Yeesh, what a weekend. Three day/nights of drinking. I don’t really overdo it anymore – a simple hangover, these days, feels like it requires hospitalization – but even a night of two, three, four drinks leaves me a little spongey the next day, and this weekend it was Friday/Saturday/Sunday, due to various social events.

The last was a fundraiser, held outdoors on a mid-80s day, in blazing sun. Started at one venue, a microbrewery, and moved to a second, a beer bar. Both great places, and one cold beer is great on a hot day, but if the taco truck is late arriving and you don’t get any food in your stomach before the second one, oy. I finally got some chow, chugged two tall soda waters, considered sitting and letting the magic of nutrition and hydration work, but ultimately made a quiet French exit, got on the bike and rode home. Weekend is over, dude, and I’m glad of it.

With all this partying, it was difficult to keep up with the news this weekend. I understand Trump did an appearance somewhere, and it was the usual. Also, Clarence Williams III left us. I was shocked that he was 81, which means he was about 30 when he started playing Linc Hayes in “The Mod Squad.” Michael Cole is a year younger, and Peggy Lipton, who died a couple years ago, was the closest to the age the three characters were supposed to be in the show, which I always figured was early 20s. According to Wikipedia:

Each of these characters represented mainstream culture’s principal fears regarding youth in the era: long-haired rebel Pete Cochran was evicted from his wealthy parents’ Beverly Hills home, then arrested and put on probation after he stole a car; Lincoln Hayes, who came from a family of 13 children, was arrested in the Watts riots, one of the longest and most violent riots in Los Angeles history; flower child Julie Barnes, the “canary with a broken wing, “was arrested for vagrancy after running away from her prostitute mother’s San Francisco home.”

All three a little long in the tooth to be in a mod squad, but then, that’s why they call it acting.

Just one bit of bloggage today, as I’m still rehydrating: You know this is what’s going to happen, right? We know this. So what are we going to do about it?

On Monday, I took a bike ride with a friend on Belle Isle, the former city park, now a state park, negotiated as part of the city’s financial distress a while back. It being a holiday, it was a busy day, but not crazy-busy. Most of the bottleneck was at the gate, but there were fewer parking places, too, because of the Detroit Grand Prix in two weeks — they’ve been setting up the concrete barriers, barbed-wire fences and sponsor banners for a while now.

By the time we came off the island, the road coming in was blocked. Park’s full, find something else to do. But walk- and bike-ons are not limited, so people were parking on the road outside and walking half a mile or so across the bridge, then wherever the party they were seeking was.

I watched them walk by, overwhelmingly young black women dressed in the current style – waist-length braid extensions and those insane false eyelashes that look like fuzzy caterpillars. I thought about how much I despise that stupid grand prix, which squats on the island like an unwanted guest not just for three days in June, but for weeks before and after, uglying the place up and constricting park capacity. We give up so much in the name of tourism dollars, I wonder why we bother.

It was an OK after-ride, though – we got a couple beers each from the party store and sat by the sidewalk and drank them. The lady at the party store put four brown paper bags into the six-pack carton without even being asked. This town cracks me up.

And so the summer begins.

Hope your weekend was good. We cooked a little. Alan is painting the dining room, and it looks great. Let’s see what the season holds, for all of us.

Well, this isn’t great news:

…in a striking intervention, more than 100 scholars of democracy have signed a new public statement of principles that seeks to make the stakes unambiguously, jarringly clear: On the line is nothing less than the future of our democracy itself.

“Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars write in the statement, which I obtained before its release. “History will judge what we do at this moment.”

And these scholars underscore the crucial point: Our democracy’s long-term viability might depend on whether Democrats reform or kill the filibuster to pass sweeping voting rights protections.

The “I” here is Greg Sargent. I have no faith we can fix this.

In other news, you might recall a story I posted last spring, by a contributor to Deadline Detroit, about a cafe owner in a little town in Myanmar who is obsessed with Eminem. It’s a great story, but bad news: The writer, Danny Fenster, was arrested by government troops last week in Yangon, on his way out of the country to visit his family in Detroit. He hasn’t been heard from since. His family is very worried, obviously. If this sort of thing concerns you, you’re welcome to call your representatives. The hashtag is #BringDannyHome.

