too bad I don't write fiction

There is a story there, at the checkout in Walgreens, one that could go either way. As we both make our way to the no-waiting register, he hesitates and loiters, giving up his claim to be first. He could be half my age, but it doesn't seem he's being polite. Before I drop my armful of half-off impulses on the counter, I turn back to offer either, "Go ahead," or "Are you sure?" but his expression silences my gesture. I complete my purchase and walk out, leaving him alone to buy a pregnancy test and a Hallmark card.

Taking the progress out of health care reform

It's been a long time since I posted here. Guess I haven't I haven't had much to say. Then I saw this.

good help

Ambushed again by my own tears, I must admit to myself the obvious: I am a crier. From poised to can't-speak-fighting-back I go in an instant, equal parts surprised and self-conscious. I am always, always unaware and oblivious until I hear the catch in my voice. Then I'm done for, my internal scales finally measuring the last straw right as they are tipped to the teary.

I'm not sure, entirely, that this propensity is a flaw, but damn if it doesn't derail a good riot act. Hard to continue a rant when one can't choke out the words. Not that I had raised my voice to the not-quite-competent receptionist for whom I suspect I'm now a dinner-time story. But I did perhaps relentlessly endeavor to point out the error in canceling the first of my three back-to-back appointments without telling me and then chiding me for being early. It's an appointment book; I get it. It's not catastrophe. Except when the outcome of a nearly six-month goal seems to be riding on information now unknown for yet another of my few remaining days. Then, for a moment, it feels as if it is.

Welcome to life in a medical office, Miss I'm-new-here-and-I-didn't-think. Next time, I beg you, call!

Miss M

I am both tickled and mortified (in a long-ago, distant way) as I sit in the center of an unfamiliar classroom and try to lose my oh-my-goodness expression as the oh so young woman in her I'm-a-grown-up suit begins to address us parents with a shaking voice.

I have so been there. Not quite in my element, not quite making any impression save, "Wow, you sure look young!" As I said, it's been a while. Now the kids who were my first 7th grade students are some ridiculous age-- twelve plus eighteen, or so I figure: potential colleagues, more-or-less peers. My memories of that time are as vague as something near half a life ago should be: I can see a few faces, recall a few names, feel the dread that curly-haired kid in 4th hour inspired. My strongest recollection of that gig, save the paltry paycheck, is that when it ended I gave all my materials away.

Did I think I'd never again be a teacher? Was I just running from junior high? Though it seems a key life decision, I can't remember the timing or my intent. It's true, however, that after turning down a high school job the next fall I didn't reclaim the big desk until nine years, four states, a dozen jobs, and a master's degree later. Perhaps by then I was ready. I was certainly no longer the same girl I saw peeking over her notes at me tonight.

for life

I understand it's only a gesture, and a meager one at that. My contribution was minimal, my participation limited. In the scheme of things, it won't matter. Unless maybe, somehow, it does.

Four weeks ago, a man I never met received a diagnosis. His cough was not just a cough, but lung cancer, stage 4. His funeral was today. As I pulled back my hair to head out into the lingering heat, a friend who helped write his eulogy told me this blunt story, and I could not help but picture his daughter, a long ago classmate, sitting in the same funeral home parlor where my family gathered twice before.

Tonight as my mother and I circled my high school track amongst the survivors and fund raisers, our conversation turned, as it does each year, to another man gone too soon. "He was kind, and, funny, and generous to a fault." It's a litany I've memorized after thirty-one years. "Of all of us," continued my mom, describing her father-in-law, "he was the best person. So why did he have to die?" That unanswerable question, multiplied, is the reason for our walk, the reason for luminaria lit in the names of family, friends, and tonight, one complete stranger. Celebrate, remember, fight back.

Today was an off day for me according to the schedule that maps out my miles. Three yesterday, six tomorrow-- multiplied by 102 degrees, or maybe by 78 air conditioned laps. So this evening, instructed not to exercise, I instead laced up my shoes. Not to run but to Relay, an effort that trumps the rules.

My Father's Day

Twenty dollar bills and oil change reminders. Dire warnings about, oh, everything. A paralysis of worry over what might and who could and what will. Sentimental tears and shouted impatience. A certain family resemblance in the lines of my face or the edge of my temper. That's what I think of, when I think of my dad. That and talents rarely used but always perfected; pride in accomplishment. That and a laugh at the kitchen table. That and money being no object even when it was. The best was all he ever wanted. Sometimes, he'd tell ya, he got it.

work

My father was a union man, an art school dropout who spent 40 years making the parts that make machines that make glass bottles. How's that for a niche? He worked with his father and his uncles in a shop that is now closed that belonged to a company that no longer exists. How's that for an American story? He earned a wage that provided plenty and a pension, though a paltry one. He still has metal fragments in his hands.

The man who bought this house--my house--when it was new was a union man. After 30 years in the blast furnace of a steel mill, he was ready to sell and retire young when his retirement vanished in a merger. He moved to Pensacola anyway. Last I heard, he was working as a security guard. What else is there to do? Back here, in the life he left, the mill is now idle, has been for months, and thousands like him await their fates.

