Memorial Day

On the Sunday before Memorial Day of this year my wife and I went to a cookout in New Rochelle. I was playing a cd in the car as we pulled away from our house. It was country or jazz. “I feel like rock n roll,” she said, “on the radio.” I noticed we were both wearing blue jeans, and I hoped her desire foretold a day or two of youthful fun.

I was in a different car, our Volvo, the next morning, when I loaded up our dogs and went out for my morning coffee. I remembered my wife’s preference from the day before, and tuned into a new station. I think they played Van Halen for the first leg of my outing. I don’t know hard rock too well, but it wasn’t bad, and I thought I’d stick with this station for the time being.

Loaded up with hot coffee, dark and sweet, from the Bagel Boys, I headed on to the video store. We got shafted earlier in the weekend with all the new releases we wanted gone when we stopped by after dinner. It was actually pretty stunning because they had about 25 empty cases of each one on the shelves. You’d think that would be enough of The Good Shepherd, say, but it was not. We love the new releases around here, I guess. A morning video run seemed like a savvy answer. Besides, what’s better than a little early beat-the-traffic tooling around with three dogs and a hot cup of coffee?

I took a right after the coffee, turned the radio back on and “Piece of My Heart,” was just getting started. “… and didn’t I give you everythang… that a woman possibly caaan?..” I turned it up a little louder. It was raw and real; she meant "everythang." It was a gorgeous morning too. No traffic on route 35. The mastiff sat in the back seat and pressed her rugby ball head against my right shoulder while I drove. The dogs love routine and this is what we like to do. They get a little down if the errand running goes past a half-hour or so.

I screamed along with Janis for another three minutes. Then they played, “Already Gone,” the Eagles song. I thought, what a good station. It’s a great song, not a classic that’s worn out a groove in your brain, but a familiar goodie. The sentiment is I don’t want you either baby and who can’t relate to that? “I will sing this victory song!”

But victory was not to be mine. Blockbuster opens at 10 am as it turns out. You can return videos in the slot, and I had to content myself with that. My hope of picking up an evening’s entertainment with a painless morning car ride had ended at 9:15 am.

Steve Miller made it all better. The chorus of The Joker is dull and overly familiar. I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, yeah yeah yeah. But the song starts out with the some wiggy stuff: “Some people call me Maurice because I speak of the pompitous of love.” I read an article about Steve Miller once that made me admire him. As I recall, he moved to San Francisco in the late sixties as a business proposition. He was a good blues guitarist and knew that the hippy bands there would need players who could actually play. His plan worked out well. So I enjoyed the Joker. Gimme Three Steps came next. My mood stayed fine although that one is doesn’t hold up all that well for me.

I arrived back in South Salem and took a left off the state route 35 onto Bouton, the same road where my wife said she wanted to hear the radio. Gimme Three Steps was over and the most richly produced drum beats I know of started to pound. It was Bruce Springsteen doing Born in the USA. Bouton Road goes up over a little mountain so its early stages give you a chance to engage the motor. And up over the mountain we went. I love how Born in the USA is a patriotic-feeling rock n roll anthem and a protest song. Inclusive and incisive at the same time. Quite a trick. I was rocking too.

We came down the moutain’s other side and cars were accumulating at the T, about 200 feet from my house. Six cars stopped at the yield sign, with someone at the bottom of the hill holding everybody up. I squinted and leaned forward to see. Suddenly, three men in tank tops came around the corner and charged up the hill. It was a race; the Memorial Day 10-K. The top guy looked like he was about 17 but two men breathing hard on his left and right were in their middle or late twenties.

The mastiff went nuts. Poor old Penny, our mutt, who’s 17 herself, had to scramble out of the way. Magda, 180 pounds and a deafening barker was drowning out Bruce and trying to scare the crap out of all the racers. They chugged by my car, which was literally rocking, heroically working the hill. A whole town’s worth of runners. After the leaders came the middle-aged majority, 30 men and women in better shape than I. Then the men with baby carriages, then a few hardy elderly. Penny joined the barking. So did our Shih Tsu. Their rage is contagious, and they show no mercy for the weak or old.

