A blatant but hopefully temporary disregard for humility

I actually used "pneumonaultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" in a sentence yesterday, a sentence in which I didn't just spout the word out of context like I was trying to show off, like I kinda did back in April when I posted on this.

A friend stopped by the office and mentioned that his brother-in-law was having a beer recently with a physician who is somewhat of a world-renowned specialist in the field of understanding the epidemiology of people who live in areas subject to volcanic activity.

As I sat listening, I just about salivated. This was the moment I had waited for since about 1973.

"You mean," I started with trepidation, "that he deals with people who have pneumonaultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis?"

A blank stare. Then a bewildered smile. This, from an attorney who could normally run verbal circles around me with two lobes tied behind his...cortex. He did our estate plan, and all he needs to say is "testator" and I go running for the Webster's.

"People who have 'black lung.' " I tell him. "It's a coal miner's disease for which they coined a term in the early 1900s, and I heard that word on 'ZOOM' on public television when I was a kid and have always wanted to use it in a sentence, and now I have. THANK YOU!"

Never thought I'd see the day. Now I have seen it.

Autumn 1994

Bandol, the black-and-white cat I grew to love as my own, unexpectedly had to go to the vet. It was not good news.

I had first encountered the feline when I started to date the woman. We were eating Chinese food in her Astoria, Queens apartment and I had given Bandol a taste of my eggroll. She jested, in a mock fortune-cookie tone of voice, “Feed cat. Take home.”

Four years later we were in Atlanta, and the cat was sick, very sick. Something was wrong with his white cells. Something that wouldn’t get better, and he would get sick all over again soon and be in pain. He was only five years old, and the decision was made to put him down. She looked at me in the car and said, “I’m losing you, and now I’m losing him. My two boys.”

This was the fall of 1994.

photo: Wazari

Answered

Walking down the hall in front of me at the south Charlotte Hampton Inn with a rolling cart stacked with suitcases was a family of four including two boys about 10 and 14.

The 14-year-old was almost as tall as his father. I thought, God willing, in a few years my three sons will be as tall or taller than I am (which is not unlikely since I am 5’9”). It was a pleasant – very pleasant – thought.

I missed Carter’s bo promotion tonight because I’m traveling through tomorrow afternoon. Bo, for the uninitiated, is one of the tools in kobudo, martial arts weapons training, and is a 1-inch diameter rod about as tall as you are made of Japanese oak (in the case of Carter’s), which he twirls around and jabs and strikes with. I was able to attend his most recent karate belt promotion (to brown belt, two steps below junior black belt) last Saturday. Tonight was only the second of his ten promotions he’s had over two years that I’ve missed. My dad saw me wrestle only once over the six years and hundreds of matches during junior high and high school; I’m determined to let Carter know that I’m watching. And that I’m a fan.

I called home a few minutes ago to get the end-of-day-report. I listen intently to how bo promotion went and am eager to know how K is faring alone with the boys, but at one point my brain sidles sideways while my eyes drift over to the muted television where the Spurs are playing the Suns in Game Six of their series. She tells me that Teak scraped himself on some rusty nails on the underside of the old couch.

But I miss this.

When I miss something she says on the phone and realize that I’ve missed something, I give off a little laugh, like it’s machine gun cover fire in advance of the enemy’s return fire I know is to come. However, this was not a story to give off machine gun laughter. It was a story to “Is he all right?” at. Or, “What?! So what happened next?” at.

I start to sink below the surface.

She knows this and gives me some grief, but I cower enough to be allowed to remove tail from between legs.

The report goes on. So far, our basement is dry – we’ve been flooded twice in the last several years and lost our wall-to-wall carpeting in the playroom. There is supposed to be up to six inches of rain in some parts near us overnight. Help me.

The last time our basement flooded, Mother’s Day 2006, we lost a carpet that had been down only about two years. I remember cutting it up with a utility knife: each stroke was like $50 coming out of my body. Following was the carpet pad. I duct taped about a dozen 4-foot long sections of soggy carpet and padding and set them out on the back patio. Fifteen hundred dollars sitting outside, getting ready to be thrown out during the next large item trash day. Just take my paycheck, please, and chop it into little pieces and blow them into the wind.

