In a minute.

There’s been, for a while now in my social media feeds, this exercise that seems fairly popular called “One Minute Briefs.”

I’ll admit two things about One Minute Briefs to be hyper-numerical about things. One: I know nothing about it, outside of you’re supposed to create an ad I think in just one minute. And two: I instantly disliked it because we shouldn’t be in the business of creating ads in one-minute. That denigrates our hard-won skills.

 

Without sounding more arrogant than I usually sound, most people will concede I’m just about the fastest copywriter around. One ECD once said to me, exasperated but appreciative, “You’re writing ads faster than I can read them,” and former Ogilvy CCO, Steve Simpson wrote this in his recommendation of me, “[George] knows that every word counts—especially if somebody’s paying for it. In spite of this, George is also a very fast writer: fast, clear and always on point. Fast and good are not incompatible, after all.”

 

I’ve even stolen the line here from the great New Yorker writer, AJ Liebling. I’m pretty sure not that many people who have worked with me would dispute my co-opting of Liebling, at least in this case.

 

Nevertheless, briefs, I believe, should not be done in one minute—even when you have a good idea that quickly. As Milton Glaser said to me the one time I was fortunate enough to partner with him, “Let’s let it percolate for a while.” That’s wise advice in nearly everything—especially for tweeting tinpot would-be-autocrats.

 

Years ago I was showing work to a client. It was our first meeting and while I don’t reek of confidence, I knew the work was good. And I knew the client would be made nervous by it.

 

I played a piece of music as I presented and the client laughed.

 

I stopped the meeting.

 

“What did you just do?” I asked him.

 

“I laughed.” He was sheepish about it.

 

“I want you to remember that reaction,” I said. “Because in about ten minutes when I’m done presenting you will have found 32 reasons why the work is wrong for you.”

 

What I wish is simple.

 

That instead of wannabee creatives working on One-Minute Briefs, wannabee-better clients and planners and account people and creative directors would sign up for my very expensive advertising course.

 

I’m calling it One-Minute Reactions: The Art of Not Overthinking.

 

Like I said, the course is very expensive.

 

But it’s worth it. 

After all, it’s only one-minute long.

 

 

Lying for fun and profit.

 

Many, many years ago David Ogilvy said these famous words—ordinarily I’d up-gender David’s words to bring them up to the standards and mores of today. But we have to, I’m sorry, as a mature society, understand that society’s past held different views. 

We can’t continue to excoriate everyone not born in our era for some alleged breach of manners, morals or beliefs—we will be left with a society that has no history and no evidence of educability. What’s more, if we believe Dr. King’s words that “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice,” then we have to believe that people, laws and nations can learn and improve. You know, bend toward justice--which is the point.

 

Ogilvy said, “The consumer isn’t a moron, she is your wife.” In other words, treat people in your advertising as if they are smart and worthy of respect.

 

If a serious intellect or academic were to look at advertising and America in the last 30 or 50 years, my guess is they would see that we have forgotten to value and respect our viewers and readers. We have forgotten to treat them as worthy of the Golden Rule. We don’t treat people as we want to be treated.

Or as another ad legend, Bob Levenson wrote:

 

There are horrible consequences of this malevolence.

 

If you believe people are dumb, your advertising will be dumb. If you believe people are dumb, you’ll wind up believing you can lie, cheat, steal from them and fool them. Your advertising will be dishonest, deceptive and duplicitous.

 

Facts will be deemed unimportant. We will be told that people won’t read. That they have the attention spans of a lightning bug. We will be told that they’re gullible, susceptible and they believe the bullshit.

 

99% of what you get from the advertising-monopoly complex is lies. “We care about you. We, the cable company won’t refund money when we don’t deliver the service you’ve contracted for, but we care.” Sure, your CEO has a net worth of $2 billion, and you can’t give me $8 back for the two days my service was out. You can’t tell me when it will be back on. And you can’t afford humans to answer humans--your paying customers.

 

Is there anyone in this entire country who believe a single advertised price? Verizon’s $49 come on? The airlines $199 flight to LA? Toyota’s Toyotathon lease pricing?

 

Likewise, is there anyone in any agency who believes their salaries should be frozen while holding companies C-level-bloat make $5 million in compensation, black car home and who knows what else.

 

When you think people are morons you get sloppy.

 

You lie. You become a liar.

 

You stop thinking.

 

You get cruel.

 

You no longer have love in your heart for your neighbors. Near or distant.

You no longer love people. They're dumb, remember?

