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***

I like words. I like putting them together to tell jokes, win an argument, write something that gets under people’s skin.

I also like the punctuation that’s required to make the words make sense. That makes them sound good as you hear them. I also like choosing punctuation that looks good on the page.

Punctuation can be tricky. I’m pretty good at using it because my mother was strict about it. (She wasn’t a fan of sentence fragments, even though her beloved New Yorker permitted them.) My kids inherited it and honed their skills in middle school.

Most are easy.

Periods. Simple. Don’t overuse them. Too many sentence fragments spoil the effect.

Commas, a little trickier. They’re good for lists (person, woman, man, camera, TV), but can be under- and overused, creating run-on sentences or herky-jerky ones better split up. As for the Oxford comma, I’m moving that way, although I don’t like it visually.

Colons: use them for setting up lists, like a to-do: change closet lightbulb, feed Lila, buy pretzel sticks. Also, as a punchy lead-up to the end of a sentence when a period is too much.

Semicolons are trickier; they’re good for breaking up longer lists; useful for a pause longer than a comma can manage, but shorter than a period; picking the right place is hard, which is why they’re called semi.

Em dash — not really sure what they’re for, but Claude likes them a lot. I’m still trying to figure them out.

Question marks? Really?

Quotation marks, I convey to my readers, are punctuation I’m increasingly avoiding because they don’t add clarity and slow down the story.

Parentheses are useful for asides that don’t advance the story (I got into an argument with my freshman English professor about this very subject.)

Ellipses…just finish the sentence. Did you fall asleep?

Which gets me to what I really want to talk about!

This!

The exclamation point.

POW! BAM! ARGHH! are okay because they’re pictures, not type.

Also okay: Fire! Help! Run!

But that’s about it.

The inventor of the exclamation point was probably a happy person, or at least a very emotional one. They convey excitement of all kinds — anticipation, fear, anger, elation. They even look excited on the page.

But using too many makes the writer opaque and the reader unsatisfied. What do people really mean when they write “can’t wait to see you!” or “work has been stressful!” or “the baby’s finally sleeping!”

Was the inventor’s intention to have a line and a dot convey whole words, sentences and even paragraphs? Any message — sending regrets for a dinner invitation, explaining a wardrobe choice, an apology — deserves at least a tiny bit of thought and words that express them clearly.

Don’t tell me: Dinner was fantastic!

Tell me: I hope you liked the flowers. They’re from our garden. We never know what to bring you because bringing a random bottle of wine is lame. The steak, of course, was “world famous” (how do you get that salty-buttery crust?); the white corn deserving of its own category of “new vegetable”; and the tomatoes, August-perfect. Thank you for having us, and including us with your lovely, but admittedly, difficult mother.

Dinner was fantastic.

Or: The house is on fire!

Instead: The house was in our family for three generations. It hosted seven weddings and countless pool parties. The flames started in the attic, where dozens of children had camped out over the years. It may have been an old wire or a spark from the barbecue (we’re still waiting for the report from the fire department). The fire roared and, faster than 911 could be dialed, it swallowed the house. No one was hurt, except the ones who remembered the place and the kids who would never get to sleep in the attic.

The house is on fire.

The overuse of exclamation points may also be a symptom of our shrinking attention span: five-second videos, texting, AI shortcuts. (Even smart kids at Harvard don’t have the patience to read Ulysses.) People use them to get out of writing the extra words that might explain what really happened. And, just as often, to hide what they’re feeling.

“You’ll love this frittata recipe!”

Translation: “I’m kind of lonely since Marcel moved out, but I’m making the best of it by trying out new things in the kitchen before I watch TV alone.”

“Can’t wait for tennis Thursday!”

Translation: “I’ve avoided playing with you all summer, but I’m too guilty to say no for the eleventh time.”

I never learned how to touch-type (thank you, Waldorf School), but I’m pretty fast with two fingers. Still, I have to hunt for the exclamation point on my keyboard because I use it so rarely.

Maybe it’s because I’m old and stuck in my ways. But I love Claude, and my back-up camera, and my new titanium skis.

Will I ever give in?

No!

It’s loud, it’s empty, and it hides the truth.

No.

A few weeks ago I mentioned my friend Larry, who complained that my subjects were too depressing. He and his wife, Tracy, visited this past week, and were here when our two young granddaughters stopped by. They loved Larry, as most people do. And vice versa. (He had to front the 12 bucks I lost to them in a bet because I didn’t have any cash.)

I took his admonition seriously and wrote today’s piece. I hope you enjoy it.

***

I have three grandchildren. Two belong to my older kid, a daughter, and one to her younger brother. All three are girls.

They have names, but I refer to them as Shmucklich 1, 2 and 3.

They call me Grumpy.

My sister suggested it when Shmucklich 1 was born. Actually, her idea was Grumps, but as the kids started to talk they changed it to Grumpy, either because it sounded slightly less mean, or because it was more fun to say.

Why either name? Because I can be that way. Towards people who don’t respond promptly to texts, who cheat at weekend tennis, who don’t like dogs, especially those who don’t like — no, love — Lila. Add to the list anyone who drives a Bentley SUV, who talks on speaker phone around other people, who uses too many exclamation points when they write. Plus, anything Trump.

Shmucklich 1 is the oldest. She’ll be eight in November, two days after my birthday. We share more than a zodiac sign.

My daughter didn’t hog her firstborn; in fact, she was very generous with her. When she was an infant, I often took over for the nanny. I’d put her in her crib for her nap; change her diapers (even the poopy ones, which I rarely did for my own children); push her in her stroller on a warm, winter day; take her to meet her mother for lunch during the workweek.

We also napped together. On floors, sofas and, my favorite, the hammock at our house. Before she could talk, I wondered what her voice would sound like. Once she did, I don’t remember if it was what I imagined, but it was exactly her voice.

When she was in pre-school and nursery, I’d pick her up right at noon and we’d walk around the corner to a famous, downtown French bistro. She always had the mac and cheese, sans green bits on top, and a side of extra-crunchy fries. For dessert, we walked two blocks to a bakery that had reinvented the Ring Ding. They were expensive and not very good, but she always got the rainbow one.

Once, when she went to the French place without me, the Maître d’ asked her who her friends were.

