I’ve been fortunate to have people to keep me supplied with books: first was my mother and then (and now) is my cousin Palma. A reliable source of books shares your taste and knows your reading idiosyncrasies. I’ve always been able to rely on Palma and my mother for books that I’m likely to enjoy. If I don’t, at least I know we’ll end up having a good conversation about the read.

Over decades, my mother and Palma have had an amazing track record. My bookshelves are populated with dozens of books they’ve recommended. There have been great stand-alone books and others — like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch — that sent me on a year-long exploration of related works (as well as a podcast!).

This is all to say that when Palma recommended Allen Levy’s Theo of Golden, at a time that I was dying for some good fiction after a spring of baseball reads, I jumped right in.

For those who haven’t read the book, it is not hard to summarize. Theo is an 86-year-old man of means who moves to Golden, Georgia. The internet tells me that the fictional town of Golden is inspired by Columbus, Georgia, a place I’ve never been. I pictured it like Asheville, NC – an old town, with a college, that is undergoing a bit of a renaissance. Theo may have money to share, but he is stingy with personal details: he won’t reveal his last name, and he’ll only say that he’ll be in town for about a year to settle some business.

Soon after Theo’s arrival in Golden, he visits The Chalice, a downtown coffee shop. Sarah and I consider ourselves coffee shop aficionados, obsessively visiting them whenever we can.1 This might have been the first clue that this book was going to be manipulative. Besides good coffee and a charming owner, Theo finds 92 pencil portraits hanging on the walls of The Chalice. He learns that the portraits were done by a local artist of occupants of Golden. The artist made them to help the coffee shop and make himself some money.

Theo begins purchasing the portraits, a handful at a time. Once he figures out who a portrait represents, he sends a lovely handwritten letter, inviting the subject to meet him at a downtown fountain so he can gift the sitter his or her portrait. The meetings serve as set pieces that make up much of the book. Levy writes the conversations that occur during these meetings wonderfully. Theo comes off as gracious, interested, and caring. The portrait subjects share details of their lives. Many share personal secrets and troubles, as Theo is one of those people who is just pathologically easy to talk to

Once I figured out this structure, I got a bit irritated. It seems like such an amateurish way to write a book. Gifting portraits allows the author to write portraits of the Golden’s residents.

I am currently making my way through Rachel Cusk’s Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy. I find these books brilliant. Each chapter describes a conversation between the protagonist and an acquaintance. (Calling the interactions conversations is probably a bit of a stretch, but I’m not writing about those books.) Through these conversations, the reader acquires a deep sense of the acquaintance’s essence. No portrait-presenting gimmickry is necessary.

Though it might be amateurish and gimmicky, Theo’s act of giving is so kind, and meeting the people of Golden and hearing their stories is so lovely that you can’t help but be touched. Because the structure is obvious, and the kindness is over-the-top, you know you are being won over by overly sweet treats, but in today’s world, is this so bad? Maybe we need more nice books like this. Or maybe I just need to read more of them. The fact that Theo in Golden sits atop the bestseller list indicates that many people want it.

I did tire of the structure and the constant niceness. More than once I thought, “I can’t believe I’m reading this saccharin drivel”; but because the writing is good, and the people’s stories are interesting, I looked forward to reading every night. I was being manipulated; I knew it. I was a little bit bitter; I was also enjoying it.

Besides his gifts of art and companionship, Theo also practices a bevy of random acts of kindness. At some point, for every character you meet, you wonder, “What will Theo do for this person?” It also had me think, “Should I be acting more like Theo of Golden?” I don’t read many books that have me asking myself that kind of question. Is this a bible for well-meaning 21^st-century atheists?2

Then there is an event that is predictable, necessary to move the plot forward, but taken to excess. I won’t spoil anything here, but I am still bitter about it.

I remember when I first became conscious that all plot points in works of fiction are the author’s decision. I had just read Atonement and was discussing it with a friend, a fiction writer. About one plot point she said, “I wish McEwan had not done that.” It was like scales had fallen from my eyes. “Oh yeah, someone just made this all up and could have made different decisions,” I realized.

This means that I hated what is probably the most consequential plot point in the book. I hated it enough that I almost stopped reading. The event is even worse because it turns out to be meaningless and inconsequential for two of the three people involved.

Yet, this irritating plot point allows for the book’s denouement. The final reveal is so damn satisfying that I was left relieved.

I gave the book a 3/5 on Goodreads. In my scoring, this means that I am glad I read it but will not go back to it. The book feels like the debut it is — the portrait plot device, the single-tone kindness — but it also feels remarkably accomplished. What Substack writer isn't profoundly jealous of someone who can write a debut novel like this that ends up as a bestseller?

What did I do after I finished the book? I put the book out on our stoop, from where it disappeared quickly. Then I called Palma. I give our conversation about the book a 5/5.

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Later the same day, we passed a duet featuring a guitar and a tuba. I asked if a tuba, featured in anything other than a marching band, brass band, or orchestra is always ironic. My companions acted as if they didn’t even hear.

I think of irony as a word whose meaning most people know, though many would be hard-pressed to define. This fact was used for laughs in a great scene from Reality Bites (which, along with The Replacement’s Bastards of Young, is a Generation X-defining work of art).

The nice people at Merriam-Webster define irony as:

a contrast between expectation and reality. It occurs when the literal meaning of words or the actual outcome of a situation is the exact opposite of what you would normally expect.

There are a few types of irony. I overuse verbal irony. This is when you make a statement that is the opposite of what you mean. Right now, I am sitting outside typing. It is swamp-like. If someone asked how I was doing, I’d probably mop my sweaty brow and respond, “a perfect day to sit outside in the sun typing.”

Situational irony was best articulated in Alanis Morissette’s song, Ironic.

A traffic jam when you’re already late
A “No Smoking” sign on your cigarette break
It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife
It’s meeting the man of my dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife

Ok, maybe these are not quite as good as I’d hoped. The internet suggests a fire station burning down or a marriage counselor filing for divorce as a great example of situational irony, where the outcome is the opposite of what you expect.

I think of dramatic irony usually happening when the audience knows something important that a character does not, and the situation is played for laughs, suspense, or meaning. My favorite example is in Lamb to the Slaughter. I first saw this as an Alfred Hitcock Presents episode, but it was actually originally a 1953 Roald Dahl short story. A wife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb. In the end, she offers the investigating detectives a lamb dinner.

None of us is fast enough with comebacks. Who doesn’t wish that Aaron Sorkin could write dialogue for you in advance? So often, hours or days later, you say to yourself, “Ugh, that’s what I should have said.” The term for this is l’esprit de l’escalier, stairway wit. You leave the party at which you were humiliated and, walking down the stairs to the exit, you think of the perfect retort.

A mullet is a strong decision. It is making the statement: I got this extreme haircut because it looks cool. But we all know mullets are not cool. Hence, the irony. The mullet is working to look cool, while the understanding is that it is not.

Tubas are key to marching bands. They add welcome drama and bass to bands and orchestras. They also look ridiculous, in the most charming of ways. If you want to go out into Prospect Park and play your flute, that is nice. If you’re good, people will probably appreciate it. You might even make some money, though less than when people had cash or change in their pockets.

If you ask your tuba-playing friend to join you, you’re being ironic.

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Photo Credit: Hitomi Bremmer

I can’t explain this, and I am not proud of it. I am sensitive to those who say, “The real world is so interesting, why do you waste your time on make-believe?”

Maybe I prefer fiction because it’s where I find the best writing. Maybe it’s because I spend so much time reading medical studies that fiction is an escape. Non-fiction books often disappoint me because they seem like they could just as well have been a New Yorker article.1 Most of my non-fiction consumption comes in the form of podcasts.

The exception to my aversion to non-fiction is baseball books. Not to sound like too much of a hyper-regimented obsessive, but for years, I’ve made it a habit to read a baseball book every spring.2

This spring, for no particular reason, I read three baseball books. Two of the books were fiction, read for two separate book clubs. (Yes, I picked them both, and yes, I remain a member in good standing of both clubs). The third book, a non-fiction epic, was a gift from a former teammate. The books were so different that I thought it would be fun to get my thoughts on paper (or, I guess, in the cloud).

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.; Robert Coover, 1968

This is a book that I respected a whole lot more than I enjoyed. It’s a novel about J. Henry Waugh, a man who creates The Universal Baseball Association. The association is based on a tabletop baseball game, think Strat-O-Matic, but with dozens of layers of complexity. The league is a mind-boggling creation in its 56^th year. The records and history include generations of players, coaches, managers, family members, singers, and politicians. The creation is so impressive that readers have suggested that the abbreviation of the protagonist’s name, JHWh is a stand-in for YHWH, the Hebrew name for God.

The league becomes an all-consuming alternate reality for Henry, both enriching and ruining his life. He deeply loves the Universal Baseball Association, but it is isolating. The writing reminded me of On the Road; I felt out of breath while reading some passages. There are sections in which Henry’s reality and fantasy run in tandem: he is in a bar with a friend, but also imagines the players from his imaginary league there too. It is an impressive work, putting the reader in the mind of someone barely keeping it together. It is also, at times, unpleasant to read. Worse than unpleasant, there are sections I found unreadable.

No spoilers here, except to say that the only comparison I can make for the final section is the denouement of 2001. I honestly don’t know if this should make you want to read it or aggressively avoid it

The book barely makes the cut as a baseball book. The original New York Times review contains the spectacular line suggesting:

…not to read it because you don’t like baseball is like not reading Balzac because you don’t like boarding houses.

Hell, not even Henry liked baseball that much. This is how his creation of the game is described:

And so, finally, he’d found his way back to baseball. Nothing like it really. Not the actual game so much—to tell the truth, real baseball bored him—but rather the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern, power and intelligence. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history, so specific an ethic, and at the same time, strange as it seemed, so much ultimate mystery.

What I admired most about the book was how prescient it felt. Coover saw into the future, our present, of fantasy sports leagues and people creating artificial worlds for themselves online. Like many fantasy football fanatics who spend hours listening to sports radio, Henry’s Universal Baseball Association is a remarkable creation that brings him joy and ruins his life.

My Goodreads rating: 3/5

The Baseball 100; Joe Posnanski, 2021

The Baseball 100 is an amazing accomplishment, coming in at 830 pages. It is an ordered list of the 100 best players in baseball history. It is, of course, filled with detailed statistics and memorable stories. It also gave me, a bit of a baseball history enthusiast, a whole new way of thinking about the effect that pre-1947 segregation had on baseball. It is funny, and joyous, and full of love.

Posnanski’s work is remarkable because the idea of ranking 100 players and writing about them promises a terrible book. You could imagine repetitive chapters about players’ accomplishments and inane arguments about why the author chose to rank Rod Carew #57, Tom Seaver #41, and Jimmy Foxx #23.

In fact, the book is nothing of the sort. Posnanski admits, right off the bat, that the rankings are a bit silly. He does this when he discusses his ranking of Ichiro Suzuki at 100.

There is no doubt that by ranking him 100, I have managed to infuriate two different camps. There are those who see Ichiro’s lack of power…, his bland .355 on-base percentage, and his good-but-not-great WAR and think he has no business being listed among the 100 greatest players ever.

Then there are those who see a guy with 3,000 hits who ran the bases about as well as anyone ever and was also one of the greatest defensive right fielders in baseball history—people who delighted in the wonder that was Ichiro Suzuki-and they ask, “How could there possibly be 99 players better than him?”

The chapters are as varied as the players themselves. Reading the book, you learn about all the quirks of the players, where they excelled, and how they could have been even greater. In the 100, there are at least two dozen stories worthy of Greek tragedies.

