A Primer About Birds and Bees

Let me tell you about the birds and the bees. 

No, this is not a sex manual primer. 

It is, regrettably, a confession about my ill-fated attempt to secure our house from unwanted bees and birds nests.

The other day I observed bees hovering around a three-quarter inch crack in our cement driveway right near our garage door. They would ever so delicately descend into the crack, no doubt to an underground hive. 

I waited till well past sunset, when all sources say they should be resting overnight, to spray insect killer into the crack. Either my insecticide was no longer lethal or these were super bees as they returned the next day, and the next day after another application of insecticide.

Plan B was to cover over the crack in the cement. The Internet counseled I should fill the crack with sand before applying caulking. I topped off the crack with an extra mound of sand. By the time I checked the next morning the bees had pushed away the sand. 

Plan C: Sand grains being too easily pushed aside, I gathered small pebbles to sink down the crack and lay on top of the opening. That didn’t work either. 

Plan D: Saturday night I went straight for the caulking, layering on several coats. Sunday morning I added more caulking in an area where there was a slight depression. When I came back a few hours later, several bees were hovering near the garage door. One had tried to penetrate the still wet caulking. He was lying on his back, legs facing skyward.

The caulking seemed to work, barring entry and exit. But I could not fathom from whence came the other bees still flying around our garage door. Is there a second portal? Will they give up and relocate? Will I be forced to enlist professional help? 

Having seemingly overcome one form of aerial nuisance, I returned to my combat with birds building nests in the superstructure of our retractable patio awning. A week ago I had waived the white lag of surrender, but I was feeling empowered to take them on again.

One nest was in the left corner. I started pulling down the detritus of twigs, lawn cuttings and leaves that comprised the nest when not one, not two but three small eggs toppled down, the last one even bouncing off my chest before cracking on the patio pavement. 

That was the first time in 11 years that I had interrupted—nay, aborted—the gestation cycle of young sparrows. I did not feel triumphant.  

Pressure-Packed Moments Kick Spurs, Aid Knicks

You don’t need me to tell you a Miracle on 34th street (okay, West 33rd street) transpired Wednesday night inside Madison Square Garden and across television screens throughout the world. 

I am not a New York Knicks fanatic. I am indifferent to basketball, probably because I was not a good, not even mediocre, player growing up. In elementary school I got into one league game, grabbed a defensive rebound and quickly threw a pass to someone who called for the ball. Too bad he was on the other team. He quickly converted my pass into an easy bucket. The coach quickly benched me before I could do more damage. 

I never could master the art of dribbling. Of course, back in the late 1950s and 1960s dribbling like they do today would quickly have drawn a whistle for either palming the ball or traveling. If you cannot dribble it is almost impossible to drive to the basket for a layup. 

Seeing my lack of dribbling proficiency my high school basketball coach quickly determined I was not worthy of a spot on the junior varsity, with no potential for improvement. He was not wrong. 

While most of my friends consumed all of Wednesday night’s game in its entirety, sticking by the Knicks as they trailed by as much as 29 points, I waited until about seven minutes were left before tuning in. New York trailed the San Antonio Spurs by about 15 points, a not unassailable margin given both team’s recent histories in this championship series. 

You know already the Knicks prevailed but they did so because of three pressure-induced mistakes by the Spurs. 

First, the normally placid, reliable Victor Wembanyama missed two critical free throw shots near the game’s end. 

Second, De’Aaron Fox secured a loose ball in mid-court. Instead of killing seconds by dribbling around, he chose to try a lay up. It was blocked by OG Anunoby with 11.7 seconds to go, Knicks trailing by one point. Anunoby then tipped in a rebound of a Jalen Brunson shot, giving New York its first lead of the game, 107-106. 

Still, with 1.2 seconds left the Spurs could tie or win the game. But the inbound pass from Dylan Harper was tipped, making it impossible for Stephon Castle to control the ball and get a shot off. 

