House Rules and Taboos

Taboos are not the same as house rules. I’ve stumbled into that truth. What’s a house rule? Well, at my sister's house the knives must go in the dishwasher points down. At a friend's lakehouse in the distant past, there was no such rule, however, there was a blue cup that was never to be put in the dishwasher, just rinsed well in hot water and replaced on the shelf. At my best and oldest friend’s home, you must run the water in the bathroom sink for a minute or two before flushing the john and at my house in order to get out of the bathroom you pull down on the knob while simultaneously yanking the door towards you. House rules are never explained unless a guest requests an explanation and they are not always fully connected to reality.

My sister says the knives should go down to prevent the drowsy first riser from impaling a hand as he tries to find the espresso carafe, but I think it’s a holdover from when her kids were little. They are now in their mid-thirties. I violated the never put the blue cup in the dishwasher rule in the midst of doing a whatever- I- could- to- help- clean- up- this- pit- frenzy. I forgot. I had been told the no blue cup in the dishwasher rule two days earlier. The cup, I was hotly informed the next morning, was NOT dishwasher safe. I then made things worse by pointing out that the blue cup had gone through the dishwasher process just fine. Breakfast was sullen, a morning boat ride was cancelled and we left earlier than we had planned. There isn’t any connection that I know of between running water down a sink drain and “air in the pipes”. That was the explanation for the routine. There is an alarming sound made by the toilet after you flush, but it sounds to me more like a sticky intake valve than air. Maybe I should volunteer to fix it. There is a perfectly good reason for the twisting, pulling, yanking necessary to get out of our bathroom, it’s necessary. I AM TOO GOING TO FIX THAT!! It’s only been like that since we moved in four years ago.

House rules have a ritualistic feel to them. Okay, not the bathroom door one, but the others do. They are ways of bringing order and when they are properly performed the world feels in synch with those present. Ah, no dangerous pointy objects, Ah, my blue cup is right where it belongs, Ah, --wait, I can’t hear over the weird sounds---the air god has been appeased. They are some of the little touch points that bring, with some irrationality, a little rationality.

Violating house rules is seldom fatal to a friendship. There is always a little tension amongst guests and hosts, but love carries us through the rough spots. Love and the right apology, - whoops, this knife is sticking up right next to the espresso carafe. Ha-Ha.

The blue cup fiasco was forgotten by the following weekend and was never mentioned again by any of us. Ever. It had changed from a house rule to a taboo. Taboos are not only not explained by hosts, they are not mentioned, they are not spoken of, they lie about the places we inhabit waiting for us to stumble upon them. They are the unmentionable subjects, sometimes merely politics, sometimes religion, sometimes both, sometimes a recent incident, sometimes a happening so ancient and long forgotten it’s difficult to recall why it became taboo in the first place. Sometimes we forget what is taboo. Taboos simply float there, mid-air, waiting for someone to stumble. Which is how a couple of days ago, in the midst of a too loud defense of Mary Todd Lincoln, I tried to say something about how the reaction in the 1860’s to the death of children was less severe than it is these days and I crashed right into a taboo.



Having a friend who knows the right thing to say at such a moment is one of the most precious gifts I possess. Having the sense to listen to her is just something I have stumbled into and take no credit for.

Street Theatre

h Sirens were echoing down the narrowness of Sixteenth Street as I got near Seventh Avenue. I couldn't tell if they were North or South of where I was huffing along in the darkness. It's lighter now in the mornings now that summer has arrived, but there are still a lot of alleys and other hidden places along my jogging route. There was a man in a light grey suit near the corner waiting for his dog to finish taking his morning dump. He had a cigarette in one hand and the leash and his official plastic-pick-up-the-doo-doo bag in the other. Between me and the dog walker a couple walked arm in arm down the sidewalk. She had her hand tucked inside his belt and he had his hand shoved into the right rear pocket of her jeans. They had done this before, what they were doing was less like walking and more like dance. The dog was finished now and was doing a little dance of it's own. A celebration of another successful mission. As the couple passed him, the man bowed low, his plastic covered hand grasping the lumps of dog poo all the while drawing deeply on his glowing cigarette. The dog was pulling at the leash making it difficult for the grey suit to keep up with the poop gathering but he too had done this many times before.