Tomorrow morning’s t-ball game for Bennett is cancelled because Buker Elementary School’s field, where they play, is a lake. So the lovely K checked the website and found that the game had been called.

Oh. She and the boys threw me a birthday party yesterday – 44 years of life, the last 13 of them joyous, the last 10 of them priceless.

We ordered pizza and had cheesecake for dessert. K bought three presents, wisely, one for each boy to give me. One was a bag with Triscuits and Irish Cheddar cheese in it, which Teak very excitedly gave me. Didn’t matter if it was on our grocery list anyway…it was a present from my little one. Earl and Ginger sent along a card and a gift. Brother Jim called this morning to wish me a happy one.

I can’t help but marvel at how much I am blessed. I’ll be bummed if our new $1500 carpet gets ruined by yet another flooded basement.

But I won’t be that bummed.

photo: criswatk

Upgraded

The difference between paying $250 and $800 or more for a commercial airline flight depends on how much you value a three-inch long, 4mm-wide biscotti.

My flights to and from Charlotte on US Airways this weekend got upgraded because of being a frequent flyer. You are probably familiar with the system. To qualify for the minimum level, Silver, you have to fly 30 segments or 25,000 miles in a year’s time. Not too hard to do, especially considering US Air’s many connections I have to take to secondary cities where I do my work, and each hop counts as a “segment.” One trip often yields four segments. Once you're at least Silver, you get unlimited upgrades so long as seats in First Class are open.

So two days out from my flight, I get a friendly email with an Upgrade Status Update. I’d say I get upgraded one out of three or four flights. I have never paid nor will ever pay for First Class within the US. Taking the lovely K to San Francisco or Tuscany for our next big getaway, now that’s a different story. But I should have miles to cover most of it.

Here’s what you get in First Class:

1. Board first…after the children, disabled, and Top Secret Air Marshals.
2. The flight attendant takes your sport coat and hangs it up.
3. S/he offers you a drink (sometimes, not on all flights).
4. Your seat is slightly wider (3.3 inches) than in coach and made of pleather that is not nearly as nice as the leather seats in our Honda minivan.
5. You have a little more leg room (~6 inches).
6. In flight, you are offered another drink – you get two three-ounce cups of soda in First Class.
7. The flight attendant brings around an attractive basket – you paid for that basket, but please don’t ask to take it home with you, because everyone else paid for it, too – filled with organic blue tortilla chips, pretzels, nuts, or biscotti. You have a choice of one or, if you are feeling impish, you maybe take two.
8. You have "exclusive" use of the First Class lavatory. (But I have flown enough with our three small kids that if one of my boys has to go: Sorry, you'll have to wait, Mr. Full-Fare-Paying First-Class Passenger.)
9. You exit the plane first (dependent on position of doorways).

Maybe if I got that third soda I could justify the extra expense of paying full fare… In the meantime, there is still the thrill of the bargain when I get that email that announces I’ve been upgraded. It's sort of the Priceline.com-type of rush when your bid is accepted.

My colleague is flying back from Charlotte on the same flight. Unless he moonlights as an Air Marshal, I’ll be walking by him at the gate: “Oooh. Sorry, dude…free upgrade.” He’ll give me grief when we get back.

There are times when you don’t necessarily want free upgrades.

Like the time Enterprise gave me a SUV when I had reserved a standard. I drove only about 30 miles that day but used more gas than my Corolla back home used in a week. We negotiated down the rental price because of it.

Or the time they were out of standard size and only had a premium car, a Volvo S40. It was sweet: silver with a sunroof and leather seats, amazing sound system. Sweet…on the lot, that is. Not sweet picking up my boss’s boss. My job involves raising money for a non-profit, so showing up anywhere to pick up anyone in a sun-roofed Volvo S40 is a bit sketchy. But the alternative was probably a Geo…so I took the Volvo and starting plotting my explanation. I was all smiles and aw-shucks when I picked up our chairman and his wife at the airport.

Everyone I saw got the story, the explanation, the aw-shucks.

But during that trip I had to drive alone from Charlotte to Raleigh, almost a three hour trip, and the sunroof and sound system made all the explaining worth it. Aw-yeah.

