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Jet envy
An Emirates A-380 at JFK International. JFK International Airport, New York – Here I was, content on my cramped regional jet because it was taking me where I needed to go. The first three legs of the journey was fine until I got to JFK International Airport.
The jet envy hit me.
You know the feeling, don’t you? One minute you are happy to be at your destination and the next you see a big airliner with an exotic livery and you suddenly wish you were on that plane, going far away.
The last time I was at JFK, last year, I was: I was flying to and from London. This time, not so much.
I have been especially fascinated by the Airbus A-380, the largest passenger jet out there and the only one to have a full-size double deck.
These jets each carry between 575 and 850 (!) passengers super long distances. I haven’t ever been as close to one as I was rolling by in my Canadair 900 regional jet.
It’s not the Boeing 747. But it’s close. -
Wait til next year
PNC Park. The last game of the regular season, Oct. 1, 2023. A lot warmer than it was on Opening Day in April.
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Peeps in a new season
Not a Peeps fan, so I was thrown today when I saw them today. It’s not Easter!
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RIP, Terry Kirkman
Sad news over the weekend with the passing of Terry Kirkman, cofounder of The Association and the songwriter of “Cherish,” one of the standards of the 1960s and emblematic of The Association’s lush and layered harmonies.
The Association oughtta be in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. They’re not, which is a shame. They performed the second-most popular song of the 20th century? “Never My Love.” They didn’t write it but it’s a classic because of them.
The video above, that’s Terry Kirkman and the late Larry Ramos performing the lead vocals LIVE TO TAPE on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” These days most singers lip synch but back in those days The Association was going through the motions on the instruments — which they could play and well — but Kirkman and Ramos are singing those vocals. How can you tell? Because Ramos enunciates one of the lines, and then smiles a bit. Kirkman and Ramos were that good, live or recorded, even though it was one of Ramos’ first songs with the band.
“Never My Love” was the No. 2 song the first full week of my life in what was a terrific month for music just after the Summer of Love: Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe,” The Box Top’s “The Letter,” The Supremes’ “Reflections,” Jackie Wilson’s “Your Love (Keeps Lifting Me Higher),” and the theme song to one of my favorite movies of the ‘60s, Lulu’s “To Sir With Love.”
And The Association, and Kirkman, was right there with them. They’ll live forever in their recordings.
RIP.
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Trying to keep a Covid-free streak going
For the past three and a half years, against all odds, I’ve been able to avoid Covid. This week, I’m concerned my luck is about to run out.
I took Covid seriously from the very beginning, ever since I came back from a trip to the United Kingdom in January 2020 and first heard about what was fast becoming SARS-CoV-2. I was one of the lucky ones who were able to work from home for the first two years of the pandemic, and I restricted my social interactions and always with masks. I didn’t even let up when I had the vaccine in the winter of 2021, nor with a booster in April 2022. I wore a mask religiously until September 2022, when I got the bivalent booster and I figured that maybe, just maybe, I could be less careful.
I’ve had close calls. Covid had been in my house in 2022, and while I avoided getting it both times, I’m not sure I could tell you why. But this week we found out that Covid is back in the house. Today I found out it was going through work, too. So there’s a good chance that no matter where I go, I will be coming against Covid again.
First, everyone’s fine. Second, it seems like the majority of Covid cases are mild or at least nothing worse than a moderate case of the flu. No one I know has gone to the hospital or stayed. We’ve tested, we’ve avoided contact, we’ve changed our lives a bit to make sure that the sick child stays home until recovery.
Feels a lot like we’re one of the few families doing that. But I don’t want to be the reason for someone else to get super sick, even if Covid is all around us and there are as many safety precautions. But I digress.
I’m not feeling as anxious this time around as I did. I’ve not only kept up with the Covid vaccines and boosters, but I also got the latest vaccine Friday, four days before I learned of the Covid case at home. I’m hoping the presence of the vaccine will help me out, lessening the chance of a more serious disease. At least that’s the theory. Wish I didn’t have to test it out, but I’m glad the vaccine exists. The vaccine isn’t supposed to prevent disease, just lessen its severity.
