That was Victor Niederhoffer.

Vic loved heroes and heroic deeds. He loved to read the lives of scientists, inventors, Western cowboys. He collected thousands of letters written by heroes, scientists, judges, authors, composers, and the Founding Fathers. His collection of fabulous antique silver trophies had its own book when he sold it at Sotheby’s.

His life was large and he made the world greater. His circle encompassed hundreds of famous, witty, brilliant people: entrepreneurs, inventors, traders, professors, philosophers. On his death, tributes flowed in from people he had mentored.

He had a gift of making lasting friendships at a first meeting. It was partly his confidence — the same aplomb that let him ride out huge losses and get back in the waves. And along with his achievements, he also had a personal warmth and humor that made him incredibly charismatic.

He was welcomed by brilliant academics at Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, and NYU; but he was no snob. He genuinely liked people. After wandering through the Botanical Garden, he liked to stop off at the handball courts in the Bronx ghetto for a pickup game. He departed with new friends, who were likely to receive Vic’s tennis racquet as a gift.

Drivers, waiters, caretakers, and housekeepers loved him.

The Walled Garden

He used to say his office was the New York Botanical Garden. He went there often in search of trading insights.

One of our first meetings after I met him in 1999 was at the garden. I was late because the first taxi driver I found refused to go to the Bronx. Vic waited. He always did.

We walked among flower beds, and he knelt to inhale their fragrance. Ah, I thought. This is a man in touch with the real world.

As we strolled under the huge trees in the dying afternoon, he began to call, “Shimek! Shimek!”

As with most of what he said in those first days, I had no idea what he was talking about. Who was Shimek?

Gradually, the day dies away. The sun goes out like a candle. The sounds that filled the day die away. There’s hardly a living soul on the street. In the windows of the little houses shine the little flanes of the holiday candles. A strange and holy stillness surrounds us, Buzzie and me, and we feel ourselves inextricably fused with the festive stillness.

“Shimek! Shimek?”

For the third time now Mama is calling me to go to shul. Don’t I know that I have to go to shul? But I’ll sit here just a minute more. A minute, and no more. — Sholom Aleichem, The Song of Songs

He loved trees both physically and for inspiration. He developed theories of stock price movements based on their habits of growth and branching.

He was also fascinated by octopuses and turkeys and elephants. He distilled the tastiest bits and regaled dinner partners with tales of their astonishing qualities and lessons for us humans.

One of his most famous strategies was based on the tendency of rampaging elephants to return along the same path. He found this in a book entitled “LoBagola: An African Savage’s Own Story” by one Bata LoBagola.

An early Wall Street Journal profile of Victor was illustrated with a photo of LoBagola captioned “Victor Niederhoffer,” supplied by pranksters on his staff.

It later turned out that LoBagola himself was a fraud. The author was a black Jewish American, Joseph Howard Lee, born in Baltimore.

When I was still the North American stock market team leader at Bloomberg, I called him for a quote. He compared the market to Modoc. I searched for Biblical references. Did he mean Moloch, the bloodthirsty god who demanded child sacrifice? Or Moab? Eventually I asked, and learned that Modoc was the greatest elephant who ever lived and that there was a book about him.

My shelves became full of books Victor liked. Gradually, I began to make some sense of him and to understand the world he dominated.

I was already a free-market person, having read Hayek and Solzhenitsyn, and I had studied under the conservative maven M. Stanton Evans.

Under Vic’s influence, I read Ayn Rand and Louis l’Amour. I began devouring textbooks on statistics, psychology, biology, and geology.

We regularly visited bookstores and invariably returned with great stacks.

One day, during a trip to the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side, he decided that I needed the complete Oxford English Dictionary. It was delivered, about 20 volumes of it, to my desk at Bloomberg.

At the time, he was still smarting from his 1997 disaster in the Thai stock market. The first time he called, it was to ask me about an error I had unintentionally inserted into a story. He invited me to “a meeting of eagles” at his Junto. Afterward, he took me to La Goulue on Madison Avenue. I wondered to myself how he could afford such a fancy place when he was broke.

He walked me home, limping badly. (A hip replacement was in the future.) He confided that he had been trading the German bund. He asked if he could use my phone. I told him there was a pay phone on the corner.

I was hoping to make him my source. I had bought his book, “The Education of a Speculator” in 1997, and found him sympathetic, particularly because he appreciated music and had a fine sense of humor. Before I finished the book, his fund blew up. I put it down.

Vic began to show me the city as only a born New Yorker could. The Oyster Bar. His family’s modest old house in Brighton Beach. Coney Island. The silver dealers at the Second Avenue antiques market. Barney Greengrass. The Broadway sheet music store, now sadly closed.

One day, he told me that he had made a million dollars that day.

Soaring up to the clouds and even above the clouds with Buzzie by means of Kabbala and flying far away across the ocean with her — that was one of my favorite dreams. There, across the ocean, begins the land of the dwarfs who are descendants of the mighty warriors of King David’s time. These dwarfs are good-nature little folk. They live only on candies and almond milk, they play little panpipes all day long, and they all dance round together. They fear nothing and are fond of guests. If anyone comes to visit, they wine and dine him and give him the most expensive garments and loads of gold and silver vessels. And before he leaves, the dwarfs stuff his pockets with diamonds and precious gems. — Sholom Aleichem, The Song of Songs

I resigned from Bloomberg at the beginning of 2000 in a dispute over whether my new source and friend Victor was trying to sway the markets through me. The idea was absurd. Did NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell sway interest rates through her husband, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan?

Vic encouraged me to quit. He encouraged me to aim higher.

A New Kind of Financial News

In those days, the only newswriter who knew anything about markets was James Cramer, a former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reporter turned trader. It was Cramer who gave me my first job as an independent columnist.

I immediately proposed that Vic be my co-author. Cramer agreed, and we began our collaboration.

We lasted about two months. We resigned after the columns editor refused to let us mention the great Victorian scientist and explorer Francis Galton, one of Vic’s heroes.

But we were on to something. The next month, I got a call from Jon Markman, editor of MSNBC Money, and “The Speculator” was born.

Our columns at The Street had attracted lots of email. A reader, James Goldcamp, set up a mail list for us so that everybody could communicate. The Spec List is still going today, 26 years later, and is the basis for a website, Daily Speculations, an online forum which topped 10,000 readers at its peak and was regularly quoted by The Wall Street Journal.

Over the next few years, we collaborated on hundreds of columns. I was the writer-editor half, sort of an AI assistant, except I was better than that. He supplied inspiration, an unerring instinct for story, and statistical analysis, fortified with outrageous humor.

No one had ever read anything like them.

Every one of our stories was backed by data and statistically tested. Could quantitative analysis be entertaining? We gave it our best shot.

We wrote Alan Greenspan a letter suggesting that he resign as Fed Chairman. We included a pair of basketball shoes and recommended that he play for the Knicks instead.

We wrote about trading lessons drawn from “The Racing Maxims & Methods of Pittsburg Phil,” a legendary 19th century racing handicapper, and Robert Bacon’s “Secrets of Professional Turf Betting.” The price of Bacon’s book soared online.

I interviewed Alan Abelson at Barron’s and wrote a snarky column on how he had remained bearish during the entire tech-driven bull market of the ‘90s.

We ran contests for readers and awarded the winners with canes that I found in an old shop in the Garment District, to be used for hobbling down to Wall Street after crashes. The idea came from an account by Henry Clews, whose vivid histories of 19th-century life on Wall Street provided endless entertainment:

But few gain sufficient experience in Wall Street to command success until they reach that period of life in which they have one foot in the grave. When this time comes these old veterans of the Street usually spend long intervals of repose at their comfortable homes, and in times of panic, which recur sometimes oftener than once a year, these old fellows will be seen in Wall Street, hobbling down on their canes to their brokers’ office.