The way he deals with the Negro Leagues is both sensitive and eye-opening. He writes forcefully about how segregation cheapened both leagues. He paints pictures of inarguably great but barely known Negro League players using legends, primary press sources, quotations from major league contemporaries, and the statistics pieced together in recent years by Seamheads.

He ranks Oscar Charleston at number five, following Mays, Ruth, Bonds, and Aaron. His discussion gives you a sense of how he deals with the race issue.

I want you to feel the fury of this ranking, feel it down deep. I want you to think, if you are so inclined, “Look, I’m sure he was terrific, but there’s no possible way that Oscar Charleston, who played in a struggling league 100 years ago, could possibly be the fifth greatest player of all time.”

Or I want you to think, “Fifth greatest? That’s ridiculous. He should be No. 1!”

Or I want you to think, “This is pure political correctness. We have almost no stats on Charleston. We have only a handful of quotes about him. You can’t rank someone this high on the list based on a few crusty legends and myths.”

Or I want you to think, “It’s such an infuriating tragedy that we as an entire nation never got to see the greatest player in the history of baseball.”

Or I want you to think, “How is it that I’ve never even heard of this guy?”

My Goodreads rating 5/5

The Natural; Bernard Malamud, 1952

The Natural reminds me of A River Runs Through It. Not because they both end up as films featuring Robert Redford, but because I don’t really understand how either became an American classic. It’s probably unsurprising, therefore, that I like the movie versions more than I like the books, even though, or maybe because, they stray far from the books. (Robert Redford famously had to wait until Norman Maclean was dead before he could adapt A River Runs Through It.)

The plot of The Natural is great, but the book is all over the place. It pokes fun at the tropes of dashed-off baseball novels written for tween boys in the ‘50s and ‘60s. (Yes, I once read some of these books…) Malamud borrows stories from many actual baseball greats. It was fun to read this book after reading The Baseball 100, which helped me identify the biographies being channeled – Babe Ruth, Joe Jackson, Ted Williams, among them.

Roy Hobbs, the protagonist, who becomes a worship-worthy Redford in the 1984 film, is the archetype of a flawed character. He’s a prodigy whose career is derailed by a targeted (at the last minute) assault. I’m programmed to root for him as he tries to fight his way back to the top. But he is a self-absorbed, bitter, greedy, womanizing jerk who, in the end, I didn’t really care if he wins or loses.

One of my favorite baseball novels is Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. This is the book that inspired Field of Dreams.​ Unlike The Natural, it’s kind of a toss-up whether I like the Shoeless Joe or Field of Dreams more. (By the way, I also deeply love the other Kevin Costner movies, Bull Durham and For Love of the Game). I bring up Shoeless Joe because The Natural manages to equal it in the absurd shallowness of the female characters.

My Goodreads rating 3/5

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Holden, why won’t you follow directions?

What I’d like to hear

Pandora, don’t open that

Dorothy, if you keep banging your shoes together, they’ll wear out

Olive, please be nice to the other children

Odysseus, make sure you go straight home

Aureliano, it’s just ice, you’ve seen ice before

Persephone, stop putting things in your mouth.

Ishmael, just tell her your name

Thurman and Reggie, stop fighting. Here’s another straw, you can both stir

Ahab, please leave the little white dog alone

Juliet, get away from that boy

Warren, Johnny, play today, it’s supposed to rain tomorrow

Winston, you’d think you didn’t know that 2 + 2 = 4

Guy, please take better care of your books

Dean, just play here for a while, and then we can get on the road

Oh, Cassie, don’t worry, there is no way that boy will fall off the swing

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Photo Credit: Johnny Cohen

You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights, I mean come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

The psychologist John Bowlby described how children explore the world, periodically returning to the secure base of their parents. Bring a child to a playground and she’ll play a few yards away from you and then come back. She’ll then play further away, and come back. Soon, she’ll have the run of the whole playground.

This is how I discovered New York. First, I got comfortable around my home and my school, Murray Hill and the Upper East Side. Next came the neighborhoods where my friends lived, Yorktown and the Upper West Side. Then I began to explore far afield: Greenwich Village, Soho, Chinatown. Finally, there were hours of wandering bike rides. I sought to cover every street in Manhattan. I didn’t come close, but I tried. On a bike I’d sail through neighborhoods, being in them but not really a part of them. The rides were a way of scouting, of seeing if a neighborhood was a place I’d feel comfortable exploring on foot.

Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.

 Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

Cities are special because of their people and places.

Places

Cities fill me with optimism because they demonstrate what a million hands, working independently, separated by hundreds of years, can build. The beauty of cities is made up of private homes and grand public works, of parks and housing projects, of shops and restaurants, of museums and theaters. Because the hands, the cultures, the raw materials, and the construction eras are diverse, cities are beautiful in wildly different ways. San Franscisco, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, and Rome are all gems, but very different ones, diamonds, sapphires, rubies... Get dropped in any one of them, (or handed one if we’re going to torture the metaphor) and you’d never mistake it for another.

There is probably some analogy to be made between capitalism and the growth of cities. There is an invisible hand that guides people, over years, to build what they want and what they need. The product is not always beautiful, or beautiful everywhere, but it is usually interesting. Kaveh Akbar wrote, “Art is where what we survive survives.” Cities are where we survived and show how we survived.

Cities are alive, evolving over time. The changes are never all good or all bad. The decisions about what to keep and what to let change are often fraught. Venice and Dubrovnik are so perfect that we feel we can’t let them change. We treat them like fragile jewels. We treasure them so deeply that we threaten to turn them into museums rather than real cities.

Chicago and New York are always changing. I love what they are, but I miss the gritty streetscapes of my youth. So many have said what I feel about New York. It is safer, and cleaner, and easier, and richer than it was when I was growing up. It is also more crowded, more corporate, more expensive, and less interesting.

New York, you’re safer and you’re wasting my time
Our records all show you were filthy but fine
But they shuttered your stores when you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored once they’d run out of crime

LCD Soundsystem, New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

There are places I miss that disappeared before I was born: the original Penn Station, the Chicago Stock Exchange.

People

I can’t figure out how to write this without sounding trite. Cities are the people who live in them, who love them, who trust that they can share them. City-dwellers maintain a faith in the people who share their streets. I love the person who says, “Why do I need a yard when there’s a park three blocks away?” Those who do have a yard, and tend to it, do it for their neighbors as much as for themselves.

Walking around Tokyo, a city that makes New York feel like a starter city, I became awestruck by the people. I thought, now these people really know how to live in a city.

Living in a city, there is never a day when you can’t comment on the people you interact with in your comings and goings. Sometimes they’re people you know, sometimes they’re strangers, often they’re that strange in-between breed, the people you don’t know but who you see nearly every day.

Well, they’re the people that you meet
When you’re walking down the street
They’re the people that you meet each day

Sesame Street, The People in Your Neighborhood

I took the subway to school every morning from 1979 through 1985. I’d always enter the first door of the second car of the 6 train at the 33^rd Street Station at 7:15. The same man sat across from me every day. During my senior year of high school, I began to muster the courage to speak to him. In January, he disappeared. I hoped he retired. I feared worse. I still regret not having spoken to him.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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I am hesitant to share essays that are mostly a list of memories. I know that great memoirs can make readers nostalgic for experiences they never had; a feeling sometimes referred to as anemoia. There’s no way I am a good enough writer to achieve this, but when I recall my years on baseball fields, I am certainly nostalgic.

Falling in Love

As an only child, I’d have been better off falling in love with something like running or swimming, something I could have mastered on my own. Maybe baseball was productive because it made me find someone else to pitch to or have a catch with, thus getting me out of my shell of shyness. The kid who loves baseball but doesn’t have a constant playmate does master a couple of skills.

Besides buying me a constant stream of baseballs, my father also bought me a pitchback. It’s a bit shocking to think about how much time I spent throwing a ball at this spring-loaded net. It’s equally shocking to remember the joy I got from the activity. My time with the pitchback did nurture a skill, one that was my most reliable -- from middle school baseball prowess to college baseball dwindling -- control, as in throwing accuracy. If I missed the pitchback, I often had to chase the ball down a hill.

The other skill I mastered was hitting fungos, tossing the ball up with one hand, grabbing the bat with two hands, and then hitting the ball. This skill launched me into the next phase of my baseball career. The spring before my first summer at camp, I joined some friends on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Many of the other kids would be heading to camp with me. They were as good or better than I was at baseball, but on this day, we decided one person would hit fungos to the other kids in the field. My well-honed superpower gained me respect far beyond what was due.

Baseball Friends

Once summer camp began, I was freed from trying to make baseball into a type of solitaire. I landed in a bunk of other baseball-obsessed boys (5 Jons/Johns and 3 Adams), and counselors who either tolerated or nurtured our obsession.

I always think that pop culture disrespects male friendship. “Men only talk when they are distracted by activities”, they say. Not true. But having shared activities certainly laid the foundation for 50 years of friendship. There were two groups of bunks, Braves for the 6–11-year-olds and Warriors for the 12-15-year-olds -- it was a time before such monikers were considered neither offensive nor appropriative. The bunks were arranged around an open lawn. During free time, we had endless catches. At first, we just honed our skills. In later years, we practiced double plays and cut-offs. Decades later, watching my daughter’s ballet classes, I realized how similar learning dance and baseball are. You repeat moves until you have schooled your substantia nigra with the muscle memory.

We also threw as hard as we could, hoping to throw a ball through someone’s webbing or cause someone to cry out in pain.

A few counselors proved to be amazing coaches, role models, and a reminder of how we’d never be pros. Doug had played semi-pro ball. We were in awe when he took infield practice with us one day. His throws from third had no arc and hissed as they crossed the field. His friend, whom I only remember as Brillo (he had curly hair), spent the very last morning of camp teaching me to throw a curveball.

Middle school baseball didn’t only happen at camp. Weekends in Brewster saw a parade of visiting friends, and as adolescent boys left alone are always trouble, we saw to it that we mucked with the purity of our national pastime. There were whiffle ball games in which the plastic ball was replaced by a densely packed aluminum foil sphere coated with masking tape. One weekend, A and I moved a dozen 4X8-foot plywood planks outside to create an outfield wall against which we could craft catches worthy of rebroadcast on This Week in Baseball.

Then there was the shrine. An old chlorine barrel, lined with a black garbage bag, and filled with retired baseball equipment: Gloves, balls, broken bats, and old batting gloves. It was buried with its own tombstone. Sarah and I got married at the Brewster house over a decade after we entombed the equipment. Someone suggested that we exhume the shrine during the wedding. It took an impressive degree of maturity and a reference to the Howard Carter curse to prevent our wedding from devolving into a tomb raid.

Glory Days

High school baseball expanded the clutch of friends who played. My memories of individual at-bats, fielding plays, and practices are impossibly vivid. It makes me understand Springsteen’s Glory Days a little too well. I can picture my three senior home runs perfectly: straight center field at Fieldston, deep right at Dwight-Englewood, and a long fly ball over the fence at Woodmere Academy. I can also remember P’s homer over a wall at a field in Riverside Park, and J’s hit to the warning track at Shea Stadium, where we played a playoff game. And then there are more pedestrian memories, like marveling at our coach’s transcendent knuckleball and timing the interval between planes flying over our Randle Island field on their flight path to Laguardia.

The End

I am pretty sure my best performance on the Haverford College baseball field occurred during infield practice on the first day of fall ball, my freshman year. (I always liked fielding better than hitting, and I always like practice better than games.) From that day forward, I got a little worse at the game and a little less invested in it every day. When I called it quits during the fall season of my junior year, it was already too late.

I still loved baseball. The summer before my “retirement,” I took a physics class at Bryn Mawr College. Every day after class, I would stop at the library, grab that day’s paper, and marvel at the previous day’s exploits of Don Mattingly. The season was a bit of a come down from ’85 and ’86, but he did hit .327 with a .937 OPS. Sarah, who was also taking physics that summer, tolerated me telling her about his accomplishments.