OK, then. Into the rest of the week.

The boat launch went fine, thanks for asking. It was freezing — mid-40s — but ah well. The marina is under new ownership, and have deprived the main guy who handles this, Pete, of his assistant, so I had to be there. But no major mishaps.

While Pete and I were pulling the mast this way and that so Alan could attach the shrouds, we talked a little bit about this phase of life. (We’re all the same age, give or take.) He said he and his wife had unloaded a big house on a very nice street, and were now living aboard their boat at the same marina, and liking it more than they ever thought they would.

A big part of it, he emphasized, was “getting rid of all our shit.”

I thought of this while some of you were talking in comments about your own shit, or your parental shit, or all the other shit that gets dumped on you as you age. Pete said nothing felt as good as personal shit-liquidation, selling all the furniture and gewgaws and collectibles and other stuff that once seemed so important. Watching it go out of the house during the estate sale, he said, was liberating. “You don’t know how tied down you are until you get rid of it,” he said.

Caitlin Flanagan, a writer I often find myself at odds with, watched “Nomadland” recently and came up with this observation:

The make-or-break moment for the viewer is right at the top; if you’re the kind of brute who doesn’t enjoy watching a woman in late middle age poke around her storage unit, you should take your leave. Personally, I could have watched an entire movie on that subject alone. You spend your whole life accumulating things, and then they end up in a storage unit, slowly losing their charge of sentiment and memory and transforming into a bunch of junk. Fern is there to pick out what she will bring with her on the journey. In the end, she chooses the least practical thing of all: a box of china, white with a pattern of red leaves on the rim. That’s not the last of that china I’ll be seeing, I thought to myself, and I was spot-on.

Since Alan stopped working, I’ve been on my own smaller-scale shit-liquidation purge, and I’m making progress. Last week I dragged pretty much all my Fort Wayne ephemera to the curb, including all my newspaper clips and, comically, my journalism awards. I saved some photographs, but will probably go through those and pitch a lot of them, too.

But some things cry not yet. The doll bed I played with as a child and Kate, not so much — I can’t get rid of it yet. Some of her crib bedding, ditto. A couple of her favorite stuffed animals.

And god, so many books. Books are one of those things you’re supposed to be happy to purge, but after I cleaned up the basement enough to make it my pandemic gym, I shelved and dusted all the books down there and thought: Can’t get rid of these. I love many of them too much. But on the same shelf are many 78 RPM records from Alan’s dad’s collection, and god knows why we still have those.

For the next move, I guess we’ll grapple with all of this. For now, I’ll settle for slimming down.

Speaking of female writers I often find myself at odds with, do you know how much it pains me to say, “Mona Charen is right?” A lot. And yet:

Today, we stand on the precipice of the House Republican conference ratifying this attempt to subvert American democracy. They are poised to punish Liz Cheney for saying this simple truth: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.” In her place, they will elevate Iago in heels, Elise Stefanik, whose claim to leadership consists entirely of her operatic Trump followership.

Let’s be clear: The substitution of Stefanik for Cheney is a tocsin, signaling that the Republican party will no longer be bound by law or custom. In 2020, many Republican office holders, including the otherwise invertebrate Pence, held the line. They did not submit false slates of electors. They did not decertify votes. They did not “find” phantom fraud. But the party has been schooled since then. It has learned that the base—which is deluded by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin—believes the lies and demands that Republicans fight. As my colleague Amanda Carpenter put it, the 2024 mantra is going to be “Steal It Back.”

If Cheney must be axed because she will not lie, then what will happen if Republicans take control of Congress in 2022 and are called upon to certify the Electoral College in 2024? How many Raffenspergers will there be? How many will insist, as Pence did, that they must do what the Constitution demands? How many will preserve any semblance of the rule of law and the primacy of truth?

Well, if we have to flee, I hope Canada will take us. If not, Mexico is warmer and has livelier food. And there’s always Europe, although I don’t think they can accommodate that many refugees. Maybe we’ll stay here and be the resistance. Works for me.

