We went to the NSU Art Museum yesterday because we had heard it’s free for residents on the first Thursday of every month. As I took out my wallet to show my driver’s license, I was told it was free for everyone, not just residents. This explained the bustle in the gift shop, the tables of kids drawing in the corridor. On the first floor, I took a picture of a man in a blue shirt with a silver design looking at a painting – actually, looking at his phone in front of a painting – of silver designs on a blue background.
Two months ago I sent a 4,000 word essay to a big magazine and yesterday I got a one-sentence email saying it isn't for them.
My friend Ardy and I were at lunch yesterday talking about all the things one accumulates over a long lifetime, and I mentioned that I have most if not all of the Sun-Sentinel Travel sections from the fall of 1989 to the end of 2007.
“What are you going to do with them?” Ardy asked.
“Give them to the Smithsonian,” I said.
It was a joke, of course, but they are artifacts: sections of ten, sometimes more, pages filled with ads and charts (those odious and instantly erroneous airfare ones) but also lengthy stories and beautiful photos of interesting places around the world. Those times when I am sent digging into one of my Travel section boxes I am astonished anew by the riches the paper provided weekly to its mostly unimpressed readers.
Yesterday we drove to Finster Murphy’s on 17th Street for lunch. During the 10-minute drive I had to swerve on Davie Boulevard to avoid hitting a car that had pulled out abruptly from the slow right lane; then, a few minutes later, on Miami Rd., I had to stop suddenly as the van in front of me made a U-turn in the middle of the street. Arriving at the fish shop, I found a car taking two parking spaces, not in the usual way, by straddling a line, but by sitting horizontally across two spaces.
Fortunately, my king mackerel and seaweed salad were delicious.
The French Open is in its second week and yesterday it offered up one of the most enjoyable matches I’ve ever watched, partly because the players – Carlos Alcaraz and Ben Shelton – looked to be enjoying it too. Until Alcaraz came along, you rarely saw players smile during matches; yesterday, Shelton smiled as he was hitting one ball. Alcaraz, better known as Carlito, also won a point by throwing his racket at the ball, which is illegal; then he lost the point by informing the chair umpire that his racket had left his hand by the time it made contact with the ball. (The French Open doesn’t use replays, so the Spaniard’s honesty was all the umpire had to go on.) At the end of the match, the two players had a long hug, and laugh, at the net. They had just finished a hard-fought match in the fourth round of a major tournament and they looked as if they had just concluded an amazing and grueling practice session.
This seems to be the trend, at least in the men’s game; the top players all appear to have not just great respect but also affection for each other, despite the fact that, week after week, they find themselves in fierce competition with each other. Perhaps the world's leaders should start watching tennis.
PS After one phenomenal shot by Alcaraz, Shelton's father applauded in the stands.
The New Yorker asks readers every week to supply a caption to a cartoon. The Spectator has a more challenging competition that changes every week. A recent one asked readers to rewrite the Hokey Pokey in the style of a famous poet. Winning entries included the Hokey Pokey written by Philip Larkin and the Hokey Pokey written by Emily Dickinson.