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Six thousand pounds is just a number. A big, round number, for sure, but still just a number. It’s not anything that Patrick Shanahan is going to celebrate or hire a PR person to write a press release about. It’s not why he does what he does, and besides, there is too much work to do to pause and throw a party.

Too much trash to pick up. Too many recyclables to sort through. Too many cans — tens of thousands of cans — that need to be collected and hauled off to the scrapyard.

A lifelong Philadelphian, Shanahan spent 31 years as a teacher at the city’s Roman Catholic High School. He retired six years ago. To some seniors, the ideal retirement conjures up images of a gated Florida community, major bingo and pickleball time, and 5 p.m. outings to Cracker Barrel for the early-bird special.

To Shanahan, it means he has more time to pursue his self-styled urban renewal project. One man can’t clean up a city, but watch Patrick Shanahan try.

“I love Philly. This could be a beautiful city if we just stop trashing it,” Shanahan told Stephanie Farr of the Philadelphia Inquirer recently.

Farr wrote a wonderful profile of Shanahan that I’d encourage you to check out.

A writer is nothing without a good story idea. Farr got hers from an unlikely source — Liam Shanahan, one of Patrick’s sons.

“For decades, he has quietly picked up trash and recyclables wherever he goes, making the city a cleaner place without recognition or fanfare,” Liam said. He thought it was a worthwhile story, and his instincts were 100 percent correct.

Although he lives in West Philadelphia, Patrick Shanahan grew up in South Philly and spent a good part of his youth in FDR Park, a sprawling green space not far from the sports complex that is home to the Eagles, Phillies, 76ers and Flyers.

He takes it personally when he sees garbage befouling the park, or any part of the city, whether it’s a Whopper wrapper or a diaper or a Coke bottle. Two or three times a week, he’ll pick stuff up, separating cardboard and paper, plastics, and bottles and cans, stuffing them in big black contractor bags and loading them into his 2017 Prius and carting them to the appropriate recycling facility. His commitment to reducing waste and cleaning up the environment is unstinting — and longstanding. When he wasn’t teaching business or coaching tennis at Roman Catholic, he was pioneering the school’s recycling program.

“I think I am much more aware of litter than the average person, according to my wife,” he said.

While Shanahan has ramped up his clean-up efforts in retirement, that wasn’t always the plan. One of his favorite avocations was working as a basketball referee, but ankle reconstruction surgery he underwent early in retirement didn’t have the desired outcome, making high-impact activity off-limits. Missing his refereeing work, feeling adrift, Shanahan found himself in the emotional doldrums for a time. His doctor recommended that he read Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychotherapist, Holocaust survivor and author of a book called Man’s Search for Meaning.

“His message is that everyone needs meaning in their life, you have to have a why when you wake up each day. What’s your why?” Shanahan said. “I needed to feel like I was contributing to the world, and I was still useful. … I could no longer play tennis or referee basketball, but I could get out of my car and clean up the park, and it felt good to do that.”

Shanahan doesn’t discriminate what kind of trash he will pick up, but he may do his best work with cans. There are small mountains of them in FDR Park, the most common being Modelo and Miller Lite.

“Miller Lite must not be too good because they all still have a few ounces left in them,” he told Farr, emptying the can as he spoke.

It’s impossible to know how many pounds of glass, paper products and plastics Shanahan has collected over the years, but cans are different. Every time he brings them to his preferred scrap-metal yard, SD Richman Sons, a fifth-generation Philadelphia business that has been collecting and recycling iron and metal for over 120 years, his haul gets weighed. They pay him 60 cents a pound. An empty 12-ounce aluminum can weighs about a half ounce, which means there are 32 cans per pound.

Every time Shanahan drops off a load, SD Richman gives him a receipt. For six years he has saved every one of them in a plastic cashew jar. One recent delivery amounted to 57 pounds, earning Shanahan $34. It pushed his lifetime total over 6,000 pounds

If that was supposed to be a milestone, Patrick Shanahan didn’t get the memo.

Summer will bring more people to FDR Park, and the heat will bring more beverages. Soon, Shanahan will have removed 200,000 cans from the streets and parks of the city he loves. Four tons is on the scrap-metal horizon. He understands some people might think that keeping up with trash in a big city is a hopeless undertaking, but he told Farr he sees it a different way.

“It reminds me of a great quote: ‘It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,’” he said. “Of course, in this situation, the darkness is litter, so we can sit around and say how dirty Philly is or just do something about it.

“If you light a candle, and I light a candle, before you know it, it’s not so dark.

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The No. 1 men’s tennis player in the world has spent most of the last two years doing a convincing impersonation of The Most Unbeatable Athlete in sports. Okay, maybe not in all of sports. Mondo Duplantis, the Swedish pole vaulter, broke the world record for the 15^th consecutive time in March (6.31m, or 20 feet, 8 ¼ inches) and hasn’t lost since February 2019, a run of 38 competitions. That’s insane.

But in the tennis realm, 24-year-old Jannik Sinner, a 6-foot-3, 170-pound Italian with blistering groundstrokes and a beanpole physique, has been the most consistent thing this side of a metronome. So it was a surprise to nobody that earlier today in the second round of the French Open, he was a few Sinner Winners from completing another center-court demolition and talking about his 31^st consecutive victory in an on-court interview.

You would expect nothing less, especially given that his opponent, Argentina’s Juan Manuel Cerundolo, is ranked No. 56 in the world and came in at odds as high as 100-1.

And then, out of seemingly nowhere, came Le Deluge . . . a deluge not of water, but lost points, 18 in a row at one juncture, Sinner collapsing – figuratively and almost literally – before the eyes of the stunned crowd at Roland Garros Stadium. And that’s how certain victory morphed into a mind-boggling 3-6, 2-6, 7-5, 6-1, 6-1 defeat.

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With Carlos Alcaraz, the two-time defending champion, out with a wrist injury, Sinner was a prohibitive favorite to win on the burnt-orange clay of Paris for the first time. This would complete Sinner’s career Grand Slam and, given his youth, continue his march on the path to all-time greatness. Then the withering heat hit him like a mallet over the head. It was 84 degrees at the start of the match, and climbed to 90. No, it’s not Death Valley in July, but in a sport as grueling as tennis, it’s no fun.

“I feel sorry for him because he deserved to win a lot of matches, and of course he was deserving to win this match, but then I don’t know what happened,” Cerundolo said afterwards.

Sinner was four points from victory at 5-1 in the third when his body began to lock up. He had struggled in the heat en route to his title at the Australian Open in January, getting a reprieve when the roof at Rod Laver Stadium was closed. There would be no reprieve at Roland Garros. In the searing midday sun, Cerundolo held at love and then broke Sinner at love, and by the time the lost-point streak hit 18, the score was 0-40. Sinner bent over and looked as if he might collapse. He called for the trainer and departed for the locker room because he felt dizzy. Medical staff took his blood pressure and chccked him out.

Would the brief respite give him new life? Sinner was serving for the match and if he could somehow find a way to hang on, the match was still on his racket. He could not hang on. Cerundolo broke again, going on to win 18 of the next 20 games. Sinner began to play more drop shots, to serve and volley, doing everything he could to shorten points. The left-handed Cerundolo did just the opposite, playing brilliant defense and extending rallies as long as possible.

Sinner battled valiantly, but was nowhere near himself. He bent over on the clay repeatedly. He used a handhold fan on changeovers. He put ice bags on his neck. His body was in full revolt, and by the end of the fifth set, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Sinner would become the first No. 1 seed to lose this early at the French since Andre Agassi in 2000.

On match point, Sinner tried one last drop shot. Cerundolo darted in from the baseline. He hit an approach into the open court. Sinner could only watch. The turnabout was done. In his press conference afterward, Sinner was somber but as classy as ever, crediting Cerundolo with playing a smart, solid match, and refusing to blame the conditions.

“This is the sport,” he said. “It was nothing against the heat. Nothing against the weather. It was just me. I couldn’t find my energy today.”

Dear Readers: This one is for paid subscribers — the pieces I write between Saturdays, whenever a story finds me and won't let go. Free subscribers get every Saturday post without exception. If you want everything else too, here's how to join us.

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Bryan Torres began his professional baseball career during the Obama administration. He was 17 years old. He signed with the Milwaukee Brewers out of Academia Cristiana Elohim High School in Puerto Rico, and reported directly to the Dominican Summer League.

A small kid with the same outsized dreams that every young player has when they sign with a big-league organization, Torres had no idea about the arduous road he was about to embark on. It wasn’t so much long and winding as it was endless. Or so it seemed. His 11-year odyssey through the minors, Caribbean leagues and independent ball spanned three organizations, 913 games, 3,174 at-bats, and 1,006 hits. His stops included Helena, Montana, Springfield, Missouri and two years in Franklin, Wisconsin, where he played in an independent league for the Milwaukee Milkmen. With the Milkmen, he hit .370 one season, .374 the other.

You couldn’t blame him for wondering, What else do I need to do?

“I’m not going to lie, at one moment, I thought I’d retire,” Torres said. “In that moment, I said I’m gonna give myself a chance. I’m gonna do that 100%, like everything I can. And I just didn’t give my 100, I gave my 200%.

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Readers of a certain age will recognize the items pictured above. They were known as tickets. Not e-tickets. Just tickets.

They were small, rectangular pieces of cardboard that you could hold in your hand or tack to a bulletin board or stick in your wallet or purse. You could show them to your friends, and you could even smell them if you felt so moved.

(I was so moved once. It was 1969. I was one of the lottery winners to get Rolling Stones tickets for their stop at Madison Square Garden. The day the tickets arrived in the mail, I opened the envelope and took a sniff. Don’t ask me why. They smelled good.)

For most of recorded time, if you wanted to go to a sports event, museum, concert or movie theatre, tickets would be your means of entry. You put down your money and were handed one of these pieces of cardboard. Your main job was to make sure you didn’t lose it, because if you did, you would not be admitted to anything.

Suppose you were the holder of the above ticket dated Aug. 17, 1979. It was the 63^rd home game of the year for the Yankees, a Friday night against the Minnesota Twins. (“My Sharona” by The Knack was about to begin a six-week run at the top of the pop charts, but I digress.)

Having invested your $7, you would’ve had the ticket ripped in half by the ticket-taker and then proceeded through the turnstile, making sure you held on to your half-ticket — commonly known as a stub. Stubs were important because, apart from being keepsakes, they were also your “Rain Check.” It said so right on the face of it. If a squall had descended on the Bronx that night, forcing the postponement of the game, you would’ve been entitled to attend the game at such time it was replayed. If you lost the rain check, sorry. You’d be out of luck.

The good news was that the weather was fine, and from your seat directly behind home plate in Section 20, Box 286G, you would’ve had a splendid view of Reggie Jackson’s home run off Twins starter and former New York Met, Jerry Koosman. Not so good, at least for the home team, was that they lost, 5-2, as Koosman pitched something called a complete game, meaning that he not only started the game, he finished it.

Tickets had numerous advantages: The biggest one is the reason I am writing this. They did not have to be uploaded, downloaded, frontloaded or backloaded. They did not require apps or digital wallets. The little piece of cardboard was all you needed. It was almost like magic. You presented the ticket, and in you went.

