David Past 50

For $8.25, the New York City Transit Authority will sell you a “Fun Pass”. Buy one and you can ride the subway all day long – sort of like the POP bracelet at Six Flags. I’m a walker by nature, so I usually opt for the regular Metrocard and pay for my subway one trip at a time. Last Wednesday was an exception. My early morning meeting was way up in Harlem, my dinner was in the East Village. Between business and pleasure, I had at least five other stops to make. If ever there were a day for a “Fun Pass”, I knew this would be it. I worked my way downtown on the Broadway-Seventh Avenue line – the 1,2 &3 trains. I started off at 137th and Lenox before progressing to Cathedral Parkway, 66th, Columbus Circle, Times Square, 14th, and Wall Street. Twice I ventured East; once on the Grand Central Shuttle and once on the L. I grabbed breakfast in a diner located in the lobby of Harlem Hospital Center, lunch with a colleague at a Columbia University watering hole and dinner with my da...

Things as critical as this, the selection of a favored baseball team, are not, as some suspect, a matter of choice; one does not choose a team as one does not select his own genes. They are confirmed upon you more than we know an act of heredity. -- David Halberstam I am reasonably certain the Mets will win the pennant in 2010. Truth be told, I’ve believed that same thing every year since 1965. That was the year my father first took me to Shea Stadium and “confirmed my favored team upon me”. We still had black and white television so I had never seen a game in color before. Like so many kids of that era I was struck by the green grass, the brown dirt and the bright colors of the uniforms before a pitch was even thrown. I was, however, dumbfounded, by my first in-person look at my favorite Met; a third baseman named Charley Smith. Twenty-seven-years old in 1965, he was already a journeyman having played for the Dodgers, Phillies and White Sox before coming to Shea. He went on to play fo...

I looked at the “Today in History” note in my morning paper and two old friends jumped out at me. One I knew very well. I never met the other, but he knew me; and every other kid of my generation. March 2nd is the birthday of Theodore Geisel (1904-1991); better known as Dr. Seuss. On a college application I was asked to name my “most memorable book”. I knew they expected 18-year-old males to respond with Hemmingway, Tolkien, Melville or Salinger. In the seventies they surely got their fair share of Keseys and Kerouacs. Maybe even a Hunter S. Thompson or two. I’m sure they reveled in more ambitious responses featuring Joyce or Milton. They did not get it from me. The application said “most memorable” and I interpreted that quite literally. I declared Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop as the obvious answer. After all, I had memorized it cover to cover by the time I was 5 and could still recite it verbatim as I completed that application in 1977. What could be more memorable than that? From “Up,...

Something amazing happened to me today. I ate a panini. I was on my way to a meeting when I stopped at Tully’s on 11th Street and grabbed a hot panini with ham and muenster cheese. http://tullysbakery.com/ Not amazed? A few days earlier, I popped in for a banana muffin. In the previous week or two, my wife made me cookies from a Betty Crocker mix, I took out a pizza from the local pizzeria, I had a hot pretzel, and I hosted a business dinner at an Italian restaurant. Still not amazed? You obviously do not have celiac disease. But one of every 133 Americans does. In my circle, I am the one. Unlike my 132 closest friends, I must adhere to a strict gluten free diet or risk malnutrition among many other physical indignities. No wheat, barley, rye, etc. No white flour. No traditional cakes, breads, beer or pasta. Landmines in the fine print ingredients of processed foods and restaurant meals of every description. In 1978 – at age 19 and reduced to 135 pounds on my 6’2” frame – a doctor who...

Social commentators often note that we've blurred the lines between fame and infamy. Some argue we actually prefer infamy. To paraphrase Richard Glover of The Sydney Morning Journal, Mother Theresa is interesting, but Joey Buttafuoco is fascinating. Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates, Sonia Sotamayor? We know them. Britney Spears, Tiger Woods, Bernie Madoff? We really know them. Fame, infamy, notoriety -- today it all boils down to this thing called celebrity. And then there is a force called the Kardashians. Their stepfather was the world's greatest athlete and had his own Wheaties box. But he's a bit player in the public lives of the Special Ks. If their reality show were a sitcom, he would be the equivalent of a wacky neighbor at best. Lamar Odom is an NBA champion with an amazing backstory. http://tinyurl.com/ydz2wcn . Still it took a quickie marriage to Khloe to hit the big time and propel him to two national TV commercials. Reggie Bush has a Super Bowl ring and a Heisman Trop...

"Welcome to America. Now speak English" I often wonder how the irony is lost on the legions posting this message on their Facebook pages and spouting it across conservative media outlets, mall t-shirt kiosks and the like. Shouldn't it be "Welcome to America. Now speak American"? You'd think so, but so few of us actually speak American. The colonists came here 500 years ago and we still speak the language they got off the boat speaking. They decided they'd rather not learn American languages like Cherokee, Navajo or Iroquois. Generation after generation, we've simply gone on speaking English; an immigrant language. Learning a new language was difficult for American colonists just as it is difficult for immigrants today. But modern immigrants do a much better job learning English than the first immigrants ever did learning "American". In fact, immigrant families of every description are far more likely to be bilingual than homegrown A...