 

That’s what has happened in our industry.

 

And our country.

Here, in closing is a bit more Levenson:

 

 

My father, the mailman.

My old man, Stanley Irving Tannenbaum, did ok. (His middle name was not formalized. Sometimes he was Irwin, sometimes Irving. Likewise, his brothers, my uncles spelled Tannenbaum differently--Tanenbaum, or Tennenbaum.)

Stan was born in West Philadelphia in 1928—when Calvin Coolidge was president—to parents who spoke little English and hadn’t much success making their teetering way in America. There were two brothers, Oscar, born in 1913 and Sidney born in 1915. The fifteen years between the first son and the last make me conclude that maybe my father wasn’t planned for.

 

My grandfather, Morris, was a tailor—and apocrypha says he was the least dextrous in all of Philadelphia, perhaps the entire east coast. My grandmother, Ida, was nearly blind. My most vivid memory of her is visiting her in her small row-house apartment that was as dark as a shroud. There was a giant TV set in the living room with a small black and white screen. An RCA Victor, made across the river from Philly, in RCA’s headquarters, Camden, New Jersey—a town today given up, or nearly so for dead.

 

When we would visit—wearing a proper shirt, tie, shoes and a sports jacket, Ida would bring me into her linoleum kitchen.

 

“Does Georgie vant a cooookie?”

 

What six year old wouldn’t answer yes?

And Ida would give me a small floral plate bought in the A&P for 19-cents with two stale Ritz crackers on it. Those crackers would still be in the house the next time we visited and the next.

 

My old man was almost 14 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He heard about it while listening to the Army-Navy football game on the radio. The next day, Franklin Roosevelt declared war on the Japanese. A few days after that, Hitler declared war on the United States.

 

By the time my father was 16, most of the 1A men in Philadelphia were overseas, fighting or preparing to. Getting ready to kill or be killed or both.

 

Money was short on 1056 S. 53rd Street and the men were all gone. My father went down to Philadelphia’s giant post office on 30^th Street, passed a memory test, and got himself a civil service job. He worked there until he was 22 and graduated from Philadelphia’s Temple College, class of 1950.

 

My old man’s brother, Sidney was doing well at that point. He had his own ad agency in Philadelphia, Weightman Advertising. Their offices were in the Weightman building on 15^th and Chestnut. Sidney reckoned if he named the agency after the office building people would think he owned the building and was successful.

 

In 1952, Stanley got a job across the Delaware at RCA’s in-house ad department. In 1954, he and my old lady moved to Fresh Meadows, Queens because my father got a job at a New York agency called Kenyon & Eckhardt. That was the big time.

 

My father did well at K&E, rising by 1974 to Chairman of the Board. He was kicked to the curb by the time he was 52, in 1980.

 

Despite all that success, when he reflected on his life, he remembered fondly his years at the Philadelphia Post Office. He remembered being given a revolver and riding in the cargo section of a mail truck, protecting and delivering payroll checks.

 

If I have any feeling at all for the Post Office, it’s because of my old man. And now, our fake president, a president who enlisted the help of a foreign enemy to get elected, is trying to destroy the postal service—mail delivery being one of the hallmarks of civilization, so he can stay, illegally, in power and continue his gutting of our nation’s treasury, institutions and democracy itself.

 

Double down on voting this fall.

 

If you can’t mail your ballot in, call me, and I’ll deliver it for you.

 

It’s the least I can do to honor Stan.

How to copywriterize for fun!!! And profit!!!

 

1. Most successful copywriters, the legendary Ed McCabe among them, have been known to successfully use in their most successful copywriting in their most successful ads both vowels and consonants. I spoke to the crusty ad-scion McCabe who said, ‘go fuck yourself, dickweed, and somebody get me another dozen martoonis.”

 

2. Don’t be afraid to break many of the conventional “rules” of punctuation. For. Instance. A. Way. Of. Showing. A. Certain. Emphatic. Tendency. Is. To. Put. A. Period. After. Every. Word. In. Your. Key. Sentence. Or. Sentences.

 

3. Write your copy as if you are writing to a friend. In writing an email, Dear FIRST NAME is a suitable salutation. Dear Easily-Gulled Carbon-based life-form, is not...unless demanded by the client.

