We Americans have been instructed to burst our buttons with pride over Artemis II’s drive-by of the Moon. But out here in cratering America, far from Mission Control, we remain buttoned-up. This is not due to our skinflint nature or lack of imagination; nah, it’s just that Big Science – “corporate socialism,” as the late parsimonious populist Democratic senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin termed the space program – is spiritless, mechanical and inhuman.
FanDuel and DraftKings ads spice the early spring airwaves, robots deliver their unimpeachable verdicts on human actions and a family of four shells out 500 bucks for parking and tickets to attend a game. Major League Baseball has returned! At least this year MLB scheduled its Opening Day game – a March 25 interleague (yech!) contest between the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants – to be played stateside. Mixing America Last-ism with corporate-culture imperialism, six previous Opening Day games have been played on foreign soil. That other countries might have sports of their own annoys the panjandrums of professional baseball and football, who seek to impose spectatorial homogeneity on a diverse planet.
It’s strange interviewing a friend who is dying, but Karl Zinsmeister is at peace. I met Karl in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1981, when we two Upstate New York hicks were new to the staff of Senator Pat Moynihan. The first thing I learned about him was that he and his girlfriend (and later wife) Ann, while on some do-gooder mission in Africa, had wandered into Tanzania and been held on suspicion of being spies. (They weren’t.) Karl threw himself into both intellectual and manual labor with fierce enthusiasm, doggedness, even hard-headedness. Over the past 45 years he has edited magazines, renovated ruined tenements, been embedded in Iraq, raised three kids, lived with Ann on a houseboat, served as White House chief of domestic policy and produced more than 20 books.
Ah, the indignities of age. Over the past year I’ve suffered significant hearing loss. “Huh?” has become my favorite word and I’ve developed a strange new respect for the loonies who hear voices. Aspiring to stoicism, I informed Lucine, my wife, “When I hit 60 I figured that I was entering a stage in which the physical setbacks, some quite unexpected, would mount. So I told myself that I could either whine about it or I could accept all this with grace and good humor.” Lucine didn’t miss a beat. “Then why have you chosen to whine?” Thanks, dear! I mean no disrespect to the late Freddie Mercury when I say ‘We Will Rock You’ sounds better muffled I confess to the occasional maudlin moment.
I once knew a man so cheap he would call my dad to report that he’d found a nickel on the pavement of the local racetrack’s parking lot. I don’t know if Jim would have stooped to conquer a penny as well – I wouldn’t put it past him – but I like to think he’d join me in lamenting the demise of the American cent, our humblest coin, burked by order of President Donald Trump at the urging of Elon Musk, neither of whom will ever be mistaken for a small-is-beautiful fan. The last Lincoln cent headed for general circulation was struck at the Philadelphia Mint in November last year, ending a 232-year run for my favorite coin.
I suppose the big anniversary event of the coming new year is the semi-quincentennial of the American Revolution. I’m all for celebrating revolution and secession but spare a good thought for the bicentennial we’ll be celebrating hereabouts in 2026: that of the Morgan Affair, featuring betrayal, a possible murder, an enduring mystery and a political eruption whose ejecta would one day help form the Republican party. I’m writing this while sitting on the polished granite bench in the Batavia Cemetery dedicated to my late friend and swimming teacher Catherine Roth, grande dame, who waged a righteously “wrothful” battle against the urban renewers who razed and ruined so much of downtown Batavia, New York, in the 1960s and 1970s. (Greatest Generation my ass!
The magnificent Griffith Park Observatory turned 90 this year and, as fans of nonagenarians, my wife and I hiked up the south slope of Mount Hollywood – well, our rental car did the hard work – to pay our respects. The city of Los Angeles sprawled out before us; the Hollywood sign loomed ominously above us. I suppose I should hate this city, the Typhoid Mary of cultural imperialism, infecting and deadening imaginations from Bangor to Bend. As Morrissey crooned: “We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/ London is dead.” But I dunno: it’s my wife’s hometown, I love her Armenian relatives and I’ve always been a sucker for the movies, at least in their pre-CGI, pre-Marvel, pre-woke, pre-franchise age.