Alas, tactile tickets have gone the way of single-admission doubleheaders.

A couple of days ago, my wife’s cousin, Ted, a swell and generous guy, invited a group of family and friends to get a private tour of Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park and Museum, then attend that night’s game against the Toronto Blue Jays.

(In the museum, we were allowed to hold — but not swing — an actual bat used by Babe Ruth. It was 45 ounces and looked like a small telephone pole.)

Babe Ruth hit some of his 714 home runs with this bat. That’s 714 more than I hit in a long baseball/softball career, though I could run fast and stretched quite a few singles into doubles.

The tour and the game were separate tickets . . . e-tickets. This required me to download the MLB Ballpark app on my phone, as well as the Ticketmaster app. Ted emailed the tickets to me, at which point it was on me to hit the ‘Accept ticket’ button and then go find them in the MLB Ballpark app. Except I had no tickets — for the tour or the game — in that app. Then I checked Ticketmaster and couldn’t find them there, either.

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I told Ted about the situation, and he texted me a YouTube video telling me how to get tickets through MLB Ballpark. I followed the directions, and still had no tickets. Finally, after multiple refreshes of the Ticketmaster app, the tickets landed. I’m still not sure how or why.

Now, I must tell you that in most respects I am a fully functioning human being. Past my prime, for sure, but still functioning. I dress and bathe myself. I mow the lawn and change overhead light bulbs. I take out garbage and recycling and even flatten my cardboard. I love to cook and have yet to poison anyone. Recipes, I can follow them quite well.

Instructions for e-tickets, not so much. I don’t know what my problem is. Maybe it’s anxiety. Actually, I am sure it’s anxiety. Every time someone transfers me a ticket, I am convinced I will hit the wrong button or send it to the wrong place and then never see it again after I accept it. In my experience, if you expect a poor outcome, very often you will get it.

“It’s easy,” my wife tells me. “Once you accept the tickets, you just put them in your Apple wallet and they will always be there when you need them.” She is very big on putting train tickets, airplane tickets, everything, in her Apple wallet. She always seems to find them.

I do not.

The last time we traveled to England to see our daughter, Samantha, my wife was mildly annoyed that I stopped at the airline kiosk to print out a boarding pass.

“I don’t understand why you don’t just put it in your Apple wallet,” she said.

“I like to have a hard copy,” I said. “What if my phone acts weird and I can’t access it? It just gives me peace of mind to have something I can hold onto.”

What I was thinking, but did not say, was, Why don’t you take care of your wallet, and I’ll take care of mine?

Of course, I could’ve also printed out the tickets from cousin Ted at home, but I believe self-improvement is important and that it was time to stop being such a Luddite and learn how to do this already. At some point, I’ll have an e-ticket waiting for me in my email and no access to a printer. Then what? The other night at the Stadium, I didn’t want to be the only one in our 12-person group standing there at Gate 2 holding a piece of paper with a QR code. (Did you know that QR stands for Quick Response? I didn’t until just now.)

As we prepared to enter, everyone held up their phones, had them scanned and breezed through. When it was my turn, I only saw the game ticket — not the pre-game tour ticket — in my wallet.

I was sure I had downloaded both. I saw them in my wallet, two of them, before I got to the Stadium.

I knew I should’ve printed them out at home, I thought helpfully.

The whole party was waiting on me now. I refreshed and refreshed. Nothing. My anxiety was ramping up. I closed the wallet, opened Ticketmaster, and somehow, the digital gods were with me and both tickets were there. I was in. Let the tour begin.

Later, I shared my e-ordeal with Ted and told him how much I miss real tickets. He said that at the University of Connecticut, where he is a season-ticket holder for men’s basketball, they give you an option to have your tickets printed out and mailed.

“I’d be all over that,” I said. “Did you go for it?”

“No,” he said. “They wanted $50 extra. It’s easier to just have them on my phone.”

A little programming news . . Today, and every Saturday until the end of time (or at least until midtown Manhattan is free of traffic and Washington, D.C., is populated by elected officials who really care about you), I will be posting a piece that will be free to all subscribers. Additional posts, which will be timely and possibly compelling, will go up during the week, though only to the paid subscribers. If you want to consider joining that ever-growing fold, well, we’d love to have you.

Think about it. Enjoy your Saturday. And I hope you like this piece on a remarkable author named Eileen Bellew.

She never wanted to write a book. She certainly never wanted to write this book. But for the better part of the last three years, Eileen Bellew did just that, sitting at a small wooden desk in a room with walls the color of sea foam. The room is just off the kitchen in her home in Pearl River, New York, a place that has seen the best that life has to offer, and the worst. She’d open her laptop and look out the window at the birds and the rose bush in the front yard, and painstakingly put down words that chronicle her love, her loss, her PTSD, her crippling grief and anxiety, but also her strength and resolve, and her determination to leave readers with something positive and empowering.

“No matter what trauma life hands you, life lessons of resilience, hope, and happiness can ultimately be learned and felt,” Bellew says. “And maybe in the end, we don’t have any control over it all, so find your rainbows . . . they are waiting for you if you are open to receiving them.”

Eileen Bellew’s book is called After John Jumped: The True Story of a Family’s Rise from the Ashes. It is a jarring title and it is told with jarring candor, tracing the beautiful life she shared with her husband, John, and their four young children, ages 6, 3, 2 and 5 months, until it was shattered in the early-morning hours of January 23, 2005.

John Bellew, a former bond trader on Wall Street, left the finance world to become a firefighter because he longed to serve people and save lives, to find meaning in his vocation. He wasn’t supposed to work that day, but a blizzard the night before made it impossible for the scheduled firefighters to make it to the house — Engine 46, Ladder 27 — in the South Bronx. John stayed to cover for them. He told Eileen he’d get home as soon as he could to take the kids sledding.

Dawn broke frigid with light snow and wind gusts up to 45 MPH. The temperature was 17 degrees, but it felt much colder. The alarm in the station house sounded just before 8 a.m. Ladder 27 was one of three companies that were initially called. The fire started on the third floor of a tenement at 236 East 178^th St. Before it was under control, some 150 firefighters and 35 pieces of equipment would be on the scene. Everything seemed to go awry from the start. The street was unplowed so it took the trucks extra time to get there. The wind was a wicked accelerant. The nearest hydrant turned out to be frozen. Six firefighters raced up the stairs, into the blaze. They were searching for residents on the fourth floor when the fire flashed through a closed door. The building had been illegally subdivided, and the drywall partitions left the firefighters trapped, with no access to a fire escape. The fire was raging, the temperatures approaching 800 degrees. The options were getting burned to death or jumping. All six firefighters jumped. Four of them survived but sustained severely disabling, career-ending injuries. (One, Joseph Di Bernardo, would die six years later from complications related to the jump.) Two of them did not: Lieut. Curtis Meyran, the commanding officer of Ladder 27, and John Bellew, who was the driver of the truck (or chauffeur, in firefighter parlance) that day. He only went in when he realized how bad things were. Both men died of massive trauma.

That same day, firefighter Richard Sclafani perished in a two-alarm fire in Brooklyn. It was one of the deadliest days in FDNY history, and the worst since Sept. 11, 2001. It became known as Black Sunday.

Eileen Bellew has suffered enough loss to last several lifetimes. She found her father dead of a heart attack when she was 16 years old. Two of her sisters died in middle age. Now her husband and the father of their four kids was gone. She had an understandable reaction.

“I don’t want to be surprised ever again,” she says.

Bellew did not write After John Jumped to throw a 313-page Pity Party for herself. Quite the opposite. The inspiration for it came from her daughter, Katreana. She was 2 years old when her father died. She is 23 now, a graduate of NYU and the author of a screenplay, Black Sunday: Trial By Fire, that is currently under development. In writing the script, Katreana Bellew had questions for her mother, scores of them, about what kind of man her father was, what happened that day, about the ill-fated decision by the FDNY in 2000 to take away the rope system every firefighter was equipped with, partly because the belief was that after 10 years or so the ropes were prone to fraying and were no longer safe. She wanted to know everything. Answering her daughter’s questions got Eileen Bellew thinking about telling the story in her own words, fully and authentically, instead of through the teary-widow soundbites she’d been reduced to in an endless procession of TV interviews.

It was also her chance to tell people about the big-hearted man with ice-blue eyes she fell in love with. The man behind FDNY Badge No. 4915.

“It brings me so much joy that readers will find out more about John,” she says.

Brielle, Jack, Katreana and Kieran Bellew — John and Eileen’s kids — aren’t big fans of their mother’s choice of book title. They think it makes it sound as if their father committed suicide. But for Eileen, it was a non-negotiable issue. Even 21 years later, the anguish she feels about what her husband’s final moments in that deadly inferno must’ve been like is almost too much to bear.

“It has to be that God took him after he jumped – that his soul was gone the moment he left that window,” she says. “In order for me to live life, it can’t be anything else.”

Perhaps the bravest parts of the book are when Bellew explores the depths of her PTSD and the way it manifested itself in her anxiety. Gripped with fear that something bad would happen to one of the kids, she worried about everything. She held fire drills at home and set up fire ladders by their bedroom windows. When Brielle was invited to a slumber party, and Eileen found out it was in a basement, she texted the mother to make sure there were two routes of egress. As the kids got older, she equipped them with pepper spray and a special glass-breaking hammer in case they drove off a bridge and had to escape their car when they were underwater. When Kieran and Jack were baseball pitchers, Eileen insisted they wear padding to protect their hearts in the event that a line drive came up the middle. Later, when she learned that there was a protective skull cap for pitchers, Eileen made sure Kieran wore that, too. She writes about all of this in a chapter called “Living With an Anxietyholic.”

She can laugh about it now.

“My kids show me so much compassion, love and patience,” she writes. “They understand my disability and tolerate me. They saw firsthand what PTSD does to a person’s mental health, yet they accepted me for who I have become and handled my craziness with beautiful compassion.”

Grief has no timeline, and neither does recovery from trauma. Eileen Bellew is immensely grateful for the people who’ve stayed by her side, and for the kindness and skill of the therapist who has done so much to help her get her life back. She has found love again, with a man named Kevin Houston, who lost his own spouse, Liz, after a prolonged illness. Together, they have seven grown children. Houston was there the other night when Eileen gave a talk about her journey and signed copies of the book.

“It’s such a tribute to how courageous she is,” Houston says.

Kevin Houston and Eileen Bellew were married on Feb. 20, 2012. That’s a story unto itself. The ABC program Live! With Kelly had a contest called “Hawaiian Dream Wedding Getaway” and viewers were encouraged to submit their stories for consideration. Kevin Houston, who in a previous life led the nation in scoring as an All-American point guard at Army, wrote a letter.

He began:

Houston’s letter was a winner. The official announcement came on Jan. 23, 2012 — seven years to the day that John Bellew jumped out of a burning building in the Bronx. Kelly Ripa was a bridesmaid at the wedding. Mark Conseulos walked Eileen’s mother down the aisle. Eileen is convinced John orchestrated the whole thing.