What finally ended my so-called career was that I wasn’t having any fun on the field. Other interests made practice seem like an intrusion, and I didn’t like my teammates. For the previous decade, baseball had meant spending time with my closest friends. When the new guy joined the team in 7^th grade, he was just folded into the group. At college, except for my roommate, my closest friends had nothing to do with baseball. To some extent, I probably disliked my teammates because they weren’t measuring up to my previous ones. I like to think I wasn’t the best version of myself for not appreciating the other players for who they were.

The Present

I still read at least one baseball book every year. I still listen to Cubs’ games most summer nights. I go to a few games at Wrigley every summer. I love having catches, especially with kids or my old teammates.

Oh, and many of my former teammates remain among my closest friends.

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I know that specificity is the soul of narrative, but that is all the details that I will share.

A month later, she had moved from the New York apartment in which I’d grown up to a senior building about half a mile from me in Chicago. Nobody needs to be told that it is difficult to become responsible for the care of an aging and infirm parent, to become a member of a sandwich generation. Many have it far harder than I did.

During the four years she lived near us, she tried to buoy herself by reminding herself of how fortunate she was. She would say she already knew Chicago from her 20 years of visits. And, of course, it was great to live near her grandchildren. But she was saddened by what she had lost: independence, friends, travel.

Her health declined quickly. Cognitive decline meant that the anxiety that had always been a challenge became ever-present. I fielded dozens of pre-dawn calls. She could no longer enjoy reading, or listening to books, or even watching movies, all staples of her adult life. Her physical health also declined, with two orthopedic surgeries and multiple falls.

Even the pleasant times we had together, mostly accustomed companionship, were colored by loss. I was sad that her life had shrunken. I was angry for all that she was missing. To this day, when I see a well-dressed elderly woman in a nice shop, or looking over the produce at the Union Square Greenmarket, or visiting a museum, or browsing at Eataly, I get angry for the time my mother lost.

During a conversation we had before she enrolled in hospice, she asked if she’d ruined our lives by moving to Chicago.

For the seven years since she died, the memories of her during these four difficult years have eclipsed the memories of the fifty years before. This essay is part of my effort to reclaim her.

Some of my dearest memories are from the summers we spent together at our house in Brewster. From my fourth through ninth summer, we would spend the weeks together. My father would join us after work on Friday night and stay until Sunday night or Monday morning, when he’d drive back to New York. My mother and I would circle each other every day, doing our own things for a while, and then reconnecting. Together we gardened, swam, prepared dinners, and ate her ridiculously good cooking.

We would go for walks in the forests and wetlands during the day. At night, our walks were spent looking at fireflies or constellations. We listened to summer thunderstorms as they passed by. We experimented with new fan arrangements to stay cool during heat waves. We’d listen to Janis Joplin and The Beatles. Paul Simon’s 1972 solo debut was on heavy rotation during the weeks because she said my father hated it.

My mother was a writer and a second-wave feminist. Sometime during 1976, my father said something to the extent of, “Would you please stop talking about feminism and just go back to work?” She did. So ended our summer idyll.

My mother was an insatiable and attentive reader. During the summers together, she read to me. First, Dr. Seuss — McElligot’s Pool was our favorite — and Richard Scarry. Next, we covered the entire Roald Dahl oeuvre. We especially loved James and the Giant Peach.

When I belatedly discovered the joy of reading, it became a shared love. I read her old books. First was a copy of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway from 1938 (complete with her marginalia and an inscription from her brother and sister-in-law). Next was her copy of A Moveable Feast; this was our favorite Hemingway. She got me hooked on Robertson Davies’ Cornish Trilogy, and we traded impressions as we read the books simultaneously. In the ‘90s, I got her reading Michael Ondaatje. From then on, we never had a conversation that didn’t end with a discussion of what we were reading.

God, I miss that.

I could always count on my mother to be in my corner and to worry about me. She excelled at worrying, a skill exacerbated by my father’s parenting style. Call it permissive, or just routine for parenting a Gen-Xer, but he believed in an exceedingly light-tough. My curfew was, “Whenever you get home is fine, just let us know where you are.” It was my mother who fielded the calls at 3:00 AM — “Now I am at Jon’s” — and to worry until I got home. Even when I was in no state to be welcomed by a parent, I appreciated her greeting.

There was more than worrying about me that made things hard for her. These aren’t really memories I’ve lost, but things I’d love to be able to talk to her about. By the time she retired — 30 years after returning to work and becoming our family’s primary wage earner — I could not imagine what it must have been like for her to be a “stay-at-home-mom.” That was not the role she was made for. But if she had to work to keep herself sane, the work was also rough. While advertising in the ‘70s and ‘80s wasn’t Mad Men, the sexism that she wrote about in her journals sounded pretty awful.

Family life was also no picnic. Not only did she have to accept my father’s parenting style, but also his family and friends, who made up most of our weekend guests.

But, back to the memories.

I remember tie-dying shirts with her and my cousin.

I remember the salt bagels she brought when she picked me up from school.

I remember riding with her on the 3^rd Avenue bus to my first day of 6^th grade. We sat separately because she was teaching me to ride by myself.

I remember meeting one winter day in 1978. My school and her office had closed early for a blizzard. We went to see the movie, Coma.

I remember her tomatoes and eggs, her fried zucchini flowers, her Christmas pasta, her corn fritters, her cucumber soup, and her chili.

I remember all the times I called her for cooking advice.

I remember her passing on her jewelry to Sarah, again and again and again.

I remember trips she took with Sarah and me, and our kids, after my father could no longer travel. She enjoyed the trips, but worried about my father at home, and grieved his absence.

I have been trying to recapture these best things about my mother.

I am sad that it takes such an effort.

Writing this has helped. Each time I read it, I add a memory.

I will continue to add to this list.

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Libraries are full of memoirs about parents’ mental illnesses and substance use disorders. I’ve read my share of them; some are great reads, but they all have their dark parts. This is my addition to the genre, though it is decidedly brighter than most.

My father was a devoted smoker. He ranged between 2 and 3 packs a day, about 150 pack-years in med-speak. He paid the price for his smoking, while my mother and I mostly got away unaffected. His smoking did shape our lives and is inexorably linked to my memories of him.

When we traveled, adjustments had to be made for his smoking. My father felt he had mastered smoking in the car so that nobody else would smell the smoke. If the driver’s window and the sunroof were cracked, we were told that nobody else would smell the smoke. Knowing he had to smoke, we couldn’t really say that it wasn’t true. The fallacy was underlined by the fact that one of my occasional chores was to clean the inside of the windshield. The rags I used always ended up stained with nicotine.

My mother and I were equally protected when we flew. My father always insisted that we sit in the first row of the smoking section.

Despite these efforts, traveling was not risk-free. In the car we had, the cigarette lighter was broken. To light up, my father would either hold the wheel with his elbows or have my mother reach over to steer.

Going cigarette shopping was, weirdly, a highlight of my youth. He and I would always go together. The ride would take us down a beautiful, winding, rural road to a shop called The International Hayloft. The meaning of this name was, and remains, a mystery to me. I always accompanied him because there was something more than father-son time in it for me. The Hayloft sold baseball cards and scratch-off lottery tickets. The baseball cards always made for a great ride home as I pored over the stats on the back and worked the hard stick of gum. If my scratch ticket was a winner, I’d repay the initial investment and then decide whether I’d buy more baseball cards or more lottery tickets. I quickly learned not to risk my winnings.

Ironically, the most persistent impact of my father’s smoking on the family came from the chronically recurrent attempts to quit. There were often mason jars filled with cigarette butts and water around our apartment. This was a Smokenders’ technique; the appearance (and the smell if opened) was supposed to keep him from falling off the wagon. Mostly, though, we benefited from the hobbies he took up during the periods where the nicotine-starved anxiety and idle hands needed an outlet. There were wine bottles cut in half to be used as vases. There were wreaths made from collected vines. There were cases of homemade jam. Perhaps the best, though, was a rhinestone suit he made me. Starting with plain blue cotton pants and a matching jacket, he began by decorating the back of the jacket with my name and a sunrise. The pants had rhinestones down the legs and around the pockets. I like to think I was the inspiration for the song Rhinestone Cowboy.

I also benefited financially from the attempts to quit. Once, he decided to give me the $6.15 that he was spending weekly on two cartons of cigarettes. (This was clearly pre-1970s inflation.) The rationale was that if he went back to smoking, he would be spending twice as much. He went back to smoking; I kept collecting. When I got to high school, the money I’d saved funded quite a record collection.

How did I not end up a smoker? As far as I can remember, I was never tempted, and then I was repulsed. My father probably helped me, wittingly and unwittingly. He bought me a cigar when I was ten. Maybe every ten-year-old should get a cigar to make them unlikely to smoke. My asthma — OK, maybe I didn’t come away completely unscathed — probably helped keep me away from cigarettes as well. Finally, as an adolescent, listening to a parent’s smoker’s cough was another effective deterrent.

My father finally stopped smoking. His final cigarette preceded a hospitalization for heart failure, during which he spent a week on a ventilator. When he left the hospital, he said, “I don’t smoke anymore.” I was skeptical, but he really didn’t.

Ten years later, when he was dying of small-cell lung cancer, I asked if he had any desire to smoke. I was thinking of my grandfather, who quit smoking in his thirties and said he still dreamed of it in his 70s. He once admitted that he sometimes walked behind smokers for the scent of the smoke.

My father said that after he’d left the hospital years before, he’d lost all temptation. There was not a day that he was not surprised that he no longer smoked.

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I will share a story that he told in 1986. While he was studying in Italy, he ran into his professor while visiting the Uffizi. They met in the Sala delle Maestà, which famously contains three enormous paintings of the Madonna and Child: Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna (1310), Cimabue’s Santa Trinita Madonna (1290-1300), and Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna (1285). If you love this type of art, the experience of standing before these three paintings is similar to being with Monet’s Water Lilies at MOMA or at the Rothko Chapel.

Snyder spoke with his professor for a few minutes and left him to visit the rest of the museum. After finishing his visit, he decided to take one more look at the Ognissanti Madonna. His professor was still there, having moved from the first to the second painting in the room. “That is how you look at art,” Professor Snyder told us. (He has just given us an assignment to go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, choose one painting, and write a 1000-word description.)

Although I never approached Snyder’s knowledge or his professor’s patience, I do appreciate paintings of the Madonna and Child. The appreciation may come from an adapt or perish response: my parents brought me to so many museums that if I hadn’t adapted, I would have died of boredom. Sarah and I were recently at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. I called her over to look at a painting, and she said, with just a hint of exasperation, “You always like these.” So here are two Madonna and Child paintings that live in my phone.

An object of devotion by a forgotten master

The first was the one at Duke. It is from Northern Italy, probably Florence, made by an unnamed master. We can call it medieval, Gothic, early Renaissance, whatever. These are common; most large museums have a room or two filled with them. Their ubiquity and lack of attribution tempt you to ignore them. It is true that many of them are of borderline quality and not particularly interesting. But good ones, like this one, are special.

I have come to see them more as objects than paintings. They were devotional pieces, rather than works to be appreciated for their artistic quality. They are formulaic, but there is much to enjoy within the formula. Mary’s gold halo is an incredible work of craft, tooled by an expert. This carries on to her collar and to Christ’s halo. Here is a link to a full-size image of this painting if you want to nerd out and zoom in.

While the secondary figures are often anonymous, almost cartoonish, it is usually worth spending some time with Mary. In this work, the virgin mother certainly isn’t realistic, but zoomed in, the chin and mouth are remarkably true to life. The nose is inhuman perfection. I can imagine concentrating the adoring eyes during a period of devotion.

