A Few Well Chosen Words: More Wit and Wisdom from Public Radio

By David Bouchier

David Bouchier brings humor and insight to the quirks and puzzles of everyday life, from buying vitamin pills to reading poetry on the subways. These entertaining commentaries were first broadcast on public radio stations in Long Island and Connecticut, where Bouchier's quirky and clever humor has made him the most popular public radio personality in the region.

Every week for the past twelve years Bouchier has plucked a topic from the chaos of ordinary life and subjected it to his special brand of ironic scrutiny. Nothing is too small or too vast to attract his attention: stuffed bears, NASCAR racing, reincarnation, the federal tax system, and shopping in Florida all find a place in this spirited and funny collection of astute observations and whimsical opinions.

A Few Well Chosen Words is the third collection of Bouchier's public radio commentaries on his life as an immigrant in America. Readers will relish his fresh approach to subjects like time and memory, the rituals that carry us through the year, our obsession with health and fitness, the horrors of travel, and the many annoyances of modern life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 3, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462041770

David Bouchier

David Bouchier is the award-winning essayist for National Public Radio Station WSHU, and a popular workshop leader at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He is the author of five books including The Cats and the Water Bottles and The Accidental Immigrant, and has contributed a regular humor column to the Sunday New York Times. David lives in Stony Brook, Long Island with his wife and two cats.

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Copyright © 2007 by David Bouchier

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Contents

Introduction

1 Whims and Observations

All American

Never Trust the Experts

Memento Kaypro

Continuing Education

Useful Insults

Who Was I?

Be Kind to Animals Week

The Labyrinth

Back to Basics

Between Stairs

NASCAR Nation

Special Offer

Poetry in Motion

The Quest

Too Many Books, Too Little Time

Solitude

A Bear for All Seasons

The Ultimate Game

Trivial Pursuit

Empty Screens

Value for Money

The Comic Sage of Remsenburg

Contracted Out

The Music of the Spheres

Endless Summer

In Praise of Idleness

2 Time and Memory

History Past and Future

On Your Bike

Life Plan

The Finishing Line

Deep Time

Gap Generation

Long Service

Memories are Made of This?

Family Stories

You Must Remember This

Heroes of the Poetic Imagination

Old News

Worth a Thousand Words

Time Out

National Procrastination Week

Reincarnation for Dummies

Waiting for the Golden Years

Veteran Tales

Stories of my Life

The Future Lies Ahead

3 Rituals and Repetitions: the Relentless Cycle of the Year

A New Start?

All Fired Up

Slip Sliding Away

It’s Cold

Ground Hog Day

Darwin Day

Immortalbeloved.com

Heroes for Our Time

Ok, Ok, I’m Irish

Taxed to the Limit

Come Back Boadicea

Lost Causes

Spring Song

Big Wedding, Small Wedding

The Show Must Go On

Born on the Third of July

Labor Pains

Give Me a Break

Yesterday’s Pool

The Ends of the Earth

Falling Towards Winter

The Dark Side

Scared Straight

Remember the Fifth of November

Plato at the Polling Booth

None of the Above

After the Fall

Reinventing the Holidays

Something to be Thankful For

Table Manners

Simple Gifts

Behind the Scenes

Party Pooper

Too much, Too Soon

Deconstructing Ebenezer Scrooge

Ghosts of Christmas Past

4 The Mind/Body Problem

No Sweat

Against Nature

The Body Beautiful

Heavy Lifting

Beethoven and Me

The White House Diet

I’m OK, You’re not OK

Inside Out

Personal Hygiene

Medicine on the Move

Mystery Pills

Side Effects

No Worries

The Existential Moment

The Toxic List

All Clean on Top

Bent Out of Shape

5 Escape Attempts

Escape Attempts

Mystery Solved

The Boarding Process

The South Will Rise Again

A Visit to the Middle Ages

Expect the Unexpected

Flight Delay

Grand Hotel

International Style

Fantasy Island

Italian Graffiti

See Naples and Shop

Resort Wear

Island in the Sun

No Island is an Island

The Last Time I Saw Paris

Small Railway Journeys of the World

Seven Wonders

Take it Easy

Nice Traffic

Dinner on the Grass

Upgrade

The Rain Man

We Are What We Drive

On Your Bike

The Road to Liberty

6 Modern Life

I Have Issues

A Code for All Seasons

Personal Space

Who Are These People?

