The Amiable Child

On this cool, overcast last day of August, out walking the beagle, with Johnny Cash singing Engine One Forty-Three (yet another cautionary tale of a young man failing to heed his mama's words) on repeat play on the headphones, I decided to visit, as I do from time to time, the monument to An Amiable Child. This small memorial is just off Riverside Dr., down a few steps and a bit north from that much more imposing monument, Grant's Tomb. It overlooks a stand of trees and beyond that, of course, the Hudson. The child was St. Claire Pollock and he was five when he died on July 15, 1797, most likely -- the accompanying historical sign back up on the sidewalk reports -- from a fall off the bluffs above the river. The memorial is of marble, square and simple, topped with an urn. Once when I visited someone had laid a spray of carnations on the marble. Another time there was a used condom on the pavement outside the fence. Today the area had been freshly groomed (it is often a bit raggedy), but the wild rose that grows inside the fence was flowerless. Here is a link from the City Parks about the site:

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs/
hs_historical_sign.php?id=6417

and here is another that includes a picture of the monument from about 1900:

http://www.morningside-heights.net/amiable.htm

The monument is inscribed on one side "Erected to the memory of an Amiable Child St. Claire Pollock Died July 15 1797 in the fifth year of his life." On the other there is this from the Book of Job: "Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not." So I think of little St. Claire, happily incorrigible, curiosity leading him to skinned knees and scoldings from his doting mother, and then, one day, accidentally too far. Hearts broke over this Amiable and sorely missed Child. He came to rest here, in what NYC Parks describes as one of the few private graves on public land in the city, because when his father or uncle sold the property in 1800 he wrote to the new owner, "There is a small enclosure near your boundary fence within which lie the remains of a favorite child, covered by a marble monument. You will confer a peculiar and interesting favor upon me by allowing me to convey the enclosure to you so that you will consider it a part of your own estate, keeping it, however, always enclosed and sacred."

It says something good and special about this huge, amazing, annoying city that this modest request has now been honored for more than two centuries.

Come visit the next time you are in Morningside Heights.

Norse Mythology and the AL East Pennant Race

No one will ever mistake the New York Times for Comedy Central or even for the latter's flagship star, Jon Stewart. Remember this is the newspaper once -- and maybe still -- known as the Great Gray Lady and the newspaper that once fired a reporter for adding the "Jake Barnes Award for Valiant Effort" to the long list of agate type awards in a Columbia University graduation. So how pleasant it was to come across this article,

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/sports/baseball/30squirrel.html
?em&ex=1188619200&en=e149305c3ef69252&ei=5087%0A

my favorite of the month, maybe even of this news dreary year.

Meanwhile, in other pennant race news, the Yankees completed a sweep of the Red Sox, leaving for now only the question of why Boston manager Terry Francona wears a long-sleeved tee in Red Sox colors instead of a numbered jersey like everybody else. Is he allergic to doubleknits or something?

And, finally, that quintessential whiner Mike Mussina is "angry" and "hurt'" -- per Yahoo -- about being pulled from the Yankees rotation. Uh, excuse me, Mike, but in a short season where every game matters, you have put together a 17+ ERA in your last three starts and stuck the Yankees in a six run (at least) hole in the first two innings of every one of those games. You deserve another start about as much as I do. People get fired for poor performance in other industries, why not baseball? The only appropriate response for Mussina is to say to Joe Torre, "I understand completely. Let me do some long relief in blowout games until I get my stuff back." But, oh, wait, I forgot -- he's a Stanford grad, impossible to demonstrate such humility.

Go Bears!

We Males Never Change

Confused, chauvinist, insouciant, feckless, drinking too much, and never doing our share of the housework.

Jesse Winchester, Yankee Lady, circa 1970

She rose each morning and went off to work
And she kept me with her pay
I was making love all night
And playing guitar all day
And I got apple cider and homemade bread
That would make a man say grace
And clean linens on our bed
And a warm feet fire place

Superchunk, Driveway to Driveway, circa 1995

From stage to stage we flew
a drink in every hand
my hand on your heart had been replaced
and I thought it was you that I had chased

The National, Karen, circa 2006

Karen, put me in a chair, fuck me and make me a drink
I've lost direction, and I'm past my peak
I'm telling you this isn't me
No, this isn't me
Karen, believe me, you just haven't seen my good side yet


Yes, our good side yet.

A Bunch of Very Rich People Get Hosed -- What's Not to Like?

I find as a regular reader of the NYTimes that, aside from sections like Science on Tuesday and Dining In/Out on Wednesday, in the paper one often has to read through a lot of qualified statements (this or that may happen) or analysis disguised as fact to get a piece of important factual information. So it is with the current sub-prime panic and credit crunch hysteria. Yesterday, in the next to last paragraph of a long article, the Times finally acutely summarized a situation over which it and a bunch of other papers have spilt gallons of hysterical ink, writing, "For all the turmoil in the markets this past week, the number of people involved appears to be relatively small. They are mostly engaged in hedge funds, banks and mortgage lending and they are usually wealthy. Hedge funds, for example, require investors to have a net worth of at least $5 million." In other words, some people comfortably within the top one percent of U.S. household incomes lost some money on bad investments. In a minute way, they contributed to narrowing the disparity between the super rich and the less well off in the U.S.; that's a good thing. And that's also how markets work, even for the super rich -- sometimes you make money and sometimes you lose money when you invest.

The trick of course is to prevent the hysteria over this minor phenomenon from becoming a credit crunch, something those same very rich want because if a credit crunch is deemed to be occurring, the Fed will lower interest rates, rescuing them from some of their losses. So far, to its credit, the Fed is having nothing of it. On Friday it reacted very nicely to that limited possibility of a credit crunch by injecting a bunch of billions into the markets. People who need loans will be able to get them; prudent banks will have the flexibility to make loans to good risks striving to buy their first house. And the super-rich, unless they and their hedge fund managers and improvident lenders can fan the markets into irrational panic, will get to lick their wounds. Sometimes there is justice after all.

Grief

Grief is a planet or an island, inhabitable, inescapable. But you inhabit it and you escape it, and when you do, grief sometimes turns tsunami, overwhelming out of a flat, placid sea, like tonight in the more than 80 degree heat after ten o'clock, walking the dog in front of the MSM residences on Claremont, smoking kids out front and just a few yards past them, the hit, doubling over and eyes shut tight at the disbelief that Annie is no longer here, gone now more than a year.