New Year’s Eve lived up to its name as Amateur Night for those drinking before they turned pro. But it was also a nightmare of people from Omaha coming to New York to see the ball drop and thinking a yellow cab was some kind of tour bus where a friendly driver with amusing patter would show them the sights.

Still, you did make good money, even if it produced cabbie PTSD that could last into March. 

About Thanksgiving, I should have listened to my friend Donahoe, a former cabbie who scored a job as a police photographer. Low man on the totem pole, he was assigned the 4 p.m. to midnight tour one Thanksgiving, shooting mugs in the basement of the precinct house. “The usual parade of skells and knuckleheads, but now and then there’d be a regular person standing with the height numbers behind him, looking at the camera like he was about to be hanged,” Donahoe said. “A cousin, who’d been invited by some family member who thought he’d finally make up with a relative he hadn’t talked to in years — and who hated him. But too many cocktails and it started all over again. Fistfights and, you know, at Thanksgiving you have those big serving forks? And knives? It was awful, these guys in nice clothes with blood on their shirts, asking me what came next, you know? What could I tell them?”

Mary and I got married in August and on Thanksgiving, figuring we could use the money and then have a long weekend, we had the meal and did the family thing before I went to work.

There were just a few guys waiting for cabs to come in off the day line when I took a seat on the bench next to Fitz. He was an old guy who was one of the great raconteurs. Everybody — from the young Black, Latino and white guys to the old cabbie wizards — talked and listened to him.

Fitz was an immigrant who came to America as a young man and achieved the dream. He started out selling insurance and worked up to running his own agency in Queens, getting married and starting a family.

But then he lost it all, through years of betting on slow-running horses. Coming to his senses at rock bottom, he got help and started over, driving a cab. He helped some other guys in the garage to find help.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he greeted me. “Get out of here. Don’t you have a home to go to?”

I told him I’d heard it was a good night to work. Lots of happy and generous people splurging on cabs. Plus, all the restaurant workers and everyone else punching clocks on Thanksgiving would be ready to treat themselves by hailing a cab home.

“But you didn’t answer my question,” Fitz said, and told me a story.

One Thanksgiving afternoon, he got a fare 20 minutes out of the garage on Park Avenue, an elderly man, holding a bouquet of two dozen roses, dressed in a three-piece suit, a camel’s hair topcoat, leather gloves and a jauntily angled fedora.

“The smell of those flowers in the cab,” Fitz said. “The smell of money.”

The old gentleman gave him an address in Little Falls, N.J. Any trip beyond the city limits automatically meant the fare would be doubled.

“I told him about double the meter and he knew all about it. I thought, ‘I’m gonna be rich tonight, mining gold in Jersey.’ ”

The dapper old gentleman was going to his brother’s, he said. He and Fitz chatted about Thanksgiving, covering everything from the proper way to cook a turkey to whether the Lions had a chance against the Packers. “He directed me to Little Falls and then started to direct me through the streets,” Fitz said. “It was already dark when he said, real quiet, ‘Here. Here we are.’ ” It was a cemetery. The passenger directed Fitz in through the gates. “I saw him in my mirror slumped in the back, his face white as a sheet. Staring straight ahead.”

The passenger told Fitz to stop and wait for him, got out and climbed a hill with his bouquet, stopping at a grave. “After a while I could see his shoulders heaving,” Fitz said. The bouquet was hanging straight down from his hand, touching the ground. Fitz waited 20 minutes before he got out and went up to the man and put his hand on his shoulder. He had pulled himself together by then, putting the flowers on the grave, drying his eyes.

Back in the cab the man apologized, saying he was alone today — some kind of old family dispute — and had suddenly wanted to be with his only brother, who had been kind to him. He had somehow neglected to express his love for him when he was alive. “I’m alone and so is he,” the man said.

Fitz suggested a cup of coffee. “We went into a diner, sat and talked. He was a terrible old man, really,” Fitz said. “Tossed his life away by not paying attention to those nearest to him.” On Park Avenue the old gentleman paid the double fare. “And stiffed me on the tip,” Fitz said, with a smile.