The Knicks have a commanding 3-1 lead in games. They need just one more victory to be crowned league champions. 

The Spurs have to be thinking “what-ifs.” If they had not blown massive leads in games two and four it is they who could have enjoyed the 3-1 lead. Now they must recoup and try to avoid handing the Knicks the NBA title on San Antonio’s hardwood floor.  

My Father's Business Was Not For Me

My Internet feed brought a story of children relating how embarrassed they were when young to say their father sold bras (https://dailyvoice.com/new-york/whiteplains/embarrassed-by-dads-bra-business-as-kids-siblings-built-a-lingerie-empire-women-swear-by/)

I can relate to that. 

My father’s primary business was manufacturing ladies’ panties and half-slips. T the start of an academic year everyone had to stand up before our elementary school classmates and relate what their father did. I would cringe. I was embarrassed to say he made panties. When I related that to my parents they suggested I say he made  lingerie.

That worked until one year I had to explain lingerie meant half-slips and panties. Tee-hees from the rest of the students embarrassed me into demanding a different vocation from my parents. Instead, they told me to just say they were “in business.” No further details were necessary. Just “in business.” 

It must have been a magical solution because no one ever questioned what “in business” meant. They could have been part of a holdover of Murder, Inc. for all the kids knew, Murder, Inc. having been a thriving Jewish-Italian Brooklyn enterprise of the 1920s-1940s.

Whatever. “Business” continued to be my parents’ occupations on all official school  forms for the rest of their working lives. 

Of course, my little secret had its shortcoming. Every year around Hanukkah it was customary to give teachers presents. Children brought in books, candy, stationery items. Nothing too expensive. We all oohed and aahed when our teacher revealed the gifts. 

My gift—my parents’ pride and joy—was a clear plastic handbag filled with colorful panties and slips!

Thankfully, gift-giving ended about fifth grade. I was spared further embarrassment until my first trip to Israel, Italy and France when I was 17. Half of my luggage for my eight-week trip contained clothing, especially lingerie, intended for my father’s friends and relatives. 

If you linked the article above you would have read that the children’s angst turned into a lucrative business for them as adults selling bras. Though my father entertained the idea of my joining him in the “business,” I demurred. I just couldn’t work for him, aside from wanting a career in journalism.

Let me explain: One of my jobs as a teenager at his factory on Broadway north of Houston Street was to assemble boxes of half-slips of assorted colors, a dozen colors to a box. On a long cutting table he would line up boxes of each color and, going left to right, instruct me to pull from each box one half-slip. Black, then red, then peach, and so on till the dozen was completed with a white half slip.

Easy enough, repetitively boring though it may be. To relieve some of the banality of my task I reasoned that once I got to the end of the line I could begin a new assortment by starting with white and making my way back to black.

My formula worked efficiently enough until Dad checked my progress. All hell broke loose as he reprimanded me for failing to follow his instructions. He wanted the white slip to be on top, black on the bottom.

I countered that all I had to do was flip the slips upside down in the assorted box, but that did not mollify him. You couldn’t argue with him. It was his way, all the way, all the time. It was an example of why my brother nicknamed him “The Boss.” 

It was also a key reason why my brother as well never considered joining him in the business.

It turned out to be fortuitous. Dad’s business, based on panties and the more lucrative half-slips, dissipated in the late 1960s as women shifted from wearing skirts and dresses to dress pants and blue jeans. Stores my father sold to, companies like JCPenney, Sears, Levine’s, C.R. Anthony, Macy’s, no longer ordered half-slips by the gross. 

Knowing the names and histories of those retail companies made my transition to editor and publisher of Chain Store Age that much easier. 

But my appreciation of his “business” did not engender personal satisfaction until my college years. I was finally able to turn embarrassment into a comic retort when asked what I did during school breaks.  “I had my hand in ladies’ panties,” I would say. 

