For ten days while Ginny and Cara were visiting the horse-rich campuses of Texas A&M and the University fo Kentucky (with a stopover in Colorado to see assorted grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins), Molly and I and the dogs played Rabbit Retrievers–chasing Steve (nee Tintin, but renamed after Steve McQueen of The Great Escape) and Gaga and the their four offspring as they broke out of their porous installation and in various combinations scampered around the backyard. Thanks God we have a garage, or else we never would have caught them (although it’s true, one evening we saw one of the youngsters find a slit in the barricades and let himself back in as easily as he had earlier let himself go.) Anyway, it was exhausting to chase them and frustrating to be eluded (I will never idly use the phrase “quick like a bunny” again) and nerve-wracking to have moral responsibility for their well-being. Thanks goodness all were present and accounted for when their real lapin lovers returned from their school visits. As it turns out, Molly and I might not bothered ourselves; three days later, two of the youngsters were given away to a neighbor boy, a fate the other two are soon to experience. I am surprised that I am somewhat sad over the break-up of this little family. They were very cute.

My latest assignment has me working for Mr. Joe Plumeri, the chairman and CEO of the Willis Company. Have you ever heard of Willis? Neither had I, until this relationship began. Turns out Willis is a venerable British insurance company, now approximately 175 years old. Mr. Plumeri is an astute and charismatic businessman from the wilds of Trenton, New Jersey. He brought me over to London for three days to absorb what I could by attending a group of town hall meetings Joe would be conducting with Willis’ employees.

Day One passed like a whirlwind. Arriving around noon at the splendid Willis Building, located on Lime Street opposite the really ugly Lloyd’s of London building and near the wonderful Gherkin, I got a quick tour of the premises, including a visit to the rooftop and the splendid view it affords.  After that, I did my best to stay out of the way of the folks in the Communications Department, who had their hands full without babysitting a guest. Later, however, I got to sit in with two sessions with Joe, during which he explained that the company’s earnings were especially impressive given the hardships the difficult economic climate imposed. In the evening,  I had a great time. Josh King and Nick Balamaci and I went to dinner at La Pont de la Tour, a terrific restaurant located on Bankside just east of the Tower Bridge. They are a couple of smart and witty fellows, and we had a great time after dinner, crossing Tower Bridge and examining the husk of the venerable, amazing, now abandoned Willis Building on Trinity Square, before retiring to our rooms at Willis House.

The next day I attended two more town hall sessions. I suppose the experience must be something like Dead Heads used to be able to go through, when they could compare concerts, and savor how Jerry Garcia would play a solo during Sugar Magnolia at one show but save it for Truckin’ at another. Relieved of duty at around 3:30, I headed back to Bankside and the Tate Modern, which was having an exhibition called Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. There were at lot of incredible photos on display, including images by Walker Evans, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank and Weegie. But the exhibit was intellectually flabby. The cohering idea, as articulated by the curator, Sandra S. Phillips, in a filmed introduction, was that these were images taken by “the invasive eye,” but that seems to be a notion at once flabby and liquid. In what way is Abraham Zapruder‘s film of John F. Kennedy assassination invasive? How is a picture of a person riding a public subway invasive? Voyeurism seems obviously invasive, but when a nude person poses for the camera, as many, many subjects in this exhibition did, does their exhibitionism not change the level of voyeurism? A lot of questions seem to revolve around an idea of rights that the exhibition did not explore; for example, does not the notion of `invasive’ change when a person falls into the territory of news. A lot of the time I was thinking that it wasn’t the camera or the taking of the photograph that was invasive, but the construct of art, the freezing of the moment to invite interpretation, that was the invasive act. Plus the surveillance portion of the show was a drag and provoked no ideas of interest. Still, it was cool to see the pix. After that, I tramped back to Willis House, stopping off for a bite under an old covered mall called Leadenhall Market, dating from the mid-19th century, where a bar band was playing sixties songs and patrons were dancing in the street.  Hearing These Boots Were Made for Walking and especially Don’t You Just Know It put me in a particularly cheerful mood.