 

4. No matter what sort of brand you’re working on don’t forget that you, as a copywriter, have a good idea of what the future will be like. Be sure to tell your readers that in the future will, inevitably, be massively different and unprecedented. eg: “In the wake of the unprecedented changes brought by the Coronavirus (COVID-19), lunch, your traditional mid-day meal will never be the same. We’re the Campbell’s soup company, and since we were founded way back in 1869, our mission has always been the same: to grind up tomatoes, add salt and water, seal it all in a can and serve it to you. We know that today, and into the future, this tomatofication process is important to you. And that’s why it’s important to the 268,000 people of Campbell’s who, together, today and into the future say to you what we’ve always said, ‘mmm, mmm good. Void where prohibited. All rights reserved. Any resemblance to any characters, vegetables, or vegetable characters real or fictional is purely coincidental.”

 

5. Use Action Words. NOW! See how immediate and actionable that was? Action words get your reader to ACT! Some readers, you’ll find, will also ION. That’s why Action words are called Action words—they impel people to ACT! and to ION! Also, never forget that your reader has the common sense of a teenager on Spring Break. If you’re selling something wholly unnecessary, ugly, defective or over-priced, fear not. Under those circumstances all you need is a strong “call to action,” (a call that moves people to action) and people will act. Selling a bag of bent and rusty nails for $73.99? No problem. Simply put the words ACT NOW! in a starburst somewhere—everywhere—in your ad. Presto, Buy-o!

 

6. Be sustainable. And diverse. And sustainably diverse. And diversely sustainable. Be true. And tru. And even troo. Be transparent. And authentic. Start a relationship with your target. Be disruptive in a comforting way and comforting in a disruptive way. Make sure you’re in the Cloud. And using Artificial Intelligence. Influencers. Micro-influencers. And nano-influencers. Target. Re-target. And re-re-target in an omnichannel way. But don’t forget OTR. Have you gamified? What about earned media? What about Medea? And Oedipus? And earned Medea? Last but not least: algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm algorithm. And algorithm.

A relic speaks.

 

The other day, I got sent a briefing form from the great creative agency BBH. I'm not exactly sure when the form dates from, but I'm guessing, partly because it's not sullied by Holding Company legalese, that it's from a quarter of a century ago, if not more.

Regardless of its exactly age, seeing this document is a bit like finding an old Cuneiform tablet. Those clay plates from 3000 years ago were most often not foundational stories or epic poems--they were usually accounting tabulations. Essentially the BC version of powerpoint.

Even so, those artifacts gave us a solid look at what life was like in Mesopotamia, Persia, and Ugarit. They showed us how many dates were stored, how many camels were needed to transport how many ewers of water and in the inflow and outflow of various goods and trade routes.

This briefing form does the same for me. It shows me an industry we threw away with both hands.

We threw away what make us work and what made us good:

Simplicity.

Start with the form itself. It's just one page. Not seven pages.

It asks simple questions, smart questions, fundamental questions.

And all those questions are clear and written without jargon or ambiguity.

The template gives the author a limited amount of room to answer those questions. So the person filling out the form can't go on and on and on. It's a form that makes covering your ass hard. And it asks for a SINGLE most important idea. 

That would be special in an "everything is top priority" world.

Next, look at the little rectangle in the lower right of the form. 

It calls not for 17 rounds of reviews, not reviews by 21 levels of creatives, not 88 different people and 176 eyeballs. It also contains pertinent information--budget and the phrase "final sign off."

Final? In 2020? 

I haven't been inside an agency in seven months. I ask all of you who are still getting briefs, to compare yours to this. The 29-page powerpoint explaining the psychographics underpinning a banner ad, or the four options of a Call To Action that the client wants to see. The five-hundred words of legal mandatories and more.

When I was a kid in advertising working in-house at Bloomingdales's I learned a very important lesson.

Every so often an ad would go through round after round of revisions. You, as the writer were dedicated to answering everyone's qualms and just getting the damn thing out of your typewriter and into production.

My boss came into my office on one of these occasions. He must have heard me screaming "muthafucka" at about 177 decibels. He read my copy as it came out of my Selectric.

"Stop trying to fix your copy," he said. "They broke it. Turn it over or tear it up and start fresh."

I think that might be where we are today in advertising.

I don't know who you are.

I don't know where I was or how old when I first saw the ad above. But I do know it was in the "book" era, not the digital era and as much as I wanted to, I couldn't rightfully tear the ad from the volume I was reading. Nevertheless, I made mental notes about it and stored it in my near photographic memory.

Some years or decades later, after making one of the many wrong turns that eventually add up to a career, I was the co-head of the flagship office of a big dull agency. We were pitching some giant piece of business and I remembered that ad and, having access to Google, was able to get my grubby hands on it.

