This is the famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River to launch a sneak attack against the British in New Jersey. Although a great morale booster, it wasn’t an important battle. Yorktown, four years later, was the battle that ended the war and created America. It went like this. Britain ruled the sea, and she was able to use that advantage to move her armies around in America. One of these armies had been having a successful time ravaging the South, but it was time to move on, so the army assembled at Yorktown, Virginia to get picked up by His Majesty’s Navy. George Washington heard about this (on fb?) and hatched a plan. He’d march a French Army (which they’d loaned us) and the whole Continental Army from West Point to Yorktown (not easy). Meanwhile the French fleet would blockade Yorktown so the British could not escape by sea (very not easy.) He’d surround them and force them to surrender. There were several problems with this plan. The first was logistics. In the days before texting it would take weeks – sometimes months – for a message to get from the soon-to-be US to France which was where the French fleet and the French Army were getting their orders.

Imagine making a plan with the knowledge that it would be two months at least before your partners gave a yay or nay on it. From the French point of view, they would have to commit their fleet and Army for months and get orders out to them. The French fleet was in the Caribbean guarding her possessions there. While that fleet was away helping us, it was possible the British would show up and take over the French possessions. That kind of thing happened all the time. While they did serve their own purposes by sticking it to the British, they did so at considerable risk and expense. A large part of the cause of the French Revolution was France never recovered from the expense of helping us out. So you really have to hand it to the nascent American government and the French to pull this whole thing off at all.  Moving all those ships and men across such vast expanses over such long timeframes with such slow communications was really nothing short of a miracle. The other problem was naval battles are not something the British tended to lose, and that’s where cooties come in. The commander of the British fleet on the North American station (with the amazing name of Mariot Arbuthnot) got sick and was recalled to Britain. His replacement was new on the job just when the French fleet showed up to blockade the British in the Chesapeake Bay. The two fleets slugged it out and the French Navy won, allowing George’s plan to succeed and America to be born. If the cooties had not intervened on Admiral Sir Mariot Arbuthnot, we might very well still be part of the British Empire. Between our wall and their Brexit, it’s hard to tell the difference.

One day my car was stolen. I went to the precinct to file a report. The desk sergeant was very helpful. “Oh, it hasn’t been stolen. It’s been impounded.” He had a computer you see.

Where I live now (Queens) you can park on top of a fire hydrant and nothing happens, but this was when I lived in Brooklyn, and they have this thing called rule of law there. Apparently, I was in violation. I could swear that the car was fifteen feet from the hydrant, but maybe it was fourteen feet and ten inches, or eight inches, but per the NYPD it was fourteen feet and not enough inches. Getting your car impounded is a New York rite of passage. In other tribes you have to sit on a fire ant hill for an hour or hang from a tree by leather thongs run through your chest or hunt a lion with your bare hands but here we know the true meaning of pain.

I was initiated into the rite years before when my friend’s car had been impounded. Danny had this habit of buying a car that was half dead and then killing it completely. This particular embarrassment was a dull brown Malibu classic. It might have been another color in its youth, but the rust had effaced its joie de vivre. I was with him when he acquired it. As we were driving it home green smoke began to pour out of the dash board. I really thought it was going to explode. As acrid smoke filled the car I yelled for him to pull over.

“No. No, I see a Thursday spot,” he said and began to execute an illegal U turn. I say began because the car died evenly in the center of Metropolitan Avenue right on the double yellow line, smoke pouring out of it like a carrier on the losing side of the Battle of Midway. For some people this would have been enough but he actually kept this car for a while, enamored of its ugliness. He christened it “The Love Boat” It was about as sexy as a suicidal slug.

This was the car that the NYPD hauled away one fine day. To extricate a car in such circumstances you must pay the fine, the towing fee, and rental to the pound for each day your car is there. In Queens there was an extra bonus round. The place you paid all of this was on the opposite end of the borough from the pound itself, and since you obviously had no car, you had to take busses to get to these charming destinations. You’d better pack lunch, and dinner. Danny figured the cashectomy of this transaction would be two weeks’ salary, which was two weeks more than “The Love Boat” was worth.
“Let them keep it,” he said.
“It doesn’t work that way,” his father replied. We were at his dad’s apartment. His father sat on his Barcalounger and took a draw on his pipe as deliberately as the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland drew on his hookah.

I think his dad took a certain sardonic pleasure in the mishaps of any of his five sons. It was his revenge on them for living. “They have your car. They know who you are. They will let it sit there and accrue debt for a few months, then they’ll sell it at auction, for scrap in this case.” He drew another puff. “Then they will bill you for the difference and throw in a few legal fees for abandonment and being a bad person. If you don’t pay they will garnishee your salary. If you duck that they will garnishee your social security. If you die before that they will dig you up and sell your organs.”

Like a good fried, I drove Danny to his destinations of pain. It took all day anyway. The pound itself was an education in unpleasantness. Every car there was damaged. They could not ALL have been that way on the street. People complain about the city being inefficient and slipshod, but they were very thorough here. Not one car was spared.

So, it was with considerable trepidation that I set out to extricate my car. It was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a place neither I, nor my car, nor the impound, nor a Rockefeller could afford now. (Although if the impound was still there you could get artisanally crafted doughnuts for only $45 while you waited.) At least the offices to pay the fine and the car prison were in the same place. Brooklyn is a little more organized.  Even so it was a process. You had to stand in a long line to get the forms required to stand in another long line to actually pay all the fines so that you could stand in another long line to get your car.