Then they always buy good stocks to the extent of their bank balances, which have been permitted to accumulate for just such an emergency. The panic usually rages until enough of these cash purchases of stock is made to afford a big “rake in.” When the panic has spent its force, these old fellows, who have been resting judiciously on their oars in expectation of the inevitable event, which usually returns with the regularity of the seasons, quickly realize, deposit their profits with their bankers, or the overplus thereof, after purchasing more real estate that is on the upgrade, for permanent investment, and retire for another season to the quietude of their splendid homes and the bosoms of their happy families.

Vic adored Broadway musicals and Gilbert & Sullivan and could quote them by heart. His writing and conversation — even his trading strategies — drew on the lyrics as others use proverbs or poetry.

One of my first assignments was to write lyrics about trading to a Broadway song, “Just In Time.”

Just in time, stocks rallied just in time…

I am a classically trained pianist, and knew little of the Broadway genre. But eventually Vic had only to toss off an idea and I could create lyrics.

We performed these songs for financial audiences around the world, with me at the piano accompanying a professional singer, all interspersed with scholarly points from Vic. It was another thing that no one had seen before. (I once studied with pianist Leonid Hambro, who had served as Victor Borge’s straight-man pianist, so the idea wasn’t completely foreign.).

All this writing and fun went on right in the middle of a very active trading business. It was a type of journalism practiced by Gerald Loeb, Henry Clews, and the other old-time greats, who knew the market because they traded it and sought inside knowledge.

That is considered a conflict of interest today. I think that’s unfortunate. The average financial journalist has little idea about what goes on behind the scenes, beyond pat quotes from interested parties, often about what amounts to Brownian motion, delivered to the innocent journalist and thence the public.

The trading room was a large space built over a garage. Banks of windows looked out on an oak forest and a clay tennis court. Trading days were punctuated by tennis games. If Vic wanted a price, he would lob a tennis ball at a window. Remarkably, none of the windows ever broke; no “Lady I Did It” moments.

One new hire was stunned when Vic climbed up on a desk and did a silent vaudeville routine as his indoctrination to the firm.

It was better than the Marx Brothers.

We began throwing big summer parties, for readers and others. The first one, in 2000, drew maybe a dozen and a half people. The gatherings grew exponentially each year. Eventually, more than 100 showed up, coming from points as far away as Hawaii, Singapore, England, Florida, and the British Virgin Islands.

The parties lasted for a few days and included excursions to Vic’s favorite haunts. The itinerary might include a baseball game, or a trip to Vic’s old playing grounds in Brighton Beach to watch him challenge the old timers at handball, or to one of New York’s great botanical gardens. Once we went to the races, guided by our friends Lila Kerns and Kevin Depew, editors of the Racing Form. At the conclusion, there might be a grand dinner at the old Wall Street traders’ hangout, Delmonico’s, concluding with a performance of — what else? — Spec songs.

Most of all, the visitors came to attend a watch Vic trade. Invariably, a summer thunderstorm cut off the power, or Vic’s positions would be losing money.

Vic and Squash

When Vic entered Harvard at age 16, anti-Jewish discrimination was still evident. He felt — or was made to feel — uncomfortable. He lacked basic WASP skills such as how to tie a tie.

He took refuge on the squash courts, where under the guidance of the legendary Jack Barnaby he quickly began winning competitions. Experts on the game regard him as among the top hardball players of all time, maybe the top.

His revenge was a carefully cultivated outward eccentricity. He wore tennis shoes everywhere. He never wore an overcoat. He’d show up in seersucker in the dead of winter. For a time, he wore socks on his hands. Whatever he ate invariably ended up on his shirt or his lap. He didn’t care. And he never, never wore a tie.

He was studying for his PhD at the University of Chicago when an important squash tournament was held in the city. The local squash club let him practice there, but refused him a membership, despite his national championships. He was convinced it was because he was Jewish.

He quit the game for five years in protest. I only heard the story when his uncle Howie told it one evening over dinner at the Harvard Club. Vic had become reticent about it, although he loved to mock the horror of members of the fanciest club in Manhattan when they looked out of the window of their elaborate building and saw a Jew walking down the street.

To confound the WASPs, he loved wearing old-money Ralph Lauren colors. He wore flamingo-pink pants, yellow polo shirts, pink, yellow, or purple blazers, powder blue cashmere sweaters, lavender button-downs, and panama hats.

Ironically, Ralph Lauren was Jewish, born Ralph Lifshitz to parents who fled Belarus. A marketing executive at the company was Vic’s friend and investor, and he invited us to join the Old Oaks Country Club, a very fancy place in Westchester built by Jews excluded from Manhattan’s clubs.

Vic once told me that he had become convinced that he should get others before they got him. (He loved Mario Puzo’s books and read them all.)

As with so many other American Jews, his brilliance overcame all else. Although the Harvard years had been challenging, he came away with an extensive network of powerful friends. It seemed to me that wherever we traveled, we would meet with a Jewish trading honcho or professor who had played handball in Brighton Beach.

The Broadway songs he loved were pure Jewish culture, delivered with a smile to a WASP America that barely tolerated Jews.

Despite his distinguished Jewish lineage, Vic never attended synagogue. As a child, he had gone with his parents, but they sneakily listened to the Brooklyn Dodgers game on the radio. Each year, a giant Christmas tree stood in the living room at his house.

Turning Point

In 2002, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent months of chemotherapy. During that time, we were supposed to be finishing our book, Practical Speculation, for Wiley & Sons. I did my best, but he was not at full power. I made the deadline. The book was published in February 2003 and was well reviewed. Active Trader magazine called it “the best trading book of the young millennium.”

Vic made a full recovery. Shortly afterward, he moved in with me.

For the next five years, we lived together in Sutton Place, at the edge of the East River.

He began to manage money for investors again, making steady gains that trounced the competition. His return, and our columns, brought talented people from all corners who wanted to trade with him. His old partner, Steve Wisdom, returned to run the shop. Brilliant programmers and PhDs joined up. The fund quickly grew to $300 million.

In 2003, we stopped writing so he could concentrate fully on the fund. I felt a bit lost, but I focused on being a good partner.

Despite his affability, his playfulness, and his carefully nurtured eccentricities, he had iron discipline. He rose early. He always kept one eye on the market, and could tell the time of day without looking at a clock.

His attitude toward loss also had iron in it. For him, everything zeroed out at the close, and tomorrow was another day. He took things one day at a time and refused to brood.

He ran multiple analytical scenarios throughout the day based on patterns and relationships among markets.

When the futures market closed at 4:15 pm, he quietly read.

Most of the time, he didn’t let anything bother him. But he smoldered if anyone wrote an unfavorable article.

When trading had not gone well, we ate at the diner. If trading had gone well, we had a magnificent fish dinner at the Four Seasons. If trading had been exceptional, we walked to the Manhattan Arts & Antiques Center to buy me a piece of jewelry.

After dinner, he bought me flowers. He also brought dozens of paintings. Many were originals of old magazine illustrations — humorous, romantic, charming. So there was always color in our apartment.

He truly enjoyed good food. Despite his eccentricities in dress, he was heartily welcomed wherever he went. He knew the names of all of the waiters at Le Bernardin and the Four Seasons.

He never drank, except for a glass of Sauterne with dinner, a pleasure he had acquired from his Harvard squash coach, Jack Barnaby, who introduced his players to fine dining when they went on the road.