She learned to swim in my pool. I’d stand in the shallow end a few feet from her and tell her she could make it all the way. She’d adjust her goggles, take a few deep breaths, make a false start or two, all before asking, Grumpy, are you steady?

I wrote a book about her called “Which Side of the Bed Did You Wake Up On?” because I wanted her to know that waking up on the laughing-singing-excited-for- vacation side is always the right side. For a while, she was anxious about all sorts of things, which affected which side she got up on. She’s mostly outgrown whatever bothered her, and the book, too.

During most walks through downtown, she’d end up on my shoulders. At first, I could just hoist her up from the sidewalk and she held onto my ears for safety. Soon, she had to start out higher, on a curb, then a bench, for me to be able to get her all the way up there. We never passed a famous musician, like we did when her mother was on my shoulders, and I said, she’s your biggest fan, and he replied, well, she’s not very big. Shmucklich 1 is too big now for anyone’s shoulders.

On occasion when I was feeling needy, I said to her: I fear we’re growing apart. She told me she loved me from here to Venus, around Mars twice, to the moon a million times…

We had a good run together, just us. Three years later, Shmucklich 2 showed up. I predicted early on she’d go to jail. She wasn’t as good a nap companion, but was a much better snuggler. She’d ball herself up and burrow into me like a baby kangaroo looking for the pouch.

She had what I thought was an extra-hard, round head. It fit perfectly in my hand. I started calling her coconut head, and bought her a real one for her birthday. She kept it on the kitchen counter and played with it while she ate dinner. No one thought to break it open, so it got mushy and had to be thrown away.

She wasn’t a fan of the French bistro (or any restaurant, really), or of my shoulders, but she was a hand-holder. She let go, however, for ice cream at the fancy store, not the truck parked in front, and insisted on two scoops and two toppings, which she never had to negotiate for.

She changed my name to No-rules Grumpy. The idea of a sleepover was met with her awkward chant, No-rules Grumpy! No-rules Grumpy! All the cliches applied: dessert for lunch, TV until ten, all-day pajamas, etc. They applied to me, too — no morning tennis.

Because she loves Lila more than any breathing creature, except maybe her mother, I also told her that I feared we were growing apart. She rolled her eyes.

Now almost five and eight, at different schools, Shmucklich 1 and 2 have become best friends. I want to be included. I make trivia quizzes for them with Claude — geography and flags for 1, math and animal species for 2.

I also create money lines for them, usually around swimming, but sometimes around blinking or pillow-throwing. Settling up gets complicated. Five bucks becomes three because there was no dive to start the four-lap race; only one jewel was retrieved in the deep end instead of two; a ten dollar bill has to be split into payments of four dollars and three, which means, as 2 tells me, there’s three bucks left over. Can their mother be trusted as the bank?

And I let them in on bad words. They said they’re not allowed to say stupid, so I tell them about the time I was somewhere around their ages. I was getting off the school bus in front of my house and I turned to answer a kid yelling something at me: you’re stupid, I shouted back. My mother, waiting on the curb, jumped in: it’s stew-pid, she said.

1 and 2 thought that was hilarious, and now, when they say it correctly, their parents allow it. (I also introduced them to friggin’, as in you’re a friggin’ genius, but that’s not going over as well in their house.)

I wrote a second book for the two of them called “The Flower and The Stone.” You barely need to know them to know which is which. They live in a garden together where the flower protects the stone, even though the stone can be hard and difficult. Despite their differences, they become best friends, like sisters, except they’re not. I wrote it for 1 to read to 2. She did once or twice, but they had better things to do.

They prefer my gifts of betting on water sports and peeing in the outdoor shower.

Shmucklich 3 is my son’s first. She’s not a year old yet, and I don’t know her well because they don’t live here. My wife and I go to see her as often as we can, but it’s not the same as living nearby. She’s a happy baby, with a mop of curly hair and cartoon-sized cheeks. People say she looks like a Cabbage Patch doll.

She’s a good eater. Peaches, hamburger, cucumber, every color food, just not squash. I was with her recently at her mother’s parents’ house. It was lunchtime and I took over. She wasn’t interested in the mush in front of her, so I switched to dessert — a chocolate chip cookie. I was reprimanded by the other all-rules adults and forced out of my job.

When she was done not-eating, I picked her up out of her high chair. She squirmed for a minute, looking for her mother, but quickly focused on my glasses. She grabbed at them, but I kept pulling my head back out of reach. She quit the game, and stared at me. We both waited. She smiled, wide, with exactly my son’s mouth, her fingers tightening on my thumb.

One day soon, she’ll call me Grumpy. I hope she doesn’t know why.

I’m asking the owner of the fish store if he has more striped bass. A man steps from behind me and reads out his order — three pounds of this, six dozen of that. When I say, “excuse me, I’m talking,” he pretends I’m not even there.

We’ve lived on eastern Long Island, mainly in the summers when our kids were growing up, for almost forty years. We sold our city apartment and moved here full-time during COVID. We aren’t locals exactly, but increasingly we agree with them about the summer people.

We started as them. A gardener just for our perennial garden. The occasional chef. A tennis club where only white attire was permitted. But — the woman at the farmstand saying she owns an NFL team; the people who cheat at weekend tennis; the guy in the fish store.

Let’s move to Maine, I say.

Our son played tennis at college there so, after never having been to the state before, we found ourselves visiting several weekends in the fall and spring to watch him play. We stayed at a movie-ready inn designed to feel slightly rundown. We especially loved the basement tavern.

We’d meet our son there along with a few of his friends and watch hockey or basketball on the small TV above the bar. We ate fried belly clams and cod sandwiches.

Everything about Maine seems to be the opposite of the place where we’re living. You don’t notice the cars, the footwear — men’s or women’s — or the price of French toast because there’s nothing about them that makes you look or think twice. They’re just ordinary things you come across in a day.

It isn’t just the guy in the fish store. I want to live on the water, which I can’t afford on Long Island. I’d always preferred the water — the ocean, not a lake — to the woods. It goes back to summer camp. The woods remind me of bug bites and camping and wet sleeping bags and the burnt smell of wood shop and bologna sandwiches and itchy wool blankets and unsuccessful crushes.

The ocean smells like possibility, and not a single tree.

Where would we live?