By the time we got to Woodstock… actually, we never got to Woodstock. Bethel, the town in which the fabled festival of mud and myth took place, is about 50 miles as the crow flies from the famous musical happening’s eponym, and it was at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts that we saw and heard Neil Young in the waning days of summer, when melancholy always spices the air. It boggles the mind that half a million kids – the youngest of whom are now hoary-headed septuagenarians – flooded Sullivan County on a rain-soaked weekend in August 1969, but it is almost as remarkable that despite the drugs and unhygienic conditions, only three concertgoers died.
Batavia, New York Election Day in New York just ain’t the same anymore, thanks to nepo numbskulls George W. Bush and Andrew Cuomo. Though I always vote for longshots and losers, radicals and reactionaries, I have such happy memories of early November Tuesdays. Mr. Milward, dressed as Uncle Sam, would tour the polling places of my hometown, benign and reassuring in a way that his model — the autocratic “I Want You!” martinet — was not. When I was a tyke, I trailed my mother as she cast a 1964 ballot for LBJ. The gray-haired election inspectors panicked — “There’s a child in the voting booth!” — but my violation of polling-place etiquette paled in comparison to Landslide Lyndon’s stolen US Senate election of 1948.
“A house for sale is not a home,” says Wendell Berry, which is perhaps why we have delayed putting our home up for sale as we slowly move, box by box, the five short – long? – miles down the road to the house my grandfather built in 1938. We are moving from Chapel Street to Bank Street, which I trust does not indicate a moral demotion from my lofty spiritual perch to the world of grubby materialism. I know for certain it does not augur riches. We are holding off on selling our Chapel Street home till we’ve cleared it out and are fully moved into Bank, though I nurture a ridiculous hope that before then I might unearth a rusted coffee can filled with 19th-century gold pieces that will enable us to keep both.
Another pigskin season kicks off, and despite the multitudinous sins committed against the game and its culture by ESPN, university presidents, major conference commissioners, take-the-money-and-run athletes and other votaries of Mammon, I’m once again giving it the old college try. Which is why I picked up my copy of Lindy’s College Football Preview the other day. (Lindy’s ranks my local team, the University of Buffalo Bulls, 85th in nation –we’re movin’ on up!) It’s a frustrating time to be a college football fan. Tradition is sacked by the almighty buck, as it typically is in the land of the dollar bill, and healthy sentiments and institutional affections are warped, processed and sold back to us in tawdry and expensive packages.
I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal She’s a good old worker and a good old pal Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal I’ve a pal named Sal – he’s no mule, alas – but it’s only a 15-mile trip for me, too, up Route 98 to the Erie Canal, which turns 200 years old this October 26. I while away the occasional summer morn sitting by its banks, editing or writing or reading, coffee washing the donuts down my maw. I love the old canal town of Albion (where perfidy has no place!), its tumbledown Main Street blessed by the silver-domed Orleans County Courthouse. The Upstate New York folklorist Carl Carmer grew up here, as did the sleeping car magnate George Pullman.
Before venturing to the North Park Theatre in Buffalo to catch a one-night-only showing of Blues Run the Game: The Strange Tale of Jackson C. Frank, the new documentary about the Queen City’s doomed native-son folksinger, I shared Frank’s most famous number, “Blues Run the Game,” with our friend Pat. “That could be the saddest song I’ve ever heard,” she said. Yet Frank wrote it during his very brief wine, women and musical heyday. One shudders to imagine what he composed as an obese, one-eyed, homeless paranoid-schizophrenic. Frank’s western New York contemporary, the novelist John Gardner, said that “art begins in a wound, an imperfection, and is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal it.