Happy Wednesday. A pic in parting, as another boating season begins:

When I was toiling for a Knight-Ridder newspaper, the executive editors of each paper wrote a monthly memo to HQ, bringing the boss and peers up to date about what they’d been up to for the last calendar page. Personnel changes, great moments, etc. Mild stuff that got passed around.

They varied in readability, but the best one by far was from the Philadelphia Daily News, i.e., the tabloid, i.e., the one that didn’t take itself as seriously as the other. That editor, Zack Stalberg, sprinkled his with short, blackly comic items from the police blotter, each one subtitled, “It’s a tough town.”

I thought of that when someone sent me the website for Philadelphia DA candidate Charles Peruto. The About Me page specifically, past the blather about his career bio and to the subheading “The girl in my bathtub.” The dead girl, specifically:

In 2013, I was dating a girl for about 6 weeks, and didn’t really know her. I learned more about her after she died by reading an investigative article done by Philadelphia Magazine, written by Lisa DePaulo, which opened my eyes.

In short, the best way to start with this is the Medical Examiner’s report. Her BAC was .45. The cause of death was alcohol intoxication, but because she was found in my tub, everyone, including myself, assumed she drowned. So many empty vodka bottles were found, it looked like there was a party in my house, but inspection of the security video of people entering and leaving showed only her.

Whoa, really? What a tough town. Of course, as in any story involving…anyone, really, it’s wise to seek out alternative versions, especially when the girl in the bathtub isn’t even named. In this case, the Daily Beast filled in some blanks. The girl in the bathtub was Julia Law, and:

The 26-year-old had been a paralegal in Peruto’s law office, where they struck up a romantic relationship. This was something of a pattern for the 66-year-old lawyer. As news of Law’s death broke, Peruto received a series of angry calls from a woman named Genna Squadroni. She was “his 25-year-old recent ex-girlfriend of three years,” Philadelphia Magazine reported, who had also worked in Peruto’s office—she had hired Law herself.

Also, the six weeks of dating and how he “didn’t really know her?” Hmm:

The description clashes somewhat with the message Peruto shared on Facebook shortly after Law’s death. “It’s very hard to find someone who really matches you on all eight cylinders,” he wrote at the time, in a post cited by NBC 10. “I found my soulmate hippy, and can never replace her. We worked and played, and never got enough life…Earth lost the best one ever. Happy birthday baby.”

Philadelphia isn’t my town, and I’m staying out of this one, but you know what I hear? That it’s a tough town.

So, a little more bloggage:

I don’t think Melinda Gates and I would ever be friends, but it’s refreshing to see one person immediately had the correct reaction to Jeffrey Epstein and acted on it, also immediately.

And how the second Civil War will start. With an election, of course:

The Big Lie that Trump really won the election is now canon among a majority of Republican voters. Any Republicans who refuses to toe the line is branded a heretic, and elections officials who dared to certify Biden’s win are being censured or stripped of their power. Arizona Republicans have sponsored a bogus “audit” of the election full of crackpot conspiracy theories, and Republican legislatures have been busy taking control of both running and certifying elections out of the hands of county official in Democratic-run cities and counties. The context of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol was the attempt by Congressional Republicans to refuse to certify the Electoral College tally, in the hopes of sending the election back to gerrymandered Republican state legislatures and handing Trump a win as part of a anti-democratic coup. It was a physical coup attempt designed to intimidate Congress into enforcing a legislative coup. Republicans who refused to back the latter are facing steep primary challenges.

It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this is, and what its consequences might entail in the very near future. As Greg Sargent notes, the “GOP appears to be plunging headlong into a level of full-blown hostility to democracy that has deeply unsettling future ramifications.”

Monday we put the boat into the water, an act that is rarely easy but hasn’t led to disaster so far. Of course Mother’s Day at our location was rainy and dreary and cold, and only the rain and dreary will be gone tomorrow. But we’ll see. Wish us luck.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: When long-running marriages fall apart, it’s often useful to remember what marriage was, once, as a cultural institution: A way to establish paternity for offspring, so that wealth can be handed down and protected within a family. A business partnership, basically. Only in recent years have we spoken of love matches and marrying your best friend and all that. Also remember that people didn’t live nearly as long, once upon a time.

