my town did not have a municipal swimming pool, although the “Y” and the country club had pools. The family finances meant I was not a member of either. The parents, however, thought that I should learn to swim. They signed me up for lessons given by the Parks Department. And those lessons were in those Lake Michigan waters, which in my memory were in the fifties early in the summer when I learned to put my head in the water and take a few strokes. It was not much fun.

If family funds were not enough for a “Y” membership, you can be rest assured that we did not have a second home on a lake. I did little swimming as a boy. When I did, I found out that my strokes were marginally adequate but that I had not learned to breathe properly while swimming. I could swim 25 yards, sometimes fifty, while holding my breath. I had learned to take breaths by turning my head and gulping in air, but I somehow never got the knack of letting it out properly. I was really just holding my breath. And that is still my swimming technique, although I am no longer fit enough to swim 25 yards holding my breath. Our Pennsylvania community has a beautiful pool. For many years, I have told myself that I will go regularly to the pool and learn how to breathe while swimming. And in each of those years, I have lied to myself.

Even if I had been a better swimmer, I would still have been uncomfortable in the water because of my eyes. I was terribly nearsighted. I was told back then my eyesight was 20/400 or 20/500, but a cataract doctor recently laughed at that and said it was much worse. I was told as a kid that I was functionally blind, which meant that without my glasses I could not function. But I did have glasses, and my disability seldom impeded me. In some ways, it stood me in good stead. I learned to navigate rooms without my glasses, which was a bit like being in the dark. Even now, at least in familiar places, I often don’t need to turn on lights to get around a darkened room. However, sometimes when I had to operate without glasses it was a problem. I tried playing high school football glassless. That was impossible. When I did go swimming, my “blindness” made things difficult.

I was about 14 when I first went water skiing. My sister’s college roommate had a home near the Wisconsin Dells, which our family visited. The roommate’s father wanted me to water ski. I couldn’t chicken out, but my fear was not of falling but whether I would know where to let go of the rope in front of their cottage. I thought that I might not be able to distinguish it from the giant blur of other ones, and I was embarrassed to tell them how bad my eyesight was. Since I was not a strong swimmer, having to swim a long distance to the starting dock — even if I could find it — was scary. However, I could see blobs of color, and luckily the cottages were differently hued. I memorized the colors of their cottage and the two next to theirs, and I let go of the tow rope somewhat in the vicinity of where I was supposed to. Later I would go water skiing on Elkhart Lake, where the grandparents of my high school friend had a cottage. I learned the color schemes of the houses there, too, and did not have the same fear of having to swim halfway across the lake to get back to the right cottage. However, often when we did get back, Steve and his brothers would talk about all the good-looking girls they had seen on the lake while towing me. Sadly, I saw none of them.

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Not the Place to Die

On a previous trip to Florida, we had identified a continuing care community that interested us, but on our most recent visit we no longer liked it. My nephew asked me what had changed our minds.

The spouse and I have toured about a dozen continuing care places, or as I put it, places to die. We have concentrated on Type A communities. That means that the community has facilities for four types of care—independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing facilities, and memory care. The fee structures require a hefty sum to enter and then monthly fees that are also hefty. In a Type A community, however, the monthly fee does not increase should a resident move to a higher level of care. In other words, if I am paying $7,500 a month for independent living, I will continue to pay $7,500 if I move into assisted living even though the facility provides more care than I received before.

What I get for my monthly fee is similar from place to place but never precisely the same. Of course, the fee covers the rent for my apartment, utilities, real estate taxes, and usually weekly or biweekly housekeeping services. Some sort of meal plan is included. Sometimes this is a meal a day or thirty meals a month. In others, residents draw down from a set amount of monthly money. For example, residents may be “given” $350 each month, and this decreases each time the resident orders something. The food is generally cheaper than it would be in a commercial restaurant. The facility may have healthcare such as a nurse practitioner on site, and there is no additional charge for a visit to the nurse. They have aides for an emergency such as a fall. All seem to provide transportation weekly or semi-weekly to grocery stores, perhaps a mall, and religious services. The monthly fee also includes the use of the facilities such as a fitness center and meeting rooms. Many, but not all, have a swimming pool.

The places to die that the spouse and I have visited have 300-400 residents. Many have small, freestanding homes, often called villas, and two or three apartment building that connect with each other. The interconnected buildings almost always contain the public facilities—dining rooms, fitness center, etc. That ability to utilize facilities without going outside has seemed attractive, especially if the mobility of the spouse with her disability becomes worse, and she starts to use something like an electric scooter to get around.

The Florida place that interested us was larger — about 1,200 residents. That increased size allowed it to support better facilities than other places. It had five or six restaurants, while others have two or three. It had at least two fitness rooms that were well-equipped and staffed, good meeting rooms, a theater, and an aquatic center that many resorts would have been proud of. This included two swimming pools, one of which was an excellent lap pool, a spa, and two nearby pickleball courts.

It did not have the usual interconnecting buildings. Instead, in addition to some villas, this “village” had six or so separate 8-12 story buildings set around two “lakes” on seventy acres. It was necessary to go outside to utilize many of the facilities, but that seemed ok in Florida where the sun always shines (right?).

One of the buildings was brand new. It had lovely apartments with interesting floor plans. We have lived in a distinctive place for a long time and are spoiled by it. Moving into an ordinary apartment box, while perhaps inevitable, is not our first choice. So this was appealing. The place also cost less than many of the continuing care places we had seen in the north.

On our first visit we were only there for a couple of hours, and we didn’t think we should decide based on that. The marketing department said that we could come back for a two-night stay, and we decided to do that. Our concern was not the physical plant, apartment designs, or costs, but something more intangible–would we feel comfortable with the residents.

The spouse and I are lucky in having a broad circle of interesting friends. From our careers, we know scientists, lawyers, and academics, but we also spend time with full-time moms; a NYC reporter; an international correspondent; a marine engineer; investment bankers; Wall Street speculators; artists; a private equity entrepreneur; school teachers; a corporate financial officer; the head of an adoption agency; New York City government officials; architects; potters; bankruptcy specialists; a minister; nurses; owners of a boutique clothing company; restaurateurs; caterers; real estate managers; authors; workers in the tech industry; analysts for the Fed; a furniture company manager; an owner of a bar. You get the idea.

Most of these people are of my generation, but they are not stuck in the past. They often refer to an experience from earlier in their lives, but usually this is done to advance something in the present conversation. We may be old, but we don’t just look backward. When you are younger, fresh input comes from work and social life. That is less true at our age, but our friends are still mentally vibrant; they still want to learn; they are aware of current affairs and fashion and sports; they read all sorts of things, watch different kinds of streaming shows, go to plays and movies, attend concerts and exhibitions. I am lucky to have friends who regularly bring something new to the conversational table and who, in doing so, keep me more mentally alive.

