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.

The Zeitgeist

        

Ah, nothing like an old fashioned cast iron monster of a furnace to keep the house warm…

I Need 65° and I Need It Now.

Like many of you, I unfortunately burn oil to heat my home. I’ve got a 50-plus year-old beast of a burner down in my basement which probably emerged from the foundry at the same time as the boilers for the Titanic (which is also probably why it continues to chug along year after year, what with it being made from solid steel and not plastic). Come what may with the outside temperature or occasional puddles down in the nether reaches of my basement this burner keeps cranking out the heat and hot water, sending surges of old fashioned scalding hot steam to my 1920-vintage cast iron radiators.

Now when this steam engine was initially installed, I bet that home heating oil was five cents a gallon. Maybe they were even giving it away. Right now however, on the last bill from my dependable oil people, I see that the charge per gallon has risen to $3.94 and at 127 gallons came to over $500.  We have a story in this week’s issue about the ever escalating expense of oil and gasoline but you don’t need that to tell you that the cost of warmth and mobility are reaching new challenges to household cash flow management.

Yeah, I hear all the time about natural gas. The thing is, to remove the existing burner and put in new stuff costs something like $5,000 along with having legions of plumbers wreak havoc on my basement for a week. It would probably take three years for the natural gas savings (on years when there are savings versus oil) to pay for it all. The other issue for me is a deep set paranoia about being the one house in the Five Towns that gets blown to smithereens by a gas leak explosion (you see these all the time on TV, don’t tell me they don’t happen every year) with my being catapulted to kingdom come in the middle of the night courtesy of National Grid. Rational? Hardly. The real solution here to my heating angst is for the weather to finally climb north of 60 degrees for a sustained period and preferably above 65 so that heat becomes irrelevant.

The daffodils, crocuses and tulip tips peaking out from the now thawing ground are harbingers and teases of the balmy temperatures on the horizon. These past two winters here have been a real throwback to the winters of my youth in the 60s and 70s – real, deep cold combined with a lot of snow and ice. Unrelenting and unremitting. I’d like to send the bill for “global warming” over to Al Gore. Maybe he’d like to fill my oil tank. Having spent a week in Florida in February and blissfully missing one of our big storms has made me ponder just how much our area would be paradise if only we had an median temperature of 70.

Thankfully, we’re in the 50s most days now, which means the scarves and gloves are back in the closet, we’re wearing lighter coats, and come next week with the first day of Spring, the banishment of my corduroy pants to the back of the closet until next November. I love cords and the preppy-tweedy look and am excited to don them around Thanksgiving time but I have a rigidly inflexible fashion policy of no cords after March 21^st and no whites after September 22^nd. So, I’m hoping that with the cords put away, the flowers will yet reemerge and we’ll see 65 degrees which I need now not only to stop supporting Big Oil (and the hedge fund/commodity speculators) but also to sit on the porch, warm my bones and get more natural Vitamin D into the bloodstream.