Cell Mates

Chaos Theory

Hi, I’m Conferencing

Forever Uncool

Early Rider

Extreme Boredom

Good News

The Vanishing Inventor

Drip Dry

Beyond a Joke

Wasted Opportunities

Suburban Legends

Flashing Lights

Travel in Style

World on the Move

Perhaps Not Quite the Best

Musical Appreciation

What’s in a Name?

Freshman Envy

How to Avoid Niceness

The Global Unemployment Line

Stand By, Turn Off, Restart

Universal Plagiarism

The Profit Motive

Literature for Dummies

Getting the Job Done

Many Happy Returns

Making the Deal

Dear Reader

Setback

Sirens in the Night

Smile Please

Old Soldiers

Spammed Out

Virus Alert

A Day in the Second Life

Introduction

My love affair with America began in 1947 with a ballpoint pen. My aunt Joan, who was working in the British Embassy in Washington DC, sent me the pen for Christmas. Ballpoints were almost unknown in England at that time, and the extraordinary novelty of this gadget made me the star of my primary school class, something that I had never been able to achieve through my academic or social skills. Our school was so poorly equipped that the youngest children still used slates, and we older children used steel dip pens, with a little inkwell in each desk. We particularly valued the ballpoint pen for its enchanting ability to write upside down, something you could never do with a dip pen without having the ink run up your arm. When I was eight years old I spent so many hours writing upside down that I have suffered from vertigo ever since. Nor did my magic American ballpoint ever seem to run out of ink. Modern ballpoints won’t write upside down, and they seem to run out of ink after only a few pages: two more symptoms of the decline of western civilization.

The ballpoint pen was a symbol and a token of America’s greatness, and my childish obsession was fed by the movies we watched every Saturday morning, when kids could see a special show for a shilling. They were mostly old American cowboy films, so we spent a couple of hours on the edge of our seats, imagining ourselves out in those great open spaces under that blazing sun, living free. Then we walked out of the cinema into the gray, half-destroyed landscape that was post-war east London. I never forgot the contrast.

Another highly valued American import was the comic book. Our homegrown comics were anemic and dull. Those that came from across the Atlantic were not only ten times bigger, but they featured super-heroes and villains who acted out mighty moral conflicts with very little thought and a great deal of violence: BLAM! POW!! ZAP!!! and every problem was solved. The comics were set in smooth, futuristic cities filled with huge, exotic cars, and they gave us kids the distinct impression that life in America was a hell of a lot more fun than it was in England. The impression was reinforced by imported movies that explained how Americans had defeated Hitler single-handed, while chewing gum and cracking wise. The British played only comic bit parts in the cinematic war. In school, we were told to be proud of our great British heritage. But black and white nostalgia seemed a poor substitute for being an American, and living the Technicolor dream.

It was a long time before I had a chance to test my fantasies against reality. But, in 1966, I finally made it across the Atlantic on a cheap flight. After such a long build-up in my imagination, I was prepared for America to be a huge disappointment. But it was love at second sight. I arrived in New York on an August day when the temperature was one hundred and two degrees. My hotel was a disgraceful flophouse, without air conditioning, in a neighborhood that looked as if had been lifted wholesale from a particularly unfortunate third world country. Many of the cars on the street had been abandoned, trashed and burned, half the windows in the buildings were broken, and every flat surface was decorated with violent graffiti. This was the sinister city of Gotham from my childhood comics, but without the romance. After my first trip on the subway I nearly took the next flight home.

It wasn’t easy to love New York in the hot summer of 1966, when John Lindsay was mayor and crime was out of control. But as soon as I escaped across the river and into the vast American landscape my idealistic image snapped back into focus. This was the land of the cowboys, strangely mixed with the land of domestic situation comedies that had just begun to filter across the Atlantic: extreme, pointless violence on the one hand, and the peaceful, prosperous life of the suburbs on the other. It seemed, and still seems to me, a metaphor of America that is almost too good to be true, but true nevertheless.

For almost a year I traveled around the continental United States like a latter day Lewis and Clark, driving an old Chevrolet Impala V8 that ran about ten miles to a gallon. Twenty years and many visits later, having realized at last that American women are the most interesting in the world, I married one. We came to live on Long Island, the ground zero of suburban life in America.