So when people like Al and Tipper Gore, or Bill and Melinda Gates, call it quits, I don’t think we should speak of their marriage “failing.” Rather, they outgrew it. The Gores had four children, the Gateses three, all of whom were/are adults when their parents split up. That is not a failure. That is a partnership that worked as intended. It provided stability and structure for offspring, and presumably for both the people who signed the marriage license. Now they move on to the next thing, separately.

If you think that’s cold-hearted, I offer Exhibit A: The marriage of Donald and Melania Trump, which is about as business-focused as it’s possible to be, right down to the renegotiated prenup post-2016 election. Melania, it was said, was interested in protecting the interests of her son, who she feared would be pushed out of the family wealth pile by his older, craftier siblings, once Fatass went to his reward. After all, they learned from the master of inheritance-grubbing.

So don’t waste any time worrying about the Gateses. I don’t know what Melinda is like, personally, but she can’t be worse than her husband. (OK, maybe she can.) They’ll be fine. Their children will be fine. I find it interesting that they appear to have already worked out the property split, and she declines spousal support, “despite no prenup,” as People magazine gasps. Good for them.

All that said, I am grossed out — no, I’m offended — by some of the social-media commentary, about how much of “his” money Melinda Gates will get. It’s not his money. It’s their money. True, Microsoft existed as a world-straddling force before they married, but she is absolutely part of his success, and fuck anyone who says otherwise.

Tangentially I’m also reminded of a hilarious seminar we had when I was fellowshipping in Ann Arbor, by a legendary law-school professor. He said we err when we refer to life being “cheap” in poor or undeveloped countries, because the opposite is true. Life is cheap in the U.S., and that’s what’s good about it. If you lose a finger in a work accident, you don’t have to extract a finger from the factory owner in return; you collect the insurance payout. And if you dissolve your marriage, there’s no need for honor killings or death feuds over a dowry. It’s a financial settlement.

I just googled the professor. Here’s the description of one of his books:

Njals saga, the greatest of the sagas of the Icelanders, was written around 1280. It tells the story of a complex feud that starts innocently enough–in a tiff over seating arrangement at a local feast–and expands over the course of 20 years to engulf half the country, in which both sides are effectively exterminated, Njal and his family burned to death in their farmhouse, the other faction picked off over the entire course of the feud. Law and feud feature centrally in the saga, Njal, its hero, being the greatest lawyer of his generation. No reading of the saga can do it justice unless it takes its law, its feuding strategies, as well as the author’s stunning manipulation and saga conventions. In ‘Why is Your Axe Bloody?’ W.I. Miller offers a lively, entertaining, and completely orignal personal reading of this lengthy saga.

He was one of the last speakers of the year, or I totally would have audited his class on blood feuds.

Njal. What a great name.

OK, then. The first part of the week is over, I’ve actually accomplished something, and more work awaits in the middle and end parts. But for now, we confront: Wednesday. I hope yours isn’t too…confrontational.

I see Jeff already spilled the beans about my Daylight Saving Time column. Let the debate begin.

I guess my befuddlement comes from all the “solutions” offered to settle this issue. Solutions imply problems, and honestly, I don’t see what the problem is. For my entire life, we’ve slipped back and forth between standard and daylight time with little more than yawning and grouchiness. Suddenly, it’s a “problem.” (And amusingly, it became a problem right about the time clocks started basically setting themselves.)

And I concede that not everyone adjusts easily. But to disrupt the very idea of standard time — standard in the generic sense — on a state-by-state basis just seems insane. There are lot of things that set my teeth on edge, but I am not advocating policy solutions for them.

Maybe more people need to spend a year in Iceland. That’s on my travel bucket list, and admittedly a long shot, because it’s kind of pointless, but I’d love to spend a winter month there. See how life is lived in near-darkness. I expect fairly happily. We could learn from that.

OK, since it’s Sunday, and a Sunday that truly lives up to its name — 81 degrees and extremely sunny — let’s be less-serious this late afternoon/early evening. (Which is still very SUNNY, because DST!)