I showed it to my assistant, a bright young woman. Instead of seeing what I saw, all she could see was the scary "school-teacher's face" of the man in the chair and couldn't even consider that that was part of the point of the ad.

Now it's 20 years after that moment which was 20 years after I first encountered the ad which was 20 years after the ad was originally written. The ad, in fact, was created by an agency I never heard of, Fuller Smith & Ross, and the man in the chair was an account executive who helped create the ad, Gilbert Morris. It first ran in 1958. A few months after I sprung from my mother's loins. If I can say that on a family blog.

Our current world is infected with a disdain for everything old. At least half the industry these days have never written an ad for paid media, and many of those in the industry haven't read, or understood, a single bit of anthropology. They believe that with every "new" thing, the wiring of humanity itself will change.

So, they believe people, for whatever reason, will want to have conversations with brands. They believe people will want to interact with ads. And they believe useful consumer information is no longer needed in order to buy a product. No, they proffer, without evidence. I will buy a $70,000 car because a sallow model drives it, or a drunk and philandering golfer or because they append the meaningless adjective "Joy," to the automobile's logo and call that a tagline or summary thought.

In fact, the stupidity of marketing professionals seems to be increasing even faster than global temperatures. And I say that on a 98-degree day.

Not long ago, for instance, the German automaker BMW inflicted on the world a minor logo update. Though they're ten years (at least) behind Tesla in making an electric power-plant, for whatever reason their logo is consuming thousands of employee-hours and, I'd assume, millions of dollars.

Here's the massive change.

Here's what Jens Thiemer, Senior Vice President of Customer & Brand at BMW had to say about this brilliant communications apotheosis.

"[It's] more than just a design update: The layout of BMW’s new brand look and feel stands for the mobility of the future.

 

“BMW becomes a relationship brand. The new communication logo radiates openness and clarity. With this new transparent variant, we want to invite our customers more than ever to become part of the BMW world. In addition, our new brand design is geared to the challenges and opportunities of Digitization for brands. With visual restraint and graphic [sic] We are equipping ourselves flexibly for the wide variety of contact points in communication at which BMW will show its presence online and offline in the future. The additional communication logo symbolizes the significance and relevance of the brand for mobility and driving pleasure in the future.”

I suppose I do a fair amount on Mad Magazine-level parody on this blog. But even when I'm going to extremes I can't lay the bullshit on nearly as thick as good ol' Jens can.

I ask you, and I ask my friends in the design end of the industry, have you ever smelled more redolent fertilizer? It might even put Terry Southern, Peter George and Stanley Kubrick to shame.

My deepest belief is that 99% of all people feel about 99% of all brands as the man in the chair above does. 

In brief, I don't know who you are, what you sell, or why you're better.

But rather than tell you what you want to know, lemme send out a puerile tweet and take 18 months to slightly change a logo while employing a raft of people who are categorically unable to speak without shoveling manure. That passes, today, for salesmanship.

Whatever you want to call our business today, communications, advertising, marketing, brand interface engineering, our most important function is to define who a client is and what they do and or sell.

Most people don't know, don't care, don't remember or are dealing with the awful and pressing vagaries of life--made worse by a cruel economic system, the crushing unequal distribution of wealth and a concerted attack on middle-class standards of living.

I don't know how or why we've stopped caring or knowing about that or about people. I don't know how or why ads that never run have become more important to a dying industry than ads that move business. I don't know how or why we've gotten here. I do know that to, again, 99% of all people, as an industry we don't matter because we don't do things that matter to the people who pay us.

Someone somewhere updated the classic ad above with the classic ad below. I don't 100% agree with all of it. 

But I certainly agree with its first line.

And to all those people spending nine days to write a brief, maybe it's all as simple as answering that issue. We have to make people care who we are.

 

 

Words. Of wisdom and not.

I was listening to the news this morning, as I do nearly every morning, on National Public Radio. I made the switch about forty years ago from TV news to NPR. Not only are the stories longer and more informative, you don’t have to be in front of the set to take anything in. For me it’s a bit like taking in a baseball game. The sport is better “viewed” on radio.

In any event, since the rise of Covid in America, say about the beginning of March (roughly four months before the non-popularly-elected president admitted its existence, if not its virulence) virtually every story on NPR has been the same. To sum up, they’ve all been about a shortage of resources, or a half-assed response, or general unpreparedness.

