(I'm off to Baltimore tomorrow, followed by a few days in DC, so this will be my last post until next Thursday.)
The cover of Sunday’s New York Times Book Review carried an essay by Pete Hamill on the noble beauty of baseball in 1950s New York. It was disguised as a review of the new Willie Mays biography, but it talked almost as much about the Brooklyn Dodgers – and the pain of lost youth – as it did about The Say Hey Kid. Indeed, toward the end of his hackneyed elegy, Hamill confessed that his despair over the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles caused him a crisis of faith so great that he gave up watching baseball and never saw Mays play as a San Francisco Giant (which he did for 14 years, at the peak of his career).
Reading this confession, I felt pity for Hamill and exasperation at the Book Review. Why on earth would you pick to review a book about a brilliant athlete someone who missed that athlete’s glory years? Then it hit me: It is the NEW YORK Times Book Review, Hamill is a NEW YORK writer, Mays began and ended his career in NEW YORK. Who cares what he accomplished someplace else? And who cares what anyone outside of the five boroughs might make of those accomplishments? As usual in publishing, it’s all about New York.
I was never one of those people who, before heading to Europe, sewed a Maple Leaf onto my luggage.
But Sunday night, watching the closing ceremonies, I thought about the advantages of being Canadian. It would be a simpler (if colder) life. No stigma of slavery. No "Canadian Go Home" graffiti when you traveled abroad. Universal health care. And how can you not love - and in a way want to be - the people who throw a parade of giant inflatable beavers?
But then Michael Buble appeared, singing The Maple Leaf Forever. It's not a bad song, but as he sang it I wondered: What will he sing next? His career has been built on music from south of the border. And these were Canada's games; he couldn't break into Rags to Riches. He suddenly looked rather handicapped, like Apolo Ohno crouched at the starting line in a pair of loafers. There is no Great Canadian Songbook.
I felt very fortunate to be an American.
Friday afternoon I decided that my lingering cough was not a side effect of watching too much curling and went to see the doctor.
"You have pneumonia," she said after putting her stethoscope against my chest and listening to my cough. "Community-acquired pneumonia."
"Community-acquired?!?" I almost said. "I'm a freelance writer! I'm practically a recluse!"
But then she would have said: "You're no Salinger."
The only way the evening could have been improved upon is if the entire Canadian women's hockey team had skated onto the ice and presented Kim Yu-Na with a cigar and a Molson.
It is no fun sitting around waiting to hear from editors. It is much more enjoyable to be out somewhere imagining the calls and e-mails piling up.
But yesterday after lunch I sat on the balcony and worked on a speech. The sky had a wintry cast. A light rain started falling, tapping the palm fronds and dulling the canal. (At moments like this I try to block out the condos - both the one in front of me and the one I'm in - and imagine myself a character in a Graham Greene novel.) Thunder - February thunder! - crashed in the west. The rain fell harder, dimming my view and dampening my papers. Reluctantly, I moved inside.
Opening the door to go check the mail, I found a large white envelope propped against the wall. Inside it was a book: The Extraordinary Existence of Nadine Tallemann: A Bildungsroman. Turning it over I found a picture of the author and recognized her immediately as our second-floor neighbor. (She had never mentioned she wrote.) Turning back to the cover I read a quote from Vladimir Nabokov's Ada: "...the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance."
He walked into the press room preceded by his handlers (some robed, some suited) almost exactly 30 minutes late. But you can't fault someone for making journalists wait, especially someone who could take as his motto Herbert von Karajan's exasperated comment once to a Berlin taxi driver: "I'm wanted everywhere!"
Representatives from newspapers and television stations took turns asking questions. The reporter from the Miami Herald asked what he did in his spare time in South Florida. He said he followed his normal routine of reading and meditating. (Did the reporter expect him to say, "clubbing"?) A more pointed question was the old attack on pacifism: How can non-violence work when dealing with terrorists? He talked about the importance of education.
When he finally appeared on stage, a sold-out crowd stood and applauded. He sat cross-legged in an armchair, in his scarlet and yellow robe, and spoke about compassion. Answering questions, he sometimes gave the impression that the job of being an oracle was getting a bit tiresome. But his famous playfulness came through, as when he made fun of our president's ears.
Filing out of the hall, the crowd appeared as a mix of young and old, students and retired people. The latter were less bedizened than the usual condo crowd, and could almost (but not quite) have come from Portland. One young man said, after what was obviously his first exposure to His Holiness, "He was a lot more down-to-earth than I had imagined him." Another said: "He was funny though. He was like a funny old uncle."
For me the most interesting aspect of the day was not so much what he said - stressing the importance of compassion, selflessness, inner beauty - but that he said it in South Florida. (It was as audacious as Pope John Paul II preaching about human dignity in communist Poland.) And thousands of people listened approvingly.