Ron's View

Thanks to a post two days ago Geoff Shackelford’s golf blog , I learned two days ago about Golfer in Training Dan McLaughlin and The Dan Plan. Shackelford linked to an article by Michael Kruse three weeks ago in the St. Petersburg Times. As Kruse explains:

On his 30th birthday, June 27, 2009, Dan had decided to quit his job to become a professional golfer.

He had almost no experience and even less interest in the sport.

What he really wanted to do was test the 10,000-hour theory he read about in the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller Outliers. That, Gladwell wrote, is the amount of time it takes to get really good at anything — “the magic number of greatness.”

The idea appealed to Dan. His 9-to-5 job as a commercial photographer had become unfulfilling. He didn’t want just to pay his bills. He wanted to make a change.

Could he stop being one thing and start being another? Could he, an average man, 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds, become a pro golfer, just by trying? Dan’s not doing an experiment. He is the experiment.

The Dan Plan will take six hours a day, six days a week, for six years. He is keeping diligent records of his practice and progress. People who study expertise say no one has done quite what Dan is doing right now.

Dan spent last month in St. Petersburg because winters are winters in the Pacific Northwest. “If I could become a professional golfer,” he said one afternoon, “the world is literally open to any options for anybody.”

According to Dan, “talent has little to do with success.” He elaborates at his website:

According to research conducted by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, “Elite performers engage in ‘deliberate practice’–an effortful activity designed to improve target performance.” Dr. Ericsson’s studies, made popular through Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, have found that in order to excel in a field, roughly 10,000 hours of “stretching yourself beyond what you can currently do” is required. “I think you’re the right astronaut for this mission,” Dr. Ericsson said about The Dan Plan.

I once enjoyed Gladwell’s articles in The New Yorker. He is, after all, such a talented writer. But I’ve tired more recently of his continuing quest to find explanations for assorted phenomena that are simultaneously novel and all-encompassing. I haven’t read Ericsson’s work, but I can’t imagine he intended for it to be applied, as Gladwell does, to explain Bill Gates’ success as resulting from the 10,000 hours he spent programming computers while in high school.

Nonetheless, I love the Dan Plan. Dan expects to “hit the 10,000 hour milestone by November of 2015. During this time, Dan plans to develop his skills through deliberate practice, eventually winning amateur events and obtaining his PGA Tour card through a successful appearance in the PGA Tour’s Qualifying School, or ‘Q-School’. I’ll be watching.

In the meantime, I have my own plan to attend to. This is blog post number 792. Just 9208 more before I hit my own 10,000 milestone and become a professional writer. Watch out, Malcolm. The New Yorker may not have room for both of us.

I realize it’s a bit lame to choose my sentence of the week from the NYT’s weekly Vows column from the Sunday Weddings/Celebrations section. I mean, the column has a top ten or top five candidate every week. Easy pickings. But still, how could I resist when I read this gem from today’s Vows?

The life Ms. Klein was leading, teaching English at a Jewish school by day and dating and taking in the city’s cultural wealth by night, was a mix of artistic and traditional.

I shouldn’t comment, should I? It speaks for itself. But I’m so tempted.

The piece is longer than the usual Vows column. And it does tell a good story, of the romance between Ms. Klein and a Jewish artist from Strasbourg, which leads to another wonderful passage:

Until then, the blond, buoyant Ms. Klein was primarily dating bankers and lawyers. But she had come to recognize, she said, that “my heart is always with the artist.”

Indeed. Mine too.

Yup, it's the United terminals B/C underground walkway at O'Hare

Another day, another WSJ article. This one, in last Tuesday’s paper, was about sidewalk rage.

Signs of a sidewalk rager include muttering or bumping into others; uncaringly hogging a walking lane; and acting in a hostile manner by staring, giving a “mean face” or approaching others too closely, says Leon James, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii who studies pedestrian and driver aggression.

For the cool-headed, sidewalk rage may seem incomprehensible. After all, it seems simple enough to just go around the slow individual. Why then are some people, even those who greet other obstacles with equanimity, so infuriated by unhurried fellow pedestrians?

Kind of nuts, huh? I sure didn’t recognize myself in any of this. Until I got to the next paragraph:

How one interprets the situation is key, researchers say. Ragers tend to have a strong sense of how other people should behave. Their code: Slower people keep to the right. Step aside to take a picture. And the left side of an escalator should be, of course, kept free for anyone wanting to walk up.