After years of being furious with God, Eileen Bellew says she has new-found spirituality. Whenever she sees a rainbow, she takes it as a sign from John. She can feel his presence, feel him looking out for her and the kids. Not even three months after John’s death, Eileen, who was having an awful time with insomnia, looked up at the foot her bed one night and saw John’s silhouette. He didn’t say anything, but it was unmistakably him. She is 100 percent positive. A feeling of serenity and safety came over her in that moment, and then, as much as she wanted to stay awake and make it last, she felt more tired than she’d ever been in her life, as if she had no choice but to go to sleep. She closed her eyes. It was April 15, and it would’ve been John Bellew’s 38^th birthday.

Purchase the book for the whole story here.

It’s not often that iconic sports figures in two different sports – Hall of Famers both – compete against one another. But stick with us here and we’ll tell you about it, and in a timely fashion. It happened 107 years ago today . . . May 11, 1919.

But first, let’s set the scene. The big-league baseball season started late in 1919 because The Great War had just ended. The New York Yankees were home in the Polo Grounds against the Washington Nationals, in the first American League game ever contested in New York on a Sunday. The previous game had been washed out and this was no beach day, either. It wasn’t raining, but it was sufficiently cold and damp that one newspaper account said the 3,000 fans who braved the elements had “dragged their furs out of mothballs.”

Still, it was an exciting time in the young life of the Yankees’ new right fielder. The son of a tailor from Decatur, Ill, the kid was a 24-year-old switch-hitter who impressed the club with his speed and arm and made the team out of spring training. Manager Miller Huggins had him batting leadoff on this day. The rookie’s name was George Stanley Halas. The hurler he was leading off against was the Nationals’ legendary righthander, Walter (Big Train) Johnson. Johnson had long since established himself as the premier pitcher in the game. In 1913 and 1914, he was a combined 69-19, with 63 complete games. In 1914 alone, Johnson went 36-7 with a 1.14 ERA and 243 strikeouts. By the time his 21-year career was complete, Johnson had 417 victories and a record 110 shutouts. He may have never been more dominant than he was that gloomy Sunday along the Harlem River.

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Twenty-five years ago, we moved into our dream house in a hamlet not far from the Hudson River. It was built in 1860. We know this because the year was etched into a beam we found beneath a piece of clapboard. The house is a white colonial with Victorian flourishes, including a columned porch, dentil moulding and scalloped trim.

I love history and old things, and it’s cool to live in a place that predates the Civil War. The house made me weak in the knees when I first saw it - that’s how much I loved it. And yet, when we moved in, I had a stubborn case of Envy.

Lilac Envy.

Yeah, I know. How absurd and petty can you get? Go ahead and tell me this is the epitome of a first-world problem. How can I argue?

I mean, Lilac Envy?

Really?

Our property had two lovely dogwoods, a cherry tree, an apple tree and a clematis plant climbing up a lamp post. Two azaleas, red and pink, gave seasonal color to the front yard, and a row of forsythia provided a few weeks of bright yellow in the early spring. We had a horticultural bounty on .4 acres. But there was not a lilac to be found. I love lilacs. They don’t bloom for more than a couple of weeks in these parts, but when they do, it’s an explosion of deep purple and lavender and white, and the fragrance is almost impossibly sweet, way better than anything you could ever find in a bottle.

The envy? Just beyond the hedge that divides our property from our neighbors were 10 or 12 fully grown, bursting-with-blooms lilac trees. They were stunning, and I won’t lie; I coveted my neighbors’ lilacs.

The coveting didn’t get too out of hand, mostly because our neighbors, generous and kind-hearted people, told us we could help ourselves to the blooms whenever we felt so moved. I felt so moved often, but what I wanted more than anything was my own row of lilac trees.

So on the first Mother’s Day we were in the house, our three kids and I gave my wife a gift we knew would touch her: a couple of little lilac trees. (Am I clever or what?) They were only three or four feet tall, with no more than a bloom or two, but she was delighted, and that was all that mattered. I dug a couple of holes, tossed in some peat moss, plopped them in the ground. I gave them a good soaking of water and then took a few steps back to take them in in all their scrawniness. I am no expert gardener, by any means. I wondered if these humble sprigs would ever attain the size and splendor of my neighbors’. I doubted it.

Over the next few years, I planted a few more lilacs in the same row as the first two. One was a Bloomerang, so-called because it blooms more than once, and two were the ‘Sensation’ varietal, with white fringe around magenta flowers, making them look as if they were dipped in lace.

So here we are in 2026, and another Mother’s Day is upon us, and one thing I can promise you is that I won’t be giving my wife a lilac, because we have a hedgerow of them, almost 20 feet tall, with hundreds of blooms and a bouquet that fills the whole backyard. Not to brag, but they are just as redolent and majestic as the ones that triggered my envy all those years ago.

This is not a story about lilacs, though. It’s a story about growth, about how in so many instances it happens incrementally, imperceptibly, without us ever being aware it is happening. Your nails are growing as you read this. Your hair, too. You don’t experience it in the moment, but then a day comes when you need a nail clipper or a trip to the barber shop or salon, or you are blowing out a whole bunch more candles on your birthday cake. Little, lapping waves eventually become high tide, even if in the moment each little lap doesn’t seem significant. I remember talking to my late father-in-law, the great Edward J. Will Jr., about his experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. He had 45 years sobriety when he passed, and he’d tell you that the only way it happened was choosing not to have a drink one day at a time. You can’t get decades of sobriety all at once. That’s not how it works. When he was newly sober, he wasn’t sure he’d get through the afternoon. He stopped worrying about whether he’d ever have the months or years or decades of sobriety that his friends in the program had. Instead, he decided not to have a drink today. His growth in sobriety happened without fanfare, or parades. He simply kept at it. His 45 years were richly earned.

“The best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago,” said Eliud Kipchoge, the iconic Kenyan marathon runner. “The second-best time to plant a tree is today.”

Which brings me back to my lilacs. After my initial gloom that they would ever amount to anything, I stopped obsessing about it and just let life happen. Let growth happen. Every few years, I would stop and notice how the lilacs weren’t seedlings anymore and then continue on my way, but the other day, for some reason, the marvel of growth hit me like a tsunami. I was walking through the backyard when my senses stirred to life. The redolence of the lilacs was overpowering. The canopy of blooms, purple majesty embroidered with white lace, towered over me. It blew me away.

How did that happen? I thought. How did something once so humble become this?

It’s a question I ask myself often when I am starting on a new book. For me, few things are more terrifying than Day 1 of the process, when your screen is blank and you have 100,000 words to go and you have all these phrases and thoughts swirling in your brain. You have no idea where to go, or where to hide. You are all but paralyzed. You think about how you’ve should’ve been a plumber, and convince yourself that no writer has ever felt this overwhelmed when the truth is that every writer or painter or sculptor has very much the same feelings at the outset of the creative process.

So what do I do? I set the bar low, really low. I say to myself, “What would be a sentence?” It doesn’t have to be a good sentence. It might be an awful sentence, and it might never appear in published form, but I peck it out anyway, and then I write another sentence that might be even worse. I have no clue where this is going, but it is going, and that’s way better than being stuck. When I get in a groove, I will often write 3,000 or 3,500 words in a day, but when I’m just starting out, I tell myself, Hey, no pressure. Five hundred words would be fine.

If you write 500 words a day, in two days you will have 1,000 words. In 20 days, you will have 10,000 words. You get out of the way and let the growth continue, and in 200 days, you will be typing, “The End,” words that are almost as sweet as the smell in my backyard.

Denise Willi was in Raleigh, N.C. Monday night and attended Game 2 of the Carolina Hurricanes-Philadelphia Flyers playoff series, because of course she did. She did not know the Carolina Hurricanes existed until a couple of days ago. She does not know a blue line from a red line, or a cross-check from a bank check.

No matter.

This was a chance to do something she’d never done before: attend a Stanley Cup playoff game. It was a chance to have an adventure. OK, hopping on a 75-minute flight to North Carolina is not quite as exotic as backpacking in Tibet and the Himalayas, which is what she did after we got engaged in 1987, but you get the idea. I’ve learned a few things in 37 years of marriage to this person. At the top of the list is that there is no one I’ve ever met who can surpass her love for trying new things, finding new adventures and, oh yes, going to new and wonderful places.

“There is so much beauty in the world. I want to see it all,” Denise says. It isn’t just chatter. Most people have a bucket list. My wife has so many buckets they could fill a storage unit.

Buying the hockey ticket to Game 2 was a spontaneous decision. Our daughter, Alex, was in Raleigh, covering the game for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and our son, Sean, lives in Raleigh with his new bride, Caroline. In Denise’s mind, with portable work and a chance to see 67% of her offspring, this trip was a no-brainer. She could’ve gone to a sports bar and watched the game on TV, or in her hotel room, or not watched it at all.

But why would she do that when she could buy a ticket and immerse herself in the crimson chaos that grips Raleigh’s Lenovo Center when the Hurricanes play? (The chaos was especially intense Monday night, because Game 2 turned into a taut overtime affair, won by the home team.)

Denise’s wanderlust started more or less at birth. She lived in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela before she was even a teenager. She spoke three languages – Spanish, Portuguese and English – when most of her peers were plodding along with one. Her father, Ed, was a U.S. Naval officer at port in Vina del Mar, Chile when he met his future wife, Cecilia. She was smart and charming, a dark-eyed beauty whose total knowledge of America consisted of what she learned watching Doris Day movies. Cecilia thought Americans spent most of their lives frolicking on the beach. For Ed it was love at first sight.

Ed worked in the import-export business, finding U.S. markets for South American food producers. There was always a surplus of garlic and onions around the house. Traveling was another staple, to Patagonia and Peru and other South American destinations. It was thoroughly in character when, as a college senior, Denise signed up for an ocean-going program called Semester At Sea, visiting Japan, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Spain and Morocco, among other countries, in 100 days.

As her parents got older, Denise accompanied them to Russia, China and Croatia. Later trips took them to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Cambodia and Myanmar. I traveled a lot for work, and whenever the destination captured her fancy (which was basically always), she’d pack up three little kids and fly overseas to join me. In 1999, while I was covering the Davis Cup in Santander, Spain, Alexandra, Sean and Samantha - ages 6, 4, and 1 - were splashing around in the Mediterranean Sea. At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy, five of us were crammed into a room meant for one in the breathtaking alpine village of Sestriere. Seven-year-old Samantha slept in a bed built into a wall. Denise and the kids probably saw as many Olympic events as I did. Every morning, Denise would bring the whole entourage into this little coffee bar called La Torteria, and every day, the owner would boom out a hearty “Bongiorno” to his new American friends. Denise was the person who made it all work.

When the kids started leaving the nest, Denise had her share of stateside adventures, too. She joined a cycling group and biked the length of the Florida Keys, 100 miles from start to finish, and did another 100-miler through the horse country of Kentucky. She had a hip replacement this winter. Ten weeks later, she hiked six miles and regularly surpasses 10,000 steps a day, hitting the gym, doing pilates, you name it. My brother likes to call Denise “a force of nature.” He’s not wrong.

