Over the years, I’ve gradually lost interest in the Kennedys. My sub-niche of boomers was a little behind the curve for full Kennedy worship — I was 10 when Bobby died — and so even though I remember them, I was a little young to be defined by them. The Kennedys of my formative years will always be the third-generation crowd of cousins, the heroin addicts, party boys/girls, earnest government functionaries and occasional congressfolk of the ’80s. That was the generation that proved no matter how remarkable, even great families have a distinct shelf life. The pluck and ambition that launched the dynasty gets bred out of the line, money and privilege and divorce take their toll, and finally you’re left with Michael Corleone at yet another family party, sneering at Fredo to control his wife. Or the Bush brothers — Neil, Jeb and George. Your choice.

This is not a bad thing, I’m happy to say. America is still very much a meritocracy, and the last thing we need is a royal family, as much as we’ve tried to make the Kennedys our very own.

I also understand that Edward Klein, despite his fancy-pants New York Times-heavy resume, has a stake in keeping the Kennedys on their pedestal, the better to squeeze another book out of them. Even keeping all this in mind, it was possible to read his account, in Vanity Fair, of the Kennedys in 2008-09, confronting the imminent death of Ted, etc., and nearly choke on a passage or three:

Soon a dozen or so members of the extended Kennedy family circle—the senator’s friends, aides, political associates, and hangers-on—were all crammed into the hospital room, and the atmosphere in his V.I.P. suite began to resemble that of an Irish wake or, perhaps more accurately, one of those medieval paintings that depict the death of a great prince. Should it come now, the senator’s death would not be sudden and violent, like those of his three brothers—Joe junior in a plane accident during World War II, Jack and Bobby at the hands of assassins. Rather, it would be like those “good deaths” during the Middle Ages, which were performed, in the words of the French historian Georges Duby, “as on a stage before many spectators, many auditors attentive to every gesture, to every word, eager for the dying man to show what he is worth.”

In that solemn setting, almost the first thing on everyone’s mind was who would lead the Kennedy family after the senator was gone.

The next time I’m in the hospital room of a gravely ill person, I’m going to have to remember this: I’m not in a hospital room, I’m in a medieval painting. That’s necessary, however, to set up the mind-reading second graf, where the assembled are not concerned about the health of the guy in the bed but the far more important matter of who will lead the Kennedy family after he is gone. I don’t know what’s involved with leading a family with 2,836 first cousins — maybe booking weekend use of the Hyannisport house — but then, I’m a pleb. When I visit someone in the hospital, I’m just in a hospital.

It gets better. After Caroline is presented with her uncle’s “dying wish” that she take over the Kennedy chair in the U.S. Senate, well, we know how that turned out:

“Caroline was humiliated; she had expected that the appointment would automatically be hers,” said the Kennedy-family adviser. “In her mind, it wasn’t just that it had been her uncle Robert’s Senate seat, or any other aspect of her legacy; it was that she is a constitutional scholar who has helped secure funding for the New York City school system, that she’s acted as an adviser to her uncle, and that she’s a star of the Democratic Party. It honestly never occurred to her that the seat wouldn’t be given to her immediately. When Governor Paterson failed to react, and made her wait, she seethed.”

Caroline called a number of Democratic power brokers in Washington and Albany, and during those calls she vented her rage. This was a side of Caroline that few people had ever seen, or even suspected. According to one veteran lawyer who spoke with her, Caroline sounded like the old Bobby Kennedy—loud, harsh, and grating. (Caroline Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.)

Yes, it occurs to me that people talk in this account exactly the way they do in National Enquirer stories. I guess that’s another upside of not being a Kennedy: You don’t have “family advisers” who whisper in the ears of would-be court biographers.

The news that comes from this passage is that Caroline was eventually called back from the brink of loud/harsh/grating by her children, who sat her down and told her she was being a real bitch, thus proving that accusations of bitch-hood are still kryptonite to a certain sort of woman. I’m with Tina Fey, m’self: Bitches get things done. Bitch is the new black. But I suppose, if it proves to a Kennedy that they still live in the United States, it’s not such a bad thing.

The story ends with some silly detail about Ted wearing a hat. Yeesh. (And at this point I think we should save a few of our commenters the carpal-tunnel stress and say: Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick. Drunk, drunk, drunk. Teddy, Teddy, Teddy. Stipulated!)

OK, then.

Speaking of politics and dynasties and cancer, I’m sure glad I’m not John Edwards at the moment. How sorry do I feel for him? Listen to the sound the world’s tiniest violin and its terribly sad song. Hell hath no fury, etc. Although you gotta love a woman who tells Oprah “it’s complicated” when asked if she loves her husband. Hell, yes, pretty boy.

As someone pointed out low in the comments yesterday, the CDC came to my rescue, advising schools to stop treating H1N1 like bubonic plague and go ahead and stay open. And so yesterday’s mini-break was all they got, and everyone went back today. May I just say: Whew. It wasn’t a wasted day — we went down to Mexicantown for Cinco de Mayo lunch and had a chat about why middle-school rumors about who actually had the swine flu are evil, counterproductive and most likely just plain wrong. Of course, stopping a middle-school rumor train is pretty much impossible, although it’s a pleasure to take them apart. “My sister knows definitely who it was.” Really? How? “Well, she’s pretty much sure. Because there’s this kid who was sick.” And so on.