I was doing this carrying my fourteen month old daughter, Cezanne. Nobody ever says her name right, even in France.  She was in her car carrier since, being an optimist, I expected to drive out of that place the same day. A baby in a car carrier gets heavy after a few hours, but that was not my biggest concern.  She was teething, and nothing was more inconsolable then Cezanne when she was teething. She’d get this look on her face like she was mad at God – which she was. Then she’d cry. Then she’s really rev up and start bellowing like a volcano on a bad day. I’d been on flights where they threatened to land the plane and arrest me if something wasn’t done. As any parent knows, there is not a lot you can do. But a lot of people are not parents and they just glare at you like you beat the kid from dawn till dusk. She had fallen asleep on the bus to the pound and I was in mortal terror during the long hours waiting in line that she would wake up and go off like Vesuvius and I’d get arrested and be put in jail with my car. So there I am on this endless line with this perfectly quiet ticking time bomb.

We got through the first line to get the forms without incident. I bore up like everybody else and got the occasional compliment about what a cute baby I had. Single gentlemen listen up. If you can rent a baby, do so. They are like a magnet for women. Once the ice is broken, you can explain that you are an uncle or you found it or something. If she woke up it would be THE END but so far, so good. It was on the second line that I encountered a New York icon, the next superhero in the Marvel franchise – Mr. Irate Crazy Frothing-at-the-Mouth Taxi Man.

I think you would need the patience of Gandhi to remain calm as a taxi driver in New York. You never know who is going to get in your cab and even if ninety percent of them are reasonable the other ten percent are the ones who make your existence a living hell. On top of that it is always a hassle to get around in this town and even when normal people are trying to get from point A to point B, there is pressure. Likewise if ninety percent of the cab drivers are reasonable it is the other ten percent that make your ride a living hell. This was a cabbie to remember. I rather suspect that he was never part of the reasonable ninety percent. On top of that his cab, and therefore his livelihood, were impounded. On top of that he had been on the wrong line (the one outside to get his car) and only discovered this by starting at one end of the line and going to the other – a long process. He snapped. He stormed into the room and cut all the lines to confront the civil servants behind their bullet proof glass. By his logic, since he had been waiting on the wrong line (and would have to wait on it again later) he should just get served now. He went from one window to another, blustering and frothing in at least two languages and scaring the bejesus out of whatever unlucky citizen happened to be in front of the window.

In my experience, belligerence may work in the private sector, where no matter how unreasonable, the customer is always right. Civil servants are under no such misconception. They do not aim to please. Special orders do upset them. One needs an act of congress to get one dismissed, so they are basically unassailable.  If you are very nice to them, they may deign to take care of whatever petty and completely unimportant problem that you in your imprudence may have acquired. Then again, they may not. In this case they continued their operations very slowly and deliberately, completely ignoring crazy taxi man. They were after all, behind glass. We weren’t. He eventually gave up his direct attack on the civil service citadel to turn his fury on the people in the line, especially the person at the front – me.  He wanted my spot. He wanted it with foam coming out of his mouth. If I refused him there was a distinct possibility of violence. In that turn of events I would have to put Cezanne down or throw her at him. I am aware that some readers might raise an eyebrow even at the suggestion of using a baby as a weapon, but have you considered that a baby in a hard plastic carrier is a pretty good weapon? With that handle you could get a nice angular momentum going. At the very least I would have had the element of surprise.  I weighed the possibilities, but somehow Cezanne had managed to sleep through this whole thing, and this strategy might wake her. At end of the day I was more afraid of her then of him. So baby cum artillery was out and caution was adopted as the better part of valor. He had already taken the first spot so I let it go. The next window came free and up he went.

I had been dubious about his approach all along. Is there that much difference between cutting by going to the window and cutting by seizing the front of the line? But one never knows in a city office so I looked on with real curiosity. By chance the next window to free up was the manager’s window. The cold, imperious look in her eye gave me to suspect that this was not going to be the taxi man’s day at all.

When he came over she said, “You again. You have cut off a whole room full of people and that man with a baby.” He started to sputter and bluster again. At that moment a cop walked in. Since he didn’t have any business of his own there I figure she must have summoned him a few minutes before.  She continued, “Arrest that man for disrupting civil servants in the performance of their duty and being a general menace.” The constable approached the bench. This had a marked effect on the demeanor of the cab driver. He started begging for mercy with the same incoherent ranting with which he had been threatening Armageddon.  She put up her hand to silence him and pointed to a chair in the back of the room. “Sit down there!” He sat down in the chair and considered the floor, whimpering softly. She addressed her minions. “No one attend to that man until everyone else is taken care of.” They all nodded. “Officer, thank you. You may go.” Then she said “Next,” very slowly and quietly so that you could hear every letter in the word.

It was with not a little apprehension that I approached the window. All my papers were in order. I’d checked them three times, but there is that arbitrary nature to all doings in the municipal government that fills one with a nameless dread in such situations. You think you’ve got it all covered but then some unseen calamity strikes you down; the parking ticket that you paid and they didn’t get, the back taxes that you owe when you actually don’t, the registration problem with your car, the regulation that took effect sixty seconds ago, or that expired sixty seconds ago, the fact that you are breathing. It could be anything. And of course it’s none of those things, it’s something you didn’t think to worry about. I put my time bomb down very delicately and pushed all my paperwork and my driver’s license and my receipt of payment and my passport and my birth certificate and my old boy scout badge and a letter of dispensation from the Pope under the window. I would have pushed Cezanne under the window if I thought she’d fit. The public servant scanned it all and her eye stopped on my driver’s license.

She looked up at me for a long moment and said, “Your photo ID does not look like you. Are you sure this is your license?” My heart stopped.
I let out a nervous laugh. “Well, of course it’s my license.”
“I see now. You do have a dimple when you smile,” she said. Without looking down she took her stamp and affixed it to my freedom. “You may go. Have a nice day.”