The spouse and I don’t expect to duplicate our circle of friends in some new place, but we hope to find people who, because of their curiosity, knowledge, and activities, will be interesting to be with. We selfishly hope they will help keep us mentally alert and engaged. So we began to look for clues to see whether we might easily meet the kind of residents we hoped for in the place to die in Florida.

Our starting place was with the events calendars. All the places to die put out a weekly or monthly calendar of events. These include bus trips to grocery stores and places of worship, but also on-campus events such as sewing groups, knitting bees, watercolor classes, creative writing workshops, book groups, choral groups, bridge groups, improv classes, often serious lectures, entertainment from the outside, resident entertainment, and so on. We became concerned about our potential place when we realized that although it was three times the size of other places, it listed fewer activities than other places. I expect to be personally interested in only a few of the activities, but a variety of programs in which many participate signals something about the vibrancy of the place.

The calendar, it turns out, was somewhat misleading. The spouse noticed that there was no listing for mah-jongg (a deal-breaker!!!). When she mentioned that to someone, she was told that Joan so-and-so in Building A hosted mah-jongg, as did Mildred thus-and-such in Building C. For such facilities as the fitness center and the aquatic center, it was one community. However, for other purposes, the place seemed to break down into smaller building-by-building communities, and it felt as if you might not be entirely welcome in the Building A community if you resided in Building B.

Every place to die we have visited has a library. The best seem to have an acquisition budget; others are dependent on resident donations. I never expected to find all my reading in these libraries, but most of the libraries seemed to have some books I might like to read. The Florida place to die, however, did not have one library. It had one for each building. I suppose if the weather was inclement, it would be nice to go the lobby and find something to read, but by not consolidating the books, each building’s collection was skimpy. And most of the libraries we have seen had a shelf or more of books written by residents. I did not see that in this “village.”

Presumably some reading was going on. The calendar listed a book group, which later in the month was discussing a novel. But I thought that a place of over a thousand retired folks who had a lot of time to read might have multiple book groups, perhaps one for literature, another for history, and others for current events or poetry. Even my local bookstore has multiple book groups, and the attendees are working and raising families in addition to reading books.

What clinched our decision that we did not want to come to this place was our two meals with residents. The marketing person who took charge of us knew that our son was transgender and that, no doubt, is part of the reason our first night we had dinner in the more formal dining room with a lesbian couple, Maude and Phillie. They had been a couple for a dozen years. Phillie had been in a previous relationship of thirty-seven years, which ended when her partner died. They both had Philadelphia roots and had lived mostly in New Jersey. Maude had been a hairdresser who had gotten involved with organizations for the deaf. The other said that she had been retired since she was thirty-five, but I think she had been involved with real estate agencies.

We did learn from them that this Florida place had an active LGBTQ+ organization with over 220 members. Other communities we had visited often touted that they had gay residents, but this was remarkable. That was encouraging, and they should some interest in our son. My reaction changed when I asked them what constituted a typical day for them. They looked blankly at each other. One finally said that they went to the pool two or three times a week. And…..? They confessed that the amount the place allocated for food covered only about fifteen meals a month. They kept a full pantry, and then–giving me the inside scoop–they said they shopped at a Walmart supercenter because it had better prices than the nearer Publix.

The next day we had a poolside lunch with a couple originally from North Carolina where Lorraine had been a third grade teacher and her husband Clay a public school librarian. She said little other than that she was in charge of the place’s thrift shop, open four hours a week, and complained that few realized how much work it took to operate it. Other than an adamant “Yes” when the server asked if anyone wanted dessert, she literally said nothing. She looked surly, as if she had been dragged to a free lunch against her will. Clay’s volubility, however, helped to eliminate any awkward pauses. He told about his days at the village. Two or three days a week, as he had that morning, he went to aquatic aerobics. A couple of mornings he went to the gym. Other mornings, usually with a friend, he walked around the seventy-acre campus, stopping, I am sure, to chat with anyone he came across. Clay smiled proudly and said that others called him the mayor of the village. Clay said that the previous night, they had gone to one of the village’s cultural events—a cover concert of three crossover R&B stars, which he pronounced excellent.

When we told him about our dinner the previous night, he labeled Phillie “a real pistol.” He then went on to say that he had been talking to friends from home and told them that he and Lorraine were going out to dinner with another couple, Joe and Bob. His friends, he said, were amazed. They had not known anyone before who knew — much less dined with — an actual single-sex couple. I felt awkward hearing a story that I might have heard two decades ago.

Clay continued by saying that their travels had made them more sensitive to cultural differences. As an example he cited their trip to Morocco where he said they had made friends with their guide. The Moroccan pointed out that gender relations were much different in his country. For example, he had never kissed his wife in front of her parents. As they were walking, however, the guide took Clay’s hand. This clearly made Clay uncomfortable, and Clay said that this would not have happened in the good old U.S. of A. The guide said that this was a gesture of male friendship in his society. Clay clearly still felt uncomfortable with his memory of walking down a foreign street with another man holding his hand. I wondered why he was telling me this story.

Our assigned dining companions over the two meals were different from each other, but in a way important to the spouse and me, they were very much alike. They did not ask anything about us. That is a slight exaggeration. Clay did ask the derivation of my surname and what I had done for a living, but there was no follow up. And literally, none of the four asked the spouse anything—where she grew up; her education; her career; her hobbies. We certainly gave openings for conversation. We thought we might be early for our lunch, so we carried books. Lorraine and Clay did not even glance at them, much less ask about them. I wore a tee that said, “Be careful or I will put you in my blog.” No comment. The spouse said that we were going to take a trip to Provence in the fall sponsored by my alma mater. Nothing. And so on. Maude and Phillie were the same. They were all more than happy to talk about themselves (and a bit about our son), but a real conversation was beyond them. And in talking about themselves, they did not indicate that they read anything, watched movies, or attended lectures. They were pleasant people on one level, but….

The last night we ate at an informal restaurant on campus. The servers were interesting and funny, and the food, as it had been at the other meals, was good. As we looked around the room, we saw a man come in by himself. He sat down and to our surprise, opened a book. We finished eating before he did. On our way out, I stopped at his table and said, “Are you reading anything good? I am always looking for book recommendations.” He said that the book was about a lad growing up in Ireland, but he did not like the novel enough to recommend it. I pressed on and asked if he had read anything good recently. He paused and said no and continued, “I am not much of a reader.” I smiled, and as we started to leave, I could swear his eyes locked onto mine saying, “Please don’t go yet. I am lonely.”

