It was another surprising day. The forecast predicted a deluge. The morning was bleak and drizzly. I was resigned to the fact the floating bookshop didn't have a prayer of opening. I figured it was a good day to read and to hit the recycling center, which is usually empty when it rains. I expected to get soaked, but when I went outside the streets and sidewalks were dry. I redeemed the plastic bottles in a few minutes, then had the crazy notion to walk up to Avenue Z and see what the sky looked like. As I approached East 13th I thought: What the hell. The car was 50 feet from my usual nook. I had large plastic bags to cover everything if the clouds opened up. It looked like a mistake when Herb passed on the new batch of thrillers my sister and niece had left me in the basement of our family's house. Sure enough, after a two hour wait, a young woman and her boyfriend stopped and bought Anita Shreve's Light on Snow, former uber-model Paulina Porizkova's surprisingly good A Model Summer, and James Frey's controversial faux non-fiction blockbuster A Million Little Pieces. And a while later one of my regulars, a slender woman who lives up the street, snapped up four thrillers and a beautiful Scientific Frontier book on bodies of water. And I again forgot to ask her name. Duh! Thanks, folks.
Harmon Killebrew lost his battle with cancer today. "The Killer," as he was known, was one of the most feared home run hitters of the '60's, long before the steroid era. He is eleventh on the all-time list with 573. He was built like a fullback. I remember watching a Yankees game vs. the Twins a long time ago. The Old Redhead, Red Barber, was at the mike, Killebrew at the plate. The Killer connected and all Barber said was: "Gone." That's all there was time for, the line drive leaving the field in a flash. Decades later I saw Darryl Strawberry hit a similar homer, the drive so fierce it broke a seat in the mezzanine. Strawberry could have been a Hall of Famer. He coasted on his enormous talent. Killebrew got the most out of his. RIP.
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