“A real prince,” I said.

“Where’s the wife today?”

“Home,” I said.

“What are you doing here?” Fitz asked, his voice soft. “Do you have to work today?”

I took the subway home, and going down the hall to our apartment, I saw the light under the door.

It was then I realized I’d forgotten to ask Fitz why he was working on Thanksgiving. 

The post Guest Column: A working holiday appeared first on Riverhead News Review.

Our institutions and traditions, handed down in America through the generations, are now under assault and seem unsteady, not able to withstand the shock of a new authority sweeping away what once we held as inviolable.

I’m speaking, of course, about Major League Baseball’s seemingly endless rule changes. Last year the vulgarians in power scrapped the requirement that an intentional walk must consist of four balls thrown outside the strike zone. A manager now has only to indicate to the home plate umpire that his team wants to put the opposing batter on first base.

The intentional walk, part of the chess match played by heavily tattooed men chewing tobacco, is employed if a team doesn’t want to face a hot hitter or to set up a double play.

Question: Why change a quirky and fascinating moment in a game that true fans relish?

Answer: The baseball powers-that-be believe it will quicken the pace of the game.

Somewhere: Abner Doubleday is weeping.

Baseball is a game requiring great skill. It’s been said that consistently hitting a ball thrown at 90-plus mph that is not moving in a straight line is the hardest feat in all of sports. (If you can do that only three out of 10 times you will be paid many millions.) It’s also the slowest of our games, and the most beautiful, because of the leisurely procession of its moments.

The pace of the summer game has always been a respite from the manic rush of American life. Baseball says, “Slow down. Really watch. There’s more here than meets the eye. Learn something.” It’s not for nothing that the political world has co-opted the expression “inside baseball” to describe intricate maneuvering.

These days, with human attention spans on par with squirrels because of touch-screen tyrants in everyone’s fist (Americans on average check their phones every four minutes), baseball is the closest thing to Zen you can have while eating and drinking stuff that’s bad for you.

The need for speed is to get younger people to watch the sport. Team owners want more folks to watch the games and make more money. I get it. It’s just how you go about it.

New rules for 2023 include putting a timer on a pitcher, giving him 15 seconds to deliver to the plate when he gets the ball with the bases empty, and 20 seconds with a man on. Also, infield shifts are banned, and two infielders must be positioned on either side of second base when the pitch is thrown, and all four infielders have to have both feet on the infield dirt. The size of the bases will be increased from 15 inches square to 18 inches.

Wonders never cease — I agree with the baseball barons on eliminating shifts and making the bases bigger. But the pitch clock? No way. In a tight game, in the late innings, with runners on base, it’s a delight to take time to anticipate the next pitch, and not have to watch an electronic indicator counting down the seconds. Take your time!

But it’s not just a matter of time. It’s also allowing the fans to see something unexpected, such as that old-time intentional walk. It used to be that the catcher looks for a sign from his manager in the dugout, who tucks his thumb under and holds up four fingers.

The catcher relays the info to the pitcher and stands behind the plate, rather than crouching. The pitcher delivers a pitch that is two or three feet off the plate, and the catcher makes a graceful, two-step sideways move to catch the ball. Four times and the batter heads to first.

Don Drysdale, the great Dodger ace (or borderline psychopath) of long ago, didn’t like the intentional walk. A pitcher known for occasionally throwing at a batter’s skull, Big D was said to hit an opponent on his first pitch after he got the signal to issue the free pass, which automatically awarded first base to the batter. His irrefutable logic was why waste three perfectly good pitches to put a man on?

Making the intentional walk automatic robs the fan of seeing once-in-a-blue-moon screwups. There have been occasions when the pitcher has thrown wildly, missing his moving target, and a runner has scored from third, and also on occasion a pitcher has thrown a little too closely to the plate and a batter has reached out and stroked a base hit. Not often, but it’s happened.

As Casey Stengel would say, “You could look it up.”

