George Clooney attended the European Political Community Summit in Yerevan, Armenia, last week and there is a clip of him on social media shaking hands with the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, his left hand firmly planted in his pants pocket. In Poland – in Europe generally, but perhaps especially in the Slavic countries – it is impolite, if not disrespectful, to greet someone with your hand in your pocket. Nabokov wrote critically of American delegations to Moscow standing with their Russian counterparts while benightedly keeping their hands in their pockets. My students in Warsaw would not dream of speaking to me, their teacher, with their hands in their pockets. I’m surprised Amal Clooney, who is British-Lebanese, didn’t teach her husband proper etiquette for these occasions.
A good friend had a hip replaced this week and before he went in for the surgery I told him that, if not for the circumstances, being pushed in a gurney would be the most pleasurable means of transportation.
Someone posted a clip of Larry King asking Ted Turner if he thought about death. Turner said he did, but not too much. He added that to keep from fearing death he told himself that life is like a B-grade movie: You don’t want to walk out of it but you wouldn’t want to sit through it again.
Leo XIV recently marked one year as pope and yesterday the New York Knicks swept the Philadelphia 76ers in the eastern conference playoffs. And? Well, Pope Leo is a graduate of the same university as three of the starters for the Knicks: Villanova (which is also my alma mater; I was a senior when the pope, then Robert Prevost, was a freshman). ’Nova, as a friend mentioned to me this weekend, is having a moment – at least in the worlds of religion and sports. Now if only we could put an alumnus in the White House.
Czesław Miłosz famously said, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Blake Morrison, in his new book On Memoir: An A-Z of Life Writing, has a different and brighter take on it: “When a writer is born into a family, that family will have an afterlife.”
I have been observing May 6 – Willie Mays’ birthday – ever since I learned the date, probably from the back of one of his baseball cards. (Wish I had that card today.) My love for the Say Hey Kid made me a San Francisco Giants fan, and a rebel in a family of Phillie fanatics. But even they admired the way he played the game, which was not just with preternatural skill and talent but with an infectious, boyish joy. Mays, who died in 2024, would have been 95 today.