Wind Sprints

From The Romanian Air-Force Diet

(1996)

An entry in my journal of roughly five years ago reads: “I learned that my cholesterol count is a very fine 185. Must carefully cross all streets. It would be a shame to die with so splendid a cholesterol count.” On the other hand, it might give my son a talking point at my memorial service. “My father,” I can hear him say, “was a man well in control of his life, as witness his cholesterol count of only 185.” I hope he will not mention that he often remembers me glancing down upon my plate at yet another boned, skinless chicken breast and looking gloomy at the prospect.

I am the man who coined the phrase—not yet in wide currency—“entree envy.” Entree envy denotes that moment in a restaurant when the waiter brings out everyone’s main course, and you look around the table in the hope of discovering that no one has ordered a more enticing dish than yours. In my case, entree envy includes the hope that no one’s plate has more food piled upon it than mine.

My natural voraciousness conflicts badly with my growing desire for long life. I grew up in Chicago on a diet of corned-beef sandwiches, hot dogs, sausage pizzas, steaks, chops, chopped liver, and rare roast beef, served in a series of restaurants that, if Jane Brody had anything to say about it, would be compelled to have at least two full-time cardiologists on the payroll. I used to go to a restaurant in Skokie, Illinois, called The Original Big Herm’s—The Hermitage, as I prefer to think of it—which served an Italian beef-and-sausage combo sandwich with sweet peppers that required three hands and fourteen small paper napkins to manipulate and consume, and then afterward there was the dry-cleaning bill to consider. In youth, my idea of a nightcap was four fingers of salami, a dozen chocolate-chip cookies, and a pint of butter-pecan ice cream, after which I slept the sleep of the just.

From Don’t Ask, Multitask

(2000)

Fasten your seatbelt, kiddo, we’re going over a bumpy bit of language, another little pot-hole on the rocky road of thought, this puppy yclept—no hyphen, please—“multitasker.” The word is popping up of late with a fair regularity in that thesaurus of faux pas, that ample warehouse of wretched excess, the New York Times. “I’m a great multitasker,” Monique Greenwood, the new editor of Essence, recently announced in the business section of the paper. Miss Greenwood also runs an 18-room bed-and-breakfast and a 72-seat restaurant in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, and she has no intention of dropping them because of her new job. Essence has more than a million readers, but, hey, no sweat, the woman is, as she herself says, a great multitasker.

The test for a new word seeking entry into the language is need; I would also allow beauty and simple amusement. In a recent collection of Henry James’s letters, I note that James, that great unitasker, refers to an American visitor who arrived for a visit at his house in Rye at 1:30 and stayed until 6:30 as “New Yorkily conversing.” Adverbing New York is swell, and I intend to do it myself the first chance I get. I also happen to like “oojah-cum-spiff,” which stands for sheer perfection in the world of Bertie Wooster, though I haven’t as yet found many uses for it.

But, somehow, I don’t think we need multitasker. I say this despite the fact that I come from a long line of the dudes. More than a mere multitasker, my dear mother was a simultasker. On the phone with her, I would sometimes hear a metallic sound and, on inquiring what it might be, learn that she was stirring soup. Once she carried on a phone conversation with me while typing a letter, and as I recall it was a serious conversation. A very smart woman, she didn’t require all her powers to talk to her son, so why not, she figured, put some of them to other uses?

I may, at one point, have been a multitasker myself. I once had three different jobs: I edited a magazine, I taught at a university, I published enough of my own writing to come perilously close to qualifying as what Edith Wharton called a magazine bore. I had no notion at the time that I was a multitasker; I thought I was just trying to make a living. But my multitaskesqueness had quite as much to do with my intellectual modus operandi—or MO, as they say down at the station—which is always to have a big project going, then do six or seven other things to avoid doing what one is supposed to be doing on the big project. By evading taking on first things first, I have found, you can get a tremendous amount of work done.

From Making a Spectacles of Myself

(2014)

Of late, the last four years or so, I rarely go out for long without being praised. I am praised not for my writing, my perspicacity, my elegant bearing, my youthful good looks, my extreme modesty, but for my eyeglasses. “Nice glasses,” strangers say to me. “Like your glasses,” they say. “Love those glasses,” is a refrain I hear at least once a week. “Where did you get those glasses?” people wearing glasses of their own often ask me. “Thank you for your kind words about these glasses,” I have taken to answering. “They are my best feature.”

The frames of my glasses are round, large, heavy, and dappled with an emphatic tortoiseshell. Although they are bifocals, I do not need them full-time. I work at my computer without them. I don’t need them to watch television. I sometimes leave my apartment without them. Clearly, though, when I do wear them they dominate my face. Were I to commit a crime, they are probably the first thing that witnesses to it would recall about me.

A few Sundays ago, I was walking in the neighborhood when a middle-aged woman, in tights and doing a power walk, paused to say, “Love your glasses.” I told her I much liked the glasses she was wearing. She told me she has several pairs of glasses at home. “Glasses are jewelry for the face,” she said, and humped and pumped her way down the street.

Some glasses make one look forbidding. I think here of those rimless spectacles that suggest an older banker foreclosing on one’s mortgage. Other glasses make one look owlish. As an older man, Cary Grant wore black-framed glasses that made him even more elegant. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan wears half-glasses low on the nose that do not work well with his sad comb-over.

When I grew up, wearing glasses of any kind was considered a serious detraction, a handicap of sorts. “Men seldom make passes,” Dorothy Parker wrote, “at girls who wear glasses.” Men who wore them were thought bookish, make that bookwormish, nerdy avant la lettre. “Four-eyes” was the put-down term of choice used against those who did. As if to illustrate how much this has changed, For Eyes is today one of the nation’s leading optical franchises. Naming a company after an insult—only in America.