We were more than ready to leave this place where we thought that we might like to live. Perhaps if we had to, we could carve out an acceptable life there, but….

If we needed a clincher, venturing outside our building to visit other places on campus was a trial. Florida was experiencing an early, but deadly, heat wave which was compounded by excessive humidity. Breathing was difficult and movement exhausting. Florida politicians may not believe in climate change or want to acknowledge global warming, but that will not stop its reality.

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Snippets

Just to set the record straight: Many Trump trial commentators have said that Trump needs only one hold-out juror to avoid conviction. This is true, but it lacks context. The jury of twelve must be unanimous to convict or acquit. If all the jurors cannot agree, we have a hung jury. The state would then have to decide whether to retry Mr. Trump. It should be noted, however, that although the exact rate is unknown, hung juries are not frequent. Getting such data is difficult because no uniform definition of “a hung jury” exists. For example, if five defendants are tried in one trial and the jury convicts four but can’t agree on the fifth, some jurisdictions would record this as a hung jury, while others would label it a conviction, while others would record four convictions and one hung jury. Similarly, when one defendant is charged with a number of crimes, many jurisdictions will consider only what happens to the most serious count. Others will call it a hung jury if the jury could not reach a result on any one count. Without going into methodological details, a study a few decades ago found that the hung jury rate throughout New York state was 2.8%. In other words, rare. Moreover, the little data we have indicate that few of those rare hung juries are hung because only one person won’t agree with the other eleven. One person can hang a jury. It rarely happens. (Drawn from my book, The American Jury System [Yale University Press.])

“What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?” Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto.

A lesson for our time? Jacques Chirac was President of France from 1995 to 2007. Allegations of corruption swirled about him. However, a controversial judicial decision concluded that he had immunity from prosecution while he was president. The court gave reasoning similar to what has been said in this country for granting immunity to a sitting president: i.e., he will not be able to perform his duties as president if at the same time he faces prosecution. In France, however, the authorities realized that such protection should end when Chirac left office, and he was indeed prosecuted for and convicted of various crimes when he became an ex-president. He was given a suspended two-year sentence for his convictions. (Chirac had suffered a stroke near the end of his presidency, and his mental health deteriorated after leaving office.) This precedent has not led to the regular prosecutions of ex-presidents in France, as it has said will occur unless Trump as an ex-president is given immunity from all criminal prosecutions.

The performance of the “Vespers” of 1610 by Claudio Monteverdi was marvelous. I expected as much with the twenty-five voices of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. The accompanying Trinity Baroque Orchestra had violins, violas, a cello, bass, harp, harpsichord, and organ, but there was a bonus. The orchestra had not just one but two cornett performers; not just one but two theorbo players; and not just one but—wait for it—three performers on the sackbut. (Sackbut is one of those words, like Lake Titicaca, that I can’t say without smiling.)

As I neared my stop, a woman across the subway car, spotting the book in my hand, asked if I was reading the new Tana French novel. After I said that I was, she wanted to know if it was good. I said that I was enjoying it, but it was too long and was not as good as her last one. The woman got off the train as I did. She asked if I was familiar with the Scottish mysteries of Denise Mina, which she felt were similar to French’s. I was not, and she urged me to try them. Later that week I got one out of the subscription library. She was right. Field of Blood, which introduced the character, Paddy Maheen, is quite good.  And I have also learned that I can get useful book recommendations in all sorts of places including a subway ride. I doubt I will ever see that Tana French fan again, but thank you for the Denise Mina mention.

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My Astrology Class

A flier at my local branch of the public library announced that on Tuesday evening there would be an “Intro to Astrology with Kristina.”  It went on: “In this two-hour overview of modern astrology we will cover the natal chart, the elements, and the modes. We will understand through the elements & modes. We will introduce the planets and houses before applying this knowledge to a chart.” No fees. Materials provided. I went.

Kristina was tall and thin. I am not good at ages, but my guess is that she was fortyish. She wore hoop earrings but no other jewelry. She said that she had been interested in astrology all her life and had seriously studied it since she was nineteen. She was a “practicing astrologer” and “read charts.” She practiced online and with a smile said that she was a “global practitioner.” She referred often to “my teacher,” clearly someone important to her.

The flier warned us to come early because the class would be limited to sixteen. No problem. There were eight of us, all but one of whom seemed more knowledgeable about astrology than I was.

We started with basic information about a “natal chart.” Apparently, the location of the birth does not have to be more precise than a city or town, but the birth time, Kristina said, needed to be within seven minutes of the actual delivery. This concerned one of my classmates. She had two adopted children, one from Ethiopia and another from Bangladesh. Not only did she not know the seven-minute window when either was born, she did not even know the dates of their births. She had been told that she could pick a birthday, but now she worried that she had chosen “bad” ones for astrological purposes. I did not know what that meant.

We were told that everything was made of four things—water, fire, air, and earth. (I resisted bringing up atomic and subatomic particles.) Apparently, one of these substances predominates in each of us, and on a handout we were asked to write down our thoughts on what it meant if a person was, for example, a fiery person. I could list traits for a fiery person and for an earthy person. I could not think of anyone, however, who I had ever thought of as a watery person. At first I wrote, “no idea” under watery. Then I wrote, “Perhaps goes with the flow—wishy washy.” I realized that a thin gruel was watery and perhaps a watery person was one of little substance. When we later discussed this, others referred to still waters running deep and another to thundering waves. I thought that if a watery person can evoke a calm that masks layers of thought or the turbulence of crashing breakers while to me it evokes someone without principles or nutritionless cream of wheat, the range of opinions made the label…well, useless.

My confusion increased when we discussed what it meant to be an airy person. I don’t remember ever labeling someone as airy, although “airhead” has been in my lexicon. For airy, what immediately came to mind was Tinkerbell, places such as Ireland and Iceland where Little People had burrowed into the folklore, and those late nineteenth century photographs that had gossamer-like creatures with diaphanous wings. However, one of my classmates said, “Flighty,” and Katrina said, “Yes, intellectual.” I intruded for one of the few times and said that I was confused: “Intellectual and flighty are antithetical.” Others looked at me in bewilderment; Of course they meant the same thing. One classmate said, “My mother is flighty and an intellectual.” I thought that that was possible but not at the same time. Einstein was an intellectual. He may have been flighty at other times, but not when he was trying to unravel the deepest secrets of the universe. The instructor said you should figure out what watery and the other words meant to you. I asked if the terms were meant to be objective or subjective. If the words were merely subjective, there could not be meaningful communication between people about them. I did not get an answer.

