JOHN BROWN’S BODY LIES A-MOLDERING IN UPSTATE NEW YORK

Who knew?

Who knew that the final resting place of John Brown, who earned fame and infamy in Kansas and Virginia, was the rocky soil of North Elba, New York, an Adirondack hamlet just outside Lake Placid?

I didn't. I assumed he was buried in Virginia, where he was hung after his trial and conviction on charges of murder, treason and conspiracy for the raid he led on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry on October 16, 1859, a hundred and fifty years ago. Brown had other plans, though. He didn't want to be buried in Virginia because he didn't want to be buried in a coffin made by slaves. So after his December 2nd execution, Brown's wife shipped his body north, first to New York City, where she engaged a Brooklyn undertaker named Jacob Hopper to prepare it for burial. Hopper's receipt itemizes his services: keeping corpse on ice, washing and soaping corpse out, etc. Then the body was transported to North Elba, where Brown had owned a small spread since 1849. And by the way, although Brown is always depicted with a flowing white beard (as he is in the tableaux at the John Brown Wax Museum in Harpers Ferry), by the time of the raid it had been trimmed to less Biblical proportions.

How do I know all this? Because the extremely knowledgeable and practiced docents at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site, which my wife and I visited in August, told me. It's a marvel they are so practiced because the John Brown Farm is not easy to find. En route, we saw not a single sign pointing the way or even noting the place's existence. We just noodled in and around Lake Placid in search, until we suddenly found ourselves on John Brown Road, which ends in a cul-de-sac, beside which are the house itself, a barn and the little graveyard where Brown and other members of the Harpers Ferry raiding party, including several of Brown's numerous sons, are interred. Close by and towering over the surroundings is a peculiar-looking structure that turns out to be a ski-jump.

It's a haunting place. The house is small and unexceptional except that, as one of the guides mentioned several times, "We are standing on the same floorboards John Brown stood on." There are a few artifacts, including Mr. Hopper's receipt and the Browns' bed, which looks too small for an adult to recline on, which turns out to have been the point. At the time, sleeping upright was thought to prevent, or at least discourage, consumption.

It's no accident that John Brown ended up in the Adirondacks. He bought his land (for a dollar an acre) from a wealthy abolitionist named Gerrit Smith who had established a land grant program for free blacks in hopes of establishing a black community in the Adirondacks called Timbuktoo. Brown moved to the area to provide guidance and help to the settlers, although he spent much of the 1850's in and out of Kansas. Adirondack soil is rocky and the growing season is about eight weeks long. Most of the newcomers Gerrit Smith staked moved on. Timbuktoo faded away.

John Brown, on the other hand, looms ever larger in the national psyche, either a great martyr to a just and necessary cause, or our first domestic terrorist. He is still so controversial that Todd Bolton, director of the Harpers Ferry Museum and organizer of "John Brown Remembered," the Museum's anniversary program of events, noted carefully in the Washington Post that, "We're not celebrating Brown. We're commemorating an important chapter in American history."

The Museum is not alone in this. Last Friday morning, some three hundred history enthusiasts started from Dargan, Md. to follow in the footsteps of the original raiding party of twenty-one. There was an observance on Friday in Torrington, Connecticut, where he was born and there's another planned in Akron, Ohio, where he lived for a while. At the end of the month, Yale hosts a conference on John Brown and his legacy.

For such a dramatic figure, John Brown has never fit well on screen or stage. Johnny Cash played him in the 80's television special North and South and looked like a man with a fake beard. Raymond Massey played him twice, first in Santa Fe Trail (You may well wonder why a movie about Bleeding Kansas is called Santa Fe Trail, and despite having seen it, I cannot begin to explain), and fifteen years later in Seven Angry Men, an excerpt of which can be seen on YouTube, where it was posted by a devotee of the film's costar, Debra Paget. Massey was also in the Broadway production of Stephen Vincent Benet's epic poem John Brown's Body in 1953. Raymond Massie was a great actor, but the great John Brown drama, stage or screen, remains to be created.