Yes, well, that’s different. What’s the deal, anyway, with those morons at the airport who get on a moving sidewalk and stop, suitcase at their sides, completely blocking passage? I mean, are you serious? You’re going to stand for 100 yards while it moves at 1/2 mile per hour? Are you trying to imagine life as a snail? Stand on the right, move your damn bag in front of or behind you, and get out of the way! Let the rest of us use the moving sidewalk to walk. The idea is to get there faster, not slower.

Geez!

The article continues:

“A lot of us have ‘shoulds’ in our head,” says Dr. Deffenbacher. Ragers tend to think people should do things their way, and get angry because the slow walkers are breaking the rules of civility. It’s unclear exactly why some people harbor such beliefs, Dr. Deffenbacher says.

Hey, Deffenbacher, I’m talking about standers, not slow walkers, and they are breaking the rules of civility. You got that right, pal. There’s nothing unclear at all.

I’m glad we got that settled.

[Gary Leonard, WSJ]

I’m a little late getting to this article, as explained in part in my post last night about my gap in writing. But better late than never, so let me direct you to the front page feature article in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago, with the clever title Maria, Maria, I’ve Just Met a Goose Named Maria.

It’s a simple enough story, about a man, a goose, and a park.

Their relationship started last spring when Mr. Ehrler discovered that the goose—whom locals call Maria—liked to accompany him on his daily walks around a lake in Echo Park, a neighborhood about two miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

He’d show up, Maria would find him and the two would walk. A city worker joked to Mr. Ehrler that he was being stalked.

Now each morning, the couple walks the loop of Echo Park Lake together. Maria waddles a few paces ahead with her head stuck up straight and her belly full of tortillas Mr. Ehrler feeds her.

When they’re done, Maria walks, then runs, then flies alongside as Mr. Ehrler, 65 years old, speeds away on his red scooter. She returns to the same spot to greet him the next day.

The problem, alas, is that the lake is polluted and the city has plans to close it city plans to drain it, put a fence around it, and fix it over a two-year period. The environmental-impact report failed to take Maria into account.

What to do? Well, you can read more in the article, about the plans and about Maria herself. She’s really quite wonderful. Click on the slideshow as well and see her flying side-by-side with Mr. Ehrler as he speeds away on his scooter after their walk.

At times, Maria won’t return to the lake, so Mr. Ehrler guides her back to the park, where onlookers lock her behind a fence until he’s gone. Once she was spotted blocks away waddling down busy Sunset Boulevard. A firehouse crew escorted her to the park in an ambulance.

…

The couple’s fame grows. A waitress at a nearby pizzeria is working on a documentary about them. On Saturday, a group of 100 people plan to sing a send-up of “Maria” from “West Side Story” while marching around the lake with Mr. Ehrler and the goose.

Hickory, Scottish deerhound

This has been a bad month for blogging. And the longer I go without writing new posts, the more post ideas accumulate, making the prospect of catching up sufficiently daunting that I keep putting it off. But mostly what has kept me quiet has been the confluence of two events: a busy period with regard to various work duties and the poor health of my still new iMac. I was without the iMac for a few days, and now that it’s back from the Apple Store, the problem that sent it there is as bad as ever. I’m using it tonight, but it will return to the store tomorrow morning.*

So much for using it tonight. It lost its internet connection partway through this post. This has been the problem. First the mail app stops working, but the browser is fine. Then the browser goes, which is what happened. And then the computer crashes if I wait long enough. I have switched to my MacBook Air and will finish this post, but that may do it for today.

Anyway, let’s see. I’ll list a few of the items I had intended to write about, though some are getting dated and I can barely remember the details of others:

1. Technology update: the woes of my iMac, the beauty of my new Kindle, some thoughts on my new 11″ MacBook Air.

2. Westminster dog show. It took place last Monday and Tuesday. How can I not comment on it? Love those dogs.

3. Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory. This was the subject of my last post, written when I was part way through the book. I’ve finished it now.

4. The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. This is the book I’m now reading. About one third of the way through.