This county, where I've lived 90% of my life, used to seem 90% a blue collar place, by family if not individual. Brass, steel, oil refining, ammunition (Winchester)-- most people seem to have a connection. And if not for the workers and managers who moved out and up, literally, a good fraction of the houses in my current town need never have been built.

And so when I ask, "now what?" that unorginal question, it is not theoretical, but a concrete query about will happen here when these jobs cease to exist. It's not as if I don't see that labor has run itself off a cliff alongside big business; it's just that I wonder where the bottom is, and how hard it will hurt when we all hit.

the morning after

The house is quiet, finally.  I choose to believe they're finally asleep. They being the half-dozen 12 and 13 year-old girls who are under my roof, still. I don't hear the TV or the video camera or the desktop; I'm taking the silence at its face. Because at four a.m. they were steadfastly awake and even a caffeinated sugar high runs out eventually-- doesn't it? 

But better-far-to be self-sufficiently oblivious to the clock than to be caught in some don't-wanna-be-here-can't-get-home-crying-vomiting-loop of exhaustion with some woman who is not your mother! 

I'm pretty sure the newly minted 12 year old--mine--assumes her birthday present was the iPod. Little does she know.

how the other half lives

"Yes, I know how AP works," I say as I meet a skeptical gaze. 

As a favor I'm proctoring a test during my ironically named plan time, and thus I have a room full of strangers. They've made their way down to my corner of the building and are politely out of their element. They come through the wrong door; half are a tiny bit late. As they enter, each is mutely questioning. 

"Yes, here. This is where you're supposed to be."  I don't bother to introduce myself or explain what normally goes on here. But as they fall deep into their diligence a boy shows up with a PE test; he knows most of the answers as I read the questions and draw a baseball diamond on a scrap. I wonder what our audience makes of it. 

At the tail end of the hour tests are over and so is their silence. In the meantime, my Senior has arrived to tell me about a tech school field trip to the morgue; we've exchanged only a few whispers out of deference. I wonder if she knows these kids or if she finds today's set-up weird; it definitely feels different. 

In the minutes before the bell one of our guests begins to talk about moving; the room's small enough that it's impossible not to listen. She speaks as matter-of-factly as she can manage about the new bedroom that awaits in the walk-out basement, and about the promotion that led to new construction. "My dad just wanted the four-car garage," she shrugs. 

I turn to my compatriot as the classroom clears at the bell, "And that would be how the other half lives," I say.  She nods emphatically. 

4.20

I can see it, or I can imagine: the drama, the recrimination, the tears. A Monday, a week--a lifetime, it must feel like--shot to hell in the first rays of dawn.

"I feel lousy," he says, later, after this warning: "I fucked up." And something in his tone and the droop of his shoulders makes me bite back the scold as his profane lapsed-Catholic confession spills out. He's disappointed his parents again. I hear regret when he says, "My mom was all crying. " I hear regret when he trails off, "and my dad. . . " I tell him I'm encouraged that he feels as he does because it shows that, in the end, he cares. He's late, so I send him off with a pass, ask his counselor to check in and go on.

And she calls him down but he doesn't go; at lunch he reappears in my room. I expect him to tune out, feet up, earphones on, at the round table in the back. Instead he unwraps the burger that he slips out of his pocket at a desk shoved up against mine. As he eats, he asks what I would do if my daughter made the same choices. I am no fount of answers, but I take that as a cue. I tell the truth as I know it, describe consequences and options. I empathize, to a point. I thank him for listening and he thanks me for talking. A door seems propped open, at least.

By the end of the day, he'll be back in the corner. Silent, and pretending to read. I sit and let him stew.

Chasing the Daylight

The chamber of commerce should have sent a photographer over to capture the reflection of the sunset on the pond. The silhouette of dog-walkers, the glint off a feather, the early-season dandelions for now seeming festive. The silent float of a kite above the creak of a swing 'til the flutter and dive and recovery. A pick-up clang off the rim, the sweet sound of bat hitting ball, and a neighborhood woman, music clenched in her fist, silenced, running uphill and into the wind.

flashback

In tribute to the news out of Detroit that Pontiac may cease to be even sooner than the rest of GM, here again is the tale of the only Pontiac I ever owned and owned and owned.

The Sunbird
originally posted January 28, 2007

This is a story of a woman and a car. Once upon a time, the woman was young and the car was new. She was on the verge of graduating from college, and the car, though not fancy, seemed cute and comfortable and reliable enough to take her out into the world. If nothing else, it was a definite upgrade from the Chevy Nova she'd been driving for six years. As it turned out, she and the car would be together for a long, long time, though the car, had it been capable, may have wished for a different fate.

