My friend, Joseph Mitchell.

"The New Yorker," yes, the New Yorker, has a short piece in this week's issue by my favorite writer, the late Joseph Mitchell.

Mitchell worked at the magazine for nearly 60 years but spent the last 30 years or so not publishing anything. For whatever reason, the magazine's editors accepted his lack of production and his presence in the office.

For the last few months or so, some pages of Mitchell's unfinished and unpublished memoir have been unearthed and the New Yorker has taken to printing short pieces. Last night, I read this week's installment, three pages of his third chapter called "A Place of Pasts."

Whenever I feel like I can't write, which happens, I turn to Mitchell. He seems to cut to the heart of the matter, to banish superfluity and to get the job done. He is plain, honest and clear.

The piece just published in the New Yorker wasn't my favorite of his. But here it is. You'll feel better, I think, for reading it.

A Place of Pasts

Finding worlds in the city.

BY JOSEPH MITCHELL

Joseph Mitchell was born in 1908 into a prosperous family of North Carolina cotton and tobacco growers. At the age of twenty-one, he came to New York City to pursue a career as a writer, and he started contributing to this magazine four years later. In the late sixties and the early seventies, he began writing a memoir. What follows was intended to be the third chapter but was never finished.

In the fall of 1968, without at first realizing what was happening to me, I began living in the past. These days, when I reflect on this and add up the years that have gone by, I can hardly believe it: I have been living in the past for over twenty years—living mostly in the past, I should say, or living in the past as much as possible.

And now, right away, before I go any further, I must interrupt myself and say that I am not entirely satisfied with the phrase “living in the past” as a description of my way of life—it makes me sound like some kind of sad old recluse—but living in the past is the closest I can come to it; I hope that my meaning will become clearer as I go along.

In my time, I have known quite a few of the worlds and the worlds within worlds of which New York City is made up, such as the world of the newspapers, the world of the criminal courts, the world of the museums, the world of the racetracks, the world of the tugboat fleets, the world of the old bookstores, the world of the old left-behind churches down in the financial district, the world of the old Irish saloons, the world of the old Staten Island oyster ports, the world of the party-boat piers at Sheepshead Bay, and the worlds of the city’s two great botanical gardens, the Botanical one in the Bronx and the Botanic one in Brooklyn. 