5. A WSJ article last week about walker rage.

6. A WSJ article last week about the friendship between a man and a goose in LA.

7. A NYT article with an incredibly poorly written sentence.

8. The Wayne Rooney goal. You’ve probably seen it by now, but if not, I was going to link to it.

9. Dinner last weekend at La Spiga.

It’s tempting to say something about the events in Wisconsin this past week, with further thoughts about state employees and unions in general, but what do I know? I mean, I know a little, what with being a state employee and all. But I’m not exactly an expert on politics or unions or disingenuous right-wing governors. I did try to think yesterday morning of what experts on Wisconsin I could think of, first among friends of mine in academia, then among bloggers I read. And then it occurred to me that a blogger I eschew reading because her views are too far to the right for me is in fact a law professor at Wisconsin, so surely her thoughts would be of interest. Off I went to Althouse, the Ann Althouse blog, and sure enough, it was of great interest.

It’s tempting also to comment on Albert Pujols and his failed contract negotiations with the Cardinals, but this is yet another area on which I’m hardly an expert.

I’ll get back to some of these issues tomorrow, I hope. But unless Apple does the right thing and hands me a new iMac tomorrow to replace the one I bought in November, I’ll have to do my blogging on my little MacBook. It’s quite frustrating, what with Gail’s iMac failing from day one and mine failing a month later.

More tomorrow.

Has over a week really gone by since my last post? Well, I can explain. Not that I need to. Basically, it’s been a busy week on the work front, starting with a dinner meeting last Sunday evening that was the initial event of an intensive 48-hour review process I was chairing. I’ll confess, that dinner was at Luc, which I wrote about last June, so I hardly have anything to complain about. Then again, I wasn’t complaining, was I?

Luc is the more casual younger brother to neighboring Rover’s, the fine French restaurant I have written about several times, both owned by famed local chef Thierry Rautureau. It opened just last May and we’ve had dinner there three times, breakfast just once. For my business last week, we had two work dinners to plan for, with a list of recommended restaurants provided to us, most of which were near the university and some pricing guidelines. I was studying the list when I suddenly realized that Luc would be perfect. And so it was. Simple food beautifully prepared.

For the record, I started with the evening’s special salad, frisée with dried cherries, and followed with the grilled pork chop, prepared with a sage mustard rub and plated atop some greens and a few small roasted potato chunks. We passed on dessert, what with everyone being quite full and with one of us having flown in from a locale in the eastern time zone and being more than ready to go back to her hotel and go to sleep.

Dinner the next night was at Ivar’s Salmon House. I was hesitant to select it, even though it is the ultimate place near the university (if not the city) to take out-of-towners to, or maybe because of that. Indeed, on my first visit to Seattle, in 1975, I ate dinner there. And it’s where I took my family on the eve of our wedding. So what can go wrong? Nothing. And nothing did. I had the foraged green salad and the alder grilled wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, maple glazed over a butternut squash hash with pancetta, onion, and spinach. Yum.

I didn’t intend this post to focus on food, but as long as that’s where it is heading, I would be remiss if I failed to mention how well we’ve been eating at home this month. I wish I could remember all the great meals Gail and Joel have prepared. Joel has been taking an active role in the kitchen, assisting Gail or preparing dishes of his own design. I’m not much of a cheesecake eater, but I loved the cheesecake he made Wednesday to accompany Gail’s prime rib. It had a macaroon crust made from scratch and a filling made with mascarpone and Meyer lemons. The prime rib was pretty good too, as were the black bean burgers Gail made the night before.

Thursday dinner wasn’t so fancy, but was still pretty special. Joel made good on a promised holiday gift of a month ago, ordering Vienna Beef hot dogs from Chicago for overnight delivery (on dry ice). They arrived Thursday. He selected the Vienna Beef Mini Pretzeldog & Mini Bageldog Combo, described at the Vienna Beef website as follows:

A snack lover’s dream! The Vienna Beef Mini Pretzeldog and Mini Bageldog Combo gives you the best of both worlds. There is no need to choose! The 2 pounds Combo gives you 1 pound of each and the 4 pound combo gives you 2 pounds of each! Perfect for your next party or family gathering.

For a limited time: get 1 bottle of mustard with 2 lbs order of minies, and 2 bottles of mustard with 4 lbs of minies

I’m not sure about that pluralization of mini. And we really didn’t need two more bottles of Plochman’s yellow mustard. But we needed those pretzeldogs and minidogs. For sure.

