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.
At lunch the other day I asked my friend Dave, who is knowledgeable about the game of basketball, what he thought of Caitlin Clark. He had his criticisms: she doesn’t like to shoot once she gets inside the 3-point line, and she doesn’t play defense. But he was impressed by her passing, and the way she filled arenas that had previously been practically empty. Jordan, he said, couldn’t even take credit for that, as people watched the NBA before his arrival on the scene.
And Dave had asked himself if anyone else in sport had ever done that, and he thought of one person: Mia Hamm. And she did it in a sport that was so unpopular in America that no one paid much attention when it was played by men.
Now, I didn’t hear or read all the commentary about the phenomenon of Clark, yet what I did hear and read didn’t include any mention of Hamm. The human tendency is to believe that one’s age is exceptional – it’s why athletes are continually given the label GOAT – and the conviction is infinitely aided by an ignorance of history. Today, when we are bombarded with so much news and information, it’s easier than ever to lose sight of the past, and think that our times are unprecedented. When in fact they’re simply self-absorbed.
It would have been nice, of course, to have been in the path of the yesterday’s eclipse. In the morning, as I saw people gathering in towns along the way, I thought it would have been even nicer to have the shared experience. That sentiment changed as the eclipse occurred and my TV roared with the shouts and cheers and applause of the observers. Their response seemed inappropriate to the event, which, in my mind at least, called for an awed and reverential hush. In 1969 a magazine, Time perhaps, asked a number of famous writers what the first man on the moon should say. Vladimir Nabokov replied: “I want a lump in his throat to obstruct the wisecrack.”