I spent a lovely day in Brooklyn on Wednesday. As soon as Mike From Whitestone turned downhill, I felt the surging image of Duke Snider slugging the ball over the screen and into Bedford Ave.
Mike parked near McKeever Pl. and I could feel my head swiveling like a compass needle to the apartment buildings where Ebbets Field used to be. But I was the only person talking about the Brooklyn Dodgers, about ancient history. The occasion was a career expo at Medgar Evers College, where several hundred very qualified students were seeking leads on jobs, on futures. I heard about the expo through Monica and Miguel Mancebo of Selective Corporate Internship Program (SCIP), which does such a fine job of preparing young people for the job market. The students saw my soccer book on the table and wanted to talk about their sport. One young woman from Trinidad plays defender for the Medgar Evers team; another young woman roots for VfB Stuttgart, from her home town; a volunteer told me she roots for Barça and her husband roots for Real Madrid. And Michael Flanigan, the director of development and major gifts officer at Medgar Evers, told me how he referees soccer matches in his spare time. I marveled at the résumés of the Medgar Evers students, their life stories, their work experience. Many of them have worked in kitchens, in day-care centers, in nursing homes. They see it as paying their bills. I told them to be proud of their work; they were learning the process, the system. Many of them want to be doctors and teachers, accountants and, good grief, journalists. I wanted to hire them all. I hope by now somebody has.
Andrew Tansey
5/16/2014 02:54:07 pm
I puffed about the link between jogo bonito and the Valley Stream Jogo Bonito in "It Must Be Nice to Be Brazil" from 5/8, and now I wonder . . . will my copy of "Eight World Cups" be one of the first to arrive in Brazil tomorrow night?
George Vecsey
5/17/2014 01:07:39 am
Andrew, the game is the game.
mike from whitestone
5/16/2014 02:54:11 pm
Thanks from the 'wheelman' GV. I enjoyed it from driving down memory lane talking about dem' guys from Flatbush to the career fair and meeting the wonderfully diverse group of students with the opportunity to hear their experiences while sharing some of mine. I got another free lesson in my soccer education too. Great day for a great group.
George Vecsey
5/17/2014 01:10:35 am
Mike: thanks for getting me there. I am proud to once in a while join the team from the NYT plant. You get me to great places.
Camille McIntosh
5/18/2014 05:24:52 am
I enjoyed the day for sure. This was the best career fair I've been to at Medgar Evers College. Next year will be even bigger and better.
George Vecsey
5/18/2014 11:38:40 am
Thanks for noticing my site. I am still glowing from meeting so many nice people. GV 5/18/2014 08:42:42 am
Nice to see the NYT involved in such meaningful activities.
George Vecsey
5/18/2014 11:42:19 am
Alan, you kept your store going on the Upper West Side for a long time...good for you.
John McDermott
5/20/2014 02:49:22 pm
And a very, very good book it is! Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God! Then I would wake into keening grief all over again. Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days. After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy. Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s. Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone. ----- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html Jan. 30, 2023 Categories
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