When this happens, I pull out the pages of the Commonplace Book I was compiling and shave off a quantity of entries. Since I haven't been adding to the pages, the nuggets I collected will eventually deplete. No problem. The blog posting have been the substitute for the entries, and will continue to be so.
This installation includes an outtake from a John Updike short story, "A Sandstone Farmhouse." I have forever marveled at the metaphor of removing rocks from a pile to the removal of years from a life span by "an invisible giant." What's left always gets smaller by one day. It's a powerful statement about the progression of life and oncoming death.
There are some favorite out-takes from Damon Runyon and Jimmy Breslin, and another one I cherish by Robert Lipsyte writing about Bill Maloney, a professional billiard, pool, and backgammon player who my friend played against in a three-cushion billiard tournament round at McGirr's pool hall half-a century ago. I've written about Bill Maloney myself in a blog posting, 'The Corner Pocket.'
Enough preface. Let the entries speak for themselves.
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“Shut up,” he explained.
–Ring Lardner
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No one ever dies who lives in hearts left behind.
–Danish Expression: Lifted from Carnegie Hall program notes, 112th Opening, October 2, 2002
I use this sentiment in an In Memoriam notice in the NYT at now 5-year intervals to remember my murdered co-workers in the September 16, 2002 shootings at Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield by an Assistant Vice President who then took his own life.
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I don’t take the shortcut through Woolworth’s anymore. You never know when you’re going to get blocked by some woman in the aisle buying a ceramic dog.
–Ray Miller, explaining why the 3rd Avenue, 41st - 42nd Street detour through
Woolworth’s was not a guaranteed time saver.
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Running away from the sound of gunfire is the right direction.
–September 16, 2002
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It’s an amazing thing. The population of this town never changes. Every time a baby is born...a man leaves town.
–Willie Nelson, commenting on the population of his home town, Abbot, Texas.
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I wish to say I am very nervous indeed when Big Jule pops into my hotel room one afternoon, because anybody will tell you that Big Jule is the hottest guy in the whole world at the time I am speaking about.
In fact, it is really surprising how hot he is. They wish to see him in Pittsburgh, Pa. About a matter of a mail truck being robbed, and there is gossip about him in Minneapolis, Minn., where somebody takes a fifty-G payroll off a messenger in cash money, and slugs the messenger around somewhat for not holding still.
Furthermore, the Bankers’ Association is willing to pay good dough to talk to Big Jule out in Kansas City, Mo., where a jug is knocked off by a stranger, and in the confusion the paying teller and the cashier, and the second vice-president are clouted about, and the day watchman is hurt, and two coppers are badly bruised, and over fifteen G’s is removed from the counters and never returned.
Then there is something about a department store in Canton O., and a flour-mill safe in Toledo, and a grocery store in Spokane, Wash., and a branch post office in
San Francisco, and also something about a shooting match in Chicago, but of course this does not count so much, as only one party is fatally injured. However, you can see that Big Jule is really very hot, what with the coppers all over the country looking for him high and low. In fact, he is practically on fire.
–The Hottest Guy in the World, Damon Runyon
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“I used to be bad when I was a kid but ever since then I have gone straight as I can prove by my record—33 arrests and no convictions.”
–Big Jule, Guys and Dolls, by Damon Runyon
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Chink approached Dutch Schultz’s table. Schultz got up and fired a gun. This was the first of three occasions on which Schultz and Chink resorted to weapons during these years. A year or so after this, Chink lost the third and most decisive gunfight by a wide margin. But this time at the Club Abbey he hit the floor breathing.
–Damon Runyon, a biography, by Jimmy Breslin
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If he and his father and grandfather had torn the porch down themselves, he would have remembered so heroic a labor, as he did the smashing of the lath-and-plaster partition that separated the two small parlors downstairs, making one big living room, or the tearing out of the big stone kitchen fireplace and its chimney, right up into the attic. He remembered swinging the great stones out the attic window, he and his grandfather, pushing, trying not to pinch their fingers, while his father, his face white with the effort, held the rope of a makeshift pulley rigged over a rafter. Once clear of the sill, the heavy stones fell with a strange slowness, seen from above, and accumulated into a kind of a mountain it became Joey’s summer job to clear away. He learned a valuable lesson that first summer on the farm, while he turned fourteen: even if you manage to wrestle only one stone into the wheelbarrow and sweatily, staggeringly trundle it down to the swampy area this side of the springhouse, eventually the entire mountain will be taken away. On the same principle, an invisible giant, removing only one day at a time, will eventually dispose of an entire life.
–A Sandstone Farmhouse, John Updike
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Bill Maloney, slim and blond, his choir-boy face just beginning to crack and fade at 31, laid his jacket and cue case on a metal tray that slid under the billiard table out of reach of junkies and boosters. He screwed the halves of his stick together with quick, sure twists of slender hands, as graceful and efficient as fish-snatching birds. He prowled the table, smoking, drinking coffee, but lithe and relaxed, as if he had purged his mind of a thousand deals and poured all his energies down into that cue. Players from other tables gathered to watch his match, part of McGirr’s current three-cushion billiard tournament, another attempt in the long, vain disjointed campaign to make something profitable of this complex and absorbing game.
Even now, so easily moving round the table, so quickly sure of his shot, Maloney might be a little bored. Maloney will never get better playing a five-handicap opponent, and he will never get better unless he plays five or six hours a day, which means giving up chess and checkers and bridge, and go and scrabble and table tennis and bowling and golf, games he also plays well and bets on.
Maloney accepted a few congratulations after winning, then reached down for his jacket and cue case, and left. He would move back and forth several times in the next hour, answering telephone calls, going into corners for whispered conversations. His movements, so sure around the table, became ragged, even tense. After a while, he joined Polsky, who had finished next-to-last in the tournament, for coffee at the counter. His eyes were darting around the room, prospecting. “I might go to Antwerp in September, to see where my game’s at but...” He saw something that may or may not have been there, softly said, “Excuse me,” and was gone.
–Bill Maloney, Plays a Game at McGirr’s, Sports of the Times, Robert Lipsyte; June 1971
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Sleek, slinky creatures crowd the bar at Vandam. With a Darwinian instinct for social display, they perch on the tall stools and preen, agreeably conscious that they have chosen a flattering setting.
–Restaurant review, NYT, July 21, 1999
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Grandma’s Bake Shoppe, now in the midst of its high season, produces some 2 million pounds of fruitcake each year. Fruitcake, that stodgy Yuletide loaf of neighborly good intentions and caloric density, endures though it has long been disparaged by the good and the great. Russell Baker has called it “the only food durable enough to become a family heirloom.” Dickens, no doubt referring to the boulder-like heft and longevity of the loaf, described it as a “geological homemade cake.”
But unlike relax-denim-clad baby boomers, fruitcake at least has time on its side. One customer took a Grandma’s Bake Shoppe loaf out of the freezer after 18 years and reported that, a generation later, it was still moist and tasty.
–A Cake So Misunderstood, WSJ, Amy Finnerty, December 20, 2002
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The grounding of the Concorde means the end of an important symbol, one that made what seemed an impossible feat—traveling faster than the speed of sound (while wearing street clothes)—possible on a regularly scheduled basis. As a boyhood fan of such interplanetary travelers as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, I never dreamed that the future might arrive during my lifetime. It makes me especially sad to see that part of the future disappear.
–The Future Is Past, Op-Ed piece, NYT, April 26, 2003, by Larry Gelbert, who developed the TV version of M*A*S*H.
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