We got another handout that listed the well-known astrological signs with their accompanying human traits. Nothing was said about how the characteristics had been determined and assigned. They came to us as self-evident assertions. We were asked to look at our signs and see what we recognized in ourselves, but I tried to look at all the signs. I noticed how the traits for each sign almost always contradicted themselves. Under Aries, for example, it said, “Initiating: Starts things but finds it difficult to see them through once routine replaces creativity.” That seemed consistent with “Spontaneous: Likes things to happen straight away and loses interest if there is any delay.” However, they were seemingly contradicted by “Focused: Not easily distracted from within by self-doubt and second thoughts, nor from without by the reactions of others.” Hmmm. Focused but loses interest easily.

I could recognize characteristics of mine in the Taurus description, but I could also recognize as many traits I have in every one of the signs. And none of the Taurine signs that fit me were immutably ever present. “Patient: Unconcerned with how long things to take to happen.” Sometimes yes, sometimes no. My last trait was supposedly “Stubborn.” I laughed to myself. Aren’t we all stubborn some of the time, but I know that I am not always rigid. Just the other day, I had lunch with a friend. When the check came, I reached for a credit card to split the payment, but Tony said, “You had to make a special effort to come [true], and I am going to pay.” I swallowed my stubbornness, put my wallet away, and let him pay.

I was slow on the uptake, but I finally realized that I was being urged to think in stereotypes. A Gemini was adaptable and expressive. A Virgo was analytical and practical. I had no idea where the stereotyping came from, but I wondered if this is worse than the stereotyping that confronts us regularly — stereotypes based on nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, geography, age, education, politics, accent, hair style, and so on.

I also realized how much of the class was based on a common but basic flaw in human thinking. Too often when an idea is presented, we look for confirming evidence, and that is often easy to find. I could see some confirmation in myself for almost any astrological characteristic for any sign. (Exception: I am not stubborn. How many times would I have to tell you this for you to believe it?) But if we want to advance our knowledge, we must go beyond just confirmation and look for the disconfirming. None of that happened in this class.

But I wondered if this belief system is any more bizarre than others. People believe in transubstantiation and predestination. Others believe that the dictatorship of the proletariat will come. Some believe that the New York Jets will win a Super Bowl. Some believe that one sect comprises the righteous religious heirs of Muhammad while others believe in a different sect. And so on.

Finally, if I had more knowledge, I might know bad things done in the name of astrological beliefs. On the other hand, I know many horrible actions that have been done in the name of other belief systems. So, what is the harm if some believe in astrology?

And if I had not come to the class, I never would have heard a proclamation, said without any sense of irony, like this one from Katrina: “My Libra is in Venus (or perhaps my Venus is in Libra) so I pay close attention to balance.” Even after the class, I had no idea what this meant, but I had never met someone who could say it with a straight face.

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Trump Can Testify. The Irony

Outside the courthouse where his trial is being held, Donald Trump said, “Well, I’m not allowed to testify. I’m under a gag order, I guess. I can’t testify.” The next morning the judge began the proceedings by saying that he needed to “clear up any misunderstandings” about the gag order preventing Trump from publicly remarking on witnesses and jurors. “I want to stress, Mr. Trump, that you have an absolute right to testify at trial, if that’s what you decide to do.” The gag order “applies to statements made outside of court. It does not apply to statements from the witness stand.”

Of course, Trump has a right to testify in his own defense. In 1987, the Supreme Court in Rock v. Arkansas held that under the Constitution, “it cannot be doubted that a defendant in a criminal case has the right to take the witness stand and to testify in his or her own defense.” That is clear, but some of the comments about that right have been misleading. For example, I have heard on television commentators say that no defense counsel would ever allow Trump to take the stand.

The right to testify is so fundamental that the accused, not the lawyer, is responsible for the decision. Defense lawyers may advise whether they think it wise for a client to be sworn as a witness, and clients may follow that advice. However, if the lawyers advise against the testimony but the client insists on testifying, the accused testifies. The decision whether to testify is so fundamental that criminal defendants who indicate that they are not going to testify are asked by the court whether they know that they have a constitutional right to testify. The affirmative response is followed by questions to make sure that that decision not to testify is a knowing, voluntary, and intelligent one. Even half-wit defense attorneys know this and discuss the right to testify with their clients in planning a defense. It would be incompetent lawyering of the highest degree if Trump’s lawyers had not done so. Of course, it is possible that Trump was not listening when the subject came up, or perhaps he knew it was BS when he said that he can’t testify.

There are no comprehensive records of how often the accused testifies. Even so, legal “experts” give us this “information” although it is often inconsistent. In a few minutes online I found some commentators saying that criminal defendants “rarely” testify while others said that defendants without criminal records testify 65% of the time and those with criminal record 45% of the time. And so on. In short data are sparse.

Similarly, I have heard commentators saying that a conviction is more likely when the defendant testifies and from others that a conviction is less likely. Such pronouncements are mere hunches. We would have to run trials twice with the defendant testifying in one and not the other to get information about the effect taking the stand has on the outcome. Take what the legal experts say with a giant grain of salt.

We do know that special evidentiary rules come into effect when a criminal defendant testifies. The jury may hear evidence they would not otherwise hear. Like all witnesses, the testifying defendant’s credibility is at issue. He can be cross-examined about matters that go to his credibility that otherwise would not be admissible. Most often this concerns criminal convictions and activities. The jury may not hear about prior convictions if the defendant remains mum. But if he testifies, the defendant may be asked about them under the theory that a person with certain convictions is less likely to tell the truth than someone who has not been similarly convicted.

Trump has no criminal convictions, but the doctrine goes beyond convictions to other actions that can affect the issue of credibility. The trial judge has ruled that if Trump testifies, he can be asked about the yearslong fraud that a civil jury found he was involved with; his violation of a gag order in that case; and about the defamation case of E. Jean Carroll. If he does not testify, the jury will not hear about these matters.

Defense attorneys have often said that the most difficult decision they have is whether to advise a client to take the stand. I have no idea what Trump’s attorneys will recommend or whether Trump will follow the advice. What is clear, however, is that Trump has a constitutional right to testify and to control the decision as to whether he will testify. And therein lies an irony.

Trump ran for president saying that he would appoint pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, “conservative” judges. He was not very explicit about what he meant by conservative judges, but the assumption borne out by his appointments is that they would be “originalist” ones, that is, they would interpret the Constitution as it originally was. They would not find constitutional rights that did not exist when the Constitution and its amendments were ratified.

The Constitution, however, does not contain a right to testify. Instead, at the time the Constitution was adopted, criminal defendants were prohibited from testifying. The law in all the states and the federal courts expressly forbade testimony from criminal defendants. That may seem strange to us now. We might think that fairness requires the opportunity to testify, but that was not the law. That bizarre stricture only began to break down in the Civil War era when Maine was the first to allow defendants to take the stand. Soon other states and the federal courts allowed such testimony, and eventually criminal defendants could testify in all jurisdictions.

