Ralph Gardner Jr.

Often, on the way to and from New York City riding the Taconic State Parkway I think of my grandparents. They would travel from their home in the Hudson Valley, the house we still own, to visit my parents, my brothers and me. I found something idyllic about their leisurely retirement lifestyle — the way they were free to come and go, seemingly without a care in the world, while my young life was bracketed by school, homework and my failed attempts to be popular.

My friend Aris, who died in December, made clear what he wanted done with his ashes. It’s on my to-do list for this spring. He wanted them sprinkled around the tree that stands in front of our house.

Nothing sparks questions about my competence and self-worth like facing the challenge of putting something together. If you subscribe to Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s (no relation) theory of multiple intelligences there are at least seven of them; not just the verbal and mathematical skills that I was led to believe were all that mattered back in high school.

Were you a tree — and given the significant size of WAMC’s listening audience and public radio’s conservationist tendencies, maples and oaks may well be among them — what would be your favorite season?

Finally, something that Donald Trump and I agree on. An executive order the President signed April 9th — propitiously titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads” — reverses a Biden era regulation that conserved water by restricting the number of gallons per minute that can flow from showerheads and other appliances.

Air travel these days, economy class air travel in particular, is an exercise in ritual humiliation. The seats are so cramped that after being immobilized on a transatlantic flight for seven or more hours you almost need to be assisted to stand upright — the ways those astronauts recently were whose return to Earth had been delayed for months.

My mother Nellie often spoke about the Bucharest apartment where she lived until her family immigrated to the United States in 1939. “Actually,” she mused less than a year before she died in 2019, “by any standards including probably today in the United States it was a fabulous place.”

My mother was an intelligent woman. She spoke seven languages and claimed to have read the great works of Russian literature in Russian, her second language, by the time she was twelve. But she wasn’t a profound thinker or doer. Raising four sons isn’t nothing but she felt more comfortable as a spectator than a participant in life.

Prior to the pandemic I used to visit WAMC’s studios every week to record my commentary. Then the lockdown hit and I started recording from home on my phone. I’ve done so ever since because nobody objected. I suspect that has less to do with the quality of the sound than because if somebody is going to complain it’s going to be about the substance of the work and the twists and turns of my damaged soul.

I worked for the Wall Street Journal for almost seven years in the 2010’s, producing more than 1,300 columns at a rate of four or five a week. The name of the column was Urban Gardner. It wasn’t a gardening column, even though first-time readers would occasionally ask my advice on growing tomatoes.