Ralph Gardner Jr.

Our living room plays host to an inherited Steinway baby grand piano. No one in the family plays it. Hardly anybody played it when the instrument resided at my parents’ apartment for six decades. And when they did play it – typically my brothers and me when we were taking piano lessons -- you wished they hadn’t.

My wife and I recently fulfilled a long-delayed dream. We held a garage sale. If ever there was a home begging to have large quantities of its stuff decommissioned through the agency of folding tables filled with junk it was ours. But we could never seem to do so. Mostly because our house is so far off the road that weekend bargain hunters probably wouldn’t be able to find the place; and also because we don’t really want strangers invading our privacy.

I was planning to address whether the human species is doomed when a hummingbird crossed my path. I’ll explain the connection momentarily. I’d always believed that Homo sapiens was perfectible. Not today or tomorrow. Perhaps not for another hundred thousand years. But eventually we’d get it right. We’d work out the kinks. We’ll ferret out a way to live in harmony.

The death this week of Mad magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee at 102 years old has sparked a totally justified, excessive, cathartic, head-scratching, at times maudlin outpouring of tributes and nostalgia from all corners of the culture; seemingly as much for the lost youth of those honoring the cartoonist as for the man himself.

TV weathermen who brave hurricane force winds do so for a reason. They’re getting paid. I could find no such excuse as I stood atop the Smuggler’s Notch ski resort in northern Vermont Tuesday morning trying to prevent myself from being blown into the woods and perhaps wrapped around a tree.

I was pleased to discover that the New York Times rightly devoted as much space to a recent obituary for my local baker as they would to a statesman, a Nobel Prize recipient, or a movie star. And well they should.

The absence of a dog is felt more profoundly, at least on an hour-to-hour basis, than that of a spouse or a child. I say that after our dog Wallie got sick and spent a couple of nights at New York City’s Animal Medical Center. That’s the premiere animal hospital where the room, or rather cage, rate is equivalent to a Four Seasons hotel.

An editor gave me some advice at the start of my career. “It never hurts,” he said, “to make one more call.” By that I believe he meant that just that little bit of extra effort could spell the difference between a story and a scoop, that there’s no substitute for doing the work.

A few years back I was a “super” at the Metropolitan Opera’s production of La Bohème. I don’t mean I was super – singing along to the radio’s the extent of my experience as a musical performer – but a super. If you have no idea what I’m talking about neither did I until the Met offered me the role.

Having heard all the summer travel horror stories – delayed or cancelled flights, altercations, lost luggage – I’ve decided to take only what fits into a carry-on bag for an upcoming two-week vacation. A couple of factors prompted this fraught decision. The first, obviously, is that airlines can’t lose your luggage if it never leaves your possession. The second is economic.