He sent me on dozens of trips. I saw Japan, China, Singapore, Cambodia, and Russia, often meeting up with friends from our Spec List. I rode a train from Capetown to Botswana. I saw the ancient cave paintings of France and Spain. I took a train ride through the American West.

The most mind-opening trip of all was a private jet tour that tracked the path of Charles Darwin on the Beagle, organized by Stanford and guided by Janet Browne, Darwin’s eminent biographer. We saw the cliffs in Uruguay where Darwin had found ancient sea creatures. I took home a fossil shell. We then traveled to Argentina, Patagonia, Easter Island, the Solomon Islands, Mauretania, Cape Verde, and finally to the London museum to view his finds.

One year, he decided we should learn the Lindy Hop. Accordingly, we took weekly lessons from a former Israeli commando who ran a studio in the West Village..

We visited Venice, but our trip was cut short by the New Orleans flood. There we were in a city sinking beneath the sea, flying home to keep his fund from going under water because of a Louisiana flood.

Another year, he wanted to attend the New Year’s Eve Waltz in Vienna. We spent months learning the waltz. And when the evening arrived, we ascended the magnificent steps in a splendid imperial castle. And danced and danced and danced.

We continued performing for hedge fund conferences and finance students. We had performances in Vienna, London, Geneva, Yale, and Harvard.

In 2006, we welcomed our son, Aubrey.

But tremors had begun in the market and in our lives.

Time of Troubles

In 2007, the Chicago market tripled margin requirements — a move aimed squarely at Victor, who held a massive position. Over the next few months, the firm gradually liquidated. By the beginning of 2008, the fund had closed. And so had our idyllic chapter together.

Love never ends, despite partings and heartaches. Vic continued to support me for the next 19 years. When I started a business, he was my backer. He financed my growing gardening obsession, and continued to send me on trips.

I never stopped enjoying his company. We focused on Aubrey. His care for Aubrey was clear and real, every day.

After a stroke in 2017, his mobility gradually diminished. But in typical Victor style, he refused to give up. He had beat the legendary Sharif Khan to win the 1975 North American Open despite a sprained ankle. Now he was barely able to walk without falling. Still, he continued to hop trains and planes, and continued inviting me to dinner. When Aubrey was accepted at UC Berkeley in 2024, Vic went to see him. He went on a marathon tour to Asia with Aubrey.

For his 80th birthday, he threw a big party for old friends and family. He asked me to play the piano accompaniment to a song from Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, “Someone in a Tree,” describing an historic meeting between American and Japanese officials surreptitiously observed by a 10-year-old boy.

The vocal and piano parts are both difficult, inexorably gathering momentum until the end. The only person willing to take it on was Vic’s brother, Roy. With only one run-through, he sang it better than the professionals.

OLD MAN: Pardon me, I was there.

RECITER: You were where?

OLD MAN: At the treaty house.

RECITER: At the treaty house?

OLD MAN: There was a tree ?

RECITER: Which was where?

OLD MAN: Very near.

RECITER: Over here?

OLD MAN: Maybe over there, but there were trees then, everywhere. May I show you?

RECITER: If you please.

OLD MAN: There were trees, then, everywhere.

RECITER: But you were there.

OLD MAN: And I was there! Let me show you.

RECITER: If you please.

OLD MAN (tries to climb) I was younger then. (tries again) I was good at climbing trees. I was younger then. I saw everything! I was hidden all the time. It was easier to climb. I was younger then. I saw everything. Where they came and where they went. I was part of the event. I was someone in a tree! (tries once more) I was younger then!

(Suddenly, a Young Boy appears, scurries across the stage, and up the tree.)

BOY: (to the Old Man) Tell him what I see!

OLD MAN: I am in a tree. I am ten. I am in a tree.

BOY: I was younger then.

OLD MAN: In between the eaves I can see. (to the Boy) Tell me what I see. (to the REciter) I was only ten.

BOY: I see men and matting. Some are old, some chatting.

OLD MAN: If it happened, I was there!

BOTH: I saw/see everything!

OLD MAN: I was someone in a tree.

Why that song? I think he wanted to tell us that when everything has been lost, when people think you are of little consequence, when you are old and the world is fading you into the past, it’s not time to stay silent. We are all important.

On August 3, 2026, I was the last friend to visit him. I drove up from my house in Greenwich that afternoon, bringing chicken broth.

At 2:30 a.m. the next morning, he took his last breath, his beautiful daughter Katie holding his hand.

In that beautiful first chapter of Sholom Aleichem’s “Song of Songs,” that story of unfulfilled love that Vic quoted from, Buzzie urges Shimek to leave. Their day outside in the sunshine is over, and Passover Eve is fading to twilight. They are only children, “together, not even twenty.”

“Shimek! It’s you they are calling. You! Go, go. It’s time! Go!”

And I imagine that I hear her saying to me in the language of the Song of Songs: Make haste, my beloved — run, my darling, and be swift as a gazelle — quick as a deer or a young stag on the mountains of spices.

⥈

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Essay on Friendship”

I try not to be a bore about politics. For a long time, I avoided talking about it.

But now, even a mild stray remark with a whiff of conservatism gets me called the “N” word — and defriended.

It has happened more times than I care to recall within the last several years.

In fact, I’m pro-Jewish. And pro-Zionist.

What I’m not is a Nazi.

Life Among Refugees

I grew up in West Los Angeles among Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. When the High Holidays came around, half the chairs in my honors classes at Paul Revere Junior High School were empty.

At the first slumber party I attended, the girls didn’t tell ghost stories. They read aloud from accounts of the medical experiments carried out on Jews in Germany. That book was more terrifying than any ghost story, and I remember the details with a shudder more than 60 years later.

My best friends were Jewish. My first love was Jewish. My favorite teacher was Jewish. The first fundraiser I attended by was organized by a Jewish family.

I gradually realized that Jews were ubiquitous in my world.

It wasn’t merely a matter of “my son the doctor.”

The Jews of West Los Angeles were astoundingly successful in an amazing variety of professional fields, especially considering that they had escaped by a hair from the Holocaust.

Hollywood’s songwriters, composers, and actors were Jewish. The classical music giants who populated Beverly Hills were Jewish. Architects, lawyers? Many of them were Jewish.

One of my friends told me that her father had advised her to choose a profession and earn the most advanced degree possible in it. My friends were already grown up when the rest of us were still bumming around. They earned those degrees, married and started families.

They didn’t exactly make a secret of their Jewishness, but they didn’t make a big deal about it. They just went about their business, helped one another establish themselves in a strange new world, and contributed to society.

Watching them, I sometimes silently wished to be Jewish. I thought I’d be smarter and more successful, more self-disciplined, maybe even better-looking. I wondered what their secret was.

When the Scaffolding Falls

My family attended the Unitarian Church, where about half the congregants were Jewish. It was a place for people who found religious belief difficult but mostly lived old-time lives. They had families and homes and jobs. Acting on unbelief was to be the fate of my generation.

We didn’t read the Bible in Unitarian Sunday school. The closest I ever came to a Bible was was a children’s version in a doctor’s office. It wasn’t until college that I heard great sacred music, sitting in the audio room of Schoenberg Hall, named after the Jewish refugee composer Arnold Schoenberg.

My parents believed in liberal politics, not religion. My father, who went from a Connecticut dairy farm boy to an Oberlin philosophy major, described himself as agnostic. He said life was a mystery.

He’d often bellow about “the meaning of meaning,” a phrase coined by one of his professors. He never explained what the professor had meant, which would have made me laugh had he not been so serious.

He said that his parents, refugees from Eastern Europe, said “Slava Bogu” (Slavic for Glory to God or Thank God), but they did not attend church. Nor did they talk about the Old Country; it seemed as if the memories were too horrible to recount.

