A contrarian: Someone who prefers antiheroes to superheroes.
Ten years ago today I began this blog – with an account of our visit to Little Havana (specifically Café Versailles) on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution.
The previous year I had been laid off from my newspaper, after 19 years as the travel editor, and gotten a friend to design this website. I had been blogging that last year at the paper, so I knew to write short and consistently. The lesson I never learned – the one that would get me legions of followers – was to provide practical information.
In fact my own blog, not surprisingly, became more personal – not in the sense of private revelations but in its focus on the things that interest me. So there’s been a lot about writing (‘this writing life’ is a recurring subject head), books, media, travel, sports, and – perhaps most frequently – everyday observations. It is not quite a politics-free zone – that’s hard with the current occupant of the White House – but it’s close. Occasionally an entry consists of only one sentence (which shows up later on Twitter). I’ve described this blog – because it’s the first thing I do when I sit down at the computer in the morning – as being analogous to the stretching a player does before a game. I’m delighted if people read it but – except for the rare posting on Facebook – I’ve never publicized its existence.
Yesterday, on the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, we drove down to Little Havana and had lunch at Versailles. There was a short wait – the crowd made up mostly of tourists – and after our lunch (vaca frita with moros and churrasco steak with chimichurri sauce) we walked over to the window serving cafecitos. Ten years ago there had been some old-timers lambasting Castro; yesterday it was like any other first day of the year.
Thirty-seven years ago today I woke up in Warsaw, Poland, to martial law. I was reminded of this fact because a Polish friend posted on Facebook the iconic photo of that period: a tank parked in the snow in front of the Moskwa Cinema that was advertising Czas Apokalipsy (Apocalypse Now).
Recently I drove my one-year-old car to the dealer. It is a Honda Civic, my fourth in 30 years. Clearly, I’ve been very happy with Hondas.
This one, the nicest of the four, does have a problem however. Often when I pull into a parking space, the front of it scrapes against the parking curb. Tractor trailer manufacturers and bridge engineers have been able to establish a standard height for each that allows trucks to pass under bridges without interference; why hasn’t the same happened with automakers and the producers of parking curbs?
I explained the problem to the man at the service center, adding that I had brought the car in because now it’s often scraping when I go over speed bumps. He took a look underneath and told me a section was hanging down, having been loosened, apparently, by a year’s worth of parking curbs.
“I get a couple of these a day,” he said, back at his desk. I asked: “Then why do they build the cars so low?” “Aerodynamics,” he told me.
I asked if the cost of the repair would be covered by the warranty. “No,” he said. “It’s damage.”
“But it’s damage caused by the design of the car, not the fault of the driver.”
In the garage, the hanging section was replaced, and I wasn’t charged for the labor. The total came to $28. Not a lot of money, but if you times that by two and then 260 (weekdays in a year) and then the number of all the Honda dealers in America you get a pretty nice windfall. The unintended (or is it?) profitability of aerodynamics.
At the Miami Book Fair the other week I took my plate of black beans and rice and sat at a table with another male author. We talked about our respective books the way other people exchange information about jobs or children. At one point in the conversation, he mentioned that his wife had grown up on Amelia Island. I asked if he knew the one person I know who had grown up there. “She’s my sister-in-law,” he said.
He also mentioned that he lived in St. Petersburg. I told him of my one friend there and asked if perhaps he knew him. “We play tennis together every Sunday morning,” he said.
I've been wondering if Muscovy ducklings - we have an adorable brood on the island right now - look at their parents and think: Oh no, so this is what we're going to end up looking like?