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Point of View: Just Spell My Name Right

Wed, 04/28/2021 - 19:06

This may not be the best advertisement for the book of “Point of View” columns I intend to publish, a book to be known as “Essays From Eden,” but Mary nearly keeled over in proofreading them this past week.

Her collapse dovetailed with reports of the latest Cuomo scandal, to wit, that he had used underlings to get his book together. “Tell me about it,” she said.

Should sales be disappointing, I’m thinking that “Essays From Eden” might alternatively be used in interrogations. I can see it now: (Captive Audience) “No, no, I’ll talk. Please, please, don’t make me read one more word — I’ll tell you everything.”

The attorney general would defend it to reporters as an innovative investigative technique, on a higher moral plane, for instance, than waterboarding, though the press corps would remain doubtful.

I would, of course, benefit from the publicity, whether good or bad. Just spell my name right, I’d say. But that might be asking too much for one who has habitually misspelled names in his journalistic career.

On a less serious note, Mary has told me to get my butt back to the office. And I’ve been going, I’ve been going, but it’s been a little hard after having lain about the house for more than a year, super-spreading all the while on the dining table, which we use only at Thanksgiving, but anyway I get the point. It is time, I agree.

I’ve more or less made the transition now, and I find I’ve become much more attuned to what day it is and what month it is. So that’s been helpful.

And it has been helpful, I think, to be back at my desk. It just seems more conducive to productivity there. Frankly, I used to think I couldn’t work anywhere else but in the office.

“I think inspiration fairly seeps from the wainscoting here,” I said in a recent phone call home as I munched on some cookies that had been on The Star’s kitchen table throughout the pandemic, but they tasted pretty good.

“Or, on the other hand,” I said, “it could be the mold.”


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