OK, we’re at 1,000 words and 20 minutes to 10. Time to start the engines and try to have a productive day of it.

T-shirt at Cinco de Mayo, Detroit.

Well, guess who got an automated phone call at 5 a.m. canceling school for the rest of the week? Yes, H1N1 has penetrated our leafy suburb, a “probable” case necessitating the closing of Kate’s middle school until, God help us all, Monday. That’s unless it turns out the kid in question doesn’t have H1N1, in which case it may reopen sooner.

Which means this happened in our house this morning:

* I went back to sleep with plans to stay under the covers until 8 o’clock, an unimaginable luxury;
* The phone rang at 6:50 a.m., from a classmate wondering if we’d heard;
* The phone rang at 7:18 a.m., ditto;
* My conscience began stabbing me a few minutes later, reminding me this is breaking news and I allegedly have a website dealing in that very perishable commodity.

And now I have a kid on my hands the rest of the week.

So that was my morning, part 1. Did I mention I’m going back to the gym with my still-tender knee, too? I am, and you can’t keep me here.

So I’ll be back later in the day. You kids find something to keep you occupied until then.

I have a new plan for retirement: To live somewhere I can ride my bicycle 365 days a year (366 in leap years). I know this boils down to “a place that is unpleasantly hot for a large chunk of that time,” so the plan needs work. But few things make me happier, I realized yesterday, than saddling up for a quick trip to the butcher three blocks away. If only we hadn’t engineered modern life to do away with much of its moderate exercise; maybe the murder rate would be lower.

Detroit is a town that, like Los Angeles, was built to accommodate the automobile, and friends, it ain’t aging well. Every few months I feel the need to say this again, but it bears repeating: This is one ugly town. Not just the decimated city, but also its suburbs, and it’s at times like this I’m ever so glad we chose the Pointes, because it was platted before walking was seen as a sign of weakness, and at least we have the lake. There’s nothing like rolling out one of the big through avenues like Gratiot, six lanes or so, flowing fast and free because it’s at maybe 50 percent of its carrying capacity even at rush hour, while one ugly storefront after another goes past. How does anyone make a living in vacuum-cleaner repair, you wonder, when just finding your store means you have to buck traffic and hunt out a five-digit address that may or may not be on the building? You can almost mark the point, as you drive out from the core, when the idea of the strip mall took hold — a little more setback in return for easier parking out front, six little shops replaced by three larger anchors, if you can call a chain video store an anchor, plus the inevitable Lee Nails. (When was it decreed that all nail shops be run by Asians? How do these ethnic connections to market sectors get made? Is it the same group that says, “OK, Chaldeans — you got the party stores. Jews? Jewelry for you. Macedonians? I hope you like restaurants.” And so on.)

Urban planners point out the inevitable a lot (perhaps to disguise how often “planning” doesn’t got as, um, planned), and say the trend toward dense urban centers is real and has legs, and the sooner individual municipalities start accommodating it, the better. Walkable, bikeable, parking-out-of-sight — this is the future. Turns out people want to rub elbows with their fellow man, after all, preferably in a farmer’s market. We’ll see. But I sure like my bicycle. In about an hour I’m going out to make my cop-shop rounds on it — it’ll be two hours of mostly riding, covering 12 miles or so, work/workout all in one. This is living.

(It helps that people don’t expect reporters to be much more than sweaty and unpleasant.)

So how was your weekend? Mine was fine. We got the boat in the water on Saturday with no arguments or even much yelling, showing that it only takes a few years of practice to get the our routine down, plus the help of a couple of able souls at the marina. The lake is a foot higher this year, a happy turn of events that’s been in the news quite a bit of late. A new study by the International Joint Commission (a group virtually unknown outside the Great Lakes) says the drastically lower levels of recent years are a natural phenomenon, caused in part by ice jams that scoured the St. Clair River bottom — nature’s dredge, in other words. An interesting theory, but at this point all I care about it how nice it is to have a little more water out there.

And so boating season begins. At least four, effectively five, and as many as six months of sailing lies ahead. In other words, as much winter as I just bitched about. Life really is binary.

Bloggage? Not much, buth this:

One of Justice David Souter’s clerks reveals the man you don’t know in Slate, a man who would rather read by the last two foot-candles of winter light than turn on a lamp. Now I feel bad for having made fun of him:

Why would a man who can understand Grokster read by the window rather than turn on a light? Souter has a characteristic New England thriftiness and a distrust of luxury that verges on the spartan. He can keep a suit for decades, and he gently mocked me and my fellow clerks for wearing overcoats in the winter, claiming that his view was shared by that other great Yankee justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Souter is also deeply unpretentious. It would never occur to him that because he is a Supreme Court justice he’s entitled to waste a bit of the taxpayers’ electricity. (He once wrote me a note on a napkin I’d left on my desk rather than using a new sheet of paper.)