Help may be on the way. Both Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorcese have expressed interest in doing movies about John Brown. Tarantino is no doubt disappointed that the victims of the notorious Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas numbered only five, but cheered that they were hacked to death with broadswords. With or without a good new movie version, John Brown's truth--or his legend, or his aura, or what Benet in his poem called "The pure elixir, the American thing"--will almost certainly go marching on.

THY NEIGHBOR’S ASS

Last month marked the twentieth anniversary of my family’s move to our current address, so I’ve been thinking about my neighborhood and the whole idea of neighborhood, at no time more strongly than a couple of Saturday morning’s ago, when I was walking home with George from his off-leash hour in Prospect Park. At the top of the block I noticed one of my neighbors, a man who lives eight or ten houses up from me, retrieving his garbage can from between two parked cars, where it had been left by the sanitation guys. My neighbor was wearing a t-shirt and the hand that was not holding the garbage can, which he cupped demurely over his front bits. He wore nothing else, naught, nada, zip, gornisht – a backside outside in the morning breeze. It’s only witnesses besides me seemed to be the fellow’s wife, who stood in a bathrobe at the top of their stoop, smiling, and the petite lady of the house next door, who was sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house, her eyes fiercely focused on her broom. George and I walked by, and I said “Quite a way to begin the day,” with perhaps a shade too much pep. She nodded as she swept.

It’s things like the unexpected appearance of my neighbor’s ass that remind me that no matter how gentrified Park Slope gets, it’s still Brooklyn.. Manhattan may have the flash, the glamor and location, location, location, but for deep dish, dyed in the wool eccentricity, you’ve got to come to Brooklyn.

I speak as a long-time resident, though hardly a pioneer. By 1989, Park Slope was widely thought to be Over, the bargains gone, the discreet charms of the neighborhood growing more bourgeois by the minute. The main drag, Seventh Avenue, had a Benetton and two restaurants with tablecloths – but it also had shoe repair shops, butchers, bodegas and dark bars specializing in shots and beers for a hardscrabble, beefily forearmed clientele. The bars had names like Mooney’s, Minsky’s and Snooky’s; some of them had no names at all.

We’ve come a long way since then. There are no cobblers or butchers on Seventh anymore, and your best bet for a boiler-maker is probably Farrell’s in Windsor Terrace. On the other hand, if by “brewski” you mean coffee, Seventh Avenue can accommodate you many times over, likewise if you’re looking for a new cell phone, a manicure or a refi.

Not that the path of gentrification has been smooth or direct. For a while, there was a store around the corner that sold fried ravioli – just fried ravioli. The place didn’t make it, but not for lack of free samples; indeed, the samples may have been part of the problem. Still, the ravioli place lasted longer than the Benetton did. Today, someone sells custom-made makeup out of the same space. When the white tablecloth restaurant that replaced Snooky’s closed recently, there were local murmurs about retribution and karma. There is resistance to the nabe getting too high-toned.

I don’t think there’s much to worry about, not so long as we have folks like my drawer-dropping neighbor, or the Cat Lady across the street or the Sweeper or Opera Man, a plumpish gent who strolls the streets giving forth with song in a manner reminiscent of Adam Sandler’s SNL character, only not so charming. There’s no telling when Opera Man’s countertenor stylings will assail the ear: perhaps when you’re trying to read the paper, perhaps when you’re in bed waiting for the Ambien to kick in. My wife believes he must be a professional singer, whereas I think he’s simply a lunatic with pipes. If I’m walking George and we pass Opera Man in mid-aria, he – that is, George – growls, because he knows passive aggression when he smells it. I sympathize, but hold the leash tightly. After all, it’s his nabe too, I assume. This is Brooklyn, where the weirdos are more than part of the passing parade; they live here.

THE WAY OF THE NOTARY

Yesterday we discovered that a document Toby needed for his return to college in a couple of weeks needed to be notarized. We soon learned that, despite the vast number of establishments of drug stores and real estate offices that have signs in their windows advertising the presence of a notary, a notary is hard to find when you need one.