I Sinned Therefore I Am

Here’s why copy-reading your own writing can be viciously amusing, why relying on spellcheck, A. I. or other programs is not infallible, why copy editors should be treasured, not discarded. 

As midnight approached Tuesday night I hastened to compose and transmit a wrap-up the evening’s poker game.  Four players, including yours truly, achieved double digit wins. Three players lost more than $30 apiece. 

I chose a simple opening sentence: “Big winners. Big losers.”

Only, spellcheck failed to alert me that I had not correctly spelled “winners.” I had correctly spelled “sinners.” 

Eighteen hours after sending out the recap, only one caught the mistake or, perhaps, matter-of-factly accepted their respective characterization as a sinner. I know I am guilty of transgressions, at least some of the time.  

Water Walking, Bird War, Unmasking America

I walked on water yesterday.

Oops. That was a typo. I walked “in” water, though technically I did walk on water, water at the bottom of the pool at the Lifetime gym.

Tuesday was my first day not wearing a rehabilitation boot since I incurred a hairline foot fracture and severe ankle sprain six weeks ago playing pickleball. Gilda has been touting the benefits of walking in water. As I am still several weeks away from court competition, I finally agreed to join her in the pool.

She regularly walks for 90 minutes. I managed 60 minutes. Was it fun? Eh! Will I do it again? Sure. At least until I am pickleball ready. 

Did the birds see me waving a white flag?

I have given up our annual fight, the birds almost daily starting construction of nests at the extreme ends of our retracted patio awning, me spending mornings yanking down their would-be habitats. Loyal readers of this blog may recall past confrontations. 

This year the birds won. Chalk it up to laziness, or the weariness of my Sisyphusian task. So instead of building just two nests at the extremes, they have further humiliated me by feathering a nest in the middle of the awning superstructure. Gracious victors they are not.

Sadly, the birds have a predator more dangerous that I to worry about. Twice in the last week corpses of decomposed birds have been left on our property, one on the patio, the other on our backyard lawn. I suspect the killer is a cat new to our neighborhood that has recently prowled our yard. In our 40-plus years in our home we have never witnessed such carnage. I hope it stops. 

Back to Reality: Musings aside, each day brings more hints we live during the possible last days of our democratic republic, not because a despot cowered the populace into submission, but rather because everyday citizens have accepted neuterization. 

Several months ago a friend, Harold Brooks, posted this commentary from one of his friends. I find it tragically coherent: 

“It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.

“Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: ‘He says the things I’m thinking.’

“And that’s the part that should chill us.

“Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?

“Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress.

“Now the mask is off. Now we know.

“And knowing is a far more dangerous place to be.”

 

News From the Far East Stirs Memories

When my family visited Japan in 1991 we were amused by the transaction process in department stores. Upon approaching a cash register, a woman would take our merchandise, hand it to another employee (usually a woman) who would then convey it to the cashier (another woman). After receiving our money she would pass along the merchandise to another woman who would gingerly wrap it in a bag before giving it to us. 

Women working in seemingly tedious, non-essential jobs were ubiquitous throughout the store. At each escalator, a woman oversaw entry and exit. So, too, at elevators. 

One could only marvel at the extreme customer service Japanese stores provided compared to their American counterparts. 

Ah, but that “luxury” service was a condition manifested by Japan’s full employment strategy, guaranteeing “work”—not meaningful work, just employment—to all. Japan had been riding a wave of economic vitality based on automotive and consumer electronics successes. Guaranteeing a job was deemed culturally appropriate.

Within a few years of our family’s visit, an economic tsunami hit Japan, the effects of which the country is still suffering through (https://share.google/aimode/cakQdcIIwMfFAXymW)

I’m reminded of this “Asian economics disaster” by an article in The New York Times detailing a court ruling in China that protects workers displaced by artificial intelligence (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/china-ai-unemployment.html?smid=em-share). 

Long-term, it seems improbable that China will be able to accommodate the millions of workers, perhaps tens of millions, who will be made redundant by A.I. What amounts to forced retirement, even with a steady paycheck, will create a population seething with repressed energies. 