“The Handmaid’s Tale” kicked off its fourth season this past week, and I for one am…unimpressed so far. Margaret Atwood’s original idea has been built out to the point it’s now collapsing on itself, and I fear the show runners are going to try to rescue it with slow-motion photography. Every time Elisabeth Moss walks purposely, she does so in slo-mo. Also: Moody lighting. Also: Torture, which I am totally not here for. (I’ve seen two Kathryn Bigelow movies, and I do not need to see any more.) They need to figure out how to get this story into port very soon, or I’m jumping overboard and swimming to a less torture-y beach.

This happened today:

That is, an impromptu lunch at a Mexican dive bar across from the notorious Zug Island, the scariest looking now-shut steel plant you ever saw. I gave up my menudo virginity and can report: Meh on menudo. A nice spicy broth, but the tripe left me cold. I kept thinking: I am eating stomach. I am putting stomach in my stomach. But as I said before, the day was glorious and breezy, and it was a fine day to see people outdoors and eat tacos (and menudo).

Those are my tragic arms, yes. I swear, there is muscle tone underneath all that slack flesh, but evidently this is how my stupid body has chosen to show its age. Sigh. But as we often say: Consider the alternative.

Into the week, then! Hope yours is great.

News comes this morning that the E.U. will be allowing vaccinated tourists this summer, which means it’s time for the Derringers to start planning the inaugural post-retirement mega-vacation, i.e., a month in France, likely this fall. I did some peeking around VRBO in Paris and found about what I expected — plenty of inventory, not a lot of bargains, but hey, no one ever said the city of lights was cheap.

But you know what? I don’t care. My high-school class Facebook page has a disturbing number of obits lately, and then with the loss of David? I’m heavy into fuck-this mode, let’s go to France.

We may only do two weeks in Paris, however. Suggestions for the other two weeks are welcome. I’m thinking Lyon or somewhere on the Mediterranean coast.

A weekend that was a mix of relaxing and productive. I got started on another book (“The Committed,” the sequel to “The Sympathizer,” which I read last month), and stopped to think what a miracle it is, because from roughly 2016 to 2020 I could barely concentrate on anything long enough to sink into a good novel. I don’t keep count of these things, but this year I’m clipping right along.

Didn’t watch the Oscars, either. I just peeked at one of those best/worth-looks roundups, however. I can give a big thumbs up to Lakeith Stanfield’s Parisian nightsuit (“Freaks & Geeks” reference there for those in the know), and sigh deeply over Frances McDormand. Great actor, I love her honest-face anti-glam aesthetic, but lordy, I am writing this post-workout, with my head-sweat drying in a frizzy mess, and can honestly say that my hair looks better than hers did last night.

There’s a line, Frances. You crossed it. But you’re a winner-winner, so hey, chicken dinner.

I have absolutely no opinion on Chadwick Boseman, other than: He died too soon.

That said, I think I will jump into the shower and fix my hair. Frances, you do the same.

I kept trying to carve out a few moments here and there today to write a blog, but then the Chauvin verdict news came in, and I thought: Wait until after, or before?

Before, I guess. New thread for verdict discussion.

In the meantime, three quick items:

If you need a break from bad news, we saw “Shiva Baby” on Amazon Prime video last night, and it was funny and cringe-y, and if you like that kind of thing, it’s that kind of thing. New York magazine called it “The Gradiate” meets “Uncut Gems,” and that’s right.

This story is five years old, but I just read it today, and it’s very funny: How Morrissey ruined Bill Cosby’s set on “The Tonight Show,” 30 years ago now.

Finally, since some of you are talking about Walter Mondale today, let it be known that for a tryout on MPR many years ago, I interviewed by Mondale and Hubert Humphrey. Simultaneously! On one show! I didn’t get the job. If I had, I’d probably still be there, and my heart would be pounding right now.

Fifteen minutes.

I was saddened to read, early Saturday morning, of the death of Vartan Gregorian. You’ve probably never heard of him. I hadn’t, before I met his son, Vahe, and later the man himself, during my year in Ann Arbor. Vahe, a sportswriter then in St. Louis and now in Kansas City, was in my Knight-Wallace Fellowship class. Vartan was invited to be one of our seminar speakers later that year.

Like I said: Never heard of him, but then, I was a Midwestern girl. He was president of the Carnegie Corp., and about as big a cheese as you could be in New York City, as we were all soon to learn.

