Ralph Gardner Jr.

Here’s how out of touch I am. I did a Google search for “the world’s most expensive yoga mat” suspecting I might have recently bought it. I paid $250 plus tax and shipping. Let me explain before you brand me some sort of pretentious jerk.

I’m sitting on the horns of dilemma. When I explain what the issue is you’d be totally justified in thinking – this guy really ought to get a life. To that I’d respond I have a life. And part of the reason is that I sweat the details. My wife and children probably think I do so way too much. And my infant grandchildren probably will too once they master the rudiments of language.

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.

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.

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.

Would you eat a tomato, or other garden delicacy, that some anonymous critter has gotten to first? That’s the dilemma I faced this week as I plucked a blushing red tomato from the vine only to discover that its orb-like beauty had been defaced by teeth marks.

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.