Up Above in My Basement.

Sometimes the finest thing that can happen is the thing that happens least often, or has happened never before. One of those happenings happened to me late last week.

A passel of books had arrived at the doorstep of my small Connecticut crib. Before too long, or more accurately, before my bookish clutter annoyed too much my wife, I lugged them down the steep steps to my basement office.

It took me until I was about 65 to have a room of my own, and it's almost exactly as I wanted it. Would I like a view of the sea? Sure. Would I like a small sofa to recline on in-between meetings? Who wouldn't. But even without those accommodations my office is fairly perfect. I get good natural light. I have two comfortable upholstered chairs. I have an elegant Herman Miller stand-up desk. I have a 15-pound dumbbell to lift to keep my biceps from looking like Walter Brennan's neck.

Most of all, of course, I have my books. 

Books and books and books and books and books and books and books. And more books.

It's those books, the ones that already line my shelves and the new arrivals that made this post happen. 

The new books meant I had to rearrange my old books. I had to do what I seldom do. Straighten things up. And under some of those books and under some papers and some old notes I had taken I found this leaflet, 16 pages or so from an event about 19 years ago during The New Yorker Festival down at the South Street Seaport.

A bunch of old New Yorker-ites and Joseph Mitchell's daughter, Nora Mitchell Sanborn, had gathered together to talk about the old man, my favorite writer of all time. For all these years, I have saved this catalog from that talk. The back is splattered like a pointillist canvas with the spray of some of my wife's viscous black coffee. It looks like the remains of a spit-take.

I hadn't really opened the brochure since my early 50s, if I opened it at all. But I opened it on Monday and was struck my how wonderful it is and how Mitchell's writing moves me like little else.

Here's what Nora Mitchell Sanborn, Joseph's daughter wrote. It's the wrap-up of her two page preface. I'm sorry about my inability to take proper iPhone photos from a printed page. Somehow I think their lopsidedness is a genuine case of form following function.

I've written a lot since I began this organ back in 2007 about Mitchell. But I'd guess very few people who read what I write have bothered to spend the time it takes to know someone like Mitchell. 

Why should they? He's old. He's dead. He's that most heinous of all contemporary sins. He's not contemporary. 

Today, we readily admit things I would be embarrassed to admit. My mother would have swatted me like ballplayers high-fiving each other's callouses during a home-run trot. We look at "Common Sense," by Thomas Paine, or "The Sound and the Fury," by Faulkner or even "The Seven Stages of Man," from "As You Like It," by Bill Shakespeare and we say,

we say TL/DR.

I find that sad. 

To my world-view, Phil Dusenberry of BBDO advanced his agency and his career by proposing that in order to be welcomed into people's living-rooms, TV spots should be better than the programming they interrupt. I've always tried to uphold that thesis with my copy. I've always tried to make it human, interesting, educational, funny. I've always tried to Joseph-Mitchell-the-shit-out-of-anything-I-was-working-on.

Of course I've failed at least 99.79-percent of the time. 

But I tried.

I hope this wasn't TL/DR.

BTW, I found one page from the brochure online. It's archived at Seton Hall University and Princeton University. I also found a photo of an historical marker commemorating Mitchell.