and:

If you like the essay please pass along to anyone you think might get something out of it.

Much obliged and Happy Holidays to you all.

The Wife and I sat on a bench in Union Square on Saturday evening and watched the world go by. A group of kids performed acrobatics on the grass not far away. Here’s a shot of one of those dudes diving through a hoop. He made it look easy when it is anything but.

At the risk of making her slightly uneasy by the attention I feel compelled to let y’all know that I sure do love The Wife.

She is one great lady.

For reals, as the kids like to say.

(And as far as attention goes this is certainly less embarrassing for her than when I loudly declare my love for her in a crowded store or when we’re walking down the street.)

The Wife on 34th street last night. (It’s gotta be the shoes.)

I’ve been with Emily for close to eleven years. Love her more now than ever.

Did I mention she likes baseball?

Late last night The Wife says, “I should get the purple heart for dealing with your ass.”

I say, “You’d get a purple heart if you’d married a Mets fan.”

Touche, she says.

When the Yanks finally won it was after midnight. I was typing away on my computer as she talked to me. She laughed because I wasn’t listening. I heard her laughing but didn’t hear what she was saying because I wasn’t listening.

She announced she was going to bed.

“The wife is exhausted,’ she said. Then, to herself: “Purple heart. And if you don’t give it to me, I’ll give it to myself. I don’t need you to give it to me.  That shit is mine, man.”

The first date I had with The Wife was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in January, 2002. Home field advantage I figured. Little did I know that painting and drawing don’t move her. So I took her on a tour and she smiled as I talked and talked. She was probably bored silly and finally she was hungry. Still, she was too polite to stop me and I was so nervous I kept talking.

As she tells it, “You talked until I was limp.”

She has not been back to the MET since. Until this past Saturday. This time we didn’t look at paintings or drawings but we went through the Japanese collection–The Wife loves the Japanese aesthetic. She wasn’t bored and we left before she was starving.

Progress.

A Heppy Ket.

Cloud City at the Roof Garden.

Spent last week in New Mexico.

Albuquerque.

Man..it sure was nice.

My wife adores baseball mascots. I think she’d rather meet the Phillie Phanatic than any player–oh, how she wants a kiss from that furry green beast. She complains that the Yankees don’t have a mascot. “What a bunch of tight asses,” she says. This helps explain why she is attracted to Francisco Cervelli, the closest thing the team has to a fuzzy cheerleader. She’s liked Cervelli ever since he joined the team a few years ago–though she did not like when he crossed home plate in a hot dog fashion up in Boston last season.

Ever since I’ve braced her for the possibility that he’s a short-timer in pinstripes. He’s spirited, throws the ball to third after a strike out with flair. The pitchers seem to like throwing to him though he doesn’t have a great arm and despite a few Luis Sojo-like streaks of clutch hitting, he’s not much with the stick either. And yet he’s still around and will go into spring training as the favorite to be the Yankees’ back-up catcher.

Over at Lo-Hud, Chad Jennings looks at organizational depth at catcher. There’s also a news-and-notes post featuring word on Phil Hughes and a rumor about Godzilla Matsui. As always, the Lo Hud remains an essential stop for the well-informed Yankee fan.

[Photo Credit: Barton Silverman/The New York Times]

It was warm on Saturday afternoon. Here’s the wife as the 1 train rolls into the station. Yup, she’s a good one.

My wife is sweet and polite, she is proper and feminine.

She is also a good shot.

Last week in Vermont, I shot a handgun for the first time in my life. Guns scare me but my father-in-law is an expert teacher, calm, cautious, and encouraging.

I kept thinking of Lorraine Bracco in “Good Fellas” when she said, “I gotta admit the truth. It turned me on.”

The wife shops inside, the husband waits patiently outside. The marriage works.

Ham and cheese, made to order for the wife. That’s three slices of black forest ham and six slices of jarlsberg cheese, red leaf lettuce (dressed with olive oil, champagne vinegar and maldon salt), dijon mustard and thinly-sliced cornichons on rye. That’s how she likes it, that’s how she gets it.

Hey…it’s good to be the queen.

It’s easy for me to fall into that line of thinking so I remind myself every day to be present, in the now, not yesterday and not tomorrow. After all, it takes a lot of energy to be pissed off. And it would be shame for me to act like a spoiled brat at my age, especially considering all the good things I’ve got going on, especially this peach of a woman I call my wife.

Damn, I’m one lucky sonofabitch.

Here’s the Mrs. taking pictures for her Christmas collection.

“Hopefully, we’ll be watching another victory parade,” I said.

“But then it’s over and what are we going to do? Maybe I should start watching football.”

Football? She hates football. What is she turning into?

Emily still likes to bust my chops when I become shrill and unreasonable, announcing the season is over after a first inning at bat. But on Sunday night, the pressure finally got to her. She retired into the bedroom by the seventh inning and listened to the game on the radio. I stayed out in the living room and watched it on TV. By the 9th inning, I came in and she said, “I think I’m going to vomit.”

An inning later, after the Yankees had won, I came in again, and she said, “I’m never going to watch or listen to another baseball game again. I can’t take it. I’m sick to my stomach.” I had to stop myself from smiling. This after the Yankees had won, mind you. “Welcome to my world,” I said.

