Ralph Gardner Jr.

I’ve been losing a lot of sleep lately. The cause of my insomnia isn’t the usual culprit – existential dread. It’s the late night matches at the US Open. The tournament runs at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens through Sunday.

I’m doing my best to be a climate smart citizen. I compost. I reuse plastic bags. I’m sealing the holes in my house to ready it for a heat pump. But I draw the line at liquid soap. I’m not referring to dish soap. That’s indispensable. I’m talking about the liquid soap you use in the shower.

I really don’t understand the rush to return to the moon when you can easily visit a more more convenient alien world. Russia’s spacecraft crashed on the lunar surface last week a few days before India successfully landed on the satellite’s south pole.

The first time I attended philanthropist Joan Davidson’s “Shad Bake,” an annual springtime ritual at Midwood, her estate overlooking the Hudson River in Germantown, NY, I wasn’t invited. I’d been working on a story for New York magazine about a proposed, controversial hulking cement plant promised to mar views for miles around and it was suggested that if I wanted to get a sense of the opposition to the project, as well as some lively local color, I attend the party.

The arrival of a new refrigerator last week required me to clean out the old one. I say “me” rather than “we” because my wife was out of town. I had a plan. I’d move the contents of the freezer to our basement standing freezer. But I’d wait until I got word of the new refrigerator’s imminent arrival – the delivery company gave me a wide window of between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. – before I’d empty the perishable items in the non-freezer side.

Good day from Maine. This is the first year, though sadly undoubtedly not the last, when I feel obligated to offer the local climate change report. The part of coastal Maine where we landed was socked in by fog for the last couple of days but is sunny today. More to the point, there’s no predication of scorching heat, floods or wildfires that are plaguing much of the rest of the Earth; though particulate matter drifting down from Canada has triggered warnings for the very young and the old.

I have three ways of gauging how much rain falls at our house during a storm like the one we had this week, or was it last; and another one between the time I wrote and recorded this commentary. Fortunately, our home in Columbia County was spared the floods that struck the lower Hudson Valley and Vermont.

Our family represents the sum total of our routines and rituals. One that’s deeply ingrained, dating back decades, has been to visit the village of Kinderhook, NY for Saturday morning breakfast. We’d once join the regulars for eggs and bacon at the Village Hutte, a small diner where the counter stools were monopolized by the town’s old-timers.

This week I did something I’ve been meaning to do for years. I got my car detailed. I’m aware this admission may not provoke curiosity let alone awe in the average person. Either because they don’t consider detailing – an interest and, on the part of some, an obsession with the cosmetic aspects of their ride – something they attend to routinely or because a car interior riddled with dust, dirt and dog hair doesn’t disgust them as much as it does me.

Wallie was a working dog whose primary disappointment in an otherwise charmed life is that she didn’t have enough, or really, any work to do. We acquired her nine years ago, after my daughter Gracie filled out an online family personality profile and Wallie’s breed popped us as the answer do our dog-owning dreams.