My friend Bernie

It was the standing joke between us that sometime in the near future, Bernie finally would write a lengthy letter telling me all that's happened in his life since we first met as childhood friends.

This promise happened year after year, Christmas after Christmas.

We did, in fact, exchange Christmas cards every year, complete with little notes inside updating key moments in our lives: surgeries, cruises, teams we liked, whiskeys we sipped, books we read, movies we saw. Stuff like that.

Bernie and I toast our friendship.

 We first met more than 65 years ago in a little town – a borough, actually – named Fountain Hill, PA, which was snuggled comfortably in the hillocks between Allentown and Bethlehem. Interestingly enough, I don't remember the particulars of our first meeting. But I'll bet it was in the borough playground, which was just across the street from where we lived on Stanley Avenue. I was probably 6 years old, Bernie was 5.

In those days, the playground was the beating heart of the Fountain Hill community and I'm guessing we might have met on the swings or the sliding boards of what most of us Hillers now fondly remember as this incredibly magical place to live. I swear it was a kind of Heaven on Earth that somehow helped mold us into the people we are today. Most Hillers still swear to that.

Anyway, no matter how Bernie and I first met, the friendship stuck. It stuck through measles and chicken pox. It stuck when Bernie got hit by a car while crossing the street to get to the playground (he escaped serious injury and was back on the playground within days). It stuck even though we went to two different schools – he went to St. Ursula's and I went to Stevens.

Bernie Gillen

 We'd flip baseball cards on the front porch of our house. We'd play in the little runoff creek that bordered the playground across the street from us, building beaver-type dams and catching crayfish. We'd play army in the woods nearby and run the bases on the Little League field next to the playground. We were inseparable.

But it didn't last. Dad changed jobs, we moved to Portsmouth, NH, and consequently, Bernie and I lost touch. Kids don't usually write letters to each other. They usually don't pick up the phone and call. Instead of each other's shadow, we were now each other's ghost.

 This separation lasted for years, and even though our family returned to Bethlehem so that Dad could attend Moravian Theological Seminary, Bernie and I never reconnected. Ghosts.

But then this happened: Because Dad had been assigned a church in nearby Coopersburg, I'd gone to Southern Lehigh for high school. Twenty-five years later, I decided to go to our 25th class reunion and so Kim and I drove the 500 miles up to Pennsylvania from North Carolina. We were milling around the banquet hall when, out of the blue, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and this pleasant looking fellow said, "Bruce, do you remember me?" 

I didn't. I had no clue. There was no name tag.

"I'm Bernie Gillen."

I took a quick look into his face as the memories flashed by and I could see it was him. We embraced. I nearly cried.

But how could this be? Bernie did not go to Southern Lehigh. He went to Bethlehem Catholic. How could this be?

Do you believe in serendipity? Do you believe in synchronicity? Do you believe in magic?

It turns out Bernie had married a girl in my class, Betsy Heimbach, and that's why he was here. And maybe, for this moment, that's why I was here, too. What were the odds?

We talked, we reminisced, we exchanged numbers and addresses and promised this time to stay in touch.

And we did, mostly through Christmas cards.

Bernie's Christmas cards were an adventure. His handwriting was atrocious and his little notes inside those cards were written in what amounted to be an undecipherable code. It could have been Latin, for all I knew. Didn't matter. I usually got the gist. A key word here and there always helped.

This kept up until my 50th class reunion approached five years ago. I asked him if he and Betsy were going, but he thought probably not. Then Kim suggested that we meet on our own while we were in Pennsylvania. And better yet, why not meet at the playground?

And so we did. We shared more memories, he treated us to a Philly cheesesteak lunch. And, at the alcohol-free playground, I broke out the champagne that I brought and we toasted our friendship, which was then in its 63rd year.

A few more Christmases came and went, complete with notes but never the lengthy letter. Typical.

The card we got this past Christmas had his shortest unreadable note ever.

"Why don't you just pick up the phone and call him?" scolded Kim in all her wisdom. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," I said. "Maybe later."

On Thursday, Kim called me from work. She'd been on the "You Know You're From Fountain Hill" site on Facebook, where the RIP's were piling up under Bernie's class picture from 1966. My throat clenched.

A little later, a friend of Bernie's from the Fountain Hill days, Bob Spirk, called me at Betsy's request to confirm that Bernie had passed. Bernie was 71 and had died of heart failure.