It wasn't until the couple had gotten to the corner that all of us spotted the half-naked black man in the middle of street. He had no shirt on, and it was a little chilly, and his pants were down around his knees. The couple stopped on the corner and briefly looked his way. The grey suit said "Oh, for Chrissakes" or something and then proceeded to take his harvest to the nearby trash basket. The half-naked black man was jumping up and down on a manhole and making a sound like the distant sirens. He was facing away from all of us watching the approach of two or three cars. The couple didn't wait for the light to change, but paced right out across the avenue, the half-naked man never gave them any notice. The grey suit man and I got to the corner about the same time as the cars reached the man in the street. He did some more jumping as they cruised around him, he waved his arms above his head and made that howling siren sound. Grey suit and dog turned right and disappeared into the entrance of a building. I watched the naked man do some spins and some karate punches. He tried to do a kick but couldn't with his pants down so low.

The real sirens were closer now and, as I watched, an ambulance turned onto the avenue and headed towards us. "Ah, they are coming to get him." I thought as I crossed the street. I turned to watch, I couldn't help myself. The ambulance came roaring down the avenue straight for the man with his pants down, the lights, even in the brightening morning light, were brilliant and glaring and the siren suddenly was very loud. The man was doing a kind of jumping jacks with little leg movement while windmilling his arms like one of those old-timey tap dancers. At the last second possible, the ambulance swerved to the right, missing the jumping man by maybe a foot and then it proceeded on down the street and in a moment was gone.

It was quiet. The man stood still for a moment, he still had his back to me. He heaved a big sigh and bent over a little to get his pants up. He shook himself like a wet dog would after getting out of a lake, then he walked to the other side of the street and headed west.

The next show is on the next block.

The ghost train and other entertainments

H The city is a completely different experience in the early morning. It's a completely different experience every morning, but The Committee for Keeping Things Interesting down at the offices of the MTA must been reading Stephen King this past weekend. Twice since Monday morning (more on that in a moment) a completely empty train has arrived at my stop . Now at five in the morning you would expect a lot of emptiness, but this was a different empty. This train had it's lights off. You couldn't see into the cars. It was as if the longest stretch limo in the universe had just pulled up to the curb,

''Is that who I think it is?'' said a woman to her male friend one night in front of the Booth Theatre. There was a white limo in front of them at the curb, it's windows deeply blacked out.
"That's the good thing about black windows, "he replied,"You can imagine it to be anyone."

Meanwhile, back at my stop I was imagining that it was the Chinese army. I was alone on the platform, they could take it, but I would make it a fight. What a perfect way to invade the city. You get your troops to Yonkers and then march down to 207th street for the A, maybe put the rest on the number 1, it's just a couple of blocks over. You keep the lights shut off so nobody sees the Chinese Army invading the city until they get off at Penn Station. The problem is there are a lot of stairs to maneuver through at Penn Station. You've got to go down a set to get to the passageway and then climb a set to get to the actual station or out onto Eighth Ave. They should have gotten off at 42th Street and taken a cab to Times Square. That's where they'd want to go in the early morning, weary few pedestrians and beautiful lights.


The lights came on revealing it was nobody. No one at all. The train sat there, it gave a little wheeze, and sat there some more, then someone found it's asthma inhaler and it moved on south sounding a bit hollow. That was amusing said someone down at the Committee to Keep Things Interesting.

So was Monday's train. They usually just screw with the trains on the weekends in order to confuse the tourists. "All A trains will be running express to 207th Street, {unintelligible inaudible sounds}is no C local service, for local service take the Express A which will be running local. Or Loco. For local service between 59th and 125th Street, take the B train. (which hasn't been spotted since Jimmy Hoffa disappeared.) or the D which will {unintelligible inaudible sounds} until 5AM." Screwing with the trains during the Monday is dangerous for the MTA because, well, because there are so many of us and fewer of them and we can be the Chinese Army if we have to be.

So when the train pulled into the station on Monday, empty, and did I mention that the platform was loaded with lots of people who had been waiting and waiting for a train,(During rush hour, waiting and waiting is defined as anything longer than one song on your Ipod.)and it stopped but the doors did not open, were they just trying to mess with us? Yes. So several people discussed the matter with the conductor who had lowered his window like a dope. And he opened the doors. We all got on. The doors stayed open. The train did not move.

There was a crackle and a voice, probably the dope, said "Sorry, folks this train has to go directly to 14th Street. This train was not supposed to take on passengers here. Please get off. This train is going directly to 14th Street." Nobody moved. I didn't move I was GOING to 14th Street.