To the right, the profiled face is remarkably specific. Sure, the line is too heavy, and the hair is a bit ridiculous, but I feel like I know this woman. Did I see her in the clinic last week? Maybe I bought a coffee from her? She is probably the person who commissioned the work (more likely wife thereof), so she might be the one real person in the painting.

A Bellini masterpiece

I have carried this painting in my phone for the last eight years. For a while, it served as my home screen. This painting has nothing in common with the first work. We know the artist, Giovanni Bellini, and it is a work of art rather than a devotional object. Thought is given to the structure: the central figures positioned before a neutral background; the (bizarre) trees offering balance; the plinth at the bottom that frames the image and allows Giovanni to show off his ability to show the weight of this pre-ambulatory child.

I appreciate Mary’s three layers of robes – red, white, and blue. The white scarf is especially great. But what entrances me is her expression. It is a look that I feel like I’ve seen on adolescent girls. I imagine she is someone Bellini met at a local market and paid a few ducats to get her to sit for him.

At times, I see the expression as that of a too-young mother looking a bit conflicted about her son, a boy she loves but who exhausts her and has stolen her youth. She could be a woman from a Springsteen song, maybe Janey from Spare Parts.

Other times, I see her face as it was probably meant to be, the all-knowing mother of the Christ child, too aware of what the future holds. Just barely holding it together, foreseeing future grief. The expression on the child, which is a whole lot less convincing, should reassure her. He knows what is ahead and is ready to face it bravely, even at eleven months.

I’m thankful for the power of the church in the early centuries of the second millennium. There are thousands of Madonna and Child paintings. Go into just about any museum, and there they are, just waiting to occupy a few minutes (or a few hours).

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As the opiate crisis made clear, there is nothing cool about heroin. Opiates themselves, however, are pretty interesting. We secrete endogenous opioids that bind to the same receptors as the pharmacologic versions. Humans have probably been taking opiates for over 7000 years. The effects of opiates are remarkably diverse. They are pain relievers that cause sedation; they can be used to suppress cough or treat constipation; they induce euphoria but also depress respiration. They are addictive, leading to tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, and continued use despite negative consequences.

I have prescribed innumerable grams of opiates. I’ve written for morphine, fentanyl, hydromorphone, codeine, methadone, hydrocodone, and oxycodone. I have prescribed them to be taken orally, intravenously, subcutaneously, intrathecaly, and intramuscularly.

Personally, I’ve had only one memorable experience with opiates. One night in 1999, I made an amazing dinner: penne with a tomato sauce, heavy cream, and Italian sausage. Around midnight, I woke up with horrible, wave-like abdominal pain. After rolling around in bed for an hour, I woke Sarah, who said, “You look terrible, let’s go to the ER.”1[i]

After writhing around on a gurney for about 15 minutes, I was given 2 mg of IV hydromorphone, Dilaudid. The pain, maybe the worst I had ever experienced, disappeared. The relief was followed by a pleasant warmth and euphoria. I remember thinking, “Huh, now I understand why people use heroin. If I didn’t have a job, I’d be back tomorrow to get more of this stuff.”

That’s a long way of saying that the world is awash in opiates, which are effective for myriad indications and are addictive. If you were a rock star of a certain time, they might have been something you could write about. It probably says something that two notable songs were recorded within a couple of years of each other.

Heroin

The Velvet Underground and Nico is an album awash in drug references. I’m Waiting for the Man is about buying drugs. Run Run Run is about the craziness associated with scoring and using. Heroin is just about the experience of using. After you’ve listened to the album once, you realize that even the first song, Sunday Morning, probably describes the morning after a Saturday night rave.

You can’t imagine where you are headed when Heroin starts with Lou Reed’s beautiful lead and Sterling Morrison’s atmospheric rhythm guitar. The star of the song, though, is Maureen Tucker’s drum. (I am pretty sure it is just one drum.) There is no way not to hear this as a pulse, throbbing away. Sometimes slow and regular, sometimes fibrillating irregularly, and sometimes throttling forward, hammering, tachycardic. You can feel the trip peaking and receding.

I find the lyrics appropriately bleak, hopeless, and depressing. They’re about abandoning a purposeful life, escaping. The second verse probably best summarizes the mood.

I have made big decision
I’m gonna try to nullify my life
‘Cause when the blood begins to flow
When it shoots up the dropper’s neck
When I’m closing in on death
You can’t help me, not you guys
Or all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess I just don’t know
And I guess that I just don’t know

You can’t not mention John Cale’s droning electric viola. I am not sure when this comes in, probably during the third verse. By the 5-minute mark, the beautiful noise takes over. I love songs that pitch melody against noise to beautiful effect. Heroin is one of the best. There are two memorable quotations about the Velvet’s first record. Brian Eno said, “I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!’ Someone else (Jim DeRogatis, maybe) said that every song on the record birthed a genre. I hear shoegazer and peak Sonic Youth in the last two minutes of this song. If you are listening to Heroin from the beginning, you’re in a trance by now. If you walk into the room at this point, you’re likely to scream, “Turn this shit off!”

Sister Morphine

While Heroin is inarguably about illicit drug use, Sister Morphine might live more in my accustomed realm. The song begins:

Here I lie in my hospital bed

Tell me, sister morphine, when are you coming ‘round again

Oh, and I don’t think I can wait that long

Oh, you see that I’m not that strong

Yet, this song is certainly not just about the medicinal, therapeutic uses of opiates. The second stanza suggests an overdose, a doctor without a face, and the need to score. Then there is the fact that, by the end of the song, sister morphine has been joined by cousin cocaine. I sometimes wonder if this is the greatest song ever about drug-seeking behavior, as we refer to it with hushed voices, in the hallway, on rounds.

I am a pushover for any song that builds slowly. Sister Morphine begins with a perfect Keith Richards acoustic guitar. Played loud, the steel strings resonate, and you can hear a hand hit the body of the instrument.

Mick’s voice joins only about 15 seconds later. There are many things that separate a good lead singer, the person you appreciate at some local club, from icons. The likes of Jagger, Bowie, and Jenny Lewis are true performers. Mick is at his best on Sister Morphine, totally inhabiting a character.

For the second verse, Ry Cooder joins the mix on slide guitar. Slide always adds atmosphere; here, it is haunting. Guitar parts weave in and out with one another on the best Stones’ songs. Here, Richards accomplishes the magic with Cooder. Bill Wyman’s bass joins in at the end of this second verse

There’s an instrumental break before the third verse, when the band is completed with the percussion: Charlie Watts on drums and Jack Nitzsche on piano. The piano on this track is so cool. It starts out distorted and then becomes sharper and more recognizable as the song progresses. (Cooder and Nitzsche were on the original Marianne Faithfull version of Sister Morphine.)

For what it’s worth, the third verse is my favorite. Jagger goes all in on the delivery, and the acoustic picks up a little swing.

Honorable Mentions

In order to do my usual nerdy “playlist included”, I’ve got to add a few honorable mentions. There’s Marianne Faithfull’s original version of Sister Morphine. There is Ambulance, a 2022 Wilco song, which is probably more an ode to an opioid antagonist (naloxone/Narcan) than to an opiate. And, finally, Torn and Frayed from Exile on Mainstreet. This one includes the stanza that clearly inspired the 2017 Anupam Jena NEJM study.

Joe’s got a cough, sounds kind of rough

Yeah, and the codeine to fix it

Doctor prescribes drug store supplies

Who’s gonna help him to kick it?

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I’ve got a blister from touching everything I see
The abyss opens up, it steals everything from me

Thus, I’ve decided to retool my list of hates into a list of things I would rate as deserving only one star. I realize this is plagiarizing from John Green’s transcendent Anthropocene Reviewed podcast, but wasn’t he essentially appropriating every website’s rating system? As good as Green’s podcast was, he mostly reviewed things he liked.1 Everybody knows that bad reviews are much more fun to read than good ones.

My previous list of things deserving one star included:

1. Three foods: rabbit, watermelon, and bread pudding. (And no, I wouldn’t like it if I tried your version.)

2. Two things that make the world less interesting: Apple watches and doodle dogs

3. Excuses: Things go wrong all the time. It’s often your fault. Admit your role, and get on with it.

4. Margarita mix: Mix equal parts orange liquor, lime juice, and tequila or mezcal; the result will be better than what comes out of those God-forsaken plastic bottles.

5. The classic toy soldier nutcracker. It’s my list, I can put anything on it.

Today, I add three things to my list.

Auto-Tune

Last week, as I walked to my lane at the pool, You’re So Vain was playing on the PA system. I love that song. I mentioned it in my duets post. Hearing it gave me an early morning smile. Then, without warning, the lifeguard (an undergrad to whom I am indebted for getting up, reporting to work before 7:00 AM, and looking out for my welfare) changed the music to an absolutely generic song replete with an auto-tuned vocal and soulless electronic backing.

I know, I know, I sound like an old guy complaining about the new music, just like every other old guy in history. Guilty. In my defense, I work to discover new music and add to my A-list—a mix of my 932 favorite songs—every year.

My problem with autotune is that it steals the humanity from music. At a time when we should be fighting the creeping advance of our inevitable AI overlords, people are willingly handing their listening over to auto-tune.

We love original human-made art for the unmistakable imprint of the maker’s imperfect hand. It is the wabi-sabi glaze on a hand-made espresso cup, the weirdly beautiful faces in Modigliani portraits, the wonderfully flawed voices of Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer, and Chrissie Hynde.

To my ears, the most transcendent, memorable vocal performance of the last 100 years is Merry Clayton’s backing vocal on Gimme Shelter. What pushes this performance to its five-star peak is the moment her voice breaks, and Mick and Keith can be heard yelping in the background.

Gimme human imperfection over computer-generated flawlessness any day.

Land acknowledgments

I totally understand why land acknowledgments exist. The “Indian Wars” — better referred to as the 19th-century Native American genocide — were whitewashed for at least 150 years. This is reprehensible and needs to be remedied. Fortunately, through some very brave work, our history books are (or were) becoming more accurate.

All that said, land acknowledgements are silly. Our acquisitional, capitalist minds might love to think of owning land; really, the land has been there for 5 billion years, with animals of all sorts transiently passing over it. No piece of land has been permanently occupied by one person, family, tribe, or religion. Usually, the transfer of land from one group to another is, well, unpleasant. This was true before Europeans arrived in the Americas. It was true while Europeans were replacing native Americans. It remains true today as newcomers replace the fading majority.

The best a land acknowledgment can do is acknowledge the group that previously acquired the land in some unseemly way.

Beyond the argument above, land acknowledgements sound to me less like a way of educating and more like a way of virtue signaling, of informing the listener that the speaker knows that those who came here hundreds of years ago, and began the process of creating the country in which we live, did some horrific things.2 A land acknowledgment avoids having to say something like this at the start of, say, a college information session:

“Before I begin telling you wonderful things about Swarthmore College, and why you should want to spend the next four years here, I think it is important to remind ourselves that we owe our privilege to people I view as genocidal maniacs.”3

That might clear the room.

Because I am at a stage of life where everything I have learned has made me less sure of anything, I am also sensitive to the moral vanity inherent in land acknowledgments. Yes, our predecessors did terrible things, and we should understand that. But we can be pretty sure that those who come after us will view us harshly.

“Before I begin telling you wonderful things about Swarthmore College, and why you should want to spend the next four years here, I think it is important to remind you how beautiful this campus once was before those people of the late 20^th and early 21^st century willfully ignored the obvious signs of environmental degradation and collapse.”

New Year’s Eve

I cannot remember the last time I stayed up to watch the ball drop (literally or figuratively). It has been decades. There are so many reasons I forsake this annual tradition.