The essays in this book were part of my self-education into my new world. They were originally broadcast on National Public Radio Stations WSHU and WSUF, which serve the suburban heartlands of Long Island and Southern Connecticut. They are tokens of my lifelong affection for this country, but also a catalog of all the things that have amused, amazed and baffled me about life in America.

Radio imposes its own strict discipline on an essayist. Every topic, no matter how complicated, must be covered in four minutes or less. But sometimes snap-

shots tell more than formal portraits and, on a good day, a few well-chosen words can say it all.

Stony Brook, Long Island, 2007

1

Whims and Observations

Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things,

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist.

Robert Browning

If one cannot reform the world

One can at least laugh at it.

E.M.Forster

All American

Virtually everybody in the world, except the French, wants to be American. So why not let’s just go ahead and do it right now. Let’s agree that every single person in the world will be an American citizen, as of Memorial Day in the year 2010.

It may sound radical, but there is an historical precedent. At the height of the Roman Empire, Saxons, Gauls, Turks, and dozens of other foreigners were all enrolled as Roman Citizens under a single government, with a single language. The Pax Romana (peace of Rome) lasted for centuries. It would have lasted longer if Latin hadn’t been such a hard language to learn. English, by contrast, is easy. When everybody is American we will all communicate in English, as nature and Hollywood intended.

That’s the least of the benefits. All this whining about globalization and cultural imperialism will have to stop. The English or the Saudi Arabians will scarcely be able to complain about Americanization when they are all Americans themselves. With no hordes of foreigners to defend us against, the INS will be able to shut up shop, as will the State Department and the Pentagon, allowing the President to cut our taxes in half overnight. The United Nations and NATO will become redundant, and go out of business, freeing up thousands of much-needed employees for the fast food industry.

What a history-making gesture this would be, two thousand years after the collapse of the Roman Empire. No more patriotic wars, no more casualties: a true Pax Americana. What a memorial to all the people who died because they happened to belong to the wrong nationality, and be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But by far the biggest benefit will be the universal application of the American system of law and government. All of the many schisms in the world will be settled according to the rule of law and the Constitution. Ethnic conflicts will become civil rights matters. Economic and religious arguments will end up in court instead of on the battlefield. The bonanza for lawyers will surpass even the Enron fiasco.

We can’t expect an all-American world to be totally peaceful, because the Second Amendment will give all six billion human beings on earth the right to bear arms, a right now strictly forbidden to most of them. But in this new truly global society, we can be sure of one thing: whenever and wherever we meet the enemy, they will always be us.

Never Trust the Experts

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus

When he said the world was round;

They all laughed when Edison recorded sound;

They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother

When they said that man could fly;

They told Marconi that wireless was a phony.

Remember that old Gershwin song? They of course were the experts of their time, and experts never change. In 1492 Columbus had two sets of experts giving him contradictory advice. One faction—the religious conservatives—said his westward voyage would certainly take him off the edge of the earth because obviously it was flat. The other faction, the entrepreneurs led by Queen Isabella of Spain, said he would certainly discover a new westward route to the East Indies and become fabulously wealthy. Both predictions were completely wrong. He didn’t sail off the edge of the world, and he didn’t find the East Indies. Instead he found the Bahamas and, not recognizing their vacation potential, he died in poverty.

Columbus, like all of us, was a victim of the experts. Every piece of expert advice generates an equal and opposite piece of expert advice, and usually they’re both false. This seems to be as common in science as it is in religion or politics. Fortunately the experts on any subject usually divide into two camps, rather than ten or fifty. This makes our choices much easier, like chocolate or vanilla. The experts say that Iraq is a triumph or a disaster, the economy is booming or busting. There’s no need for us to worry about nuances of meaning, let alone evidence. Just choose your favorite expert.

Columbus made the choice that most of us make. He chose the theory he liked best, the one that would lead to fabulous wealth. This is exactly my own philosophy, and I suspect that everyone else on the planet shares it. If they say that spinach is good for me I dismiss it on the grounds that the research is inadequate, and probably funded by the wicked Spinach Growers’ Council. If they say that red wine is good for me, I assume, without further investigation, that the research is one hundred percent reliable.

Experts are generically referred to as they. We’ve all wondered about this anonymous they. They seem to know everything. A Missouri man called Andrew Wilson has changed his name to They, perhaps in the hope of becoming omniscient, like them. Every one of the world’s four thousand plus religions has an authoritative explanation of the meaning of life, certified by the local experts. At best only one of them can be right, but they are all very sure of themselves.

