Dimples.

Sometimes, and I’m not entirely sure why, I get a recollection in my head that plays out as vividly and indelibly as a scene from a good movie. Maybe this is a function of growing older—of having more years to look back on than you have to look forward to. Maybe, there was an image or an aroma that triggered something limbic in my cortex. Maybe it’s sheer chemical synapses—a connection with my past that just snapped, somehow, into my present.

This morning, a cold windy day in New York with bright sunshine, I was leaving my psychiatrist’s office. As I do every Thursday morning, as I’ve done every Thursday morning for the past 23 years, and I thought about this ball game I was playing in when I was nine or 10 years old.

It was a Little League game and the most important thing in the world to me at that point while also being of no consequence whatsoever. I remember it being a hot day and muggy, even though it was just eight in the morning. Oddly enough, my old man was there as was my little sister, Nancy.

When I was a kid, I probably played a thousand baseball games, through Little Leagues and Junior Leagues and high-school and summer leagues, and I can count, virtually on one finger all the times my father decided to watch me. He had more important things to do.

But my sister, who wanted more than anything to play ball like her brothers did, would regularly show up. She was a tomboy in those years and wanted her swings at the ol’ horsehide just like the boys did. Of course, there was no baseball for girls back in 1966, so girls, if they loved ball, were relegated to the sidelines.

I was playing 3^rd base, I recall, and my sister was in foul territory down the 3^rd baseline, maybe holding my old man’s hand, or maybe he was off chatting with another dad.

When I was a kid, we didn’t enjoy the same level of caution kids today are raised with. There was no fence down the foul lines, and nothing to prevent spectators from standing as close to the actual field as they could get.

A batter came up, I remember, and after a pitch or two, he hit a pitch funny and cued the ball wickedly foul at an acute angle. I remember the smoosh like a fallen watermelon as it crushed into Nancy’s cheekbone just below her left eye. I remember her screams. I remember the blood. I remember my father, who earlier that year had almost died from a massive coronary, knowing he couldn’t lift Nancy and couldn’t run for his old Ford to take her to the hospital.

I didn’t know what to do at 3^rd base. I ran over to her and heard Nancy’s screams and saw the pink red purple of her face. But the adults had forced us kids away. They were taking charge.

My old man left me on the field and took Nancy to the hospital. When he brought her home two or three hours later, the left side of her face was bandaged, but, I was told, her eye was undamaged and she was going to be ok.

For the rest of Nancy’s too short and too hard life, when she smiled, as she did not often enough, a dimple formed on the top of her cheekbone where the baseball had dented the bone.

Nancy died about 11 years ago in a motorcycle crash on 12^th Avenue and 52^nd Street. I’ve never, truth be told, recovered from her deadness.

So I think about that dimple, as I did this morning as I was waiting for a cab to take me to work.

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In praise of slow.

If you visit this space with any regularity, you know that of all the world's writers currently putting words down on paper, the one I admire most is Robert Caro.

Caro has won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards. The Society of American Historians awarded him the Francis Parkman Prize saying, "Caro best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist."

Comparing Caro to David McCullough or Ron Chernow is, IMHO, like comparing Maria Callas to Bobby Sherman. Caro, like Callas, was touched by a god, or at least, a divine genius that makes his work--I'm not exaggerating here--Shakespearean. 

Just yesterday I read an interview with Caro in "The New York Review of Books." You can read the whole thing here; it should take you about 15 minutes.

There were a couple of things in the interview that I think have some bearing even on the sort of writing we do in advertising. 

First, there's this:

"It's a cliche today that people's attention spans are short. You know something? David McCullough's book on Truman is roughly 1,100 pages and it has sold thousands of copies. Doris Kearns Goodwin's book "Team of Rivals" is more than 700 pages and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I'm sure Ron Chernow's "Grant" will sell hundreds of thousands, too."

Finally, in a world obsessed by "agility" and speed, there's this:

"My first three or four drafts are handwritten on legal pads. For later drafts, I use a typewriter. I write by hand to slow myself down. People don't believe this about me: I'm a very fast writer, but I want to write slowly.

