The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  This year, up here, the snow seemed more than ever an unexpected gift. At this point last year we were all still rocked by Sept. 11 and barely noticed the snow. (My unscientific telephone survey tells me no one in New York remembers any snow at all last year.) In fact we had very little, as if the heavens too were in shock.

  But this one yesterday, this first snow—it was heavy, wet, coming down at a slant, it is building. It was a real snowfall. And it was beautiful.

  The first snow always startles you. It makes everything look better. In the suburbs it gives a layer of cottony brightness to trees and fences and lawns; it covers the tricycle left in the driveway, turning its little aluminum frame into an abstract sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today. In farm areas the snow is a blanket over cold corn and baby wheat. It heightens beauty, covers flaws, softens hard angles. It makes a row of trash cans a craggy white wall. It gives wholeness back to rusty fences and heightens the dignity of plain things like stoops and elegant things like steeples. It makes us see again what we’d been forgetting to notice.

  * * *

  But it isn’t only the beauty. That’s not the only thing a big snow brings.

  “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.” So wrote James Joyce at the end of his great short story “The Dead.” They are famous words; it’s a famous passage. Joyce’s snow didn’t fall over the house, or the city, or over his sensitive characters in a neighborhood in Dublin. Snow was falling all over Ireland, and touching everyone, as if they were together.

  The biggest problem no one talks about in America, still, is loneliness. Maybe we don’t hear about it much because most of the talkers about America—TV people, pundits of all sorts—are pretty well integrated into the world around them. And busy, so that if they’re lonely they don’t know it.

  But a lot of people are lonely, encased in their thoughts about their own lives and experiences and memories and challenges. Encased in habit, too. And embarrassed to be alone in a technologically sophisticated place where a high value is put on our ability to reach out and touch someone.

  But then something happens. Nature comes along and hands us something big—a storm or an earthquake—and the lonely come forward, if only by inches. We all find ourselves sharing the same preoccupation. This breaks down reserve and gets us thinking of and dealing with the same subject matter.

  Bad weather, bad news makes you part of something: a community of catastrophe. You see your neighbor, and this time you don’t just nod or keep walking. You call over, “Wow—you believe this?” And you laugh. You make phone calls. Weather makes you outward. It eases the lives of the lonely.

  And then when the storm passes or the earthquake is old news, people retreat back into their aloneness with their own thoughts. They get quiet again. It will take another snowstorm or a hurricane before the ad hoc community of catastrophe springs up and makes them a member of something.

  * * *

  So that’s what was in the air, too, yesterday: an easing of estrangement, a coming together, and people who didn’t know each other talking.

  I could see it all outside my window. I write in a room with a big window just beyond my computer. The window is seven feet tall and 40 inches wide. At this moment I am looking out the window at the church across the street. It is made of granite stone, is more than a century old, and its big brass doors were once the doors of the old ship the Normandie. To the right of the doors there is a little garden. In the middle of it is a statue of Mary of Fatima. She stands almost five feet high. Before her, two statues of kneeling children look up. There was a third but someone stole it. I have seen people stop and look at the statues at night. There is a lady in the neighborhood who every time she goes by stops and says something to Mary and nods; she sometimes gestures as if they are old friends catching up, and then walks on. You see wonderful things when you live across from statues.

  The day of the storm, Mary and the children have snow on their heads and their cloaks. She is still looking down at the children, and they are looking up, their hands together in marble prayer. People are bustling by. The snow is coming at an angle against them as they walk by the church toward Montague Street, and they are leaning forward in the wind. A nanny and a child in a red jacket and a black cap just passed, holding hands. Now an old woman in a raincoat with an umbrella. Now a bunch of teenagers are running, throwing snowballs. A boy just literally slides by on the street as if his back were a sled. I want to applaud. There’s laughter out there, great gaiety.