Of course, it requires free time and disposable income to embark on all these adventures, but it’s not as if she is gallivanting the world without a care. Her mother, now 88, has had dementia for more than a dozen years. It breaks Denise’s heart a little bit every day, but she remains a deeply devoted daughter, just as she was with her father, who passed eight years ago. She has a fulltime sales job in the honey business (she’ll give you a sweet deal) and regularly must manage a high-maintenance husband who complains about how hard writing is and who does not quite share her zest for excursions. When your DNA commands you to do, and see, everything you possibly can, such complications are proverbial molehills. Just a few weeks ago, Denise put together a trip to San Jose and Seattle so we could watch Samantha play with the U.S. Women’s National Team, and then the plot thickened.

“I’ve always wanted to see the Canadian Rockies. I think I’ve found the perfect way to do it,” she said. The plans were hatched, the tickets booked. Off we headed to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we boarded a train called The Rocky Mountaineer, which took us on a two-day, 20-hour excursion through snow-capped mountains and raging rivers and villages so tiny they may not even be on a map, and natural beauty that seemed almost make-believe. The terminus was the town of Banff. More snow-capped mountains, in every direction, made it feel as though we were in a cocoon. When the train pulled in, two elk were grazing in front of a bank. The grizzly bear we saw on the trip wasn’t quite so bold. It was all new and exhilarating. Denise Willi was so happy. Other adventures will follow. They always do. It is a wonderful way to live life, don’t you think

?

Today we depart from our usual programming to talk about writing and self-knowledge and having the courage to chase your dreams. Please join me.

The word meretricious means “gaudy” or “excessively showy.” It can be applied to costume jewelry or a tricked-out sports car or anything else that tries too hard to draw attention to itself. Writing for my college newspaper a few years – or was it decades? – ago, I went out of my way to use “meretricious” in an article. I don’t recall the context, but I can tell you what my motivation was.

I wanted to show off. I wanted to look smart, dazzling readers with my polysyllabic vocabulary and command of obscure words. It was my own effort to try too hard, and to embarrass myself in the process.

Two hallmarks of good writing are economy and clarity. Perhaps the cornerstone rule of The Elements of Style, Strunk and White’s classic instructional book, is the one that states: “Omit needless words.”

The authors go on:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.

A corollary to this rule is to avoid what I did in trotting out “meretricious,” i.e.grandstanding. Apart from insulting the reader, all grandstanding does is clog up the flow and muddy the narrative waters. It is a telltale sign of an insecure writer who feels compelled to inject himself or herself into the story. I should know, because I did it for way too long.

This morning brought a fresh reminder of what a joy it is to read the work of a writer who never tries too hard, who stays out of the way and lets the story tell itself. It came as I read about the 2025 winners of the National Headliner Awards, a journalism contest that goes back almost a century. One of the honorees in the feature writing category was Alex Coffey of the Philadelphia Inquirer. She is my daughter. You may find it insufferable when a parent brags about his/her kid, but I hope you will cut me a bit of slack here.

Alex is a young journalist who already has a shelf full of awards and distinctions, among them having her work included in the Best American Sports Writing anthologies in back-to-back years (that’s two more times than her father, if you are scoring at home). Awards are nice, but what I am most proud about is how Alex continually finds fresh stories and tells them with a clear, spare voice and an understated elegance. She honors the people and places she writes about with the thoroughness of her reporting and the care she takes in listening.

Coming out of The College of William & Mary, Alex knew she wanted to write but wasn’t sure what direction to take it. She had a couple of PR internships and then got hired to work in the communications department of the Baseball Hall of Fame. From there she joined the Seattle Mariners’ baseball information department. It was a turning point in her life because with each unfulfilled day, Alex came to realize that she did not want to do public relations. She wanted to be a storyteller. She wanted work that would reward her curiosity and creativity and her ability to connect with people in a deep, authentic way. So she quit her job, worked as a barista and in a hair salon, and started to freelance. She reached out to Jon Wertheim, of Sports Illustrated and 60 Minutes fame, who also started in PR. Jon basically told her, “You can do this.” Alex bet on herself and won big.

One piece that earned Alex the National Headliners Award was a poignant story about the people trying to save the iconic but decaying Philadelphia gym once owned by the late heavyweight champion, Joe Frazier. Another was about a young basketball coach. It wasn’t easy to write. Alex Coffey did it beautifully. This is how she began:

WASHINGTON — When Pat Behan watches a Bucknell basketball game, his wife, Nataly, likes to look at his eyes. She can still see the intensity. They dart from his TV to his computer, to his TV, to his computer, as he dictates observations.

On a recent Saturday, Bucknell was playing American University in an arena two miles away. Behan was stretched out on his bed. A feeding tube was in his stomach, and two breathing tubes were in his throat.

An oxygen concentrator hummed in the background. A nearby monitor kept track of his pulse, beeping and flashing whenever his levels dropped below 90.

Five people (and one dog) were crammed inside this tiny D.C. apartment. Their mission: to keep Pat Behan alive. In May 2022, he was diagnosed with ALS at age 34. Since then, he has lost control of his muscles. He cannot move his hands or feet. He cannot smile or frown.

But his eyes and his mind have been spared, so he uses them. To coach.

(The story goes on from there. You should check it out.)

The most anticipated game of the women’s college-basketball season concluded with a dominant performance by South Carolina and a pathetic one by UConn coach Geno Auriemma. Instead of congratulating his counterpart, Dawn Staley, on her team’s victory, Auriemma behaved like a petulant child, angrily accusing Staley of not shaking his hand pre-game, precipitating an angry exchange and hijacking the celebratory moment so completely that it became a story that wouldn’t go away, even as UCLA overwhelmed South Carolina to capture its first NCAA title in the championship game.

It took two days for Auriemma to offer a tepid apology and four days for him to stop the hedging and do better:

“This morning, Dawn Staley and I spoke about our interaction after the game last Friday,” Auriemma said in a statement. “I apologized to Dawn, her staff and her team. I’ve lost more games in the Final Four than any coach in history. But Friday I lost something more important. I lost myself.

“Those who know me know I have nothing but respect and admiration for the game and the coaches who coach it. Dawn and her team deserved to win, and they deserved better from me.

“Women’s basketball deserved better. My university, my athletes, my former players and our fans deserved better. Dawn and I have agreed to move on, and we hope the focus will shift back to the growth in women’s basketball. The game deserves it.”

Staley, for her part, said she has a “great deal of respect for Geno and what he’s meant for this game. One moment doesn’t define a career, and it doesn’t change the impact he’s had on growing women’s basketball. The standard at UConn is what it is because of him, and that’s something this game has benefitted from.” She asked for everyone to “turn the page.”

That it took two tries and almost 100 hours for Auriemma to show genuine remorse will inevitably lead some to question his sincerity and believe he only issued apology No. 2 because he was ordered to. Nobody knows what’s in his heart but the man himself, so I will withhold judgment. What’s more interesting to me in all this is the liberating, life-changing power of an apology when it’s done right. (And the uselessness of it when it is not.)

So what is right? Maybe the best way to answer this is by calling out what is not right . . . the non-apology apology. You’ve heard them plenty of times:

“It was never my intention to hurt your feelings.”

“I’m sorry you took it that way.”

“If said something that was upsetting or offensive, I’m sorry.”

“I’m doing the best I can.”

“I’m sorry about what I happened. I’m just going through a hard time right now.”

In all of these examples, the apologizer is subtly shifting the blame back on the other person, absolving themselves of responsibility in the process. The problem isn’t me and my poor judgment or selfishness or quickness to anger; the problem is you for being overly sensitive, unreasonably demanding or unwilling to cut me a break.

Harriet Lerner is a clinical psychologist and the author of Why Won’t You Apologize? Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts.

Says Lerner, “A good apology is when we take clear and direct responsibility without a hint of evasion, blaming, obfuscation, (or) excuse-making - and without bringing up the other person’s crime sheet.”

In other words, it’s taking full ownership of our words and/or actions. Easier said than done, I know. Apart from self-awareness, it calls for bravery and a strong enough sense of self to shoulder the blame. That’s a lot but consider the benefits. Is it an accident that the core tenets of 12-step programs center on taking ovewrnship, allowing for “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” admitting out wrongs and making amends to people we may have hurt wherever possible? Making amends is different from making an apology, but both go a long way towards repairing relationships, rebuilding trust and setting us free from the damage brought on by guilt and shame.

In her book, The Power of Apology, author Beverly Engel calls apology “a way of showing respect and empathy for the wronged person” that is “also a way of acknowledging an act that, if otherwise left unnoticed, might compromise the relationship. Apology has the ability to disarm others of their anger and to prevent further misunderstandings. While an apology cannot undo harmful past actions, if done sincerely and effectively, it can undo the negative effects of those actions.

“Apology is crucial to our mental and even physical health,” Engel writes. “Research shows that receiving an apology has a noticeable, positive physical effect on the body. An apology actually affects the bodily functions of the person receiving it—blood pressure decreases, heart rate slows and breathing becomes steadier.”

I make many mistakes, so I’ve had a lot of practice at apologizing. I used to be a chronic non-apologizer, throwing out excuses and finding ways to explain away my screwups. I’ve gotten much better.

Awhile back, we were putting an addition on our house and having issues here and there with the builders. Right around the holidays there was a problem with the wood flooring we’d selected. I wanted to get it straightened out right away, so I called one of the builders at home. On Christmas Eve. He was an honorable, hardworking guy with a wife and two little kids. He wasn’t happy about the timing of my call, and I instantly knew he was 100 percent right. It was terrible judgment. The next time I saw him, I said, “I was totally out of line calling you on Christmas Eve. I’m really sorry.” He probably still thought I was a jerk, but it felt good to own my bad judgment.

I always feel better, lighter, after I apologize. Sometimes, it even has unexpected outcomes. Not long ago I was driving through a small upstate town and rolled through a stop sign. Seconds later, I saw a flashing red light behind me. It was a cop. He asked for my license and registration and said, “Do you know why I pulled you over?”

I could’ve given him some excuse about being distracted or fiddling with my GPS. I did not.

“Yes, officer,” I said. “I didn’t come to a full stop at the stop sign back there. I’m sorry.”

He handed me back my license and registration.

“Make sure you stop next time,” he said. “Have a good night.”

The Brooklyn Nets are one of the worst teams in the NBA. Their record is 18-58 going into tonight’s game at Barclays Center. They were effectively eliminated from playoff contention around Christmas. None of this has any bearing on how Chris Carrino goes about his work as the Nets’ radio play-by-play broadcaster, a job he has held for almost 25 years and performs with the humility of an everyman and the skill of a consummate craftsman.

Carrino, 55, is the 2026 recipient of the most prestigious accolade a basketball broadcaster can get, the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He will be officially inducted in August, accompanied by his wife, Laura, his son, Chris, his longtime broadcast partner, Tim Capstraw, and undoubtedly a slew of others. The Gowdy Award is given in recognition of his significant contributions to the game. World-class courage, and positivity to match, are not prerequisites, but Carrino will bring them along just the same.

“I’m telling you, he’s in the 1 percent club of the best,” Capstraw recently told a reporter from The Athletic. “People who are in the business all say it. That’s how high his talent is in terms of smoothness, capturing the moment and his humor.”