"When I was a student at Princeton, I took a creative writing course with the literary critic R.P. Blackmur. Every two weeks, I'd give him a short story I'd produced usually at the last minute. At the end of the semester, he said some complimentary words about my writing, and then added, 'Mr. Caro, one thing is going to keep you from achieving what you want--you think with your fingers.'

"Later, in the early 1960s when I was at "Newsday," my speed was a plus. But when I started rewriting "The Power Broker," I realized I wasn't thinking deeply enough. I said, 'You have to slow yourself down.' That's when I remembered Blackmur's admonition and started drafting by hand, which slows me down."

In this space and when I write copy, I write fast. But more often than not, though I write fast, I've thought about my words for hours and hours before I mark them down. It might look like I'm being rapid. But really, because I don't start writing until the words are in my fingers (that process takes time) I am slow. 

I'm slowed further by being the worst typist on earth. And I think exactly as fast as I type. At least, when I am thinking deeply enough--which I don't always get time to do.

Scary, I suppose.

Simca in the city.

We had out-of-town guests in this weekend, Jewish, and that means the almost obligatory journey down to Katz’s on East Houston Street.

For whatever reason, primarily I suppose because I have unmatched New York City parking karma, we decided, the five of us to fire up my 1966 Simca 1500 and drive down to the legendary deli.

“George will find a parking space,” my ever-loving offered. “He’s amazing, the Michelangelo of municipal meters." Feeling more pressure than I like on a three-day weekend, I shot her a glance. “No, seriously,” she continued, “George’s knack is uncanny.”

Our guests looked doubtful. The last time someone had found a parking space in Manhattan was sometime in 1963, months before Kennedy was killed. How could I possibly find one on the Lower East Side, around a place as crowded at Katz’s.

“Is it true?” our guests asked.

I looked down at my feet, self-effacing like the strong-man in the circus about to ring the bell.

“I’m pretty good,” I admitted. “Today’s a holiday. We’ll see how it goes.”

I steered the car down the FDR and exited on Houston, heading West on the broad avenue. One of my guests saw Katz’s across the street.

“There it is,” he said.

I down-shifted into second and darted right onto East First Street which runs alongside Houston just north of Peretz Square.

We pulled up to a van, and I quickly parallel parked into a perfect spot fewer than 100 yards from the Mecca of pastrami. I fed the meter and within minutes we were within the friendly confines.  

In short order, we navigated the lines at Katz’s and laden with pastrami, corned beef and Dr. Brown’s cream sodas, we settled into a table my wife had somehow secured.

One hour later, after we had each gained about a dozen pounds, my wife had the idea to show our out-of-towners the High Line.

“It’s no problem,” she blustered. “George will find a spot.”

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I shot her another look. Finding a space around Gansevoort Street is like finding a Republican who believes ‘all men are created equal.’ Or, worse, that women deserve equal pay.

In any event, I eased the Simca down 12th Street and headed south past thousands of orange and white construction barriers running toward the start of the High Line. In just seconds, I slid in behind a white SUV the size of a mastodon, and the Simca shut off with a cough and then another.

I hustled up the block and tried to decipher the parking regulations written on the white and red sign. They might as well have been written in Cuneiform, but given that there was a meter there, I inserted my credit card and got a little ticket, good for two hours, to park literally spitting distance from the grooved metal stairs that lead up to the elevated park.

"How did you do that?" one of our guests asked. 

"Do what," I non-chalanted.

"The space, at both Katz's and here?"

"There's a thing in New York," I said. "It's called parking karma. You get it when you swerve to avoid hitting people, when you lay off the horn in hospital zones, but mostly when you tip cab-drivers well. Acting like a human, in other words, gives order to the universe."

We strolled, in the frigid air the High Line.

As I would have assumed, my Simca was still there when we returned an hour later.

Parking karma. 

A Shithole Country.

You want shithole? I'll give you shithole.
Guess which country is:

26^th in the world in life-expectancy.

26^th in infant mortality.

17^th in educational performance.

45^th in literacy.

4^th (highest) in income inequality.

7^th in air quality.