  And now just outside the window I hear for the first time the authentic sound of winter in the north: a shovel scraping a sidewalk. It is an undistinguished and prosaic sound, and yet if I took a high-quality tape recorder and taped it and played it for a room full of 1,000 people and said, “What is this sound?” I’ll bet 990 of them would know: That is someone shoveling snow. It is a distinctive sound. Soon I hope I hear the slap of tire chains on a blacktop road. I haven’t heard that yet this year. I can’t wait. I have no idea why.

  * * *

  It’s dusk now, and it’s still coming down. Snow is general all over the East. It is falling on every part of the crooked shore, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Chesapeake Bay and, farther north, softly falling into the dark mutinous Montauk waves. It is falling, too, upon every part of the lovely churchyard across the way.

  And this, to end. After snow gets you out of the house, and out of yourself, and into the world, it stops you in your tracks. Because it reminds you of something you know and forget to think about. It reminds you that there is a higher force at work, it is beyond and above, it governs all the heavens and “the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling.”

  Thank you, James Joyce. I spent my snow day with you.

  Nobody’s Perfect, but They Were Good

  The Wall Street Journal: June 4, 2010

  We needed some happy news this week, and I think we got it. But first, a journey back in time.

  It was Monday July 4, 1983, a painfully hot day, 94 degrees when the game began. We were at Yankee Stadium, and the Yanks were playing their ancestral foes, the Boston Red Sox. More than 40,000 people filled the stands. My friend George and I had seats in the upper decks, where people were waving programs against the heat, eating hot dogs, drinking beer and—oh, innocent days—smoking. In fact, it was the smoking that made me realize something was going on.

  The Yankees’ pitcher, Dave Righetti, who’d bounced from the majors to the minors and back again, was having a good game, striking out seven of the first nine hitters. The Yanks were scoring; the Red Sox were doing nothing. Suddenly, around the sixth or seventh inning, I realized the boisterous crowd had turned quieter. George was chain-smoking with a look of fierce intensity. “What’s happening?” I asked him. “Don’t say it,” he replied. “If you say it, you jinx it.” He said some other things, talking in a kind of code, and I realized: This may be a no-hitter. We may be witnessing history.

  Now I’m watching not only the game but everyone around me. Fathers are with their kids, and you can tell they’re starting to think: “I have given my son a great gift today.” Just down from us was an old man, 75 or so, tall, slim and white-haired. I never saw him say a word to anyone, and throughout the game there was an empty seat beside him. I thought: He’s got a wife in the hospital and she told him to take the afternoon off; he’d bought the tickets before she got sick, and he’s by himself. He was so distracted and lonely looking but inning by inning the game started to capture him, and the last few innings he couldn’t sit down.

  Everyone else in New York was at the beach for the three-day weekend, but around us were regular people, working people who didn’t have enough to be at the Jersey Shore or out on the island, but who had enough for a baseball g
ame. Also there were diehard fans holding their game cards. Meaning everyone who was there deserved to be there, everyone who got the gift deserved it. It was one of those moments where life is just.

  Twenty-five years later, on July 3, 2008, Anthony McCarron of New York’s Daily News wrote of the final moments of the game. Righetti is facing the final batter, Wade Boggs, and is worried he’ll tap the ball toward first and beat him to the bag. At the plate, Boggs is thinking, “If I get a hit here, with two out in the ninth inning, and break this thing up, I’m probably not getting out of here alive.” As Mr. McCarron wrote, Righetti “snapped off a crisp slider, Boggs struck out swinging,” and Righetti flung his arms out in joy.

  The crowd exploded, they wouldn’t stop jumping and cheering, and later they filled the bars around the stadium. It was raucous, joyful. Everyone acted as if they were related, because it is a beautiful thing when you witness history together. It’s unifying.

  Only later would it be noted that it wasn’t only Independence Day, and a home game and the Red Sox, it was the anniversary of Lou Gehrig’s 1939 farewell speech. So it was fitting everyone left feeling like the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

  I bet you know where I’m going.

