Blueprint Blues Traveler

I know the Arabic word for "whore. " I heard it spoken yesterday. In jest of course. From a distance. I wasn't part of the conversation.

It's a poetic word. It sounds like the name of an old New York baseball player, back in the seventies when the names were funny.

I went to a baseball game in the seventies. I went to several. I remember the one with the boxed seats and the rain delay. Mets vs. Dodgers. In New York. Shea Stadium.

I think it was the historic New York summer of '77.

God I'm old. Or maybe everyone else is young.

Still, there's a lot I don't know. Like how to sew. I'm not good at ironing either. I'm great at irony.

Am I the only one who sincerely believes we ought to give M. Night Shyamalan the benefit of the doubt. Dude made Unbreakable.

This time the British internet radio station has gone too far. Peter Gabriel? Even I'm not that nostalgic. I tried to hold back. But I couldn't.

(note to L.A. Hope Street Department of Motor Vehicles staff: I'll make a deal with you. Just pretend to be interested in my needs. I'll pretend to be interested in yours.)

Unbreakable!

That night in '77 the man who took me and my cousin to the game (strangely I had never met him before and he wasn't a relative) was obsessed with Dodger outfielder Von Joshua. Von must have enjoyed the journey from here to here. Von Joshua is not the player whose names sounds like "whore" in Arabic.

Unbreakable spoiler alert: They called Samuel L. Jackson's character Mr. Glass.

Further research reveals Von Joshua played for the Dodgers in 1974 and then not again until 1979. My cousin - the one who taught me the Arabic word for whore - visited us from Egypt in the summers of '74 and '77 and then never again, so we must have gone to the game in '74, an equally historic summer in New York and other places.

You see, glass is not unbreakable. It breaks.