amicusamo's Xanga

Monday, April 25, 2005

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:08:56 GMT

A Lawyer in Dutchland

Even for his fellow lawyers, a Dutch law school graduate may have a gone a bit too far in expressing a desire to strike it rich.

Reinder Eekhof, a freshly minted lawyer, recently wrote in an e-mail that he had “finally finished this stupid education,” and was “now looking for someone crazy enough to dump a suitcase full of money in my lap every month.”

The e-mail was meant for a friend at the Houthoff Buruma law firm. But Eekhof mistyped the address and his missive landed in the inbox of someone in the communications department instead. That person forwarded it, and soon the e-mail was being read at law firms across the Netherlands.

“Good luck with your career,” wrote one lawyer who saw the e-mail. Another noted that “the advantage is that now everyone in the legal profession in Holland knows your name.”

Still, it appears Eekhof's e-mail hasn't turned off law firms looking for a young lawyer to fill their ranks.

“We're having him in for an interview about an internship,” said Marry de Gaay Fortman, managing partner at Houthoff. – AP

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 01:22:58 GMT

Not That There Is Anything Wrong With That

Do you remember that Seinfeld where the gang was at the hospital, and a mental patient jumped off the roof and landed on George's car? When George went to talk to the hospital administrator, she was appalled by him asking for the hospital to pay for the damages. Assuming his insurance wouldn't cover it, doesn't he still have a claim for negligence against the hospital?

1- The hospital owed George a duty of care, in that they owed everyone in and around the hospital a duty to protect them from harm caused by a mental patient under the hospital's care.

2- The hosptial clearly breached their duty by allowing the mental patient to escape and ultimately jump off the building.

3- The hosptial's breach of duty caused the damage to George's car. But for the hospital's negligence, George's car would not have been damaged.

4- Proximate Cause: The tricky issue in negligence. Certainly it is reasonably forseeable that an unsupervised mental patient could harm a person in or around the hospital. If I remember correctly, the exact kind of harm that occurred does not have to be forseeable, just that the victim was reasonably forseeable. George, as a visitor to the hospital, was certianly a reasonalby forseeable victim.

5- There was actual harm done.

None of the defenses apply. There was no superceding cause; the hospital may argue that the patient jumping was one, but the duty the hospital had was to supervise the patient, including suicide prevention.

There is no assumption of risk or contributory negligence. George was parked legally in the street, and did nothing wrong. Nor did he in any way consent, either expressly or impliedly, to having his car subject to damage from escaped mental patients.

George should have sued.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:55:38 GMT

(By Invitation) Jonathan Safran Foer

The Sixth Borough

Once upon a time, New York City had a Sixth Borough. You won't read about it in any of the history books, because there's nothing -- save for the circumstantial evidence in Central Park -- to prove that it was there at all. Which makes its existence very easy to dismiss. Especially in a time like this one, when the world is so unpredictable, and it takes all of one's resources just to get by in the present tense. But even though most people will say they have no time or reason to believe in the Sixth Borough, and don't believe in the Sixth Borough, they will still use the word ''believe.''

The Sixth Borough was an island, separated from Manhattan by a thin body of water, whose narrowest crossing happened to equal the world's long jump record, such that exactly one person on earth could go from Manhattan to the Sixth Borough without getting wet. A huge party was made of the yearly leap. Bagels were strung from island to island on special spaghetti, samosas were bowled at baguettes, Greek salads were thrown like confetti. The children of New York captured fireflies in glass jars, which they floated between the boroughs. The bugs would slowly asphyxiate, flickering rapidly for their last few minutes of life. If it was timed right, the river shimmered as the jumper crossed it.

When the time finally came, the long jumper would run the entire width of Manhattan. New Yorkers rooted him on from opposite sides of the street, from the windows of their apartments and offices, from the branches of the trees. And when he leapt, New Yorkers cheered from the banks of both Manhattan and the Sixth Borough, cheering on the jumper, and cheering on each other. For those few moments that the jumper was in the air, every New Yorker felt capable of flight.

Or perhaps ''suspension'' is a better word. Because what was so inspiring about the leap was not how the jumper got from one borough to the other, but how he stayed between them for so long.