As a reporter and as a curiosity seeker and as an architecture buff and as a Sunday walker and later on as a member of committees in a variety of Save-this and Save-that and Friends-of-this and Friends-of-that organizations and eventually as one of the commissioners on the Landmarks Preservation Commission, I have known some of these worlds from the inside. Even so, I have never really felt altogether at home in any of them. And I have always felt at home in the Fulton Fish Market.And I should also say that when I say the past I mean a number of pasts, a hodgepodge of pasts, a spider’s web of pasts, a jungle of pasts: my own past; my father’s past; my mother’s past; the pasts of my brothers and sisters; the past of a small farming town geographically misnamed Fairmont down in the cypress swamps and black gum bottoms and wild magnolia bays of southeastern North Carolina, a town in which I grew up and from which I fled as soon as I could but which I go back to as often as I can and have for years and for which even at this late date I am now and then all of a sudden and for no conscious reason at all heart-wrenchingly homesick; the pasts of several furnished-room houses and side-street hotels in New York City in which I lived during the early years of the Depression, when I was first discovering the city, and that disappeared one by one without a trace a long time ago but that evidently made a deep impression on me, for every once in a while the parlor or the lobby of one of them or my old room in one of them turns up eerily recognizable in a dream; the pasts of a number of speakeasies, diners, greasy spoons, and drugstore lunch counters scattered all over the city that I knew very well in the same period and that also have disappeared and that also turn up in dreams; the pasts of a score or so of strange men and women—bohemians, visionaries, obsessives, impostors, fanatics, lost souls, gypsy kings and gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks—whom I got to know and kept in touch with for years while working as a newspaper reporter and whom I thought of back then as being uniquely strange, only-one-of-a-kind-in-the-whole-world strange, but whom, since almost everybody has come to seem strange to me, including myself, I now think of, without taking a thing away from them, as being strange all right, no doubt about that, but also as being stereotypes—as being stereotypically strange, so to speak, or perhaps prototypically strange would be more exact or archetypically strange or even ur-strange or maybe old-fashioned pre-Freudian-insight strange would be about right, three good examples of whom are (1) a bearded lady who was billed as Lady Olga and who spent summers out on the road in circus sideshows and winters in a basement sideshow on Forty-second Street called Hubert’s Museum, and who used to be introduced to audiences by sideshow professors as having been born in a castle in Potsdam, Germany, and being the half sister of a French duke but who I learned to my astonishment when I first talked with her actually came from a farm in a county in North Carolina six counties west of the county I come from and who loved this farm and started longing to go back to it almost from the moment she left it at the age of twenty-one to work in a circus but who made her relatives uncomfortable when she went back for a visit (“ ‘How long are you going to stay’ was always the first question they asked me,” she once said) and who finally quit going back and from then on thought of herself as an exile and spoke of herself as an exile (“Some people are exiled by the government,” she would say, “and some are exiled by the po-lice or the F.B.I. or the head of some old labor union or the Mafia or the Black Hand or the K.K.K., but I was exiled by my own flesh and blood”), and who became a legend in the sideshow world because of her imaginatively sarcastic and sometimes imaginatively obscene and sometimes imaginatively brutal remarks about people in sideshow audiences delivered deadpan and sotto voce to her fellow-freaks grouped around her on the platform, and (2) a street preacher named James Jefferson Davis Hall, who also came up here from the South and who lived in what he called sackcloth-and-ashes poverty in a tenement off Ninth Avenue in the Forties and who believed that God had given him the ability to read between the lines in the Bible and who also believed that while doing so he had discovered that the end of the world was soon to take place and who also believed that he had been guided by God to make this discovery and who furthermore believed that God had chosen him to go forth and let the people of the world know what he had discovered or else supposing he kept this dreadful knowledge to himself God would turn his back on him and in time to come he would be judged as having committed the unforgivable sin and would burn in Hell forever and who consequently trudged up and down the principal streets and avenues of the city for a generation desperately crying out his message until he wore himself out and who is dead and gone now and long dead and gone but whose message remembered in the middle of the night (“It’s coming! Oh, it’s coming!” he would cry out. “The end of the world is coming! Oh, yes! Any day now! Any night now! Any hour now! Any minute now! Any second now!”) doesn’t seem as improbable as it used to, and (3) an old Serbian gypsy woman named Mary Miller—she called herself Madame Miller—whom I got to know with the help of an old-enemy-become-old-friend of hers, a retired detective in the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, and whom I visited a number of times over a period of ten years in a succession of her ofisas, or fortune-telling parlors, and who was fascinating to me because she was always smiling and gentle and serene, an unusually sweet-natured old woman, a good mother, a good grandmother, a good great-grandmother, but who nevertheless had a reputation among detectives in con-game squads in police departments in big cities all over the country for the uncanny perceptiveness with which she could pick out women of a narrowly specific kind—middle-aged, depressed, unstable, and suggestible, and with access to a bank account, almost always a good-sized savings bank account—from the general run of those who came to her to have their fortunes told and for the mercilessness with which she could gradually get hold of their money by performing a cruel old gypsy swindle on them, the hokkano baro, or the big trick; and, finally, not to mention a good many other pasts, the past of New York City insofar as it is connected directly or indirectly with my own past, and particularly the past of the part of New York City that is known as lower Manhattan, the part that runs from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge and that encompasses the Fulton Fish Market and its environs, and which is part of the city that I look upon, if you will forgive me for sounding so high-flown, as my spiritual home.