We give them too much respect. We’ve all sat passively listening to doctors, car mechanics, lawyers or professors spouting palpable nonsense. Even if we think we know better we hesitate to contradict them. There’s always an uneasy feeling that they must have sources of knowledge hidden from us. But they don’t. Just about all the knowledge in the world is available to everybody, and it’s free. On at least two occasions I’ve been saved from dangerous reactions to medications because I checked them out on a website after the doctor had assured me they were safe. In the same simple way I’ve detected false diagnoses of car problems, and completely wrong legal advice.

We’re just too lazy to go and find the facts, so self-appointed experts can make a good living by pretending to have all the answers. A good example is that inescapable public television program the Antiques Road Show. Members of the public bring their treasures to be evaluated by the experts, and they always seem amazed by what the experts tell them. I had no idea that the old hat stand was worth a quarter of a million dollars, they say with a mixture of joy and embarrassment. But they could have found out everything they wanted to know by spending an hour in the library.

Experts are annoying enough, but people who have an unquestioning belief in them are even worse. We are perpetually harassed by good advice passed on secondhand from some nameless so-called expert reported in the newspaper or seen on TV. They say you should eat this, or do that If you believe what you read in the newspapers or see on TV I have an elegant Victorian bridge in New York that I’d like to sell you.

There are real experts of course, people who win Nobel prizes and push back the boundaries of knowledge. But they’re not in the good advice business. Real experts talk to each other. The phony experts talk to the rest of us

As Christopher Columbus discovered to his cost, it’s not healthy to believe everything we’re told. But at least he had the initiative to go out there and see for himself. We can’t have a democracy unless citizens think for themselves. At least, that’s what they say.

Memento Kaypro

What happens to old computers? That’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer. Old computers go straight to the basement.

In the process of tidying the basement I decided to organize the mess in a systematic way: books in one area, suitcases in another, boxes of old files in the far corner, and so on. One area was reserved for electrical stuff, and I put a superannuated computer there, then another, then another, then another, then another, until there were six of them.

A little electronic archaeology allowed me to arrange the computers in layers, according to their ancient origins. The oldest was something called a Kaypro IV, which came into our lives about 1983. This was called a portable computer, although transportable would be a better name for it. It weighs almost thirty pounds. When we traveled by air we couldn’t take any other baggage. But we became so attached to that monster that we lugged it to Europe four times. My bad back dates from the time we bought the Kaypro.

The Kaypro IV may have been the perfect computer. It used two big floppy disks, one for the program and one for recording what you wrote. It didn’t record much, but that was OK. Unless you were setting out to write War and Peace, it was enough. The Kayro never crashed, never froze, and never lost any data. It wasn’t Internet compatible, but in 1983 who cared?

Next to the Kaypro was another machine called a DFL, and another from Hewlett Packard, and another from Packard Bell, plus an ancient laptop from Compaq that the cats had disliked on sight. I didn’t explore the remotest corners of the basement in case I found an old IBM Mainframe lurking there.

The total number of computers in the house, including those in current use, turned out to be nine, which was astonishing. We don’t even have kids, and clearly we can’t get rid of these things. Old computers are defined as hazardous material, and must be disposed of properly. Unfortunately nobody agrees what properly means, which is why they end up in the basement. They also age very fast. Your state-of-the-art new machine will be history in about four years, a rate of planned obsolescence that even the auto industry cannot match. With two hundred and fifty million computers in the United States being junked every four years, the problem seems not so much their toxicity as their sheer volume. Whole western states could soon be several feet deep in discarded computers.

Old computers are toxic in more ways than one. Criminals can steal identities from them, and perhaps even material for blackmail. The contents of your hard drive may be emotional dynamite, like Madame Bovary’s letters, or they may be just embarrassing because of the web sites you have visited or the bad poetry you have written in the past. Those computers in the basement are not just junk: they are time bombs.

They are also a source of guilt, because they are such obvious symbols of waste and hysteria. Our old computers are not dead. They all still work. They’re just not fast enough or clever enough for the maniacal modern world. They don’t have enough memory. They are not state-of-the-art. If we applied the same brutal logic to ourselves we would all be languishing in the basement.

