The Zeitgeist

               

Ah, Spring Daffodils! And the weather will break 60 finally on Sunday! One of my favorite movies, “Dr. Zhivago,” and the Route of the Dashing Dan, the LIRR.

Morphing Into Daffodils and Slogging Through the LIRR

The weather people are forecasting temperatures finally, finally hitting the low 60’s on Sunday and staying that way at least through mid-week. Can’t come a moment too soon as I’m scheduled to attend my first Mets home game on Monday evening and there’s nothing quite as uncomfortable as watching baseball as though it were November football – that is, in the freezing cold. Also, as I wrote last week, my tulips are is desperate need of solar radiation. Thankfully, as you read this, the daffodils are in bloom throughout the neighborhood.

The Mets, I’m happy (and relieved) to say have acquitted themselves somewhat respectably in their first week of play on the road against some very good competition, so its not an embarrassment of any kind for people hither and yon to be publicly informed of my Monday evening plans. As long as they play .500 ball or better, all will be good with the world.

The other night Channel 13 aired Dr. Zhivago, the classic, epic 60’s  film starring Omar Sharif along with the luminous Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin and directed by David Lean. My favorite scene in the movie is when the Zhivagos are snowed-in at Verikeno and we see a slow dissolve through the window of ice crystals morphing into bright yellow daffodils as Winter turns to Spring. Amazing cinematography for its time. This time of year reminds me of that cinematic moment as I’m highly partial to flowers of any and every kind.

One of the reasons I so enjoy living here in the suburbs is because of  our bucolic surroundings (except for January through March) and I’m one of those people with no hankering for Manhattan, finding it dirty, claustrophobia-educing, cramped, crowded and expensive. I’m also hardly enamored of the Long Island Rail Road, which I try to avoid.

So, unfortunately, on Monday afternoon I had some meetings in Midtown and Midtown means the LIRR as parking there is something like $200 an hour. Newsday recently reported what we all probably already intuitively know: A recent study by the Citizens Budget Commission of the nation’s Top 10 commuter railroads rates the LIRR as one of the most inefficient commuter railroads in the country.  Quoting Newsday: “The LIRR pays 57 cents for each mile that a passenger travels, the highest of all the railroads included in the study and well above the 37-cent average. The LIRR also ranked ninth worst out of 10 in cost per active vehicle, and eighth in cost per mile of service. It was seventh in cost per passenger trip and sixth in cost per hour of service.”

Now, the LIRR is blaming some of this on “unfunded pension liabilities” that the MTA inherited from the formerly independent LIRR back in 1965! The railroad is saying that very soon there will be more people drawing pension benefits than actually working!

The bane of virtually every governmental institution in the New York area (and much of the country) are pension mandates and lifetime benefit entitlements after as little as 20 years on the job in an era when people (thankfully) live into their 90s. Many of these pension schemes were devised when the average life expectancy was 67, so the actuaries who concocted these plans thought only a few people would live long enough to seriously collect on them. As we’re seeing, this is unsustainable from a financial standpoint. The solution will bedevil and encumber us for years to come.

There are other quality issues plaguing the LIRR as well, such as why on an 8:08 p.m. Babylon Branch train from Penn Station there were no seats available and tons of people were jammed-in standing with an off-peak roundtrip ticket price of $14.50? (I often use the Lynbrook Station because there’s a train every 20 minutes in the evening, as opposed to the one train every two hours on the Far Rockaway branch and because said Lynbrook bound train generally makes the trip in under 35 minutes without changing in Jamaica).

Commuters know of the LIRR’s manifest shortcoming far more than I and deserve medals for bravery above and beyond the call of family duty for slogging into Manhattan on a daily basis on this unnerving of conveyances. Listen-up wives and kids – show some love and appreciation for all the guys scrambling to catch the pre-8:00 a.m. express – it’s an amazing sacrifice made to give you all an idyllic life in the country that they basically see only on weekends.

As for me, I live my live within a few square miles of The Five Towns and am grateful for it each and every day.

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The Zeitgeist

        

Time for Spring cleaning in the garden. Tulips just like the ones in bloom in Manhattan but not on Long Island. Lovebirds and the late Elizabeth Taylor, Of Blessed Memory.

Sure Signs of Spring

Monday morning my gardener showed up for the first time since November. They came in force – practically a battalion of probable illegals (I am not checking for Green Cards in my pajamas) brandishing rakes, hoes, pikes and blowers in a determined effort to turn over the soil in my South 40 and prepare it for the floral cornucopia to come. Thanks to what seemed like 20 weeks of a polar ice cap on the lawn this winter, my grass is in particularly forlorn condition, so Ralph and his crew threw down a mealstrom of fertilizer, plant food and anti-crabgrass concoctions to jolt my grass back to life when and if we finally break 50 degrees again.