 

This morning, as I was hearing this governor or that bemoan the inadequacy of Trump’s executive orders on financial relief for the unemployed, I said to myself, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That statement, and thousands of other maxims or axioms were, for centuries or millennia, part of human-kind’s upbringing.

 

They went under a variety of different names, the 147 Delphic maxims, Aesop’s fables, Poor Richard’s ramblings, the Ten Commandments and more. But chances are, if you grew up around the time I did, you were inculcated with these precepts.

 

I remember as a kid reading an autobiography of the great Negro leagues’ pitcher Satchel Paige. Paige, because Black people were kept out of the major leagues until 1947, didn’t pitch in the bigs until he was 41—probably twenty years past his prime. He lasted five distinguished seasons in the majors, and then he came back in 1965 at the age of 58 and pitched three shutout innings for the Kansas City Athletics.  

 

As for maxims, Paige was famous for these:

 

Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.

If you stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.

Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.

Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful.

Avoid running at all times.

Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

This disappearance of maxims, Delphic, Paigean or otherwise troubles me. Today, I suppose we call them memes. But for virtually the entirety of human existence on this troubled orb, we’ve used these bon mots or seminal stories to transmit wisdom from one generation to the next.

Today it is our habit as a society to call everything a “culture.” To my ears, the word culture seems, today, to be a shorthand for splinter group.

So you have people talking about skate culture, ink culture, goth culture, garden club culture. Errol Morris even shot a movie on the “Nub Club,” people who intentionally blow off limbs to get insurance payments. In our severely atomized world, it seems there’s a culture for everyone, even the limb-deprived.

But what we may be missing from a macro sense is our cultural ability to pass and communicate shared values and histories across large groups of people—millions of people. I’d bet less than 50% of the US population knows exactly when WWII was fought, much less the Spanish-American war or some lesser conflagration. Even the lessons we might have learned from the 1918 flu pandemic which killed 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 Americans (at a time when the US population was only 103 million) are almost entirely unknown.

Patience now, I’m rounding into my point. You really can’t rush these things some times.

I worked at Ogilvy for a total of eleven years, spread over four decades in two chunks of time.

First, I was there when the office was in Manhattan, on Eighth Avenue between 49^th and 50^th Street—right on the footprint of the old Madison Square Garden. I worked in that location from 1999 to 2004.

I came back and was in Ogilvy’s new offices in East New Jersey, from 2014 until I was fired late in the day (always considerate) on Tuesday, January 14^th, 2020.

The big differences between the two office spaces were two-fold. One, the agency had moved far West to a neighborhood of Toyota dealers, methadone clinics and homeless shelters. And two, all of the hundreds of Ogilvyisms that used to festoon the hallways around the entire agency had been expunged.

My first round at Ogilvy, the agency was branded. David’s face was on a giant poster looming in the lobby. The carpeting was red. And there were David’s statements everywhere, his maxims, his wisdom. Many of these axioms we good, smart and memorable. They made up a decent part of my advertising education because, there’s no other word for it, they were ineffable. As a way of personal comportment, business ethics, they stressed the importance of creativity, individualism and sales.

They just made sense.

By my second round they were all gone except for some bland statements stuck in an emergency fire stairway.

I suppose someone decided, in some agency rendition of “The Death of Expertise,” that because they were writ by a white man born in 1911, they couldn’t possibly have any meaning to the new generation of clients and employees. Abiding by Ogilvy’s dicta, having vestiges of the culture and agency he created, would make the agency seem woefully out-of-date, retrograde, gasoline-powered in a Tesla-powered era.

I wonder if the same is true for our country and the world.

I wonder if verities stay verities when they’re no longer taught, understood and believed.

I wonder, for instance, if anyone knows any of these (gently amended by me for gender sensitivity.)

Consumers aren't morons. They’re your family and friends.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.

Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.

 

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

 

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own family. Don't tell them to mine.

 

We sell, or else.

I picked those maxims relatively at random. They were the first quotations that popped up in my Google search.

Words like those, just like words like these, to be effective, to be part of the fiber of an agency, to become inculcated across departments, down hallways, around the country and the world—they’re not a some time thing.

You repeat them. You live them. You demonstrate them in how you act, how you pitch, how you create, how you promote, hire and fire.

Ping-pong tables, Thirsty Thursdays and Wastrel Wednesdays don’t make great agencies, a great place to work or great, effective work.

A set of values does.

Just as a 4^th of July Mattresspalooza does not make a great country.