Continuing Education

Whenever election time comes around, but at no other time, we hear a lot of rhetoric from politicians about the need to improve education. We’ve heard it before, of course, in 2004, in 2000, in 1996, in 1992, in 1988, and all the way back to Jefferson’s famous campaign of 1800. It’s a comforting ritual, like listening to the same carols every Christmas. But we mustn’t expect miracles, any more than we expect term limits or campaign finance reform. The age of miracles is past.

I am not one of those cynics who subscribe to the theory that education never improves because politicians don’t want it to improve. I know that, deep in the hearts, all the candidates would love to campaign for the votes of a highly educated, historically aware and critical electorate. They would have to change their tactics, of course, forget the balloons and the silly slogans, and come up with some policies that would convince a bright five year old. But how can this desirable result be achieved?

The answer came to me the other day. I waiting in a big office, and an idiotic song was dribbling down from speakers in the ceiling. The song’s message seemed to be that feelings are good, and thought is bad. This is not only noise pollution, but also intelligence pollution. What does it do to our minds, to listen to this inane stuff for eight hours a day?

Naturally, the question made me think of Ybor City in Tampa, Florida, which was a great cigar-making center in the late 1800s. Cigar makers worked mainly in silence, as do modern office workers, now that the clack of typewriters is no longer heard. To keep boredom at bay, the workers would hire a reader, who would read aloud to them from the great books all day long.

Because of this informal, continuous lecture, cigar makers became highly educated and active in the trade union movement. Samuel Gompers got his education this way. These were just the kind of wide-awake voters that both parties would love to attract.

So, if we could just pull the plug on all that sentimental elevator music playing in millions of American workplaces, and substitute excellent readings from the best books, what an educational revolution could be achieved! Most jobs require no intelligent thought, so the reading wouldn’t interfere with productivity.

Some discretion would be needed in the choice of material, of course. It wouldn’t do to have a surgeon distracted at the critical moment in an operation by one of the romantic high points in Pride and Prejudice. Certain classics might create depression and anxiety in certain settings, for example Madame Bovary in shopping malls or Lord of the Flies in high schools. But a little common sense would solve these problems.

While we’re about it, why not replace that ghastly music you get over the telephone when you’re on hold with useful quotation and aphorisms to improve the mind? When you call the bank you might hear: A penny saved is a penny earned; time is money. Call the doctor’s office and be told by Thoreau, ’Tis healthy to be sick sometimes, or Health is a great blessing, if you can stand it from Cardinal Newman.

By substituting good words for bad music, we could create the highly aware, critically thinking populace that Jefferson dreamed about, citizens perfectly able to distinguish lies from truth, hype from substance, and sense from nonsense. What politician, in an election year, could possibly argue with that?

Useful Insults

I was amused to read in The New York Times about the tribulations of students at prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in suburban Westchester. It seems that young men from Yonkers have been quite rude to the students at Sarah Lawrence, shouting insults in the street and even tossing empty beer cans and paper cups in their direction.

Now there’s never any excuse for rudeness, and these abusive young men have clearly not been brought up properly, or at all. But what amazed me was the reaction to their boorish behavior. Poor kids from the community college get insulted in the street all the time, but their hurt feelings don’t get written up in the papers. Not only did the sensitive students from Sarah Lawrence rate a large top-of-the-page story in The New York Times, but the college administration and the police became involved. An associate dean was quoted as saying: There are students who are more sensitive or who might be struggling with their identity issues.

All college towns have these kinds of town-gown conflicts. They are really about social class, although we’re not supposed to say that. The overt issue at Sarah Lawrence was the appearance of some students. In the process of struggling with their identity issues they have found it useful to arrange their hair in colored spikes, wear nose rings and dress like refugees from Le Cirque du Soleil, as is their absolute right. In response the bad boys of the town have called them freaks, and worse.

What’s interesting about this storm in a latte cup is the assumption that outward appearances mean or should mean nothing, when in fact they mean so much. Identity is mostly about how other people see you. If you dress like something out of the circus they will think you are a clown. If you wear a backward baseball cap they will assume you are a backward boy with a bad attitude. That’s information. That’s how we navigate the world. It’s no use complaining I’m quite different inside. We can only see the outside.

A three-piece suit, a micro miniskirt, green hair, a tattoo on the backside, or inch-long fingernails are all intended to send messages about the wearer. We understand those messages perfectly well. Change the appearance and you change the message.

