The Family Jewels Among all the other issues we face these days, there remains one underlying issue that always manages to bubble up when the going gets tough. This may be just my own sensibilities, but it has to do with guns. Just to review the facts, there are supposedly 393 million privately owned guns in America. There are about 260 million adults (people over 18 years old), so that would seem like 1.5 guns…
Bagel Run In my family there is a legend that goes back to my days of owning a house in the Hamptons (technically in the town of Quiogue, which means “little clam” in the language of the native Montaukett tribe). I owned that house from 1989 until 2003 and used it as my weekend respite where I would take my children for our time together. We spent time in the pool, we built a treehouse…
Getting Crazier We all know that American politics has been pretty crazy for about eight years now. Yes, that coincides with Donald Trump coming onto the scene of the American political landscape in a serious (I have a really hard time using that word to describe anything Donald Trump does) way. It does strike me that we are in the beginning of the eventual end to that reign of terror now that we are seeing…
Little Maxie Back in 2012 (hard to believe that was 11 years ago!) I was just starting work on the New York Wheel project. That seems like a lifetime ago at this point, but then I was living with Kim at our South Street Seaport condo and as of late July, I was on payroll as the CEO of New York Wheel, which had offices at 19 State Street, a curved glass high rise building…
Walking Myself Home I just read a beautiful story in the Washington Post about a man who spent a year of his life caring for his cancer-ridden wife until the moment of her death. He described it as walking her home. Many people over the years have written about these final moments, and we have seen movies like Terms of Endearment, that capture the wistfulness of someone beloved’s last moment of consciousness. But despite the…
I’m So Confused In the last ten days we have all been inundated with more and more breaking news about the war in Israel and Gaza. I didn’t think anything, even the war in Ukraine, could displace the Trump legal drama unfolding in New York City, Atlanta, Washington D.C. and everywhere in between, but this Mideast crisis has done just that. Everything else in the news cycle is taking a way back seat. While there…
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod In 1889, poet Eugene Field, “the poet of childhood” and a man of letters wrote the poem, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Field was from a somewhat storied family in Missouri as his father, an attorney, famously represented Dred Scott in his failed attempt to litigate for his and his immediate family’s freedom in 1857. This led to the infamous Dred Scott Decision wherein the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that he was…
Secret Gardens As I’ve mentioned recently, I characterize my property as having 30 or so separate gardens. Perhaps that’s just a reflection of how easily I can, or cannot, manage the scope of my gardening. But nonetheless, I do attack my gardening in segments that reflect my thinking or at least my aesthetic interests of the moment. I have always thought that compared to many people I have a pretty good three dimensional sensibility about…
The Bestselling of America I just saw this week’s New York Times listing of the top Bestsellers in the non-fiction category in America. The top four books on the list were all pretty much newcomers with three having only one week on the list and the fourth having been on for only its second week. I’m not sure whether that’s normal or unusual, but what does strike me about the top four books is that…
The Birkenstock Dream This evening we are watching a movie we know that we have seen before, but which is less than fully memorable to us since so much of it is subtitled. It is the 2022 film called The Swimmers, and it is a real story about two Syrian girls that are trained Olympic swimmers. It tells the harrowing tale of their escape from war-torn Damascus, leaving their family behind for the time being,…