Under stress I often become forgetful, but I did remember to collect all the papers and the baby before I walked out. Extricating the car proved easy. It wasn’t even damaged! I cleared the gates of the Navy Yard feeling very much like Odysseus – right into downtown Brooklyn rush-hour traffic. We inched along. I began to hear a rumble from the back seat. Well, it would have been too much to ask the gods to get all the way home. My little volcano was awakening. Babies have to be mounted backwards in the back seat. If I was a baby, I wouldn’t like that arrangement very much. Very boring. (There are so many weird things about babyhood I don’t know how anybody gets through it. It must be like being stoned all the time. Everything is unfamiliar and novel and exciting and crazy and intense and disorienting.) She woke up crabby, and teething. She started to rev up. I couldn’t get home. I couldn’t pull over. The only thing I knew would work in such circumstances was putting my finger in her mouth so she could gnaw on it. So on we went, her happily gnawing away, and I driving left handed in the rush hour with my body bent over like an abstract sculpture. Could have been worse. Car could have been a stick.

The body likes fat. It likes to be fat. It rewards you for doing things that make you fat, like sleeping and eating. The body likes muscle and bone, but to a much lesser degree. Why? Fat serves as a calorie reserve for hard times, which were a lot of times when we were evolving. Fat gets you through famine. Fat is also easy to maintain. You don’t need a lot of extra calories to support those tissues. They are metabolically cheap. Fat is like an extra gas tank that doesn’t take too much energy to haul around. Muscle and bone are a calorie drain. They are expensive tissues to maintain, sucking up calories even when you are sleeping. This is one of the reasons people with a lot of muscle find it easier to keep the weight off. They draw more calories even while asleep. The body’s survival strategy has always been to trim down muscle and bone to only what you need on a day to day basis. If you don’t prove to the body that you need them, they get reduced because they cost too much in calories to maintain. Muscle does not turn into fat, but muscle can thin out, and fat can fat in.

When a person exercises they expend energy in the form of calories but they also put a strain on the muscle and bone. Body tissues are piezoelectric. That means when you put a strain on body tissues they generate an electric field. This electric field signals the cells to build more muscle and bone. As you exercise you build muscle and strengthen bone internally. If you stop, there is no more electric field and the cells stop putting on muscle and bone. Muscle and bone eventually reduce to whatever you need to get through the day. You have to exercise twice a week to maintain what you have, more if you want to build up. Muscle and bone don’t fade away to nothing because we are still exercising somewhat by dragging our bodies across the surface of the planet. Where there is gravity there is resistance. The body reinforces itself to resist strain exerted on it. The more the strain, the more the reinforcement. This x ray of the foot reveals the internal structure of the bones.

If bones were solid bone they would be stronger – and three times heavier. That’s a lot to drag around. Instead the bones are mostly hollow with fine filaments inside to reinforce them. The filaments are aligned in the best way to resist stress on the bone. Note that most of the filaments in the calcaneous (heel bone) are running parallel from the heel to the ankle, matching the lines of force on the foot when the heel strikes the ground. Even as you read this there are groups of bone cells eating away unnecessary filaments and other groups building new filaments to resist stress more efficiently. The whole skeleton is replaced every two years or so. Its unchanging appearance is but an illusion.

The astronauts don’t have this resistance and their bodies suffer for it.  Their muscles and bones start to weaken after about three days. Who needs bones in space? Despite exercising a lot most of them end up with severe osteoporosis. When they come back to earth they often have to be carried off the space capsule on a gurney. Back on earth their bodies recover, but not completely. Going to Mars sounds like fun, but unless somebody comes up with artificial gravity like the Starship Enterprise,

we aren’t going anywhere. In the year or more in space it would take to get to Mars an astronaut would turn to jello. NASA has all sorts of strategies for this problem. They have resistance equipment on the space station but it’s not enough.  Nothing beats dealing with gravity 24/7. (Those strap on electric stim machines they sell in the TV guide so you can “exercise” in the Barcalounger while eating nachos don’t work either.)

The body likes exercise somewhat. Muscle and bone is good for some things; you could run out to the candy store for example (or away from a predator). The body rewards us for exercise with endorphins and serotonin, more feel good neurotransmitters, but you have to get going. Like most people, I never want to exercise, but I know that about five minutes into it my blood is up and then it’s good, or at least ok. I always feel better afterwards. You do have to get over that initial hump though. It also takes a certain amount of discipline. Like a diet, you need to make it an integral part of your routine.  Diet and exercise are lifelong. That being the case, try to find something that you like. I like nature so for me it’s swimming, biking, hiking, and skating. Some people like dancing, some are attracted to martial arts.

If you are social, take classes or find a workout partner. Keep trying different things until you find what works for you. It doesn’t have to be huge. A twenty minute walk at a good pace three times a week does wonders. Even a little exercise, if done on a regular basis will have real effects.

The piezoelectric effect mentioned earlier is found in many materials including collagen, a major structural protein of the body. The Body Electric, by Dr. Robert Becker and Gary Selden is an excellent book for all the wonderful things electricity does in your body.

Why is it so easy to eat and so hard to work out? People invariably need no coaxing to eat. They look forward to it, consume mass quantities with gusto, and even look back on the meal with a certain fondness. One out of five people force themselves to exercise, and the other four out of five people don’t work out at all except in front of the fridge. It’s open and bend and reach and up and close and open and bend and reach and up and close, repeat. There are whole professions dedicated to help people work out. Not so with eating. You don’t find eatotonics classes where we all get together around a big table with a horribly enthusiastic cheerleader egging us on. Hard to imagine a personal eating trainer at dinner. ”O.K. O.K. That was good. Lift that fork again! C’mon! You can do it! Three more reps and we’re done.”

There are exceptions. Some people don’t eat enough and some people do work out too much, but the overwhelming tide of humanity goes the other way. When given the chance of working out or watching other people work out (sports on TV), most people will do the latter, and eat while they are doing it. Since everybody knows you are supposed to exercise and not overeat, why does the average person do just the opposite?

We are the victims of our own success. In the beginning, when the world was young it was also hungry. Humankind grew up in the East African rift valley over the last million years or so. Estimates are, to get enough food those early hunter gatherer societies would walk six or seven miles a day.

