Every time I see posts like this, it makes me so mad that these beautiful places were torn down. Some, I suppose might have been necessary, but I feel robbed that I never had a chance to experience these buildings — especially Penn Station pictured above.
Derek Jeter, the Joe DiMaggio of my generation announced that 2014 will be his last season. He’s only played for one team – the New York Yankees – and while he might have been some kid from Michigan (though born in New Jersey), he’s as new York as the Brooklyn Bridge. After reading about his retirement, a lot of publications reached back into their archives for articles written about his 3000th hit. This one by Roger Angell is one of my favorites.
Nothing went wrong on yesterday’s brilliant, blue-sky Saturday afternoon. Two hits shy of the tri-millennial mark, Jeter amped expectations with his first-inning single against the Tampa Bay lefty David Price. “Now!” said the forty-eight thousand one hundred and eight fans on hand—not counting the right-field bleacher chorus chanting “Der-ek Je-tuh! De-rek Je-tuh!”—when he stepped in again against Price in the third. The tough at-bat went to three and two, with two more full-count fouls, and Jeter looked almost awkward as he bent and swung at an inside curveball and got all of it, driving the ball into the second tier of seats in the left center-field bleachers. Jorge Posada was the first Yankee waiting at home plate when he arrived for hug-up, and Johnny Damon, his old teammate, now a Ray, was the first to come clapping out of the visitors’ dugout. Casey Kotchman, the Rays’ first baseman, had tipped his hat as Derek turned the bag.
And this one from Joe Lemire is a great one, too, if not for this tidbit about Dick Groch who recruited Jeter for the Yankees:
The longtime scout said that Jeter was the greatest player he ever scouted. The first time he laid eyes on the star from Kalamazoo Central High was at an all-star showcase in Michigan. Groch was standing next to a baseball coach from Michigan State, who marveled at Jeter’s athleticism and remarked that he needed to send the teenager an information packet, to which Groch quipped, “Save your postage.”
The Yankees made Jeter the No. 6 overall pick of the 1992 draft, and when he tried using his scholarship offer to Michigan as leverage in negotiations, a few front-office personnel grew concerned they might lose him, though Groch assured them otherwise.
“The only place Derek Jeter’s going is to Cooperstown,” Groch said.
Bill Hayes, writing for The Virginia Quarterly Review, on the kindness of strangers found in New York City’s Subway:
While waiting for a 4/5 one mercilessly humid summer afternoon last summer, I found unexpected refuge from the suffocating heat under a gigantic fan installed in the ceiling at Union Square. I’d never noticed it before. But there I stood, gratefully, as if in the final leg of a car wash, my sweat-drenched clothes getting a jet drying.
It was near that same spot on an equally hot day that I saw a young woman faint just steps from the platform’s edge. She wilted in slow motion, but at the exact opposite speed two people came to her aid. By the time I reached the scene, she was in very capable hands, literally. There was a man who turned out to be a doctor cradling her head, and at her side, holding her hand, was a preternaturally calm woman who looked like a yoga instructor. When the fainted girl came to, she looked terrified and confused, but the calm woman calmed her and the doctor doctored her, and in due time the two walked her outside for some fresh air.
There are other examples he lists – like the woman who joined him making sure a distraught person didn’t hurt himself and got home safely – that just reenforce, to me anyway, that there is no better city in the world in which to live.
This article is the last of a series of four posts and every one is worth reading. The first one is here.
I might have shared this already but it’s worth re-reading this story about a couple who have Asperger’s Syndrome and the strengths and challenges they have with one another. It starts:
The first night they slept entwined on his futon, Jack Robison, 19, who had since childhood thought of himself as “not like the other humans,” regarded Kirsten Lindsmith with undisguised tenderness.
She was the only girl to have ever asked questions about his obsessive interests — chemistry, libertarian politics, the small drone aircraft he was building in his kitchen — as though she actually cared to hear his answer. To Jack, who has a form of autism called Asperger syndrome, her mind was uncannily like his. She was also, he thought, beautiful.
So far they had only cuddled; Jack, who had dropped out of high school but was acing organic chemistry in continuing education classes, had hopes for something more. Yet when she smiled at him the next morning, her lips seeking his, he turned away.
“I don’t really like kissing,” he said.
Kirsten, 18, a college freshman, drew back. If he knew she was disappointed, he showed no sign.
On that fall day in 2009, Kirsten did not know that someone as intelligent and articulate as Jack might be unable to read the feelings of others, or gauge the impact of his words. And only later would she recognize that her own lifelong troubles — bullying by students, anger from teachers and emotional meltdowns that she felt unable to control — were clues that she, too, occupied a spot on what is known as the autism spectrum.
The story is from a few years ago but it was recently featured in The New Yorker’s Weekend Reading section.
Yahoo released movie posters for best picture nominees at this year’s Oscars… in Lego. I can’t help but think that if they were all made out of Lego, I’d go see them. I haven’t seen the Lego Movie yet but I will just as soon as it comes out on iTunes.