In the beginning, of course, she took special care of it, and invested wisely in ArmorAll and oil changes. It was a real disappointment, then, when Kenny, her fellow student teacher, busted one of the air vents on a ride to lunch when the car was mere days old. And it was sadder still when the woman accidentally drove down a freshly oiled street when the odometer was still in the triple digits. The paint was never was the same.

Nevertheless, the car was dependable, and the woman and her friends took it to Memphis and back, and then to Memphis and back again. The woman graduated and drove the car through all those endless Illinois cornfields looking for a job. Finally, at interview number 13, she halfway succeeded (the work was part-time), and she moved her car out into the country, racking up the miles to visit civilization, and her friends (both the close by and out of state), and the homebound students she took on for extra cash. Soon enough, she got married and moved to another town, and she and the car continued their commuting life, first across the Illinois prairie and then around the St. Louis highways.

Three years into their relationship, the woman towed the car to Green Bay behind a moving truck, paying extra for an undeground parking space so as to protect the car from the Wisconsin elements and herself from the drudgery of cleaning them off. A year later, she and a puking, shedding, nervous wreck of a cat drove the car to Iowa, where she would be happy but the cat and the car would be less so. Getting the car moving in the cold Iowa mornings developed into an elaborate ritual involving cans of starter fluid and depressing the gas pedal in a way no one but the woman could master. So maybe that's why, when she cracked the rear bumper on an on-coming car (yes, that does take skill. or tragic inattention when one backs out of the driveway) and scraped yellow paint from a concrete pylon at the bank onto the front fender fixing those cosmetic flaws was a low priority. Surely the car was on its way out. Alas, financial priorities change, especially when news of a new baby is received, and since the car was basically trustworthy (though touchy) and thorougly paid for, it stayed, both long enough to trade its Wisconsin plate for not one but two Iowa models and to deliver that baby home.

The same year the baby arrived, the woman and her family moved to Indianapolis, and the car came too. The car became well acquainted with the "boys down at Firestone," but they drove it as long as they could--right up until it started randomly losing power on the freeway as the woman delivered her work to the office each morning. Adventure is grand, just not on I-465. Now, at that point, believe it or not, that car was the only one the woman and her family had: the husband's car had been totaled back when they lived in Iowa, and, Iowa City being manageable on one car, they'd kept the cash and tried life with a single vehicle. That was less workable (read: a huge pain in the ass) in a larger city, so once a new car was acquired, the woman was tempted to keep the Sunbird to see if it could be resurrected, so she did. Their itinerant life being what it was, it was now time to move again, so they towed the car back to Illinois and dropped it at a trusted mechanic's. And hark! there was a miracle. While the Indiana mechanics had planned to gouge $450 to "maybe" fix it, the woman's new best friend in the whole world found a loose connection, charged $40 for his time, and restored the woman's faith in humanity and her place as a member of a two-car family. Hallelujah, indeed.

The woman abused the good nature of that car for two more years and thousands more miles, but even she agreed it was time to give it up at the end of mile 168,000. But what to do? It certainly had little value according to Kelly or any other expert. And she really didn't want to sell it to someone who'd know where to find her, its maintenance--except for the oil changes, her father having drilled that right into her head--being as spotty as it was. The solution? Donate it! Surely the non-profit would just sell it for whatever parts remained anyway, and she could walk away with a clean conscience. Which she did.

The non-profit had other plans, though, and so did the car: not long after she gave it away, the woman saw it on the road. There was no mistake: it was always easily recognizable, given the bumper, the fender, the Bluenote in the back window and the local tax stickers in the front. Now, however, it was even more identifiable. The new license plate? SEXY 64. The woman was chagrined, and momentarily wanted to rescue her car from whomever had that kind of vanity, but at least the car was still going. We should all hope to endure so much and last so long, she thought. The woman's entire family knew the story of SEXY 64 and would occasionally see it around town, or even further afield than they'd think safe to drive it. Heads shaking with disbelief, they'd update each other on what had rusted or faded or fallen off the car that would not die. Eventually, the car was spotted with a new license plate, and though the woman was relieved that the old car's honor was restored, she figured that this sighting might well be the last.

Which it was, until the phone rang today, seven years after the car was given away, sixteen years after it was new.

"Guess what I saw!" said the woman's husband. "The Sunbird!"

Biggest Loser indeed

Tonight brought the grand finale of the third of my trio of guilty pleasures -- reality TV. First went The Amazing Race, Sunday night Survivor ended, and tonight the Biggest Loser was crowned. I'm pretty pleased with all three outcomes:

--brother-and-sister team Nick and Starr Spangler (she's now dating someone from the show who I hope is surnamed Banner, or that he'll change to it)
--high school physics teacher Bob Crowley became the oldest (and perhaps most genuine) Survivor winner
--and Michelle Aguilar gave Biggest Loser it's biggest misnomer. Michelle is no loser.

Not after patching things up with her mother, who joined her on the show. They hadn't spoken in 5-1/2 years after mom left her daughter and husband for another man, taking Michelle's siblings with her.