Important clues to your real identity can be gleaned by considering your family. You’ll never shake off their influence. Beyond that your authentic inner identity comes from your life. You are what you do. Eventually, with luck, inner and outer identity may come together. You appear as you are, and you are what you appear. But it may take a lifetime, and it won’t get you elected to Congress.

The students at Sarah Lawrence are a talented lot. They have already won the social class lottery. But obviously they need to get some perspective on themselves, and they are getting it. The insults hurled at them by town kids have useful sociological content. They teach the privileged college kids something about the society they live in, something they may not learn in their art and music classes.

It’s one of those passages we all go through. I remember I having my self-image put in perspective by Sergeant O’Reilly during army basic training. He wasn’t afraid to make very definite statements about the identities and personal qualities of everybody in his squad, especially me. He often confided to me, at the top of his voice: Bouchier you are the *** worst *** apology for a *** soldier that I’ve ever *** seen. I have never forgotten his acute observations on my character, and they have been useful in keeping me away from jobs that require uniforms and guns.

So, Freshman Identity Search 101, Rule Number One: If your ego is so fragile that you can’t absorb a well-directed insult, you may never discover who you really are.

Who Was I?

Identity has become a kind of cult. I suspect that the hysteria surrounding it has to do with the notion that we are all unique beings, so our individual identities are uniquely precious. Don’t believe a word of it. We have some unique physical qualities, like our DNA and our fingerprints, but we can live together just because we are fundamentally alike. We can empathize with suffering people in Darfur or Iraq because we know that, in all the essentials, we are just like them, and they are just like us: at least I hope we know that.

Identity Theft is much in the news lately. Warnings are posted all over the place and, even in our local post office, we are assaulted by a booming voice and a video presentation about the terrible dangers of Identity Theft. It’s enough to make a person paranoid, if we weren’t already paranoid about the Iraq war, the elections, the Supreme Court, global warming, and bird flu. At home we’ve started shredding documents as anxiously as if we were living in the White House.

I must say that Identity Theft is not at the top of my list of worries. In the literal sense it is impossible, and inadvisable. Anyone foolish enough to steal my identity, for example, would probably be knocking on the door next morning asking to give it back. This fear campaign seems to be about identity imitation, which is quite a different matter.

I did some research on this, or at least I stood in the Post Office for five minutes watching the video presentation. It seems that today’s sophisticated thieves can use computers to take any scrap of information about any of us—such as our social security number or golf handicap—to discover all the rest of our personal details, and fabricate a complete parallel identity. Using this doppelganger they can dip into our bank accounts, discover our e-mail secrets, and buy all sorts of things we wouldn’t think of buying ourselves. Unfortunately they don’t follow through and live the other half of our lives. They don’t pay the bills for example, or rake the leaves, or feed the cats.

In other words, this ominous new threat called Identity Theft is what used to be called simply fraud, which has been around forever. As usual it has been inflated and given a scary name, which is how our leaders keep us in a perpetual state of nervous anxiety. Identity Theft sounds deeply sinister, like those old science fiction movies where aliens take over people’s bodies. But it’s just a hightech way of stealing money.

So we become security-conscious. We have so many passwords that we might as well be living in a spy movie. Even these are not enough. We are required to remember bizarre facts like our mother’s maiden name, to guarantee that we are who we are, and that our money belongs to us.

Shakespeare’s Iago had it completely wrong.

Who steals my purse steals trash, he proclaimed.

"But he who filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him

But makes me poor indeed."

Things have changed since the seventeenth century. My good name doesn’t mean much. The electric robbers can have it, along with my DNA and my email. But my purse means everything.

In the unlikely event that somebody does steal my identity, I claim the right to steal someone else’s. I would rather like to vanish into new name and a new biography, like a person in the Federal Witness Protection Program, to abandon the unanswered e-mails and the un-raked leaves.

Who would I like to be? Not a living person—he might complain. But the dead never complain. I would like to steal (or at least borrow) the identity of Michel de Montaigne. He lived a peaceful life in a chateau near Bordeaux in 16th century France, with cats but without computers. He was one of the finest essayists who ever lived. If radio had been invented in his time he would certainly have been on NPR. Nobody could steal his identity, because he was unique. But that’s who I’d like to be.

Be Kind to Animals Week

Be Kind to Animals Week was created by the Humane Society in 1915, the second year of the Great War, when kindness was in short supply. I’m all in favor of kindness to animals, but it does have a downside. The word gets around. Just reach down to pat a puppy in the street and, within a