Ian Eagle, who will handle the play-by-play at the Final Four Saturday and Monday, is Carrino’s TV counterpart with the Nets.

“Chris understands painting the word picture on radio as well as anybody that’s ever done it,” Eagle told The Athletic. “His voice perfectly fits basketball play-by-play.”

To listen to Carrino call a game is to hear a pro who never makes it about himself, his delivery marked by clarity, economy and honesty. Net fans will tell you that even in a season in which losses have piled up faster than traffic on the Belt Parkway, Carrino and Capstraw’s banter, insights and wry exchanges make them a must listen. Carrino manages all this despite living for more than three decades with Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy (FSHD), a degenerative, muscle-wasting disease with no treatment and no cure.

Carrino was a seemingly healthy, athletic college kid at Fordham when he noticed something wasn’t right. His balance was a bit off. He would occasionally stumble and lose his balance, and found playing basketball and other sports he loved was getting more difficult. He was diagnosed at age 23, and almost from the outset, he decided he wasn’t going to feel sorry for himself or ask, “Why me?” He’d dreamed of being a professional broadcaster from the age of 10, when his father brought home a tape recorder. Carrino began to call games on his own, emulating such iconic voices as Marv Albert and Dick Enberg. One of the reasons he went to Fordham was the school’s storied legacy of producing top-tier broadcasters, from Vin Scully in the 1950s to an array of contemporary New York sports fixtures, Mike Breen, Bob Papa, Ryan Ruocco and Michael Kay among them. Marty Glickman, a 1936 Olympian who went on to become a legendary play-by-play man and mentor to young broadcasters, taught a course at Fordham and had a massive influence on Carrino, whose career was about to lift off when the genetic abnormality that brought on his Muscular Dystrophy manifested itself.

“It’s a scary world to begin with, and now this disease is put on top of it,” Carrino told an interviewer. “When the doctor said there’s nothing you can do, to me it was like, ‘Well, alright. I’m going to keep going and doing what I always did. We’ll take all the difficulties and all challenges as they come.’” His life became a race against the relentless onslaught of the disease.

“From the moment I was diagnosed with FSHD, I was trying to outrun the wheelchair,” Carrino said.

As his career flourished, Carrino worked hard to maintain the appearance of normalcy. For a long time he was able to conceal many of the worst symptoms, but by the age of 40, it wasn’t working anymore. That’s when his wife challenged him, telling him, “You have to share this with people now.” You don’t realize what an impact you can have, how you can become a beacon of hope for others who are afflicted with the disease, she said. Carrino knew she was right. The Chris Carrino Foundation for FSHD is now in its 15^th year and has raised several million dollars for research into treatments and a possible cure.

That conversation with Laura was a life-changing moment. Another one came in the winter of 2019. The Nets were in Toronto. It was snowing. Carrino didn’t want to risk falling so he and Capstraw decided to eat in the hotel restaurant. Carrino was finding it increasingly difficult to manage the steps to get on the Nets’ charters, and the team bus. Even getting dressed was an ordeal. The NBA travel grind is unrelenting. His outrunning days were nearing an end.

“What if I’m going to need a wheelchair?” Carrino asked Capstraw. “How am I going to do this?”

Capstraw – Carrino always calls him “Capper” - is much more than Carrino’s broadcast colleague. He’s a confidant, and a cherished friend. He looked at Carrino and said, “Well, you’re not going to quit. We’ll figure this out. We’ll find a way to do stuff.” Carrino realized his prideful resistance to having people see him in a wheelchair was making his life immeasurably more difficult. Having mobility would expand his world, and Laura and Capstraw and many others would be there if and when complications arose.

“It changed the framing of my life,” Carrino said.

Chris Carrino is wheelchair-bound now, and at peace with it, surrounded by people who love and care for him, and thrilled that his son has a promising broadcast future his own. A senior at Fordham, young Chris does play-by-play for football and basketball on WFUV. Father and son have even had a chance to work several Nets game together this season when Capstraw was called to the TV side. The thrill went both ways.

Chris Carrino x 2

Carrino has never forgotten Marty Glickman’s broadcasting mantra: “Consider the listener.” Glickman said it was the most important thing a radio play-by-play man can do. Carrino still thinks about Glickman’s words before every game. Now he is the one doing the mentoring, not just for his son, but for a roster of aspiring sportscasters who are learning their trade at WFUV under sports director Bobby Ciafardini.

“Chris is one of a kind,” Ciafardini said. “He has an amazing heart and is so generous with his time. He’s a gentleman in every sense of the word. Simply put, he’s not only a Hall of Fame broadcaster, but a Hall of Fame person.”

(For more information on how to support Chris Carrino’s mission, please visit www.chriscarrinofoundation.org. Proceeds from new subscribers to Coffey Grounds as a result of this story will be donated to the foundation.)

The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, the formal name of the iconic structure that has stood as a beacon of freedom and hope in New York Harbor for 140 years, will be torn down next month and replaced by a 600-foot gold likeness of First Lady Melania Trump.

Twice the size of the current Lady Liberty, the new structure will be part of President Donald Trump’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s birth in 1776.

“We’re going to have the greatest birthday party in history, and the new statue will become the most admired work of sculpture the world has ever seen,” Trump said. “It will be gleaming proof that America is indeed greater than ever before.”

The pedestal of the statue will bear the name “TRUMP” in block letters and will be repurposed into a movie theatre that will feature nonstop showings of Amazon Prime’s acclaimed documentary, also named “Melania.”

Trump cited two other reasons why the existing statue, a present to the U.S. from the people of France, needed to go, saying that “the green is tacky” and the U.S. no longer wants a gift from “a NATO deadbeat that won’t even help us open the Strait of Hormuz.”

Besides, he added, “Besides, Melania is way better looking.”

”

(Happy April Fool’s Day.)

Richie Alexander loves to fix things. Vacuum cleaners, computer printers, garden equipment - if there are moving parts or any sort of mechanical puzzle to solve, he is all over it. The idea of having someone else work on his stuff is abhorrent.

“Any chance to turn wrenches, he does,” Richie Alexander Jr. says.

Alexander Sr. is old school and proud of it, a poster person for self-reliance. He mows his own lawn. He plows his own driveway. He cuts wood for the wood-burning stove in the home he shares with his wife of 61 years, Kathy, in the Hudson Valley region of New York. You don’t call a plumber or an auto mechanic. You do the job yourself. You do it because you’ve always done it, even if you are 88 years old.

There is no secret Alexander Sr. has to share, no insight he cares to offer, about either his vitality or his ambitious daily to-do list. Sitting in the center of Hudson Valley Motorcycles, the business he started 60 years ago, he is surrounded by rows and rows of gleaming bikes. Next to him is his own model, a white 950-cc Ducati Desert X, the one he rides for 200 or 250 miles every Sunday, accompanied by a half-dozen fellow motorcycle lovers, winding through back roads in Putnam County and Dutchess County and points north, often into Connecticut and Massachusetts.

How many octogenarians are doing such a thing? Richie Alexander Sr., who could easily pass for someone 15 years younger, doesn’t know, or care, and sees nothing particularly remarkable about it.

“I don’t really have a comment about that,” he says. “I just know I feel more comfortable on a bike than I do walking.”

Alexander Sr. started riding shortly after he got out of the Air Force in 1964. A love affair was ignited and it still burns hot. He once biked 8,5000 miles, from the southwest corner of North Carolina to Las Vegas, eschewing interstates, meandering through one state after another, always on secondary roads, and smaller, because that’s what purists do. Interstates tend to be straight and direct. And boring. Making good time is not the point. “You want (roads) with corners,” Alexander says. He went from Washington, D.C. to the Pacific Coast when he was a young pup, in his 70s. For much of his life, Alexander has biked more than 20,000 miles a year. He is not one to wax eloquent about the sensory experiences he has on a bike, about the fresh air in his face and the feeling of freedom you get from being out in the open on a ribbon of a road. He’d much rather do it than analyze it.

“He’s a very straightforward gentleman,” says Vince Cook. “He’s not one to talk about himself. There’s not a lot of bluster to him.”

An earth science teacher for 28 years, Cook has been part of Alexander’s Sunday group for almost a decade. There are only one or two riders he’s ever known who can match Alexander’s love for the sport, or his skill at it.

“He’s absolutely a master rider. Age has nothing to do with it,” Cook says.

Richie Jr., who runs the dealership now and is a professional motorcycle racer on weekends, knows that it may seem reckless for an 88-year-old man to be riding a motorcycle, and admits to worrying about his father going on such long rides. But he also has an implicit trust in his father’s judgment.

“It’s his love and his passion, and it keeps him sharp,” Richie Jr. says.

Richie Alexander Sr.’s Ducati Desert X can go upwards of 125 MPH. It is not a threshold he is going to explore.

”I’m too old to worry about how fast it will go,” he says, with a smile.

Alexander Sr. says he’ll ride until it’s not safe anymore, and believes he will be the best judge of when that time will come. In the meantime, he’ll keep turning his wrenches, fixing his stuff and taking long Sunday rides with his friends on the back roads of New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts, the destination much less important than the journey.

Confession is a core practice among devout Catholics. I am not in that club (though I am a believer), but feel compelled to confess anyway: I wrote the piece below for the March 17 edition of Coffey Grounds and somehow never hit the send button. Now I know why the reader response was non-existent. Was this a lame mistake? It certainly was. But I am owning it, and now I feel a little lighter.

Here’s the story of St. Patrick. Pretend it’s three days ago, please.

As the Guinness flows and the pubs fill and vast swaths of the world turn green today, we pause to honor the godly man responsible for all the fuss. He is the patron saint of Ireland, quite a feat considering that St. Patrick, among the most renowned Christian figures the world over, was not even Irish. He has some story to tell.

Born to a well-to-do family in Roman Britain in 387 AD, St. Patrick’s given name was Maewyn Succat. (He became St. Patrick only after he was ordained as a bishop.) He was captured on the grounds of his family’s estate by a marauding band of pirates and taken to Ireland around the age of 16 (though some accounts say that he was 14.) For six years, he worked as a slave, herding and tending to sheep, alone in the pasture with his worrisome thoughts and uncertainty about what would become of his life. Ireland then was a land of pagans and Druids, ancient Celtic spiritual sages, and though the young man was not a particularly devout Christian, he turned to prayer for comfort and hope, as he wrote in his memoir, The Confession:

“The love of God and his fear grew in me more and more, as did the faith, and my soul was rosed, so that, in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers and in the night, nearly the same. I prayed in the woods and on the mountain, even before dawn. I felt no hurt from the snow or ice or rain.”

In a vision he believed was straight from God, Patrick was told to head towards the coast and return to Britain. A ship would be waiting for him. He escaped from his captors and walked 200 miles from County Mayo and, arriving at the promised ship, convinced the sailors to allow him on board for the voyage back to his homeland. Several years later, he had another vision, this time of an angel carrying a letter. As Patrick started to read it, he heard a voice beseeching him to return to Ireland, this time as a missionary.

“We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us,” the voice said.