Of course, that isn't very often, but when you need one, you need one. And therein lies the germ of my next act. I'm going to become a free-lance, part-time notary.

How much training can be required? From what I can tell so far, not much. It's not like going back to school for that Phd or even learning to drive a manual. This retraining has, I'm happy to say, not yet terrified and depressed, though I haven't actually begun it so it may be too early to tell.

Soon as I put out my shingle, foks will be dropping by with stuff they need notarized. What a pleasant break in the roiling tedium of creation that is the general mood here in my office. I'll get out my little stamp and collect a fee. The fellow Helen and Toby finally tracked down this morning charged $4 for his imprimatur. I'm sure I can do better, especially if I make house calls and find ways to persuade people they need more documents notarized. I wonder if I can mess with the ink I'll use for the official stamp. Different colors? Metallics?

This could be the part-time gig I've dreamed of.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT HUFFPO...

I'm blogging there too. Check it out.

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DEAR GAIL,

Thanks for mentioning my millennial list in your hilarious column. The Milennium Book, as you recall, was published in 1991; just think of the '90s bad ideas we didn't get to include. The living hell that was the dial-up Internet connection – a rotten idea that could very well have made the list, had we but known.

In fact, re-reading it in the harsh light of the present, not to mention your Early Bird Edition of our new millennium’s worst ideas (and I couldn’t agree with you more about reality television, btw; nothing against schadenfreude, but it's just not enough), I’d say the list needs some tweaking.

I’ll stand by Chamberlain’s appeasement, trial by fire or water (can we include water-boarding here?), foot binding, flagellants, the ontological proof of the existence of god, trench warfare and scientific creationism. They were and, imho, still are, a bunch of bad, bad ideas.

But wine in a box need not be bad at all, especially if you’re willing to pay more than you think you ought to pay for wine in a box. I don’t like the fact that you can’t see how much wine is left in the box you're drinking from, which can lead to drinking more than one thought one might, followed by suddenly and horribly running out of wine. Still, there are worse things in the world: hazelnut flavored coffee, for instance, or Bud Light Lime, or all flavored coffees and light beers, for that matter. And I’m only considering beverages.

And what's sociology doing on the list? What was I thinking?

Finally, my view of French mime has undergone turbulence and, finally, a sea change, especially since last week’s auction of items from Marcel Marceau’s estate, the proceeds from which from which went to retire the considerable debt Marceau left at the time of his death in 2007 -- as if anyone need further proof that mime is not an easy gig.

But in an age in which political correctness and fear of violent revenge have rendered the traditional targets of ridicule and abuse -- people weaker, poorer, or sometimes simply different from ourselves -- strictly off limits, mime has been there for us all.

No matter your color, creed or station in life, everyone can make fun of mimes. And many do. And do, and do again. And that's a good thing.

And yet.

Without mime, Shields and Yarnell would’ve had to retrain and Bill Irwin probably wouldn’t be so slim.

Besides, how annoying is mime, really? Compared to, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals or Quentin Tarantino movies, it’s not even close.

Mimes of the world, pardonez-moi.

MOVE OVER, DAKOTA

I love New York's titled apartment buildings. I'm not talking about those enormous, turn of the (last) century piles like the Dakota, Apthorp or Belnord, massive structures which contain some of the city's grandest apartments and toniest residents. I mean the innumerable smaller buildings around town, modestly ornamented and sometimes downright shabby, whose names conjure a grandeur utterly belied by their appearance. Sometimes the names are classically august, sometimes they seem to be tributes to some forgotten builder's wife or daughter or mother (I've never seen a building with a man's name) and sometimes they're horrendous puns. Here are some of my faves:

ASSHOLE FOR JESUS

“His friends and adversaries recall the time in the 1970s when the musical “Hair” first came to this city, and Mr. Riner, upset by its nudity, quietly interrupted the show by climbing on stage, a Bible in hand.” – “Lawmaker in Kentucky Mixes Piety and Politics” NYT 1/3/09

Do we think he reimbursed the audience? Or did he deem his quiet display of superior rectitude sufficient recompense?

