I am in Auckland now, having arrived tired but safe around eighteen hours ago,
And I think this is the perfect time to write about the power, I guess, of writing.
Somehow, through the magic of the internet, I attracted a reader or two in New Zealand. And somehow, along the way, one of these readers, Terry Levenberg, and I have become friends.
Terry and I became internet friends. Which isn't creepy because we've led strangely parallel lives.
Terry is married, has two kids in their 20s and has toiled in the advertising industry for at least two decades. A lot like me.
Terry and his wife visited New York last fall, and we tried to meet up with them, but I was out in LA shooting and things never worked out.
However, mensch that he is, when he found out through Ad Aged that my daughter Hannah was taking a semester in Auckland, Terry and his wife and his two kids have fairly adopted Hannah as their sister from another mister.
They've shown her the sights in and around Auckland. Invited her over for Passover. And even given her their old "New Yorker" magazines so Hannah doesn't feel so far from New York.
Yesterday, Terry and Hannah picked me and my wife up at the Auckland airport. He drove us to the top of One Tree Hill where we could get an overview of the configuration of the city and the surrounding islands. He took us to his office--he runs an agency here called Apropos--and finally to his lovely home and to our hotel.
On the one hand this all makes sense.
We share a religion.
A having worked at Ogilvy.
And we're roughly the same age.
On the other hand we live almost 9,000 miles apart (that's a greater distance than the #1 train covers) and would never have met if it weren't for the odd binary beaming of what I write in this space.
It's all making it very hard for me to be a misanthrope.