One year -- many, many years ago -- the end of the jumper's big toe touched the surface of the water and caused a little ripple. People gasped, as the ripple traveled out from the Sixth Borough back toward Manhattan, knocking the jars of fireflies against one another like wind chimes.

''You must have gotten a bad start!'' a Manhattan councilman hollered from across the water.

The jumper nodded no, more confused than ashamed.

''You had the wind in your face,'' a Sixth Borough councilman suggested, offering a towel for the jumper's foot.

The jumper shook his head.

''Perhaps he ate too much for lunch,'' said one onlooker to another.

''Or maybe he's past his prime,'' said another, who'd brought his kids to watch the leap.

''I bet his heart wasn't in it,'' said another. ''You just can't expect to jump that far without some serious feeling.''

''No,'' the jumper said to all of the speculation. ''None of that's right. I jumped just fine.''

The revelation traveled across the onlookers like the ripple caused by the toe, and when the mayor of New York City spoke it aloud, everyone sighed in agreement: ''The Sixth Borough is moving.''

Each year after, a few inches at a time, the Sixth Borough receded from New York. One year, the long jumper's entire foot got wet, and after a number of years, his shin, and after many, many years -- so many years that no one could even remember what it was like to celebrate without anxiety -- the jumper had to reach out his arms and grab at the Sixth Borough fully extended, and then, sadly, he couldn't touch it at all. The eight bridges between Manhattan and the Sixth Borough strained and finally crumbled, one at a time, into the water. The tunnels were pulled too thin to hold anything at all.

The phone and electrical lines snapped, requiring Sixth Boroughers to revert to old-fashioned technologies, most of which resembled children's toys: they used magnifying glasses to reheat their carry-out; they folded important documents into paper airplanes and threw them from one office building window into another; those fireflies in glass jars, which had once been used merely for decorative purposes during the festivals of the leap, were now found in every room of every apartment, taking the place of artificial light.

The very same engineers who dealt with the Leaning Tower of Pisa were brought over to assess the situation.

''It wants to go,'' they said.

''Well, what can you say about that?'' the mayor of New York asked.

To which they replied, ''There's nothing to say about that.''

Of course they tried to save it. Although ''save'' might not be the right word, as it did seem to want to go. Maybe ''detain'' is the right word. Chains were moored to the banks of the islands, but the links soon snapped. Concrete pilings were poured around the perimeter of the Sixth Borough, but they, too, failed. Harnesses failed, magnets failed, even prayer failed.

Young friends, whose string-and-tin-can phone extended from island to island, had to pay out more and more string, as if letting kites go higher and higher.

''It's getting almost impossible to hear you,'' said the young girl from her bedroom in Manhattan, as she squinted through a pair of her father's binoculars, trying to find her friend's window.

''I'll holler if I have to,'' said her friend from his bedroom in the Sixth Borough, aiming last birthday's telescope at her apartment.

The string between them grew incredibly long, so long it had to be extended with many other strings tied together: the wind of his yo-yo, the pull from her talking doll, the twine that had fastened his father's diary, the waxy string that had kept her grandmother's pearls around her neck and off the floor, the thread that had separated his great-uncle's childhood quilt from a pile of rags. Contained within everything they shared with one another were the yo-yo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, and the quilt. They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string.

The boy asked the girl to say ''I love you'' into her can, giving her no further explanation.

And she didn't ask for any, or say, ''That's silly'' or ''We're too young for love'' or even suggest that she was saying ''I love you'' because he asked her to. Her words traveled the yo-yo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, the quilt, the clothesline, the birthday present, the harp, the tea bag, the table lamp, the tennis racket, the hem of the skirt he one day should have pulled from her body . The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love from him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he could never open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know that it was there.

Some, like that boy's family, wouldn't leave the Sixth Borough. Some said: ''Why should we? It's the rest of the world that's moving. Our borough is fixed. Let them leave Manhattan.'' How can you prove someone like that wrong? And who would want to?

For most Sixth Boroughers, though, there was no question of refusing to accept the obvious, just as there was no underlying stubbornness, or principle, or bravery. They just didn't want to go. They liked their lives and didn't want to change. So they floated away, one inch at a time.