  It was Wednesday night of this week, and it was a heartbreaker, and you have seen the videotape. Comerica Park in Detroit, the Tigers vs. the Cleveland Indians, and on the mound is Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga, 28. In his brief Major League career, he has not pitched a complete game, never mind a perfect one, but here he is. He’s retired 26 straight batters. It’s two out in the ninth with just one to go, one out between him and history. Indians shortstop Jason Donald is at the plate. Donald hits a grounder between first and second. Miguel Cabrera, the Tigers first baseman, fields it as Galarraga sprints to first. The pitcher takes the throw from Cabrera and steps on the base. Donald crosses it just a step later. Galarraga gets this look of joy. And the umpire blows it. He calls Donald safe. Everyone is shocked.

  It’s everything that follows that blunder that makes the story great.

  When Galarraga hears the call, he looks puzzled, surprised. But he’s composed and calm, and he smiles, as if accepting fate. Others run to the ump and begin to yell, but Galarraga just walks back to the mound to finish the job. Which he does, grounding out the next batter. The game is over.

  The umpire, Jim Joyce, 54, left the field and watches the videotape. He saw that he’d made a mistake and took immediate responsibility. He went straight to the clubhouse where he personally apologized to Galarraga. Then he told the press, “I just cost the kid a perfect game.” He said, “I thought [Donald] beat the throw. I was convinced he beat the throw until I saw the replay. It was the biggest call of my career.”

  Galarraga told reporters he felt worse for Joyce than he felt for himself. At first, reacting to the game in the clubhouse, he’d criticized Joyce. But after Joyce apologized, Galarraga said, “You don’t see an umpire after the game come out and say, ‘Hey, let me tell you I’m sorry.’” He said, “He felt really bad.” He noted Joyce had come straight over as soon as he knew he’d made the wrong call.

  What was sweet and surprising was that all the principals in the story comported themselves as fully formed adults, with patience, grace and dignity. And in doing so, Galarraga and Joyce showed kids How to Do It.

  A lot of adults don’t teach kids this now, because the adults themselves don’t know how to do it. There’s a mentoring gap, an instruction gap in our country. We don’t put forward a template because we don’t know the template. So everyone imitates TV, where victors dance in the end zone, where winners shoot their arms in the air and distort their face and yell “Whoooaahhh,” and where victims of an injustice scream, cry, say bitter things and beat the ground with their fists. Everyone has come to believe this is authentic. It is authentically babyish. Everyone thinks it’s honest. It’s honestly undignified, self-indulgent, weak and embarrassing.

  Galarraga and Joyce couldn’t have known it when they went to work Wednesday, but they were going to show children in an unforgettable way that a victim of injustice can react with compassion, and a person who makes a mistake can admit and declare it. Joyce especially was a relief, not spinning or digging in his heels. I wish he hadn’t sworn. Nobody’s perfect.

  Thursday afternoon the Tigers met the Indians again in Comerica Park. Armando Galarraga got a standing ovation. In a small masterpiece of public relations, Detroit’s own General Motors gave him a brand-new red Corvette.

  Galarraga brought out the lineup card and gave it to the umpire—Jim Joyce, who had been offered the day off but chose to work.

  Fans came with signs that said “It was perfect.”

  It was.

  Scenes from a Confirmation

  My community.

  The Wall Street Journal: June 15, 2001

  As is fitting for a soft June afternoon with bright sun and a mild breeze, I have no thoughts today, only bits and pieces of thoughts. I continue to work on a book and find myself happy, tired and thinking about things that happened long ago when the world even then was not young. Also this has been a big week in my home, with my son having a birthday on Monday, being confirmed in the Catholic Church on Tuesday and taking part in closing exercises at school on Wednesday.