The abomination known as the designated hitter is now entering its second year in the National League. This means there are 10 players to a side, and not the mystical number of nine players, corresponding in perfect harmony with nine innings, which relates to three, an unbreakable relationship with nine, as in three strikes, three outs.

But four balls, you say? Never contradict a person when he’s being mystical.

It’s probably best to leave the final word to someone who actually played the game. Asked about rule changes, former Major League catcher Russell Martin told Sportsnet: “My thing is, if they really want to speed up the game, then when a guy hits a home run, to speed up the game should a guy, just like in softball, when he hits it, should he just walk to the dugout? It’d be quicker. I’m just wondering, at what point do we just keep the game, the game?”

Amen, brother Martin.

The post Column: Changes to baseball? Do not get me started appeared first on Riverhead News Review.

Which leads me to conclude there are worse ways to kill a weekend.

But what Ms. Holiday was getting at is it’s always prudent to remember on this annual conspiracy of florists that not all good things come when love comes to town.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Like love itself, all this can be baffling, but stay with me here. Show some patience, which is something love requires.

The traditional American song, “Careless Love,” recorded many times but owned by Bessie Smith, speaks to what can happen when an accelerated heart rate combines with being struck suddenly blind staring at a light all around one person.

“Love, oh love, oh careless love

You fly through my head like wine

You’ve wrecked the life of a many poor soul

And you nearly spoiled this life of mine.”

This love-with-consequences theme goes back to the man who gives his name to today’s feast day.

There are many legends attached to St. Valentine.

One story goes that St. Valentine believed in love so fervently he fearlessly married Christian couples in ancient Rome when doing so was a capital offense. He was arrested but was spared a dinner engagement with some lions when Emperor Claudius II took a liking to him. Still a fool for love, Valentine tried to convert the emperor, which didn’t go down too well.

The emperor had Valentine beaten with clubs, stoned and then publicly beheaded. Talk about careless love.

Some honor the martyr to love on this day by celebrating with trysts at motels where the bed is shaped like a heart, the tub is a giant cocktail glass and there’s a complimentary bottle of uncertain vintage. The fortunate ones, at least.

The triumph of hope over experience has often been a definition of a second or third or Liz Taylor-number of marriages, but it can also be a working explanation for love in general.

I once did a business story for a newspaper that tried to go beyond the flowers/sweets/lingerie matrix and discovered that V-Day for divorce attorneys meant a happy spike in billable hours. It seems lots of romantics get hitched on February 14 and more marriages inevitably beget more divorces.

David Mejias, a partner at a Glen Cove-based law firm specializing in divorce, told me that after the glow of joyous emotions during Christmas and New Year’s — when the love-intoxicated believe everyone is as blitzed as they are — many see Valentine’s Day as “an idealized situation. They look at their own lives and think it might be time for a change,” Mr. Mejias said.

(It’s tragic to think of an April morning when the Valentine Day marriages are wrecked on the rocks of dubious bathroom behavior or alarming in-laws.)

But those are in many ways sad cases, and what we want to celebrate and remember is the battle-tested bravery of great lovers. They’re the ones who have gone through the fire because of their commitment to each other and have a to-hell-with-you defiance to throw in the faces of society, parents, tribes or any convention that would dare separate them.

Think of Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, Tristan and Isolde, Donald Trump and Donald Trump.

Except for the last couple, all the others had to fight for their right to party with each other.

Walter Benjamin, the great German writer, made a study of, among other things, German romanticism. ­ Benjamin said, completely seriously – maybe a bit too seriously, he was German, after all – that the only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

His counsel to give your all to the love of someone with full knowledge there will be unpleasant or even dangerous consequences, and somehow putting all that from your mind, is one of the bravest acts a person can perform. That courage is truly what makes the world go ‘round.

What is love? Love is like jazz, and not just when it’s choreographed correctly. Remember Louis Armstrong’s response to someone who asked him to explain his art — if you have to ask, you’ll never know.

But Shakespeare did make a fine attempt: “Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake — it’s everything except what it is!”

Got it?

Happy Valentine’s Day.

The post Column: On Valentine’s Day, love’s labor’s won appeared first on Riverhead News Review.