I know the exact day that I began living in the past. I didn’t know it then, of course, but I know it now. The day was October 4, 1968, a Friday. I had recently been in what I guess could be called a period of depression, during which, on the advice of a doctor, I had begun keeping a detailed diary, really a journal, and I have continued to keep it, so that I have a record of everything of any consequence that happened to me on that day and on almost every day of my life since then. 

On that day, according to my diary, a dream woke me up around 4 A.M. In this dream, I was standing on the muddy bank of a stream that I recognized, because of a peculiar old slammed-together split-rail bridge crossing it, as being the central stream running through Old Field Swamp, a cypress swamp near my home in North Carolina. I had often fished in this stream as a boy. 

In the dream, I was fishing for redfin pike with a snare hook hung from a line on the end of a reed pole. I was watching a sandbar in some shallow water out in the middle of the stream that the sun was shining on, and I was waiting for a pike to show up over the sandbar where it would be clearly visible and where I could maneuver my line until I had the hook under it and could snatch it out of the water. I was intent on what I was doing and oblivious to everything else. And then I happened to look up, and I saw that the bridge was on fire. And then I saw that the mud on the opposite bank was beginning to quiver and bubble and spit like lava and that smoke and flames were beginning to rise from it. 

And then, a few moments later, while I was standing there, staring, fish and alligators and snakes and muskrats and mud turtles and bullfrogs began floating down the stream, all belly up, and I realized that the central stream of Old Field Swamp had turned into one of the rivers of Hell. I dropped my pole and spun around and started running as hard as I could up a muddy path that led out of the swamp, but the mud on it was also beginning to quiver and bubble and spit, so I plunged into a briar patch beside the path and tried to fight my way through it, whereupon I woke up. I woke up with my heart in my mouth. ♦

Dumb.

Ever since I was a little kid I've always debated who are the dumbest business owners in America?

Back in the 1970s and 80s, I gave the dubious distinction to the people who owned supermarket chains. As a nation, we had undergone a huge jump of women in the workforce, but supermarkets changed not at all.

There was virtually no prepared food to go. And at 5:30 or 6:00 PM, most supermarkets would employ no more than one or two cashiers. Lines would be all the way down to the creamed corn.

Next, in the 80s and 90s, I landed on movie theater owners. At a time when large-screen TVs were coming in and VCRs and DVDs, what did theater owners do? They made their screens smaller and they showed dumber movies.

They did nothing to accommodate working parents, like letting you reserve seats, etc. No wonder people stayed away in droves.

Today, I think the dumbest business owners in America are those people who run our broadcast networks. At a time when people are paying all sorts of fees to avoid watching commercials, they're piling more and more commercials into a pod. Sometimes these pods are broken up by a blip of programming, but more often than not we have a good five to 10 minutes of unadulterated commercial drivel.

In other words, give people more of what they hate and less of what they like.

Then wonder why your business sucks.

Unfortunately, I often see the advertising industry following that same precept. We give clients more protocol, more process, more jargon. Faster. And, naturally, fewer ideas, fewer breakthroughs, fewer successes.

Dumb.

New York ice storm.

New York's been taking it on the chin of late.

After the Thousand-Year Storm turned out to be something of a bust, we've had three or four days and nights of sleet and slush and slippery.

There are more old-people prostrate on the streets than used condoms.

Someone ought to come by and sweep them up.

But no.

The ice keeps coming, like at a Yuppie's pool party in the Hamptons.

It's cast a pall on New York, it all has.

Partly due to the gloomy weather, partly due to the fact that there's no one who isn't wearing a black coat. In fact, the closet at work looks like it belongs to the Hasidic.

I even think people are choosing to stay home, rather than come to work. The M15 bus this morning, for instance, it reached speeds of up to three miles per hour. Unprecedented.