The Supreme Court in Rock v. Arkansas that pronounced that there was a constitutional right for a criminal defendant to testify was not an originalist court. If they were true to their principles, originalist judges — including the ones appointed by Trump — would not have come to that conclusion. Indeed, the present court, if given the chance, could abolish the constitutional right since it is not specifically included in the Constitution. Trump has the constitutional right to testify, but only because non-originalist judges said so.

Posted on by rjonakait

A Place to Die

We have recently returned from Florida where we were looking look for a place to die. Of course, that is not the express purpose of the institutions — sorry, communities — that we visited. As the spouse explained after a similar trip last year, (See post of September 19, 2023 “Please Take Good Care of…Me”), they are called “continuing care retirement communities” or CCRCs. Here’s some of what she wrote:

“These popular retirement options (increasingly known as “life care communities” or “senior living solutions” [who thought up such an awful term?!?!?] ) are designed to make your last years on earth as pleasant and carefree as possible. Towards that end, they promise independent living in a comfortable apartment (or free-standing “cottage” or “villa” or “townhome”), meal service (usually one meal a day), housekeeping, a fitness center (machines and pools), day trips, art workshops, chapel, library (either check-out or book swap), book clubs, bridge, mah-jongg, musical events, etc. etc. etc. (God forbid you should just want to relax and read your book.) Importantly, the best ones offer “assisted living” should daily activities (like bathing and dressing) get to be overwhelming, memory care should dementia raise its ugly head, and skilled nursing should such be required. For all this fun one usually pays an entrance fee (higher the bigger the dwelling you select) and a monthly fee. The monthly fee may remain constant as one moves from, say, independent living to memory care, or it may start off small-ish (never really small) and get steeper as one moves to more hands-on levels of care.

“Now. There are several problems with all CCRC’s. While they offer some welcome activities to those of us who no longer get up in the morning to go to work, they also tend to remind us that we no longer get up in the morning to go to work, and we need other things to keep us engaged with the living. Moreover, it requires us to come to terms with the fact that bad things happen when one gets older. But the main problem with all of these CCRCs is that everyone, I mean everyone, is OLD. Some of us old people don’t like the idea of always being around old people. I know, I know, but there it is.”

So, we went to Florida not just to look at life plan communities, but to check out Florida itself. The spouse and I had felt that we had understood the good and the bad about Florida. She had spent formative time there, including her junior and senior high school years. The spouse worked there after graduate school. Her mother continued to live there after her father died. My parents moved there from Wisconsin after my father’s heart attack. I volunteered in a public defenders’ office on the west coast. However, now we were no longer so sure that we understood Florida. It had gone bonkers, banning books and rejecting abortion rights. We were particularly concerned about what seemed to be attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. Would the gay, transgender, and nonbinary members of our families feel comfortable visiting us? Would we feel that we could find a comfortable community in this atmosphere? So we took our son along for a read on the place.

The first leg of our journey to find a place to die started with a hired car to take us to the airport. Our Uber driver—surprise, surprise—was an immigrant. He had come from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. He talked about Georgian restaurants in New York City. He also said that driving for Uber could become boring. But it was only a part-time gig. He also worked for a family business. His father owns a sixty-acre vineyard in Georgia, and our driver was helping to set up a business to import the wines into the United States. We talked about varietals and the name of the family wines. His English was nearly perfect even though he had been in the U.S. only for eighteen months. His mother had taught him, he said. She had gone to veterinary school at the University of Florida.  

Although we had often driven ourselves to the airport, being driven meant that we saw things we hadn’t noticed before. In one short stretch there were three billboards extolling the services of various personal injury attorneys and one reminding us that Jesus saved. I wondered if you had Jesus in your life whether you would have the need for a PI lawyer. In Florida even more attorneys advertised. Indeed, car accident victims are more numerous than in New York City.

On the last leg of our trip to find a place to die, we used Lyft to take us from the airport back home. The spouse asked the driver why he drove for Lyft and not Uber. He said that he drove for both but preferred Lyft. Uber customers, he said, were more obnoxious than Lyft ones.  He–surprise, surprise—was an immigrant. He was born in Jamaica but had been in New York for nine years. He was married with two sons, nine and four, and was looking to buy a house on Long Island. His driving was also part time. He had a computer science degree and had a retinue of clients he helped with their technology issues. His real passion, however, was soccer. He had played professionally in England in one of the lesser leagues with a team hoping to work its way up, but he had blown out his knee. His dreams disappeared with torn cartilage. His four-year-old, however, loved the game, and his father already dreamed of having him play professionally.

Why regale you with taxi driver stories when I’m talking about moving to Florida? These two conversations are part of a broader New York experience. In this city under all sorts of circumstances, I have met people who in a small way have expanded my life. They have given me glimpses into other societies and lives and have given me vicarious new experiences. Perhaps it would happen as much to me elsewhere, but I know it happens to me often in New York City, and I will miss it. Onward to Florida.

Instead of using hired cars, we rented one, which was fine except for one thing: When we returned it, we were a quarter tank short of full because we had not seen a gas station as we neared the airport. We had neglected to learn how much the car rental company would charge us for topping it off, but I assumed it would be the usual extortionate six or eight dollars a gallon. Wrong. It was $12. Fifty-two dollars later, we left the car.

We stayed at a two-bedroom condo on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. It was a high rise among a bevy of beach high rises. This not-exactly-new building was part condo and part hotel. The clientele was American. We had stayed at a Miami Beach place a few years back where most seemed to have come from South America. In any event, the clientele was…well…not to put too fine a point upon it…tacky.

We were hungry and frazzled when we arrived, so we headed downstairs for a drink and some food. We passed up an Italian restaurant off the lobby and headed outside on what was warm and lovely evening. A tiki bar was next to the pool. When we went to check out the water temperature, a large man came over to help us. We asked him his name. He said that everyone called him Big Mike. There was a reason for this. He was BIG. Maybe 6’6” and solidly built. He looked over at his sidekick, an even larger man, and said that he called him Big Fabian. Fabian stuck out his hand and after the question told us he was 6’9”. I nervously wondered why this tiki bar needed to employ these gentle giants. A cat sauntered by as if it owned the place. Big Mike said that he had adopted it and took care of it. The cat’s name—ready for the surprise?—is Tiki. A number of dogs were also in evidence. A sign said that only service dogs were allowed, but Floridians apparently have even more need for service dogs than patrons on the New York subway, or maybe that rule was not enforced.