On Saturday I got up early and did the public tour of The Palace of Westminister, also known as Parliament. It was fabulous; if there was a downside, it was the crisp 75 minute tour did not permit lingering, and man, if anything deserved lingering, it was the incredible art that hangs in the joint. Most breathtaking were the two giant (45′ x 12′) frescoes in the Royal Gallery by Daniel Maclise, The Death of Nelson and The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher. The heroic paintings are just brilliant, but tragically, humidity from the Thames caused the colors to deteriorate, and now the pictures are almost monochrome. It was a great treat to stand on the backbench of the government’s side in Parliament. After that, I hiked down down Millbank for a about a mile to the Tate Britain, to see a merry exhibit called Rude Brittania, which showcased Britian’s splendid satirical and comic artists. I was delighted to see work by William Hogarth, the great Regency satirists Thomas Rowlandson and my main man James Gillray, the Victorian George Cruikshank, Ralph Steadman and the great Gerald Scarfe. I got a particular kick seeing the hilarious puppet of Margaret Thatcher that was used on Splitting Images. The exhibit was great fun, and after that I wandered around the rest of the museum for a while and absorbed a nice fat blast of culture. Then it was back to the airport and into the clutches of American Airlines, for a long, cramped, punishing eight hour flight home, whose tortures were relived only by a very pleasant chat with my seat mate, a young schoolteacher from Rockland, Illinois, named Sara, who was returning home from a month in Spain–a month that included the once-in-a-lifetime night she spent in Saville watching Las Rojas capture La Copa Mondial, and joining he celebration that followed. What a night that must have been!

Hey, whatever happened to thunderstorms? You remember–great, violent downpours of drenching rain, accompanied by flashed o lightning and booming thunderclaps? The horrid heat wave of the last week has left me wondering why we haven’t had one or more of those smashing storms that seemed to have almost a daily companion of nearly all the summers of my life. After all, this heat business isn’t some recent invention–we had hot days in all the summers of my youth. But the usual contract was that at some point between 4 and 9 PM, but most often in the early part of that span, we’d get a big thunderstorm that would cool things down. Instead, all we’re getting is the heat and humidity. Someone should investigate, and for god’s sake, bring them back, quick!

My Top 5 Thunderstorm Memories:

1. Herr’s Ridge, Gettysburg PA, July 1994 or 1995–a storm during a reenactment scatter Malanowskis to the four corners of Adams County. Hilarious!

2. Mets Game, Shea Stadium, circa 1979–sudden storm brings grounds crew sprinting onto the field, but the wind catches the tarp rollers and sends them into centerfield, scattering groundskeepers in perfect slapstick

3. Offices of Scanlon & Menken, 330 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, circa 1982, standing with Jim Noonan and watching a magnificent storm overhail Weehauken and roll right for us across the Hudson

4. Riding my bike up Ridgecroft Road, Baltimore, Maryland , from Belair Road, during a downpour, some time in the mid-1960s

5. Riding with the Jackson family from Deadwood, South Dakota to Sundance Wyoming after dark, August 1998, and seeing a panorama of lightning strikes across the rolling prairie

Recently my younger daughter, age 16, shared with her mother the following revelation. “I need new sneakers,’’ she said, “but not, you know, sneakers.’’

Confronted with this Delphic utterance, my wife, like a character in a Dan Brown novel, sought to penetrate this mystery by showing my daughter a website devoted to sneakers. “How about this one?’’ she helpfully suggested.

“Mesh?!?!?!?’’ replied my daughter, her voice conveying the utter revulsion customarily reserved for villains who commit crimes against humanity. “I hate mesh.’’

As a loyal father, I couldn’t agree more: mesh is despicable. Of course, easy agreement on fashion matters has long been part of my successful strategy to maintain peace by limiting my involvement in my daughter’s fashion choices to a few broad comments—a bland “You look nice’’ that is bereft of details, lest I over-praise or under-praise some particular feature; non-judgmental interrogatories like “Do you know that it’s raining (or freezing, or hailing frogs) out?’’, and firm citings of legal precedent, like “The law forbids you to drive in flip flops’’ or “You will be arrested if you do not wear more clothing than that in public.’’ But sometimes curiosity gets the better of me, and I wonder: why does she wear what she has chosen to wear?