The one thing that keeps the city's equilibrium is the Chinese delivery men wrapped in plastic, smoking cigarettes down to the nub and biking everywhere with food for everyone. There are so many delivery guys out in the evening that I even saw one going the right way down a one-way street.

I don't know how New York would respond if, god forbid, we were once again terrorist-attacked.

My guess is we'd hunker down.

Maybe stay home from work.

Order our beef and broccoli.

And tip a little better than usual.

A night game in Reynosa.

Late in the season, the Seraperos de Saltillo had a game against the Broncos de Reynosa—the Reynosa Broncos of Reynosa, Tamaulipas—our division foes in the North Division.

Reynosa was about six hours east, through the mountains, from Saltillo. That is, if our bus didn’t break down, which it usually did. Mind you, today, now that Route 40 has finally been finished (about twenty years late and a trillion pesos over) you can make the trip, on a good day, in about three hours. But back in 1975 when I played ball in the Mexican Baseball League, you had to take Route 85, where even the most casual of drives often turned into something out of Clouzot’s “Wages of Fear.”

I always liked playing in Reynosa—I just liked the town. I liked the people, I liked the restaurants I was able to afford (we got $12 a day meal-money).  I loved just watching the scene at Morelos Square. This was long before, of course, Reynosa became bloody with drug crime and the carnage that often accompanies illegal border crossings.

As usual, I made it to the clubhouse early. I was always a three-or-four hour before the game kind of player. I’d do a crossword, or read absent-mindedly. Or I’d find someone to throw some batting practice for me, or I’d just have a light catch. I’ve found through life that as much as it annoys my wife and my kids and most of the people I work with, there’s very little bad that happens when you show up places early. And as often as not, something good happens.

On this particular day in early September, the weather was unusually cool—not like the 90s and even 100s, that are not atypical for Reynosa in the summer. I arrived in the locker-room early, and Hector Quesadilla, my manager handed me the line-up card as usual.

“Brutus” Cesar, CF                .308  4   47

Arnulfo Adame, 2B               .277  2   40

Daniel Garibay, LF                .293  20 103

Salome Rojas, 1B                  .262  22  91

Jorge Navidad, RF                 .287  11  73

Gonzalo Bustamante, 3B       .400   0    6

Isael Buentello, C                  .244  13  65

Angel Diablo, SS                   .217  0    19
Orestes “Tito” Puente, P        14-4     3.22

I checked to see who’d be on the mound, and was happy it was “Tito” Puente. He was fast and efficient, Puente was, and games whizzed by when he was chucking. I also noticed that I was in my usual fifth slot. I didn’t have the average of Garibay who was third or the power of Barojas who was hitting clean-up. Fifth suited me just fine.

What I should have noticed but didn’t was that our regular right fielder Clemente Bonilla wasn’t playing. Pulled hamstring, which the cold would exacerbate. A newcomer, Hector told me, Bustamante (a hot kid who had just joined the Seraperos a week earlier) was taking my spot at third base and I was being asked to man the loneliest place in any ballpark—right field, at least until Bonilla was back.

I’ve never enjoyed playing the outfield, especially right field. It’s too far away from the action, too distant. And my mind tends to wander. I’ve always liked playing third—the hot corner, right there in the eye of the storm. That said, I quickly got into my uniform, threw on my dark green Seraperos wind-breaker and trotted out to right to shag a few flies and get accustomed to the position as much as I could in an hour or so.

It was a desultory warm up and after about half an hour of basically horsing around, I began jogging on the warning track between foul poles. After completing about three or four circuits, I removed my jacket and since there were no fans yet in the stands, tossed it over the railing separating the seats from foul territory, roughly halfway between first base and the right field fence.

And that was that. Batting practice, a bit of tossing the ball about, and then the game. We scored first, right in the first inning, when our centerfielder, “Brutus” Cesar belted a line drive over the fence in left center. Then things settled in to a real pitchers’ duel. Our guy, Puente was throwing aspirins. And their pitcher, Camacho, except for that lead-off homer to Cesar was matching Puente virtually pitch for pitch.