I highly recommend Homestand, Will Bardenwerper’s new book contrasting the community-enhancing qualities of grass-roots baseball with the soulless corporate product that Major League Baseball has become – and it’s not just because I am a central character therein. The book is at once a beautiful portrait of bleacher-level society and a scathingly effective indictment of the automatons who are destroying the American game. Will spent the summer of 2022 in and around Dwyer Stadium, home of the Batavia Muckdogs, an independent team of college ballplayers. This amateur ball club was the feisty successor to professional teams that had graced our fair city since 1939.
Batavia, New York Fifty-five years after his Vietnam-era military service ended, Russ Benzin remains haunted. Not, thank God, by memories of the state-sanctioned mass murder that is war, but by a seemingly intractable and feral military dog he came to love. I met Russ years ago in the third-base bleachers at Dwyer Stadium, where we whiled away many summers watching a set of trained canines – the Batavia Muckdogs of the (now defunct or, rather, exterminated) New York-Penn League. In the manner of ballpark friendships, ours developed over the years: from nodding acquaintance to grumbling exchanges (“why the hell didn’t the third-base coach send that guy?”) to friendship.
"Giant Asteroid" has been a popular also-ran in the last three presidential elections, at least judging from bumper stickers, and those wiseacres who preferred planetary annihilation to Hillary, Biden, Kamala and Trump may finally get their wish in 2032, when the newly discovered asteroid 2024 YR4 has — according to current calculations, liable to change — about a 3 percent chance of hitting Earth. The geekoisie has been all a-twitter over this forecast, as visions of tsunamis and extinction-level events and the hot astrophysicists who adorn disaster movies dance in their heads.
Batavia, New York I bear no ill will against golfers — I triple-bogey easy holes and miss gimme putts with the worst of them — but President Trump’s demand that we eliminate Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a double eagle out of the blue, especially as Trump had earlier advocated a move to year-round DST. Although Benjamin Franklin is often credited as its progenitor, the real father of Daylight Saving Time, according to Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward, was the golfing British architect William Willett, who deplored “the waste of daylight.” The British Royal Astronomer dismissed Willett’s idea with the counterproposal that “between the months of October and March the thermometer should be put up ten degrees.
"You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come," sang Bruce Springsteen many moments ago. But sometimes it comes and catches you off guard. Perhaps once a decade you are gifted a sentence begging completion or a question inviting the perfect answer, and if you don’t spit out the mot juste you spend the rest of the day cursing on the staircase, pained by a bad case of l’esprit de l’escalier. (And that about exhausts my C-minus college French.) You never know when or wherefrom these pitches are coming. I doubt that even Oscar Wilde could hit much above .500 in this league. I’m probably closer to Cornel Wilde, but I have driven a few into the gaps. Let me explain. Last spring I was toting a garden-shop tray that my wife was filling with plants.
Batavia, New York I sit in hospice at the bedside of my beloved Aunt Jane — who never let us use the honorific, as “Aunt” made the perennially youthful Jane feel old — and the jukebox in my mind plays its saddest song: “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention. Jane, who is eighty-nine and till a few weeks ago looked twenty-five years younger, was my hip and happening aunt of the 1960s who lived in Buffalo and dated pro athletes and bopped along to WKBW’s Top 40. She taught my brother and me to write letters, which is why I still have an autographed photo of Minnesota Vikings kicker Fred Cox, and my brother has his signed picture of Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel.
Once again, high-school gyms across America resound with the thump-thump of balls dribbled on hardwood floors, the clang of three-point bricks bouncing off steel rims and the rubber-soled roar of twenty sneaker-clad feet running up and down the court. Yes, basketball is back — and I curse the imagination-deprived standardizers who succeeded thirty years ago in banishing four additional feet from roundball courts in the Hawkeye State. Iowa, the historic hotbed of girls’ basketball, is hailed today for producing the superb Caitlin Clark, but for most of the twentieth century its hundreds of small-town bandbox gymnasiums were alive with the wonderfully idiosyncratic sporting variant known as six-on-six basketball.