I never found the Unitarian way very useful. In my twenties, bewildered by the chaos of the ‘60s and ‘70s, I converted to Christianity.

For the first time, I read the Bible. I attended church three times a week. (I had to, because I was the pianist.)

I was astonished by the beauty, depth, and humor of the Bible. I delighted in discovering the phrases interwoven through so much of great art, music, and thought.

My church welcomed professionals in their 20s and 30s, people who read the Bible for themselves and tried to evaluate it with modern eyes. The pastors were curious and studious, and weren’t afraid to challenge widely held conceptions — for example, on the submission of women — based on their reading.

We read history. We studied the origins of the post-Christian socialist state. We pondered liberty; as I had always silently suspected, it wasn’t just fireworks on the Fourth of July.

So now I wasn’t just a Christian; I was a conservative. My parents were appalled. They didn’t de-daughter me, but it was a near thing.

Older Eyes

Once you’ve read the Bible, memorized some Proverbs, laughed at Jonah, wondered at Job and Daniel and Elijah, and discovered the 10 Commandments, you’re never quite the same. Many of the Bible’s injunctions and perspective remained with me over the next half-century, even as I divorced, left the church, remarried, re-divorced, changed careers, and behaved, I though, like a modern, complicated person.

Recently, for the first time, I read the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh (what Christians call “the Old Testament” cover to cover, taking it a chapter or two every morning. Each day, I thought about what I had read.

It took me about a year to finish.

The Jewish Bible is a uniquely remarkable collection of works. What unifies them is a documentation of human nature so savagely penetrating that I can’t dismiss it.

Like any thinking person post-Darwin, I struggle between the Bible’s description of a a loving God of all people and the atheist vision of a cold, dark, soulless universe.

For me, the resolution to that anguishing modern dilemma is that evil is like chiaroscuro. It is the shadow that makes colors seem radiant by contrast.

Defining ‘Nazi’ in the Post-Nazi World

I have shown that I am not a Nazi. But in the 21st century, the term “Nazi” has been distorted beyond recognition. It’s simply stupid name-calling — unimaginative, brutish, specious.

Opinions that trigger a Nazi diagnosis by today’s shunners:

• Refusing to glorify the rape, mayhem, torture, illegal imprisonment, and murder committed by the avowedly antisemitic Hamas terror organization during the Oct. 7 invasion of Israel and numerous prior attacks

• P{referring the dealmaker Donald Trump, on balance, to racial-quota-imposing socialists who are so busy milking taxpayers for dubious under-the-table NGOs that they couldn’t negotiate their way out of a T-shirt

• Believing that America’s military and economic power can be used to control chaos and aggression

• Opposing coercion as a fundamental government policy

• Believing that all men are equal regardless of skin color

• Believing that women’s sports are for biological women

• Believing that laws should be enforced equally

• Believing in agency

• Abhorring elective abortion

Who’s the Nazi Now?

Lumping these widely held American beliefs under a “Nazi” label is specious, the equivalent of the drunken ravings of Huck Finn’s father.

As for who are the Nazis today, consider:

• Who vows to destroy Israel and all Jews?

As for who is a settler and colonialist:

• Which migrants say that Americans should follow Sharia law?

As for what constitutes evil behavior in general:

• Who was Cain? Who was Abraham? What are the Ten Commandments?

America is an amazing place; you’re free to read and think for yourself, to ask questions, to change your mind. In only a few times in history has this been true.

So happy reading, and remember: You don’t catch Nazism (or totalitarianism of any flavor) by staying curious.

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After 25 years working as a journalist in the brutal noise of Manhattan, I was thrilled to settle in a leafy street in Greenwich. But the idyllic quiet I hoped for turned out to be a dream.

From morning to evening, lawnmowers shatter the calm of spring and summer days.

Fall brings on leaf-blowers, even worse.

The noise is depressing, like being in a dentist’s chair on an airport runway.

Going inside gives no respite; the sound penetrates through walls and closed windows.

Night workers like police, firefighters, and health-care workers can’t sleep during the day.

The Town of Greenwich has noise limits, but only readings taken by licensed decibel readers are considered valid.

The machine noise is unbearable in expansive Back Country estates as much as in the pocket lawns of downtown.

They massacre every leaf of every lawn and rather than let the green dissolve into nitrogen they cart it off the to dump, in defiance of town guidance.

Silent robotic electric lawnmowers are available. An Old Greenwich entrepreneur demonstrated a Swedish one on the spacious Town Hall lawn and confided his amazement that gas-powered mowers were still used in Greenwich.

For decades, Greenwich residents have tried to stop the leaf blowers and mowers. Remarkably, the landscaping companies argued that a ban would violate their right to work.

What about residents’ rights to quiet enjoyment?

When COVID-19 forced families to work at home, the issue took on fresh urgency. A nonprofit group, Quiet Yards Greenwich, documented the damage of noise and gas.

Endless committee hearings reviewed the proposal. At last a few extra limits to hours were adopted.

A sad end to a valiant effort.

The workers aren’t benefiting from the machines. Often, they lack ear protection. Landowners are reluctant to pay them much, so the workers band together to charge higher prices.

It’s comical to see sturdy young men riding a gas-powered lawnmower to scalp a small lawn weekly. Raking isn’t so hard! Even I can do it. But even a Luddite might agree that silent electrical machines would improve everyone’s mood.

Meanwhile, everybody suffers. Greenwich changes slowly.

My parents and grandparents had narrow escapes. Today I’m remembering all the people who didn’t.

Grandpa Elmer Bame taught riding to a cavalry troop in North Carolina. One day, his horse threw him and he was injured so badly that he had to stay behind when the rest of the men went on to France. Every single man died.

My grandpa Andrew Kucharczyk and Stella Mielowicz, left Eastern Europe in the years before the Communist coup in 1917. Hundreds of millions of their countrymen died in the torture chambers and starvation campaigns of Lenin and Stalin.

My father, John Kenner, was too young to be drafted until the final year of WWII. He was sent to Alaska by Army Intelligence; already we were fighting the Cold War.

My mother, Mildred Bame Kenner, managed to avoid the fatal infections in the Pacific Theater while working as a nurse in Hawaii during WWII.

I am grateful to be alive. Thanks to my grandparents and parents for doing their duty. Hats off to all their relatives, friends, and peers who died before I was born.

But my friendly coin dealer wasn’t having any. He’s buying nothing but Eagle coins. The usual buyers — industry, mints, and jewelers — don’t have the capacity to handle the inflow.

Never before has he turned away sellers.

You would have thought that the round number, $100, occasioned the overflow. Oddly, the glut began back in October 2025, when silver was going for around a mere $48 an ounce.

To be sure, that was up from $28 at the end of 2024. A double-plus bagger evidently encouraged some unloading.

My dealer suggested that I enjoy my silver for a few weeks and check back. I countered that the glut would bring down the price. He wasn’t so sure.

Will the silver-buyers’ boycott drive down prices permanently? Will an enterprising broker step in to bridge the gap?

Or will macro risk repricing keep driving silver up?

Sellers like me may be able to persuade a dealer to buy a single coin. To cover a nice lunch, say. As a favor. But 50? He’ll say no.

Being arrogant enough to believe myself among the few who saw the opportunity, I bought a mining stock targeted by Goldman Sachs for a 100% gain.

The stock rose. Then swooned. I sold.

It quickly rose past the earlier high. I bought again. It tumbled below where I had sold the first time.

Greed had led me to forget old investment wisdom. Such as a warning against trying to get even, from Max Gunther’s 1985 “The Zurich Axioms.” Entitled “Stubbornness”, the 11th Major Axiom accurately describes what was wrong with my trading:

If it doesn’t pay off the first time, forget it.