Vartan served as president or provost at several universities, but his real claim to fame, and the centerpiece of his NYT obit linked above, was that he saved the New York Public Library from near ruin. He had his work cut out for him:

The underpaid, overworked staff was demoralized. The beautiful Gottesman Exhibition Hall had been partitioned into cubicles for personnel and accounting. Tarnished chandeliers and lighting fixtures were missing bulbs. In the trustees’ board room, threadbare curtains fell apart at the touch. Outside, the imperious marble lions, Patience and Fortitude, and the portals they guarded, were dirt-streaked. Bryant Park in the back was infested with drug dealers and pimps and unsafe after dark.

But the main problems were not even visible. The library faced a $50 million deficit and had no political clout. Its constituencies were scholars, children and citizens who liked to read. The city had cut back so hard that the main branch was closed on Thursdays, and some branches were open only eight hours a week.

To Dr. Gregorian, the challenge was irresistible. The library was, like him, a victim of insult and humiliation. The problem, as he saw it, was that the institution, headquartered in the magnificent Carrère and Hastings Beaux-Arts pile dedicated by President William Howard Taft in 1911, had come to be seen by New York City’s leaders, and even its citizens, as a dispensable frivolity.

He seemed a dubious savior: a short, pudgy scholar who had spent his entire professional life in academic circles. On the day he met the board, he was a half-hour late, and the trustees were talking about selling prized collections, cutting hours of service and closing some branches. He asked only for time, and offered in return a new vision.

It so happened that 1980-ish is when I started receiving the Columbus Dispatch fashion editor’s copies of Women’s Wear Daily, and I remember that new vision appearing in its society columns: The Literary Lions, a huge fundraising effort led by business titans, socialites like Brooke Astor and Vartan, which coincided with the city’s comeback and the flood of financial-industry money rolling in from Wall Street. What better, what nobler cause than libraries and literacy? People like Jackie Onassis and Isaac Bashevis Singer jumped on board, along with…pretty much everybody.

It was a huge success. The grand institution was saved. By the time he spoke to our group in Ann Arbor, he’d long since moved on. The night he visited, Wallace House was at standing room only, with many of the guests other university administrators who’d worked with him at one of his previous posts — Brown, Penn, University of Texas. The atmosphere was like a low-key Bruce Springsteen concert prelude. I soon learned why.

He spoke that night about his stewardship of the committee that chose the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan. (This was 2004, and I believe Maya Lin’s design had recently been revealed to the public.) As you can imagine, every macher in New York wanted to be on that committee, and the ones who were selected all had their own ideas about how it should do its work and what the winning design should look like. Vartan talked about how he tamed these mustangs, hitched them to his wagon and got them pulling in one direction as a team.

Wallace House seminars were officially off the record, and we were discouraged from even taking personal notes. If I had a recording of that talk, I could sell it as a MBA-level class in effective management. I can’t even recall individual details now, but how he made them all responsible for the entire group’s success, kept them from leaking to the media to their advantage, and even showing up to every meeting so that their work could proceed smoothly and quickly? Was genius, like watching someone work a complicated math proof in 30 seconds. And he did it all through charm and ego-stroking and flattery; I doubt he had enough strong-arm in his personality to lift a coffee cup, but he could levitate it and make it dance in the air through the focus of his attention.

I got a glimpse of that part later. We had the chance to ask questions, and I posed an overlong and convoluted one. I’d recently read a scathing critique of the Oklahoma City bombing memorial in the New York Observer, and the writer made the case that its biggest flaw was: Too Soon. Tragedies need time to understand, particularly those with political elements, and in its rush to honor those who died in the Murrah building that day, the designers had left out the Why of it all.

So I asked Vartan about Too Soon, but said that lower Manhattan real estate was some of the most valuable in the world, and was the goal to get an appropriate memorial up while they still could, or something like that. I don’t recall his response (probably “yes”), but I do remember afterward, when we were introduced and he said, “That was such a smart question! Why aren’t you working for the New York Times?” He had that gift, so vital in a fundraiser, of making the person you’re talking to feel like a) the focus of 100 percent of your attention; and b) the most interesting person in the world. And to somehow do it without a whiff of ass-kissing or sucking-up or smarminess. He just liked you so much! Thought you were great!