Unlike Japan, China’s goal of Asian, if not world, hegemony lies beyond its borders. A.I. is not making gameplanning any easier for Chinese officials or their American counterparts.

During that same trip to Japan, organized around interviews with executives of Ito-Yokado, Japan’s most profitable retail company, I met with Toshifumi Suzuki, mastermind behind Seven-Eleven Japan.  Suzuki’s passing at age 93 was reported last week (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/business/toshifumi-suzuki-dead.html?smid=em-share).

Suzuki was a dynamic, creative retailer. Though his haed-driving demeanor was not universally revered, his leadership made 7-Eleven a Japanese mainstay. When Ito-Yokado became a franchisee of Dallas-based Southland it opened one store in Tokyo in 1974. When I interviewed Suzuki it operated 4,300 highly-profitable units with extensive services beyond traditional convenience store fare, such as in-store banking. He also introduced bento boxes and seaweed-wrapped rice balls that were replenished several times a day in a store’s 24-hour operations. He also pioneered implementing the first large-scale point-of-sale system for item-by-item inventory management in Japan.

Thanks to Suzuki’s innovations Ito-Yokado was able to buy Southland. 

Suzuki disdained market research undertaken by American companies. “American research doesn’t really capture the consumer market,” he told me for an article in Chain Store Age. “Americans look at point of sale data to make merchandise assortments and they think they’re filling market needs. POS data only shows what’s on the store shelf.

“Marketing means to elicit and realize their potential needs.” 

In words as current today as they were in 1991, Suzuki said, “Convenience stores in the United States should be where customers want to shop and buy what they want.” He decried past practices that turned c-stores into soft drinks, beer and cigarette shacks. “That’s not a c-store,” he said. “People have illusions that these are c-stores.” 

Fondly Recalling Saloons of Chicago

Chicago is a great restaurant town.  Perhaps an even greater saloon town. 

Before retirement almost 17 years ago I visited the Windy City three to five times a year for nearly three decades. I enjoyed many a good meal there. 

Not being a big drinker I did not quench many thirsts at the numerous, friendly local bars throughout the city’s varied ethnic neighborhoods. Not even at the storied Billy Goat Tavern located behind Lebhar-Friedmnan/Chain Store Age’s offices at 444 North Michigan Avenue. A frequent hangout of my Chicago-based associates, I never got to meet Sam Sianis, Billy Goat’s effusive bartender-owner whose passing was noted on the front page of Fridays’ New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/dining/sam-sianis-dead.html?smid=em-share). 

I did, however, have a memorable meal in another Chicago landmark saloon, not because the food was extraordinary, but rather because Schulien’s was known for magic performed tableside for your exclusive amazement. 

Ernie Arms, the public relations chief of Sears, Roebuck and Co., took me to  Schulien’s, a tavern in the Albany Park section of Chicago run by the family from the time its first drink was sold in 1881 until it closed in 1999. 

Details of the meal elude my recall, but after dessert and dinner drinks were enjoyed, Charlie Schulien joined our table. The performance was about to start. 

His sleight of hand card tricks were sufficient to earn my appreciation, but his final act of wizardry truly caught my breadth. 

At his request I pulled a card from a deck without showing it to him, then tucked it back into the pack he was holding in his hand. I focused on the cards, consciously ignoring the spiel he was spewing intended to distract me. 

After a few minutes it was time for the big reveal. He asked what card I had picked and put back into the deck. 

Ten of diamonds, I said. 

Charlie took a glass of water and poured some onto the white tablecloth. It became translucent, revealing … the ten of diamonds!  

I was dumbstruck. Forget about getting the correct card. How could have slid the card under the tablecloth without my noticing? 

Naturally, an explanation of the trick was not forthcoming. It is now more than three decades since that magical night. Schulien’s is long since closed. But I fondly recall my meal with magic.