Interim memo

 

Back in Installment 16 I did a rap on my then-car, my dear ’67 Camaro. You’ll read what happened to it in this installment; and the update is that I heard from one of my readers, who sold me a gorgeous 1950 Packard, which (I’m told) after only two years in the refurbishing shop, will soon be schlepping my bones around Los Angeles. Very deco. Cream and ocher.

The day after this column appeared, things got terminally scary when Installments 18, 28 and 29 beat out entries from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to win the prestigious Silver Pen award of the international journalism society, P.E.N. It was my first journalism award, and the plaque commends the work in the name of “protecting freedom of expression and opposing censorship, dishonesty, discrimination, or any other threat to a free and responsible press.” P.E.N. Los Angeles Center awarded me an actual, real Silver Pen, a replica of a 1920 Lalique implement. I use it constantly. But it was scary. These little pisher commentaries of mine were being seriously considered. Oh, sure, it was heady and made my ego swell up ever larger; but it was also très scary. A. J. Liebling I ain’t. E. B. White I ain’t. Jimmy Cannon I ain’t. I find humility exceedingly unnerving.