1. I love to sleep. I am generally a 9:30-5:30 guy. I’ve had my years of all-nighters: adolescent stupidity; college papers and parties; medical school cram sessions; residency call nights. Now, it takes something really special to keep me up to 10 or 11 – usually a few friends over for dinner.

2. I stopped drinking in 2024 — too many calories, PAF, sleep disruption — so alcohol fueled revelry has lost its appeal.

3. Forced happiness. Who needs that? I generally run hyperthymic and can get excited about vaguely pleasant activities, but not about turning the page of a calendar.

4. And then, of course, there is the idea of celebrating the passage of time. Are you kidding me? In whose life is this a reason to celebrate? Sure, you might celebrate getting to the age you can drive, or drink, or vote, or register for the selective service, but really, your youth is passing. You might even celebrate reaching 65, signaling retirement and Medicare, but the milestone just marks the beginning of your dotage, a waystation on the journey to inevitable decline, disability, and death.

I’d rather get a good night’s sleep.

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The Dylan albums that were on repeat were the early ones: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), The Times They Are a-Changin’ (1964), Another Side of Bob Dylan, (1964), Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Blonde on Blonde (1966), and Nashville Skyline (1969). The first concert I ever saw was Dylan at Madison Square Garden, September 30^th, 1978. I was 11.

With that history, the Dylan album that I consider mine, the one I discovered, adopted, and loved, is Infidels. Infidels came out in 1983, when I was 16, and my appetite for music was insatiable. It followed years during which I didn’t listen to much Dylan. I no longer spent much time listening to music with my father, and the trio of Christian albums from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s didn’t do much for me.

And then came Infidels. It was kind of made for me. Classic Bob Dylan, but with the ‘80s sound that was mine. Produced by Mark Knopfler, who, with Dire Straits, had released Making Movies in 1980. I’ve almost certainly listened to Making Movies, straight through, probably more than any other record. Add to Knopfler Mick Taylor, who played with The Rolling Stones on Sticky Fingers and Exile, among my favorite records of all time. Then add the Sly Dunbar/Robbie Shakespeare rhythm section, whom I knew mostly from the Peter Tosh records I owned, and I was hooked.

The album opens with Jokerman, still my favorite on the album. The lyrics are classically Dylan, alone deserving of a Nobel Prize. His voice is strong, not yet the ragged mess it will become. (I write that with love.) He sings with heart and sincerity. The Dunbar/Shakespeare rhythm section is at its best, as are the Mick Taylor fills. The stanza that is a sort of victorious denouement still sends shivers down my spine

It’s a shadowy world, skies are slippery gray
A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet
He’ll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heat
Take the motherless children off the street
And place them at the feet of a harlot

There is a video of Dylan singing Jokerman on Letterman with a punk treatment. I like this version better than the one on the album. It makes me wonder what Infidels would have been like, rerecorded the next year with a different producer and band.

Songs in which the singer, singing in the first person, inhabits a role are among my favorites. Sweetheart Like You is one of the best. The protagonist sits at a bar, weakly propositioning a woman with a string of come-ons that reveal everything about him. I love the throwaway:

By the way, that’s a cute hat
And that smile’s so hard to resist

Then there is:

They say that patriotism is the last refuge

To which a scoundrel clings

Steal a little and they throw you in jail

Steal a lot and they make you king

No comment.

The song ends with a Mick Taylor solo that brings to mind Time Waits for No One or Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.

As a teenager, I thought Neighborhood Bully was a cool song. It is kind of punky and shamelessly pro-Israel, released at a time when that was easier to accept. It feels like We Are the Champions. As a teenager, I was probably just excited that I understood the metaphor and realized the importance of this song coming after the so-called Christian Period.

I have nothing to say about License to Kill except that I like it. Ahh, the joy of Substack and not being an actual rock critic. I guess it’s a bit of an environmental commentary, but it’s also all over the place. To be honest, I’ve never been great at interpreting poetry.

Man of Peace is a rocker that flashes back to the best of the previous three albums, songs like The Grooms Still Waiting at the Altar. The guitar on this one sounds like Dire Straits. You also get the message that it would be hard to resist this “man of peace.”

He’s a great humanitarian, he’s a great philanthropist
He knows just where to touch you, honey, and how you like to be kissed
He’ll put both his arms around you
You can feel the tender touch of the beast
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace

Union Sundown is like Neighborhood Bully, but the message is even easier to understand. It is remarkable how little has changed. So much for music making a difference.

I and I is a blend of reggae rhythm, Dylan lyrics, and Dire Straits orchestration. “I and I” appears frequently in reggae, supposedly referring to the oneness of God and humanity.

My favorite story I’ve heard about I and I is that once, Dylan and Leonard Cohen were discussing their music. Cohen told Dylan he liked I and I and asked him how long it had taken him to write it. Dylan replied, “Oh, about 15 minutes.” Dylan then asked Cohen, “How about Hallelujah? That’s a great song. How long did that take?” Cohen responded, “15 years.”

Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight is a sweet song with which to end an album. Dylan ends a lot of albums with love songs. Today, it does sound a bit too ‘80s. I love the stanza about the Louvre because it reminds me of my favorite stanza from Vision of Johanna where “Infinity goes up on trial.” I also can see Dylan winking as he sings:

But it’s like I’m stuck inside a painting
That’s hanging in the Louvre
My throat starts to tickle, and my nose itches
But I know that I can’t move

The stanza about wishing he’d become a doctor also makes me smile:

I wish that I’d been a doctor
Maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost
Maybe I’d have done some good in the world
‘Stead of burning every bridge I crossed

I still listen to Infidels start to finish, though when I reach for Bob these days, Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde go on first, with one of my mixes (Best of Dylan and Bob Covers) being next.

The politics of Infidels are less appealing to me these days. More likely, politics as expressed in song lyrics is geared to adolescent ears rather than to the middle-aged brain awash with, or paralyzed by, nuance. The production of the record is also not quite right; it’s got a bit too much of that ‘80s polish.

Of course, it was probably that sound, shared by my other favorite albums of that time — True Democracy and Imperial Bedroom from ’82, Speaking in Tongues and Murmur from ’83 — that sucked me in when I first heard Infidels. It was the voice and lyrics of the music I’d been weaned on, combined with the sound I’d grown into.

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I’m certainly not alone in having parents’ words stuck in my head. I am fortunate that most of these words are helpful rather than harmful. I have written here before that my father was an intentional parent. Even though I spent a whole lot more time with my mother than with my father, he grasped the idea of “quality time” way before that was a thing. He plotted time together that gave us time to talk. He also ensured the talks were conversations rather than lectures. Because I always had some time in the spotlight, I never objected to these premeditated tête-à-têtes.

Every day, make things a little bit easier for somebody else.

I know, I know, it is not terribly original. Jackie Robinson’s epitaph says: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” The advice was not even given during a spontaneous conversation; he shared this while I interviewed him for a 4^th-grade assignment. One of the questions that the teacher encouraged us to ask was, “What is your philosophy of life?”

All that said, it is pretty great advice. It works to guide large decisions, like which career path to follow, as well as small ones, like whether you should give up your seat on the EL. It is also crafty advice. At face value, it seems that by following it, you are doing things for other people, but you soon realize how good the little actions make you feel. This makes it pretty good advice to follow. I am sure it was not lost on my father that it was especially useful for a pre-teen, only-child boy who had the potential to become a selfish brat.

NS tells so many jokes that nobody takes him seriously.

Have I said that my father’s parenting was marked by intentionality?

NS was a dear friend of my father’s. Twice, I remember him relating advice he had given NS. One went something like this, disguised, as usual, as a conversation:

BC: What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about my friend NS?

Me: He is really funny.

BC: Exactly. That is what everyone thinks of first. He’s also a brilliant guy, and fewer people know that than should. NS loves to make people laugh, and he needs people to like him. I’ve noticed that NS makes so many jokes in meetings that many people only see him as the guy with a sense of humor, not the thoughtful, insightful person with loads to give. We drove home together last week, and I talked to him about this.

My father did not tell me this as a warning that if I horsed around too much, nobody would take me seriously. This was never a risk for me. He was teaching me that sometimes being a friend means giving advice. He was also letting me know that having these conversations can be dicey and should be done thoughtfully.

The lessons of this story became obvious over time. When friends of mine were going through difficult times, my father often suggested ways to talk to them — when the time was right. Because he was always one step ahead of me, he also prepared me for conversations I didn’t even know I’d be having — like dealing with peer pressure or breaking up with girlfriends.

When it’s time to choose a career, make sure you do something for the money rather than because you love it. I studied what I loved, and life would be easier if I followed the money.

I was absolutely expected to understand that this recommendation was made tongue-in-cheek. My father probably realized that recommending, as the Talking Heads would later sing, “Never for money/Always for love” would seem laughable in our cynical age.

There were other reasons to give the advice the way he did. First, as this essay attests, these words were memorable. Second, although I never really knew want, there was certainly anxiety about money in the house. My parents shielded me from it, but the ‘70s economy and my father’s desire to live the life he wanted led to some angst. I also think he recognized that, given where we lived and where I went to school, I’d be surrounded by a whole lot of wealth. Making this recommendation made it clear that there’d be choices to make.

What I find most interesting about this piece of advice is the irony of it; an irony I’ve only recognized with time. Having the option to do things for love rather than money is a privilege, one that my parents worked hard to provide. I am sure that the anxiety they felt as I headed off to college the year my mother lost her job must have been intense. That anxiety was also completely hidden from me.

Just so you don’t think I grew up with a perfect father constantly doling out memorable wisdom, rest assured, there were also memorable fails. He told me a story about a dog named Lucky and another one about a patient of his who was struggling as a world-champion marbles player. Even at the time, the veracity of these parables was suspect. The lessons were also just a bit too obvious for the cynical New Yorker he was raising.

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Although I’ve grown into a committed fanboy of certain authors, and now recognize the transcendent cool of The White Album, I’ve never attached myself to a magazine writer.

Except for Peter Schjeldahl

I started reading Schjeldahl when he joined The New Yorker as their art critic in 1998. I had emerged from the seven-year cocoon of medical training, we had no kids, and Sarah was doing a second residency. I finally had time to read more than just the cartoons.

I loved Schjeldahl’s writing. I found his willingness to criticize refreshing. He could convince me to reconsider art I found uninteresting. My favorite articles of his concentrate on a single painting. The Immersive Thrill of Matisse’s “The Red Studio” is a great example.

The Schjeldahl article I have read the most, however, is not a review. It is not even about art. It is about life, written by a man facing death. The article, The Art of Dying, is a memoir, a celebration, and a collection of observations that could adorn an entire line of T-shirts.

I am not sure why I am writing about the article when you can (should) just read it.1 Read it again and again—every few years. I guess I am writing about this essay to share, to pay homage, and to wring more meaning out of it.

The article begins with Schjeldahl reflecting on a lung cancer diagnosis. The first paragraphs are downright funny. “I’m an alcoholic twenty-seven years sober. Drink was destroying my life. Tobacco only shortens it, with the best parts over anyway.”

But the humor passes, and beauty begins. This is how he recounts the call from his doctor with the diagnosis:

After the call, I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of the passing late-August land. At mile eighty-one of the New York State Thruway, the gray silhouettes of the Catskills come into view, perfectly framed and proportioned. How many times had I seen and loved the sight? How many more times would I? I thought of Thomas Cole’s paintings, from another angle, of those very old, worn mountains, brooding on something until the extinction of matter.

I have been the voice on the other end of that call dozens of times. I don’t think I have asked a patient what they thought about after they hung up. Why would I? Knowing would not help me care for them. Yet, Schjeldahl makes me want to start asking.2

Much of the article reads like a series of disconnected thoughts. As you read, though, a whole comes into view. I’m tempted to compare the essay to a painting by Seurat, first viewed up close, and then from a distance — but references to art in the presence of Peter Schjeldahl seem presumptuous. In its construction, the article also reminds me of Dear Committee Members, a novel constructed from letters of recommendation.