You didn’t need a coach, you had a built-in coach called hunger. Hunger is an excellent coach. Exercise was provided by the lifestyle and nobody liked it then either, so we invented ways to avoid it ultimately inventing the car. We have gotten so good at it that by now you have to schedule exercise.

People in cities that were built up after the invention of the car (cities like LA, Dallas, Phoenix) get no exercise unless they seek it out, and the general population is not in good shape. You can’t even walk around because cars require big roads and big parking lots so everything is spread out.  LA has sidewalks, but I don’t know why. My first time out there I went for a walk.  I was the only pedestrian for miles. Eventually a police cruiser started to follow me, I suppose because I was involved in the suspicious act of walking. Without a car, you can’t exist in these places. People in cities that were built up before the invention of the car (Chicago, San Francisco, and all the big eastern cities) get more exercise and the populations fare a bit better. Without cars, the cities are more dense and you can walk from place to place. Many people don’t have cars. The cities solved the problem of getting around with subways and busses, which you still have to get to. Most New Yorkers climb many flights of stairs every day just to get to work. Even so, they are hardly clocking seven miles.

Since we used to walk all over, why no urge to do it now? Simple, then as now, the internal urge was to conserve energy. Food was hard to come by and what you could depend on was sometimes it would be really hard to come by – famine. Famine was always around, and for much of the world it still is. The survival strategy then would be to get as many calories as you can whenever you can and expending as few calories as possible to do so. The ultimate expression of this universal desire is driving to the Olive Garden.

If they could figure out a conveyor belt to take you from your car to a booth they would do it. There are drive through deli’s in California where attendants put anything in your car you like. Not only do we want to eat as much as possible, we want to eat as much food with as many calories as possible. Carbohydrates (sugar, high fructose corn syrup, bread, cereal, crackers, cake, pasta, potatoes) are a great source of calories and fats (butter, cheese, oil) are even better. Too improve a carb, just add fat. Bread is improved with butter. Bread is really improved by deep frying it and rolling it in granulated sugar – churros! Pasta is improved with a cream sauce. Potatoes are improved with sour cream and butter (even better, deep fry the potatoes in oil to make fries and smother them in melted cheese!) Heck, you can even fix vegetables with fat. Salad dressings (ranch, blue cheese, creamy Italian) are more than half fat. What does asparagus need? Hollandaise sauce which is fat squared! What can we do for this broccoli? I know, lets pour some melted cheese on it. Hungry yet?

This particular desire for fats is driven by a neurotransmitter called cholecystokinin, a mouthful of a word that causes you to eat many more mouthfuls. Cholecystokinin is THE BEAST WITHIN YOU.

Plants generally don’t have fats. Animals have fats, and they want keep them. If you want a fat now you need do no more than walk into a convenience store. If you wanted a fat in the old days it would be attached to some animal who was running away from you. You’d have to sharpen a stick, make a strategy, walk even more miles then try to kill it and if it was big it just might kill you. What a pain. You can almost see Thag looking out of his cave on a winter morning at some wooly mammoth who is looking right back at him as if to say, “Just try it.” Thag turns to Mrs. Thag and says, “Can we just have pasta tonight?”

We used to need a strong incentive to hunt down those fats. Cholecystokinin is a neurotransmitter that can control your mood. The stomach releases it when you eat food with fats and that makes you feel good. Everybody has their own comfort food, and every one of those foods is laced with fat. Nobody looks at rice cakes as a comfort food. Wrap them in bacon and you are getting closer.

Not only do we have a sweet tooth, we have a fat tooth. We still have the cave man drives that we used to need to get calories, and especially fat calories, but now we can get them easily, and we do. We’ll take things that already have plenty of fat and add more fat to it. “I’ll have the double bacon cheeseburger with fries. Supersize me.” Dominos sold a lot more pizza when they doubled the cheese on it. Now they even have cheese inside the perimeter crust.

Our sweet tooth is sharpened by the bacteria in our gut. If we eat a lot of carbs, the bacteria in our gut that breaks down carbs is getting more nutrition, so it is fruitful and multiplies. Since more is better it will secrete its own hormones and neurotransmitters that make you crave even more carbs, thereby ensuring its own food supply. It’s not so much that you think with your gut as your gut often thinks for you.

If you are having a hard time accepting the idea that gut bacteria – the micribiome – are influencing your behavior this sort of thing goes on all the time. We have a dynamic and shifting relationship with the civilizations we carry within us. Various species within the intestinal biota can be “good guys” one day and “bad guys” the next, so such labels are not so useful. Think of it more like the UN. Everybody has their own agenda and sometimes these agendas coincide and sometimes they do not. If you are curious about this topic, I recommend I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong, a fascinating walk through the various relationships within ourselves.

The body is well designed for the hardscrabble existence it evolved in. It is not good for the land of milk and honey. When you go “on a diet” you are going against the grain. One thing is certain. All extreme diets fail. Unless you want to suffer and gain weight don’t go there. They all advertise about how much weight people lose but everybody on them gains it back within a year. A workable diet is what you do eat, not what you don’t eat, and cutting out your favorite stuff will only make you want it more. Also, your body interprets extreme rationing as famine and decreases its calorie use which makes you tired and crabby. So eat what you want, just not as much as you want to. (That said, junk food is not a good idea.) Decreasing eating by a little bit is way more effective because it has to be something you can sustain forever. If you link that with moderate exercise the weight will come off. Exercise is at least as important as diet, probably more so. This is easier said than done. Behavior modification seems to be about the hardest thing in the world. Ask anyone who smokes.

My next post will address why we don’t have an exercise tooth to go with the sweet tooth and the fat tooth.