Anybody know how long it takes to get fully immunized from this shot? No one does, apparently. Guess I’m going to find out.
And whether my covid-free streak keeps going.
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A horrific crash close to home
Still reeling from the news of the fatal bus crash on Interstate 84 in Orange County, New York. It’s a spot of highway I know well. I not only used to drive that stretch to and from work in Middletown, New York, but I have been driving that stretch all my life.
One adult killed and dozens of high school kids injured – five critically – when the bus rolled over and fell down the embankment. Thinking of the kids and adults who were on that bus, and their families.
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Goodbye, sports section
I’ve been a journalist for a long time, and an avid newspaper reader for a lot longer. I never thought I’d live to see this day, but I’m wondering if the vaunted sports section is about to take its last gasp.
The New York Times this week shut down its sports desk. The last Times written and produced sports section was published Tuesday. The reporters and editors who were assigned to the sports section are being dispersed throughout the Times, and The Athletic will take over sports coverage. The Times acquired The Athletic in 2022.
There’s a lot of history to The Times’ sports desk: Red Smith and George Vescey and a lot of other great writers passed through there. While I’m not a huge sports fan, I still perused through it because The Times had such a unique take on sports that you almost had to read their stories. Plus, for a decade or so while I covered the media, I worried about getting beaten by their great sports media reporter.
But history doesn’t mean a whole lot to newspapers these days. We used to say that we printed the names of dozens of subscribers every day on the obituary page. We as an industry, thanks to the Internet and other changes, aren’t able to replace those diehard newspaper readers.
They’re out of the habit.
I’d like to think I’ve weathered the changes in the newspaper industry since I started. It’s almost a completely different business than it was back then; it’s almost completely different than it was back in 2002, the last time I worked for a general newspaper. They’ve been supplanted by the web and social media; battered by the loss of classifieds and then display advertising and supplements; and then subjected to severe cuts and also by a brain drain. A journalistic time traveler from 1992, say, would be shocked at how few newspapers there are, how small they are, and how understaffed newsrooms are.
I first made the transition to online media in 2002, which doesn’t make me a pioneer but instead makes me prescient. I still work for a printed newspaper but we have a strong digital presence and a digital-first attitude. My opinion, you have to. The print edition is still important, thankfully. I have printer’s ink in my heart, even as I have pixels in my veins.
Or whatever the metaphor is these days.
But I have to say losing The New York Times sports page is shocking. I wonder who else will come to make this same decision. It’s a long way from the days, early in my career, where the sports department pretty much ruled the newsroom: they got their pick of pages, had a lot of reporters, and had the late deadlines because of trying to get in West Coast sports scores and such.
Now, of course, a lot of that has changed. You don’t need to go to the newspaper to find out the scores. That’s on my phone, whenever I want. Or I can have them texted to me. But I never looked at The Times for the sports scores. Even as long as I have read The Times — and I started when I was in sixth grade so it’s a long, long time — I never got the scores from there. Other newspapers, yes. But I always looked to The Times for notebook-style musings and context and standout features.
Where are those going to be in The Times now?
I like The Athletic. It has led to a revolution in sports coverage and a needed one. And I suppose both The Athletic and The New York Times Sports Section shouldn’t compete for resources within the same organization. But it makes me wonder what other things might end up going away in this latest evolution of the newspaper business.
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The subtraction mindset
An interesting op-ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times took a chunk out of the mindset revolution — whether that’s the growth mindset, the abundance mindset or the gratitude mindset.
Climber Francis Sanzaro’s point is that the trend toward a mindset and self-optimization is cluttering the instrument it seeks to improve: the mind itself.When I added (determination, grit, self-confidence, desire), I failed. When I took away (the desire for success) my body moved with greater fluidity and naturalness.
He calls it “the power of subtraction.” And it doesn’t have to be an athletic endeavor at all, Sanzaro said. It could mean just about any type of endeavor.
“The key is removing barriers to clarity, not adding them in hopes of reaching our goals,” Sanzaro said.