Not after nearly leaving the show for the guilt she felt about leaving her dad at home, not to mention many years of pent up guilt and feelings of inadequacy.

Certainly not after sharing the same household as Icky Vicky and Hippo Heba. I know it's a game, but Vicky showed her true colors through her behavior and should have been sent home by Shellay when she had the chance. Heba was her all-too-willing partner in crime.

All's well that ends well though as Michelle won despite not having the highest percentage of weight loss. That distinction falls on Heba, who lost 46.93 percent dropping from 294 pounds to 156 (contestants spend about three months at the ranch for the taped episodes and nearly that long before the live finale).

Michelle "only" lost 45.45 percent, going from 242 to 132. You could always see the beauty in her and her mom, but tonight you could tell they both finally saw it themselves. You have to love a reality show that rewards those that it brings the best out of.

In a perfect twist of the game that restored my faith in the voting public, America got to choose between Heba and her husband Ed to be the third finalist to join Michelle and Vicky. Ed pleaded with viewers to vote for Heba, and both seem to have spent the last three months assuming we'd listen.

Not so fast, my friends. A very pregnant Allison Sweeney revealed that Ed received 84 percent of the vote. Talk about profound rejection!

Heba wound up winning the $100,000 consolation prize, which is probably fair. And Vicky got shut out, finishing third among the finalists. Reality can be harsh.

To his credit, Ed lost 139 pounds (one more than Heba), but started out at 335 (41 pounds higher). Yes, losing weight is easier for men, but in his defense he's a chef. How can you know if it's good if you don't taste it?

Pounds-wise, Phil, who took the most crap from Vicky and Heba -- until he was voted out and they turned their wrath on Shellay -- led with 180 pounds. Can you imagine?

Phil's wife Amy nosed him out for second place in the consolations with 45.85 percent to his 45.62. That couple is nearly half the size it was six months ago!

Kid gloves

It never ceases to amaze me how two children born of the same parents can be so different. Not good and bad, although both have been each at one time or another, just different. It's taken me all of 15 1/2 years -- give or take -- to learn you can't parent them the same way either. Also, I recently discovered, my "tough love" approach worked for neither.

So I'm experimenting with a "kid glove" approach. Ignoring the fact that I communicated via e-mail, only because I worked late and they were asleep when I got home, how did I do on report card day?

First, the straight-A sixth-grader:

Way to go! I was so proud and impressed when I looked at your report card tonight. Of course, I wasn't surprised after seeing your continued stellar ITBS scores. Your mathematics total equates to a student in your brother's grade! And your problem solving and data interpretation scores are off the chart. Maybe you will be president some day -- or a detective like Nancy Drew.

Anyway, congratulations. You've done very well. Now keep it up.

Your reward? I don't believe in paying for grades and, though we set up a plan for Zach, it wasn't until he was in high school. (So far, it hasn't provided him much incentive anyway.) But we should discuss an appropriate reward for your accomplishment. What do you think? I'm sure you have ideas. Let's talk about it.

Meanwhile, remember I love you no matter what. And at the moment, you've made me
very, very proud.

Now, the underachieving 10th-grader:

Don't worry. I'm not going to yell at you. I've learned that doesn't accomplish the intended goal. I'm trying to look at the positives and I have to say, you kept your word about getting your geometry grade up. Good job! Unfortunately, it seems to have come at the expense of your Spanish grade. Not exactly what we're looking for.

I hope you will take Mrs. Stiles comment to heart and "report for extra help."

Your GPA of 2.715 isn't horrible. But 3.0 is well within your reach, and I hope
you'll strive for that this trimester.

The C+ in driver's ed kind of surprised me. I guess you should have taken it pass/fail. Regardless, it's good to have it out of the way. Now you won't have it to distract you from your other studies. You need to find out the procedures for getting a school permit and we'll get that done. I still don't know what we'll do for a vehicle, but we'll work on it.

Financially, here's how the payout works (PE and Driver's ed do not count). $10 for each A that isn't canceled by a D. $5 for each B that isn't canceled out by a C. Obviously, straight A's or A's and B's is not applicable. So your A- in Biology is canceled by the D+ in Spanish, or you'd have earned $10. The B+ in LA (though I'm really proud of you improvement in this class) is canceled by the C- in Geometry. That leaves a B- in world history, for which you've earned a grand total of $5. I think you can easily see how eliminating the D's and reducing/eliminating the C's would be much more profitable.

I would like for us to meet with your counselor to discuss your educational goals. If you'd rather meet with her alone, that is fine, as long as you do it. Please let me know how you'd like to proceed.

Keep working hard, buddy, and don't slack off between now and Christmas break. You've learned how hard it is to make up ground when you've fallen behind. And please, please, please make sure you turn in all of your assignments.

Don't be afraid to ask for help, whether from your teachers, your classmates or even your parents. We love you and only want the best for you.

Parenting for dummies

Oh, how I wish someone would write this book. Maybe I should. It seems I'm qualified.

