We went to the Beaux Arts festival at the University of Miami on Saturday and, as usual at South Florida art fairs, I found the artists more interesting than the art. One older gentleman was from Blue Hill, Maine.
“Roger Angell was from there,” I said.
“He was from Brooklin,” the man said, naming a nearby town. They had been friends. “What a dynamic man,” he continued. “Well into his 90s. He couldn’t see a thing, but he told wonderful stories. I miss him.”
One of the worst cliches in travel writing is “land of contrasts,” for it can be used to describe any number of places. But perhaps no place fits the description better than the United States. We have some of the world’s most overweight people and some of the world’s most health-conscious. We have terrible schools and great universities. For presidents, we’ve had Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump. Though it’s not clear if this last one is an example of our many national dichotomies or an indication of our national decline.
Jimmy Carter was the only president - or I should say "ex-president" - I ever met. (I think of the thousands of people who can say that; interesting that the most soft-spoken and unassuming president in my lifetime was also the most outgoing.) It was in 1984 or 85; I was a staff writer – the staff writer – for the Observer, the monthly publication of the American College of Physicians, and I was covering a conference on preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. After the panels, various speakers, including President Carter, met individually with the media. I no longer remember what he said; all I remember is that he gave me, a writer from a small, little-known, organizational publication, the same amount of time and consideration that he gave all of the other reporters.
The sports columnist for The Spectator, Roger Alton, ended his Oct. 2 column with a note about Kris Kristofferson. He recalled, as a young man, coming home with the singer’s latest album. His father – whom Alton described as “a cricket-loving don involved with the Rhodes Scholarship committee" – noticed the cover and said warmly, “Ah, Kristofferson, a very fine left-arm bowler, as I recall.”
I had lunch yesterday with a woman who grew up in Tampa and now lives in Miami Beach with her Portuguese husband whom she met in Brazil. They both have jobs they like, and a condo on the beach, but they’re planning to move next year to Portugal.
Toward the end of our lunch our waitress arrived, a woman with naturally silver hair, and said she had to leave us: her friend had just gone into labor and she needed to drive her husband to the hospital. She told us that we’d be in good hands with her colleague.
Her colleague was much younger. She presented us with the check, and asked if we had any exciting plans for the weekend. We didn’t, but my friend said that last weekend she had gone on a cruise.
“I would love to go on a cruise,” our waitress said. “But I’m scared to. I can’t swim.” She then went into a long monologue on her failure to learn how to swim due to her inability to understand “the physics” of swimming.
I love Portugal, and if I spoke Portuguese I might consider moving there myself. But I’d miss – as I’d miss everywhere in Europe, pretty much everywhere else in the world – hearing the personal stories of my waitresses.
Sunday’s New York Times Book Review carried a review of two new books by Joseph Epstein – a memoir and a collection of essays. Both were heavily criticized, by a man who clearly has a distaste for Epstein’s writing. And I wondered why, given this fact, he didn’t pass the review on to somebody else. Why let your obvious bias stand as the official word on an author’s work?
Some of the essays in the collection appeared in The American Scholar, which Epstein was editor of for 22 years. The reviewer found them way too long, and chastised Epstein for taking up precious space with them in his own publication. As someone who occasionally published in The American Scholar – pretty much began his career in its pages – I never resented Epstein’s personal essays in the front of the book; I thought they were often the best and most entertaining things in the quarterly. It didn’t hurt that Epstein was the kindest and most gracious editor I had ever come across – writing thoughtful, encouraging, helpful rejections long before I had any success with him.