Ralph Gardner Jr.

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.”

My mother was an intelligent woman. She spoke seven languages and claimed to have read the great works of Russian literature in Russian, her second language, by the time she was twelve. But she wasn’t a profound thinker or doer. Raising four sons isn’t nothing but she felt more comfortable as a spectator than a participant in life.

Prior to the pandemic I used to visit WAMC’s studios every week to record my commentary. Then the lockdown hit and I started recording from home on my phone. I’ve done so ever since because nobody objected. I suspect that has less to do with the quality of the sound than because if somebody is going to complain it’s going to be about the substance of the work and the twists and turns of my damaged soul.

I worked for the Wall Street Journal for almost seven years in the 2010’s, producing more than 1,300 columns at a rate of four or five a week. The name of the column was Urban Gardner. It wasn’t a gardening column, even though first-time readers would occasionally ask my advice on growing tomatoes.

When the going gets tough, the saying goes, the tough get going. I guess the message is to grow a spine; when things look hopeless isn’t the time to lose your nerve but to charge bravely ahead like the British cavalry did into the “Valley of Death” in Tennyson’s poem Charge of the Light Brigade. I’m taking a more measured approach — it didn’t end well for British — by deciding that escapism is the better part of valor.

It takes all my self-discipline to adhere to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s admonition that I hang my bird feeders only from December 1st through March 31st, to reduce conflict with bears. Frankly, I don’t follow their advice. After losing several pricy feeders, I have cheaper second string feeders that don’t cause heartbreak if they happen to get destroyed in the early fall or late spring.

Among the raft of initiatives with which Donald Trump and his Musk minions have carpeted bombed the American people — let us not even get started on the beleaguered citizens of Denmark, Greenland, Panama, Ukraine; the list goes on — the one that fills me with the greatest ambivalence is his decision to cease minting the penny.

Among the entertaining elements of Hudson’s holiday season Winter Walk were tableaux performed in storefronts. Children ballerinas executing pirouettes in one window, Santa getting his locks shorn in another. But perhaps the best show in town was invisible from the street. And for good reason. It was happening behind the imposing walls of a bank. Or should I say Banque.