So, should I finish up the week? Okay. As some of you know, Friday night is Northlake night in our household. Northlake Tavern & Pizza House. Especially if Russ is around. Gail went there decades ago, before I knew her, when she lived with Jessica and a roommate not far from the university. When I first knew Gail, I couldn’t believe she liked to go there. For one thing, it’s a bar, and there was all the cigarette smoke. For another, its pizza wasn’t my idea of pizza. Over the years, Gail came around to my idea of what good pizza is, thanks in part to our year in Princeton and joint discovery of the greatest pizza place in the country, Red Moon Pizza on Route 1 between Princeton and Trenton. On many a Friday, we got into the car and drove to the otherwise character-less strip mall that was home to Red Moon, becoming regulars. I suppose we stood out, what with Gail’s accent and a small girl and baby boy in tow. After pizza, we’d walk down to Crazy Eddie to check out the electronics. That was always fun. And we knew how to have fun.

But back to Northlake. Oddly enough, in recent years I have come to appreciate that their pizza is pretty darn good too, especially if you don’t compare it to real pizzas, those of the thin-crust family, thinking of it instead as its own food group. Plus, there’s good beer. And most of all, there’s Russ, their most important customer, whose coattails we get to ride on. As Friends of Russ, we’re special customers too, even on days when he’s missing. Fortunately, Friday was not such a day. Russ was there, in part because he called me late in the afternoon to confirm that we were planning to go, which we were — Gail, me, and Joel too. Great evening.

Yesterday was leftover day, with all that good prime rib waiting to be put into sandwiches, which we ate before watching the first movie we rented in many months: The Kids Are All Right. I hadn’t paid attention to the Oscar nominations earlier in the week, so I didn’t even know it had been nominated for best picture, best actress (Annette Bening), and best supporting actor (Mark Ruffalo). I loved it. Gail didn’t. I can’t figure out why. For one, she was upset with the plight of one of the characters. I couldn’t convince her that her anger was a strength of the movie. One highlight: part way through the movie, the son is wearing a t-shirt with a map of something on it. A familiar map. Nantucket! I stopped the movie and kept going back and forth frame by frame to see the shirt better, until we could read the wording above the map — Nantucket Island. Boy I miss it.

I might have gotten an earlier start on blogging today if I didn’t spend half the day at work, writing a draft report as a follow up to my meetings earlier last week. And there’s another reason for my blogging absence over the last week, the fact that when I finally had free time in mid week, I picked up a book I had started last year and got re-engaged, finishing it after midnight Friday night/Saturday morning. Of course, when I say I picked up a book, I am being metaphorical. What I really did is pick up my Kindle and click on the book to see where I had left off. More on that in a post tomorrow, the post I thought I was going to write tonight. And I have still another post to write about my new Kindle, and my new MacBook Air, and the failure of my two-month-old iMac. Another day.

[Joshua Lott for The New York Times]

I’ve been doing my best to find more details about today’s shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson: updating the NYT article, going to Tucson TV station websites, refreshing my RSS feeds, looking every few minutes at The Daily Dish for Andrew Sullivan’s live blogging. I suppose we’ll all know soon enough the identity and motives of the attempted (or perhaps ultimately successful) assassin.

At Sullivan’s live-blogging site now are the items on left and right from the campaign of Giffords’ opponent last year, and the item below from SarahPAC, with Giffords as one of 20 members of Congress in the crosshairs.

(Sullivan writes, “Various Palin sites are frantically removing various incendiary materials – which is both gratifying, but also, it seems to me, an acknowledgment of previous rhetorical excess.”)

How can it be that our far right wing gets to control the use of the word “terrorist”? If you’re a Moslem and you look different, you’re a terrorist, even if you’re a US citizen. But a white American who flies a plane into a federal office building, or murders a doctor who performs abortions, or — I fear — assassinates a member of Congress is … what? A patriot?

Let’s take, for instance, Peter King, himself a member of Congress, who with the change in control of the House is now the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. As reported in mid-December, he

is planning to open a Congressional inquiry into what he calls “the radicalization” of the Muslim community … responding to what he has described as frequent concerns raised by law enforcement officials that Muslim leaders have been uncooperative in terror investigations.