It was much better than biscotti, and the leather was real.

photo: beriliu

A sincere smile

I used to see Anthony standing along the wall of the steep pathway leading from the #6 train down to the #7 platform. He was on crutches and was missing his right leg, his pants folded back on that side. Had an old black Bible in one hand and was always fingering a rosary with the other. He must have been about 35 or so. Never asked for money, but many of us gave it to him because of his sincere smile.

I would take the #6 from 96th street down to Grand Central Station and then transfer to the #7 to get across town to Times Square, which was two blocks from where I worked. It was easier than the shuttle to my way of thinking.

So I would sort of gallop-walk down that ramp, and most mornings I’d see Anthony.

He always smiled and said, Good morning, brother! I would shake his hand though it was dirty and cigarette stained, and I felt guilty afterwards because I wanted to wash up.

Frito Pie

The woman serving us at Magnolia Bakery in Greenwich Village said quite matter-of-fact that she had been born with an extra finger on each hand and that her parents had instructed the doctors to surgically remove both digits, which they had done.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of someone telling you something like this, but it is odd banter while standing in line for a slice of apple pie. She showed us the spots where the ostensible pinky-ettes were, and we all kind of craned our necks to see. Ooooooh. Woooow. Look at those…spots.

How many people had she told? How many years had this story been in existence? At any point, did she or anyone she knew have equal to or greater than fourteen fingers. That’s what I wanted to know. That would be something.

The lovely K’s friend Doug had told us about Magnolia Bakery, on Bleecker Street in the West Village. True to reputation, it did not disappoint.

About eleven years later, K and I were meeting Doug once again down in the Village, this time for brunch on Saturday of the weekend we had escaped to New York for our 10th wedding anniversary. We were supposed to meet him at a restaurant on the corner of 9th Avenue and 14th Street, “in the heart of the meat-packing district,” a neighborhood that combined a somewhat bizarre mixture of cool and animal slaughter. Once we got there, however, we saw that a high-rise was going up on the spot where this restaurant once was, so we waited for Doug across the street. He found us and we walked down to Plan B restaurant: Paris Commune at 99 Bank Street.

Years ago I recall visiting a friend who lived on Bank Street. She and her husband, a top manager at Calvin Klein, had no children, but instead had a bird, a cat and four dogs, including a Great Dane, a Newfoundland, and two golden retrievers. Their loft was fortunately about 3000 square feet, which also meant that when you visited them, the enthusiastic canines had a running start at you coming through the front door. You basically put one leg back and braced yourself. And you didn’t wear clothes you didn’t plan to send to the cleaner the next day. In addition to the apartment, they had purchased a seven-bedroom, 100-year-old house along the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York sight unseen: the previous owner had allowed them to view it only from a helicopter ride. They decided to go for it. They found that it was furnished exquisitely with antique linens, beautiful mahogany furniture, original fiestaware from the 1950s, and so on. Oh: and it was situated on its own private island in the middle of the river.

Just down the street from Paris Commune was Cowgirl, another restaurant we went to when K worked at Donna Karan. They feature a classic southwestern meal – Frito pie, which is a bag of corn chips slathered with chili and which really should have been kept in the southwest and not allowed to cross the Hudson River.

One of my most memorable though is China Fun, a fairly standard Chinese restaurant on Columbus and 71st. K and I would go there in 1996-97, chat about our work days, and then take in a movie over at Sony-Loew’s/Lincoln Center. Somewhere along the line, she said she’d be my wife. It was five blocks from the studio we lived in for two years before the first baby came.

We don’t go to Chinese restaurants much. We see maybe two movies a year.

But we’re still married.

photo: shOdan

Mom the magician

When Jim and I as young boys would stand on Fifth Avenue and 97th Street waiting for a southbound bus to come, wanting especially the #4, which was express, Mom would walk a few feet out from the curb, look north toward Harlem – some 13 blocks away – and chant “Hocus Pocus, Domino-cus, Ala-kazam-kazoo…” and wave her right hand in the air like she was conjuring up transportation for us – fine if the others who were waiting got it, too – and then her voice would go soft, unintelligible to us, but her knowing all the while that the two of us were watching wide-eyed and expectant.

The bus would always come soon, because we were so pre-occupied with watching her that we forgot about the time.