At my farewell toast, a Times newsroom tradition, I found myself wanting to tell my younger colleagues to appreciate the ride more, that in the final analysis, I had come to the realization that I had few, if any, regrets and no serious complaints. Was I kidding? Telling a pro forma lie in light of an occasion that included Beth and my boys by my side? I don’t think so.
If a state of contentment was a rarity for the typical sports journalist, it was practically unheard of for me. There were more than a few folks in my audience who had indulged my grumblings about editors, assignments, and other grievances through the years. One of them, Selena Roberts, had hilariously dubbed me Sir Whines-a-Lot during one rainy afternoon in the Wimbledon media workroom. Filip Bondy, my old friend and colleague from the Daily News and briefly the Times, as well as a Montclair neighbor, told me afterward that he was dying to get up and tell all those toasting me, “At one time or another, Harvey has complained about every one of you.”
Who was this new cheerful, self-fulfilled guy? I wasn’t quite sure myself, but I hoped he might stick around. And I knew that in no small part I owed his existence to Michelle.
Eleven The End Game
As the winter of 2018 gave way to spring, I phoned Michelle to say that Beth and I would be having Sunday brunch in Greenwich with an old family friend. Would she be around later for a drop-by?
“Just you or Beth, too?” she said.
“Both.”
Michelle sounded thrilled. Seldom leaving Stamford, unwilling to drive much beyond her neighborhood, she saw fewer people these days. It also had been a while since she had seen my better half—about eighteen months, at the funeral of Beth’s father, just thirteen months after we had buried her mother. It had been years since Beth had spent much quality time with Michelle, going back to her Christmas Eve parties or the occasional holiday dinner at my in-laws’ home in Greenwich. Still, I always sensed their mutual affection. Michelle loved hearing about Beth’s midlife transition from sports public relations to education and her role as a union activist, fighting for teachers and against corporate annexation of public schools. Not surprisingly, she admired tenacious women with a cause but, more selfishly, she appreciated how Beth was never threatened by how much I confided in her or resentful of the time I devoted to the friendship. Even the hour or two I invariably stole from in-law visits was never an issue. Michelle especially was flattered when I told her how Beth had made it clear to her parents that she, for me, was family, too.
We arrived at her condo in the midafternoon and sat on her L-shaped living room couch, sipping wine, catching up, Michelle apologizing in advance for any memory lapses she might have, as she now tended to. Just that week, she said, she had confused the days, mistaken Thursday for Saturday, and missed three appointments: a lunch date, a yoga class, and therapy for her latest malady, a sore rotator cuff. Her accountant had also called to tell her she had made a mess of her tax filings and he would have to come by to help put them in order. “He obviously doesn’t trust me anymore to get the numbers right,” she said. “But the neurologist told me I should expect that as I move a little closer to dementia.” She sighed. “It is what it is.”
Michelle had made few concessions in her daily routine beyond the sporadic use of a cane and a senior alert necklace. She was still stubbornly navigating the stairs in her condo, albeit slowly. Her attendance at yoga classes—in all likelihood the cause of her rotator cuff pain—was steady. She concentrated harder when reading and watching television but remained committed to the byzantine plotlines of her favorite Showtime programs, Billions and Homeland. Much as she knew she would be worse off for it, she couldn’t resist tuning in to cable news at night to recoil over the state of American politics and fret over the future of the republic—for which on occasion she expressed sardonic relief that she probably wouldn’t have to endure too much of. Thank goodness, she said, there was Trevor Noah, her new TV hero, to put a comic spin on it all.
Despite a determined but futile tutorial from me during almost every visit, she was hopelessly befuddled by the smartphone she had talked herself into buying, but was still backing her Subaru out of her narrow driveway and into the cramped space between the condos across the way. She tired earlier and was following her doctor’s advice to not answer the phone at night, but that apparently wasn’t keeping her from staying up late to watch Noah or a good NBA game.
She lately was fixated on a Boston-Houston cliffhanger she had stuck with despite it ending close to midnight. The game was already weeks old, but watching Mike D’Antoni coach the high-scoring Rockets—in