My nerves.

BLESSINGS OF THE SEASON

My wife says the holidays feel shorter this year because Thanksgiving came relatively late in November. To me the holidays feel longer this year because they started on November 4th, when I waited almost an hour and a half to vote. I’ve voted at the same polling station for nineteen years and the longest I’ve ever waited was fifteen minutes, max. Never have I waited on such a jolly line, full of smiles and amiable chat. Some voters had brought books and magazines. I stood with a friend and his eighteen year old son, who was proudly voting for the first time. A couple of neighbors said hello to me on their way out; one leaned in as she passed and warned me to be on the lookout for dual Republican inspectors minding the District 21 voting machine. “There’s supposed to be one Republican and one Democrat, not two Republicans. We reported it,” she said.
I am aware that the world outlook has, by most measures, deteriorated since Nov. 4th. The economy continues to collapse; violence and uncertainty dominate the international stage; the Knicks continue to suck, albeit now in a more up-tempo way.
But the light at the end of the tunnel shines on. Even now, during the Most Wonderful Time of the Year with its countless opportunities for soul-flaying introspection, the thrill isn’t gone. Hope is still in the air. Any day, the words “tectonic shift” will start appearing on the Op Ed page like toadstools after a rainstorm. For the record, I want to stately clearly that no one is shifting more tectonically than I.
For example, we’ve had our living room painted – for the first time since the Clinton years. This was not an easy change to undertake, even though the living room walls had seen better days, having withstood well over a decade’s worth of fingerprints, exploding champagne bottles, projectile vomiting and people who talk with their mouths full. Still, the ambience was wonderful: comfortably bohemian, chicly shabby, unfussily inviting and many other jolly terms designed to defuse my wife’s urges toward home improvement. Long, elegant curls of dried paint – at least I thought they were elegant – hung from the ceiling, reminders of the Great Leak of 2002. The leak was repaired, but the paint dangled on. No more, and that’s a good thing, especially now that the painters have left. With luck, that will be the last paint job I’ll ever have to cope with in my lifetime, and I don’t mean that in a morbid way.
Even the dog has found the new zeitgeist, and no one has ever called George a quick learner. George is a small terrier whose immense charm can be easily derailed by other dogs sniffing him at the wrong moment, or people coming too close when the light isn’t right, or black garbage bags wafting ominously, or taunting squirrels or a whole lot of other creatures and things great and small. When fussed, George lunges at offenders and barks in a surprisingly scary way for a fifteen pound dog. This can be a real drag on the atmosphere, especially when the object of George’s (let’s-not-call-it) bloodlust is, say, a school kid who wants to pet him.
It would be nice if George channeled Obama’s forgiving, hold-no-grudges-even-against-Lieberman attitude, but that is not George’s Way. Instead, George has honed his aggressive impulses. No more school children, no more dogs his own size. George’s irritants these days are big, beefy beasts wearing prong collars who have unknowingly trespassed onto what George considers his terroir. The morning of November 5th, George and I were walking in Prospect Park and passed a dog and person we see several times a week. The other gent and I nodded and smiled to each other and the dogs seemed to do what they usually do, ignore each other. The other dog looks to be about 150 heavily muscled pounds; he sports a collar with studs in it and a scrotum the size of a grapefruit. George abruptly went into his heavy-breathing, pre-attack crouch. Then he was snarling, growling, baring his teeth – everything except, you know, actually touching the other dog. To my immense relief, the big dog did not seem to notice George’s throwdown and George soon grew bored and pranced off proudly to cadge treats from his usual vendors among the morning walkers, as if he knew he was the dog he was waiting for.
Preparing for our bright new day has not been easy. Like many fellow citizens, I’ve found the last eight years a strain, and in order to keep my blood pressure from elevating dangerously every time the 6:30 news rolled around, I cultivated defense mechanisms – storing up nasty jokes about W and his unindicted co-conspirators, tearing off angry letters to my congressfolk, etc.
Now it looks like I won’t be needing these mechanisms much longer, and while I’m looking forward to a president who won’t embarrass the nation every time he opens his mouth, it’s a tough adjustment to make because, as any student of Freud knows, defense mechanisms can be, well, defensive. That is to say, they react with violence when their necessity comes into question.
So it has been with me. My defense mechanisms realized that by January 20th they’d be out of a job and in response they attacked me – my head, to be specific. Within days of Obama’s victory, I developed an enormous toothache, which hurt like hell and caused the side of my jaw to bulge like one of Brando’s jowls in The Godfather. Then I got a nasty eye infection, which was a recurrence of an eye infection that had last occurred in 1988. It waited all this time. Then I started sneezing and coughing and it turned out not to be a cold, instead an allergic reaction. To what? Don’t ask me, my allergies cleared up when I was twelve. Until now.
Then my son badly sprained his ankle playing pick-up basketball – just in time for the holiday. Then my wife caught something – milder than flu but much worse than a cold, very hard to shake to boot. And we’ve both noticed that a disturbing number of friends and acquaintances are suddenly coming down with something or other too. And we’ve noticed too that a disturbing number of these sniffling friends and acquaintances voted for Obama.
You do the math.
Please understand, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I never thought fluoridation was a communist plot and I do not believe the government is reading my mind through my dental work. But can there be any doubt that this welter of discomforts and inconveniences is the parting shot of a fading administration? I’m not accusing, I’m just saying that my view of the matter has shifted, though not yet tectonically.