All of which brings us to Central Park.

Central Park didn't used to be where it now is. It used to rest squarely in the center of the Sixth Borough; it was the joy of the borough, its heart. But once it was clear that the Sixth Borough was receding for good, that it couldn't be saved or detained, it was decided, by New York City referendum, to salvage the park. (The vote was unanimous. Even the most obdurate Sixth Boroughers acknowledged what must be done.) Enormous hooks were driven deep into ground, and the park was pulled, by the people of New York, like a rug across a floor, from the Sixth Borough into Manhattan.

Children were allowed to lie down on the park as it was being moved. This was considered a concession, although no one knew why a concession was necessary, or why it was to children that this concession must be made. The biggest fireworks show in history lighted the skies of New York City that night, and the Philharmonic played its heart out.

The children of New York lay on their backs, body to body, filling every inch of the park as if it had been designed for them and that moment. The fireworks sprinkled down, dissolving in the air just before they reached the ground, and the children were pulled, one inch and one second at a time, into Manhattan and adulthood. By the time the park found its current resting place, every single one of the children had fallen asleep, and the park was a mosaic of their dreams. Some hollered out, some smiled unconsciously, some were perfectly still.

Was there really a Sixth Borough?

There's no irrefutable evidence.

There's nothing that could convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced.

But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to: in the peculiar fossil record of Central Park, in the incongruous pH level of the reservoir, in the placement of certain tanks at the zoo (which correspond to the holes left by the gigantic hooks that pulled the park from borough to borough).

There is a tree -- just 24 paces due east from the entrance to the merry-go-round -- into whose trunk are carved two names. They don't appear in any phone book or census. They are absent from all hospital and tax and voting records. There is no evidence whatsoever of their existence, other than the proclamation on the tree.

Here's a fact: no less than 5 percent of the names carved into the trees of Central Park are of unknown origin.

As all of the Sixth Borough's documents floated away with the Sixth Borough, we will never be able to prove that those names belonged to residents of the Sixth Borough, and were carved when Central Park still resided there, instead of in Manhattan. So some believe that they are made-up names and, to take the doubt a step further, that the gestures of love were made-up gestures. Others believe other things.

But it's hard for anyone, even the most cynical of cynics, to spend more than a few minutes in Central Park without feeling that he or she is experiencing some tense in addition to just the present. Maybe it's our own nostalgia for what's past, or our own hopes for what's to come. Or maybe it's the residue of the dreams from that night the park was moved, when all of the children of New York City exercised their subconsciouses at once. Maybe we miss what they had lost, and yearn for what they wanted.

There's a gigantic hole in the middle of the Sixth Borough where Central Park used to be. As the island moves across the planet, it acts like a frame, displaying what lies beneath it.

The Sixth Borough is now in Antarctica. The sidewalks are covered in ice, the stained glass of the public library is straining under the weight of the snow. There are frozen fountains in frozen neighborhood parks, where frozen children are frozen at the peaks of their swings--the frozen ropes holding them in flight. The tzitzit of frozen little Jewish boys are frozen, as are the strands of their frozen mothers' frozen wigs. Livery horses are frozen mid-trot, flea-market vendors are frozen mid-haggle, middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilty and innocent. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying. On a frozen shelf, in a closet frozen shut, is a can with a voice inside it.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 00:29:07 GMT

UPDATED

The Predictions/The Pundits	Philip C.	Marc N.	Andrew G.	Jack F.
Percentage Turnout:	58%	60%	60%

Percentage Received:

George W. Bush (R)	46%	48%	53%	53.80%
John F. Kerry (D)	52.10%	51%	47%	46.20%
Ralph Nader (I)	0.90%	N/A	N/A	N/A
Michael Badnarik (L)	0.60%	N/A	N/A	N/A

Swing State Winners:

West Virginia:	Bush	Kerry	Bush	Bush
New Hampshire:	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry
Florida:	Bush	Bush	Bush	Bush
Ohio:	Kerry	Kerry	Bush	Bush
Oregon:	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry
Pennsylvania:	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry
Louisiana:	Bush	Bush	Bush	Bush
Maine:	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry
Iowa:	Kerry	Kerry	Bush	Bush
New Mexico	Kerry	Bush	Bush	Kerry
Arizona	Bush	Bush	Bush	Bush
Washington:	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry
Wisconsin:	Kerry	Kerry	Bush	Bush
Minnesota:	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry	Kerry
Colorado	Bush	Bush	Bush	Bush
Missouri	Bush	Bush	Bush	Bush
Nevada	Kerry	Kerry	Bush	Bush

Friday, October 01, 2004

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 12:16:31 GMT

President Bush may not be "articulate," his advisor said, but he won the debate with his "conviction and core beliefs." Using a phrase the Bush surrogates deployed frequently, advisor Bartlett said Bush spoke "from the heart." I asked the same question of Mike McCurry. His answer: "There's some things you just don't have to spin."

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 14:41:59 GMT

I thought I’d do my readers an intellectual service and point out some interesting things I read in last week’s Economist.

First up is the strange recommendation from the September 11^th Commission, that the states adopt a uniform design for their driver’s licenses. This sounds like useless regulation, but it would be in line with European practices.

Second is that some Iraqis are predicting a “flurry of attacks on the eve of the American presidential election in November, with the rebels hoping that they may thereby help bring down George Bush.” Note to the Iraqis: Americans don’t seem to care how much Bush fucks up Iraq, so quite while you’re ahead.

Third is their profile on the chief executive of Wal-Mart, which highlights the company’s low wages and subsequent high turnover rates. CEO Lee Scott notes that “70% of Wal-Marts senior managers were once hourly-paid workers.” Frankly, I’d stop complaining about Wal-Mart, if they increased their retail prices by five cents and then could afford to pay all entry level workers ten bucks and health insurance.

Fourth, the Economist invites the often in undergraduate economic courses writer Fred Bergsten to compose an article on the five major risks for the global economy. If you’re wondering, they are: a crash of the dollar, America’s deficit spending, America’s trading relationships, China’s coming downturn, and oil prices reaching 60 to 70 dollars a barrel. No surprise, Mr. Bergsten offers solutions. In a nutshell, he argues for cutting budget pork, prohibiting Congress to deficit spend for the next five years, tax gasoline with a bi-partisan effort, carve up Alaskan wild lands for oil, let the Chinese Yuan appreciate (but don’t float it!), introduce the Chinese to western banking procedures, and strengthen world peace by opening American markets to third world countries.

I agree with Mr. Bergsten, with the exception of drilling Alaskan wild lands, and cutting needed spending for education/heath care. A combination of corporate (and corporate agriculture!!!) subsidy slashing and higher taxes on the rich would more than do the job on our deficit woes.

Finally, the Economist continues their focus on developmental economics by blasting the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG). And they are right to do so. “The weakness of the whole MDG concept is that it wills the ends without willing the means – something which the UN, perforce, has come to specialise in.”

No British irony there.

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Sat, 29 May 2004 01:12:27 GMT

When I was a kid, my father used to describe the escalator at the 51st Street & Lexington station as 'the longest in the world.' This was before the messy divorce, and the flight from the suburbs, when trips to the city with dad were rare and eye-opening. I was so young.

Now, it was no more than a redundant commute. The escalator finally did again seem the longest, and the E/F tracks felt submerged in lost ruins shifted downwards by earthquakes and erosion. It was the summer of 1999 and high school independence seemed trite.

There were people everywhere, even for eight o’clock in the evening. It was an early summer and the business suits and skirts sweated miserably. Quick movements originated incessantly from the banks of the escalator, each person wanting to stand before the exact subway car needed to optimally drop them off at the next embankment. The station is basically a long corridor, but it’s continually in disrepair: paint over paint, whole spaces sectioned off by thin wooden panels, marked by official and unofficial scrawl, and, of course the stench of ones fellow man.

It had been twenty minutes and no Queens-bound trains had arrived. Aspiring surbanites lined the track at its edge, hoping to catch a glimpse of light from mid-town. Instead, the hopeless eyes followed the tracks of rats on tracks. The platform condensed with frustrated life.