26^th in environment.

25^th in infrastructure  (behind Oman and Barbadoes.)

11^th (highest) in crime.

1^st in gun violence.

1^st in prison incarceration.

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16^th (lowest) in corruption.
5th (lowest) in social mobility (among OECD nations.)

The mountains of New York.

One Saturday when I was about seven-years-old, my old man took me mountain climbing. At least he called it mountain climbing, and what did I know? I had hardly ever been further west than Philadelphia, or further north than White Plains.

It was 1964, maybe, before the world was derailed by rampant drugs, and crime, and racial strife and hippies and the chaos—and danger—that tainted so much of my growing up. There was still order in the universe. You could tell there was order because the Yankees were still winning pennants in 1964 with the likes of Whitey Ford still on the mound and Yogi and Mickey still slugging roundtrippers. The Yankees won, when I was a kid, with the regularity of the sun rising in the east or at least the IRT pulling in to 51^st Street.

So, one Saturday my old man must have had some work to do at the office, or some secretary to meet illicitly and he reckoned I would, unknowingly of course, be a good beard. We piled in his dusty green 1949 Studebaker and he let me sit in the front seat.

“Son,” he gurgled, “today we ascend to the heights. Today, we blaze in the footsteps of Sir Edmund Hilary. Today, we climb mountains.”

He threw the car into gear and we rattled down the street and across to the park. I had on an old pair of jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and probably a ball-cap and sneakers.

“Is it hard, Dad? I’ve never gone mountain-climbing.”

He laughed and steered the Studebaker around a black-smoke-belching city bus. “A strong boy like you—you have muscles on your muscles,” he said, squeezing my non-existent bicep. “A strong boy like you, you’ll scamper up the escarpment like a mountain goat. You’re a natural.”

In just a few moments we had reached out mountainous destination—a large exposure of Manhattan schist that lifts up in Central Park just north of the zoo at around 65^th Street. He parked his car and hustled me across Fifth Avenue against the light. We walked down the asphalt path and up to the fringe of the giant out-cropping.

“Here it is, son,” he said, “New York’s Everest, New York’s Kilimanjaro.” He handed me a brown-paper bag with some lunch in it: a bologna sandwich and a plum. “Look,” he continued, “it’s 10 o’clock now. Your dad has some work to do in the office, I’ll pickya up in a couple hours. Stay right on these rocks and don’t talk to anyone.”

There were other kids around. Some with parents or nannies, some, like me, were alone. They were playing ball, or drawing on the sidewalk with big sticks of dusty chalk, or climbing the rocks, or kicking through the large clumps of pigeons that had congregated where an old man with bread crumbs in a dirty bag was feeding them.

I put my bag of lunch in a crevasse a few feet above where we were standing. It would be safe there, I figured.

My old man kissed me goodbye. And I went off to climb Mount Everest.

Time is on your side. Or should be.

For about thirty years, I've regularly done "The New York Times" crossword puzzle. For about the last ten years, I've confined my efforts to the Sunday puzzle. I've always regarded it as a reward for the week gone by, and a way to relax and unwind.

There's a lesson gained from doing the crossword--an act of problem-solving--that most people and most agencies ignore.

Here's what I mean.

Last Sunday, I got the puzzle and I was stumped. I filled in about eight or 10 easy clues, but with the puzzle just about 10% done, I was stuck, baffled, unable to even hazard a guess.

When this sort of thing happens when you're in your 60s, you immediately think, "Fuck, that's it, I have early onset something. I'm beginning to lose whatever mind I once had."

So, I walked away from the Times, frustrated and a little worried.

Then, after an hour or so, I come back to it. I look at it with fresh eyes. I start seeing things, pulling at strings I hadn't noticed before.

Quickly, I answer 10 more clues, then 20. In just a few minutes I'm 90% done. Then, after another break, I come at it fresh again, and I finish the thing.

Creativity and problem-solving demand distance. They demand time. They demand breathing.

In our ridiculously "agile" world where "scrums" and "swarms" and "sprints" say "do it now," all that is obviated. We solve things half way. And creativity suffers.