We sat outside the tiki enclosure and ordered. The drinks came quickly although I am not sure that there was alcohol in my dessert-like tropical concoction. The food took a long time to come, and the order was only partially correct, but the servers were welcoming and friendly, so who cared? One of the servers came over urging us to go to the beach because a full moon was just rising. She helped the spouse to get to a viewing area. Watching a full moon coming over the horizon of a body of water, which I have seen many times, is always a spectacular sight. This was no exception. Huge and golden it rose out of the sea. (Two nights later we watched a spectacular sunset from our apartment windows.)

We passed the tiki bar frequently since it was on our way to the pool or beach. The patrons may have changed from day to day, but somehow the crowd always seemed the same. Even though this was Florida, there were not many old people of our age. And while some colleges were on hiatus, it was not a spring-break crowd. A lot of the people seemed to be local. As I mentioned, it was not a particularly high-class place, but I found consolation in seeing that my overweight body looked almost svelte next to most of the men who had bodies that strained extra-large clothing. There may have been some not-so-young women “negotiating” with older men. There was a middle-aged man with a dog on his lap so small that he should have been embarrassed sitting with it and a woman on his right with a large dog. His hand regularly stroked her ass. I do not know if she welcomed it, but she certainly did not object. Perhaps the bar was best summed up when the son reported that he had seen one woman drinking a can of beer from another woman’s cleavage, urging some men to join in the revelry.

The next day we visited two places to see if they might be good places to die. That evening we headed off to a popular seafood place on the intracoastal waterway. It did not take reservations. When we pulled into the valet parking lot, we could see people — mostly young (duh!) — spilling out of the restaurant and heard blasting music. The parking lot attendant informed us that there would be an hour wait. We left and headed inland where we found a place that could seat us immediately. We sat outside in the balmy air and were especially pleased to be introduced to a new to us dish, a delicious grilled artichoke.

The next day was Saturday and not a day to look for a place to die. Instead, besides walks on the beach, we went off in search of the former home of the spouse. She remembered the neighborhood of the house but not its precise location. The house was on a canal and a half block from the intracoastal. She thought it was a wonderful spot when she was twelve since she could take a powerboat on the waterways. Her house was a modest one, and modest ones still existed in the neighborhood, but not surprisingly, many of the original homes had been replaced by much larger ones. The Fort Lauderdale of the spouse’s youth had changed dramatically. The city only extended a few blocks west of the intracoastal then, but now it goes miles further into what was once Everglades territory.

After cruising the old neighborhood as if we were teenagers, we went to a nearby fish market to get seafood we were unlikely to find in New York City. The spouse settled on yellowtail snapper filets, which she cooked perfectly that evening.

Sunday was a beach and pool day followed by dinner in a lively, popular Greek restaurant with good food. On Monday morning we looked at another possible place to die, which we liked and might choose.

So we might have found a place to die, but how about Florida? Its politics are terrible, but our transgender son deemed it “okay” and “non-threatening.” We were helped in that conclusion with a conversation with a woman who showed us around one of the potential places to die. Her son is transgender, and we learned that he had good medical care and had carved out a life for himself in Florida. Maybe we can live in the state and join its librarians in fighting book bans.

Monday afternoon we flew back to New York City, and if I believed in omens, my future would have been decided. On the one hand, it makes much sense for us to move to a place to die. On the other hand, I will miss New York City and don’t want to leave. As we approached JFK airport, we could see an almost complete arc of a rainbow welcoming us back to our home.

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First Sentences

“On the night of May 28, 1988, my dad took me to a baseball game.” Russell A. Carleton, The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball.

“Trey comes over the mountain carrying a broken chair.” Tana French, The Hunter.

“When white-sheeted nightriders first appeared in the dark Southern night, many people thought they were ghosts.” Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.

“. . . I know, I understand, I shouldn’t have done it.” David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black.

“In winter, when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow, this is the time for storytelling.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

“He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson and no one could bear to listen to him.” Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

“On January 25, 2011, on the first day of the Egyptian Arab Spring, nothing happened in Abydos.” Peter Hessler, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution.

“You will notice in just a second that this book actually begins on page 145.” Paul Reiser, Couplehood.

“He was like the hero in an action movie: cool under pressure, always ready with a quip.” Reid Mitenbuler, Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age.

“They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, following deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs.” Daniel Mason, North Woods.

“Probably the strangest way anyone celebrated the accession of King James I of England was when a gentlewoman in the far north of Lancashire organised a mock wedding in a country church, between two male servants.” Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689.

“Mas Arai didn’t think much of slot machines, not to mention one with a fake can of Spam mounted on top of it.” Naomi Hirahara, Snakeskin Shamisen: A Mas Arai Mystery.

“I stood on the ship’s deck in my long underwear and fireproof jumpsuit, watching a pale silver sunrise and gauging the wind.” Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.

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To Kayfabe or Not to Kayfabe

News over the last month has me wondering again about how people in important positions with at least a modicum of intelligence continue to maintain that the 2020 election was stolen. Some do so because they are not concerned with facts. John Eastman, one of Trump’s lawyers, comes to mind. A judge recently ordered the disbarment of John Eastman because, the judge wrote, Eastman, in representing Trump, made “false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information he was relying upon.” (Emphasis added.) In short, he didn’t seem to care whether his statements were true or false.

Others, whether lawyers or not, do a lawyerly dance. (A bad metaphor; I have seen lawyers dance, and seldom is it a pleasing sight.) For example, news reports state that interviews for positions with the Republican National Committee have included the question: Was the 2020 presidential election stolen? Many have given an answer that does not answer the question by saying that there had been irregularities in that election that had created “cause for concern.” No evidence cited.

Recently that guy whom you would not recognize if you brushed shoulders with him on the street, Mike Johnson (reminder: He is Speaker of the House), meets with Trump and issues vague statements about “election integrity.” This was said not with irony even though Johnson tried to undercut election integrity in 2020 by failing to vote to certify the vote, and Trump is the chief underminer of election integrity in our history. No facts were presented to indicate that we have a problem with our elections.

And then there are those who, when it suits them, maintain that they did not really believe their own falsehoods. Ronna McDaniel, after she resigned as co-chair of the Republican National Committee (as an unacknowledged act of wokeism, the RNC has both a male and female co-chair), was signed as a political commentator by NBC. A backlash ensued because throughout November and December 2020, McDaniel supported former President Trump’s efforts to throw out the election results. At one point she even called Michigan election officials to ask them to delay certifying the state’s results. As late as 2023 McDaniel said that Biden had not “won it fair.” Now, however, she smiles and says that she was only kidding and indicates that she never believed the election theft claims. “When you’re the R.N.C. chair, you kind of take one for the whole team, right?” Apparently, you “take one for the team” even when the team is trying to overthrow a democratic election.