Last night, with a chance to clinch a playoff birth, A.J. Burnett gave up seven runs in just over two innings, and I opted for the wife’s world of Dancing with the Stars. Figured I owed her one. The Bombers rallied but fell short, 7-5. The Red Sox also won, but the Rays and Twins both lost.

We’ll do it again tonight.

My wife Emily and I have seen most of our friends become parents over the past six or seven years. It’s been painful at times as we don’t have children of our own. But as our friends’ children grow up, any discomfort we’ve experienced has eased.

As childless parents, our cats have become our kids. It might sound corny to some, but for animal lovers it won’t. We adopted our oldest cat, Tashi, a few months before my old man died. I never knew I could love an animal as much as I love her. At night, she’ll crawl up on our bed and sit between our pillows. I press my ear to her belly and listen to her purr. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up overcome with emotion because I know that one day she’ll die and life will continue without her. It almost makes me sick and I imagine that’s a small variation of the kind of anxiety parents must feel all the time about their kids.

I don’t miss having children now. I enjoy the ones I know. And I cherish every day with my wife and our two cats. I force myself to stop and appreciate the moment–like I do every time Mariano Rivera pitches–because it’s just a moment, and no matter how tightly I hold on to it, time slips through your fingers and nothing lasts forever.

In the spirit of spring and Mother’s Day–which is just around the corner–the wife is having a sale (15% off ) on her photography note cards now through 5/9/10.

She’s added a number of new sets including orchids and cherry blossoms.

Ah, spring loveliness. Dig it.

Last night my wife and I sat on the couch, facing each other and she told me about her day. We didn’t turn on the TV all night, a rarity. At one point, she showed me the cartoons from last weekend’s Week in Review section. I told her how those were the only cartoons we ever saw in my house growing up. She said they always got the Sunday Funnies and I told her the Times never had comics. I said maybe her parents got one of the tabloids.

“Can you see my parents reading a tabloid?”

“I’ll bet your mother grew up reading the Post.”

“What!?”

“Sure, it was a liberal paper back then. I’m sure they got the Post along with the Times. Maybe the Herald Trib too. Or the Journal-Amer–”

She burst out laughing.

“The Herald Trib?”

Laughing at me. In my face.

“Well, that’s what they called it,” I said, raising my voice in mock fury.

“Yeah, right. You are such a dork!”

“That’s what they called it!”

She curled into a ball as if to protect herself from attack and I picked up the phone and called her mother.

Her mom answered and Em and I took turns talking to her, laughing. She called it the Herald Tribune. But they read the Post in their house.

“See, I told you,” I said.

Emily spoke to her mom and her voice dropped, “Oh-no.”

Emily’s folks had to put down their dog in the morning, a fourteen-year old Dalmation. We stopped giggling and Emily’s voice became soothing and concerned. As childless parents, our two cats are like our kids. The thought of life without them is dreadful. I often day-dream about what will happen when Emily’s parents die, how I’ll feel when my mother dies. In two days it will be the third anniversary of my father’s death. And I think about when our cats will die until I force myself to think about something else.

This morning, I sent Emily’s parents an e-mail, letting them know that I was thinking about them. Em’s mom sat on a rug in the Vet’s office a few hours later and held her dog as it was put to sleep. 

Em and I talked about that tonight. The pain of losing loved ones. We talked about the shrine we’d make for our cats when they go. She was back on the couch. A re-run of The Office played in the background. I got up to get some some cereal. I found an unopened box and brought it into the living room and handed it to her.

“Why can’t you open it?” she said.

“Because…things…happen.”

“Oh, I don’t think opening it is the problem. I think it’s when you leave it on the counter all night, wide open so that you make sure that it gets completely stale. That’s the problem.”

She laughed at me again.

“Hey, listen,” I said, “I’m trying to be pro-active here, and what’s with the editorializing?”

“I figured it might work well in the Herald Trib.”

A pause. She scrunched into a fetal position and then filled the room with laughter.

The wife and I were on our way home Saturday night, riding the IRT back uptown to the Bronx. Two young, heavy-set women sat across from us with a stroller in front of them. One of the women drank a can of orange soda and played with her infant son; the boy gripped her fat fingers and laughed. The other woman tapped her cell phone and complained about how long it was going to take for them to get ready–showered and dressed–to go out.

“It’s nine o’clock, you gunna take forever to get your ass in gear. I don’t even know what I’m going to wear.”

The women chattered along–giggling and talking loudly like teenagers–and the child became restless.

“What are you bothering me for?” the mother said to him. “Why do you keep saying, ‘Papi’? Your father isn’t here.  Papi, Papi, Papi. I’m here. He’s not here. You want me to call him so you can talk to him? I brought you into this world, why you need to always bother me? I’m the boss. You do as I say.”

The Mrs and I were tucked into the two seats at the end of the car. We were distracted by the mother, our conversation halted. Finally, Emily turned to me and said, “Can we move?” I had been thinking about changing our seats for several stops. At 168th street, we moved to the next car.

It’s not about being judgemental it’s about comfort. If you can do something about it, why expose yourself to something that makes you uncomfortable, anxious or upset? Yeah, when I’m aware of it–and both Emily and I are exceedingly sensitive to this kind of thing–I don’t think, I just move.

Watch the closing doors.