Walking north.

It's only Wednesday, but I've already had a helluva week. I'm not busy at work--which is rare. I'm experiencing that lull that comes before a big shoot. That stillness before a storm. But that's ok, I'm enjoying it.

There is still, of course, the daily dosage of drudgery to attend to. Small ads that need to be done, well and on-time. And meetings called by people whose job it is to call meetings. Agencies are teeming with meeting makers these day, people who, like cardboard actors, come to life only when amphetiminized by powerpoint.

My youngest daughter is home for the first time since late May, and my oldest is coming home today for 48 hours or so. The new puppy roars to the rafters. And my wife is back and forth from LA like a tennis ball at the US Open. In all, the usual delicious mayhem of family.

Last night, with the Republicans glowering on TV, fat and pale like marzipan, I headed north, as I so often do, for a walk with my dog Whiskey along the river.  There was not a dark face in attendance in republican Tampa last night and once I got north of 96th Street, there was not a white one--except for me. Up here I was safe from the dying elephant bellows of New Jersey charlatan governor Chris Christie. I was safe from the Stepford wifery of Ann Romney who spun a Horatio Alger tale of she and Mitt accomplishing the American Dream, oMITTing the part about starting with a $50,000,000 nest egg.

Up north, amid the as-yet-un-gentrified precincts of Harlem, I was happier, away from those parts of America where they don't believe in minimum wages, health care, pollution controls, Darwin, taxing the rich, unions and global warming.

Whiskey and I walked north. North through the broken sea wall of the East River Drive, collapsing into the drink. North past the Triboro. North past the projects where the great ballpark the Polo Grounds used to be, where Willie Mays caught Vic Wertz's flyball and wheeled and made that throw to second.


We exited the promenade around 165th Street, four miles from my apartment and walked through the broken asphalt of Highbridge Park, leaving the park at Yeshiva University, not far from the original Washington bridge over the Harlem River, a span that predates its more famous namesake by almost 50 years.

Whiskey's tongue, by now, was as long as my forearm. I found a gypsy cab manned by a fat Dominican, got in, and headed $20 home.