Out in right field there just wasn’t that much to do. The few pitches the Broncos got ahold of were mostly scratch infield hits, or there was the occasional pop-up. I think, going into the ninth, I had handled the ball but once, and that was nothing to speak of, a “dying quail” I made a shoestring catch on. Without even running hard.

Around the fifth inning it had gotten sufficiently cool out that I looked around the dugout for my team windbreaker. I could find it nowhere, and then I remembered having thrown it over the railing in right field. When I returned to the field after another three-up, three-down half, I realized that my jacket was no longer there.

In between pitches I scoured the stands to see if I could spot it. It was then I noticed the prettiest girl I had ever seen sitting right where I had left my windbreaker. She was wearing a white dress and had wrapped herself in my coat. Never in my life have I seen anything that looked so beautiful.

I watched her sitting there, watching the game intently. Maybe she saw me, maybe she didn’t. I’ll never know. But she sat there through the sixth, the seventh, and the eighth.

As we took the field for the bottom of the ninth, we were still up on the Broncos, one to nothing, and Puente was still throwing smoke. Even from deep right field I could tell he wanted the win—he wanted the shut out.

Quickly, he fanned the Broncos first two batters in the bottom of the ninth. I shouted something, infield chatter from the outfield, but I’m sure no one heard it. Like I said, right field is a lonely place. And then Puente went wild and walked their third batter on four straight pitches. They had the tying run on first and the winning run at the plate.

Buentello, our catcher went out to the mound to chat with Puente. And in a second Hector was out there, too, as was Trevino, our pitching coach.

“Do you have any stuff,” I’m sure they asked Puente.

“I’m good,” I could hear him say. And then I could see Buentello nod in agreement.

The conference on the mound over, Puente delivered the pitch, I guess he grooved it, and there was a sharp sound like a firecracker. The Broncos batsman had gotten good wood on one and hit a liner that sped over my head and off the wall in right. I fielded the ball cleanly—I was lucky with the bounce off the wall and spun and threw a dead-on strike, overthrowing the cut-off man, to home plate. I had nailed their runner by a good three feet. He was stopped in his tracks and tagged out by Buentello. The game was over with us winning 1-0.

My first instinct wasn’t to run into the dugout and join my teammates celebrating. No. As soon as I saw that I had thrown their guy out, I looked into the stands for the girl. But the girl wasn’t there. She was gone. And on the railing right where I had left it some three hours before, she had left my dark green Seraperos jacket.

I jogged over to the railing on my way into the dugout and picked up my windbreaker. I spent a good five minutes more looking for the girl. Finally, because it was chilly out I put the jacket on. I was cold no longer.

A lesson learned.

When I was about 19, I got a job working for a guy called Frankie Moreno and his cousin Olindo Nocito. They had a small aluminum-siding business and they needed a large stevedore like myself to do the work--more, the cleaning up--they didn't want to do.

They'd leave me at a job site with a hammer and a crow bar and tell me to strip all the shingles off a house. Or I'd unload aluminum strips off their Ford pick-up. Or I'd help them install aluminum casement windows and vacuum up afterward.

It wasn't a great job. I wasn't really on the same wave-length of Frankie and Olindo, but it paid $125 for 40 hours of work with time and a half for overtime. For a teenager, that was a lot of money back in 1977.

One week it rained but fortunately we had some interior window work to do. We'd knock out the old wooden windows and put in new aluminum ones. It was hard work and messy. You had to measure meticulously and shape moldings with care lest something not look finished and squared off. 

I remember the guy whose house we were working on. When we were finishing up around 4 (we had started around 7:30) he came out to where we were working. He was black and large and wore a white "wife beater" t-shirt. In one hand he held a large cannister vacuum cleaner.

