Nearly Done in by Gravity

I just read a book review of a collection of pieces by Calvin Trillin, a man whose wit is so dry it could be a martini. Shaken, or stirred.

The book is The Lede: Dispatches From A Life In The Press. Mr. Trillin is much in demand as a eulogist, someone who will say pithy things about your life at your funeral. I don't know if he supplements his writing income with eulogy appearances, or does the work pro bono, but apparently he's in demand, and popular enough that there could be listings in the New York Times on where he'll be speaking from in the coming week.

The book is described as being in sections, with one being called R.I.P. that contains remembrances of some of Trillin's favorite people. Amongst those listed is one of my favorite people, Russell Baker, a New York Times columnist who passed away at 93 in 2019, after being the longest-running columnist in the history of the paper. 

Mr. Trillin recalls the time Mr. Baker wrote of the time a raw potato "fell from a tall building, barely missing him." The potato didn't come loose from a roof top garden across the street from Mr. Baker's 58th Street apartment in Manhattan, but was likely chucked by a bored youngster who had yet gained access to firearms, but could be just as deadly with grocery store items. After the potato splattered on the ground missing Mr. Baker by inches, he looked around and saw a parked car nearby that be been splattered with an egg. Mom was going to have to add some items to her list.

Mr. Baker was just about to reenter his building when the grocery store hand grenade was let loose from about the 48th floor of the building across the street. At the time, Mr. Baker was musing about what to write about next. He now had the basis for his column that was appropriately given the headline "Groceries from Heaven" by the person who is paid to do these things.

He wrote, "what if the potato had scored a direct hit with fatal consequence? After a certain age most people probably speculate occasionally on the manner of their ultimate departure, but the possibility of becoming a potato victim was one that had not occurred to me, and I did not like it."

I think there a book that summarizes unusual manners of death, what a British coroner might ultimately label, "death by misadventure." Luc (Lucy) Sante translated works form Félix Fénéon who compiled a book of unusual deaths, Novels in Three Lines.

There's one that will forever stick out in my mind that I read set in agate type from the front page of a 1912 New York Times about the fellow who in 1912 was taking a lunch break from blowing up tree stumps in Massachusetts with dynamite who sat down on a stump yet to be blown up with sticks of dynamite in his back pocket and was himself sent heavenward in many pieces. It was the ultimate butt dial.

We never really know what's going to do us in until perhaps a terminal disease descends. But even then something else might beat even that out as to the cause of our demise. Hospital power failure, flood, missile strike: start the list.  

I've been without something to write about since January 10th, an eon for me. But reading about Russell Baker and the potato that saved him from writer's block saved me from writer's block.

For now.

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