I wasn't in the conductor's car, but I imagine there was some more discussion. We waited and waited, about half a song or more. The doors stayed open. "This train is out of service" the dope tried, "No passengers. All passengers must exit the train."
I didn't move but a lot of more obedient people did. They got off. Soon there was only me and about six others. "Everyone going to 14th Street?" I asked. "Oh yeah,"they said. We sat there. I read the New York Times Dear Diary.

The doors shut and the train started going. It was like your best dream, friends, there was plenty of room and the train was skipping every stop along the way. As a special treat, it went through the stations just slow enough so we could see the looks on people's faces as we zoomed by.

At 14th Street, we stopped. All of us got out of our private limo and went to work.

====
That's not what really happened. What really happened was that the trains were cancelled due to a power outage and I had to run up St. Nicholas Ave at 126th Street to catch a gypsy cab which took me and another abandoned passenger all the way to 23rd and Third for about Thirty-Five Bucks. It was a lovely ride through Central Park and the environs of Lexington Ave which is where I am going now for my Sunday run.

Sleeping on the Beach

Sleeping on the beach is seldom a good idea for me. I tend to expose some unprotected skin to several hours of full sun with the resulting red tattoo having to be slathered with an pain-killing cream for several days. (Right now the woman on the next blanket has been asleep for nearly two hours but she was the color of breakfast sausage when she strolled out onto the sand and set up her chaise.) What I needed was some way to keep track of time so I could tell how long I had been out there.

Ancient technology has always intrigued me. Tools have been of greater interest that the products produced by them. I bore people by wondering why it is that museums display thousands of sculptures and carefully carved wooden objects but not the gouges, files and chisels required to make them. Art is not what sets us apart as a species, it is our use of tools. Art is just another by-product of that use of tools . For me, the more basic, the more primitive a tool, the better I like it. My dad had, and I still have, this tear shaped chunk of steel. It was the perfect sheet metal working tool, he said, sharp at one end and nicely rounded at the other, one could use all of it's contours to shape anything else into anything else. I didn't really appreciate what he was talking about until years later while browsing through the Metropolitan Museum of Natural History, I saw reproductions of the first stone tools found in Africa. Tear-shaped, looking just like this comma , it was dad's tool unchanged for 3 and a half-million years..., you could use the sharp end to chop the end of a lance or scrape the meatside of a skin. the round end makes a perfect hammer, drive a stake or bust open a marrow bone.

So I decided to make a sundial on the beach. It's another primitive technology that I have some grasp of, no pun intended. I found the perfect stick and luckily there was someone going by who had a watch, so I got a pretty good reference for high noon. (Yeah, it's cheating, but this is experimental science on a zero budget.) Shells were collected to mark the hours and I settled in to listen to my book and watch the boats, girls and gulls go by.

I once wrote a story about a survivor of an airplane crash in the far North woods of Idaho who tries to signal his whereabouts to rescuers by starting a fire signal everyday at noon. He gets North by looking a the moss side of trees and sets a stick in the sunshine every morning when he wakes up. When the shadow is at it's shortest, he lights up the nearest sap-filled pine tree. When no rescue arrives he moves Southward until darkness falls and then does the same thing again the next day. It takes ten days, and two raging forest fires, before anyone at the search end of things to notice the regularity. They come and get him before he can burn his way to Boise.

So I fell asleep on the beach and I missed one o'clock, the little FM radio I have said it was 2:10 (more cheating, uh, outside reference use.) So I got up and marked where the two would be. Then, more reading, listening, to my book. Which is the problem, the book, it's Theocracy and even though I am interested in the subject matter - the influence of religion on American politics - almost the whole of Part One is a recitation of the growth of churches by percentages. Paragraph after paragraph of "increased by nearly six percent between 1865 and 1877...". ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz. Huh?

Now the sun seems to have moved a great deal across the sky and a quick check -"Excuse me, Miss Brown-as-a-JimmyDean-Extra Lean, do you know what time it is?"..proved to be-------- not as much as I had thought. It was only 3:20 but the shadow had moved twice as far as it had between noon and one and nearly three times as far- if her watch was right- between two and three. What the hey?

So I got up and marked three o'clock or so and then called it a day, but I went inside to find out what the deal was. Here it is. The ancients figured out what I did. The spacing between the hours was never the same, AND, as I would find out the next day, the sun moves down the horizon every day so you would have to adjust for that too, otherwise in a couple of weeks even your noon would be wrong. What they did was two things: they tilted the base of the dial so that it matched the angle of the sun's travel and they re-aimed the thing every day to follow the season. Except at Stonehenge, there they had the big gates to look through as the sun traveled, but it was more of a yearly calendar than a watch.