For enlightenment, I turned to an expert, my friend, the author and fashion consultant Holly Brubach. “Years ago,’’ she told me, “people floated the theory that fashion is really a coded language spoken only by women. I’m not sure I ever entirely bought it, but if there is ever a time in a women’s life when it’s true, it’s when she is a teenager. Fashion is a way of expressing identify, and at that age, usually nothing is more important than fitting in with one’s peer group.’’

Hence the outfit that most of the girls in our local high school wear most of the time: a pair of preferably brand-name jeans, and a close-fitting top. Not too many have the inclination or the will to deviate for long. As it happens, this is a flattering look for my daughter, but that’s not the name of the game here; the girls seem more driven to own cool than to actually look cool. But it’s not as if girls in this group could be counted on to objectively analyze what they actually look like.  Self-image is susceptible to distortion at any phase in life, but perhaps never so much as during the generally narcissistic and hypersensitive days of adolescence.

But the safety of conformity can be confining, of course. “I think girls might have had some things working in their favor before,’’ says Brubach. She recalls that her high school that didn’t require a uniform, but it did forbid jeans. “That almost forced us into wearing a wider variety of clothing. We got to wear more things, we got to see more things, a wider range of choices was acceptable, and from that, we began developing a more individual style.’’

Which, slowly but surely, is what is happening with my daughter. You can see her taking steps, tentative though they may be. A few months ago, she and her best friend co-hosted a Sweet Sixteen. Each selected a long, beautiful gown, special jewelry, a special hairstyle, and—to round off the look—a pair of high-topped tennis shoes (in a matching color, of course—and without mesh.) Their messages were clear: to their friends, they were saying we’re taking this glamour look seriously, but not too seriously; to mom and dad, they were saying that [our] heads and bodies may be veering into adulthood, but at bottom, we’re still kids.

Last month my daughter was given a ticket to a concert by Britney Spears, a performer who had not previously ranked among her favorites.  She brought home two souvenirs: a Britney trucker cap, an ordinary item that could serve as a badge indicating that she’d been to this cool event, and a loose-fitting T-shirt bearing the phrase “It’s Britney, Bitch,’’ from one of the singer’s recent songs.  For a moment, I felt my inner Church Lady rising to the surface, but I soon got the message: she’s may not be ready for hot pants and halters, or to emulate Britney’s brazenness in full, but with this shirt, she’s telling us something important.  Think of it as a flag planted on the unexplored shore of adulthood.

Notably, she has yet to wear it to school, to subject the garment, and her message, to the judgment of her peers. But the time may come. “Eventually, most of us stop trying to fit in by being like everybody else,’’ my friend Holly comforts me, “and we start trying to fit in as ourselves.’’

(This article recently appeared in BG, the magazine of Bergdorf Goodman.)

One should always take the opportunity to associate oneself with the Marx Brothers. Yesterday Ginny and Cara and I went to Belmont Park in Queens for a day of races capped off by the Belmont Stakes. It was fetid afternoon in the metropolitan apple, but sitting in the lower grandstand, under the overhang, we enjoyed a modest breeze, and everything was relaxed. It was a very pleasant and even lazy atmosphere; very 19th century. We best all the races, and the best we did was short-odds winner that paid us $4.40. Otherwise, Ginny had a strong run of second place  finishers and in the tenth race picked two of four in the Super Perfecta, which means she had a rather ordinary Imperfecta. In the big race, the 14:1 Drosselmeyer under Mike Smith emerged from a starless field and legged out his rivals in a five-wide cavalry charge to the wire, and almost as quickly, off we went to the parking lot.

I had the good fortune to spend three days last week with friends Jim and Lisa at the oceanfront condo at Cocoa Beach in Florida, talking politics and watching playoff basketball (tough, exciting wins by eventual losers Magic and Suns) and contemplating the vista presented here. Hot and humid all day; ocean breezes, such as they were, cooled nothing. It’s funny, you can watch CNBC and MSNBC from anywhere, but as soon as you get away from the epicenter, they seem like nothing but TV shows. On Wednesday morning, the space shuttle Atlantis, completing a 25 year career that saw it log 120 million miles in space,  landed at Cape Canaveral, a stone’s throw away; I heard the characteristic BOOM BOOM of the sound barrier breaking as it descended. A nice visit, but as the Ramones put it, not my place.