  However (she said not at all defensively), it is not true that I have nothing to say. It is only true that I have nothing important to say. So go read Mickey Kaus or check Drudge or Romenesko’s medianews, or cruise the papers or jump around this splendid site. All I’m going to do is something that a part of me has always wanted to do, and that is a gossip column with boldface names. Only the boldface names don’t belong to the celebrated and famous. But they are very important in my neck of the woods, as we say on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

  * * *

  St. Thomas More Church in Manhattan rocked Tuesday night with the strains of a small, well-trained choir singing into adulthood the eighth graders of the Narnia Class of 2001. Standing to the right of a statue of St. Joseph, in which the earthly father of Jesus bears a striking resemblance to Douglas Fairbanks Jr., were the confirmation candidates: Robert von Althann, Philippe Arman, Timothy Barr, John Mason Coyne, Christine Culver, Michaela Culver, Henry Delouvrier, James Fouhey, John Gerard, Nicola Johnson, Christopher Latos, Skye Lehman, Nicholas Manice, Gregory Marino, Diana Mellon, Christopher Mixon, Evan O’Brien, Patrick Fionnbharr O’Halloran, Gregory Pasternack, Matt Petrillo, Rudi Pica, Will Rahn, Brett Rehfeld, Jimmy Reinicke, Evan Richards, Lily Salembier, Alexandra Schueler, Chris Skrela, Katrina Sullivan and Giulia Theodoli.

  They were confirmed in a ceremony that not only started on time, it ended early because Bishop Patrick Sheridan likes both people and homilies to move at a brisk pace. Also there was a beautiful young woman named Jennifer who was confirmed with the kids and who walked proudly with them and didn’t make them feel she was any different. She did her part with great style.

  When you are confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church, you take as your own the name of a saint whose life you find moving or inspiring. (Some take this very formally and internalize it; Bobby Kennedy signed his name Robert Francis Xavier Kennedy into early adulthood.) So many of the candidates this year chose unusual names—Clement, Blaise, Augustine, Siobahn, Alejandro. One of the girls took St. Michael the Archangel.

  Will Rahn, son of a certain Wall Street Journal columnist, read the intentions during mass—“for the poor of the world, that they might find sustenance”—and Matt Petrillo did a Bible reading. The boys were so tall and dignified in their red graduation-style gowns—14-year-old boys are now often six feet tall—and they repeated with deep voices the words, the prayer actually, said at baptism but voiced at that time for the baby being baptized by his godparents. But Tuesday night they made the vows on their own, with their own voices.

  “Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” they were asked.

  “I do,” they answered.

  I wondered if those in the pews were s
truck by the starkness of those grave words, and I wondered, too, how many were thinking: This is like the end of “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone stands for Connie’s baby at the baptism while his enemies are rubbed out. Francis Ford Coppola made great artistic use of the extraordinary dialogue of baptism but may have damaged the ceremony for an entire generation (no, for two) that would be relieved not to be thinking about gangster movies while taking part in the sacraments.

  JoMarie Pica, mother of three and wife of Vin, had taught many of the boys in Christian doctrine classes and had readied them for confirmation. Three hours before the ceremony she was in an accident and the front of her SUV was smashed up. She went to the preconfirmation buffet at Natika and Victor von Althann’s anyway, threw back two Advils and a glass of wine and walked into the church with the candidates holding her candle high.

  I taught a small class of girls and got to walk in holding a candle, too. The writer Sim Johnston, who also lives in the neighborhood and also teaches one of the Christian doctrine classes, was there helping out the boys. My girls were beautiful and a little nervous, and a few of their sponsors were late—you have to have an adult Catholic who stands up with you, and for you, when you’re confirmed—and Lily worried that her sponsor might not make it. I said don’t worry, I’ll stand in for her if she doesn’t make it. And then I was so relieved for Lily and half disappointed for myself when her sponsor came to the altar with Lily and stood with her right hand on her shoulder as the bishop made the sign of the cross with holy oil on Lily’s forehead.