A violin sounded from the back-side of a rising staircase. It distracted no more than a few pairs of eyes. A warm up followed and eventually I glanced around. A Chinese man cautiously took the bow to the instrument until he looked sure of himself and then the music pounded on our ears.

It was music to our ears, I think.

I don’t know the first thing about classical music, and it is possible this man played Bach or Beethoven or Brahms or Vivaldi or any other of those famous composers whose names popular culture obliges people to recognize. But what I do know is that he played a moderately paced tune, with what I can only describe as highs and lows. I followed them with my thoughts and forgot about the next hour of commute until a young black woman in a nurse’s uniform walked up to his hat, kneeled slightly, and drop a dollar.

A circle has formed around the meager violinist and homage needed to be paid. Each of us, who could get near the musician, offered what we could. He played on, undeterred and speechless.

His concentration was not even broken by an incoming, air-conditioned, F express to 179street, Jamaica, Queens: my train. He struggled against the screeching of the metal and closed his eyes when the train doors opened.

When he opened them, after the departure of the much-awaited train, he took in the view of the entire circle, still around him, including me, who had figured that they could wait for the next one.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Tue, 04 May 2004 20:06:19 GMT

"I am selfish," he thought.

"This is not a quality that will change when I 'see human suffering' or 'lose my parents' or 'help others.'

"This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

"It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can poise and balance into my life.

"There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend - all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness."

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."

Sunday, May 02, 2004

Sun, 02 May 2004 06:29:27 GMT

It is three-thirty in the morning eastern standard time.

My last days in Montréal. It figures it would be an ironic sultry goodbye.

It is hot. It reminds me of a family vacation at a cheap hotel in Florida. Even the keyboard of my laptop has an unwelcome warmth about it.

I can't sleep - you know as much. The list of online "buddies" is a wasteland of incommunicado insomiacs. I'm in that limbo hour between midnight reverly and dawn's sobriety.

There are no girlfriends at this hour, no best friends at this hour.. they are in a reality that is hours off. I think, with a sad hope, about this coming hour.

I realize I am alone. I've spent a good deal of my life alone, and I know how that is. Though, it always seems the history of my life is the continual integration with others - less time alone.

There is barely an hour in this world, where I could not pick up the phone right now, and talk to somebody. An appeal to California, a stay-of-execution call to Germany.

That's not the nature of this particular hour, however. Instead, it's to convince you how alone you are. I struggle with sleep but only find myself in a dogged conversation with a God, for whom my conscience makes up responses. This has become a habit this semester.

God was constantly being stolen by other people. Take note: Religion is not the worhsip of the deity, it is the worship of the deity by men.

As far as I was concerned, the fundamental disadvantage of being an atheist was the lack of an authority to be grateful to. Life is meaningless, hell even the bible got that right, but there is an instinctive gratitude for drawing in a breathe of life. It is sort of the precursor to the guilt ridden lives we humans lived.

So I make my peace with God, or as a psychologist would say, I make my peace with myself.

This afternoon on our second floor porch, my roomates and I chill. Patty, the transsexual from New Orleans just moved in two days ago. She waits for her internet cable to be installed with a smile. Her (his) dreadlocks fall around her haphazardly. She is lanky and poised on the railing, while I sit, buddha-like on the plush couch, inexplicably placed outside on the balcony, instead of in the apartment. To my left, standing, just arrived from a mysterious ramble in Verdun (the neighbourhood) is Lindsey.

Lindsey does not look at you often, and he says even less. His black noble face is compact and barely fleshes out his skull. He is thin, ascetic even. He is gazing out on the residential condo construction project across our apartment. He is talking slowly, maybe even rhymatically in his Carribean accented English. "People here in Canada don't know how lucky they have it."

I can't help but think of a girl I recently had to work with. She is the type, who claims to be egalitarian - a communist no less - and then makes fun of me living in Verdun. I wish she could have been there with Lindsey and Patty this afternoon. I am embarassed by her incredulousness. I almost want to atone for it.

I am surprised. I am surprised by the whole situation. These are not ones typical college roomates. Both are five to ten years older than me, and their lives - their destinies - seem so far from my own. But when I talk of law school, they are curious and I talk very sparsely, in a pensive voice, matching their unsure questioning with an insecure voice.