A common thread through all of this is that Trump supporters feel that they can create their own “reality” (remember “alternative facts”?). Without any sense of irony, they seem to think that they can change “reality” when a such a change suits them. In considering this phenomenon, I did what any deep-thinking political scientist would do: I looked for guidance from pro-wrestling.

Shortly after Trump became president, I wrote that his rallies bore a strong resemblance to the “promos” of pro wrestlers. (See post of January 26, 2017, “Shut Up, You Elites.”) In that post I concentrated on the performances of Donald Trump. A wrestling fan since childhood, he sponsored two of the early WrestleManias.

Trump, however, has been more than a fan of pro-wrestling; he was featured in one of the WWE storylines. I don’t remember all the ins and outs of this “drama”, but as I recall, Vince McMahon, then the head of the WWE, backed one wrestler and Trump another. Either Trump or McMahon would have his head shaved depending upon which wrestler lost. The buildup went on for weeks or maybe even months, but, of course, no one could really believe that Trump was going to become bald to further wrestling ratings. The mere thought of it, however, whipped up the crowd, and in the end, Trump helped shave McMahon’s noggin.

The ties between Trump and McMahon are strong. Vince’s wife Linda McMahon donated $7 million to pro-Trump super PACs in 2016 making her one of the largest Republican donors. Trump responded by appointing her Administrator of the Small Business Administration, where she is said to have performed credibly. The ties are so close that Abraham Riesman in his recent book RingMaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America reports that McMahon may be Trump’s closest friend. McMahon “is said to be one of the only people whose call Trump takes in private, forcing his retinue to leave the room so the two old chums can chat in confidence.” It comes as no surprise that Trump is a member of WWE Hall of Fame, inducted in 2013.

The recent bits of news, however, made me think not just about the possible connections between Trump’s rally performances and pro-wrestling, but also about the connections between wrestling fans and Trump’s supporters. My cursory internet research found no data about the percentage of Trumpistas who are devotees of the WWE or similar organizations. I did, however, come across an article by David S. Moon, a Senior Lecturer at the UK’s University of Bath entitled “Kayfabe, Smartdom and Marking Out: Can Pro-Wrestling Help Us Understand Donald Trump?”  Political Studies Review, Volume 20, pp. 47-61 (2020). I am seldom astonished by anything in the academic world, but I was somewhat surprised to learn that there is an academic field of professional wrestling studies, with its own association and journal. However, what most interested me about Moon’s article was what it set out to explore: “How to explain a cynical American electorate’s engagement with and emotional investment in the campaign of such an obvious political fraudster.”

The exploration starts with the historical premise of pro-wrestling captured by the term kayfabe. Abraham Riesman explains: “Kayfabe (rhymes with “Hey, babe”) is a term of unclear linguistic origin. It emerged from the worlds of carnivals in the 1800s and, in its original definition, simply denoted the public-facing fictions of professional wrestling. . . . It referred to the business’s central conceit: that it was a legitimate, unscripted athletic competition.” (My understanding is that entire matches are not necessarily scripted but only the beginnings and ends with the middle improvised by the wrestlers.) Reisman further explains that a work was anything that was scripted (kayfabe), and a shoot was anything that was real.

The performers were expected to maintain their characters or storylines even outside the arena. They were “to stay in kayfabe” or “to kayfabe.” If a wrestler was billed as Native American, he couldn’t be known to be Italian. (The real name of Chief Jay Strongbow was Luke Joseph Scarpa.) If two wrestlers were supposed enemies, they could not be seen drinking together in off hours. In a famous incident, the supposed fierce enemies “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan (James Edward Duggan Jr.) and the Iron Sheik (Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri), broke kayfabe when they were caught driving together under the influence of drugs and booze. The WWE fired them not for the drugs and booze but for breaking kayfabe.

Of course, never in the history of wrestling did all the fans believe that the matches were genuine contests. The industry divided its fans into marks who believed wrestling was real and smarts who accepted it was fiction. No one knew how big each category was, but the assumption was that the majority were marks. That may never have been true, but Riesman reports “that wrestlers believed that fans believed it.” (Riesman’s emphasis.) Thus, the pro-wrestling industry thought that breaking kayfabe would undermine the industry.

The WWE itself, however, broke kayfabe. Vince and Linda McMahon did it to avoid regulation. When pretending to be an authentic sporting event, pro-wrestling came under the jurisdiction of state athletic commissions, but the WWE wanted to avoid the health regulations and other measures that were mandated for athletes. The McMahons publicly acknowledged kayfabe, and pro-wrestling now became “sports entertainment.”

The end of the pretense, however, was not the end of pro-wrestling as once feared. It goes suplexing along. Both Moon and Riesman conclude that kayfabe still exists, but in a new form. Moon states, “The term kayfabe has taken on a different meaning. It now describes a new form of audience engagement that involves in the first instance, a willing suspension of disbelief with which performers, promoters and the audience all ‘keep kayfabe’.”  

Might not this also describe much of our modern politics? Surely neither Trump nor his supporters can believe all the things he says — some of which is ignorant blathering and some of which is blatant lies. Some of his supporters now even acknowledge that they did not believe what they said when they echoed Trump. But Trump and his supporters keep kayfabe. They all suspend disbelief in order to act as if what is being said is an authentic reflection of the world. But what is the point to this?  In wrestling it is to entertain and be entertained, but while politics may provide entertainment, it is far more serious than that.

Riesman also writes that wrestling fans today know it is fiction, but now there is a new status, which the author calls neokayfabe. Wrestling is a lie, yes, but the fans now believe that “the lie encodes a deeper truth, discernible to those few who know how to look beyond what’s in front of them. To these fans adept in reading the signs, another narrative emerges, and another beyond that. Suddenly, the pleasure of watching a match has less to do with who wins than with the excitement of decoding it.” The smarts now are different. In the past they understood the scripted nature of what they saw, but now smarts want to be insiders, learning the rules of the game, getting smart to how the business works. The audience tries to guess the outcome not from who is the better wrestler but from the promulgated story lines and from guesses or knowledge about who is favored and disfavored by the wrestling bosses and others who create the story lines.

It is a small jump from this to Trump’s politics. Many are convinced that what is said and done on the political surface is not real. It needs to be decoded. Other forces control. Call those forces the deep state or conspirators in our law enforcement and justice system or communists who promulgate environmental regulations. Of course, these political smarts don’t take Trump at his word—who could?—but you can understand the world if Trump’s pronouncements are decoded. It becomes a visceral activity, not a cerebral one. Wrestling is in essence a conspiracy, and so is politics, or at least Trumpian politics.

