Happy Events

Two happy events of late, one in the stratosphere, one just nicely satisfying. The first is the first granddaughter, a skinny beauty, 21 inches long and eight pounds, with amazing long fingers and eyes that she likes to open one at a time, as if she's not quite sure she wants to be in this new place. She grips firmly with those fingers when offered a grown-up finger and we spent a lot of time this past weekend sitting with her in one or another's lap, just staring at this perfect new miracle. She had some oxygen level problems for a few days, but came home from the hospital earlier than expected and at one week got pronounced perfect by her pediatrician, with no need for another visit until the routine check-up at one month. Ellison Jane.

And the second, passing all the hurdles to become a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History, then giving my first tour on Wednesday. At the peak there were more than 20 visitors following me around, most of them from Australia. Enthused at each stop, I talked way too long, lost track of the time, and had to end the tour before visiting all the halls I'd planned, but they left applauding and more excited about the museum. And that last is the point.

Four Things That Go Together

Although it is perhaps only the Argentine Finca Flichman 2007 Chardonnay, Oak Aged Three Months, and a September NYC night that feels like one in August that makes them do so.

1) The closest star to us is Alpha Centauri. It is four light years away. To travel there in our currently fastest spaceship would take 70000 years. There are uncountable billions of stars in the universe. Alpha Centauri and our sun are no big deal. To put it in baseball terms, they probably wouldn't even get drafted.

2) Lyrics from Orphans of God, written by Mark Heard, sung by Buddy and Julie Miller:

Like bees in a bottle
We are flying at fate
Beating our wings
Against the walls of this place
Unaware that the struggle
Is the blood of the proof
In choosing to believe
The unbelievable truth

3) I've been studying the early vertebrates in preparation for my test to be a Museum highlights tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History. There were some very scary monsters 400 or so million years ago. But tonight I wondered if we had been around to harvest them, instead of vice versa, they would have been as tasty as the shrimp in the pasta I tossed for dinner.

4) Today I was helping one of the hospice patients pay his bills. I'd write the checks for him to sign. He wanted to pay some of them by phone. So, laboriously with his arthritic fingers, he punched the too small buttons on his phone to reach the 800 Citibank number. He got through, listened, then hung up and handed me the phone to dial for him. "Wild Party Girls," he said. We laughed, truly, in the face of his proximate end, the mistake at once funnier and infinitely sadder because his partner of forty years, who sometimes exasperated him as in any couple so long together, died last month in a separate hospice.

Signs

In the Bronx on a car, seen while coming home from the hospice:

Just let me shop and no one gets hurt.

Handwritten with a Magic Marker on a sheet in the window of one of the three -- count 'em, three -- Chinese restaurants in the next block:

students special

welcome back

inside quickly