Ralph Gardner Jr.

I’ve always been impressed by WAMC’s triannual fundraising campaigns. Perhaps this pegs me as a nerd but I listen to them for fun. Not all day, mind you. But an hour here, an hour there. If you’ve ever listened to other public radio stations’ exhortations for money their strategy seems to be to bore you to death until you cough up some dough, just so that they’ll return to regular programming.

Baltimore orioles began to alight on the white clouds of Callery pear trees blossoms lining our driveway on April 26th, more than a week earlier than they have in the past.

Every once in a while I take time out from my busy day to wonder what’s happening to us as a nation. I mean I know what’s happening. I read the news. Way too much of it. One of the blessing of writing is that while you’re writing you’re not reading. It doubles as a form of mediation. But you can’t write all the time. Nor would my constitution allow it. After several hours I’m exhausted.

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.”