A much more complicated observation of time could be made by the astrolabe invented around 150 BC, (sigh, later condemned as an instrument of the devil by the Church, another in a long line of errors by the inerrant.), it shows the depth of knowledge achieved by the most ancient of our ancestors.

So I found out that the simple technology of the sundial is not so simple, and I had a good nap.

Next I intend to show how easy it is to control the wind.

An Incident at Sea

Before I forget, I want to get this down. You know how that is, something happens, but before you can collect your thoughts about it, something else happens. This happened two days ago and already the facts are fading, no wonder defense attorneys love to question eye witnesses weeks or months or years after the events in question.


Tuesday afternoon the tide was out and we decided to go for a walk in the ocean. Just off shore, about twenty five feet or so, is a large sandbar that extends down the length of the beach for at least a mile perhaps more. When you get in the water, it gets about chest deep and then in the space of two or three steps, the water is barely over your knees. (It's all the sand that they replenished to the beach about three years ago.) All afternoon we had watched people walking slowly up and down the sandbar looking down into the water for something, for what we couldn't tell.

Now we were out amongst them. The water is crystal clear, you can see every swirl and dip in the sand's surface. It is a barren landscape except for the occasional shell or stone that somehow has been left on top. It's those that the walkers are seeking, I suppose. Something that no one else has had a chance to admire.

I thought I had scored when I spotted a large object and bent down to pick it up. It was a conch shell, but the conch was still in it.

"Oh, you touched it."said L."eew"
"It's nature."I said with my knowledge of the Discovery Channel. "It's a conch. We are in the middle of nature here."

I am so scientific. I tossed it back in further out where it was less likely to be picked up again. Meanwhile, L was telling me the stories of the riverwalks with the Girls Scouts down the mighty Illinois. The mighty Illinois in mid-summer is quite walkable with long stretches of very shallow water, I know that from trying to canoe down that river in August. You do more dragging than paddling. Anyway, L was remembering how everyone slept so good the night of riverwalk day, so good, so quiet, so deeply. Speaking of deeply, we had drifted out a little ourselves on the sandbar and now were in water about waist deep. And that's when I saw the shadow.

It was about forty yards away and maybe twenty feet further offshore than we were, moving in a straight line along the edge of the sandbar, coming closer to us by the second. It was rectangular, so at first I thought it was the shadow from a kite or the odd edge of a cloud, but there were no kites and all the clouds were way off near the horizon.

Now it was twenty yards away, still twenty feet farther out than us. I was fascinated. What a big thing to be moving so smoothly.....? Then a voice nearer the shore called out, "What is that?"

Which is what I should have been wondering.

Now it is even with us and I can see that the thing is eight or nine feet long and three feet wide and I start thinking s h a r k ,,, the thing is very big and I am trying to recall what you are supposed to do if you spot a shark, and I even wonder if it's possible to punch something that big through so much water and I am watching it for any signs that it might be turning this way...but I don't want to panic and now ...

the rectangle has eased on down the beach...

It occurs to me that we are standing very still.

"Was that a manatee?" the voice, a woman's, asks.
"Beats the hell out of me." I answer scientifically.

We went to go see some manatees about eight years ago, but they were in a muddy river and we were standing on asphalt. They were about as big as the shadow and just as rectangular.

"It's supposed to look like a blanket is floating in the water." The woman said helpfully.
"Yes." I thought it did look like a kind of floating blanket, a huge, giant, moving faster than us floating blanket."Yes, I think it was a manatee."

She was thrilled to have been so close.

Not as close as us.

Yes, I know, manatees are as gentle as cows, but would they mind having a buoy put on them saying "NICE MANATEE, NOT SHARK" on them.? It would help get us to the next ocean walk.

"Oh,"said L, "that was big. This place has all kinds of stuff like that, those sharp black thingies."
"Horseshoe crabs."
"Yeah, too much nature."

I reminded her that on the riverwalks down the Illinois there must have been snapping turtles, rattlesnakes and cottonmouths.

"Yeah, but I'm a citygirl now" she says."I could handle Nature then, now I just want to relax."

Me too, and I don't need any floating blankets to wrap up in, thankyou very much.

We slept very well that night, so good, so quiet, so deeply.