MYSTERY SPOON SENDER IDENTIFIED

My sister bought it on eBay and had the seller send it directly to me from Eugene, Oregon, where I know no one, hence my puzzlement at the parcel from those parts. Certainly, it is a charming reminder of both my left-handedness and deep-seated affection for Georg Jensen, whose tiny and all but illegible hallmark may be seen on the back of the spoon. Who knew? It's true that I, like Leonardo da Vinci and the Babe, am left-handed. Furthermore, I was a Georg Jensen fan as a kid. I loved the ads for fancy glass and silverware and I really was astounded that "Georg" had no final g. If I had been more sensitive and introspective, I would've remembered it all and realized that it came from my sis. Refurbishment of my character continues.

OBAMARAMA

The Disappearing Dog Waste Station
At first I thought it was an old-school mailbox, sturdy and peak-roofed, mounted on a thick post stuck in the ground on the edge of the Long Meadow in Prospect Park, not far from the Garfield Place entrance to the park, through which George and I usually pass at the start of our morning constitutional.
Then I wondered why there would be a mailbox on the edge of the Long Meadow in Prospect Park, not far from the Garfield Place entrance, etc.
Then I noticed that the long blue streamer flying from a hole above the mail slot was a length of plastic doggy bags, and the mail slot was not a slot at all, rather a hinged flap opening inward.
The dog waste station offered free bags and a place to put them after use, a useful convenience for bagless dog people or those too dim to realize the nearby garbage can also accepts properly packaged dog waste, and even that which is not. I have never met such dog people, but I’m sure they exist.
Less than a week after I first noticed it, the dog waste station is gone, leaving only a hole in the dry earth. Did somebody steal it? Who would want to steal a dog waste station? Even considering its camp value? Or was the removal order from the highest reaches of the Prospect Park bureaucracy, a tacit acknowledgment by the responsible parties of the dog waste station’s stupendous ugliness?
One doesn’t expect one will ever know.

R.I.P. -- L. RUST HILLS

As a teen dilettante during the sixties, I loved Esquire, the other men’s magazine, the you really did buy “for the articles” as boobs were not reliable parts of its editorial lineup. I vividlly recall turning the huge gorgeous pages of one issue and coming upon L. Rust Hills' quietly hilarious “How to Do Four Dumb Tricks with a Pack of Camels.” It was just perfectly funny, both measured and ridiculous. Then I started noticing Hills' pieces in other magazine and I have long cherished my hardback copy of his first collection, How to Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man.