Saved by the grace of God, St. Patrick knew that the voice must be heeded. He devoted years of study to the Bible and was ordained as a priest by his teacher, St. Germanus, the Bishop of Auxerre in Gaul. He returned to Ireland around 432 AD and now a bishop himself, spent the next 30 or so years ministering to the few Christians he encountered, sharing the Gospel and converting thousands of new believers to the faith. Because he spoke the language and understood Irish culture, St. Patrick was able to invoke powerful indigenous symbols to connect with people. He explained the Holy Trinity by using a three-leaf clover – i.e., a shamrock. The sun was a symbol of power and reverence; Patrick would superimpose it on the Christian cross to create what is commonly known as the Celtic cross. Because the Irish often used fire to honor their gods, Patrick would celebrate Easter, and Jesus’ resurrection, with a bonfire.

More than a thousand years later, in 1631, the date of St. Patrick’s death – March 17 – was declared a sacred occasion, a faith-based day of feasting – and a break from Lenten moderation. It was in the U.S. that the festivities took on a more secular flavor, marked by parades, pints and a celebration of Irish culture, particularly after the massive influx of Irish immigrants in the 19^th century. So go ahead and raise a glass to St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, today, remembering that it all originated with a lost shepherd boy who prayed and prayed, and whose prayers were answered.

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Scott and Marni Graves

This is about a good neighbor and has nothing to do with State Farm or Jake. Actually, it’s not about a good neighbor at all. It’s about a world-class neighbor. His name is Scott Graves and he lives with his wife and three daughters, just down the street from us in our hamlet north of New York City. Sunday night and all day Monday, we were socked with a blizzard that brought almost two feet of snow and winds so fierce that at times the snow fell horizontally. I woke up today to a complete whiteout and the sound of a snowblower. It was Scott on a mission to clear our driveway. His snowblower is a humble machine that was no match for the wall of snow and the gales that accompanied it. Scott was unfazed. He loves snow more than any adult I have ever known. Two days before the storm, the forecast went from 4-to-8 inches to 6-to-10 and then 16-to-20. Every revision amped up Scott’s enthusiasm.

“This is going to be so awesome,” he said in a text. He also said, “Don’t worry about the driveway. We’ve got you.”

For 2 ½ hours Monday morning, Scott was out there, making one 150-foot pass after another. He gave himself and his snow blower a short rest before coming back with the whole platoon: his wife, Alyson, and shovel-toting daughters Clover, Marni and Phoebe.

The Graves family does this every storm, because that’s how they roll. Some years back, we helped them find a house in our neighborhood when they decided to move out of Brooklyn. We also introduced them to the leaders of a private school that all three girls now attend. They’ve never forgotten that, and it seems as if they never will. It was not a heavy lift for us, at all. We love the Graves people and were thrilled to welcome them to the neighborhood. It doesn’t warrant a lifetime thank you, but I doubt I will ever be able to convince them otherwise.

I am pretty good with a shovel, and have cleared my driveways for decades. I rather like the workout and the palpable sense of accomplishment it gives, but I am also of an age when shoveling heavy snow is not recommended, so I try to be sensible. I was out there alongside the Graves people for a time Monday, shoveling snow off the car and clearing key pathways for the oil-delivery guys and the mailman, but there’s no doubt who was doing the real work. I went inside and made them a big batch of hot chocolate. They thanked me profusely. The snow began to taper off. They told me they’d be back in an hour or two to finish the job.

Phoebe Graves and her parents, Scott and Alyson

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Jack Hughes’ golden moment

The U.S. Men’s Hockey Team defeated Canada, 2-1, in overtime Sunday to capture its first gold medal in almost a half-century. It achieved the feat in Milan, Italy, on the 46th anniversary of the most iconic hockey game in American history: the U.S.’s 4-3, miracle-on-ice victory over the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, New York.

The two games were different in a million ways. The American players in 1980 were almost all college kids, going up against perhaps the most storied hockey team ever assembled. In Milan, both U.S. and Canadian rosters were stacked with stars from the NHL. The Lake Placid game was a semifinal, not a gold-medal game, and was played not on a Sunday afternoon in a world-class city, but on a snowy Friday night in a one-stoplight mountain village, broadcast on a three-hour tape delay. (One of the charms of the pre-internet world is that it was possible to not know the outcome.)

The one thing that was identical about the two games on Feb. 22, though, was the scene that unfolded seconds afterwards, U.S. players pouring en masse over the sideboards to celebrate, sticks, helmets and gloves flying, the Olympic ice sheet strewn with red, white and blue items, the happiest hockey flotsam you will ever see. It was remarkably reminiscent of what transpired three days before, when the U.S. Women won their gold, also in overtime, also by a score of 2-1, also against Canada.

To celebrate the Sunday heroics of golden-goal scorer Jack Hughes, and the epic, 41-save performance of U.S. goalie Connor Hellebuyck, I am devoting today’s Coffey Grounds to an excerpt from The Boys of Winter, my bestselling chronicle of the Lake Placid game against the Soviets. It was published for the 25^th anniversary in 2005, and keeps on going. The miracle has serious legs.

Now for the fun part: Where were you on Feb. 22, 1980? Who did you watch the game with? What are your most vivid memories of that night? Send a paragraph or two to waynecoffey@substack.com. I’ll send a signed copy to the three entries our panel (me) deems the best.

Here’s the excerpt. I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter One

WEEDING THE GARDEN

Vladimir Petrov was skating in loose figure eights near center ice, his pace slow, his stick still and horizontal, a predator in wait. He edged in for the opening face-off. His two famous wings, Boris Mikhailov and Valery Kharlamov, were on his flanks. Petrov, No. 16, was perhaps the strongest player on the Soviet national team, with blacksmith arms and a bulging neck, a 200-pound slab of muscle who was possessed of the rarest of Russian weapons: a nasty slap shot. Historically, not many Russian players had one because for years not very many practiced slap shots, sticks being both in short supply and of inferior quality. If you wound up and cranked a slap shot, you stood a good chance of getting a splinter and having no stick to play with. “So we never slap puck,” defenseman Sergei Starikov said. “We make good wrist shot instead.” Petrov was 32, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and nine-time world champion. He didn’t know much of anything about Mark Johnson, the U.S. center whom he was about to face off against, except that he wore No. 10 and he looked small and ridiculously young.

It was 5:06 p.m. in Lake Placid, and 1:06 a.m. in Moscow. Bill Cleary, star of the 1960 gold-medal team that had been the last U.S. team to beat the Soviets, had just finished a brief talk in the locker room. “There’s no doubt in my mind–nor in the minds of all the guys on the ’60 team–that you are going to win this game. You are a better team than we were,” Cleary said. Herb Brooks followed him, standing at one end of Locker Room 5 in the new Olympic Field House, wearing a camel-hair sports coat and plaid pants that would’ve looked at home on the dance floor of Saturday Night Fever. The room was a cramped, unadorned rectangle with a rubber-mat floor and a steeply pitched ceiling, situated directly beneath the stands. You could hear stomping and chanting and feel the anticipatory buzz that was all over the Adirondacks. There was a small chalkboard to Brooks’s right and a tiny shower area behind him, the players on the wood benches rimming the room all around him. On the ride to the arena, Brooks sat with assistant Craig Patrick and they talked about what Brooks was going to say to the team. Brooks loved intrigue, the element of surprise. His whole style of play was constructed on it, moving players around, changing breakout patterns, keeping people guessing about everything. Just when his players were sure he was completely inhumane, he’d throw a tennis ball on the ice for a diversion, or have guys play opposite-handed or in different positions, lifting morale and breaking the routine. “You’re going to like it,” Brooks said to Patrick of his talk. The locker room was intense and quiet. Defenseman Bill Baker caught the eye of backup goaltender Steve Janaszak, his former teammate at the University of Minnesota. “What do we do now?” Baker mouthed.

“Pray,” Janaszak mouthed back.

Herb Brooks stood before his twenty players. The quiet got deeper. The coach pulled out a yellow scrap of paper and said, “You were born to be a player. You were meant to be here. This moment is yours.”

Neal Broten, 20-year-old center, second youngest player on the youngest Olympic hockey team the United States had ever fielded, looked down at his skates. “I didn’t know what he was talking about,” Broten said. Broten was nervous, very nervous. He knew he could handle the skating, playing the game. The Russians’ strength he wasn’t so sure about. Don’t make any glaring mistakes, he told himself.

Led by goaltender Jim Craig, the players charged out of the locker room, turned right and then right again. At the threshold of the ice, Craig paused and looked up for a second. The building was shaking from the cheers. He took it in and it felt great. Ten days earlier, the players hadn’t been much less anonymous than the Lake Placid goal judges. Now that they’d gone undefeated in five games and come from behind in four of them, they were Olympic darlings. Somebody rang a cowbell, a tinny touch of the Alps in the Adirondacks. “C’mon, Magic!” winger John “Bah” Harrington shouted to Mark Johnson from the end of the American bench. Magic was Johnson’s nickname. If you ever saw him play you know why.


The last time the U.S. players had seen Petrov and his teammates was thirteen days earlier, in Madison Square Garden, where the Americans didn’t lose so much as get annihilated. That day began with the crowd jeering the Soviet national anthem and cheering every solid American check, and it ended with the fans in numbed silence, even before Soviet winger Alexander Maltsev put a red-coated exclamation point on things. Maltsev was 30 years old and would become the Soviet Union’s all-time leading goal scorer in international competition. Speeding across the U.S. blue line in the third period, defenseman Dave Christian in front of him, Maltsev cruised left by the top of the circle and then began to spin, 360 degrees in a blur, the puck on his stick as if it were glued. When he was done spinning he started snapping, a backhand, inside the far post. In the U.S. goal, Steve Janaszak looked at Christian in disbelief and then laughed inside his mask.

“They were gods,” Janaszak said. On the U.S. bench, trainer Gary Smith walked over to Brooks. “We don’t have a chance against these guys,” Smith said.

“No shit,” the coach replied.

Brooks had spent months trying to debunk the aura surrounding the Soviets. He would talk about how Mikhailov, the fabled captain, looked like Stan Laurel, with his long face and jutting chin. He would tell his players that the team was getting old, that the Russians’ time was past. It was a hard sell on a wintry Saturday in New York City, the U.S. players taking the ice with a bit of trepidation and a lot of awe. “It was hard to even warm up,” Harrington said. “We looked down at the other end of the ice and there they were: Kharlamov, Petrov, Mikhailov. And I’m thinking, ‘Holy smokes, there are the guys I saw beating the NHL All-Stars on TV.’ We weren’t just playing when the game started. We were watching them play, and by the time we felt like we belonged on the ice with them, it was 8—0.”

The final score was 10—3 and merely confirmed what the hockey world already knew: there were the Russians, and then there was everybody else. Virtually everyone expected a similar result in the Olympics. As Harrington knew, the Russians had drubbed the best of the NHL, 6—0, on the same Garden ice the year before, and with their backup goaltender, a guy named Myshkin, no less. “What can change in two weeks?” asked Sergei Makarov, the young Russian star who would go on to a long NHL career. “You can’t get whole new team.” Even Mark Johnson said, “If you asked anyone on our team and they told you we could beat the Russians, they would’ve been lying.”