Dad Looks Good in Black.

Aw-kah-awh ... I know it was him. He loved the woods, he loved being in the woods, in the out-of-doors, a running stream brought peace to his eyes. He loved the woods, but this morning he was on the beach, just after dawn, dressed in black. I know,(my oldest sister rolls her eyes) this ought to be entitled, Why Primitive People believed in Spirits, Part Six, but my father was on the beach perched on a little mound of sand watching as I slogged by in the morning light. All the seagulls flew off as I approached, flew off for fear or to find breakfast, I do not know, but the single crow amongst them stayed put, hunched a little as I came nearer and then said,
"Aw-kah-awh"
"Hi, Pop." I replied. He made a little nodding motion as I went by.

===
Some of you know this story and some don't, some have been told this story several times and have either forgotten it or they prefer to have it forgotten, but for those who have never been told the story, here it is, to be believed or not, remembered or not.

Outside our seventh floor apartment windows in New York is a ravine full of brush and trees. It is very uncitylike, a little hidden valley populated by chickadees all winter and wrens, starlings and nuthatches all summer. (Sigh) Yes, there are a lot of very city-ish pigeons, but on a happier note, they have attracted the occasional red-winged hawk and a falcon or two, who have happily lunched on squab for a day or so before moving on to greater heights in the Heights.

There are blue-jays, yelling at the feral cats who are just doing their job of de-ratting the area and lots of squirrels, both gray and the rarer, coal black variety. No, the coal black ones are not rats, they are squirrels. I did think a few years ago that I might have discovered a hybrid in our little ravine, but I have since seen them up in Ft. Tryon Park. Once, I saw a large parrot, obviously lost out of someone's window. He hung around for a couple of days and then disappeared. And there was the afternoon of the owl. He only stayed until nightfall.

The point of all this population reporting is to show that I do a lot of looking out my windows at the lifeforms and that I have never seen a crow. Except once.
===
There had been a message waiting for us when we had gotten home late that Friday night. Pop had struggled his last battle. There was too much, there was too little. They had tried removing the breathing tube, it was causing problems, but without it, he was gone in moment or two.

I didn't sleep much, in and out of dreams, like diving into waves, going under, feeling the power pass and surfacing in safety. About six am, before any real light has begun to penentrate the ravine, I got up and washed my face, then went to my chest-of-drawers for a shirt. At first, I only heard a movement, only saw a shadow, but then looking closer, I saw the crow sitting on the nearest branch to my window. He looked right at me.
===
Our family supposedly arrived in Virginia about the same time as John Smith, before the Pilgrims had packed their bags. I've been sorting through the various records and may have found the "crossing ancestor'', a nice fellow from a fairly large family in England, but there has always been a certain reverence for the Native American in our family. My father's mother always seemed drawn to Indian lore and one of my sisters was nearly obsessed by the idea that she was an Indian of some sort, but then people are interested in all sorts of things and little girls get obsessed, possessed with ideas great and small. And too, never in his life did my father mention any kind of spiritual connection with anything beyond his father's Methodism and the songs of Tennessee Ernie Ford. But... he did so love the woods.
===
The crow jumped to the window sill and cocked his head the way birds do when they want to really see something. He strolled a few steps then used one flap to get back onto the branch.
"Aw-kah-awh" It said.
"Goodbye, Pop,"I said,"Thanks for coming by."
And off he flew.
===
There are crows in Fort Tryon Park, they perch high up on the Cloisters, and there are crows in the trees just down the street by the subway station. They make a racket everytime they spot a wandering cat, but not in our ravine and not on my window sill, not before that morning and none since.

Okay,you say, your dad looks good in black, but how do you know it was him this morning?
Easy, I say, I recognized the accent.

===
And today was the day he married my mother, sixty seven or so years ago.

This is not him.

After Ben's Visit Last Fall

Waving, waving, waving
goo'bye, goo'bye
goo'bye,
Waving, waving, waving
till we cannot see your eyes.

a flash of brakelights at the corner
makes us think
hope
for a moment
you are coming back
then there's a flash of your favorite hat
and just the morning chill remains.

yet still we wave
goo'bye
goo'bye goo'bye
long after the taxi's turned and gone

Waving, waving, waving till we cannot see
taxis
hats
your eyes.

Why does that sign say Canal Street?