Yet, King was himself a long-time supporter of the IRA. As Alex Massie wrote a year ago:

King has been on a tear since the attempted Christmas Day bombing, attacking the Obama administration at every turn. Earlier this week, he was asked what more President Obama could do to reassure Americans in the aftermath of the failed Christmas Day bomb plot. King’s response? “I think one main thing would be to—just himself to use the word ‘terrorism’ more often.” Even by the standards of the House of Representatives, this is impressively bone-headed.

For decades, King was one of the keenest, most reliable American voices supporting the Irish Republican Army during its long and murderous campaign.

Still, many members of Congress are stupid and the people, bless them, seem quite unconcerned by that. What’s more galling is that King presents himself as a hawk on security issues who, like so many so-called conservatives, is an enthusiastic supporter of torture and, should it prove necessary, nuclear weapons. Listening to King talk about al Qaeda, you could be forgiven for thinking that he’s the terrorists’ most implacable enemy.

Which would be funny if it weren’t such a sour joke. For years, King, who represents a chunk of New York’s Long Island, was in fact the terrorists’ best friend. King wasn’t merely an apologist for terrorism, he was an enthusiastic supporter of terrorism.

Of course it was Irish, not Islamic terrorism that King championed. So that’s different. Right? For decades, King was one of the keenest, most reliable American voices supporting the Irish Republican Army during its long and murderous campaign.

According to King, the terrorist movement was “the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland.”

There’s terrorism, and there’s patriotism. Terrorism is what Moslems do. Patriotism is what white Christian Americans do. Or so it seems.

I have written several times of my affection for the NYT Sunday Vows column, each week featuring another love story, sometimes of the rich and famous, sometimes of just regular Joes and Jills (or Joes and Joes, or whatever). Well, this past Sunday’s ventured into new territory. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Do people really want the story told in the national newspaper, in its most prominent social news site, of their meeting (while married to others) at their children’s pre-school, falling in love, and deciding to leave their spouses for each other? Well, in case I wasn’t sure, I know now that the answer is yes. You might think you would rather not know more, but in case you do, check out the full story here.

I’ll share here the story’s climactic moment.

In May 2008, Mr. Partilla invited her for a drink at O’Connell’s, a neighborhood bar. She said she knew something was up, because they had never met on their own before.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he recalled saying to her. She jumped up, knocking a glass of beer into his lap, and rushed out of the bar. Five minutes later, he said, she returned and told him, “I feel exactly the same way.” Then she left again.

One more detail:

As Mr. Partilla saw it, their options were either to act on their feelings and break up their marriages or to deny their feelings and live dishonestly. “Pain or more pain,” was how he summarized it.

“The part that’s hard for people to believe is we didn’t have an affair,” Ms. Riddell said. “I didn’t want to sneak around and sleep with him on the side. I wanted to get up in the morning and read the paper with him.”

I had to head to my office Sunday morning to grade or I might have written about the Vows story then. In the meantime, the publication of the story has turned into a story in its own right. At Forbes, Jeff Bercovici wrote yesterday:

In addition to strong condemnation from numerous bloggers and many of the paper’s own commenters, the article, as a first of sorts for the Times, invited a number of questions. Why were the ex-spouses of the newlyweds not mentioned by name in the story? Did the reporter call them for comment, as basic journalistic practice would dictate? Why did the Times open up the comment board when most Vows stories are off-limits? And above all, what were the couple thinking in telling their story in a space normally reserved for feel-good, soft-focus meet-cute tales?

“We did this because we just wanted one honest account of how this happened for our sakes and for our kids’ sakes,” Riddell told me. “We are really proud of our family and proud of the way we’ve handled this situation over the past year. There was nothing in the story we were ashamed of.”

You really should check out the full Vows piece. I dare not even think of what awaits us next.

Emma, one year ago

Things have been a little too quiet here at Ron’s View. Sorry about that. I had some grading to do this past week, and although that didn’t occupy every waking minute of my days, it did interfere with regular blog posting. At 4:00 PM yesterday, with just an hour to spare, I got my grades submitted. Time to relax!