Publicly, Brooks did nothing to discourage such thinking, saying the United States should forget the Russians and worry about sneaking away with a silver or bronze medal. Privately, he was not so convinced. In the Olympic format you didn’t have to beat a team best-of-seven, or even best-of-five. You had to beat a team only once. The Americans were in superb shape and had a sturdy emotional makeup, honed from months of fending off their coach’s verbal floggings. They could skate completely unburdened by expectation, just as their coach had scripted it. Before the game in Madison Square Garden, Brooks told the players to go out and have fun. He had never said anything close to that in the previous sixty pre-Olympic games. Have fun? Brooks had followed Warren Strelow’s suggestion to let goaltenders Jim Craig and Steve Janaszak share time in the Garden goal, limiting the Soviet preview of Craig and sparing the No. 1 goalie any unnecessary angst. For the first half of that game, especially, the Americans weren’t skating, attacking. Part of it was awe, but part of it was Brooks playing at least a little bit of possum. Even Viktor Tikhonov, the Soviet Olympic coach, said that the U.S. team seemed to be holding something back. Brooks himself later described the Garden game as “a ploy.” What could possibly be gained by playing the Russians tough, waking them up? Brooks was beginning to believe that if everything fell together, the United States could take the Russians into the the third period in a tight game. That’s all you could ask for. You get into that position, and you take your chances.

Six weeks after the death of Herb Brooks, Viktor Tikhonov stood in a barren room inside the arena that is home to the Central Sports Club of the Soviet Army (CSKA). He was 73 years old and surrounded by drab white walls. He had a gray tweed jacket and flat face and slicked-back hair, and the vaguely beleaguered aura of a man who is the most decorated international coach in hockey history but may be most remembered for a game his team did not win.

“No matter what we tried we could not get that 10—3 game out of the players’ minds,” Tikhonov said. “The players told me it would be no problem. It turned out to be a very big problem.”


Across the ice from the American amateurs was not simply a staggering assemblage of hockey talent but the end product of one of the most astonishing sporting dynasties ever developed. The Soviets did not look like much, at first glance, in their well-worn red sweaters and matching red helmets, their chunky skates that looked like Sputnik-era hand-me-downs. They would march into the arena in their long fur coats and fur hats, with strong Slavic faces and impassive expressions, the thick-bodied KGB guy never far away. Then it was into the locker room, into their gear, like a bunch of Clark Kents going into the phone booth, and soon they would be on the ice doing their supernatural tricks, passing from stick to stick to stick, a clacking, high-speed symphony performed by athletes with light feet and hard bodies.

“You’d get in the corner with one of those guys and they’d stick their ass out toward you, it was like pushing against cement,” Neal Broten said.

The Soviets staged a chuda (miracle) of their own once, twenty-six years before Lake Placid. It came in 1954 in Stockholm in their first appearance in the world championships. It was led by Vsevelod Bobrov, the Bolshevik Bo Jackson, star not only of the Soviet hockey team but also of the national soccer team, a man known for both his prolific scoring and his disregard for rigorous training.

The Soviets were still new kids on the world-sport block at the time, as deep a mystery to the Western world as Siberia in January. They had excluded themselves ever since they came to power during the revolution of 1917, pronouncing their distaste for Western-style sports organizations and the Olympics, which Communist party leaders saw as the ultimate bourgeois institution, a certain road to imperialist ruin. The attitude changed, swiftly and markedly, after World War II. The Soviet Union had lost 28 million people in the war and was facing the most massive reconstruction project the world had ever seen. Sports began to be seen as a welcome and pleasant diversion, as Robert Edelman notes in his history of spectator sports in the U.S.S.R., Serious Fun, but it was not enough to merely play. Against a backdrop of heightening Cold War tensions and a recognition by party officials that sporting success could be a valuable propaganda tool, the goal, increasingly, was to win, for the motherland and to show the world that Karl Marx had it right. Or as the publication Sovietskii sport argued floridly, “We have created our own Soviet style in sport, the superiority of which has been demonstrated by our football, basketball and water polo players, gymnasts, boxers and wrestlers in the biggest international competitions. Our goal is to create in this new sport for us, Canadian hockey, our advanced Soviet style, in order that our hockey players, in a short time, will become the strongest in the world.”

Nikolai Romanov, the postwar chairman of the government’s Committee on Physical Culture and Sports, was among the first to feel the heat of the winning imperative. When the Soviet speed skaters were upset in the European championships in 1948, Romanov was removed from his job. He somehow got it back in 1952 but had learned his lesson well. Scheduled to compete in the 1953 world championships in Switzerland, the Soviet hockey team pulled out after Bobrov fell ill. “In order to gain permission to go into international competition, I had to send a note to Stalin guaranteeing victory,” Romanov would write years later in his memoirs.

With Bobrov healthy if not a model of temperance, the Soviets surged into the 1954 semifinals against Canada, the most dominant hockey nation on earth. For years the Canadian custom was to send its senior-league champion to the world championships, men who had regular jobs by day and played their hockey by night. That year’s Canadian representative was the East York Lyndhursts. It wasn’t regarded as one of Canada’s stronger entries, but what difference would that make? The Soviet Union did not have a single indoor hockey arena in the entire country. Though they had played a game called bandy–essentially field hockey on ice–for decades, the Soviets had formally begun to compete in ice hockey only after World War II.

Few people inside or outside the ancient brick walls of the Kremlin could fathom it when the Soviets scored a 7—2 triumph. Two years later, the Soviets captured their first Olympic gold medal, in Cortina, Italy, shutting out Canada’s Kitchener Dutchmen. In a sport Canadians all but considered their birthright to rule, they found a new heavyweight in town. It was coached by Anatoly Tarasov and his co-coach Arkady Chernyshev, and it eschewed the rough play and dump-and-muck verticality that were the hallmarks of Canadian hockey, in favor of a system built on speed and crisscrossing movement. The Canadians couldn’t have been more jarred if the Russians had spray-painted Marxist slogans in the Montreal Forum. A major shift in the ice-borne world–strategic, philosophical, and political–was on. Any lingering doubts about it were dispelled in the Summit Series of 1972, a historic eight-game competition between premier Canadian players from the NHL and the reigning world and Olympic champions from the U.S.S.R. The Soviets were still more than fifteen years away from playing in the NHL, and this was the first time they had ever competed against the world’s top pro players. Most observers predicted a Canadian rout. “I wouldn’t mind playing the Russians with the players we won’t dress,” said coach Harry Sinden, whose roster included Ken Dryden, Phil Esposito, and Brad Park. Sinden was somewhat less swaggering after the Russians took Game 1, 7—3, rolling over the Canadians like tanks on the tundra. Ultimately, Canada would take the series, 4—3—1, but rarely has victory been so chilling. “We would never feel the same about ourselves and our game again,” Dryden would say much later in a symposium on Canadian hockey.

Connie Ohlson mopped the kitchen floor the other day. This, in itself, was not unusual; she has been mopping the same floor since 1951, the year she and her husband Carl left the Bronx and moved into the three-bedroom ranch that Carl built, board by board, in the northern Westchester community of Yorktown.

It’s where Carl and Connie Ohlson raised their only child, also Carl, just across the street from the Kreiser family and their nine kids. One of those kids, Liz Proctor, still lives in town, the mother of three and grandmother of seven. Liz remembers when she put her arm through a glass door, blood spurting from the gashes on her arm and hand. Her mother was already at the emergency room with one of her brothers. A telephone repairman who was working in the neighborhood saw Liz’s arm and alerted Connie Ohlson. Connie was painting the living room. She dropped the brush, put Liz into her car and rushed her to the doctor to get her stitched up. The Kreiser kids knew they could always count on Mrs. Ohlson.

“She has the largest heart ever,” Liz Proctor says. “She’d give you the shirt off her back even if she didn’t have another one.”

Connie Ohlson celebrated her 96^th birthday last week. She doesn’t weigh much more than 100 pounds, but her heart is as stout as ever, and so is her desire to be independent. She lost her husband three years ago, but forward she goes. She still makes her famous pot roast and her Swedish meatballs, goes up and down stairs and bakes the same cookies she used to bring to Carl and his cadet buddies when they were across the Hudson River at West Point in the 1980s. She only gave up driving last fall, and not because she wanted to.

“I don’t want to be a danger to anybody else,” she said.

This is the essence of Connie Ohlson, one of those people whose kindness pours out like water from a spigot. She has been a pillar of her neighborhood for eight decades, a person who nobody would ever say a bad word about, because why would they? Connie had only one child, but people on her block will tell you that she raised about 30. She took kids ice skating, to the movies, to the doctor. If anybody needed anything, at a moment’s notice, they knew who to call. Connie’s favorite colors are yellow and pink, her default outlook upbeat. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993, when Carl and his wife, Maria, were expecting their first child.

“I am going to be in my grandson’s life,” Connie told Maria, a daughter-in-law she cherishes. And she has been, for 33 years.

“Her glass has been half-full her whole life,” Carl says. “One of the things she likes to say is, ‘Impossible just takes a little longer.’”

Connie could easily alter her world view these days. Nobody would blame her. A year ago, she had acute pain in the right side of her neck; doctors found cancerous lymph nodes. She had surgery last June and made a remarkable recovery, but a follow-up scan showed more cancerous nodes on the left side. She underwent another surgery. Again, she recovered well, but a recent scan showed the cancer had returned on the right side. Carl, who lives in Pennsylvania, has been in Yorktown helping Connie over the last few weeks, with Maria’s complete support. Connie is on a palliative-care regimen now, doing her best to power through the pain, her mind as sharp as ever (if Carl needs a reminder of an anniversary or special occasion, he knows who to call), taking in all the love that is coming back to her. She had six visitors from three different families on her birthday, and bouquets of flowers that just kept coming. Her phone rang constantly, old neighbors and friends and family members calling to celebrate her. Jeff Elliott, a dear family friend and Carl’s fellow West Pointer, was among them. He has known Connie Ohlson for 40 years and will never forget how she helped him navigate the intense academic rigors of the U.S. Military Academy. He still calls Connie “Mom O.”

“She is angelic,” Elliott says. “From Day 1, she was my second mom. She is one of the most positive people I’ve ever met.”

On Thursday afternoon, in a gray swivel chair in the family room of the home she has lived in for 75 years, Connie and Carl watched the U.S. Women’s Olympic Hockey Team make an epic comeback to win the gold medal. Connie loved the team’s perseverance in the face of almost certain defeat. She is looking forward to seeing the flowering of spring, and the summer after that.

“The amount of grace she displays is unbelievable considering what she is facing,” Carl says.

Connie Ohlson doesn’t see it that way. You push on and make the best of things. Today might even be a pot roast day.

“I’ve had a really good life,” she says.

You probably didn’t know Vic Rosenthal. You’ve probably never even heard of him. That’s not your fault, but it is your loss. Today would’ve been Vic’s 71st birthday. One of the things that sucks about getting older is that funerals and memorial services come at you with ever-greater frequency, often without warning. Vic gave us warning, because he battled bladder cancer for years, right to the end almost three years ago. It didn’t make his passing any easier.

