This letter is brought to you by the feeling of cannonballing into a lake.
Yesterday, I had the privilege of serving as the foreman of a jury. Once we reached a verdict, I got a very kind ovation from my fellow jurors. When I returned home, I learned that after a long saga, I’d been promoted at work. The kids and I read Roald Dahl’s The BFG before bedtime and laughed and laughed. Later in the evening, I scored and assisted in our semi-final soccer game.
I am unaccustomed to tooting my own horn, but I guess you could say it was an “all-timer” of a day.
It made me wish I had been smart enough to previously stash some fine bottles away for celebrating rare and perfect moments like this. Which got me thinking further…
Things to celebrate
Birthdays, anniversaries, and divorces
The long-awaited accomplishment of a personal goal
Weddings, births, and passings
Graduations and the kids becoming adults
The first and last mortgage payments (and paying off loans in general)
Hirings, retirements, and firings (if you’re a rapscallion)
Winning a championship
Your nemesis finally being humbled
What to crack open
The spirit and vintage that moves your celebratory needle is a deeply subjective thing — as a cursory search for “bottles for special occasions” reveals. To wit: There’s something undeniably romantic and personal in the way this commenter talks about his bygone cellar:
I haven't had such a thing for years but there is a certain calmness about having something there when one just wants a glass of wine. I remember having more than ten cases each of Chateau de Fuissé Pouilly Fuissé 1985 and Lafarge Bourgogne Rouge 1999, each bought at auction for well under a fiver a bottle, and I didn't get bored even slightly. I knew a rather grand family whose house red was Carruades de Lafite, and they didn't get bored either. More recently I remember multiple cases of Luneau-Papin Folle Blanche which cost even less, again with huge affection though the current UK price is preposterous.
This is an area you simply have to explore for yourself. If you’re really freaky and have waded into the deep waters of global wine, it changes each year. If I had to choose now, my celebratory bottles would include:
Ransom Old Tom gin (served at the Overserved Society’s “Martinez” party, now on rotation during the winter holidays)
La Socarrada Cervesa Artesenal de Xativa (a glorious honey-rosemary beer that we drank at North Avenue beach when we got engaged)
Chimney Rock Tomahawk Cabernet Sauvignon (which we drank on our honeymoon)
Antico Castello Taurasi Riserva DCOG (we brought a case back from Campania)
All of this leaves me curious: What are your special-occasion extravagances? Particularly if they’re non-alcoholic. Reply back or leave a comment below.
away we go.
The Quintessential Urban Design of Sesame Street
By Anna Kodé for The New York Times (🎁)
Best line: At the time, the New York depicted in the media wasn’t glamorous — it was frightening. Crime, riots, filthy streets.
So a city street was far from the obvious choice for the setting of a children’s show. But the perceived seediness of New York emboldened the television producer Jon Stone as he was conceptualizing “Sesame Street.” “For a preschool child in Harlem, the street is where the action is,” Mr. Stone said in the book “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street” by Michael Davis. “Outside there are kids hollering, jumping double Dutch, running through the open hydrants, playing stickball. Our set had to be an inner-city street.”
Chasing le Carré in Corfu by Honor Jones for The Atlantic
Best line: “Black dress, pink coat, thick beige stockings. This is the third time I’ve seen her. She walks down the middle of the street outside my window, her head bent forward under its helmet of grandmother hair. She carries her handbag like a briefcase with a bomb in it. She has the look of someone whose friends are all dead.
I saw her first outside Saint Spyridon Church, lighting a candle. And then again in Spianada Square, among the scootering children. I lean out the window to watch her disappear around the corner. Maybe there’s nothing suspicious about it.”
The Triumph of Stupidity by Andrew Nikiforuk for The Tyee
Best line: “The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.” — Kurt Vonnegut. Fools pose the biggest threat, warned an Italian historian. We’re living the proof.
Goodbye to Pencil Factory (and the version of Greenpoint that made it possible) by Charlotte Klein for Grub Street (archive 🔗)
Best line: Pencil Factory opened in December 2001. “It was right after 9/11. New York felt like we’d just been rocked to our core,” says Favier, who remembers NYPD bagpipers marching down the street and into the bar on one of their first nights. “Because the ceilings are so low, it basically lifted the ceiling off; it was filled with sound,” she says. “People were in tears.”
When the bar opened, rent was $2,500 per month. This year, they were paying $13,000, and in the spring the landlord decided the new asking price would be $29,500 a month. Even if Pencil Factory’s owners could have paid the rent — which they couldn’t — they weren’t given the option to renew. “He wouldn’t give us specific reasons and just said that he was done, and then kind of went silent on us,” Taylor tells me. “If I were to guess, I think he’s just kind of over it.”
home tour
Vladimir Ossipoff: the Hawaiian Modernist Maestro’s Mountainside Cabin
By Eunica Escalante for The World of Interiors
Best line: “Renowned for the elegant Modernist houses he designed in Hawai‘i, Vladimir Ossipoff set about his purest architectural experiment when, in the 1950s, he constructed a mountain cabin on the island of O‘ahu. The mild, tropical climate meant that – once the Russian émigré had solved the challenge of transporting his materials 720 metres above sea level – just glass and sliding shoji doors could serve as walls, connecting his family directly to the panoramic vista beyond.”
Seth Putnam is an editor and writer in Chicago. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in a 1920s home that is the epitome of a work in progress.
"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." —Mary Oliver