Mid-coast, a little north of Portland. On a finger of land, facing east, with a rocky shoreline, but no cliffs. Some trees for sure, set back so they don’t obstruct the view. Not the ocean, but a wide tributary that empties into the sea a few miles down.

The house would be fine. The one we have now isn’t fancy — not old or new — so the next one doesn’t have to check many boxes. A few bedrooms upstairs, two that share a bath. Large windows in back that face the water. But, most important, a screen porch. If the ceiling wasn’t already “porch blue,” we’d paint it.

I’d start getting up early — the sunrise would be blinding and optimistic some days, dark with red stripes others — a bad day to be on the water.

I would write. About a college classmate who seemed so ordinary fifty years earlier, but who became very rich. About my mother, whom I adore while she still infuriates me. I’d write about sailing, and how much I used to love it. I’d nap. I might even think about getting a boat.

My wife and I both love tennis and we’d find a small place with four courts and no clubhouse. I’d invite players from our son’s old college to indulge me. My wife would play with a group of women she’d meet through the “tomato lady” down the road.

Most would be year-rounders, with a few summer people from Boston mixed in. The server would always announce the score, and none of them would cheat.

They’d all have gray hair, except for one who would dye hers blondish — one of the Boston women. My wife would still resist becoming gray but, ever-so-slightly, she would start to think about it.

She would enjoy the tennis, and then the company. She’d miss seeing her grandkids as much as she used to. She’d miss a few close friends, although not as many as she would’ve thought. And she’d miss going to the theater in the city whenever she felt like it.

Also, she’d miss Mah Jongg.

Bam, crak, dot.

She plays religiously with a group of friends on Monday nights. They rotate houses and, even though I sit outside and read while they play, I enjoy the group getting together at our house.

My wife is always the most gracious host — not just pistachios and cherries, but sometimes sushi, hummus and pita chips, guacamole. Lots of chatter and laughing, and then, someone excitedly: two bam, five crak, eight dot.

No one in her tennis group would be Jewish. None would have a mother who taught her daughter how to play. None would have a set passed down from her bubby.

Still, she would ask the group if they’d like to learn.

Bam, crak, dot.

She’d invite them all over on a Wednesday evening after tennis (Monday wouldn’t work for too many of them). She’d get out her two square card tables, cover them with regulation mats and put out two sets of tiles, one that was her mother’s and another she found at a yard sale.

She’d teach them the basics: bams, craks and dots, jokers, the Charleston, when you can call a tile and when you can’t. Like everyone first learning, they’d struggle with the terminology and the strategy, but soon another chord would take hold.

Bam, crak, dot.

Gray-haired lady with the red reading glasses: My son is moving to California for his residency in orthopedics. His girlfriend decided to stay here for a year to let him get settled.

Gray-haired lady with the almost-Birkenstocks: Our house is too big and, being an engineer, my husband doesn’t like the work it takes to keep it pristine. We’re thinking of moving.

Gray-haired lady who wears all-white playing tennis: My string beans are gorgeous this year. The fencing is keeping the deer out.

Bam, crak, dot.

Blondish lady with a faint Boston accent: I think I had a breakthrough in my painting class. I’m not good at capturing people, feet are especially hard. But, for some reason, I’m good with animals. The entire class really liked my frog.

Gray-haired lady who brought dahlias from her garden: I moved here from Cincinnati in 2004, after college. It was suffocating there.

Gray-haired lady with the clamshell necklace: Do you miss Long Island?

Bam, crak, dot.

My wife, still brown-haired: I miss some things, but not seeing my neighbors’ roofs or the sound of lawn mowers. I miss picking my grandkids up at camp, but they’re at sleepaway now, so I’m not needed for that anymore. I’m closer to my son and his family in Boston, which I like. I didn’t realize how much I missed him.

Bam, crak, dot.

I’d listen from the porch, Lila with her head on my outstretched legs on the sofa. The sun, setting on the opposite shore, would make the water gray. No roofs.

What time is tennis tomorrow?

The school bus picks me up at one house in the morning and drops me off at a different one in the afternoon.

We’re moving, and the school day falls right in between leaving the old house and entering the new one. We’re leaving a three-bedroom ranch in the middle of a perfectly straight street with matching ones that run perpendicular. There are sidewalks, street lights and houses with stubby, concrete driveways in front of one-car garages.

We’re moving to a house that’s just a few miles away, but an unimaginable distance in every other way.

Our street has a graceful curve because the tiny village of 90 families wasn’t built on a grid. There are no sidewalks, lights or even phone wires. Each house is different, at least the ones you can see from the road.

The streets in and out have wooden gates. They stay open, but still let people know what they think of them.

Our new house is a white shingled “summer cottage” built in the 1920s. The driveway is circular, covered in gravel with a Belgian block apron. It curves past a two-car garage. There are four floors, including an attic with eaves and a basement with coal bins.

The two middle floors are where we’ll live. There are two staircases. One from the front door, probably used by guests and grownups. The other is a dark spiral thing off the kitchen for the kids, the help and anyone else the front stairs aren’t for.

The house also has two front doors: a heavy one with a giant brass knocker, and the mudroom door that’s near the garage and lets you into the kitchen. I imagine they had roughly the same restrictions as the staircases.

Upstairs are six bedrooms. My brother’s and my favorite is actually two small rooms at the top of the back staircase. They share a bathroom and have uneven eaves that make sitting by the windows feel safe and quiet. Before we moved in, the help lived there.

In the large paneled dining room there’s a doorbell on the floor. Every other room has one as well, but only the one in the dining room is on the floor. Ring any one of them and a box on a wall in the kitchen displays a flag letting the help know which room they’re needed in. The one in the dining room is rung with a foot.

Out back, set on a large lawn, is a rose garden planted as a maze. Except for the thorns, it’s a great place for hide and seek with my brother. There are also apple trees, and a giant copper beech. It’s taller by far than any of the neighbors’ trees, and because the limbs at the bottom are at the height of a kid’s knees, it’s the best climbing tree imaginable.

But the prize of the house isn’t the mystery of the rooms or the majesty of the outside. It’s the roof. The roof is shingled, like any roof made of asphalt or wood, but ours is green. Green because the shingles are wrapped in copper. Each and every one of them. Bright green, oxidized copper.