There is a rhythm to living in the city that cannot be ignored. It's wound up and around by timing, timings, and the lack thereof. You have to stay within the boundaries of the city's space and time or you end up, as I did, three stops beyond where you should be at 7:28AM.

I still don't know what happened.

Everyday the train runs, the conductor drones on about the bombs, uh, suspicious packages or bags, which should not be kept to oneself, and you turn to the sports section of the Times to see if the Red Sox are still playing .600 ball. (They are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's early.) Then you get off.

Except that yesterday, I got off three stops late. Not one stop. Not two. Three. Did I fall asleep?
There is this odd thing that happens to you when you get off at the wrong stop because everything looks about right. My first thought was that they had closed my usual staircase and gotten rid of the bench I sit on while waiting for the next train. They hadn't, I had been in Wonderland.

I took the uptown back to Normalville.

The Catacombs under the Blue Wall

One day last week, they put up a new wooden fence around the empty corner lot and painted it blue. A bunch of earthmoving equipment arrived and within the next few days a couple of things happened: first, the blue wall became the billboard for every musical, record or movie company and second, they dug out a lot of New York City schist.

What I wanted to see, and couldn't,was what was in the caves under the blue wall. You can see what I'm talking about here:





Those arches had been buried and sealed under the sidewalk for about six or seven decades, at least since the last building was built on the property. (Search this blog for "Goodbye to Bobo's" to see what it looked like.)

I talked to some of the guys working on the site. They were kind enough to bring a little old lady a couple of bricks up from deep inside there, but reported that the catacombs had contained nothing more than some rusted cans and a lot of rat droppings.

What?
No copies of the Constitution?
No secret Mafia files?
No lost or stolen or missing artworks?

Nope.

Some nice old bricks though.

I don't believe them for a minute.

Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar

I was concentrating on trying to win a Scrabble game on my Palm Pilot when the fellow sat down at the table next to me. He had a quarter in his left ear. I was sixteen points behind with five letters left, D T I A R and no tiles left to choose. He had the chicken salad. I was looking a free Y, thinking about playing DIARY and then hoping the Palm wouldn't go out when my brain said "Uh, did you say he had a quarter in his ear?" "Yes," I hissed at my brain,"A quarter. In his ear. Now start thinking about TIDAR or DRAT or something, we are in training here." (Vacation with the Scrabble addicts, uh, experts, is next week.) "Ooooh-kay," said my brain, "But that's interesting and he's going to sit there with a quarter in his ear and you are going to miss the story while you are trying to think of TRIAD, which is what you are trying to think of, duh." "Hmmm," I thought, "I could play TRIAD, but why would someone have a quarter in their ear?

So, I did the New York thing.

""xcuse me, do you mind if I ask you why you have a quarter in your ear?"

Meanwhile, smartboy brain is guessing Arthritis cure... or hex-keeper-away thingie, but the guy, older guy, maybe late sixties, a little crooked here and there with age, was shoveling in the chicken salad as if the tour bus had announced it was leaving in five minutes.

"In case, " he grinned widely, -he'd answered this one before-, "In case, I ever need a flop in a two-bit hotel." He picked up a piece of melba toast and crunched off a bit of the end.

His name is Albert _______. Seventy-eight years old, so, older than I had thought, and from the Lower East Side, so, had lived his whole life within twenty blocks from here, except for three years in the Army, so, what's with the quarter?

His old man, it turns out, had been a little nuts, a little frantic, during the depression. He wanted everyone of his kids, six of them, to have some money on them at all times. At least have car-fare, in case they got lost or something, like dragged off the playground or something. So, even as a six year old, he had to have at least a dime on him or the old man would get pissed. Well, sometimes the pants of a six year old don't have such good pockets, so he started putting the dime in his ear.

He kept it there at the time. It fit nicely, he could still hear good, and his old man could tell in a second that he, the kid, was in the dough.

He scrapes the last of the salad up with his fork pushing the limp lettuce to one side. So, he says, time goes on, prices go up, he gets bigger, he puts a quarter in his ear and starts using 'the flop in the two-bit hotel' line. He grins.

"I tried to stop once." he says,"I gave it up for about a week, but it didn't feel right. I put the two-bits in my ear and all's well with the world. I don't even remember that it's there unless someone like you asks about it. It's just something."

Yup. Just something which keeps our planet from spinning out of it's orbit.

I play TRIAD on the end of JOYS and go out. The Palm is stuck with eight points. I win by two.

What a beautiful Spring we are having! Look at that New York stoop garden!