We have been quite worried about our old dog Vicki. For the last couple of weeks, she has been limping, a hobble that just showed up after a long and pleasant walk in the woods. No big deal, we’ve been thinking, and it would show signs of lessening, and then she would bound off the porch after some squirrels, or Duke, the huskie who lives across the river, would walk down Todd Lane like he owned the place, and Vicki would have to hop and bark at him the length of the fence, and then she’d be limping again, worse than before. This has gone on for a couple of weeks, leaving us to conclude little other than she’s getting pretty old and just doesn’t bounce back like she used to. Vicki, however, remains dauntless. Saturday at 3:30 AM, both Vicki and our most unadulterated cat Playful detected some alien presence on the porch. I offered my usual display of noise and lights to allow the intruder time to escape–always advisable, since the pests we’ve met met in the past have included a couple of remorseless skunks–and then let the hopping and woofing Vicki out the door. Bad leg and all, Vicki charged down the steps, out to the gate, around the western side of the house, back around front, up the steps of the porch (up which she had limped most pathetically only hours earlier), and off to the Todd Lane side and around back. I could no longer see who, but moments later, I could hear her, emitting a terrible whine/growl/bay/yelp combination. Thinking that Vicki was engaged in some kind of combat, and losing, I ran out the door after her (in my underwear) and across the lawn. Glassless, aided by wan porch light, I unreliably witnessed Vicki release something, a charcoal smudging something that quickly undulated into the bushes in the raised bed.  An otter? A muskrat? By then, Vicki, winded but no longer yowling, was joined by me and Ginny, Molly and even Wendy  (Cara heard the ruckus, but feared that Vicki was meeting her demise at the hands of the local coyote, and slunk under the covers), and soon hobbled back into the house. The next morning, limping around the yard, Vicki joined us for some gardening, and investigated the raised bed for signs of her recent adversary, though to no avail. At long last, she sat in the shade, and as her protoge Wendy patrolled the perimeter, the old dog rested, still mistress of her domain.

I had a delightful time yesterday meeting with McCracken Poston, a lawyer and former state legislator from Georgia who told me a warm and delightful story about, of all things, a murder case he tried a decade ago. He and I are going to work to try to turn it into a book. McCracken and I met at Soho House, a private club on Ninth Avenue that I had never heard of, but which was pretty terrific. We saw Stanley Tucci. Almost everyone we saw was young and svelte. Well, not Stanley, but he looked good nonetheless.

Ginny and I spent a pleasant hour Monday night watching the HBO documentary about the Philadelphia Flyers of the mid-seventies, the famous Broad Street Bullies, whose adventures Ginny and I much enjoyed. Indeed, some of the footage was a little like seeing home movies. The famous fog game in the Cup Finals in 1975? That was on the night of our college graduation. Game 5? Saw it at Francis Nathans’ house in Bucks County the day after we were married, the night the famous misdaventures of our wedding night. The Game 6 clincher? We saw it with Peter Westbrook at True Light Manor. And though the show caught some of what it was to root for the near-criminal Flyers, it somehow missed the essence: they were very brave, and they just never, ever, ever backed down. It’s true, as the program stated, that their heyday was pretty nearly over after the Montreal Canadiens swept the Flyers in the 1976 Finals (but as Bill Barber told me a few years later, the presence of the injured Bernie Parent would have rewritten the story.) But for me, their greatest moment came in Game 4 of a 1977 quarter-finale series. Trailing a very good Toronto Maple Leaf team two games to one, and behind in Game 4 by 5-2 with six minutes left, the Flyers rallied to tie on goals by Tom Bladon, Mel Bridgeman and the incredible Bobby Clarke, and won after 19 minutes of overtime on a slap shot by the cool, brilliant Reggie Leach.  That was the Flyers I loved.

Bird, Hammer, Hound and Moose/The Broad Street Bullies Are on the Loose.

It’s one of the few poems I know by heart.

At about 2:30 this afternoon, an out-of-control panel truck full of bottles of juice rear-ended a Briarcliff school bus at the intersection of Route 100 and Chappaqua Road, about a mile from the house. Thankfully, it seems no one was badly hurt. I took these pictures. Later I sent the to The Gazette. We’ll see if a photojournalist has been born.