I didn't know before reading Hills' obituary that he nurtured and edited many of the terrific writers Esquire published in the 60's, but I still abide by a strategy he advanced in “How to Eat an Ice-Cream Cone:” When you're with a group of people who're getting ice cream cones, get chocolate chip. Chances are no one will ask you for a taste.

MYSTERY SPOON

Received a left-handed spoon in the mail Friday. I didn’t buy it online or win it on eBay. It just came in the mail, carefully enfolded in patterned tissue paper, tucked into a baggie, swathed in several layers of bubble wrap and stuffed into a small manila envelope. It’s about six and a half inches long and looks streamlined, reminds me a bit of a 50s-era Pontiac hood ornament.
According to the envelope's return address, the spoon comes from someone named McCarthy in Eugene, Oregon.

I know no one named McCarthy from Eugene, Oregon.

I am grateful but puzzled. I am left-handed, so the spoon is not wholly inappropriate, but I have never felt the need or desire for left-handed cutlery. Still, it’s a pretty object, much prettier than the other left-handed spoons I found online, of which there are many: Jonathan’s Lazy Spoon comes in left and right-handed versions, as do a variety of Homecraft Roylan’s therapeutic and rehabilitative implements, also Kitchen Carver’s hand-hewn wooden pointed spoons, draining spoons, soup dippers, sauce spoons, jelly spoons, spatulas, spatula spoons and spoontulas (The differences between spatula spoons and spoontulas I leave to others.).

At Anything Left-handed, the left version of their jar spoon is six centimeters longer than the right-handed version. I’m not asking why; I assume that a righty who shops at an outfit called Anything Left-handed likes to live dangerously.

Mr. or Ms. McCarthy of Eugene, Oregon, I think of you now as Eugene McCarthy, which isn’t unfitting, as I’m sure only a fundamentally decent and really smart person, like Gene was, would send me a good-looking left-handed spoon out of the clear blue.

So many, many thanks. Who are you and why'd you send me a spoon?

NYT CRINGE WATCH

Trolling for typos, grammatical errors and bad writing in the NYT is a big part of my morning newspaper ritual. You would think after Judith Miller and Jayson Blair, the soft-core stylings of the sports columnists, William Kristol and whatever-happened-to-Maureen Dowd, the Grey Lady’s gold standard-esque authority would be in tatters. But I still expect the Grey Lady to be, if not perfect, at least staid, decorous, conservative (only grammatically, of course). Instead, the Grey Lady inclines toward the loopy and you have to wonder who’s minding the prose.

Take this sentence from an article about Mayor Bloomberg’s Spanish tutor in Aug. 5th’s Metro section: “The tutor, Luis Cardozo, wore a suit — thin white stripes slicing light gray fabric that matched his yellow tie.”

Say what?

More in sadness than in anger, I must point out that gray fabric cannot match a yellow tie. Maybe it could comlement it, but that would depend on the particular gray and yellow in question.

Catching infelicities like that is a whole lot less disturbing than detecting new NYT tics and trends of language which tend to make me feel that the center is not holding, which is exactly how I felt when I noticed that the Times had used the word three times this week already, and it’s only Wednesday.

1. On August 4th, a front page article about a senate race in New Hampshire: “The maverick voters of New Hampshire love to keep politicians guessing. But this state, famous for its libertarian mojo, has shifted so hard toward the Democrats...” – Whoa, maverick and mojo in one paragraph. Talk about an embarrassment of vernacular vitality.

2. Elsewhere in section A was this: “Mr. Obama awoke in St. Petersburg, Fla., ready to talk about an ailing economy and saw this newspaper headline: ‘IT’S A RECESSION.’ The mojo should feel good.” – Hmmm, sounds like Barack's mojo is working, in case anyone was wondering.

3. The third mention was in Tuesday’s business section: “Dish appears to have lost its mojo when it comes to attracting new customers.” This happens to be a Reuters piece, so if the image of a satellite television provider even having a mojo, let alone losing it, makes your fillings ache, blame does not rest entirely with the NYT, but still.