Frankie nodded to him and then the man handed me the vacuum. As Frankie and Nolindo put his tools away, I was down on my hands and knees cleaning up all the dirt, dust and wood shavings. When it was neat enough for me, it still wasn't neat enough for the owner of the house. He stood over me like Gulliver and pointed here and there. I vacuumed until he was satisfied.

I learned a lot from that guy that's served me well in my career and I think my life. Whenever a job is done ok--when things look neat and clean, when the copy is written and the brief is covered, I think of that large black man pointing.

So I go over things again. Read the brief again. Comb through my work again. I try to clean things up.

I didn't really like Frankie and Olindo. And at the time, almost 40 years ago, I resented the guy that made me crawl around all over his house cleaning.

But I still think about him.

And I roll up my sleeves.

A West Indian cab ride.

It's a pretty gloomy day out and I'll admit my mood matches the weather.

Some things I was expecting to happen either aren't happening or are happening at a pace I'd call glacial. Add to that the fact that New York's fairly freshly fallen snow is now a slurry of dog shit, bum urine, used condoms and carbon monoxide and the whole of my world, right now, is pretty foul.

It's enough to make you want to take a cab with a West Indian driver just so you can get in a screaming match.

"I said 83rd Street."

"No mon, you said 89th Street."

"Look, I know where I live."

"You said 89th, mon. Do you think I'm deaf in the ears?"

You won't win such a battle, you won't even be the loudest. But you will get some anger and volume out. And that's a good thing.

I guess there are times that life is like a cab ride with a West Indian driver.

You'll get tossed around along the way. Starting too fast and stopping too abruptly. With invective and general nastiness your accompaniment.

But eventually, with a little luck, you'll get where you're going.

Hector helps me figure it out.

About a month after I arrived in Saltillo, Mexico, after having played just 25 or 30 games for the Seraperos (and doing fairly well in the offing) I got a telegram at the stadium that my old man needed to speak with me.

One of the many reasons I had sought to play ball south of the border was to get away from parental demands like these. My parents, when they wanted something from me, could be as oppressive as a sauna in Houston in August. Now, obviously, my father needed something from me—was demanding something.

“Son,” it read in telegraphic terseness, “call me at work, person to person. Dad.”

“That’s funny,” I said to myself. “I never thought of him as a person.”

But I called. I had to. I was raised to be obedient, to be the Good Son, so I followed his imperative.

“Your mother has left me,” he said when I finally reached him.

I was in the middle of a short hitting streak to start my professional career. Like I said I was tearing up the league. After my first month, my line looked like this:

G         AB      H         R         2          3     HR      RBI     BB       SB   AVG

27       114      40        19        8          0      4         21        11         3      .342

“Where is she,” I asked.

“I need you to come home. I need you now.”

“Dad, I can’t come home, I just got here.”

“Baseball isn't your future. What are you making down there?” He said caustically.  “$200 a month.”

I corrected, “$200 a month and two chicken dinners.”

He begged, the old man did and I hung up the horn.

I scanned the 8’x10’ room I was flopping in. It wasn’t much to look at. I slept on a tiny cot and had my few belongings stuffed willy-nilly in a cardboard bureau. There was one small window girded with some ratty brown plaid curtains.

“Nothing to stay for,” I said aloud.

I threw my shit back into my duffle bag, put a dog-eared copy of Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge” in the back pocket of my Levi’s and I walked to the Estadio de Beisbol Francisco—about two miles from my small rented room. I figured I would pick up my glove, my spikes and say goodbye to my manager, Hector Quesadilla. Then I would take the bus—whenever the bus came—to Corpus Christi, and then make it home from there.

I arrived at the clubhouse—it was three hours before game time—and Hector was there. He came over and put his arm around my shoulder. I’ve never been much of a hugger, not then, not now, but I took Hector’s arm in stride.

He must have seen me with my duffle and put two and two together. We had just started a homestand and weren’t due to travel for at least a week.

“You no go,” he said.