I also should have remembered advice from Nick Colas, head of DataTrekResearch, who made his bones at Credit Suisse and Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital. It’s his job, he explained years ago, to know things before they land in the media.

Meaning that if someone is giving tips to news outlets, he is looking after his own interests more than yours.

On Oct. 2, a full week before China’s announcement, Hugh Hendry wrote a Substack on volatility risk in mining stocks:

When gold gets moving, miners can shoot up like a SpaceX rocket. But here’s the problem: they fall back to earth even faster. And every time they fall, they damage your portfolio’s ability to compound.

People underestimate this. Volatility isn’t just about day-to-day swings. It’s about recovery from deep drawdowns, the patience to see out long recoveries, and what I call investment scar tissue. The more of those you collect, the harder it is to build wealth over time.”

Too bad I didn’t read Hendry’s column for two weeks.

It takes me back to the spring of 2000. I was in a taxi, and the driver was extolling Cisco Systems, which had already embarked on what turned out to be an 89% slide from its March 2000 peak. Victor Niederhoffer and I had been documenting the bust of the Internet stars, and I warned the driver he might want to sell.

No, he insisted. Cisco was a great stock. It would go up.

Cisco had been a star of the boom, rising 166,666% from its 1990 IPO. It was briefly the most valuable stock in the world by market cap. But from 2002 to 2017, it traded in a funk between $20 and $30. Today, it’s making post-bubble highs, but it’s still in the low $70s.

Depending on where they got in, the opportunity cost for Cisco believers was horrendous.

So much for the warnings of wise old traders. The mid-20s have a fresh, distinctive flavor. Like it or not, President Trump’s full-throttle (BTTW) international deal-making diplomacy is a wildly unpredictable risk for individual investors.

It makes wonderful drama. It’s like the cascading revelations in the Marriage of Figaro’s hilarious sextet. (Sua madre?!?)

One week, the U.S. is done for. Tech swoons. No more metals for iPhones? OMG.

The following week, Japan, Australia Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia are in supply agreements with the U.S. After a visit from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, even China sounds conciliatory and delays the controls for a year.

Tech zooms, everybody is happy again.

I spent many hours researching mining stocks, but how was I to know?

Hendry also observed that rare metals are mined in the U.S., then shipped to China to be refined. (Sua madre?!?!?)

My next thought was to buy mining equipment stocks. The people who got rich in California’s Gold Rush weren’t miners; they sold picks, shovels, pans, and groceries.

On third thought, maybe it’s best to resist buying into something with heavy government involvement. If you sup with the devil, you had better bring a long spoon.

I started talking to Grok 3 last week about some health problems. After just a couple of sessions I came to think of AI as a super-helpful genius friend who doesn’t mind long chats, probing questions, or boring tasks.

My problem is super-high glucose and low calcium, both common in 70++ women. I don’t have any of the dietary habits typically associated with diabetes, but with my outrageous numbers, doctors pressed me to take more and more prescription drugs. After several months, I stopped them all because of debilitating respiratory side effects that kept me from exercise and social contact.

In the back of my mind, I knew I still had to fix my problem. I started listening to some heavyweight academic experts on cellular biology: Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Benjamin Bikman, Dr. Casey Means, and the Glucose Goddess. They gave me lots of ideas.

One idea was to use a continuous glucose monitor to see what was going on. I found an over-the-counter, no-subscription CGM. It sat in the box for a couple of weeks while I worked up the courage to stick it on.

I finally did it last week. It didn’t hurt.

For days, the reading remained stuck at >200, way into diabetes territory.

So I decided to ask Grok 3 to create a food table listing carb and calcium content. I had given up on previous attempts after hours of effort. In some cases, the data differ wildly. It’s hard to reconcile different data sets and recalculate everything to my serving sizes. Many information sources are dominated by listings of processed foods that I never eat anyway.

Grok 3 searched multiple university and government sources and in a blink gave me a list of foods, sorted by group.

Now that I had data, I wanted a table to post on my fridge door. I have always thought of counting the whatever in my food as excruciatingly boring. But I was determined to get my numbers down rather than to submit to further indignities at the hands of doctors.

Grok 3 taught me the prompt for a table. I gave it a bulleted list of the foods I eat regularly or wouldn’t mind trying. In an instant, I had my table.

Wow. But how would I print it out? Who better to ask than Grok3?

My new table, which Grok 3 can update instantly if I give it new data, is now on my fridge door. I use scratch pad for my daily counts.

I trimmed my daily carb intake to 20-50 mg, which is super-low. But the CGM reading remained stuck at >200.

Once more, I turned to Grok 3.

Grok 3 asked a bunch of questions about my habits: daily carb intake, alcohol use, exercise.

It suggested tweaks to my diet. For instance, the 8 oz of kefir that would have given me an easy 390 mg of calcium was also giving me 11 g of carbs — more than half of my daily limit. It suggested a 4 oz portion.

After more questions, Grok 3 determined that it wasn’t my diet that was keeping my glucose level sky-high: it was long-term chronic stress. In plain English, it explained that the stress-hormone cortisol orders up glucose to fight threats. The hormone is so powerful that my body will make glucose out of protein and fat if cortisol demands it.

That was good information: my main job was mastering stress. If I could manage that, while keeping to my diet, cutting alcohol to zero, and exercising daily, my cortisol “trigger points” would start to reset in a couple of months.

That session left me feeling in charge. A minute afterward, I was amazed to see my first-ever reading: 183! I rushed back to my PC to tell Grok3.

How do I say this? The AI kind of patted me on the back and cheered me on.

Yesterday, I took a walk on the beach and was thrilled to see my glucose reading fall to 120.

(It rose back to >200 at bedtime, but I am determined to be patient with myself while I reset.)

Meanwhile, I am grateful to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his daily health missives on X! His very first post was about how walking after dinner can reduce blood sugar!

My doctors, even the best ones, have nowhere near enough time to explain the cellular biology behind my health, or to analyze what isn’t working for me. As a Feb. 23 article in The Wall Street Journal noted, patients don’t trust their doctors as much as they used to. They don’t feel listened to.

Seniors, don’t be afraid of AI!

Jordan Peterson, who is hosting a series of discussions on the Gospels, points out that the very first miracle Jesus performed was turning water into wine (John 2:1-11).

As the world prepares to imbibe in celebration of the New Year, it strikes me as curious that such an important event as the first miracle produced wine.

Was Jesus endorsing wine?

Some scholars do draw parallels between Bacchus and Jesus.

I looked up the Bible passage. John doesn’t actually say that Jesus turned the water into wine. Rather, He directed the servants to fill large jugs with water, and then to take a cup to the host, who found it superb.

But maybe what the host found so enjoyable was water. Not wine.

When my son and I went out for had Christmas Eve dinner, we ordered water. It was delicious. Better than wine. No hangover.

Maybe Jesus, in his hidden character as humorist and Zen master, was telling us to savor what’s really good for us.

This passage from Heather Heying’s year-end review resonates:

We have become a sick, out of shape, and confused people. We accept meds for every perceived ailment, including the ones caused by the last meds. The ingredients in the prepared foods on our grocery store shelves are a toxic brew—far more toxic than the products allowed on the shelves in other countries. Our food pyramid is inverted, and the recommendations coming out of nearly every agency tasked with watching out for our health are the inverse of what healthy people should do. Do not listen to the FDA, the USDA, or the CDC. Instead, eat animal proteins and fats, and produce that has been grown with as little chemical intervention as possible, savoring every single bit. And then do what is free and feels good. Go outside and face the sun. Walk. Form relationships. Touch people, and also grass and water and soil. Be barefoot under a night sky.