Maverick is a word we’re all used to hearing more than we'd ever though possible or advisable, and we will until McCain, aka Senator “I-hate-to-talk-about-my-wartime-experiences” McMaverick, leaves the national stage. But mojo? When did “mojo” enter the national conversation? The NYT archive lists about twenty uses of mojo in its pages in just the last week. And what are they using it to mean? Not what Muddy Waters meant, I’d hazard.

END OF...





Alternate side of the street parking regulations went back into effect in Joy Buzzer's Brooklyn neighborhood today, three months after the regs were suspended to facilitate the posting of new signs throughout the nabe. The event has been reported endlessly, including a lengthy piece in today's NYT. The great fear here was that outlanders would park their cars more or less permanently on our streets, while we locals would wander the streets in our cars like so many exhaust-spewing Flying Dutchmen -- crusing Dutchman, actually -- searching endlessly and fruitlessly for parking spots. The situation never got that bad, but we area residents are certainly glad to see the end of what we are sure were hundreds, possibly thousands, of vehicular squatters from Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights and Nebraska. Happy motoring and good riddance.

MY BIRTHDAY SUIT

Part One: Shock and Awe

For my recent Very Important Birthday, my spouse gave me a bespoke suit. She could not, of course, present me with an actual, corporeal suit; it doesn’t exist yet. A bespoke suit doesn’t come into existence until there have been discussions, negotiations and several fittings with your tailor. The gift is really a promise of a suit, a suit made for me, only me, in accordance with my measurements and my preferences, no matter how quirky either may be.

Bespoke clothing has long been a means of expressing individuality as well as, or sometimes instead of, good taste. As per his wish, Richard Burton was buried in a red suit which I assume was made for him, given the general dearth of men’s ready-to-wear red suits. Theater critic George Jean Nathan’s jackets buttoned from right to left, which must have greatly bemused those who noticed. When the blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson toured England in the sixties, he had a Savile Row tailor make him a two-tone suit – shades of grey in a harlequin quadrant. On him, it looked good. Like a trip to Burger King, the bespoke experience is a chance to have it your way.

Accordingly, the promise of a bespoke suit means that, if you’ve never thought about what you’d like in a suit, it’s time to get serious about the issues. Do you prefer a high gorge or a low one? Two or three button front, or are you thinking double-breasted? (It’s just my opinion, but unless you’re slim, don’t) How deep should trouser cuffs be? (Before you shout out “1¼ to 1½inches,” let me tell you that a friend of mine wears trousers with cuffs less than an inch wide. He had to cajole and hector his tailor to make such narrow cuffs, but they look swell, especially after they’ve been pointed out to you.). A visit to a custom tailor, in other word, requires a certain amount of preparation, especially if you’ve never contemplated these things before.

I’ve been contemplating these things for decades, because a bespoke suit has long been tops on my list of things to acquire, visit and/or eat before I die. My plan was to get one when my ship finally comes in.

My ship has not finally come in. At least I hope not, for that would mean my ship is a dinghy beached in a hidden cove. I mean, there is no singular triumph to cheer, no windfall to justify a celebratory expenditure or buffer its impact. But what the hell.

I’ve decided that the gift itself is something like that ship. In fact, it’s better. It symbolizes my wife’s generosity as well as our mutual determination to seize the day – the suit, actually – instead of waiting around for some metaphorical vessel which will probably never materialize. In other words, my suit has finally come in and, as my son might say, I am down with that, totally.

I’m ready, too. Here is a chance to draw upon my decades of rumination about fabric, lapels, desired number and depth of vents, if any, and other vital concerns that have been on my mind since the tenth grade, when a classmate showed me the functioning button-holes on his sports jacket, a hand-me-down from his natty dad. I was hooked. I ingested every word of Mr. Wolfe’s seminal essay The Secret Vice, about custom-made menswear and the men who live for it. A friend and I – the fellow with the narrow cuffs, actually – once had wide ties made to order for ourselves because we couldn't find any in the shops; this was a year or two before the Peacock Revolution swept the land and big “kipper ties” were popular for about ten minutes. I still have the tie, my only truly custom garment. It’s navy blue with white polka dots and about 3.5 inches wide, only a little bit wider than normal these days, which goes to show that in matters of fashion, as well as in matters of life and death, Paulie Walnuts' observation after learning of Johnny Sack's death – words variously quoted online as “Ride the painted pony, let the spinning wheel turn,” “Ride the painted pony, let the spinnin’ wheel glide,” “Ride a painted pony, let the spinning wheel turn,” and “Ride the painted pony, let the spinner wheel fly” – obtains.