I can’t proclaim to be an expert on any type of mindset. I first encountered the growth mindset, which was coined by Stanford University Professor Carol Dweck and elaborated in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, several years ago. I was in the early stages of learning another language and had stumbled upon an article advising a growth mindset would help me learn it better.
I later bought Dweck’s book and read it. One of the things that resonated was her explanation of the growth mindset vs. the fixed mindset. A growth mindset focuses on what you can achieve by constant learning, hard work and discipline. That would, in the case of language learning, mean you can improve by those strategies. A fixed mindset, on the other hand, would be someone believing there’s an innate ability to learn a language and not much that can be done to improve on it.
It’s more complicated than that, of course. Dweck herself, in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article, set down some myths about the growth mindset. Dweck said just being open-minded wasn’t enough nor was failing to deal with what she called “fixed-mindset triggers” that lead to derailment.
Look anywhere, from the corporate world to Instagram to podcasts, and you’ll see a lot of talk about the growth mindset. This battle has been something I’ve fought my whole life, whether I was a student or as a journalist. My job, I felt, was to keep an open mind and look at journalism as continuing education. Even then, sometimes, it’s hard to keep an open mind. But I’m always testing myself.
Sanzaro’s advice is strip down to the essentials and nothing more.
“We must take away until there is nothing left to remove, “You are in it, then, in sport or in love, with clarity, intensity and solidity.”
I try to apply this to my writing, both for work and then my personal expression as well. It’s difficult, but it’s important. -
Being acquainted with the night
When I was a kid, I used to wake up in the still of the night and wonder what it was going on in the dark half of the day.
It was silent and still and the only light on a clear night came from the moon. Once a night, after midnight, there would be the rattle of the train where you could hear up and down the town. There were factories in my blue-color hometown but I wasn’t close enough to hear the machinery.
Once or twice a week, I slept in the back seat of our Plymouth Horizon while my Dad drove into the city to pick up Mom from her retail job so she didn’t have to take the bus home after dark. People got out of work at 5, like my Dad, or 8 like my Mom. And my Dad would carry me from the car to the house so I would stay asleep, and I would wake up and it was daylight.
But some nights, I would wake up and wonder what the night was like.
Most nights I would fall asleep to the low tones of my Radio Shack AM handheld. In the summer, it was a Red Sox game out of WTIC, north and east of me in Hartford. The rest of the year it was WCBS 880, the all-news station in nearby New York City.
Newsradio 880 was an education in itself in the ‘70s and ‘80s. That old TV show proclaimed there were 8 million stories in the naked city, and they came one by one from my radio: the Son of Sam murders and the blackout in 1977, the Blizzard of ‘78, John Lenin’s murder, the Bernard Goetz subway shootings. A lot was going on in the Naked City, and I heard it all on WCBS.
All news, all the time.
There was another all-news station in New York, WINS. I stuck with WCBS, for it had less structure and more art and shoe-leather reporting. WINS had the headlines. WCBS gave you the beating heart of the city, and personalities you grew to know by listening.
I credit my parents, who were both journalists, for my eventual career. You could say I grew up in newspapers: One of my earliest memories is being in the city room of my father’s paper. And I would end up working with three editors on my first job who had worked with my Dad 20 years before and knew me as a kid.
Yet WCBS played a big role, too. It fed one of my life’s obsessions, a thirst for breaking news and the rhythm of story. And it was a constant reminder of just what was out there in the middle of the night: There was always an announcer or two giving the news and a reporter who was working nightside, traveling around the city to breaking news stories.
Little did I know in the ‘70s and early ‘80s that I would be doing that kind of work, too. Not in New York City — though I was a journalist in New York City for a decade it wasn’t for crime and general mayhem — but not too far away, in inner-city and suburban Connecticut. I learned a lot, going to midnight and early morning fires and shootings and other breaking news. Whatever fear — and fascination — with the dark went away pretty quickly.
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A turn in the road
Funny how seemingly normal days can change your life. Today is the anniversary of one of those days. It was a Monday then, too. Doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than me, but I knew immediately after and I know now, how crucial.
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About Me
Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.
Nows and Forevers 
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