Check out Heather’s Substack here.

Wishing all of you a happy, healthy New Year.

Laurel

Agua Limpia Todo

I am so grateful for all of you.

I am against early voting and other unbounded residuals from Covid. Election day should be a civic event where people actually show up.

Nevertheless, I voted early because it’s now part of the political game. Forecasts based on the ratio of early-voting party members make headlines.

Back in the day, networks and wire services traditionally withheld results from the East Coast until after West Coast sites had closed. If a candidate lagged in early results, western voters might stay home. You could call that election interference.

Early voting is election interference on steroids.

The League of Women Voters disagrees, claiming that restrictions on early voting are “particularly devastating” to "voters with disabilities, people of color, indigenous communities, students, young voters, and older adults.” Same with third-party ballot drop-offs, ballet drop boxes and absentee ballots.

That’s a broad statement that no doubt encompasses some genuine hardships, but at a minimum it continues the trend of infantilizing people of color. As for young voters, getting to the polls on time is part of growing up. Older adults are more clever than they’re given credit for. Workers have extended voting hours so they won’t have to take miss work, if an employer is so boorish as to deny a couple of hours off.

Democrats pushed for broader use of absentee ballots during Covid, but they didn’t stop there. In Connecticut and elsewhere, you don’t even need ID now. You can just sign a statement saying that you are somebody on the registration checklist.

From a March 22, 2022 LWW blog: “COVID-19 brought pain, loss, and loneliness, but in the case of our democracy, it also brought important lessons. We saw firsthand how we could make our democracy available to more voters, honoring the voices of low-income, BIPOC, disabled, and other Americans. We must build on this knowledge and not waste it or use it to restrict the voter further.” (Italics added.)

Whenever a politician overuses the term “our democracy” in a maudlin call to justify change that wasn’t on the table before, I remember Soros, who used to say that he counted the coins in his pocket when a potential partner promised honest dealing.

I delete them and report them all as junk. They just keep coming.

Take a hint, comms staffers. Political texting — let’s call it poxting — is invasive. As a social strategy, it’s cringe.

Any political campaign that texts me is not going to get my vote.

Perhaps the landscapers and their clients seek to emulate the grand topiary gardens of Europe. But in suburban settings, little boxwood balls look like green scat.

Aesthetically and practically, they are a perfect match for tiny lawns and sidewalk-to-curb hell strips. They are useless except to provide landscapers another excuse to use their expensive, noisy equipment at regular billable intervals despite the stress to plants (and humans).

It doesn’t take a horticulturist to see that most of Greenwich’s boxwood balls are in terrible shape.

While it’s OK to remove a stray branch here and there, pruners should respect the natural shape of the plant, according to New York Botanical Garden experts. The preferred time to prune a boxwood in the mid-Atlantic region is around March 15.

According to the Chicago Botanic Garden, established boxwoods need little or no pruning. Dead or diseased branches should be removed no matter the season. You should check the interior and base of the plant as well as the exterior.

Shearing, as opposed to pruning nips, reshapes the plant. In other words, it’s the type of carnage practiced by the landscapers of Greenwich. Shearing causes a a lot of stress to the plant and can cause dieback.

If you are determined to shear your boxwood, don’t cut off more than 3/4 inch, and do it in June — never past mid-August. If you shear boxwood in autumn, the new growth encouraged by the cuts will die when the temperature drops, weakening the plant’s defenses to disease. The gardens of Greenwich were abuzz with boxwood shearing this autumn, courtesy of the landscaping services.

Experts say the top of the plant should be narrower than the bottom, so that the sun can reach all parts — the opposite of the Greenwich landscaper practice.

Branches at the outer edge should be thinned so that sunlight can pass into the interior. To thin or cut deadwood, you need to get inside the plant. I’d really enjoy seeing our local landscapers use an electric trimmer inside a tiny boxwood ball. Does that make me a bad person?

If you do thinning yourself, wear safety glasses. Nothing like a twiggy poke in the eye.

Some landscapers, always oblivious to recommended practice, apply the lollipop technique to all trees and shrubs. I sometimes take classes from Plant Amnesty, an organization founded by the late Cass Turnbull to teach pruning. One landscape renovation specialist said she once discovered a magnolia bush that had been pruned into a ball. The poor thing hadn’t bloomed in years. I’ve seen maple balls and crabapple balls around town.

Truth is, carving boxwood or anything else into a ball is bad for the plant. Deprived of light and air, the plant dies from within.

Anyway, with the exception of blight-causing fungi, living creatures aren’t great fans of boxwood balls. Would you enjoy sitting in a boxwood ball garden?

The funniest sight of all: boxwood scat dressed up in burlap for winter.

Why not just let the poor little boxwoods grow into a hedge? At then least they would be a natural barrier and provide an amusing shelter for birds.

I say, dig them all up, along with the hell strips and the tiny lawns. Replace them with plants that are beautiful instead of weird.

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That was one of the big questions I had for Sally Davies, chair of the Greenwich Recycling Advisory Board.

But I had an even bigger question.

Why, I wondered, do Greenwich residents actually like to go to the dump? It’s not like it costs a lot to use a trash service. Anyway, Greenwich has the word “affluent” stuck in front of it with glue.

So why would Mary Bishop, an Old Greenwich social maven, have a weekly date with her husband at the Holly Hill dump? Why are the Bishops on first-name terms with Dexter, who makes sure nobody dumps things in the wrong place? Why does my former neighbor Meredith Sampson, an Audubon bird expert, look for books on wildlife at the dump library?

Yes, the Greenwich dump has a library.

I was curious about these stories, but hesitant to go see for myself. In Southern California, where I’m from, dumps weren’t destinations.

The closest one to my home in Santa Monica was a 500-acre pile in the Sepulveda pass separating the beach towns and Westwood from the San Fernando Valley. I drove up there once with my father, and found it necessary to hold my nose. It was scary to speculate on what might lie in those gigantic heaps of rubbish. Bodies? Toxic chemicals? Who knew?

At a BackCountry Jazz concert, I found myself between Sally Davies and the head of Greenwich Green and Clean. When Sally found out that after three years in Greenwich I was still scared of the town dump, she offered to show me around.

So, one summer morning we headed for the dump, properly known as the Holly Hill Resource Recovery Facility.

A guard waved us in.

The first thing I noticed is how organized everything is. Neat little lawns and trees border the roads. Signs point visitors to the various areas.

Near the entrance is a Goodwill trailer. At the next stop, you can heave recyclables like cardboard and bottles over a railing into a trench.

Following the arrows, you find places for food waste, cloth, yard trimmings, broken appliances, dead batteries, and outright trash.

Volunteers talk about past finds — a $500 mountain bike, gas grills in their original packaging. I didn’t see anything like that, but I did see some secret treasures that no one would expect at a dump.

In addition to being a major social spot, the Holly Hill dump is also a sculpture garden. You can see fanciful orange metal sculptures created by eminent sculptor Michael Manning, who uses recycled materials in his creations.

And then there is the famous library.

Almost no libraries accept used books nowadays, and Greenwich’s book swap is a big draw when it’s open on Friday and Saturday mornings.

Volunteers sort books for distribution to senior centers, resource-strapped schools, and homes for the disabled. Some books are on display, neatly shelved by category in the two book sheds. I was reminded of the used-book stalls along the Seine.

Officially, the library is called the Book Swap. Volunteers will energetically urge you to take some books home.

You may catch some distinguished Greenwich residents there. Among the volunteers accepting donations the day I visited was Alex Voulgaris, who this year became the first female moderator of the Greenwich Representative Town Meeting.