At first I was embarrassed by the barking, the fury, the fogged up windows. But then I thought: this is applause. They love this. I do too. The Memorial Day racers are reminding us to remember. I was missing the good song, but holidays are like that.

Eye of the Needle

For a couple of weeks I was satisfied with having read 5 pages of the book and entered an ill-informed but enthusiastic thumbs-up into this blog (see my last entry). After all, it was purchased to protect me from sitting on my hands for 20 minutes when I couldn't find a magazine, and deriving pleasure worth memorializing from a stub reading experience seemed like enough to ask. I felt obliged to the author, though, for answering my basic need for amusement with unexpected flair so I went ahead and finished the book. The title is The Eye of the Needle and if it isn't it should be considered a spy thriller classic. The London postal worker I took for the hero was in fact the villain, ruthless, brilliant, the legendary Needle. The characters are not short-changed cliches the way they often are in genre fiction; they feel real, even the minor characters. Many of them have bit parts to play in this battle within a battle, and have little knowledge of the significance of their contributions. The novel's heroes are not so different from their fellow citizens. Certainly they can't claim to be smarter or stronger than the villain. They're just logical and dogged, admirable Brits, illustrative of the Churchillian virtue of never giving up.

The problem with suspense novels is they can't keep the mystery mysterious straight through to the end. The flip side of relying on mystery is that once you see how things are winding up, enjoyment weakens and you finish for the sake of finishing, if you finish at all. The Eye of the Needle keeps you curious about 99% through it, so it's in the Hall of Fame. It doesn't transcend the category, like, say, Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, but it is masterful and memorable. Speaking of Ellroy I cracked the Cool 6,000 or whatever his latest is called and it's stylized beyond comprehension. I'm a big fan. Maybe I'll try it again.

Another Story of Wall Street

I went into my colleague KL’s office last week to discuss how to advise an entity about to increase its outstanding debt from 30 billion to 90 billion over the next five years. He hemmed and hawed before arriving at some reasonably good thoughts. We agreed to convene a broader group for the broad question, then he stopped me on my way out the door he said there’s something on your pants. He asked me to turn around, and then said, “there’s hole in your pants!” I asked him what he thought I should do and he said in the near term you should tear a patch out of your cuff and glue it onto the butt. I hope our clients get better advice than this.

What I did was I went to the dry cleaners. They said they could fix it, but said I would have to take off my pants while they worked on it. They pointed to the small cubicle where I would be sitting. I asked if they took credit cards. Cash only. So I went out to get some money and something to read. Weirdly, I couldn’t find a newsstand—I work in lower Manhattan—but a Fedex Kinko’s had about 10 bookshelves of old paperbacks for sale, a few on the front step and then a few more inside. I asked the salesgirl, “what’s up with all these paperbacks?” She couldn’t make sense of my question, so I offered her my dollar and took a Ken Follette book.

It was damn good. I gave the seamstress my pants through the closed door and sat in my underpants reading. The central character was a highly intelligent postal worker who made keen observations about England’s war preparations, just by observing phenomena on the street and in the post office most of us would miss. His landlady makes a fuss over him; he’s coolly aware that she is looking for a husband. He was an interesting character, a stud, a prig, and an iceberg, with a lot going on under the surface. Soon to be revealed as a heroic spy I’m sure, but his pretext was well-drawn. A frenetic pounding on the cubicle door informed me my pants were done. I opened the door and knew that no one being there was a result of my privacy being respected. Everyone on Pearl Street could see me in my underwear, but my recently hired seamstress was hiding behind the door with my pants being offered back to me in her outstretched hands. I closed the door and inspected her work. The material is a little informal for Wall Street. I think it’s a twill, but a very soft and sleek twill from Tommy Bahama. Sweet and supple, but if you sit on your butt for 12 hours a day like Bartleby the scrivener, you will rub a hole in it eventually. I had three holes and they were all repaired with very nice work from the sewing machine. Black pants, black patches, black thread. Twenty dollars, well-spent.