You know those shopworn words that are so often trotted out when people die, how they made the world a better place? That is exactly what Vic did, not just by virtue of his character, or because he was a wonderful husband, father and grandfather. It was, quite literally, his job. He spent the first part of his career tirelessly advocating for the aged and disabled in New York, pushing hard for nursing home reform and holding people accountable. Then he and his family moved to St. Paul, where Vic was just as tireless as a community organizer and champion for social justice, as executive director of an organization called Jewish Community Action. Vic’s ancestors were Jewish immigrants who fled Russian persecution. All people who were on the margins of society or discriminated against were guaranteed to have him in their corner. If ICE had stormed into Minneapolis when Vic was alive, I promise you he would’ve been leading the charge against the excesses and thuggery.

Was it just a coincidence that St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter declared March 18, 2023 - shortly before his passing - “Victor Rosenthal Day”? No, it was not.

“Vic’s tenacity and unflagging spirit have always been accompanied by a total inability to hear the word no or stop fighting for justice, in spite of any political environment, inclement weather, illness, or (being told no in the past),” the mayor wrote.

Today is sad for me, thinking about this beautiful man who is no longer with us. But somehow it is a hopeful day, too, because no matter what vile notions Stephen Miller and the MAGATs have about what a true American is, Vic would’ve never backed down. They would’ve called him a Radical Lunatic Leftist and a Socialist, a Menace looking to sabotage America’s calling to be the greatest, whitest Christian nation the Lord ever made. Vic was none of those things. He was a smart, insanely committed, deeply moral man who saw goodness and dignity in everyone. That’s not so radical, is it?

Here’s what I wrote to honor Vic’s life at a memorial service in April 2023 at Mt. Zion Temple in St. Paul:

The operative noun for what you are about to hear is “eulogy.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “a commendatory oration or writing especially in honor of one deceased.” Its second definition is “high praise.” You are going to get both, for no extra charge.

Vic would not be happy with what I am about to share with you. He never wanted it to be about him. The world is overflowing with people who have turned self-promotion into an art form, who have gotten rich and famous with check-me-out antics and off-the-charts grandiosity. Vic would’ve made a terrible Kardashian. He wanted the focus always to be on the greater cause, on the people who were on the front lines, the people who he devoted his whole life to giving voice to.

I met Vic a half-century ago, on the third floor of Cleveland Hall on the campus of what was then known as SUNY Binghamton. He was lean and dark and handsome, a Jewish kid from Yonkers. I was a Christian kid from Long Island– one whose knowledge of Judaism was so skimpy that Vic had to explain to me what the High Holy Days were. I remember asking him about the necklace he was wearing, as I’d never seen anything like it before.

“It’s a chai,” he said.

“What’s a chai?” I asked.

“It’s a Hebrew word for ‘life.’”

The next time I saw him in the Cleveland Hall lounge, I waved and said, “Chai, how you doing?”

Vic smiled. I kept this pathetic joke going for years. One of the next Hebrew words I learned was “goy.” I was a hopeless goy. When I learned Vic’s middle initial was H, I asked if it stood for Hebrew.

No, it stands for Howard, he said.

He indulged my sophomoric humor and laughed. Vic loved to laugh. He loved The Honeymooners and introduced me to the Marx Brothers, but laughed most of all at himself. When we first met, he told me, with almost perverse pride, that he graduated from Gorton High School, one of the worst schools in America. On the way to an intramural basketball playoff game one cold, snowy night, Vic was at the wheel on an icy overpass when his car skidded into a 360-degree spinout. Halfway through, at about the 180 mark, Vic turned and said, “Pretty normal.” The car ended up on a shoulder, and we were okay, and we finally got to the game, which we somehow won. That was important. We loved sports. We both worshipped Mickey Mantle and rooted for the Yankees and Knicks. We played intramural softball and soccer and had a good bowling team with a totally gross name - Toe Jam (you can blame Vic for that.) He was by far the best bowler on the Toe Jam squad, our cleanup hitter, though, true to form, he made it out like we were all on the same level.

When Vic and I lived off-campus together, we’d have regular Sunday night outings to the laundromat. We’d load up on quarters and Tide, and while our clothes got laundered, we’d talk about coursework and girls and Walt Frazier, the Knicks’ star guard, or President Richard Nixon, who was being dogged at the time by two reporters from the Washington Post named Woodward and Bernstein. Vic was better at laundry than me, and way better at folding. We’d go to the diner across the street. It was called The Spot. We called it The Stain. When I randomly mentioned The Stain to him a few months before he passed, he said, “Let’s go.”

In the summer before my senior year, I stayed in Binghamton to take classes and Vic went home to work before we embarked on a six-week cross-country trip. When it was time to say goodbye, for all of four weeks, we hugged alongside his green Dodge Dart and as he pulled out of the driveway, I ran behind the house and cried.

An even more indelible memory –no tears this time – was when Vic visited me at my apartment in the Upper West Side after another cross -country trip. This one didn’t include me. “I met somebody I really like,” he said. I started firing questions at him. What’s her name? How did you meet? Where is she from? When will you see her again? Vic spoke about this woman with pure rapture. Her name was Chris Sathrum and she was a Minnesota farm girl from a metropolis called West Concord (pop. 851), in Dodge County in the southeastern corner of the state, not far from Hayfield and Blooming Prairie. No, Vic was not in Yonkers anymore. They met at Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Vic was completely, hopelessly smitten.

And do you know what changed in 42 years of marriage?

Nothing. Not one thing. I loved to tease him about how much he overachieved in the spousal department. “You don’t have to tell me,” he’d say.

Vic and Chris got married two years later, and loved each other so much they did it twice: once in New Jersey and once in St. Paul. I got to learn another Hebrew word and helped to hold up the chuppa. Their starter apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey was a second-floor unit in a house with a cranky landlord and a mean German shepherd named Colonel on the first floor. Chris was getting her master’s in social work and Vic was running an advocacy group for nursing home residents and after a few busy years, Chris got pregnant and Vic asked me months ahead of a time if they could come to my apartment in the city when her labor started, so they would be closer to the hospital where the baby would be born – Beth Israel on East 14^th St. Vic was an organizer even when it came to childbirth; he was taking no chances on George Washington Bridge traffic. The day Chris started to go into labor – April 23, 1984 – Vic called and told me they were on their way to my apartment. They rushed into the city, and Chris lied down in a bedroom and waited it out. When the contractions came closer, the doctor said it was time. I went and got Vic’s car – a yellow Dodge Colt, a truly sketchy vehicle with a manual transmission I taught Vic how to use. He escorted Chris downstairs and into the car. I said, “I’ll drive, you take care of Chris.” Vic said, “No, I am driving.” I tried to talk him out of it. He wasn’t budging. I got in the back seat, and let me tell you, the miracle wasn’t the birth; it was that we made it to Beth Israel alive. Vic drove like a maniac, down the West Side Highway, weaving in and out, passing trucks and buses on the right as we went crosstown on 14^th St. When we arrived, my white knuckles and I moved into the driver’s seat and Vic took Chris into Beth Israel, and some hours later, he called with the greatest news of his life: Chris had given birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy . . Benjamin Howard Rosenthal. Four years later came an equally blessed event: the birth of Aaron John Rosenthal, which somehow took place without my assistance. I hope it was a better ride to the hospital, but doubt it.

There are people who will follow me to speak of Vic’s towering professional achievements, as a community organizer and fighter for the disenfranchised, but for me, as a friend, his greatness was his every day heart and soul, which he poured into Chris and Ben and Aaron, and his daughter-in-laws, Megan and Florencia, and his grandchildren, Harper and Henry, and Baby Rio Vic, who he never met but carries his name and his spirit. You will never meet anybody with a deeper love and commitment to his family, or anybody with more loyalty. Loyalty defined Vic. His specialty was showing up, with all of those passions of his, every . . . single . . . day. In 50 years he never missed calling me on my birthday. He reached out to me more than I did to him, and he never kept score. He knew I was prone to isolation and to lapse into writer’s neuroses, and he’d always have a way of getting past the minutiae of life and ask me, “Are you taking care of yourself?” If I didn’t answer truthfully, he’d always know it, and gently – but firmly – urge me to do better.

I could keep this going for another two hours, but I don’t want to incur the wrath of Rabbi Spilker. I want to close by sharing another Hebrew word I’ve learned: Bashert. It means meant to be. I think it was bashert that brought Vic to the third floor of Cleveland Hall in 1973. It was definitely bashert that brought Vic and Chris Sathrum to Jenny Lake at the same time five years later. It was bashert that Vic did the work he was so brilliant at, work that, yes, made this world a measurably better, more just place.

The exhibits were deemed by the president to “inappropriately disparage” our Founding Fathers, and focus too negatively on this country’s legacy of systemic racism. It’s an interesting way to usher in Black History Month.

Here is what the president wrote in one of his gazillion executive orders last March:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.

This president, as we know, has never let little things like facts or truth get in the way of his narrative. He declared the crowd at his first inauguration to be the largest in American history, no matter that President Barack Obama’s turnout made his look like a gaggle of people on a streetcorner. On January 6, 2021, he incited an angry mob and told his supporters to “fight like hell” to save their country, and after the predictable storming of the Capitol and a deadly insurrection ensued, he said he was all about peace. And, of course, he has been screaming about the “rigged” 2020 election for more than five years even though he lost and there is not a shred of evidence to the contrary.

The offending exhibits at the President’s House included two entitled “Life Under Slavery” and “The Dirty Business of Slavery.” In the former, the ‘disparaging’ content had references to whipping, deprivation of food and clothing, as well as beatings, torture and rape. Another exhibit featured artwork showing Washington signing the Fugitive Slave Act, his quill and elegant shirt cuffs in the foreground and a posse of white men with clubs and guns shooting at four slaves in the background. The president didn’t think this was a good look for the land of the free and the home of the brave, and because he believes he has the power to do and say whatever he wants, unconstrained by Congress, law or moral rectitude, he decided he’d make it go away. He did just that, with a single stroke of his wannabe-dictator pen.

But then, would you expect anything different from a man who would post an image of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on social media, and then refuse to apologize or even acknowledge that it was a mistake? Or who would turn DEI into the three most evil letters (at least this side of ICE) in the alphabet? The National Park Service used to offer free admission to park visitors on Martin Luther King Day. This president saw no reason to celebrate King in such a way, so he stopped it. Do you know one of the days you can get into national parks for free?

Donald Trump’s birthday.

The unrepentant racists in the MAGA crowd no doubt regard the demo job on The President’s House on Independence Mall as a righteous step to taking our country back, whatever that means. George Washington’s birthday is next week, February 22. He was the commander of the Continental Army, president of the Constitutional Convention, our first president. He was also a slaveowner, as were fellow Founders Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. You can’t wipe that away with an executive order, or bluster, or threats. Life is complicated. Wisdom comes from understanding that, and learning from it. The exhibits in The President’s House are gone, but the truth is unmoved.

“History is not merely a collection of celebrated moments,” said Catherine Hicks, president of the NAACP Philadelphia Branch, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “This action is a disservice to our city, our nation and denies future generations the chance to learn from our history, fostering an environment of ignorance rather than understanding.”