In my rudimentary Spanish—I’d yet to pick up the language—I tried my best to explain what was going on. Not only was I needed elsewhere, well, this was the end of the line for me baseball-wise.

Hector knew all this. Somehow.

He took my duffle from me and brought it to his office.

“You will stay. You will stay en mi casa con mi esposa.”

“Si,” I answered.

Hector led me into his tiny office and pointed to his phone.

Hector stood beside me as I sat in his chair and called my old man.

I told him to go to hell and hung up.

Found copywriting 3.

Held by a young woman in a bagel shop on University and 9th.

Some thoughts on last night's commercials.

I guess my biggest impression from the commercials during last night's game is kind of simple: Virtually everyone is following the same brief. "Make my brand a part of popular culture." Make me cool. Make me relevant. Make me buzzworthy.

Information is dead.

Talking about the actual attributes of a product or service is passe.

Useful consumer information is no more.

I understand this if you're Snickers. Or Pepsi. Or Doritos.

I don't get it if you're selling a product that's more complicated and more expensive. Do people really buy a car just because it's cool? Do they book a vacation because you've used a dead president as a voice over?

It seems to me we are not doing our full job. We are not appealing both to heads and hearts. We are the communications-equivalent of running for class president in the 7th grade. The most popular kids win.

I'll admit I am almost wholly divorced from popular culture. I think less of esurance for using Lindsay Lohan in spots. Less of T-Mobil for using Kim Kardashian.

Most of popular culture to me is vulgar, stupid and ugly.

So commercials that say "we're with it," estrange me.

But no advertisers talk to me.

My household income is in the top 5%.

I'm in the wrong demo.

On the beach.

Despite temperatures that weren't quite in the teens, we loaded up the Simca and headed up to Rye, a small patch of suburbia about seven miles from the northern-most border of New York City. We wanted to give Whiskey a chance to romp around in snow that wasn't already crusted with carbon-monoxide and the other noxious residues of modern urban living.

The Simca's heater is still on the fritz--I have an appointment next week after work to see Lothar, my Croatian Simca mechanic and, to my mind anyway, the world's best. But for now my wife had wrapped herself in a yellow and green afghan her Aunt Louise had crocheted some decades ago. She also brought along a tall tumbler of hot chocolate and had on fur-lined winter boots that would be at home in Murmansk, hard on the chill of the Baltic Sea, not far from the Arctic Circle.

I was dressed with equal resolve in my genuine Astrakhan hat and red woolen hunting jacket I got decades ago. I wear the jacket no more than five or ten times a year, but like Shane, who only strapped on his .45s when needed, I'm glad I have the jacket. I will wear it, probably, until I leave for that last, long hunt--a one-way walk through the woods, with no compensatory antlered-trophies to carry home.

The roads were empty, even the roads that never are, and we made it to Rye in just under half and hour. We let Whiskey out of the backseat and she bounded up a hill of snow and onto the snow-covered field, sinking into the snow up to her elbows, about eight-inches deep.

Given that the wind was howling and the snow was deep and the temperature was what it was, there were not many dogs and people out. I suppose if I lived in suburbia and had a fire roaring and the Times' crossword puzzle waiting, perhaps I would not brave the elements either. But taking Whiskey up to the country is now a routine, and an enjoyable one at that.

What's more, the sun shone brightly and its rays felt warm on our faces. I threw underhand Whiskey's favorite toy and she bounded through the snow, proudly returning with her quarry. We did this over and again for an hour, walking around the Rye town park as she fetched. Though she showed no signs of becoming tuckered out we left the park and walked about a mile on the snow-crusted boardwalk that runs along the sea. Even on the boardwalk I would toss ahead of her her toy and off she'd run for it, returning directly to me.

After about two hours in total, we re-Simca'd and drove back to Manhattan, parking in our lot, two or three stories beneath our building.

It wasn't much of a day. Not eventful at all.

It was merely perfect.