I don't know quite when I got so dumb, though the transition to high school seems logical. Once best buddies, our relationship seems to have deteriorated to angry dad and brooding son.

"Why can't you just let me figure it out on my own?" he said for the second year in a row as grades that started out so promising continued their downward spiral as the trimester quickly draws to a close. If only you gave me some reason to think you could.

Much as I appreciate e-mail progress reports from teachers, they only add fuel to the fire. Less-than stellar grades I can accept. Missing assignments I can't.

"You yell too much." Guilty as charged. My intentions are pure, even if my methods are flawed.

"Sounds like a normal kid," said the youth pastor we consulted today. Also, "does he understand consequences?"

Yes and no.

Serious consequences like throwing away a free education or accomplishing a dream of playing college baseball don't seem to resonate. But trivial consequences like the threat of missing a high school football playoff game as a spectator? That's enough, apparently, to prompt the suggestion that he might just quit baseball.

He didn't mean it, I hope. He just knows how to get my goat.

Maybe I went too far with the academic contract, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

--Meet with your teachers to discuss strategies for improving grades and/or submitting missing assignments.
--Meet with geometry or Spanish teachers after school for extra help, or attend study table.
--Spend 20 minutes each without distraction studying geometry and Spanish each night.
--Begin using your planner so you don't miss any more assignments.

Is that really so unreasonable?

Failure to comply results in grounding, including loss of cell phone, computer, television, IPod and video game privileges. Most of those things didn't exist when I was his age, so maybe I don't understand how dire the consequences are.

Or maybe I just don't understand teenagers.

Much as I'd love to have my buddy back, my first responsibility is to be your dad. Admittedly, I have much room for improvement. But so do you. What do you say we work on that?

at the funeral home

"It's not like I have a choice," she says, staring off into the future. She's done what she had to do, and she'll keep doing it. For her father, for her sister. For her mother, lying still in the next room. She looks younger than nineteen. She looks like the kid she'll never be again, except no kid should be that weary. No mother should pass from life at the age of not-quite-forty-two. It's not that others don't have it worse, not that it won't be as right as it can be in the end. It's not that anyone said life would be fair; we just wish it would be, anyway.

The rented chapel is crowded but silent, the custom not quite familiar to the two blondes in the back. We are all just being there for them, quite literally. At the moment, it's all that we can do.

message

RIP. A name. A date. Tragedy reduced down to a text. If only it were really that small.

The buzz of homecoming recedes as I type out my reply, say either nothing or everything. I can't tell. I can't help but think of my mother. And being nineteen. And all that's ahead, or what might not be now, for the girl on the other end of the line.

I tell a girl who needs to know. We sit quietly.

"At least she's at peace now," says my teenage companion. I wish that and more for the daughter.

RIP Paul Newman

>

from the NY Times

Paul Newman, one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars, died Friday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 83.

The cause was cancer, said Jeff Sanderson of Chasen & Company, Mr. Newman’s publicist.

If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless. Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into craggy, charismatic old age.

Mr. Newman made his Hollywood debut in the 1954 costume film “The Silver Chalice,” but real stardom arrived a year and a half later, when he inherited from James Dean the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Dean had been killed in a car crash before the screenplay was completed.

It was a rapid rise for Mr. Newman, but being taken seriously as an actor took longer. He was almost undone by his star power, his classic good looks and, most of all, his brilliant blue eyes. “I picture my epitaph,” he once said. “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

Mr. Newman’s filmography was a cavalcade of flawed heroes and winning antiheroes stretching over decades. In 1958 he was a drifting confidence man determined to marry a Southern belle in an adaptation of William Faulkner’s “Long, Hot Summer.” In 1982, in “The Verdict,” he was a washed-up alcoholic lawyer who finds a chance to redeem himself in a medical malpractice case.

And in 2002, at 77, having lost none of his charm, he was affably deadly as Tom Hanks’s gangster boss in “Road to Perdition.” It was his last on-screen role in a major theatrical release. (He supplied the voice of the veteran race car Doc in the Pixar animated film “Cars” in 2006.)

Few major American stars have chosen to play so many imperfect men.

As Hud Bannon in “Hud” (1963) Mr. Newman was a heel on the Texas range who wanted the good life and was willing to sell diseased cattle to get it. The character was intended to make the audience feel “loathing and disgust,” Mr. Newman told a reporter. Instead, he said, “we created a folk hero.”

As the self-destructive convict in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) Mr. Newman was too rebellious to be broken by a brutal prison system. As Butch Cassidy in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) he was the most amiable and antic of bank robbers, memorably paired with Robert Redford. And in “The Hustler” (1961) he was the small-time pool shark Fast Eddie, a role he recreated 25 years later, now as a well-heeled middle-age liquor salesman, in “The Color of Money” (1986).

That performance, alongside one by Tom Cruise, brought Mr. Newman his sole Academy Award, for best actor, after he had been nominated for that prize six times before. In all he received eight Oscar nominations for best actor and one for best supporting actor, in “Road to Perdition.”