My father has a sign made and hangs it from the lamppost at the foot of the driveway.

Coppertop.

Improvements are made. Central air conditioning. A kitchen with two stoves. Bay windows in every room across the back of the house. A terrace laid with worn bricks salvaged from a Brooklyn street. A pool. A greenhouse. The two maids’ rooms turned into one large bedroom for our new sister, with the eaves intact. The bell system replaced with an intercom.

My mother decorates the house in French antiques because she hates mid-century modern. She says she was one of Pierre Deux’s first customers on Bleecker Street. The furniture is covered in chintz, and even the carpeting is floral, wool.

Home is Coppertop.

November 22, 1963: my entire class is at our house for my eighth birthday. My mother plays the guitar and sings happy birthday. My father isn’t here. Not here to help blow out candles. Not here to throw out wrapping paper. Not here to comfort my mother when the parents start screaming along with the kids who are still playing because Kennedy has been shot.

A winter weekday: my brother and I watching our thirty-minute allotment of TV. Batman. The front door opens then slams. The brass knocker clangs one time. Only one person uses this door. My father doesn’t come into the room where we’re watching. He doesn’t come in and say “hey boys, how was your day?” or “hey kids, what are you watching?” or just “hey!” We don’t see him even after our thirty minutes are done, or after we’ve brushed our teeth, or after we’ve turned out the light. He’s waiting for us to apologize to him, for what we’re not sure. He’s gone when we wake up in the morning.

A summer Sunday: my mother in the kitchen and the rest of us diving for coins in the pool. I’ll cook the lamb chops, I say. I light the grill and put on the food. Go back in the water and play some more. The charred lamb chops don’t wait. We all sit down in the dining room. My mother, knowing the torrent that’s coming and trying to change its course, pronounces the burnt food delicious. My father throws his napkin on the table, toppling the chintz-covered chair on his way out.

The basement: two tables, ping pong and pool. The green felt is covered with hundreds of two-by-two-inch 35mm slides. My father is an oral surgeon and they chronicle his research developing the dental implant. Each slide shows a bloody mouth. To my brother and me, they’re not so much gross as inconvenient. Today, we want to play pool instead of ping pong, so we carefully move the dozens of stacks of slides from one table to the other. We chalk our sticks and play. Our housekeeper from South Carolina yells down the stairs. Get up here, says Belle, it’s fried chicken. The next time we see our father, he doesn’t say hi or anything. From so much practice, we know. The slides are on the wrong table.

September, 1982: My wedding in our backyard under a giant oak in front of the black iron gates to the pool. A hundred or so guests are there, happy enough for us to give up a Labor Day weekend, but nervous about the weather. A friend from college gives a toast, asking why I’d had a poster of Gandhi in my dorm room. Because, I answered, he’s thin, he’s tan, and he only wears one-hundred percent cotton.

After dinner, my friends throw me into the pool with my tuxedo on and wedding money in my pockets. I don’t remember my father being there, except when he argued with the rabbi about whether our neighbor’s tallis hanging over a branch of an oak tree counted as a chuppah.

2013: my sister, her husband and their twin teenage girls move in when they sell their house because of the boy next door. Everything is sad: the furniture, the pool, the greenhouse, the window frames, the barbecue, the bricks salvaged from Brooklyn. Stopping by one afternoon, they are all sitting at the kitchen table in front of a smudged bay window — silent, sad.

The giant Copper Beech, with the knee-high branches perfect for climbing, is gone. The bright green roof, made of thousands of shingles each wrapped in copper, is also gone. Years, money, other battles to fight, have worn it away. A section at a time, the hand-wrapped roof replaced by sheets of asphalt. And, in a last grasp, a coat of green paint.

My father doesn’t ignore the twins for getting tattoos, or topple over chairs because dinner is overcooked. Even if my mother needs him, he isn’t here.

They are in the Cayman Islands the spring after my sister moved in. My father is snorkeling, one of the few joys he has left. He has dementia from the anesthesia during an operation on his ankle. No more than a hundred yards from the beach where my mother and sister sit, cooling their feet in the waveless sea, he drowns.

2023: The village still has 90 families and the unwelcoming gates, but everything else has changed. The Jewish families are different now, mostly Orthodox and Russian. Many of the “summer cottages” are gone, replaced by giant modern places invented for the suburbs.

My mother sells the house and the new owners tear it down. A big, white house, with lots of once-pretty rooms — with eaves, French furniture, bay windows. With two staircases and two front doors. A pool and an oak tree that hosted a wedding. A green, copper roof.

A big house with lots of places to explore. Hide. Be scared in.

To just fall apart.

Maybe it wasn’t any different from the small house where the school bus picked me up that morning. Just more room for damage.

For years, countless friends have asked me for the same kind of help.

“Will you talk to my kid,” they say, “about advertising?”

I spent all my working life in it. I started at the last hair on the long, wild tail of the Mad Men era.

The creative director at my first agency was an Amherst man — how men of that time from elite colleges were referred to. There were many like him in advertising back then because it was a good job — like a lawyer, banker, dentist, accountant — just more fun.

He took me and a couple of other young copywriters to lunch one day. We ate at a dark restaurant with white tablecloths, men in ties and not one woman. We sat down at eleven-forty-five. He ordered dry vodka martinis for the table. Years of lunches like this must have perfected his peripheral vision: with his nose halfway down the glass, he circled his finger in the air, signaling the waiter passing by, that we needed another round. Proof of his special skill: no one ever had a meeting with him after lunch.

He was a legitimate Mad Man, albeit one of the last. At a dinner honoring the agency’s CEO, an Irish New Yorker who probably went to college in Queens, he toasted his new boss: “Since his promotion, he’s been working on his grammar. In fact, at a client dinner last night, he asked politely across the table — “please pass I the butter.”

The creative director of my next agency was recovering from lung cancer, an unfair penalty since everyone else smoked but no one else I knew got sick. He was undoubtedly funny before, but being sick made him care less what other people thought, so he was deadly funny now.

An art director and old friend of his had a huge lump for a nose and eyes too close together, both placed in the middle of an unusually large head. His saving grace was a mop of thick black hair. Any time he passed a mirror — in the bathroom, by the elevators, in the conference room — he’d adjust the swoosh of hair on his forehead so it just grazed his eyebrows.