Imparting the wisdom of a Lincoln, who hoped for a government of the people, by the people and for the people, could.

But, that’s old. That’s archaic. Let’s try something cool.

Ok, dude?

 

 

 

 

Be it ever so humble.

When the storm hit our little seaside cottage I didn't know what to expect, really. My wife, Laura, and I have been renting up here on Connecticut's Gingham Coast since March and had been through half-a-dozen Nor'easters, some with winds strong enough to knock over a $3000 gas grill. But we had never borne a storm in our own home and we did not know what to expect.

Our house is of the sturdy variety—built in 1920 when 2x4s actually measured 2x4, not some legalese abbreviation thereof, and it was built with a full concrete basement despite being just a long spit from the sea. Nevertheless, the last owner, a wicked old man who in my mind conjures up an image of a male-version of Almira Gulch, was grudging with the house. And things started falling to pieces the moment we moved in.

First, the refrigerator stopped cooling. Then the washing machine stopped working. Then the oven decided to no longer ov or even en. Worst for me, someone who prefers the chill of winter or the icy grip of the nearest harridan to the dank humidity of summer, the air-conditioning starting gasping and wheezing. If it were a Looney Tunes character, it would have its tongue out and would be panting against last week’s 90-degree heat.

Even so, I like a good storm. There’s something of a Maslowian comfort to be sheltered and dry when the hurly burly’s done. And I like seeing the anger of the gods in the javelin of lightning and the timpani of their furious thunder. Most of all, as long as I’m not plying a small craft, I like seeing the fury of the sea. I like seeing the bravery of the rocks as they battle the waves. I like seeing the osprey fly to their aeries for cover and the gulls flap and flap their wings just to stay in place as they battled the gale.

Our little house is not in a flood zone. Though the entire area around us is low and littoral, we are on the highest in town. A good twenty feet above the highest tides. That elevation might not avail us when the petro-republicans are done destroying the polar icecaps, life as we know it and our entire planet, but it will probably suffice until it’s time to turn our home over to our daughters some time just before my size 13s zero in on a nearby bucket.

The storm quickly knocked out our power which put both my wife and I in a panic. It’s not quite on the order of a flame going out in a coal mine as the oxygen becomes exhausted, but when you’re working 20x7 (we do sleep) from home, and your deadlines offer no leeway for missing amperes, well, I felt like singing an old Wobbly song or two, something maybe by Mother Jones or Joe Hill.

I walked out to the sea with Whiskey and took these videos. If you’re an ocean person, the waves don’t look like much. But technically, the Long Island Sound is merely an estuary (the north coast of Long Island is just ten miles away, as the Ederle swims) and waves do not often crest at much more than two feet.

These waves were double that, or triple. And were atop rolling swells another three or four feet high. The winds were blowing the tops off the waves and down and up the moraine east and west of us, we could hear the thunder of the sea.

About an hour into the storm, I was still working putting together a large presentation for a meeting the next day with a large client. Like the storm was bearing down on us, I was bearing down on my copy. My wife who is even more ursine than I and can bear down like a freight-train, hardly stirred.

Then a crash came. A “house” sound. Something she and I, apartment dwellers did not recognize. She looked at me and locked in on eye contact. She slowly blinked than locked in again. A silent communication, unspoken but as clear as a telegram, that it was my job to get to the source of the cacophony.

I went outside onto the front lawn. Next to a low stone wall that girds our property stands a noble Acer Rubrum, a red maple or a swamp maple. The wind was rustling its burgundy leaves and whistling like a tea kettle neglected on a stove. I looked up to our roof and not even knowing what our roof looked like—we’d been in the house just two weeks at this point—deemed it fine.

My wife silently interrogated me when I returned. I mumbled something stupid, which is what I do when I mumble stupidly.

A minute later a teenager wearing a bikini top and very short shorts knocked on our double-pane plate glass.

“I think your chimney blew off,” she informed me, handing me an aluminum apparatus that looked like you could fry french fries in it.

“My what?” I mumbled stupidly.

“Your chimney cap,” she answered, rolling her eyes. “It was in the neighbor’s driveway, two houses down.”

I thanked the young lady and brought the small structure inside.

In the end, the storm passed. After 60 hours with no power, and a brief return to the Masked City, we returned to Connecticut this morning.

A piece of my house blowing away to the point where it could have decapitated someone or killed a small dog taught me something and it all made me feel a bit at home, at last.

It was the first time since we moved here that I’ve felt really really guilty.

It feels nice to be home.