“When a role is right for him, he’s peerless,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1977. “Newman is most comfortable in a role when it isn’t scaled heroically; even when he plays a bastard, he’s not a big bastard — only a callow, selfish one, like Hud. He can play what he’s not — a dumb lout. But you don’t believe it when he plays someone perverse or vicious, and the older he gets and the better you know him, the less you believe it. His likableness is infectious; nobody should ever be asked not to like Paul Newman.”

More than a movie star and a sometime stage actor, Mr. Newman was an entrepreneur, a philanthropist and, after he turned 75, a racecar driver. In 1995, as a 70th birthday present to himself, he raced at Daytona. When he won his event, he made the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest winner in his race class.

In 1982, as a lark, he decided to sell a salad dressing he had created and bottled for friends at Christmas. Thus was born the Newman’s Own brand, an enterprise he started with his friend A. E. Hotchner, the writer. More than 25 years later the brand has expanded to include, among other foods, lemonade, popcorn, spaghetti sauce, pretzels, organic Fig Newmans and wine. (His daughter Nell Newman runs the company’s organic arm.) All its profits, of more than $200 million, have been donated to charity, the company says.

Much of the money was used to create a string of Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, named for the outlaw gang in “Butch Cassidy.” The camps provide free summer recreation for children with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. Mr. Newman was actively involved in the project, even choosing cowboy hats as gear so that children who had lost their hair because of chemotherapy could disguise their baldness.

Several years before the establishment of Newman’s Own, on Nov. 28, 1978, Scott Newman, the oldest of Mr. Newman’s six children and his only son, died of an overdose of alcohol and pills, at 28. His father’s monument to him was the Scott Newman Center, created to publicize the dangers of drugs and alcohol. It is headed by Susan Newman, the oldest of his five daughters.

Mr. Newman’s three younger daughters are the children of his 50-year second marriage, to the actress Joanne Woodward. Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward both were cast — she as an understudy — in the Broadway play “Picnic” in 1953. Starting with “The Long, Hot Summer” in 1958, they co-starred in 10 movies, including “From the Terrace” (1960), based on a John O’Hara novel about a driven executive and his unfaithful wife; “Harry & Son” (1984), which Mr. Newman also directed, produced and helped write; and “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” (1990), James Ivory’s version of a pair of Evan S. Connell novels, in which Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward played a conservative Midwestern couple coping with life’s changes.

When good roles for Ms. Woodward dwindled, Mr. Newman produced and directed “Rachel, Rachel” for her in 1968. Nominated for the best-picture Oscar, the film, a delicate story of a spinster schoolteacher tentatively hoping for love, brought Ms. Woodward her second of four best-actress Oscar nominations. (She won the award on her first nomination, for the 1957 film “The Three Faces of Eve,” and was nominated again for her roles in “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” and the 1973 movie “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.”)

Mr. Newman also directed his wife in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (1972), “The Glass Menagerie” (1987) and the television movie “The Shadow Box” (1980). As a director his most ambitious film was “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1971), based on the Ken Kesey novel.

In an industry in which long marriages might be defined as those that last beyond the first year and the first infidelity, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward’s was striking for its endurance. But they admitted that it was often turbulent. She loved opera and ballet. He liked playing practical jokes and racing cars. But as Mr. Newman told Playboy magazine, in an often-repeated quotation about marital fidelity, “I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?”

Paul Leonard Newman was born on Jan. 26, 1925, in Cleveland. His mother, the former Teresa Fetzer, was a Roman Catholic who turned to Christian Science. His father, Arthur, who was Jewish, owned a thriving sporting goods store that enabled the family to settle in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Paul and his older brother, Arthur, grew up.

Teresa Newman, an avid theatergoer, steered her son toward acting as a child. In high school, besides playing football, he acted in school plays, graduating in 1943. After less than a year at Ohio University at Athens, he joined the Navy Air Corps to be a pilot. When a test showed he was colorblind, he was made an aircraft radio operator.

After the war Mr. Newman entered Kenyon College in Ohio on an athletic scholarship. He played football and acted in a dozen plays before graduating in 1949.

Arthur Newman, a strict and distant man, thought acting an impractical occupation, but, perhaps persuaded by his wife, he agreed to support his son for a year while Paul acted in small theater companies.

In May 1950 his father died, and Mr. Newman returned to Cleveland to run the sporting goods store. He brought with him a wife, Jacqueline Witte, an actress he had met in summer stock. But after 18 months Paul asked his brother to take over the business while he, his wife and their year-old son, Scott, headed for Yale University, where Mr. Newman intended to concentrate on directing.

He left Yale in the summer of 1952, perhaps because the money had run out and his wife was pregnant again. But almost immediately, the director Josh Logan and the playwright William Inge gave him a small role in “Picnic,” a play that was to run 14 months on Broadway. Soon he was playing the second male lead and understudying Ralph Meeker as the sexy drifter who roils the women in a Kansas town.

Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were attracted to each other in rehearsals of “Picnic.” But he was a married man, and Ms. Woodward has insisted that they spent the next several years running away from each other.

In the early 1950s roles in live television came easily to both of them. Mr. Newman starred in segments of “You Are There,” “Goodyear Television Playhouse” and other shows.

He was also accepted as a student at the Actors Studio in New York, where he took lessons alongside James Dean, Geraldine Page, Marlon Brando and, eventually, Ms. Woodward.

Then Hollywood knocked. In 1954 Warner Brothers offered Mr. Newman $1,000 a week to star in “The Silver Chalice” as the Greek slave who creates the silver cup used at the Last Supper. Mr. Newman, who rarely watched his own films, once gave out pots, wooden spoons and whistles to a roomful of guests and forced them to sit through “The Silver Chalice,” which he called the worst movie ever made.

His antidote for that early Hollywood experience was to hurry back to Broadway. In Joseph Hayes’s play “The Desperate Hours,” he starred as an escaped convict who holds a family hostage. The play was a hit, and during its run, Jacqueline Newman gave birth to their third child.

On his nights off Mr. Newman acted on live television. In one production he had the title role in “The Death of Billy the Kid,” a psychological study of the outlaw written by Gore Vidal and directed by Arthur Penn for “Philco Playhouse”; in another, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Battler,” he took over the lead role after James Dean, who had been scheduled to star, was killed on Sept. 30, 1955.

Mr. Penn, who directed “The Battler,” was later convinced that Mr. Newman’s performance in that drama, as a disfigured prizefighter, won him the lead role in “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” again replacing Dean. When Mr. Penn adapted the Billy the Kid teleplay for his first Hollywood film, “The Left Handed Gun,” in 1958, he again cast Mr. Newman in the lead.

Even so, Mr. Newman was saddled for years with an image of being a “pretty boy” lightweight.

“Paul suffered a little bit from being so handsome — people doubted just how well he could act,” Mr. Penn told the authors of the 1988 book “Paul and Joanne.”

By 1957 Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were discreetly living together in Hollywood; his wife had initially refused to give him a divorce. He later admitted that his drinking was out of control during this period.

With his divorce granted, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were married on Jan. 29, 1958, and went on to rear their three daughters far from Hollywood, in a farmhouse on 15 acres in Westport, Conn.

That same year Mr. Newman played Brick, the reluctant husband of Maggie the Cat, in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” earning his first Academy Award nomination, for best actor. In 1961, with “The Hustler,” he earned his second best-actor Oscar nomination. He had become more than a matinee idol.

Many of his meaty performances during the early ’60s came in movies directed by Martin Ritt, who had been a teaching assistant to Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio when Mr. Newman was a student. After directing “The Long, Hot Summer,” Mr. Ritt directed Mr. Newman in “Paris Blues” (1961), a story of expatriate musicians; “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man” (1962); “Hud” (1963), which brought Mr. Newman a third Oscar nomination; “The Outrage” (1964), with Mr. Newman as the bandit in a western based on Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”; and “Hombre” (1967), in which Mr. Newman played a white man, reared by Indians, struggling to live in a white world.

Among his other important films were Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” (1960), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” (1966) and Jack Smight’s “Harper” (1966), in which he played Ross Macdonald’s private detective Lew Archer. The character and film were renamed “Harper,” it was said, in the hope of continuing Mr. Newman’s line of hits with titles beginning with the letter H. He reprised the character nine years later in “The Drowning Pool.”

In 1968 — after he was cast as an ice-cold racecar driver in “Winning,” with Ms. Woodward playing his frustrated wife — Mr. Newman was sent to a racing school. In midlife racing became his obsession. A Web site — newman-haas.com — details his racing career, including his first race in 1972; his first professional victory, in 1982; and his partnership in a successful car racing team.

A politically active liberal Democrat, Mr. Newman was a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention and appointed by President Jimmy Carter to a United Nations General Assembly session on disarmament. He expressed pride at being on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

When Mr. Newman turned 50, he settled into a new career as a character actor, playing the title role — “with just the right blend of craftiness and stupidity,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times — of Robert Altman’s “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976); an unscrupulous hockey coach in George Roy Hill’s “Slap Shot” (1977); and the disintegrating lawyer in Sidney Lumet’s “Verdict.”

Most of Mr. Newman’s films were commercial hits, probably none more so than “The Sting” (1973), in which he teamed with Mr. Redford again to play a couple of con men, and “The Towering Inferno” (1974), in which he played an architect in an all-star cast that included Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway.

After his fifth best-actor Oscar nomination, for his portrait of an innocent man discredited by the press in Sydney Pollack’s “Absence of Malice” (1981), and his sixth a year later, for “The Verdict,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986 gave Mr. Newman the consolation prize of an honorary award. In a videotaped acceptance speech he said, “I am especially grateful that this did not come wrapped in a gift certificate to Forest Lawn.”