The last 10 days of unseasonably cold weather (thank God it’s April already!) have done a stunting job on my couple of hundred pink tulips. They’re partly up but have been going nowhere for more than a week. I am gravely concerned that all this late cold will literally nip the tulips in their buds and make for a poor blooming. I’ve already seen this with the daffodils on many an area lawn, which characteristically should have been in bloom by now.

Living and working in The Five Towns, I don’t get into Manhattan as much as I used to (I’m sure many a commuter would like to make that statement). On Sunday I met some friends in town for dinner on the Upper East Side and got to stroll down a bunch of the side streets. In Manhattan the tulips are already in bloom. This is I’m sure due to it’s being warmer in The City than the ‘burbs but also no doubt due to the profusion of four-legged fertilizer in the form of man’s best friends augmenting nature in the small flower beds surrounding city trees. There is also a high probability that Masters of the Universe in 10021-land would not stand for nature impeding the arrival of their Spring tulips while we mere mortals here on Long Island will just have to wear down our collective prayer rugs hoping for the survival of our flowers.

Another sure sign of Spring are the birds. Cardinals and Orioles, (no, I’m not talking about baseball – more about that later) and sparrows. There are two sparrow lovebirds who’ve been perched on my sunroom roof now for a couple of weeks, sitting and chirping side by side. I’m sure they’re planning where in my leaders and gutters they’d like to build a nest but for now the singing is delightful. Some of you may know that I’ve been divorced now for about a year so the lovebirds are bittersweet for me as I’d sure like to have someone to chirp with on the porch myself. Internet dating and set-ups have borne no fruit of any value these past 12 months, so if you know of a good match, Spring is always a good time for a man’s fancy to turn to love. 

Now, to baseball – by the time you read this the Yankees will have played their home opener in The Bronx’s new $7.5 billion (really $1.8 billion, but what’s a few billion here and there?) Yankee Stadium – home of the $11 beer and South Bronx vistas. The Mets started their season on the road. Some Little Leagues have already begun. The beginning of baseball augers sultry nights and languid Summer days at the ballpark which pleases me no end. Unlike most Americans, baseball, not football, is my favorite sport. I probably watch 80 or more games and also play in at least two softball games a week. New York Magazine has a great article this week called “Mets Moneyball” (get it on their website, NYMag.com) which concurs with my assessment of Carlos Beltran being the nexus of Met bad luck (see last week’s Zeitgeist column) and also lays out how the new Met management is going to turn things around – in time.

Lastly, for many Five Towns residents another sure harbinger of Spring is the arrival of Passover food sections at area supermarkets. Gourmet Glatt Emporium has added about 30 percent more space to their store which has enabled them to offer perhaps 90 different kinds of matza complimented by an equal variety of dried fruit with which to unclog the effects of the aforementioned matza. I’ve also never seen as large a selection of kosher for Passover frozen pizzas and ice cream – just what everyone needs to keep their waistline slim and trim. For sure Cedarhurst will see an uptick in parking meter and parking ticket revenues thanks to an expanded Gourmet Glatt.

Mom and Liz Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor passed away last week and my mother was none too happy about it. Not that my mom is some star-struck movie fan, quite the contrary. The key here for mom was that Taylor was just two years older than she is and even more to the point, in her youth, my mother looked a whole lot like Liz.

Mom in her 20s was the paradigm of the sophisticated “Sweet Smell of Success” 1959-look and had the same jet black hair and build as Liz. She also was (and still is for her age) very pretty and got a lot of attention (as did Liz) as a result. In the 60s my mom also had the Jackie-O look down cold. Mom identified with Liz even though she was a one-man woman in contrast to Liz’s eight husbands. Liz also cared mightily about Israel and used her influence and celebrity for Israel’s benefit. Although an eccentric (what Hollywood star isn’t?) Taylor was a charitable person who did a lot of good in her life while at the same time setting the screen ablaze with her talent and charisma. She’ll be missed by more than just mom.

•••••

The Zeitgeist

      

Something like my green resin Adirondack chairs, bikes in China, the Tech Talk guys from MetroPCS and Oliver Perez the Mets’ $12 million persona non grata.

Back on The Bicycle, Back on the Porch

About six years ago having a had burning need to feel the wind in my hair, I ambled down to South Shore Bikes in Woodmere and purchased something from China (a country that knows something about bicycles with zillions of people using them to get around) with fuddy-duddy fatter tires, padded seat and shocks that makes no pretence than I am firmly ensconced in middle age. The only cool aspect of this bike is the jet black color and chrome accents.

