Around Here

A banyan tree has grown to fairy-tale size at The Golf Club, an abandoned golf course not far from around here. Fifty years old this year the golf course, and its popular club house, were  the social hub in the scotch and samba sixties. The city now has golf courses galore - an Irish word that means, literally, enough. Surely. The Golf Club was purchased by a consortium four years ago, and was promptly closed, apparently in the hope that the property could be developed in a more lucrative direction. Those plans were bollixed by the city. It is now in litigation. But nature never waits for a settlement. It's more overgrown now than when these photographs were taken. I’m OK with this state of "decline". If the lawn is one of the most profligate stressors of the environment on the planet, the golf course is its paragon. There were few if any lawns in the U.S., or so the story goes, until the Rockefellers saw Buckingham palace. They soon proceeded to plant acres of the stuff ...

When I’m out riding my scooter and wearing certain shirts, the wind will  invariably catch the collar and flap it, flicking the collar point against my jaw. It’s annoying, and after a while it hurts. I can defeat this by opening my shirt a couple of buttons and letting the collar slip back behind my neck. Oddly, only my left collar hooks up with the wind to party at my expense. Seems the human body is subtly, and not so subtly, asymmetrical. I’m right-handed, but left-eyed. You can check your eye dominance by crossing your open hands, palms out, about ten inches in front of your face and creating a small window just above your crossed thumbs. With both eyes open, frame a small object across the room in the window. Keeping the object framed, alternately close one eye, then the other. The eye that has framed the object is your dominant eye. It has been said that one side of your face, I forget which one, is the one you’re born with, the ot...

I heard about 911 (“a wake-up call from hell” as Benjamin Netanyahu  put it) like a billion other souls, when the news bulletin hit on television  that morning, and appropriated the television screen, and global  attention, for many days and weeks to come. I got on the phone with  Stu, a fellow ex-New Yorker, and we both watched the disaster  unfolding, phones to our ears, saying little, until Stu realized he had  other phone calls to make. Within the next couple of hours a real-life  replica of the destruction scene from Independence Day, whose  monstrous majesty I’ve always suspected inspired Bin Laden, was  played out in the dreadful cinematic slow motion that no one can forget,  and the towers lay collapsed, along with three thousand lives,  in a tower of dust. My friend, and Staten Island ex-neighbor Pat, told me that a lot of  Staten Islanders who worked in the World ...