By Russ Smith
mug1988@aol.com

Dinner was drawing to a close last Friday night at Cellini Ristorante in Midtown when my brother Jeff came up with a novel gimmick to command the attention of the 30 family members who’d gathered for a whirlwind reunion over the weekend. He clinked two glasses together and asked the assembled to each think for two minutes and then take a stab at guessing the collective age of everyone in the room. This was like counting jellybeans in a jar, since the oldest at the party was my Uncle Pete (86) and the youngest his granddaughter Olivia (six)—with a mixture of graybeards like myself and a slew of kids to consider. But after 15 minutes a winner was declared.

My cousin Veronica’s husband, Richie Mannarino, came closest to the answer, picking 1085, and for his calculations received a fancy pen from Jeff, an item that’s almost as much of an antique as several of the guests who were present. I almost nabbed top honors, choosing 1077, but there was no consolation prize, just a jab from my oldest brother that perhaps my math skills were deteriorating more quickly than my eyesight. At least a stronger eyeglass prescription can alleviate the latter affliction.

Since moving to Baltimore three years ago, I’ve made countless visits to the city, but it was my wife’s first trip back after living here for 16 years, and the kids have returned just five or six times. On the Amtrak train going back south on Sunday, I asked each of them what they missed most about New York, and the answers were predictably disparate. Melissa had a ball catching up with her best friend Janie, who resides in Brooklyn and journeyed up to our lodgings at the Peninsula Hotel—my favorite in Manhattan, trumping the overrated Four Seasons by a significant margin—and after a casual lunch in the lounge, purchased a couple of frocks at Barneys. She had no desire to see our old apartment in Tribeca, too close to the unfathomably dormant Ground Zero, and remembered how unbearable the traffic is on Friday afternoons.

Nicky and Booker, both born at New York Hospital 13 and 11 years ago respectively, were eager to see the 62nd St. shell left by the late and wacky Dr. Nicholas Bartha, since it was just a few doors down from The Browning School, the fine institution they attended until 2003. That was about the only similarity in their assessments. Nick, an aspiring filmmaker who recently completed an eight-minute, anti-Bush (there’s a big political tent in the family) short called “Cowboy Crunch,” couldn’t stop gabbing about what makes NYC stand out. A partial list: the billboards and snipes all over town; the mass of people on the sidewalks; Bleecker St. Records; the hot dog stand in front of the Union Square Virgin store; the striped polo shirts at Paul Stuart; Russian-speaking cabbies giving bicyclists the finger; and the sizable number of rock venues.

His brother, who claimed the city was too dirty—actually, I’ve never seen it cleaner—prefers the trees and grass that we have at our residence in Baltimore and said that Manhattan’s one attraction for him was the manga collection at Forbidden Planet. Oh, and also the sweetbreads and goat he ate at Tudor City’s L’Impero on Saturday night.

The one thing I miss most about New York never changes: it’s taking a walk outside before six a.m., when the streets are deserted and you can witness the beginning of the day unfold, with newspaper trucks making deliveries, bags of bread in front of restaurants and the stray drunk waddling home to parts unknown. Last Saturday morning I was in particular need of such a jaunt after reading a Times editorial on the escalating violence in the Mideast. It was bad enough watching CNN’s unabashedly anti-Israeli coverage on the tube, but against my better judgment—it really makes no sense to read the Times during such a profound crisis—I opened the paper and felt soiled upon seeing the headline “Playing Hamas’s Game.” 

The writer acknowledged that Israel’s courageous (my word) military response may be “legally and morally justified,” yet called for patience on the part of America’s ally. “Most Arabs are not blaming Hamas and Hezbollah for provoking these Israeli raids,” the edit read, “They are blaming Israel for carrying them out. That is not fair. But it is the way things work in the real world, and the provocateurs of Hamas and Hezbollah and their allies in Damascus and Tehran understand how to use it to their long-term advantage. Israel’s political and military leaders need to understand it too and not let themselves be drawn into the provocateur’s game.”

In other words—and I’ll admit that Maureen Dowd’s silly column on the opposite page, “What’s Up, Slut,” was probably a coincidence—Israel ought to lay back and enjoy it. And since when do the insulated pundits at the Times know a damn thing about the “real world”? 

President Bush, whipping up his detractors, said he wouldn’t criticize Israel for defending itself, and was joined by Sen. John McCain, who blasted Iran, Syria and the terrorist organizations it supports at a campaign fundraiser last weekend in Illinois. He said: “You have probably seen our European friends say, well, the Israelis have got to stop. What would we do if somebody came across our borders and killed our soldiers and captured our soldiers? Do you think we would be exercising total restraint?”

I chucked the Times on the floor and went outside to a nearby deli, drank some coffee and tried to calm down. After all, 18 of us were going to the Stadium that day, and it was my hope that Ozzie Guillen’s White Sox could knock around Mike Mussina. Of course, the Yanks crushed the Pale Hose by a score of 14-3, I got sunburned, and a middle-aged dope (wearing a Jeter jersey) screamed at the few Sox fans near the visiting dugout, but that’s just baseball. At least his bad manners extended only to the ballpark and not to the printed pages of an inexplicably anti-Semitic newspaper.