The Wedge Will Return

Kev is a melancholy baby, not because he has anything to complain about, but because he is embarrassed by his riches when much of the world is filled with danger and sorrow. Golf score was in triple digits again today, but he is enthused about his full swing under the tutelage of a good friend and smart guy in the sun and breeze of Dyker Beach.

The check will hit the bank tomorrow. He has tickets to the U.S. Open and Belmont. His supply of diet coke and Hungry Man TV dinners will keep him hydrated and fed. His children are beautiful and healthy. The Athletics pulled through for him tonight against the Rays, more than compensating for his loss by taking the O’s vs. the pinstripers, who used the jet stream to knock three homers in a row off an otherwise artful moundsman.

Didn’t have to worry about bombs lobbed onto the first tee by drones. Enjoyed deepening his tan and head of hair that needs a crew-cutting now that summer is upon us. Didn’t have to care that he lost his sand wedge at a prior hole, knowing, somehow, that it would return.

No, we are brought to our knees by recalling the verse of John Keats, a genius who died at the age of 25, who wrote of the nightingale’s immortal life beyond the experience of those who wave a wand at a dimpled ball and pretend it means something.


“What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs.”

What a description of putting strokes, or stock picking. Kev grows worrisome about the stock market. To paraphrase Keats, there is no long run for the sentient species. Somebody told me that homo sapiens are the only animals that laugh because they are the only ones who know they will die.

But let’s not despair in our inability to reach the green in two. The wedge returned, finished 18 with a double bogey and that lucky ol’sun will be out tomorrow.

Palm has killed us recently, Ford has hung in, AMD has been a stalwart. NYT is up because takeover rumors are rife. Life is good. Buy oil.

Miss Piggy

Like Keats listening to the nightingale, “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk.” But I am listening to the snorting and oinking of bacon, not the avian cluck of doom in recent years past. The influenza that originated with the porcine staple of subsistence farmers, such as my grandfather, who relented to my mother’s pleas and didn’t slaughter the pig she had raised in the depths of the Depression, has put us in the slop.

Given the panic infecting the markets, I fully expect to see pedestrians with surgical face masks when I venture out for my bacon (make that steak) and eggs this summery, un-flu like morning. But I got a shot back in the Ford administration when the swine flu alarum first sounded. Hope it took.

Miss Market can turn on a dime from seductress to you know what with lipstick. I don’t mean you, Gov. Palin. I look forward to your presidency and admire you for sticking up for everyone challenged by the mess we make of things. Plus you look as good as Obama in a tailored suit.

The day is not over, but I remain cheered. Unlike Keats, whose psyche (to which he wrote another ode) was absorbed with the fleetingness of youth, my gaze is fixed on tomorrow. I remain in the green, thanks to F and SLV. Even the redoubtable PALM refuses to bend. The only virus it fears is the one that could infect its operating system.

The airlines are suffering. NYT is down after Ms. Dowd’s wry farewell address to her profession on Sunday. Oil is dipping, but precious metals could be a refuge.

And Yankees’ fans, your ballyhooed pitching staff is suffering from walking pneumonia. I’m stealing home on them and I’m having a BLT for lunch.