Inspired by The Times

You’re perhaps tired of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene stories, but indulge me this one personal note.

Gilda, Ellie, Donny and I were traveling in upstate New York, in the area around Lake Placid, Saturday. It was a beautiful sunny day, with temperatures approaching 80 degrees. Had it not been for the impending landfall of Irene, we would have stayed overnight instead of driving back down to White Plains and arriving home well before the full force of the deluge hit.

It’s a good thing we didn’t sojourn upstate. Torrential rains whacked northern communities. One of the towns we drove through on Route 73, Keene, was particularly devastated. “While the damage was widespread, (Essex) County Emergency Services Director Don Jaquish said Keene and Keene Valley were hit the hardest. The Keene fire station was swept away by the floodwaters,” North Country Public Radio reported.

There truly is no escaping the wrath of Mother Nature, should she ever wish to single you out for misery.


Time to Reorder: In case you haven’t noticed by now, I’m an old-fashioned type of guy. I’m not an early technology adopter. To a fault I often resist adapting my ways to new-fangled means.

Which explains why I just turned the page in my At-A-Glance weekly pocket calendar and came across the friendly reminder it’s time to reorder for 2012. My iTouch has an electronic calendar. I just find it more comforting, convenient and calculating to use an old-fashioned paper calendar to keep track of appointments and significant dates.

I’m not alone in this allegiance to past practices. Last month The NY Times ran an article, “A Paper Calendar? It’s 2011,” that lauded the now-seeming eccentricity of non electronic record keeping (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/fashion/calendar-wars-pit-electronics-against-paper.html?scp=3&sq=pamela%20paul&st=cse).

I also walk around with a notepad in my back pocket just in case the muse descends upon me and I’m inspired to write a blog. Though I readily compose at my laptop, a goodly number of blog entries are first written in longhand. This practice presents the challenge of reading my scribble, often aided by a magnifying glass to help deduce and discern my scrawls. So if something you read doesn’t make sense, my defense is that I didn’t transcribe it correctly.

Though recently I’ve taken to keeping an electronic to-do list, I find it not as fulfilling as a paper memorandum. Either way, if a task doesn’t get on one of my lists, fuggetaboutit, it won’t get done.


Roomies: I went to a commuter college, Brooklyn College, so I never had the dorm experience of living with one or two classmates (even in graduate school the “pleasure” escaped me as I lived off-campus in a studio apartment). But I was intrigued nevertheless by an Op-Ed piece in today’s NY Times suggesting the random assignment of college dorm roommates was better than allowing freshmen to choose like-minded individuals they screened through Facebook and other social media interfaces (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/opinion/when-roommates-were-random.html?scp=1&sq=dalton%20conley&st=cse).

A sociologist and dean of social sciences at New York University, Dalton Conley asserts living with someone from a different background and culture is far more developmental than sharing a 10-foot-by-10-foot space for nine months with a clone of your beliefs and biases.

When Dan and Ellie went off to college, their roomies could not have been more different than them.

Though Dan’s best friend also was going to Tufts, they chose to accept the university’s pairings. Dan was into sports, both as a participant and a fan. He was really into The Simpsons. His roommate was Chinese, from a family that ran a restaurant in a nearby town. He’d go home weekends to help out. His physical activity consisted of drawing a bow across a violin. He’d never heard of The Simpsons. Indeed, he never watched TV.

By the end of freshman year, Dan’s roommate still played violin, still went home every weekend, but had become a Simpsons’ convert. Dan, meanwhile, had not adopted any of his mannerisms. Dan resolved to room with best friend, Eric, for the rest of college and beyond.

At Skidmore, Ellie got paired with the daughter of a minister of an independent denomination. She was not a shining disciple of his ministry. She left school before the academic year concluded. From sophomore through senior year, Ellie chose her own roomies.


Ecstasy Above: Two weeks ago Gilda and I returned for a second walk of the High Line, now that the northern part of the elevated urban park on the west side of Manhattan has opened for people gazing and perambulating. The High Line, for those not familiar with it, used to be a railroad spur along the city’s lower industrial corridor running from Gansevoort Street to West 30th Street. Abandoned for many years, it has been transformed into an aerie filled with wild flowers, benches, fountains, and bonhomie heard in the many languages that inhabit New York City.

It is hard not to smile when on the High Line. Just as hard when just thinking about it. Since its opening a year ago, it’s become a quintessential New York experience. In case you missed it, here’s a reflection on it from Sunday’s NY Times Style section: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/fashion/the-high-line-by-day-and-night-nyc.html?scp=2&sq=high%20line&st=cse