The creative director with cancer wondered aloud: “I would pay anything to see what that man sees when he looks in the mirror.”

An agency or two later — you either changed jobs every couple of years to be able to make enough money, or picked one and became a lifer — I was a creative director at a place that had been a pioneer in the creative revolution. It was started by an ad great, a woman.

Her agency was responsible for some of the most famous ads ever — for an antacid, a muffler chain, a deodorant. For presentations, she had Chanel suits made in her clients’ brand colors.

For Christmas one year, she gave a favorite employee a mink coat. Another year, she paid to decorate every room in another employee’s new Fifth Avenue apartment. She may have been the last of the Mad People.

Just before I arrived, she had sold her agency for over a hundred million dollars, kind of like a trillion today.

The new CEO was a dope, more suited to selling carpet by the yard. She may have promoted him to ensure the place would fail without her. One of her parting acts was picking a new phone number for him, because she didn’t want him to have hers. The thinking went that, since she wasn’t sure whether he’d succeed or not, she gave him extension 5050. The agency closed two years later.

We moved to Chicago for two years. My new agency had built its own forty-story building on the river. Everyone in the city knew bonus day: for car dealerships, jewelry stores and marinas it was almost Christmas.

I wrote a famous diaper commercial featuring a water balloon. I would’ve stayed, but I missed the ocean, even though everyone in Chicago thinks the lake is the same thing.

The second half of my career was spent at a giant global agency. I liked the place and rose quickly. For the last ten years, I was the creative director of the entire company.

Smoking was still permitted at our offices, although it being the ad business, it was undoubtedly one of the last. Most days I’d have a cigar at my desk. One afternoon, mid-puff, my door flew open. Another creative director, with the office directly under mine, was mad. He was an occasional cigar smoker, so he knew what he was talking about: “Your office,” he fumed, “smells like a humidor. Mine,” he continued, “smells like an ashtray.”

After we won a big government contract, we took our soldier-clients to a fancy restaurant to celebrate. (It was the same place, now redone and renamed, as the one where I had my first martini at lunch years earlier.)

Ten of us were in a small private wine room. When the first course arrived, the soldier-in-charge, with three inches of commendations on his breast, asked us to say grace. We lowered our heads and held hands as he thanked God for his new advertising partners.

I cast a famous actor as our voiceover for a new campaign. We were on a phone patch to do the recording, and I gave him direction as best I could — be more curious, show more wonder, whatever. He interrupted me: “Read it for me, tell me how it should sound.” So, while an Oscar- winning actor listened, an unknown, striving ad guy read his lines for him to copy. Which he did, perfectly.

A college friend called me to ask whether I could get a friend’s daughter a summer internship at the agency. She was a sophomore at Princeton and wanted to work in strategic planning. She came for the summer and stood out in her job. The next summer, she went to work for a hedge fund.

I don’t know if I knew then it was a turning point, but I knew where we were headed. The ad business took itself far more seriously, even as it became less serious to clients. The stories were changing, too.

I visited a giant tech-company client and waited at security behind a caterer delivering lunch, maybe even for our meeting. We were issued the same badges: VENDOR.

I was in Switzerland for a meeting with a large food company. Several of our offices around the world had been working on a new global campaign for a coffee brand. They were a difficult client, and we were on our third round of presentations. It was clear this meeting wasn’t going any better than the previous ones. I was upset when the client said they needed to see more ideas, partly because I liked what we had presented, but also because everyone was burnt out.

Imagining the hypothetical experiment of getting a group of monkeys to type the complete works of Shakespeare, I said, “I’m sorry, but the monkeys are tired.” After a long pause, executed with Swiss precision, my client gave me this simple instruction: “Then get me more monkeys.”

I was in the office of the president of a famous financial services firm. My colleague was flipping the storyboard panels as I presented a new campaign. Because there was no conference table, he was on his knees on the floor, a magnificent Persian rug. We were interrupted by the CEO, who came through the door without knocking. He was holding fabric samples. He asked the president which one he preferred for the sofa in his new office, the suede or the velour.

We were pitching a major credit company. For the meeting, our new business guy had to make sure the conference room was ready: window shades even, name tags in the correct places, enough coffee cups and stirrers, the projector plugged in.

Our team had created a campaign that would become famous and help save the company. The team was small enough to work in a phone booth (still around then). Yet after our new business guy left the agency, he said he had been the one in charge. He called himself “the Picasso of new business.”

After I retired, I bought a small house from an elderly couple who had died. Their son was handling the sale. He was rich from private equity, and invited me to his oceanfront home to chat. We sat in his extraordinary, quiet living room, with the ocean waves playing like a silent movie outside, and he asked me to tell him about the advertising business.

“You killed it,” I said. Finance. The comp. The bros. The money moved, and so did the Amherst kids.

Advertising was never a business that did any good for the world. It wasn’t saving anyone from cancer or teaching a kid to read. But it was an honest living. Like being an accountant, just a lot more fun.

Now, when friends ask me to talk to their kids about advertising, I tell them, no. Not anymore.

Through 30 years of birthdays, vacations, Thanksgivings, job promotions, the passing of a father and beloved pets, the birth of grandchildren, the change of seasons, my brother and I didn’t speak.

Why, I’m not really sure. We didn’t have a fight over politics or money or anything consequential. I’m older by two years and, while we were never best friends, we had a serviceable relationship growing up.

We did the kinds of things most brothers probably do together: played basketball after school in the Goodmans’ driveway, played Stratego and a weird electric football game that had a vibrating metal field that made the players move in random directions, went to Knicks and Rangers games with our father, skied and played tennis on family vacations.

(That said, our early years together may have been a harbinger. When Andrew was born and came home from the hospital, I yelled to the baby nurse, “Hey, Miss, you forgot your baby!” Not happy that she had left him at our house, I threw a heavy, metal fire truck into his crib. A few years later, I guess because I deserved it, Andrew threw a dinner fork at me which almost put out my eye.)

Our time living together in our parents’ house ended when I went off to college. Our last activity I remember was a draft we held with our pretty impressive record collection. Back and forth, we chose the records each of us would keep. “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos went to me, “The Royal Scam” by Steely Dan to Andrew, until we worked our way through hundreds of records from A (Allman Brothers) to Z (the Zombies).