His best-actor Oscar, for “The Color of Money,” came the next year, and at the 1994 Oscars ceremony he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. The year after that he earned his eighth nomination as best actor, for his curmudgeonly construction worker trying to come to terms with his failures in “Nobody’s Fool” (1994). In 2003 he was nominated as best supporting actor for his work in “Road to Perdition.” And in 2006 he took home both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for playing another rough-hewn old-timer, this one in the HBO mini-series “Empire Falls.”

Mr. Newman returned to Broadway for the last time in 2002, as the Stage Manager in a lucrative revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” The performance was nominated for a Tony Award, though critics tended to find it modest. When the play was broadcast on PBS in 2003, he won an Emmy.

This year he had planned to direct “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, in October at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. But in May he announced that he was stepping aside, citing his health. It would have been his first time directing a stage production. (He was also part owner of a restaurant, Dressing Room, on the playhouse grounds.)

Mr. Newman’s last screen credit was as the narrator of Bill Haney’s documentary “The Price of Sugar,” released this year. By then he had all but announced that he was through with acting.

“I’m not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to,” Mr. Newman said last year on the ABC program “Good Morning America.” “You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that’s pretty much a closed book for me.”

But he remained fulfilled by his charitable work, saying it was his greatest legacy, particularly in giving ailing, often dying children a camp at which to play.

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

Leonard Pitts: Do yourself a favor-- read a book

It took some time for the daughter to become a reader. Some time, and some funny exercises to help her eyes work together, and some colorful books about a mouse named Geronimo. The mother was relieved, though perhaps she needn't have worried. The child's life has become so full of so much reading and writing so quickly that surely it was inevitable. Whether nature or nurture, though, as ever it's hard to say. Perhaps as a control group we could check the habits of all those Palin kids in Alaska.

by Leonard Pitts
the Miami Herald

Of course, we all have questions for Sarah Palin:

Does she actually think living across the Bering Strait from Russia constitutes foreign policy expertise? Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth? How, exactly, does one field dress a moose? And why would one want to?

My first question, though, would not be one of those. I'd simply ask which books she wants to ban -- and why.

Yes, there's a list of titles floating around the Internet right now, but it's a fake. It is, however, established fact that our would-be vice president has in the past tried to pull books off library shelves.

The New York Times reports that as a member of the City Council of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin complained to colleagues about a book called Daddy's Roommate, described in promotional material as being ''for and about the children of lesbian and gay parents.'' Laura Chase, who ran Palin's campaign for mayor, explained that the book was harmless and suggested Palin read it.

Chase told The Times that Palin replied she ``didn't need to read that stuff. It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn't even read it.''

Later, as mayor, Palin reportedly asked the town's librarian three times whether she would agree to remove controversial books from the shelves. Three times, the librarian refused. Palin fired her, but eventually bowed to public pressure and gave the woman her job back.

''I'm still proud of Sarah,'' said Chase, ``but she scares the bejeebers out of me.''

And in that context, it seems apropos that next week is Banned Books Week.

As you doubtless know, that's the week set aside each year by the American Library Association to bring attention to attempts by some of us to regulate what others of us may read. The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom reports that it has seen 9,700 ''challenges'' -- a challenge is defined as a formal written request to remove a book from a library because the content offends or is deemed inappropriate -- since 1990. Chillingly, the office suggests that's probably an undercount. It estimates that for every challenge reported, four or five are not.

So Palin has company, to say the least.

Count among that number the woman from a Cuban exile group who bragged to a Miami Herald reporter how in 2006 she checked out and kept an elementary school library book she felt painted too rosy a picture of life on that communist island. Like Palin, she thought she had good reason. Would-be book banners always do.

I'm reminded of how someone challenged me the other day on my contention that anti-intellectualism has overtaken this land. I mentioned by way of example Palin's Bible literalism, but really, there's so much more. There's the ''Jay Walking'' segment on Leno. There's this notion that ''elite'' is a four-letter word. There's the White House's censorship and politicization of science. There's the recent survey which found that more people can name all five Simpsons than all five freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment.

And there's this: as many as 50,000 incidents since 1990 in which a book was forced to justify its existence. We're talking books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, books like The Color Purple, books like Harry Potter and, yes, books like Daddy's Roommate, books that offended because they expressed ideas that made someone uncomfortable. As if any other kind of idea was worth expressing.

We are becoming the stupid giant of planet Earth: richer than Midas, mightier than Thor, dumber than rocks. Which makes us a danger to the planet -- and to ourselves. This country cannot continue to prosper and to embrace stupidity. The two are fundamentally incompatible.

So do us all a favor: Annoy Sarah Palin. For goodness sake, read.

Homecoming

Tonight is the high school homecoming dance and my son has taken an interest, in his second year. He's got a date, even, from a cross-town school, just like dear old dad way back when.

So I'm a nervous parent, after all, I was once his age. But I'm really not concerned. Zach may not always live up to his dad's impossible expectations, but he never let's me down. Besides, he's got a game tomorrow.