Archives for April 25, 2005

I moved to New York twenty years ago this month. It never occurred to me as a young man that I would someday live here, and I’m still capable of being taken aback by the improbable fact that I do. Just the other day I was riding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab, and as I glanced out the window at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the city suddenly looked strange to me, as if I’d never seen it before. Perhaps you can never feel completely at home in a city to which you move at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.

I celebrated my twentieth anniversary as a New Yorker by slipping out of town for a few days–an appropriate gesture, I think, since Manhattan, for all its myriad wonders, has a way of getting on your nerves after a couple of months’ worth of continuous exposure. As I sat on a park bench by the Hudson River, basking in the sunshine and idly turning the pages of Du c

For those who’ve been elsewhere of late, we’re batting around
the possibility of coming up with a more striking name for the mental disorder known as “clinical depression.” One reader wrote to remind us that Winston Churchill referred to his own depression as “the black dog,” and a couple of classicists obligingly translated that homely phrase into resonantly medical-sounding Latin.

In case you didn’t see her announcement last Wednesday, Our Girl in Chicago has a new job and two full hands. In order to maintain her sanity, she’s decided to post mainly on Saturdays and Sundays (though you shouldn’t be too terribly surprised if she should poke her head in on the odd weekday), meaning that “About Last Night” now returns to its former status as a full-service 24/7 blog.

When I remember bygone days

I think how evening follows morn;

So many I loved were not yet dead,

So many I love were not yet born.