Brother’s Keeper Dept.

This has not been a good month for depending on the kindness of strangers:

Police: Diabetic Man Missing After Being Kicked Off Train

Group says U.S. citizen wrongly deported to Mexico

Tape: 911 operators did little to help dying woman in ER

As you probably know . . .

. . . there aren’t enough assholes in the world, at least not in Washington, D.C., or, rather, at least not among lawyers in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, Roy Pearson, Esq., is doing his best to rectify that state of affairs:

Judge aims to have pants suit ironed out next week

A mammal that can live to be 200

I really can't add to this AP story except (1) I didn't know this about whales and (2) Herman Melville was still alive in 1890 (although by then he was perhaps best known as a retired customs inspector, who had worked at the customs house on Gansevoort St.).

What Tony is reading

After a craving to read British novels of the first half of the 19th century (which is why I read Frankenstein in February), I got sidetracked. After Frankenstein I read The Namesake because I wanted to know the book before I saw the movie. However, I ended up being too busy to see the movie, which in the meantime has closed. (Good planning, Tony! Well, I was busy with things like visiting Paris and moving to Brooklyn.)

I then read Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson--my craving had shifted to catching up on other things I hadn't read. When all the other boys read Old Yeller, in the Scholastic edition, I read the How and Why Wonder Book of the Human Body. And I didn't see the movie of Old Yeller--although not because I was going to Paris; it was probably because I wanted to see The Ghost and Mr. Chicken instead. I can't help thinking that my life might have gone in a different direction if I had read Old Yeller in second or third grade, when other boys were reading this incipient-testosterone coming-of-age story. Then again, for that to happen I would have had to have been a different person anyway.

In May I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass--they're late 19th century, but oh, so British. They are also totally crazy books. I hadn't read them since I was 12 and I had forgotten how off-the-wall they were. This is the culture that brought you Monty Python and "I Am The Walrus," which didn't suddenly spring out of nowhere in the 1960s. By the way, here's a trippy fact I gleaned from the Wikipedia: When Alice Liddell was hard up for money, she auctioned off the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground that Lewis Carroll had given her. In 1932 she visited America when the manuscript was displayed at Columbia University for the 100th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's birth, and it was on that trip (when she was 80 years old) that she met Peter Llewelyn-Davies, one of the brothers who were the inspiration for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. So, there you have it: Alice in Wonderland met Peter Pan, and I’m sure if you had enough patience you could eventually connect them to Kevin Bacon.

I also read Growing Up, by Russell Baker. On Monday I finished Wuthering Heights. And I am now reading a P.D. James for the first time, A Certain Justice--which is British but certainly not from the first half of the 19th century, which I still want to get back to.

In the new

This phenomenon of doing new things--or at least recognizing them, whether they be trivial or grand--is contagious. Last night I did something new: I spent the night in Brooklyn. I know that doesn't sound impressive, but I have lived in New York for over half my life, and I have spent the night in Queens, Manhattan, and The Bronx--because I have lived in all those boroughs. But never Brooklyn.

My Bronx apartment is being renovated, and I found a good sublet deal on craigslist. By Saturday night I was all set up; so there I fell asleep in the back room on the top floor of a three-story brick walkup to the sounds of people in the yard below chatting and drinking beer. The apartment doesn't have air-conditioning; so, keeping the window open for cross-ventilation in this weather is essential. Jenny is staying with a friend, also in Brooklyn--her first night ever in Brooklyn was Friday.

I have been in Brooklyn late at night before. One of my first jobs in New York was monitoring fire and police radios and dispatching a freelance TV crew. As I went off shift at 2 a.m. one winter night, the crew was in our Times Square office dubbing tapes to deliver to TV stations when the radios came alive with dispatchers sending fire engines to a two-alarm blaze in Brooklyn. "Ever seen a fire, Tony?" one of the guys said. I hadn't, and so I went with them. We sped through empty New York, running red lights, and when we got to the fire, which was on Avenue U or something, I carried a spare battery belt for the crew. Nobody got hurt in the fire, and a cat that had been overcome by smoke inhalation was revived on the hood of the fire marshal's car. That was the clip that ended up on the local news later that morning.

A house fire has an awful mixture of smells: The pleasant smell of burning pine, which you might experience in your fireplace when you're glad to be home on a dark winter evening. But it's mixed with the dust and dirt of dry old timbers and the buttery smell of burning paint, which might contain lead. And the burning tar of the roof. And the house's vinyl siding. This smell sticks in your hair and coats the inside of your nose for days. You smell like fire till you get your clothes off and take a shower and then you still smell like a fire.

Last night was a lot more restful than that. And I'm going to do it again tonight.