Andrew went off to college two years later, and it was as if he went off to Mars. We rarely spoke, not about girls, classes, frat parties, food fights, lawn frisbee. Nothing. I think we may have visited each other once in the two years our college years overlapped, but maybe not.

Over the next 30 years, our lives hardly crossed, although there seemed to be good enough reasons for us to reconnect. We both had two good kids, second homes, a series of dogs, cats, or both. But, in hindsight, there were probably more powerful reasons not to.

I moved to Manhattan, near where I had grown up; Andrew stayed in Boston, where he had gone to college. I got married to a woman he thought was fantastic; he married a woman I told him he shouldn’t. I went to work in advertising and got to the top of my field; my brother changed midlevel P.R. jobs frequently and hated them. I lived large, he much smaller.

I don’t know if he was envious of me, or if he just didn’t like me because I was an unbearable New Yorker. Given that he was much smarter than I was, I think I was disappointed in him.

Then our sister got sick. She’s seven years younger than I am, five younger than Andrew. She drank too much. Why she did is how Andrew and I started speaking again.

We spoke often about her rehab and her therapy. We talked about our father’s role in her drinking, our mother’s, and the boy’s who lived next door. We discussed the impact on her husband and their twins.

Our conversations began to expand. Which professional sport has the highest percentage of Jewish players? Who was the best jazz saxophonist? What pasta shape is best to use for carbonara? Best series of all time, “The Wire” or “Breaking Bad”? Sometimes we talked until one of our phones ran out of battery.

I turned 70 last November. To celebrate, my plan was to rent a house in the Caribbean on a small island with a deserted beach. I was going to go with my wife, my two kids, and their spouses and my two grandchildren. I found the perfect house on Bequia, a small, little-known island in the Grenadines.

I was disappointed when both of my kids said they couldn’t go. My wife and I didn’t want to spend two weeks alone (well, she didn’t), so we talked about friends we might invite.

When we set up a Zoom call with Andrew and his wife, they asked us if we were getting divorced. (I told him that, at least from my perspective, I didn’t think so.)

I talked about the last 30 years. I told him I was sorry and that it was more my fault than his, which I think is true. I said that I felt guilty and angry that I had wasted those years, especially knowing what I know now: that we have more to talk about than a phone battery sometimes allows us.

I told Andrew and his wife that we wanted them to join us on my birthday trip to Bequia. Partly as an apology, but more as an opportunity to keep talking, about stupid stuff like the wisdom of replacing human umpires with electronic ones, and serious stuff like why our sister drank so much.

The four of us just returned from Bequia. And we did talk. A lot. About how the seven turtles that live on the property get up and down the 53 steps between the house and the beach. About whether Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell was the best songwriter of all time. We talked about our kids’ futures and our parents’ pasts. We talked about our sister’s recovery. We talked a lot about our dangerous, deranged president.

Andrew is a musical savant. Along with his encyclopedic knowledge of any genre, starting with early jazz, he’s also been singing in an a cappella group since college. Because of his predilection for music that’s highly structured, he prefers jazz to rock. (My tastes are much simpler and undoubtedly less refined.)

On Bequia, he was the house D.J. and chose the music throughout the day. Often, we listened to obscure jazz tracks featuring, at least to my ear, discordant piano solos, out-of-tune sax riffs, and sad, aimless plucking on a bass.

But mixed in was another sound that cut through clear as Fitzgerald. When I heard it, it found my ear and drowned out all the others. It was Andrew’s voice. “Yodels or Devil Dogs?”

We could’ve had 30 more birthdays together. But who knows, maybe we would’ve run out of things to say.

My mother lives in a retirement community in Princeton, New Jersey. She lives in apartment 2310.

She moved there because, as she put it, “they don’t play bingo.” Many of the residents are retired professors from the university, others from Columbia and similar places. I’ve met psychiatrists, judges, and at least one Nobel laureate. There seems to be an over-sized sample of astrophysicists.

She likes it there, even though she doesn’t like admitting she’s happy.

The residents are encouraged, or at least it seems that way, to display art and personal knickknacks outside their apartment doors. On the walls outside her door are: a large painting of ship masts I did in high school — terrible; a dark, abstract seascape she bought in Santa Barbara; and a small oil painting of a saint with a cross and a halo picked up in Florence.

Next door is 2320. The walls on either side of their door are lined with photographs. They show: a single tree on a wide open range in Africa; the Brooklyn Bridge; a street in what looks like Paris, with a young couple carrying a candlestick; a tropical beach — not a resort but a public place with vendors who rent chairs and serve local, fried food; a ski slope.

I don’t know who lives in 2320.

A retired radiologist from Larchmont. Married to a professor. A brick colonial on a half acre.

One daughter, a veterinarian, the other a social worker. One with a good marriage, the other not. They had a Lab and a cat.

They were hosting a birthday party for the older girl when Kennedy was shot, and still tell the story.

They traveled. First with the children — Utah in winter, the Caribbean in spring. Later on, they visited new places, off-season to avoid the crowds and save money. They packed light.

She was the photographer. She had bought a Nikon after seeing a Robert Frank exhibit. She was probably a better tennis player than photographer, but taking pictures was her way of expressing herself. She never thought she was a good writer.

They eat dinner in the dining room a few nights a week with a Chinese couple who escaped after Tiananmen Square. They talk about their children, the news, and what has become of the country.

They don’t miss Larchmont, although he sometimes misses his patients.

I turn back to 2310, my mother’s apartment. I look at the ship masts, the landscape and the small Christian painting.

What should I know?

That she’s Jewish, raised in Brooklyn, and turned her back on her religion when she moved to Long Island because she was offended by her Jewish neighbors?

That she’s a gardener who forced tulip bulbs and made hybrid roses in her winter greenhouse, using them in the spring in her perennial garden and on her dinner table?

That she was always a reader, but now, because of macular degeneration, is a book listener? That she prefers nonfiction because she falls asleep listening, which means with fiction she loses the plot, but with a biography, only a few years?

That she one-ups everyone she meets? Like during a conversation about eggs she’ll say “well, in France…” or talking about FDR, something like “well, you haven’t read James MacGregor Burns…”?