The RTM descended from New England town meetings dating back to the 1630s. At 230 members, it recalls the ancient democratic governing councils of Scandinavia and Iceland. And here was the RTM’s leader, taking in books.

Doug Francefort founded the book swap with his wife, Eleanor, in the 1970s. Lorie Stapleton runs the shed now, and she ferries books in a red Jeep. Janet MacKenzie, a former Greenwich High School English teacher, showed me around.

I also was curious about the town’s single-stream recycling. If you throw cardboard, bottles, cans, and newspapers into the same blue bin, how exactly does everything get sorted out?

Turns out that human hands are part of the process. Greenwich’s take goes to a giant sorting center in Stamford where workers pick through items on a conveyor belt. Sally used to take kids there on tours, but the center is now closed to the public.

The Greenwich Green & Clean website has everything you might possibly need to know about getting rid of stuff, including a Waste Wizard that tells where to put what. There’s even a Waste Wizard QR at the entrance to the dump.

By the way, the dump didn’t smell bad, except for around the food waste bin.

After I saw how easy it was, I started hauling my yard trimmings to the dump in brown-paper lawn bags. In two trips, I’ve saved $150.

Maybe there’s something to Yankee thrift.

Not everything can be taken to Holly Hill. Bottle caps, alas, are unwelcome.

I perused the old accounts, but there were plenty of current examples, too. In the early naughties, when we co-wrote hundreds of financial columns, Nigerian scams came regularly to our inboxes. In delightfully louche English, they invited us to execute wire transfers to release lost funds, with handsome rewards.

Eventually, these pitches became famous and ended up on federal warning lists. I hadn’t seen any for quite a few years. Until a couple of weeks ago. 

It was pretty well done. The email was in decent, albeit imperfect, English. It came from a gentleman who asked me to play for his wedding in December. 

He said a close friend had offered to pay my fee and that I should let him know when the check arrived. 

I said I would be delighted to play at his wedding, and started preparing the music.

Yesterday, he said his friend had inadvertently included the photographer's fee in my check. Today, he phoned me as soon as the check dropped in my mailbox. He pressed in most urgently to deposit the funds, after which he would let me know the Zelle address of the photographer so I could forward him his portion. 

It was almost plausible. Who targets wedding pianists? But my hours in Victor’s library, the bit about forwarded funds, and the fact that the supposed groom had never called me on the phone before put me in mind of the Nigerian scams of bygone days. I couldn’t quite see the rat, but the high pressure was enough to prompt me to tell the fellow that I would not play at his wedding.

I marched straight to the post office to send the check back, noting that check address was a Alabama PO box, but the package had been mailed from Florida. 

When I picked my brilliant son up at school, he immediately identified it as a scam and said the check would have bounced. Not only would I have never seen a dime of my fee, I would have been out the photographer’s fee, about a year's average salary in Nigeria. 

I can't help but admire the enterprise of someone who aspires to take a bite of the grand spending on Greenwich weddings. Still, it’s pretty low to target a hapless pianist. 

At least I now have a repertoire of wedding music.

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Among the stranger landscaping sights of Greenwich are the narrow strips of lawn between curb and sidewalk. Most are 5 feet wide, but they can be as slim as 18 inches. The Town owns these bits of real estate and has seeded them with grass.

Supposedly residents care for the grass. In practice, the weeds have won. My friend Martina Doshan, president of the Garden Club of Old Greenwich, calls these narrow pieces of lawn “hell strips” — because they look like hell.

Because of another weird Greenwich thing — the use of gas-powered landscaping equipment — it’s a common and ludicrous sight to see men riding lawnmowers down the little strips, making lots of noise and wafting gas fumes.

If you didn’t know better, you could almost be fooled into thinking the result was grass instead of clover, dandelion, plantain, violets, and quitch grass.

I used to mow my strip every few weeks with a push mower. Once I got busy and asked my neighbor’s landscaper to do mine. He demanded $30 for my 5x30 strip.

When the Town decided to replace the curbs this summer, they dug up the hell strips too.

Suddenly, I had a blank slate.

l piled on topsoil and compost. Then I planted perennials — Black-Eyed Susan, milkweed, anise hyssop, hibiscus, red coneflower, purple sage, butterfly bush, goldenrod, yarrow, false sunflower.

I put in rosemary, hoping it would last through winter. Oregano proved a fast-spreading groundcover.

Nothing too tall, so as not to block the view of neighbors backing out of driveways.

The planting took me a weekend. As I worked, covered with dirt and sweat pouring down my face, passersby made funny comments:

• “Is that legal?”

• “Hard work.”

• “Where are people going to step when they get out of their cars?”

But often, “Beautiful!”

One neighbor said some folks on nearby Connecticut Avenue had beat me to it. I walked over to take a look and was inspired by their flourishing sedum and native grasses. I planted some ‘Autumn Fire’ sedum and little bluestem grass. A couple of weekends ago I added some annuals: marigolds and yellow chrysanthemums.

I wasn't too concerned about foot traffic, given that only three cars will fit along my curb. Not exactly Yankee Stadium. I put in some steppingstones, though, for people to cut through the bed.

I water almost daily to help the plants take root before winter. They’re all drought-resistant, so they won’t need much water in coming years. Most are thriving in the full sun.

The bees took to the new microenvironment immediately. All day long, they drink nectar from the dusky purple spike flowers of the anise hyssop.

I’m still experimenting. I’ll see which plants overwinter best, and next spring I’ll play with patterns.

Meanwhile, every couple of weeks so I drive up to Sam Bridge Nursery and bring home another plant for my heaven strip constellation.

Have some fun. Dig up your lawn.

Your indefatigable correspondent

The Town of Greenwich, a green oasis an hour from Manhattan, has long tolerated some bizarre landscaping practices.

Every morning except Sunday, pickup trucks begin driving along the Town’s tree-lined streets. The trucks are laden with large gas-powered lawnmowers and, in autumn, leaf blowers.

The trucks park. A few men jump out. They unload the equipment and fire up the engines. The decibel level is said to exceed torture levels. No one can sit outdoors while the machines are in the neighborhood. The noise penetrates walls. There is no escape.

Sadly, that’s not all they do.

The crews spray everything with herbicide and pesticide, ensuring that no birds, bees, or butterflies mar the pristine lawns.

They gather up the grass clippings and haul them to the dump so that none of the nitrogen-rich material can renew the soil.

They blow every smidgen of topsoil and leaves onto neighboring yards or into the street so that drains can’t handle storm runoff.

They carve every shrub into a ball, as Cass Turnbull turns in her grave.

And they use rather too much fertilizer, judging from the algae collecting in Town rivers and ponds .

This is known as “landscaping.”

Everyone loathes the mowing-and-blowing racket and the rest of the lawn business. No one has peace. No one can sit outside when the landscapers are in the neighborhood. The noise penetrates walls, so there is no escape.

The landscapers claim to be protected by right-to-work laws. Apparently, it makes legal sense for landscape companies to exercise their right to drive people crazy.

A Robot Takes a First Step

People can agree on common-sense solutions, and that is what has happened in Greenwich.

It only took 40 local environmental groups, the support of First Selectman Fred Camillo and the other two selectmen, a group of students, a Swedish manufacturer, and one entrepreneurial Norwegian.

The solution to the mower-and-blower problem, a robot named Farmer Joe, made a debut on the Town Hall lawn on Sept. 21, cutting grass in total silence as reporters and local leaders looked on.