We think we know ourselves, but do we really? When something surprising happens we often surprise ourselves. So it was with me as I was to find out late one afternoon on the Lower East Side. I used to teach an anatomy and physiology workshop for massage students who were preparing to take their New York State Board Exam. I’d rent a big room for a weekend in the Ukrainian Sports club (the only sport I ever saw there was cards.) For $100, I would run them through their paces over two rather grueling days. I’d get about fifty students, and that was a nice chunk of change in the nineties. As a prop I used a disarticulated skeleton, basically a back pack full of bones. I had a small satchel for the tuition, your basic bag of money. I also had a container of matzo ball soup from the Second Avenue Deli. The Second Avenue Deli isn’t on Second Avenue anymore. Then again, Madison Square Garden isn’t in Madison Square anymore. We do this to confuse the tourists. Why the soup? There was a child coming into our lives, and pregnant women often have peculiar culinary desires. This one was Shelley’s, and since she was bound to do most of the heavy lifting when it came to labor and what not, the least I could do was pick up some soup when I was in the right neighborhood.

I was pretty tired, but feeling ok. I had just finished the workshop. I had a back pack full o’bones, a bag o’money (quite a lot of it), and a box o’soup. There was no reason why the remains of the day shouldn’t be spent in the comfortable embrace of a martini the size of my head. But one should never completely relax in NYC. Anything can happen, and often does. As I walked out the door onto Second Avenue there was a sudden blur five angstroms in front of my nose as someone flew by at about warp eight. As the figure pounded up the block I wondered, “Who is chasing you?” I looked down the block to see none other than my old pal Waldo charging up with a two by four.

Waldo is well over six feet tall with the kind of big bony face you have to have if you are the crazy villain in an old sci-fi movie. He looked nothing if not impressive in the afternoon light, but looks can be deceiving. I knew him to be a fairly reasonable homo sapien and if he was after someone with a two by four, they likely had it coming. He owned Big Bar around the corner. I figured something bad went down in the bar and Waldo was simply displaying his most sincere disapprobation of such. As these wheels were turning in my head what came out of me, in my best Alpha voice was, “Hey Waldo! You want me to get him?” Who said that? That was an unauthorized communication! I’m not getting involved in a bar fight. But as my rational frontal lobes launched an investigation into what vestigial dinosaur idiot neural remnant was responsible for the words coming out of my lips, Waldo roared, “YEAH!!!!” Ours not to reason why. I set out in hot pursuit of the official bad guy.

One might think that encumbered as I was with a box o’soup, a bag o’money, and a bag o’bones I would have trouble overtaking the perp. It was a challenge. The bag o’bones on my back were rattling like castanets and a big bone, probably the femur, worked its way through the top of the bag and was hitting me in the back of the head with every stride. Likewise it is not possible to run flat out and keep the hand that bears the soup perfectly still. After a good fifty yards a froth began to emanate from the top of the box and I had that sinking feeling that one gets as ones balls are disintegrating.

Notwithstanding the impediments, I am in shape, and he, poor fellow, was not. Before we got up to St. Mark’s church

I was close enough to see that he was disheveled in a way that said, “Heroin addict.” In the Lower East Side they were easy to spot as pigeons, and just as common. I have nothing against heroin addicts. Some of my best friends have been heroin addicts, and that is why I have never tried it. I’ve tried other things,  but

:

I have been horrified and saddened at what I have seen it do to people; people I know personally to be a strong and smart. For some of them, it burned their lives to the ground. Others did manage to claw their way out, but none of them emerged from the experience entirely intact.

While sympathetic, it doesn’t mean I want to touch one of them, certainly not as skanky as this guy. However, it is a fact of life that you cannot grab someone without also touching them. I transferred the soup, which was quite agitated at this point, to the money hand and grabbed the assailant by the wrist and brought him to a halt. The two of us then performed what can only be thought of as a sidewalk pas de duex.

Though I had him by the wrist I sure didn’t want to have him any more than that so I was leaning away from him. For his part he was leaning away from me for reasons that are probably obvious to the reader. When two men of about the same size are pulling away from each other it is easy to end up in a bit of a stalemate. This did not work for my partner who lurched sideways. Always the congenial partner I lurched also and the two of us began to orbit around our one point of contact. It was such a natural thing it was hard to tell who was leading. And then came Waldo.

He raised the mighty two by four high over head and arced it down at my partner with the obvious intent of smashing his brains out. It was then that I had a childhood memory. My dad was a cop, and I remember him mentioning at some point that homicide, while often desirable, is a felony, and that I should never do it, at least not in a way that is obvious and discoverable. It occurred to me that the bashing out of brains on the sidewalk was discoverable, maybe even obvious. My good friend Waldo might go to jail, and I did not want that to happen to him. In retrospect, I could have gone to jail too, as an accessory, but my brain was rather busy and hadn’t the time to consider every little ramification of the unfolding drama. I did the second totally unexpected thing of the afternoon. I let go.

When in the course of human events one person dissolves the physical bands connecting him to another, and the two men are leaning away from each other while spinning, the laws of physics take over. We flew apart, the two by four whistling down in the air between us. I fell back until I bounced off a building,

and the junkie staggered into Second Avenue until he bounced off a cop car.

For all the times in my life I have asked, “Where is a cop when you need one?” I must observe their timing was spot on that day. They had seen the altercation and were pulling over to investigate when one half of the altercation came to them. The junkie rolled across the hood, landed on his feet and took off, followed by the NYPD, Waldo, and me. He barely made it to the opposite curb when he fell and several little bags of a highly suspicious nature fell out of his pocket. The Force descended on him pronto.

As they were cuffing him I had another thought. The soup, frothy though it was, could be easily explained; the bag o’bones and the bag o’money not so much. The femur rested affectionately against the back of my head, quite, as it were, out of the bag. I made a gesture of slicking down my hair and forced the femur back in the bag with one suave move just as the constable glanced up. He looked at me quizzically for a moment, but was preoccupied with his new catch. Quick thinking was called for.

“Officers, do you need any assistance?”
“Ah No. No. We got it.”
“Good work. Finish your tour safe. Waldo, see you later.