I thought these insights explained a lot about Trump supporters. They did not believe the fraudster but were operating in a world of neokayfabe where the surface hid the true meanings. However, as I thought more, I doubted my analysis. It butted up against data, information, facts. For example, polls indicate most Republicans maintain that Trump did not try to overturn the election. Half say that he did not take top secret and classified documents from the White House. My notion was that Trump supporters were, in wrestling terms, smarts, but polling indicates many are not. Perhaps most undercutting my neokayfabe approach is that polls show that the percentage of diehard Trump supporters who believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent and stolen is increasing. In the wrestling world, fans go from marks to smarts, but in the political world, it has been the opposite.

 Of course, it is possible that Trumpistas stay in kayfabe even when responding to a pollster; that is, they don’t believe the election was stolen but will maintain the fiction when asked. But now I feel that I have entered the world of neokayfabe on top of neokayabe. Shouldn’t I take them at their word or are these many, many people also fraudsters? I feel like a cartoon character whose head is about to explode.

It is a strange world where one can make more sense of pro-wrestling than of aspects of the political world.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The House Speaker Mike Johnson, who I am convinced came to life after being a character on the Simpsons, is in trouble. His problem is he may allow a vote on aid for Ukraine. You might think that the point to the House of Representatives is to vote on stuff, but for many Representatives, apparently not. Why would you oppose voting on an issue? One reason is that you expect your position will lose, and you want to thwart the will of the majority. Another reason to oppose a vote is that you do not want to take an authoritative stance on an issue. If there is no vote, I may avoid criticism. In other words, cowardice. We may call ourselves a democracy or a republic, but those reasons for preventing a vote indicate we are neither. Furthermore, how in democratic or republican theory, does one person control whether the House votes or not?

I go to the theater for the play, but I experience more than that. For example, I recently saw a matinee at the Belasco Theatre. It is on a block with several other theaters. The street was crowded with people waiting to get into various shows, including many school children and easily spottable tourists and suburbanites, as well as Broadway denizens. I absorbed the air of excitement and expectation. New York’s vibrancy was also palpable from a conversation I had at the intermission. Before the play started, I heard the woman next to me say that she had been a law librarian. When the break came, I asked her about that. I learned that she and her husband were from the San Franciso Bay area and were soaking up New York City for a couple weeks. They were going to shows—they highly recommended Merrily We Roll Along—and galleries and museums. They had been impressed by the Harlem Renaissance exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum but not so much by the Biennial at the Whitney. (I generally agreed with them about the museum exhibits.) They told me about an installation in the Soho district I was not aware of. And then I thought about all the baseless claims about how bad and scary New York is. My afternoon on Broadway told me otherwise.

I was seated on a round, backless stool at a long lunch counter. The diners were engaged with their phones or the menus, not with each other. As I ate my unusual sandwich—corned beef with chopped chicken liver on rye—I glanced to my right. A young woman who had not yet ordered sat there. Tears soundlessly streamed down her cheeks. I looked away. As I got close to finishing my lunch, I looked over again. She was no longer crying. Should I have said something to her?

If Trump, as he suggested, would have immigration only from “nice” countries, would that include Russia?

I left the Metropolitan Museum after viewing its Literary Poster exhibit. I wandered down Fifth Avenue, and I saw that the street was closed. I asked a police officer at a barricade what the event was. He replied, “The Greek Independence Day parade.” “Who knew?” I said. He told me that I was in luck and could see it because it was about to appear, and it was short. I walked a few blocks south and coming north were people in uniform carrying a blue and white flag, another flag saying, “Correction Officers Hellenic Association,” and a third flag bearing “1895.” Soon came similar contingents from the police and fire departments. I spotted a couple standing on a bench waving smaller versions of the blue and white flag. I asked them, “From whom did Greece get its independence?” The man answered, “The Ottoman Empire.” Showing off what I thought was my new knowledge, I said, “1895?” “No. 1821.” The man paused and then continued, “But maybe 1895 by Greek time.” I responded, “That’s not true. The service is fine in Greek restaurants.” He smilingly said, “That’s because we Greeks love our food.”

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Snippets

I recently saw the play Patriots, which was written by Peter Morgan and directed by Rupert Gold. The production came from London where it won awards. I knew that the play had something to do with Vladimir Putin but didn’t know much beyond that. Within a few minutes, I realized, however, that I was familiar with the story from having read Masha Gessen’s book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. In both the play and book, we learn how Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky elevated the obscure bureaucrat Putin from insignificance to the dictator of Russia. The play — the set, the acting, the direction, the writing — was outstanding. I enjoyed it, but it also made me think about the creative process. How does one learn about Berezovsky and Putin and decide to make a play about their dynamics? How does one read Ron Chernow’s Hamilton and decide to make a hip-hop musical of it? How does one read American Prometheus and decide to make a movie of it?

The menu said that a dish contained “tofu and other stuff.” I eschewed it.

Are desert flowers more vibrant than others or does it just seem that way?

I apparently need to learn more about the Bible. Or football. Or perhaps both. Deion Sanders, now a football coach, in promoting his book Motivate and Dominate: 21 Ways to Win On and Off the Field, was asked: “What book (fiction or nonfiction) best captures the game of football as you know it?” Sanders replied, “The Bible.”

A friend said, “All my life I said I wanted to be someone. . . . I can see now that I should have been more specific.”

From her dress, I pegged her as a street person. She was pushing a cart filled with bulging kitchen trash bags. She reached into one. She pulled out latex gloves. She put them on. She reached back into the bag and pulled out sanitizing wipes. She then scrubbed the subway seat before sitting down.

At a New England town’s used book sale, a friend held up Smallbone Deceased and said I would like it. I did. The mystery by Michael Gilbert published in 1950 is set in a London solicitor’s office where the corpse of Marcus Smallbone is discovered in a large deed box. I had not heard of Michael Gilbert before, but I learned that he was a practicing solicitor as well as the author of many books in different styles. Perhaps what I found most intriguing is that Gilbert only wrote on his weekday commute from the suburbs to London, averaging five hundred words a day. This schedule produced over thirty novels and more than 180 short stories. I assume he commuted by train, and since I also assume that he was writing in longhand, his train rides were smoother than my subway trips.

The first mysteries I remember reading were Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks. The Library of Congress cataloging data printed on the copyright page above the ISBN for Freddy the Detective states: “Brooks, Walter R. (1886-1958) with illustrations by Kurt Wiese. Summary: Freddy the pig does some detective work in order to solve the mystery of a missing toy train.” Below the ISBN it continues: [1. Pigs—Fiction 2. Domestic animals—fiction. 3. Mystery and detective stories.] How could you not want to read this?

My idea for a book group: Everyone reads three-quarters of the same mystery and then gets together for a discussion.