YOU SAY THAT YOU ARE SO HELPLESS TOO

Guilty pleasure.

Could it Be I'm Falling in Love?— The Spinners

The Spinners, like the '73 Mets and Gerald Ford, were emblematic of an era that saw the repeated triumph of mediocrity.

Time and again, the thoroughly ordinary would find themselves lifted to unanticipated heights.

More often than not they quickly lost their footing and slid back to the middle level, but they could hold tight to the memory of that brief moment when fortune was their franchise.

I personally found it a great comfort to live in such times.

One afternoon in the late fall of '73 I came home and was greeted by my mother, her face contorted in hard grief and hysteria: “Do you know what it's like to have no friends? Do you?” she screamed.

I did not.

I turned on my heels and retreated quickly, so I don't know how the rest played out. I only know that I didn't see her again until a few days before Christmas.

She returned home and brought with her one of the few gifts I received that year: a leather belt, hand-tooled in the psych ward of Central General Hospital.

It was a very mediocre Christmas...