I departed the scene as fast as discretion would allow. It was only when I got to Astor Place that my legs turned to water. When I got home there was dialog:

“Oh Honey, what happened to my Matzo ball soup? The balls are all dissolved?”
“Oh Honey, it’s a long story.”

Once upon a time, when normal people could still afford to live in the city, there was a neighborhood called the Lower East Side. It was such a dangerous place that it has been disappeared. Developers renamed it the East Village and populated with galleries, college students, tourists, and artisanal coffee shops, artisanal bakeries, artisanal bars, artisanal eateries and artisanal people. Each cup of coffee is hand crafted from beans that are hand-picked by agnostic Jesuits, brought down the mountainside by golden hoofed donkeys, and roasted by NASA scientists. Each pastry is hand crafted by a member of a Coven of Seventy Sisters who had special training in the French Culinary Institute AND the Food Network AND Hogwarts. Each drink is hand crafted by a young, hip guy with a man bun who learned his trade at the University of Porcelain Springs. Each entrée is hand crafted by a master chef who has honed his skill while creating the last five blockbuster restaurants in New York City. Each entrée is hand delivered by a former cast member of Book of Mormon with a five-hundred-watt smile. That same waiter will be happy to point you to an artisanal bank where you can get an artisanal mortgage to pay for all this. Tompkins Square Park is populated by artisanal babies pushed along by their West Indian nannies or occasionally by their designer/banker/lawyer/mother.

This story is not about that place. On the Lower East Side you got a cup of cawfee from the Stage Diner that was later closed when it was discovered they had cut into the utility lines and had been stealing gas for about forty years. You got your pastry standing on line behind a girl with a chain purse and a pit bull so ugly and scary you might rethink the whole need to get a pastry. (In fairness to the pit bull, if approached it would roll over and wag its stump, giving you a big toothy grin, but most people didn’t know that. Her name was Pumpkin.) You ate at Veselka, whose motto is “We serve soup to nuts.” The bars were usually down a flight of grimy stairs which turned out to be immaculate when compared to the bar itself. The banks were robbed. Tompkins Square Park had a permanent homeless encampment complete with tents, lights and appliances which they powered by tapping into the power grid.

You could afford an apartment. You just couldn’t get to it. The sidewalks were awash with trash of every imaginable kind – and bodies. The bodies were at least partially alive. Most days they were the homeless or junkies, but Sunday mornings were special. There was a truly fabulous club, the Saint, on Second Ave and it would discharge its clientele of leather clad gentlemen into the gutter where they would roll around and puke for a while. This was while the Reformed Church across the street was getting out from morning mass. New York has always been a city of contrasts.

Of all the delights of the old days, nothing could match the Beggars’ Market for street theater. It constitited the last stage of trickledown economics; the redistribution of stolen goods. All week long, hard-working burglars, muggers and crack heads would free the citizenry of its possessions, and then fence said items to the secondary markets of electronics stores, pawn shops and jewelery stores – that is those where no one asked too many questions. (The citizenry would fortify its apartments and cars as much as possible. One battleship-gray car had steel grates on its windows and padlocks on its doors. Another relied on advertising. It had a sign on the window: “Doors unlocked, ash tray gone, glove compartment empty, radio gone, spare tire gone, too late.” But you had to watch your strategy. One friend hid his cash under his stereo. This did not work very well.)

Everything that could not be fenced during the week found its way to the Beggar’s Market, a strip of Second Avenue from Sixth Street to St Marks’s place. On Saturday night the homeless/junkie/alkie/merchants would lay out their wares on crushed stove and refrigerator boxes on the sidewalk, entirely blocking entrance to the buildings. To get in you had to tiptoe, through the stereos, to the front door, trying not to throw up, just tip toe, through the evidence, with me. Sometimes I would get calls; “Oh man, I got hit again. They got my tuner. It’s a Denon. If you see it get it back for me.” On my way home I would scan the market to see if I could reacquire stuff – at rock bottom prices. Such a deal! Anything they couldn’t sell, they just left. On Sunday morning Sanitation would come down with a couple of big trucks and throw everything out (except the disco boys.)

On one such early morning, before sanitation had arrived, a cabbie was starting his shift. He pulled over to get a paper, and while walking to the newsstand, tripped over a box. He opened the box and was surprised to find it was full of human heads, individually wrapped for freshness.  He called the police because, as he philosophically observed, “A box of heads is not something you find every day.” The police were nonplussed. From their point of view they were now six bodies short. However, the desk sergeant noticed “New York Eye and Ear Infirmary” on the side of the box. Based on the deduction that a box with a label often comes from the institution on said label, and that the contents in said box might be the property of said institution, he made a call:

“Hello, this is the Ninth Precinct. Is this New York Eye and Ear?”
“Yes it is.”
“We have a box of heads here and…”
“Oh. We’ve been looking for those.”

Sometimes, for teaching purposes, body parts have to be moved among medical institutions, in this case from Valhalla, NY to New York Eye and Ear. You can’t send heads through the mail. I don’t think you can FedEx them either. Ergo the most expedient method of transportation is to give said dead heads to someone-in this case a doctor- who works at both locations to take the heads for a drive. However, at his destination he parked on a local street and left the heads in his trunk. Might as well have gift wrapped them. No one knows exactly how the box ended up at St Marks, but you don’t have to be Benedict Cumberbatch to make a further deduction. A member of the Wealth Redistribution Society broke into the good doctor’s trunk and absconded with the box, heading straight for St. Mark’s Place, happy in the knowledge that fortune smiles upon the bold. You can imagine his disappointment on opening the box at St. Mark’s. He’s probably still running.

