Ralph Gardner Jr.

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.

My son-in-law Henry has a way of posing profound philosophical questions masquerading under the guise of the everyday, the commonplace. Or maybe they’re just profound to me. Recently, he solicited my opinion about the correct number of pillows that a bed should have. Little did I know it at the time that he was in the throes of a dispute with his wife, my daughter Gracie, about the appearance and comfort of their bedroom.

I haven’t done any estate planning lately and my itinerary for the week feels like fate is encouraging me to do so. Every year my friend Bruce posts photos on Facebook of him and several mutual friends skiing fresh powder on their annual pilgrimage to Alta, sparking envy. I haven't joined them there since sometime during the Clinton administration.