Farmer Joe looks like a big red Roomba. Among his wonderful attributes:

— silent

— no gas fumes

— flexible hours

— no workplace injuries

— he remembers everything

— he leaves grass clippings on the ground to restore nitrogen to the soil, lessening the need for fertilizer and landfills

“We love his work ethic,” said Patricia Sesto, the Town’s director of environmental affairs.

Could robots really take over the job of maintaining Greenwich’s 8,000 acres of lawn?

Robotic mowers have been widely used in Europe for years, but this seems to be a first in Connecticut, said Erik Horn, who imports the robotic mowers from Husqvarna, a big Swedish maker of landscaping equipment.

“The technology is here,” Horn said. “Battery-powered equipment will replace all gas-powered equipment.”

Horn emigrated from Norway seven years ago, settling in Old Greenwich. He was so appalled at local landscaping practices that he founded a company, Pyoor, to provide sustainable landscaping services.

A large model like the one being used by the Town runs $3,200, which includes guide-line installation, setup, and charger. A residential version designed for lawns of less than an acre costs $1,800.

With landscaping fees on the rise, a robot could turn out to be economical, even with electricity bills.

“Greenwich residents should be able to breathe clean air and enjoy their properties,” said Jane Brash of Quiet Yards Greenwich, which is seeking to replace gas-powered landscaping with electric mowers and blowers.

Camillo and Selectwoman Janet Stone McGuigan were careful to acknowledge the four Teamsters standing toward the back.

“There’s a lot of work to do here in town,” said Camillo. In 10 years, the robot will seem “so yesterday,” he added.

After the speeches were over, I walked over to ask the Teamsters if they are worried about being put out of work by the robot.

“Somebody’s got to maintain Farmer Joe, said Roger Taranto, business agent of Local 456, which represents 500 municipal workers in Greenwich.

He said he has questions about the mowers, though. “What are we doing with the batteries? I personally see that as a problem going forward.”

The solution to that one: remove the lawns.

Your indefatigable correspondent

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Fireflies

Fireflies start to light up around sunset. At first, they dart around near the ground. As the dusk deepens, they proceed up into he trees.

They don’t mind lawns, but if you use pesticides they will not come to your yard.

I sit on my porch in Greenwich each night to see this spectacle. For me, few entertainments are as fine.

Why do fireflies flicker? It’s a mating dance. As is only right, on a fine summer evening.

Tonight, I went out around 8 o’clock for my nightly transfix. Eventually, a train whistle told me that I had spent an hour on the porch as the fireflies danced and the spiky purple delphiniums grew ever more dark and mysterious.

When I moved from Los Angeles to Princeton in 1994, I took a walk one evening along a brook. I saw fireflies dancing, and knew I was in love with the Northeast.

The nature-starved of Manhattan gather on July nights in Central Park and Battery Park to watch the fireflies light up on lawns and under trees.

July

I planted peas, lettuce, arugula, yellow and green string beans, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, and tomatoes, along with herbs.

Paired with beans from Rancho Gordo, broth from Brodo, and cans of fish with an occasional steak or rib blowout, my vegetable harvests have been feeding me well.

Friends! Eat Your Lawn.

Dead Rabbit

In Manhattan, a legendary bar called the Dead Rabbit serves tasty cocktails, delicious vittles, and fine blues.

In Greenwich, we have no historic bars. But we have had a little run of actual dead rabbits. It’s rumored that one of our neighbors is using a deadly pesticide. One of the dead rabbits ended up in my yard.

At first, I praised my cat up and down as a rabbit slayer. After all, the rabbits eat everything good in the garden. The corpse had appeared under a Japanese maple, near a catnip bush where my cat likes to shelter from the 90 degree July heat.

But when I shoveled the poor little bunny corpse into a bag, I saw no signs of struggle, no blood, no wounds. My cat, while visibly pleased, is not likely to have done the deadly deed.

My question is, how can one approach the subject with neighbors of diverse gardening cultures? The newer houses are strictly of the Mars-landing-pad landscape persuasion, with severe straight rows of arbor vitae that serve no purpose other than privacy.

Some of the older houses are of the “let a thousand weeds grow” persuasion.

Others have the Mosquito Joe flag planted in their gardens.

My faithful readers will no doubt recall my confrontation with the trellis-throwing, border-disputing virago on my western border.

Clearly, this is not a neighborhood for friendly discussion about horticultural methods. And I am merely a renter, which subtracts my cred points to below zero in the suburban milieu.

But I am really, truly, pissed off about the rabbit in my garden, and somebody should speak up.

Renters and Land Rights

I beg a dispensation from my libertarian readers for discussing the injustice of treating renters as without any property rights.

I understand perfectly well that many renters are slovenly wretches and ingrates who blithely run properties into the ground.

But what of the hardship cases who plant gardens, improve properties, and build businesses, only to fall prey to an owner’s determination to seek more profit by destroying all of that work?

You know. A bigger house. A luxury spa. Whatever.

It isn’t right, my friends. I don’t know how I would change it, but it’s got to change.

I have no mechanical knowledge of the incentives. I just know it isn’t right.

Your indefatigable correspondent,

Laurel Kenner

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Biden’s sanctions will have no effect on Putin or his sprawling palaces. The Russian imperialist has a golden guarantee from Comrade Xi (who will certainly collect somewhere out on the squares of his long game).

It’s Russian civilians, not Putin, who suffer. as inflation soars.

In more civilized times, targeting civilians just wasn’t done.

Our leaders believe Ukrainians should do the dirty work of weakening Russia. That’s what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said April 25, after visiting Kyiv.

So we’re sending crummy old weapons to Z and sacrificing Ukrainian civilians. So Russia won’t destroy any more countries.

Yeah, Slavs have always been great workers.

I can’t even begin to comprehend what kind of spirit could advance such a ludicrous idea with a straight face.

Nuclear blackmail is new news. News of such horrific newness that it’s far, far beyond man-bites-dog and good-G-d-Martha-did-you-see-this!

Yet we have become used to the situation in a remarkably short time.

No, we haven’t become used to it; we’re ignoring it. We’re living atop a volcanic cognitive dissonance.

Americans are back to discussing real estate prices. Some of our weirder conservative voices complain that arms makers will make money when weapons sent to Ukraine are replaced in our stockpiles. It’s rumored that Biden is moving to Edgehill, our local la-la complex here in my dear peaceful town of Greenwich.

So the plan seems to be: Let the Ukrainians bleed. Pooh-pooh Putin’s nuclear threats.

Does it continue with Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Moldovans, Finns, Swedes, and Germans? Does it continue with Greenwich, which as I have written is directly in the path of a radiation plume emanating from New York, thanks to the prevailing winds?

Let better minds prevail.

The parallels to today’s Ukraine need not be mentioned.

In January 1968, the Czech leader, Alexander Dubček, started to liberalize the country. But Soviet imperial authorities saw the “Prague Spring” as an attempt to break away.

On Aug. 21, 1968, 500,000 Soviet troops and tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. They arrested political leaders and occupied the capital. The center of protest was Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague, the same good king we sing about in the Christmas carol Good King Wenceslas, which always makes me cry.

Just as in 1938, the West turned its gaze away from the tragedy.

Five days after the invasion, Daniel Barenboim and Du Pré performed with the London Symphony Orchestra to raise funds for the Czechs. Du Pré, at 23, “was at the height of her powers, finding nuances and colors in the concerto that no one had discovered before or since,” writes Tony Woodcock, the future head of the New England Conservatory for Music, then just 17 years old.

The recording of her performance of Dvorak’s cello concerto stayed buried for 30 years.

Its reemergence reminds us “of a genius who could and still does, inspire us with music that comes to us straight from her soul, her Deep Song,” Woodcock wrote.

May she ever be remembered, and may the heroes of Prague and Ukraine never be forgotten.