The observations shared in The Art of Dying stick with me. I have remembered many of them for years.

About his father, “I spent years of my childhood trying to win his approval and years of my adolescence trying to provoke his disapproval, until I had to accept that he didn’t care either way.”

“Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side.”

“The years that you spend as a nobody are painful but golden, because no one bothers to lie to you.”

An observation that he makes about writing meant nothing to me when I first read it. Now that I’ve become a bit addicted to daily writing, I understand:

“Writing consumes writers. No end of ones better than I am have said as much. The passion hurts relationships. I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.”

And then there is a paragraph like this, which explains snobbery to perfection and gives a lesson in art appreciation.

The same goes for snobbery, a necessary stage for the insecure until we acquire taste that admits and reflects the variety of experience. To limber your sensibility, stalk the aesthetic everywhere: cracks in a sidewalk, people’s ways of walking. The aesthetic isn’t bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption. If you can’t put a mental frame around, and relish, the accidental aspect of a street or a person, or really of anything, you will respond to art only sluggishly.

A career in medicine makes you see it in everything. Schjeldahl writes, “I believe in earnestly agreeing to deathbed wishes and then forgetting about them, unless it’s to satisfy those among the living.” We do this with people’s “end-of-life plans” all the time.

He covers how he learned to write criticism: “Educating yourself in public is painful, but the lessons stick.” This applies so perfectly to learning medicine, where even your most private failings involve at least you and your patient.

And then there’s this. Its application to lung cancer screening belongs on Sensible Medicine. Its application to my father belongs here.

A CAT scan… incidentally discovered a spot in my left lung. This later led to hospital visits for scans and tests, including a needle biopsy (ouch), all of them inconclusive. Fed up with the rigmarole, I refused further investigation. Shouldn’t have? Live and learn.

I am thankful for all of Peter Schjeldahl’s work. Before going to an exhibition, I often search for a related Schjeldahl article to help me prepare. I’ve read The Art of Dying more than any article about art, because it helps me prepare for just about everything.

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After one of these get-togethers, a friend posted a picture of us on Instagram with the caption “Old friends are the best friends.”

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these relationships and have considered writing about them, but is there anything novel to say about friendships? Also, not being a real writer and valuing my friends more than my readership, I can’t be terribly specific about any of these relationships. Still, I can stop thinking about how important these relationships are to me and the sheer pleasure they bring me.

For me, an old friend is someone you’ve been with long enough and through so many stages of life that you are sure they’ll be your friend forever. The duration of the relationship means that you’ve had to embrace one of my favorite Jonathan Franzen quotations: “To have friends, you have to realize that nobody is perfect.” This is especially true since if you’ve been friends since middle school, high school, or college, you’ve been friends when neither of you was the best version of yourself. When I see these old friends, there are always stories of something you said or did that can only be acknowledged with a shake of the head.

A striking feature of these friendships is that you knew each other before all the accretions of age were added. These old friends are unimpressed by titles, publications, accomplishments, and earnings. They are also unfazed by divorces, job losses, and ill-considered life choices of people’s kids. Friends know who you are beneath the adornments of age.

This does not mean these friends know us better. We really do change with time.1 But this knowledge is what differentiates the old friend from the person you see at a high school reunion for the first time in 40 years; the old friend knows your core, but also knows who you’ve become, and thus knows you better than anyone else. Elbert Hubbard said, “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”

I have a bit of a pathological need to stay connected to friends. As my own untrained therapist, I attribute this to being an only child and feeling the need to replace siblings with friends. Jess C. Scott famously said that “friends are the family you choose.” There were times when I wondered if there was any point in maintaining these friendships. So much of our time together was spent rehashing old stories. This was fun, but could it really sustain relationships? Happily, these old friendships have evolved wonderfully. Our college crowd now meets yearly to add new adventures. Our conversations are less about times past and more about discussing our current issues. We joke that the weekends have gone from going to listen to music at bars to group therapy sessions for middle-aged men.

During my internship, I was hanging out with a new friend (who I now consider an old friend) who commented that we were each other’s first adult friend. He noted that all previous friends were founded on happenstance — they began because you were classmates, or bunkmates, or roommates, or teammates. I am not sure I buy this differentiation anymore; many of my current friends are the people I work with in the clinic or the ceramics studio. Still, I like what it shows about people. Put a bunch of people together, and most are going to find a soulmate or two who you’ll love for decades. This makes you understand why arranged marriages work.

In the end, I am just thankful that these old friends remain in my life — a group of men and women scattered across the country, with different jobs, families, and interests. Among them are people I can call with specific needs or call, nearly at random, when I just need some pleasant company. Whether we talked a week earlier or it’s been a month or six, the conversation is always easy. As we are all about the same age, we recognize each other’s present challenges. Every conversation exists in a judgment-free zone, where no one is seeking secondary gain.

Oh, and they usually make me laugh, they make me feel good, and I love them.

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Photo Credit: Pete F

Two wonderful things came out of the read for me. The first is an appreciation for the R.E.M. albums that I thought I didn’t love. I am what the book refers to as a murmurer. Thanks to my age, I got obsessed with R.E.M. between their EP Chronic Town and their first album, Murmur. While Murmur remains my favorite album of theirs, I adore everything through Life’s Rich Pageant. After that, they gained a sound that made them infinitely more popular but lost the enigmatic murmuring that I so loved. I bought all the albums through New Adventures in HiFi and appreciated many of the hits. How could you not? The One I Love and Losing My Religion are perfect songs. Getting walked through what led to Document, Green, Out of Time, Automatic for the People, and Monster gifted me what feel like new albums.

The other thing I got from the book is a reminder of two terrific duets, Shiny Happy People and A Campfire Song. Michael Stipe seems like a nice, friendly, generous guy who liked working with others. These songs sent me down a rabbit hole, thinking about other great duets. Like any “best of” list worth its salt, I had to make a bunch of stipulations. Songs on this list had to be people you would not expect to sing together -- no John and Paul, Mick and Keith, or Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood on this list. I also nixed any people who collaborated on a whole record. There are a few obvious ones, hugely popular, totally from my era, that I just don’t like as much as these. Please name yours in the comments.

Shiny Happy People, Michael Stipe and Kate Pierson.

The Name of this Band is R.E.M. is almost worth reading just for the trivia about this song. The band may not hate Shiny Happy People, but it does bother them that this piece of pop perfection is what many people know R.E.M. for. For the entire time R.E.M. was on IRS records, the band refused to record music videos that would be acceptable to MTV. After they moved to Warner Bros., the IRS execs were devastated to see the charming video of this song. To see what they were producing while they were on IRS, take a look at the Fall on Me video. Years later, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, and Peter Buck performed Furry Happy Monsters with the Muppets. A Kate Pierson Muppet stands in for her.

Before the vocals, Shiny Happy People begins with the Peter Buck Guitar that made every critic add “jangly” to their vocabulary and had Michael Stipe bragging that Buck had “the best right hand in Rock and Roll”. Then comes everything I love about a great rock duet. The two singers are clearly identifiable. There is a good backstory about their relationship. They seem to enjoy singing together. While I appreciate Stipe’s vocals, you hear what a talent Pierson is; her voice cuts through other vocals and instruments in such a pleasing way. Really, this song is a trio. Mike Mills has a significant vocal part. I’m gonna say that just makes it better.

A Campfire Song, Natalie Merchant and Michael Stipe

When I was finding my way into the 10,000 Maniacs album In My Tribe during college, I remember hearing Michael Stipe’s voice chime in, trading parts on the bridge. It is not a big part, but it makes the song a subtle environmental protest. I never knew much about their relationship, which is covered in some depth in The Name of This Band. A couple of years later, 10/16/87, I saw 10,000 Maniacs open for R.E.M. at the Philadelphia Spectrum. The concert was terrific, with the lead singers joining each other’s bands for parts of the set.

One More Cup of Coffee, Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris

This song could also be considered a trio since Scarlet Rivera’s violin is like a third voice. It’s a haunting song. The percussion is totally amazing. I think Harris challenges Dylan because he goes all in on the singing. There is another song in his catalogue that he really sings like this. The singers’ voices have nothing in common; there is no real harmonizing, but they sound great together. There are amazing covers of this song – The White Stripes, Robert Palmer – but, for me, none even approach the original.

Girl from the North Country, Bob Dylan and Johnnie Cash

Nashville Skyline is a strange album. The songs are uneven, and Bob barely even sounds like himself. I actually like the version of Girl from the North Country on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan better than this one. That said, the Nashville Skyline version is charming. Dylan and Cash are clearly having a good time, and you can hear their mutual respect and admiration. They duet not just with their voices but with their guitars. I like that Cash’s vocals make Dylan sound like Sinatra. I recently was fed this video on IG, and it made me wish I could have been hanging out with them.

Carpetbaggers Jenny Lewis and Elvis Costello

I think Jenny Lewis can do no wrong. She is uncategorizable, sometimes rock, sometimes country, often just called Americana. I loved Rilo Kiley, and her solo output is even better. Sarah and I saw her perform Rabbit Fur Coat at The Chicago Theater, and the concert ranks with my favorites of all time.

Carpetbaggers reminds me of A Campfire Song; it’s an enjoyable song with great primary vocals that hits another level when the second, outrageously recognizable voice comes in. I am pretty sure that Elvis Costello is doing his best Elvis Costello impression here.

You’re So Vain, Carly Simon and Mick Jagger

This shouldn’t really qualify. It is barely a duet. If this makes the list, then Gimmer Shelter should. Mick’s is a backup singer here, rather than a true partner. But, come on! He starts with understated backing vocals and then becomes more recognizable as the song progresses. By the end, you can’t miss him. It has begun to sound like a Stones song. The story is that the duet was unplanned and only came to be because Jagger happened to be in the studio.

You’re So Vain is 1970s pop/rock perfection. Carly Simon’s voice is perfect. The song is wonderfully harsh.

Well you’re where you should be all the time
And when you’re not, you’re with some underworld spy
Or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend

If the song was written today, it would be called Swiftian, but it proves that Simon was Swiftian 17 years prior to the birth of Taylor. I also like the song because it reminds me of my mother, who loved the song (and had her own crush on Warren Beatty).

Our House, Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell

A deep cut here. Graham Nash wrote this song as an ode to how wonderful life was, however briefly, with Joni Mitchell. The song describes their home together. This version has them just messing around. The sound is awful, but hearing these two amazing voices la-la-la-ing is priceless. Nash does most of the singing, occasionally seeming to willfully drown Joni out. They sound pretty happy here, but just from the vocal give and take, I can imagine her getting fed up with him.

Straight to Hell, Lily Allen and Mick Jones

Ok, this gets in based on the history, the trivia, the quality of the song, rather than the quality of the duet. Like Girl from the North Country, this version is not as good as the original — the song that ends the first side of The Clash’s Combat Rock. I consider Straight to Hell the finale for one of my favorite bands; a band I can’t imagine my adolescence without. It’s a classic late Clash tune: creatively arranged, politically aware, intelligently written.

Lilly Allen’s family was close with Joe Strummer — I have heard she referred to him as Uncle Joe. Here is Allen dueting with Mick Jones on a Strummer classic, seven years after his death. As reimagined, this version is a perfect balance of the original, post-Clash Mick Jones, and vintage aughts Lilly Allen.

The Mess We’re In, PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke

The opening guitar on The Mess We’re In reminds me that there will never be a better instrument than the electric guitar. People may not like this song because, although it is on a Harvey record, Yorke dominates, and people either love or hate the Radiohead frontman. Often, he uses his voice as an instrument. Here he is making his way through lyrics that are clearly intelligible. Harvey’s voice is beautiful, but it is used as an ornament here. The call-and-response part of the song — the only part that Harvey really occupies — is lyrically and musically wonderful.