I am not afraid of them, though. I feel vulnerable in my differences and my imagination is a wild one, but chilling on their blacony with them made me feel otherwise. There'd be enough conference board rooms and cocktail parties in the unfolding future.

Never again in my life, will I be able to live with a transvestite and an drug addict.

Or was it that never again in my life would I be able to live with the most attractive male in the western hemisphere, and Jesus incarnate himself.

Was I sleeping already?

Sunday, March 28, 2004

Sun, 28 Mar 2004 12:56:39 GMT

I Saw Her on the L Train

By JASON GORDON

HE New York subway has become the city's last bastion of hope for romantics. That's partly because the subway is one of the only places where people aren't subdivided into small cliques depending on social class or musical tastes. And instead of the carefully selected and touched-up photos that people present online, under the bright, fluorescent lights of the subway you can see exactly what someone looks like. There is no dark lighting to cover a premature wrinkle, a scary makeup job or a bad hair day.

The subway exposes people when they are their most unfortunate selves, and I, for one, love it. Every day, millions of naturally stunning women parade in front of me, and all I have to do is look up from my seat to appreciate them.

From a distance, I admire these beautiful women, and I speculate about them, based on how they're dressed. You can tell who feels comfortable in a pants suit and who'd prefer to be wearing a thrift-store dress and fishnet stockings. But who knows if the woman in a Versace business suit really has a thing for leather?

Recently, a friend told me that she had seen in the subway a man so beautiful she felt like a 16-year-old looking at a photo of Luke Perry at the peak of his "Beverly Hills 90210'' fame. She pictured their entire future together. I told her that she had just had her first subway crush.

A subway crush is simply someone you most likely will never talk to or even meet, but will stare at adoringly from afar. It's a crush in the simplest, most intense sense of the word. During the limited span of your ride, you can imagine any future you want with this person. She or he may not even be your type, but you find yourself becoming temporarily infatuated.

Could it ever go further?

I will always remember the day I was riding the L train and a young woman sitting across from me was reading John Kennedy Toole's novel "A Confederacy of Dunces.'' She had short black hair and was wearing your standard Williamsburg outfit of Converse, stockings, and all black everything else. It was the novel that brought her to my attention.

The words immediately formed in my brain. "That's one of my favorite books."

Amazingly, she smiled at me and asked me what I was reading. I told her it was a manuscript of David Brock's new book, "The Republican Noise Machine,'' and explained to her its premise. She immediately went into a little rant about how important it is for people our age to be involved in politics.

It turned out she worked for a cause I really believe in. At this point we were both just smiling at each other, waiting for one of us to ask for the other person's phone number. I asked first, and she gladly gave it to me.

The next day I called her and asked if she wanted to go out the following evening. She said yes and plans were made, but that night we bumped into each other at Dan Kennedy's reading of "Loser Goes First." It was a complete coincidence but a great one. We spent the entire event together.

We confessed to each other our love for David Sedaris and Scrabble. We confided to each other our favorite private hideaways in New York, where we can go and not see anyone we're friends with. Mine was a park near Riverside Drive. Hers was a doughnut shop in Chinatown. She hated new bands. I loved finding them. She didn't own a computer. I was addicted to mine.

We dated for a year before moving in together. I was against marriage and so is she, but after three years together she wanted a ring and I gladly got it for her. It was a small ceremony and we both cried. We pooled our money in a bid for me to run for governor, then senator. I won and we moved to Washington. We had three children, named Jagger, Bowie and Moz. I was asked by my good friend Hillary Rodham Clinton to be her vice president. I accepted.

Eight years later, I ran for president and easily beat Giuliani. My wife was the most fabulous first lady since Jackie O. We retired young and moved back to Manhattan, where on a gorgeous spring day I caught her sunbathing on the roof of our brownstone rereading "A Confederacy of Dunces.''

That, at least, was my fantasy; in reality, I never said a word. I thought about her for a week or so, I told my friends about this woman I saw reading my favorite book and I even checked the Missed Connections section of Craigslist. I hoped I would see her again, but I don't know if I'd even recognize her.