That she was married to a famous dentist who invented the dental implant?

That he punished their three children with days of silence because of a slight, like being interrupted at dinner?

That their middle child never came home after college?

That their eldest felt dread at the slam of the front-door knocker, because he knew his father was home — the only one who didn’t come in through the mudroom?

That my mother took the brunt of it, even though she didn’t show it?

Should I know she’s 93 and, as lifelong friends pass away, sees her horizon more clearly?

Should I know she’s happy, maybe at last?

Down the hall, on the other side, is apartment 2047. Outside the door: small architectural drawings of the Parthenon and Chartres.

My List doesn’t have a defined number of items. I don’t necessarily replace one that’s crossed off with a new one. I don’t check it at specific times during the day, although it’s rare I go to sleep without reviewing it. Here’s what’s on it June 23, 2026.

My mother. She fell and broke her arm. She’s 93. Her arm was fractured in two places, with a bad displacement. My wife and I met with her, the surgeon and anesthesiologist to review the procedure. Her bones are brittle, so the titanium rod might not hold. Her age — anyone her age — means she may have complications from being sedated. Recovery will take months of PT.

My mother looked terrified, an expression I’ve never seen on her face.

The surgery was quick and successful. She spent one night in the hospital and we took her home the next afternoon. My wife and I stayed with her for a week.

My mother is well-traveled and reads a lot, which translates as a know-it-all. She’s also stubborn. Our family has been begging her to get a full-time aide, but she wouldn’t have it. Partly due to being cheap, partly to her just being like this. She might not have fallen if someone had been living with her.

When we came home from the hospital, one of her part-time aides moved in. She is everything you’d want in an aide, even a companion: kind, punctual, immaculate, thorough.

On and off, my mother is mean to her. She’s old, angry, blind and, for now, without the use of her right arm. Sometimes I can’t blame her because I’d be angry, too. But I’m also not surprised. She’s been this way for as long as I’ve known her.

I call her every day. She went to a concert yesterday. I’ll call her tomorrow after she sees the pulmonologist.

My perennial garden. There’s a vacant spot right in the middle, between the Rudbeckia and the Echinacea. Our garden is large and dense with color in full bloom. The hole bothers me. Our gardener says it will fill in. I sent him a photo to show him the defect. He’s coming Friday to add a few plants.

My son. He lives outside Boston and has a new baby. I miss him.

My dog. Lila is five. We got her when she was three-months old. I take her everywhere — to the farm stand, the beach, stores, restaurants.

I had a bad back last summer, and slept in our son’s old room because the mattress was softer. She knew something was wrong, and slept there with me.

When my back started to heal I returned to our bedroom. Every morning at 12:30, give or take, she comes into our room, walks to my side, and hits her paw on the bed. Repeatedly. If I don’t turn over, she barks. Every night I relent, and follow her into our old room. I sleep there until morning.

She’s five. Which means in 10 years, she’ll be 15 and I’ll be 81 and. What then?

Friends. I have two close friends. There are a few people I enjoy talking to, but not about anything important.

A few years ago, I tried making a new friend, who I hoped would become a good friend. He betrayed me. The circumstances aren’t important, and I may have chosen badly.

I don’t know why I can’t find another good friend, but I’m not willing to try.

Trump. I wish I could cross this off. I can’t because I’m so fucking angry. Fuck him.

My wife. We argue about too many things. Travel logistics, for instance. Getting to the city, getting around the city, getting the grandkids to bed. And we argue about being late, which she often is.

They’re dumb, unimportant things. It’s my fault and I should stop instigating.

It’s quiet now in the house without her. I miss the NYT jingle that plays when she finishes the crossword puzzle.

This list. I wish I didn’t have it.

.

By Jonathan Cranin

I was driving to the city on Route 27, something I do almost weekly. As I passed the sign for the Westhampton Beach exit, I realized I had no reason to get off and probably never would again. My best friend was dead.

I met Joe Nissen when I was desperate for an art director to work over a Presidents weekend. The headhunter told me she could send someone good, but he wasn’t young. (Maybe she said “old” because you could then.)

Joe showed up at Geer DuBois at 9 sharp. He was about my size — 5 feet 6 and trim — wearing Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, a navy blue cashmere sweater over a white turtleneck, and crisp blue jeans. (I’d find out that was his uniform.) His hair was full, curly, and shiny white. A Jewish-Waspy cross between Philip Roth and Paul Newman.

Joe was 62, I was 32. Our paths to this Saturday morning turned out to be strangely similar, which may be why sitting there, creating orange juice ads, felt like we had been doing it forever.

We were best friends for the next 35 years, half of my life and a third of his. We were connected as outsiders in a world where we didn’t feel like we quite belonged. We loved making ads, but not the ad world, which took itself far too seriously for what it contributed to the real world. Joe’s two kids went to Middlebury College, not particularly popular with New York City Jews. So did I. Both of us were a little stubborn in the face of new things that seemed dumb, like paddleball.

Our lives continued on similar paths. I lived in the city and had a weekend house in Water Mill. I became the chief creative officer of McCann Erickson. My two kids went to private school and tried summer camp but didn’t like it. Thirty years earlier, Joe had started his own agency with its moments of fame. His two kids grew up like mine — city, private school, Westhampton, no summer camp.

Joe’s career ended several years after I brought him to McCann, when he was forced to retire. Joe and I had become best friends, but without his job our relationship turned into something else: Joe became a father.

(And I needed one. Mine didn’t grow things, he killed them. If he were a gardener, his plants would all be dead.)

I was still working in the city when Joe, along with his wife, Lee, moved mostly to Westhampton Beach. Joe and I started a new ritual: We’d meet most Thursdays for dinner when I got off the Jitney. We started at Bobby Van’s in Bridgehampton but kept moving around because, true to our nature, something always annoyed us. Until it didn’t.

The Palm in East Hampton was small and dark, with a few cramped booths like church pews wedged in under a low tin ceiling. When you entered, you felt hugged.

At first, Joe and I met practically every week. We’d be the first ones in at 5, when they opened, and most nights every seat was filled by 5:30. The other Joe, the bartender, knew our drinks and enough about our lives. He always asked Joe about his golf. (Joe and I both loved tennis, but he had switched to golf because of a bad shoulder. He shot his age at 79.) They were both good golfers and, like most people who play golf, they liked talking about it.