His late wife, Clare, called him “the one-man swarm,” someone who could pay a call at any Upper East Side apartment and leave with a check worthy of transport in an armored car. No wonder he saved the library. No wonder he boosted the endowments of all his academic employers. No wonder he appeared so often in Bill Cunningham’s Evening Hours column that after we met, I started looking for him there. I thought of him as the Silver Goatee of Merriment.

Anyway, because of my belief that personalities are always more interesting with a little shadow in the picture, I should also say that Vahe, Vartan’s son, said his upbringing wasn’t always easy, that as the American son of an Armenian immigrant, they had profound differences as he grew up. I’m sure that as a PhD who wrote books and spoke seven languages, it probably drove Vartan crazy to have a son who played football and read Spider-Man comics. But by the time I met them, they seemed to be on the best of terms. In his later years, with the Carnegie Corp., Vartan mostly gave money away, and often took his family with him to faraway destinations to watch the check-passing and do a little sightseeing after.

One such trip was to a town in South Africa, where Vartan was endowing, what else, a library. The rest of the family arrived jet-lagged and slept through the ceremony, all except for Vahe’s wife, Cindy, who was a witness. She told me the town made a big fuss, and the fuss included a band with high-stepping dancers, or majorettes, or something, and how delighted Vartan was to see it all. He would have been around 80 by this point, a man who’d stood in the Oval Office to receive the Medal of Freedom, whose Rolodex and life experiences included literally everybody who was anybody all over the United States, and he was thrilled by a band in a dusty town in South Africa.

That, I’m telling you, is how to live your life. Condolences to his family, and all who knew him. The hole he leaves in the world is immense.

Postscript: If I’d had a chance to meet him in recent years, I’d ask him about Donald Trump. Trump’s rise coincided with the Literary Lions, and I’m sure that social-climbing piece of crap got his foot in the door of a few of those dinners. I bet he had some stories. I hope he told them to someone before he left us.

Another week where I thought it might ease up after a while, but didn’t. But no matter — work is better when it’s busy and this week I got to interview Don Was, so that was a cool interlude, although it was on video, which I hate, but oh well that’s where the ad buy is this month.

It’s up, and you can see it here. Please don’t say anything cruel about my hair or makeup.

The weather cooled off this week, and Alan’s been working in the yard. New bushes, transplanting a hydrangea, the usual mulching and cutting back and waiting for spring to really hit the gas, as well as getting the boat ready for the water in a few more weeks. Much of the work we’ve been doing (OK, Alan’s been doing, although I scrub the fucking toilets, so it evens out) around here is stuff we’ve put off for years, which makes me wonder if homeownership is even worth it. It’s wonderful on a summer night when you can go into your back yard, put some cool tunes on the Bluetooth speaker, start a fire in the pit and enjoy it all, but man — keeping even a well-built house in good repair is exhausting.

On the other hand, a friend of mine just bought a house in Ann Arbor, and the prices there are — no other word for it — simply jaw-dropping. Like, over $400 per square foot jaw-dropping. They’re bad here, but there? Ai yi yi. Then I think about people I know who went back to renting after owning, and simply hated it. The noise, the neighbors, dealing with a landlord after being your own, all of it — they couldn’t deal, and bought another house p.d.q. Our own is approaching payoff, and I expect we’ll be here until we can no longer climb steps.

What’s going on in the news? Afghanistan, the world’s tar baby, claims another victim. It’s the Venus flytrap of quagmires, to mangle a metaphor. And someone asked about Covid in Michigan. It’s…complicated. The governor is resisting further restrictions, and pushing vaccination instead, but the acceptance rates are insanely low. I can’t explain it. Unburned forest, i.e., large numbers of uninfected? Yes. Variants? Yes. Dumbasses who won’t get the shot? Also yes. We’re carrying on, and fully vaccinated. Doesn’t look like a month in Europe will be in the cards this fall, though, as I had hoped. Sigh.

On the other hand, children are still being shot to death by police, so. Things could be worse.

Happy weekend? Yes, happy weekend. I’m going to watch the new Bob Odenkirk movie and be an extra in a video — not for Kate’s band, another one. Tell you more after.