Souter’s current position on the left wing of the court owes much more to movement by the court and the country than to any lurch on his part. The current court, after all, has seven Republican appointees and has been on a steady rightward drift since the Reagan years. The Republican Party has, too. I think Souter is indeed in many ways a Republican; it’s just that his sort of Republican no longer really exists.

Remember those? I do. I miss ‘em.

OK, off to edit my syllabus and fire up the NewsCycle. Have a great week, all.

ADDED: Because Brian brought it up last week — either here or in an e-mail, I don’t recall — an interview with Lenore Skenazy, who advocates off-leash child-rearing. Interesting.

A few suggestions for President Obama’s first Supreme Court nomination:

Bill Ayers (thanks, Gasman);
His wife, the lovely and unrepentant domestic terrorist Bernadine Dohrn;
Squeaky Fromme (after a presidential pardon);
Some homeless guy who now forges signatures for ACORN.

The possibilities are endless, really. I’m putting my money on “a moderate Democrat with XX chromosomes.”

They say David Souter, the retiring justice, hates Washington and aches to get back to New Hampshire. “They” have to say it because, as usual, Souter says nothing. When he was nominated I recall a Mark Russell song about him, called “The Man Who Has No Footprints.” I know there are many people in this country who delight in court-watching, people who in another time would have made excellent Kremlinologists, spending months analyzing body language and position in the May Day photograph, but I’m not one of them. I think their proceedings should be on television, too. All it takes is one Clarence Thomas to queer you on the idea of the Gang of Nine as some sort of council of divine mandarins.

Souter must be insane. I can hardly blame him for hating Washington, but on his current work schedule he can enjoy his New Hampshire home four months of the year, the best four months (in New Hampshire, anyway). The guy must love winter, I guess. Once he’s retired he can go on leaving no footprints up there, year-round. Nothing like Vermont and New Hampshire for privacy protection. Solzhenitsyn found it a nice, cold, media-free simulacrum of Russia. You wonder why more of these camera-shunning Hollywood ninnies don’t buy houses up there — it’s certainly pretty enough. On my sole trip to Vermont, nearly oh-my-god 30 years ago, I recall: Hardly any freeways, every town a small one. (Montpelier is smaller than Grosse Pointe Woods.) Very scenic, general stores, the whole bit. New Hampshire, which we drove across to get to Vermont — much the same, plus an valued-out-of-proportion primary.

Well, godspeed, Justice Souter. The best job in the world, followed by the cushiest retirement. Enjoy it.

Good to see the outstanding Nina Totenberg broke the story. For some media outlets, covering the court is sort of like being on the court — a lifetime appointment. No one can say she hasn’t left big footprints, however. She’s going to be a hard act to follow.

From her report:

Rather than fly home, Souter preferred to drive. He also resisted other forms of contemporary technology and convenience, holding out against the cell phone and e-mail and continuing to write his opinions and dissents in longhand, using a fountain pen.

Another technological stick-in-the-mud! What is it about writing that makes people so loathe to change their ways? (I don’t know how anyone writes in longhand, anymore. My brain moves so much faster than my pen these days it would be like running a race with one foot in a bucket of cement. I can barely write a check anymore.) On the other hand, good for him for spurning e-mail. I watched “Rachel Getting Married” last week. My favorite line, from the addict Kim: “She never responded to my amends e-mail. I hate it when people won’t meet you halfway.” A couple years ago I told a friend her ex-husband had gotten a big job he’d been after for a while. “I’ll have to send him a congratulatory e-mail,” she said. I replied: “Yes, for when only the least you can do will do, the congratulatory e-mail.”

I’m sure you lawyer types will bat this subject around in the comments, so have at it. Please, ladies and gentleman, no hitting below the belt.

NPR had a a piece on Snowball the dancing cockatoo last night, which prompted me to look up his YouTube collection. This being NPR, the story was on research into whether animals really can coordinate movement to music, but me being me, I was mainly interested in the yuks. Snowball’s opening act was to a Backstreet Boys track, but I really prefer his interpretive routine to Stevie Nicks.

I’ve always liked birds like this, although I’d never own one. When Kate was a toddler I used to take her to a local pet store where they had about half a dozen parrots, macaws and cockatoos, none for sale, that talked and interacted with customers without fail. My favorite was Smoky, an African gray, who loved to make this sound: A descending whistle, a muffled explosion and then, “Bombs away!” It reminded me of a parrot in a Carl Hiaasen novel, who’d been liberated from a drug dealer’s home after its owner was shot to death. DEA agents taught it to say, “Duck, shithead!”

A little TGIF bloggage? OK:

Did you know the Keep Your Distance Bug Vacuum not only exists, but is a big seller? Now you do. SkyMall catalogs: The middle-class man’s Archie McPhee.

Finally, if you missed Coozledad’s most excellent description of a day on the farm yesterday, you missed something that prompted a writer with a national profile to e-mail and say, “I’d read a whole book of stories like that.” Me, too, but Coozledad says he lacks the motivation. As a consolation prize, he sends along a picture of the farm’s newest resident, Bodankey:

I can’t top this. Have a great weekend.