By this time, Joe was in his mid-80s, and he drove an hour to East Hampton just for our dinners. But for Joe and me, Thursdays were like Saturday nights for a teenager, even though we never said it.

For several years, our dinners were automatic. We’d text in the morning to confirm, meet for dinner, share a steak, talk to other bar people about politics or grandchildren or real estate prices, then Joe would drive me home to Water Mill, sometimes come in for a cigar, sometimes not.

Then it changed. Slowly. Joe would text some Thursday mornings saying he’d had a bad night and wouldn’t make it. My three-hour ride on the Jitney was awful enough, but knowing I wasn’t meeting Joe at the Palm made it endless.

The texts became more frequent. Joe had always defied the physics of aging. When we hugged, his body felt hard and permanent; his wardrobe from decades ago was still intact; when I called most nights, his brain was supple and active. Joe had been playing golf and resisting his mysterious illnesses.

Then Covid arrived. Between caring for Lee and avoiding the virus, he was trapped. Unbothered by his ancient, stained sweatpants, tuned out even to Trump news, it was undeniable and incurable: Joe had gotten old, which, for a man who was ageless, was his way of dying.

I started to visit him at home more often. I brought food from Goldberg’s and Round Swamp, and sometimes visitors: my daughter, Olivia, and her daughter, Charlotte; my wife, Ilene, and always our new puppy, Lila.

Joe loved my family. We’d sit on the covered porch outside their bedroom, which, even on the hottest days, had a breeze no one could explain. I thought about the surprising ways, over more than three decades, Joe’s life and mine wrapped around each other’s, often with his austere, white house at the center.

In his large backyard, when Olivia was 5, she looked up at the open sky and told Joe the moon was beautiful, but that it was okay if it visited someone else’s house. Their pool wasn’t heated, which made the warmth of the hot tub extra rewarding. Our son, Josh, learned to swim in that small, safe place.

Joe and Lee got sick together and died together. Their lives ended 48 hours apart in the austere, white bedroom off the inexplicably breezy covered porch. Sitting there, I once asked Joe what made good art. The sureness of the artist’s hand is what he said.

I haven’t been back to the Palm since Joe died. It’s just a bar without the surest man I knew.

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I’m not a late-night talk show fan. I appreciate all of the hosts, like some better than others, but they all hit pretty much the same note, which gets monotonous.

I knew the last night of the Late Show would be different. Like a game seven, I didn’t want to miss it. I watched online the next morning, ad-free, along with the companion “Colbert Questionert” episode — two uninterrupted hours of his last act.

“To do this many shows,” he said in his opening, “it has to be a machine. But the thing is, if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn’t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears.”

The last two shows were especially joyful:

Colbert singing “Hello, Goodbye” alongside Paul McCartney, backed up by Jon Batiste and Elvis Costello.

Colbert’s answer to the question from his wife, “What’s your favorite smell?” — “When we’re going out someplace and you go upstairs to get ready first... I get to the top of the stairs and I know you’ve already gotten out of the shower because I can smell that rose lotion. And I know that you’re in there wearing very little.”

Colbert and Josh Brolin kissing on the lips.

Colbert’s pick for the one song to listen to for the rest of his life: Glenn Gould’s performance of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, Op. 19, No. 1.

The entire staff mobbing the stage — dancing, hugging, singing — even before the final chords of the final song were done.

Colbert’s answer to the very last question “How would you describe the rest of your life in five words?” — “My family, my friends, fun.”

Colbert called his show “The Joy Machine.” You didn’t have to be a fan to feel it. His kind of joy was for debaters. Sandwich-lovers. Coffee-spitters. Mendelssohn and McCartney fans. For people who question God. For anyone who just liked a good time. (The cancellation wasn’t anti-joy — although it was a joyless act — it was a calculated political decision.)

We all have pets that die, friends who betray us, relationships that don’t work out. Joy is how we survive. The Late Show was one place to find it. It can also be found in good fiction, the dog park, a late-night call to a brother, the Knicks in four, any night Jeopardy’s on.

But there’s also the hum of another machine: Hannity, Charlottesville, school shootings, election denial, the manosphere. Literally, a hate machine.

Too many of us have stopped looking for Colbert’s kind of joy because it’s become partisan. Kamala Harris ran on joy and lost. Colbert ran a “Joy Machine” and got canceled.

The plug’s been pulled, so Colbert’s machine won’t be emitting any more of the fossil-free stuff. It was only an occasional source for me, so I won’t miss it as much as his staff or Jon Stewart or my friend, Peter, who saw the show seven times in person.

But there’s plenty of joy out there. Politics are beside the point. Find some.

The caption for my Substack is: “Disappointed in most everyone. Except my dog, Lila.” Why dogs are so great is well-covered ground. As a dog, Lila exceeds all the amazing things people say about them. But as a human, I believe she’d also run circles around most of the people I know.

If Lila got emails and texts, she’d answer them promptly, usually with something funny. And she’d never use emojis.

If Lila got gifts, she would write or call to say thank you. And if someone died, she’d write a personal condolence note, sometimes even the old-fashioned kind that gets mailed.

If Lila were invited to a friend’s house for dinner, she’d bring something thoughtful and definitely not a bottle of wine she grabbed out of her fridge. And she’d reciprocate with an invitation to her house.

If Lila did something that might even remotely warrant an apology, she’d give one right away, even though, when the shoe was on the other foot, she’d rarely get one.

If Lila worked in customer service, she’d never say “well, if I did it for you, I’d have to do it for everyone.”

If Lila were talking to anyone, she would ask lots of questions. And she wouldn’t use me and I incorrectly.

If Lila played tennis, she’d scream at the guy who cheated because if you cheat at weekend tennis, you’re really pathetic.

If Lila voted, she’d always do it.

If Lila were a retired ad executive, she would donate her time to nonprofits that do things like help poor kids go to college. And when the people in charge were rude and never once said thank you, the way every general she’d worked with at the Pentagon did, she’d feel angry.

Then she realized they weren’t worth being angry at. She felt disappointment.

It’s not hard. If more of us just acted the way I’m certain Lila would if she were one of us, we’d have a friendlier place. And it isn’t even a high bar.

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