This clothes consciousness didn’t just appear out of nowhere, of course. In high school, I wore a tie and jacket five days a week and believed that adult life would, in all probability, involve a similar dress code. As things turned out, I work at home for the most part, and to say that I have little need for a fine suit understates the reality on the ground. Except for walking the dog and the occasional errand, I could probably get by without pants.

But if my personal style these days lies somewhere between comfortably casual and downright slovenly, my dreams are dapper as ever. I can’t wait to get started. I’m thinking of a light grey with perhaps a hint of a sheen, but subtle, nothing flashy.

All I’ve got to do is visit the tailor my wife selected and we can get started. An appointment is required, and somehow I haven’t gotten around to making one, even though I’ve been really eager to do so for every single minute of the three months that have passed since my Very Important Birthday.

The Wrong Side

Sartre said Hell is other people, but to a New Yorker, Hell is forever trying to explain alternate side of the street parking to someone from Columbus, Ohio. Even in this mortal sphere, my crystalline and succinct understanding of this archetypally New Yorkish body of law occasionally clouds.

On Thursday mornings, the north side of my block must be clear of cars from 8 to 11; on Fridays, cars must clear the south side during the same hours. For those three-hour periods, cars are permitted to double-park across the street. Well, they’re not exactly permitted, but our innately gracious and kind traffic cops have been winking at the practice for years.

Last Thursday, I waited until 10:55 a.m. instead of 10:50 to move my car, double-parked on the Friday side, back to the Thursday side, where it would not require moving for a whole week – unless, of course, I wanted to actually drive somewhere, which is almost never a smart thing to do unless you’re going out of town. At 10:50 (or 10:51 or 52, depending on how far up or down my car is), there are plenty of Thursday spots to choose from. But on this morning, that five minute window of time was enough for the Thursday side to fill up entirely. I had to move on in search of a parking place good for a week. No worries, though. If you’re early enough, you can always find something pretty close to home.

In the arrogance that comes from seeing lots of free curb space, I didn’t notice that none of the numerous open spaces was long enough to accommodate my car – which isn’t particularly big, so don’t get the wrong idea. Meanwhile, the streets were filling up. I made two increasingly desperate circuits of the surrounding blocks and found nothing that would free me from the awful fate of having to move the car again on Friday. Finally, at the top of the block two over from mine, I found a spot big enough for me and quickly pulled in, spending a minute or two extra to make sure I was close enough to the curb – in New York, you can never be too rich, too thin or too close to the curb.

Relieved, I locked that car and headed home. A block and a half on, I began wondering about the side I’d parked on: Thursday or Friday, Friday or Thursday? I was over a block away from the car anyway, so what difference did it make? I could check again tonight when I walked the dog.

That’s when I knew I’d parked on the Friday side, the if-you’re-parked- there-at 8:01 a.m.-you’ve-got-a-parking-ticket side. For the first time in my memory, as least so far as I can remember, alternate-side regulations had confused me.

I grow old, I grow old, but I swear it’ll never happen again. That’s for out-of-towners.

BROTHERS BENEATH THE SKIN?

"When Professor Archibald Henderson titled his definitive biography of George Bernard Shaw Playboy and Prophet, he probably came closer to using the word Playboy as we conceive it than is common today." -- Hugh M. Hefner, The Playboy Philosophy

I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.

I'm speaking metaphorically, of course. It is not literally true that I am sick, spiteful, unattractive or believe my liver is diseased. I sincerely apologize if I’ve done anything to create that impression.