Whenever I hear this song, I end up putting on OK Computer (which is a better album than In Rainbows, VP!).

I included a playlist for my previous music post, Family, Friends, and Rock & Roll, so I feel like I need to do it here: nine songs, no surprises. Please chime in with your favorites.

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City of Chicago

1. The first job doesn’t actually exist, but it should. I would like to be hired by the City of Chicago as a Retrieval Specialist in the Department of Bicycle Reuse and Recycling. As I imagine it, the city would provide me with a really cool pickup truck — decorated with an insignia that ingeniously combines the Chicago flag and a bicycle1 — and a really powerful bolt cutter. I would drive around looking for abandoned bikes. Once I identified those with flat tires, rusted chains, and missing wheels, I’d clip the lock that held the bike to a rack, a pole, or a fence and throw it in the back of my pick-up.2 Back at the garage, these bikes would be fixed up (certainly as part of a bike repair training program) and given away or sold off for scrap metal.

2. Little boys frequently get obsessed with the vehicles that keep our cities moving.3 I’ve watched kids marvel at fire trucks, garbage trucks, and street drain cleaners for hours. One of my son’s first days of nursery school was made easier when a bevy of firetrucks arrived at a building next to the school. The boys, many of whom were still struggling with separation anxiety, were completely distracted by the trucks. I’ve always been enamored of the trucks that Chicago uses to clean the beaches. It would be a treat to get to do this. I am worried, though, that this job seems to already be under threat by robot replacements.

Art History

1. At the end of my sophomore year of college, I decided between chemistry and art history as a major. A mentor pushed me over the line toward chemistry, arguing that I could study art history for the rest of my life. Still, I took one art history course each semester for the remainder of my college career. On days that I questioned my whole college-medical school-residency-fellowhip-academic physician trajectory, I imagined combining my chemistry and art history training to become an art conservator. Now, at the end of my career, I think about rekindling this dream. However, now, instead of wanting to be a professional, I want to be an underling. I dream about spending days up on scaffolding in damp old Italian churches, cleaning and conserving frescoes.

2. If I can’t spend my days in Italian churches, how about American museums? I’d love to work as a museum docent. I would specialize in tours just of the art that I like with groups of nonjudgmental people, who already know about the art, and therefore would not be disappointed if they didn’t learn much.

Medicine Adjacent

1. Of the whole list, this is the one encore career I am likely to do because I have already started it. If you’re anything like me, when you read a person’s Wikipedia page, you always read the death section.4 I am annoyed that frequently, the description of the circumstances of a person’s death is medically illiterate. These days, I rewrite these whenever I happen upon them. I change “died of a blood clot in the lung” to “died of a pulmonary embolism” or “died of prostate cancer and bone cancer” to “died from metastatic prostate cancer.” In retirement, this will become a full-time job.

2. In a similar vein, I wouldn’t mind being employed by media outlets to proofread health science stories. My job would be to clean up the language so it would not offend me when I listen to otherwise well-reported stories. (Writing this, I don’t think I would succeed at this job, as I’d constantly end up critiquing the health churnalism that we are all fed.)

3. The final medicine adjacent encore career is so difficult, I could never really do it. Richard Lehman was a bit of a hero of mine. He wrote a blog for the BMJ, in which he summarized, critiqued, and contextualized articles recently published in the medical literature. I always looked forward to these and was impressed by his ability to write something intelligent and original on a wide breadth of medicine. I felt like I reached the apex of my career when he commented on one of my articles. His articles always ended with something about his garden. I’ve attempted similar articles a few times over the years. I even substituted a baseball factoid for his garden factoid. I realized that these articles are remarkably difficult to write, and how easy he made it seem. My efforts only increased my respect for Dr. Lehman.

Quirky Old Man Jobs

1. I am too old, uncool, and insufficiently pierced/tattooed to be a modern-day barista. However, I’d love to work making espressos and cappuccinos (nothing more) in a small, relatively unpopular coffee shop. The shop would be similar to the small cafés found in Italian cities and towns. My customers would drink their espresso standing at the counter, before going about their days. I would get to chat with these people, briefly. There would also be a couple of tables for some old-timers to sit and chat at. There would be no outlets, no Wi-Fi, and cell service would be blocked. Somehow, I would limit the shop to about seven customers at any one time.

   Ideally, I’d also have a small display case from which I could sell off some of my old collections. Want a baseball card from the ‘70s, a dinged-up Matchbox car, a Seiko watch from the ‘60s, or a well-loved leather box? This is the coffee shop for you.

2. The last is the hardest, because before I do the job, I need someone to design an app. Everybody makes a big deal about how bad loneliness is for one’s health, but nobody does anything about it. Someone needs to develop a Tinder-like app for people seeking temporary companionship. The app will need a catchy Tinder/Grinder/Hinge type name. It would be a combination of a dating app and a ride-sharing app. If you wanted to offer up your companionship, you’d enter your address and click through a list of the (strictly G-rated) activities you’d be willing to do. Then, when you are free, you click yourself “available,” and your phone pings when someone wants your company. On the other side, a user feeling a little lonely would come up with an activity, enter it into the app, and BINGO, a match would appear.

   I could see making myself available for a whole bunch of things:

   A walk/run/bike/swim on the lakefront

   Being the 4th in a game of mahjong

   Getting a coffee at a nice shop

   Browsing at a bookstore

   Playing catch with a baseball

   Going to a museum

   Helping garden

   Arguing, good-naturedly, about pretty much anything

   Like my list of loves, I fully expect this list to grow. I’ll reshare the post every time I come up with a new encore career. Do let me know if you develop the app!

1

Here are a couple of examples that could be adjusted for the Chicago Bicycle Reuse and Recycling Program.

For the record, I do nurture my own hate list:

1. Three foods: rabbit, watermelon, and bread pudding

2. Apple watches and doodle dogs: because everyone has one they make the world less interesting

3. Excuses: things go wrong all the time, it’s often your fault, admit your role, and get on with it.

4. Margarita mix: mix an orange liquor2 and lime juice with your tequila, mezcal, or sotol, and you get something better than what comes out of those God-forsaken plastic bottles.

5. The classic toy soldier nutcracker: it’s my list, I don’t need a reason.

What I find more interesting than lists of dislikes are lists of what people once loved but have grown to hate. These lists reveal what the list-keeper thinks about and how they have changed over time. Because I spend a lot of time in museums, I’m keenly aware of a few artists that I once adored and now don’t.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

In 11th grade, I was taking a survey-style art history class. One day, while we were waiting to review Greek urns, our teacher accidentally slipped the wrong carousel into the projector.3 What appeared was a series of terribly buxom, mostly naked women. Like any self-respecting, heterosexual, sixteen-year-old boy, I was smitten. I might have suggested that we skip the Greeks that day and learn about Renoir instead.

Of the impressionists, Renoir is the easiest to like and understand. It is all there: the visible brushstrokes, the light sparkling in diverse ways across a single work, the movement of leaves, light, water, and figures, the quotidian subjects. Once you’ve seen a few Renoir paintings, though, they begin to seem formulaic. While other impressionists rewarded my growing familiarity with discoveries, the more I saw of Renoir’s work, the less I liked it. These days, each new Monet, Sisley, Morisot, or (of course) Cézanne I discover presents an opportunity to more deeply understand the artist. A new Renoir just gets me out of the gallery faster.

The end for Pierre-Auguste and me was my latest visit to the Barnes. The wealth of mediocre Renoir painting in that collection did me in. Mary Cassatt famously commented that his works are filled with “enormously fat red women with very small heads.”4 I couldn't stop thinking about this as I walked through the galleries.

I’ve now reached the point that even the masterpieces, Bal du moulin de la galette at Musée d’Orsay, for instance, look cartoonish to me.

Andy Warhol

Sarah and I were recently lucky enough to spend a morning at the Tate Modern. We were awed by the collection of Giacometti sculptures and unaffected by some of the other art. We discussed whether the word art has too broad a definition. We agreed that, considering everything, art can be challenging, enigmatic, labor-intensive, and requires great talent. Our conversation centered on whether art that exists solely to make a point, while making no effort to please (acknowledging the subjectivity of pleasing), should be called something else. Are these pieces more visual essays than art?

This is where Warhol lands for me now. I get the point he was making – believe me, I have taken too many art history classes not to get it. I even find some of his work terrifically pleasing – believe me, if someone gave me a Campbell’s Soup Can to hang in our living room, I would not say no. Mostly, though, I find his work a bore. Sure, what is considered disposable and mass produced is actually worthy of attention, but the aspects of his work that make the point, the reproducibility, the invisibility of the artists, that a Factory created it, also make it less than art for me.

I used to marvel at the thesis and look forward to seeing Warhol pieces. Now the paintings, a must for any 20^th-century collection, just induce a shrug, whether it is a Jagger, or Jackie, or Debbie. Perhaps Marcel Duchamp is a better example, but does anyone still argue that his urinals are art?

Georges Rouault

I once loved Georges Rouault. His art is museum-quality versions of paintings that a friend of my father’s painted, which hung in our apartment and his office. I even almost purchased a small, 2nd-tier (or possibly even 3rd-tier) Rouault at Art Chicago in the late 1990s. (The $2,000-$3,000 price tag scared me off.)

Now I find his work impossibly dull: every-one-exactly-the-same. The only thing that I do find interesting about him is that there exist other artists, who are equally monotonous, whom I adore. Georgio Morandi is the leader of this group. Another deceptively simple still life of jars and bottles painted in muted tones, and I go striding briskly across a gallery, and I am lost – in a good way.

I am not enough of an art historian or intellectual to know why some painters — painters who would likely be categorized as experimentalists by David Galenson, artists whose “innovations develop slowly over a long period of experimentation and refinement” — have staying power with me, while others I find tiresome. Morandi, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline each created similar canvases repeatedly. I’ve stood, transfixed, before their works for years. Rouault, Tahitian Gauguin, or even Mondrian, no thank you.

A list of six things I hate, and three artists I used to love and now don’t. Help me feel better about myself; please add something you used to enjoy but now could do without.5

One night last July, my daughter and I were sitting in the kitchen. She was knocking off crossword puzzles, and I was typing what I hoped would be a deeply profound essay for Sensible Medicine. A firefly arced close to the window and caught her eye. We stepped outside to watch a particularly rich show over the backyard.

About half an hour later, the sky opened with a spectacular midwestern thunderstorm. We opened the front door to watch the rain clatter down, the street turn to a river, and water stream from the eave over our door.

The sound and smell brought me back more than 50 years to a time when my mother and I would sit on the stairs in the middle of our house in Brewster, New York, during equally impressive storms. We sat on the stairs because the storms were a little frightening – we were in a 150-year-old wooden house surrounded by trees – but we were brave enough to open the front door at the bottom of the stairs, so that we could appreciate the entropic wind, rain, and electricity.

This is one of the hundreds of memories that connected me to that house so tightly that years later, its sale haunted my dreams for months.

But that was decades later.

The house defined my childhood more than the apartment that I lived in from the time I was born to the day I left for college. My family purchased the Brewster house when I was three years old. We spent nearly every weekend there, and my mother and I spent entire summers there for years.

Freedom

Before I was old enough to explore New York City, Brewster meant freedom. The days were mine. I’d hang out with friends, sit by the brook that ran across the property, or explore what seemed like endless forests and wetlands. The activities seem charmingly old-fashioned now – endless baseball, catching frogs, snakes, and turtles, and helping my mother in her vegetable garden. Some seem charming but also idiotic – playing chicken with cars in the summer, pelting cars with snowballs in the winter, and filling a wheelbarrow with gypsy moth caterpillars.