It’s not as glamorous as Duke Ellington would lead you to believe.  I’m writing this while stuck on the A train.  I get a lot of my writing done here.  One of the only advantages of travelling on the MTA is you can tell amazing, horrible stories of trying to get home tantamount to the Odyssey – monsters included – and other New Yorkers will believe you.  But I suppose things could be worse.  I could work for the MTA, passing out the pitchforks.  You put over two million people – no, not people, New Yorkers – on a system and there are going to be surprises, many of them unpleasant.  And there you are wearing the uniform.  Over the years the conductors have used their microphone for:

1) Philosophy: “Get on or get off. It’s that simple.”

2) Advice: “If you don’t stop holding that door, you and everybody else on this train are gonna be late for work and they are gonna be mad – at you.  Now I’m fine with it.  I’m already at work.”

3) Physics lecture: “Take your foot out of the door. You weigh 150 lbs.  The train weighs 400 tons.  You will move.”

4) Mathematics instruction: “As of this morning you are all paying twenty percent more for your commute.  You should all give yourselves twenty percent more space.  There is a train right behind us.”

5) An appeal for the brotherhood of man, “Ladies and gentleman, when something goes wrong with the railroad, don’t get all in the conductor’s face.  I didn’t do it!”

6) More philosophy on the morning commute, “Ladies and Gentleman, sometimes it just doesn’t pay to get up in the morning. There is a woman gone into labor and we are not moving for some time.”

Hard to believe, but it used to be much worse.  It is those halcyon days when there were two hundred and forty violent crimes a week that photographer Willy Spiller records in all its grittiness in “Hell on Wheels.” , sadly out of print. It was a time that the MTA suffered from years of neglect and seemed to be on its last wheels.  Sounds familiar?  The city itself was falling apart.  The blackout, looting and rioting of forty years ago laid waste to great swaths of the city.  There were no man’s lands of burned out buildings and wreckage that ran for blocks and blocks.  But the city, and the subway, rumbled on.  Finding a car with air conditioning was so rare many, like me, chose to ride in between the cars where there was at least a breeze – the breeze of a dragon with halitosis.  The cars were so crowded sometimes the only way to get on and off was in between the cars.

Then then there was the graffiti. It was everywhere; covering the windows, the subway maps, the lights. I am aware of the popular mystique of graffiti as an art form, and I admit that some of the pieces were quite impressive,

but most were not,

and they did lend an air of lawlessness to the whole system.

The guns, knives, drugs, broken glass, and racial tension provided the actual lawlessness.

Then along came Koch, and rule of law was eventually restored.

Now we just have crappy service.

Far Rock A train approaching Broad Channel Island.

While you are stuck on the train it is hard to appreciate how much better for the planet your mode of commute is then driving.  The subway car I am on will one day become part of a reef.

Nonetheless this endless adventure is tiresome.  I have been stuck in the system on this hot steamy night, on one lost train after another for over two hours.  My essay is done and here I sit.

The LYL challenge today was to write about what I have done that I am proud of.  There is the novel of course, that is a contribution.  It was a lot of work, and I loved doing it. As far as work and contribution go though, there is no doubt my most important job of all time has been being a dad.  I have two intelligent, engaged, beautiful daughters of whom I am justly proud.  And boy was it a lot of work – a lifelong project in fact.  Parenthood is definitely not for everyone, so if you are on the fence, stay there until you read this fairly typical episode of mayhem.

When my kids were small they wanted a horse. Having kids is more work than you can possibly imagine unless you have them, and if you do have them you don’t have time to imagine it. As such I was opposed to taking on what I considered to be unnecessary work – like pets. Pets add an element of chaos to a household which with 2 small girls and all their friends was chaotic already.

Other parents, when faced with the horse conundrum usually have a pretty legitimate out. “We live in a high rise sweetie” or,” I’m not sure horses are allowed in this subdivision.” However, we lived in Arizona, on a ranch, where several people already owned horses and rode them around in front of us on a daily basis. It’s an old dude ranch in fact, turned into an artist colony, about 15 houses on 80 acres with corrals and a tack room. Idyllic really. So I conferred with one of these horse people, KB, who’d been riding all her life.
“KB, How much does a horse cost?”
“Oh it’s not the cost, it’s the upkeep. They eat like horses you know.”
“So, how much a month?”
“You realize you have to include your kid’s medical bills in the budget.”

So I started a campaign to get the pet down to a more manageable size. I may not be a great father but I am a good negotiator. Over a few weeks I got them down from a horse to a gerbil. Then I started delaying the gerbil, hoping the whole thing would go away, but my 3 year old, Lyra, was not to be deterred. She had the most charming speech impediment back then, so she pronounced it gerbbull. “Dad, when can we get the gerbbull.” “Oh maybe tomorrow dear.” The next day, “Is today a good day to get the gerbbull?” “I have to work today, sweetie.” “Dad. When can we go and get the gerbbull?” “I have to cut the cord wood today.” And so it went. One day she was painting with her little easel on the porch and an errant breeze blew her almost finished painting face down on the floor. She balled her hands into little fists and yelled, “I WANNA GO TO TUCSON AND GET A GERBBULL RIGHT NOW. I know when I’m licked. We hopped into our 1964 Plymouth Valiant station wagon and headed off to Petco. A short while later we were the proud parents of Snowflake and Cawnmuffin.

There is no greater love than that of a 3 year old for her gerbbull. She carried it around all day, which made me and Cawnmuffin a bit nervous. Lyra could be a little rough and ready with her affections. I noticed when she approached the cage in the morning Snowflake and Cawnmuffin would run for it, resulting in her grabbing them by their tails. “Don’t do that honey, I don’t think they like it.” “Yes they do dad, they love me.” Hard to argue with logic like that.