Now in my adolescent youth, I owned a series of French-inspired “10-Speeds” (this bicycle has maybe 40, I think, and I use perhaps four of them) that looked straight out of “Breaking Away.” Before obtaining my license at 17 I used to ride anywhere and everywhere, miles on end and without using my hands. I could navigate any traffic or terrain with both hands at my side or even eating ice cream, such was the measure of my teenage dexterity. Once I got behind the wheel of an unending series of cars however, bicycles were what Manhattan food delivery guys rode, not me.

As part of the “Battle of the Bulge” (a/k/a Middle Age Spread) I decided on more aerobic pursuits, so hence the bike purchase. Typically, once we get past mid-November, the bicycle remains in the garage and doesn’t reemerge until sometime about now – mid-March. I am proud to report that this past Sunday I made my Spring 2011 bicycle debut in that beautiful 55-degree day and promptly discovered that despite using the bike machines at the gym all winter that my knees were not in the least bit happy to be pedaling to Hewlett Neck. Now, I’m in reasonably good shape for a 52 year-old but there is no denying time. Clearly it will take a few weeks back on board to shake the cobwebs out so I can resume my routine ride from Woodsburgh through Hewlett Neck, with a stop at the Woodmere Town Dock to admire the clear vistas to Mount Garbage in Oceanside and the Long Beach skyline and then on to the back of Lawrence to soak in the mansions of the rich and famous on Ocean Avenue.

First Day of Spring

I was feeling so optimistic Sunday that I actually dragged out some chairs from the garage (and even cleaned them!) to put on my front porch where in nice weather I like to drink wine, read the paper and watch the geese poop all over the Woodmere Club fairways. Sunday’s chairs were of the molded plastic Adirondack variety which in Summer are consigned to the backyard. It takes real heat and warmth for me to put out the white wood Adirondack Rockers where I can truly morph into Bartles and James. Monday, on the first full day of Spring however, we were inundated with cold rain, clouds and 46 degrees. Wednesday and Thursday mornings was a smidge of January déjà vu all over again with snow on the lawn and all over my car. I thought we were done brushing snow off the car!? As I said last week, I need some sustained warm weather and this past week hasn’t been it. The weekend is not supposed to bring much relief either. Will someone please turn on the tanning machine and leave it on through October?

Metro PCS

About a month ago I switched my Blackberry from Verizon to MetroPCS. Why? No two year contracts. No contracts at all. My bill dropped from about $145 a month to $55 a month with unlimited web, email, text and phone to anywhere at anytime. That’s a $90 a month savings, or nearly $1,100 a year. That means more sushi for me and less lucre for Verizon. Happy to say that I’ve been happy with the service which has been 90 percent as good as Verizon for a whole lot less. On a family plan, you can get a phone with web and text for $35 a month. Taxes included. Good for the kids. They have a place near the Dunkin Donuts at Burnside and Rockaway. Something to think about especially if you own a bunch of phones.

Mets

The best $18 million the cash-strapped Mets have spent in years. That’s what it cost for the team to dump two of the loathed kings of bad Met karma that they let go of this week – namely the hapless Little League (and no insult meant to Little League) pitcher Ollie Perez and second baseman Luis Castillo, he of the “Let’s drop an easy pop fly in the ninth inning against the Yankees when we’re winning and can go home” variety. There is one last missing link left to purge the Mets from the miasma of the past four seasons – Carlos Beltran (whose knees are about as good as mine were last week on the bike) who can’t move and can’t hit but sure is getting paid a lot of money.

The Mets unbroken precipitous descent into the pits of baseball hell began in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game Seven of the 2006 National League Championship Series when Beltran, with two outs and bases loaded and with the tying run on first got struck out by St. Louis closer Adam Wainright on three pitches with Beltran getting caught looking as pitch three whizzed right by his head without him taking so much as a stab at it. I was at Shea that night. The air got sucked out of the stadium and the wind got knocked out of the Mets from that moment on. It was like the Curse of the Bambino for the Red Sox. Now, Carlos is a good guy (even if he’s a bit hobbled) but the fact is he’s the nexus point of all the Mets’ bad luck which was born at that awful moment in October 2006. Nothing the Mets did after that ever worked. Nearly all the dead wood from those days has been chopped away with the cutting of Perez and Castillo. Now is the time for another bold move – bring some young buck up from the minors to play right field and let’s have some fun watching an up-and-comer and not a faded star in his death throes.