Mom’s Cooking

My mother was a fantastic cook; she made countless dishes that I adored and devoured. Some of these I make for myself or my family, savoring memories of her when I fry zucchini flowers, sauté tomatoes and eggs, and assemble “Christmas Pasta.” I can almost hear her telling me to add more salt, more butter. Other dishes are too tied to the era or too damn involved to make. I don’t even attempt these: chilled cucumber soup, ossobuco (with a little spoon to dig out the marrow), and gravlax.

Friends

I went from spending time alone or with my mom to spending weekends with school friends. I had Brewster Friends, but as time passed, those friendships faded -- too little time together and a widening gap between shared experiences.

There were always visitors at the house. Holidays and birthdays were peopled by family. Other weekends hosted a parade of my parents’ friends. My father erected flag poles and flew the flags of the country of origin of the visitors. (There were always chuckles when the Greek and Turkish flags or the Israeli and Iranian flags flew on the same weekend.)

In middle school, I started inviting friends. A weekend with a school friend would reveal the depth and promise of a friendship -- who would be a repeat visitor and friend for life, and who would be the friend destined to drift away with the shuffling of classes the following year. The visitor dictated the activities of the weekend. PT and I set up absurdly dangerous sledding challenges. AG and I sold black walnuts to passing cars. CS and I played 20 hours of a baseball-like game using a Whiffle ball bat and a ball made of wadded-up aluminum foil and masking tape. JW and I flirted pathetically with the daughters of my parents’ visiting friends.

The most memorable weekend activity started one Saturday morning when JM, AG, and I began digging an underground clubhouse. By noon on Sunday, with blistered hands, sore backs, and a 100 square foot hole, four feet deep, it became clear that this project would never be completed. I am sure there is still a scar in the forest floor.

Adolescence and Beyond

In the fall of my sophomore year of high school, my parents announced that I’d be allowed to stay in New York on weekends, alone. I became more of a visitor to than a fixture of the old house. Yet, unlike so many things jettisoned in adolescence, my attachment to the house remained strong. Friends and I still spent weekends there. I visited alone when I needed an escape. I holed up there for a week during college to study for the MCATs.

At some point, I even began calling to ask if I could spend the weekend -- the answer was always yes. Eventually, it became understood that if I were coming, Sarah would be coming too. The pull of the old house was so strong that when we decided to marry, we just assumed the wedding would be there. I don’t remember discussing any other options.

Conflicting Emotions

Visits to the old house with my own small children brought mixed emotions. I loved sharing the place that hosted many of my best moments with them. Seeing my parents with them was a gift. We also had some truly good times together there, hiking, catching frogs, and car washes that ended up as water fights.

Yet there was something painful about the visits. My parents were less up to caring for the house. Once, working on the place was an activity shared by all. Now, its constant needs were a stressor. It was clear that I’d never be using the house myself and never be able to commit the time to its upkeep. After my father died, these feelings were more powerful and more painful. My mother loved the old house perhaps even more than I did. She took pride in managing it on her own. But she acknowledged that we’d have to make a change at some point.

The End

A week before a serious medical event, my mother and I discussed the future of the old house. The following spring, I’d spend a couple of weeks with her there, get things fixed up, and start the process of selling it.

Then everything changed. Over the course of a month, my mother went from living independently in New York, driving to the house most weekends, to living in Chicago, without a car, with me managing her affairs. A 150-year-old house, 1200 miles away, could not be part of those affairs. With the absurdly generous help of a cousin, I moved a smattering of “treasures” to the Midwest, organized an “estate sale” during which 45 years of collected heirlooms were sold off, and sold the place.

Done, right? Hah. For the first time since I was a kid, I started having recurring nightmares. Without the new owners knowing, my family would visit the house for a weekend, fearing we’d be found out.

One night, reading a book to my daughter about a family falling in love with an old house that needed work, I started to cry. She looked at me, confused. This was not a sad book. I played my tears off as tears of happiness, telling her that the book reminded me of our Chicago house.

I was mourning the loss.

Then an email. An old friend had heard from an acquaintance that the house had been sold to a young couple with two young daughters. A few more emails, and I was connected with the family who had purchased the house from the original “as-is” purchaser. Hearing the couple’s excitement and sensing the Old House’s future, the dreams stopped.

Sarah and I have been back once to visit the old house. We walked the area of our wedding vows, and I showed the new owners where my old pets were buried. We finished the visit with a surreptitious visit to the adjacent wetlands. Years earlier, Sarah, my mother, and I had spread my father’s ashes here. This time, we spread my mother’s, which had made the trip in a small backpack I carried.

In a single afternoon, I revisited a treasured location, said a final goodbye to my mother, reunited my parents, and closed a (very long chapter) of my life.

But once you go beyond amassing the necessary, collections are counterproductive. Resources are spent accumulating objects that offer no survival benefit. Even after you have wasted the time, money, and energy acquiring objects, they distract you from more productive endeavors and clutter your home, whether your home is a cave, a childhood bedroom, or a house.

Many reasons have been proposed for why we collect. Mostly, the reasons sound like collectors’ attempts to convince their parents, their partners, or themselves that they are not insane. Let’s call these the six rationalizations.

1. Pleasure

   Collections bring joy to the collector who appreciates the aesthetics of the collected.

2. The Thrill of the Hunt

   Collectors often celebrate the thrill of the hunt and the dopamine hit when an object is found. Of course, little is written about the subsequent remorse. The emptiness usually drives the collector to restart the process, hunting for a variation of the last find.

3. Nostalgia

   Nostalgia affects collectors in two ways. For old collections, nostalgia might encourage people to hold on to their goodies. Older collectors might be driven by nostalgia to collect objects that remind them of their youth. It is well known that objects’ values often peak 40 or so years after their release. This is when the fifty-something, now flush with cash and a midlife crisis, begins collecting the things he became smitten with at thirteen.

4. Education

   The collector acquires knowledge during his quest. I’m kind of good with knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but what he learns is usually useless minutiae.

5. Community

   Collectors often connect with a like-minded community. In today’s world of bowling alone, it's hard to be skeptical about anything that brings people together. I do wonder if the collector’s communities are mostly groups of people fetishizing useless objects to avoid meaningful conversation.1 I am sure there are baseball card collectors, poor and newly single, who occupy their time discussing the condition of a 1969 Topps Tom Seaver card.

6. Preservation

   A benefit of collecting referenced on The Antiques Roadshow is that it helps preserve objects. Museums care for an impossibly small number of pieces while families and the collecting community maintain the rest.

I am writing about this because I am a serial collector. The glitch exists in my genome. I can track the genetics back to my father and maternal grandmother.2 My affliction is, fortunately, relatively benign; it has not yet led to the loss of a home, a family, or a career. It has undoubtedly led me to bore some friends, but it has also brought me some joy, knowledge, and middle-aged quirkiness.

I’ll skip my first collections: match books, bottle caps, coins, stamps, and the labels from bottles of mineral water. They were boring, the collections that you’d expect of a little boy. Let’s just say that they unmasked the pathology (and I still have a half dozen rolls of wheatback pennies.

Wacky Packages were trading cards that parodied consumer products; they were also my first collection associated with any of the six rationalizations. I loved them, and I still regret giving them to a younger kid who lived in my building. I gave them away when I felt like they were too childish for me.

I kind of yearn for them. It is strange to think of the nostalgic power of a collection I no longer have, but this is the truth of Wacky Packages. Just thinking about them gives me some strange longing for my 1970s childhood. The art was amazing, done by some famous cartoonists, and so “of the time” (catachronistic?). The products spoofed were American classics. My mother worked in advertising -- a copywriter and creative director -- and I remember her getting a kick out of the most intelligent ones. (They were not all good; some seemed made to appeal to the 10-year-old boys. My nostalgia for Whacky Packages is so strong that a few years ago, I actually bought a couple of hardcover books that reproduced the cards. (Give me credit for not spending the time, money, and energy to repurchase the collection.)

If you’ve read anything else on this site, you know this was coming. I collected baseball cards from 1972-1980, and I can tick off most of the rationalizations for what I got out of the collection.

Baseball cards certainly gave me pleasure. I remember the excitement of tearing open a pack, rifling through the cards, and chewing that pink piece of cardboard masquerading as gum. I thrilled at the hunt, always hoping to find one of my favorite players. If Springsteen sang, “I learned more from a three-minute record than I ever learned in school”, I can say this for baseball cards. Before the internet, and even before my aunt and uncle bought me The Baseball Encyclopedia, the back of cards was where you accessed player stats. I pored over those.

Although playing baseball and rooting for baseball brought me my childhood community, the cards were less a part of that. I am not sure my collection is doing much for preservation. I can’t imagine there is that great a market for 1970s cards in mediocre condition, but they are still safely boxed up in our basement.

Lastly nostalgia. Like Whacky Packages, nostalgia didn't play a role in my collecting, but it's part of why I keep my cards, even though I don’t need them for this memory. At some point on a Saturday, my father would ask me if I wanted to go with him to The International Haystack. We’d race the 10 miles or so to the store, he tended to drive fast. He would buy a couple of cartons of cigarettes – enough to get him through the week -- and I would get a pack or two of cards.

After baseball cards came, predictably, records. (This post is making me feel so damn ordinary.) Instead of tearing open packs of cards in the back of our Beetle, I would tear open the cellophane packaging of an album on the six train. In the time it took to go from 59^th Street to 33^rd, I’d have devoured the liner notes. Records provided pleasure, education, and community in spades. Preservation? Not so much. I abandoned 4/5 of my collection in 2015. Not being an audiophile and maybe possessing only one copy of the collector’s gene, I made the rational decision that I did not need to lug five wine boxes of records along with me for life.

A quick segue into a collection of pure nostalgia. Growing up, there were always a few Florentine leather boxes around the house. They contained collar stays, safety pins, buttons and whatever else needed keeping. I even had a few of my own – usually passed down after they’d been partially destroyed. As an adult, I bought one or two on trips, mainly to give Sarah and I something to hunt for.

Cleaning out my parents’ apartment, I found a stash of these. This collection activated the gene, and one unfortunate day, I realized that they were pretty easy to come by on eBay. What followed was six months of cobbling together a collection that now contains family heirlooms and more recent purchases. Most are empty, but some contain collar stays, spring bars, baby teeth, and pacifiers.

Spring bars, you ask? I’ve been a watch wearer since high school. At the time, I sported a pretty cool, 4-button digital Casio. I would buy a new watch every few years. These watches were fine, always quartz, always inexpensive, and I never gave them too much thought. I was wearing a Timex Iron Man on December 3, 2015, when I stumbled on this article in the New York Times. There was something about the article and the timing that got me interested. I asked Sarah for a Seiko SKX007 for Christmas – they were selling for about $175. She bought it for me – I think we’d both say that was a mistake – and I tumbled into a rabbit hole.

Really, though, it hasn’t been that bad. They can be relatively inexpensive (though they can also be exorbitantly expensive). They don’t take up much room. They are easy to resell. As Sarah once said, when asked if this collection annoys her, “It could be worse. It could be cars, or younger women.”

I take pleasure in the objects, their mechanisms, aesthetics, and stories. I’ve been occasionally thrilled by the hunt or the bidding, and I’ve experienced my share of buyer's remorse. I’ve learned a ton, though the knowledge is utterly useless and toxically dull to most of my friends. I have found a remarkable community, some online and some actual humans.

I’ve done OK in the world of collecting. I have little remorse; I’ve made it through my journey relatively unscathed. There is one clue that I might be an unreliable narrator here. I asked my daughter to guess which collections I’d written about. Among her guesses were t-shirts from Instagram, baseball caps, and matchbox cars. I might be worse off than I care to admit.