Time passed, and Easter came. The girls were going to be in the Easter Parade in Oracle, our local town. Since their mother, Shelley, was more into this sort of thing than I was it fell to her to get them off to the parade. However, being a nurse, sometimes she was called in to cover a shift. Therefore on Easter morning – the only day of the week yours truly could sleep in, he was up at 7 to get the girls to their appointed rounds. I’m not really a morning person, except the part of the morning that falls after say 11, so I wasn’t really firing on all cylinders when I heard Cezanne, my older daughter, scream, “Dad, the gerbil’s bleeding from the butt!” I must have missed the chapter on “Gerbil Rectal Bleeding” in the fatherhood manual. I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee. I went running into the bedroom and the girls were covered with blood. I didn’t know that much blood could come out of a gerbil. It must have been exsanguinated! It was as if Quentin Tarantino had done a remake of ‘The Shining.’ I’m a Pathology teacher and the word “Ebola” wandered around in my head looking for a place to sit down. Can gerbils catch Ebola? Can they spread Ebola? I took the gerbil from Lyra’s bloody little fist and it looked – fine. It looked at me as if to say “What?” A bleary eyed examination revealed nothing amiss. Not a drop of blood on it. It didn’t compute; not at 7AM without coffee. I put poor Cawnmuffin back in his cage, stripped off the girls bloody Sunday Easter costumes, and did my best to clean them up and put new costumes together out of whatever I could find in the room without a crimson stain. The costumes were pret a porter. By this time we were quite late. As I shooed the girls down to the car Lyra said, “What about Cawnmuffin?’ “I’ll give him a transfusion after I get back.” “What’s a transfusion dad?” We roared toward the center of town at twice the speed limit, right in front of the Sheriff.

“What was that word you said, dad?” “Never mind honey.” But as I passed the patrol car I noticed that the Sheriff was shoving his interestingly clad kids into it. He didn’t care how fast I was going as long as I didn’t get in his way. We sped off to the staging area for the parade like Smokey and the Bandit, screeching to a halt in a swirl of dust. As I got out, the float started to move down the street. This parade is not passing me by! I grabbed one kid under each arm, and ran down the street with the law right behind me. We tossed our respective kids into the float, as nonchalantly as possible, and shook hands. The float glided away five whole feet and stopped. For 45 minutes. It was just getting into position. But then the parade finally started. I picked the kids up on the other side of town, about 100 feet away.

By the time we returned to the scene of the crime Shelley had returned from the hospital, Cawnmuffin seemed no worse for wear and that left us with a mystery. Whence came all that blood? But we had little time to ponder because the Easter egg hunt was about to start.

The ranch we lived in was a genuine art commune started in the 1960’s so many of the kids who grew up on the ranch had kids of their own by now, and they usually all came back for the Easter Egg hunt, traditionally held in the barnyard. One year we had a freak snow so the Easter egg hunt was held in the largest house on the ranch called the lodge. Arnold and Marilyn were very gracious to host it, being Jewish and all. But this year it was already hot, and would be in the barnyard. Putting eggs and chocolates in various hiding spots in the desert was a bit tricky. The fire ants were very fond of chocolate, and the hunt didn’t even count if somebody didn’t get stung by a scorpion. Mind you, that whole thing about scorpion stings being fatal is really overblown. Lyra was fine after a short hospitalization, but that’s another story. As Shelley observed, a scorpion sting isn’t that much worse than a wasp sting, and she’s right, considering the local wasps are the largest in the world. They’re about as big as a small plane, and for fun they beat up tarantulas, paralyze them, drag them back to their own dens, and leave their eggs on the paralyzed body to feed on. Being stung by a wasp like that is memorable.

So I was girding myself up for a late morning of dealing with scorpions, tarantulas, tarantula hawks, fire ants and guests. To fight off the guests I was preparing a pitcher of mimosas, and of course sampling generously to be sure I got it right. That’s when I heard THE SCREAM.

I was a pretty experienced dad by now and quite familiar with the cornucopia of screams that my kids, and everybody else’s could make. Sound travels quite well on the ranch. I could be sitting on the deck with a glass of Bordeaux, enjoying the sunset, and collecting screams, much as a birdwatcher might record a great blue heron or a yellow bellied sapsucker. “Oh that’s Nick. He hurt himself. Not too badly.” “Wow that’s Eva. Nobody screams like Eva. She’s mad at her sister.” “Oops. That’s one of mine. Sounds borderline.” To my experience, only one scream in 5 really needed intervention.

But this was a scream like no other. An emotional keening that made the hair go up on the back of my neck and over the top and down the front. It perfectly communicated that there was a crack in the firmament. Santa Clause shot god. Something unimaginable must have happened, and it did. Before I rounded the kitchen counter, Lyra levitated into the room. I don’t know for sure if her feet were touching the floor the way she moved, it was like an apparition. Anyway I was looking at her hands not her feet. In one hand was Cawnmuffin and in the other was his tail. Lyra was vibrating from head to toe so I handed her off to the nurse and took the other victim and his tail. Ah but his tail was still attached, it was his tail pelt, the tail cover, the tail end so to speak that I held – at a distance – in my hand. Cawnmuffin looked at me with such reproach I was compelled to say, “I didn’t do it.” But now the light dawned. His tail, cartilage and bone, was still very much attached, it was simply denuded. Lyra must have torn the skin this morning, which explained the blood, then one more pull on returning from the parade finished the job. Shelley and I exchanged victims. She disappeared into the bathroom and I took Lyra. She couldn’t cry. She couldn’t speak. She was in shock. “It will be ok honey, I told you not to pull on his tail,” Wrong thing to say. Revved her right up again, now with guilt added; it’s that old Catholic touch. After a few minutes I got her down to about 120 decibels and her mother came back with a restored gerbbull. She had worked the skin back on and taped it together. She held her creation up to Lyra and I said, “That’s never gonna work, you should know that you’re a nurse.” Wrong thing to say again. It’s called diplomacy – that talent that I don’t have. I was right of course, the graft fell off, leaving him with a stump too short to grab. On the bright side Cawnmuffin survived.

He was a tough gerrbull who had many more adventures. Lyra learned the hard lesson of action and consequences at a tender age, and I learned that no matter how many gray hairs fatherhood can bring, you can always get more.