Except it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. Not yet. It didn’t help that I did something really dumb right after submitting the grades. I wanted to clean up both the physical and electronic documents for the course, clearing my real and virtual desktops in preparation for my course next quarter. My last step was to move my grading spreadsheet into the course folder on the computer. When I did so, I found that some strange file had appeared in the folder, and when I went to delete the unwanted file, I managed to delete the entire folder instead. That wasn’t good, all the more because I intended to use some of the now-deleted files as templates for next quarter’s course. After writing an embarrassing confession to our computer support staff, I headed home, imagining the worst. I never did relax last night and enjoy the quarter’s work being done.

At 7:00 this morning I opened my email to the happy news that the staff had restored the files. Time to relax at last. I thought. I let Emma (the cat) out, went about my business, looked forward to catching up on assorted tasks. Then, maybe an hour later, I heard outside the window that screeching cat sound that always makes me worry that Emma is being attacked. I opened the window, then the front door, then the back door, then ran upstairs to see if maybe Emma were actually sitting in her usual daytime locations, which she wasn’t, then came back down and opened the side door off the kitchen, then the garage door, then went out to look for her. Not in front. Not in the side yard where she sometimes hides if she’s uncomfortable. As I came around to the backyard, I saw two cats, seeming mirror images, facing off about three feet apart on our back patio. I couldn’t tell which one was Emma, whether the interloper was between her and the house or whether she was keeping the interloper away. As I approached, the cat farther from the house ran toward the bushes and the other (now revealed to be Emma) ran to the back door. When I came closer, she raced through the door, faster than I’ve seen her run in years. I followed her in and watched her disappear down the basement stairway. I reached the stairway and she was a few steps down looking up, but when she caught sight of me she turned and ran again, down I imagined to her usual remote safety zone, the guest bedroom.

Which brings me to the next part of the story. I need to note that a week ago we had some of the heaviest rains in decades here in Seattle, what’s called a Pineapple Express, when a warm weather system comes straight in from Hawaii and dumps inches of rain. I was afraid to go down to the basement, lest I discover some flooding. Not that there has been flooding lately. None since October 2003, the last and worst of our many basement floods, after which we finally re-did the whole drainage system outside, where the drainage contractor could. One area couldn’t be reached. But that’s okay. It was by the basement bedroom, which in 17 years has never flooded.

Well, when I finally did head down to look for water last week, with Joel beside me since I didn’t dare do it alone, I found no water in any of the old bad spots. The guest bedroom though I wasn’t sure about. No standing water or anything, but a sense of dampness. I told Gail, thought we’d check again on Friday when our contractor was going to swing by to deal with a different issue, but when Friday came I completely forgot.

So now it’s Tuesday morning, a week after the Pineapple Express, and Emma draws Gail and me down to the bedroom. The carpeting still didn’t feel obviously wet, but the odor suggested that it surely was. Two hours later, our friend Bert (longstanding employee of the contractor) came over from another job, pulled up some of the carpeting, and the pad was soaked. Another two hours later and two more members of the contractor team pulled out all the carpeting and pad. We have a pretty good guess where the water came in and why, but more diagnostic work needs to be done. A dehumidifier is hard at work. With the pad gone, the odor will disappear in due course.

Sigh. This isn’t how I wanted my break to begin. I don’t feel relaxed at all. And there are all the blog posts I have to write. Better get to work.

[Bernard Gotfryd, in the New Yorker]

Joyce Carol Oates has a beautiful remembrance of her husband’s last week of life (and her experience of it) in the December 13 issue of The New Yorker. Unfortunately, the online version is behind a paywall, so you will need to pay or get your hands on a print issue to see it. Make the effort.

Oates’ husband, Raymond Smith, died suddenly almost three years ago while hospitalized for pneumonia. (See the brief NYT obit here.) I could quote from her article, but really, you owe it to yourself to read it in full, without preview. I’ll just say that parts of it reminded me of our experience in August during the last week of Gail’s brother Gary’s life, when he too was connected to various measuring devices and you could study his oxygen intake with each breath. Oh, and of course, we have our own memories of arriving at the emergency entrance of Princeton Medical Center, near the end of the year we lived in Princeton, first when Joel fell off a speaker he had climbed on — around the time of his first birthday — and cut his face near his eye, and second just weeks later when Gail took an elbow in her face during a summer evening volleyball game and was lucky her cheekbone wasn’t broken.

Oops. There I go again. This isn’t about me, even if it is my blog. It’s about Joyce Carol Oates. Do read her article.