Our friendship ultimately spanned 68 years. I think about that. The corporeal friendship is over now, but the spiritual friendship will last into perpetuity.

Quieti tam amicus meus.

Rest well, my friend.

 

 

Liz and Jon

Back in December, my friend Mark Loper texted me asking whether or not I'd be interested in going to a speaker forum to be held at Wake Forest University's Wait Chapel. He had two tickets available, but Karla, his wife, was unable to attend.

So he thought of me.

The two scheduled speakers on the program were Liz Cheney and Jon Meacham.

Holy cow, I thought. This is great.

"I'm very interested," I texted Mark. "Thanks."

 And so, Thursday night, we sat in our assigned seats in the balcony of sold-out Wait Chapel for the third Face to Face forum of the season.

Cheney, of course, served as Wyoming's at-large U.S. representative from 2017 to 2023. She was the House chair for the Republican Conference, making her the third-ranking person in the Republican House leadership.

She also lived through the January 6 insurrection (which makes her an eyewitness to history) and has since served as a vocal and dedicated thorn in the side of Donald Trump.

More pointedly, she served as Vice Chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Meacham is a presidential historian and a Pulitzer Price winning author of several No. 1 New York Times bestsellers and who sits in the Rogers Chair of American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. He often appears as a thoughtful, witty and knowledgeable commentator on MSNBC, especially on matters of politics or religion ("I am probably one of the last six Episcopalians left in the United States," he joked last night).

Meacham more or less served as the interviewer, asking Cheney numerous probing questions and follow-ups about her experience on Jan. 6. Some of the questions were direct and some were philosophical, which required Cheney to pause and think hard before answering.

What most of us in the audience probably came away with, if we couldn't have guessed already, is that Cheney is guided by a deep and abiding passion for the U.S. Constitution. Sensing that American democracy is under fire by Trump and his authoritarian minions as it hasn't seen since the Civil War, she warned of the dangers of a potential autocracy that lie ahead. Although she hesitated and would not commit when asked if she would vote for Joe Biden for president in November, she said she would never vote for Trump.

As the program neared its conclusion, Meacham acknowledged Cheney's courage in the face of Trumpian retribution, thanking her for standing by her principles and not for temporal power. That brought the 2,200-member audience (probably the largest gathering of left-of-center voters in the state at that particular moment) to its feet in an ovation that clearly touched Cheney.

Mark and I left the forum feeling satisfied by what we heard. It had been a while – decades actually – since I set foot on a college campus for an intellectual moment of stimulating thought that did not include Civil War study.

It felt good.

Wow, what a week

Sometime around rapist Donald Trump's first term in office as president of the United States, a friend of mine said that one of the reasons he voted for him was because Trump was clearly such a successful businessman, which was a particular quality this country really needed.

I tried to point out in my rebuttal that Mafia Don had had several bankruptcies by then and how was bankruptcy a skill set we needed in the presidency?

I thought of all this when, on Friday, New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron ordered the odorous rapist to pay a fine of  $355 million for fraud, specifically for fraudulently misrepresenting financial figures to get cheaper loans.

A pre-judgment interest covering the dates he received benefits from his fraud adds another $100 million to the overall fine.

That's a lot of dough.

All of this comes on the heels of Mafia Don being required to pay writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her. It's not easy to lose a defamation case. Mafia Don managed to pull it off twice against her. It's Carroll, incidentally, whom a judge ruled was violated sexually by the rapist Trump.

Anyway, add it up. That's around a half billion dollars in fines. What a businessman.

I suspect the rapist will find a way to skate around this. He almost always does. He plans to appeal Engoron's ruling, of course. But his miraculous Houdini-like escape will come when a foreign entity – Saudi Arabia, perhaps, or Putin's Russia's – surreptitiously puts the money in the rapist's account to pay the fine, leaving Mafia Don solvent still.

It's how you undermine democracy.

•   •   •

We also learned on Friday that Russian dissident and Putin opponent Alexei Navalny was found dead in the colony in which he was imprisoned as a result of "sudden death syndrome." Yep. Sudden death syndrome. That's the official cause of death coming from Russian authorities.

There's a lot of sudden death syndrome in Russia these days, what with political poisonings and dissidents falling out of windows from Moscow high rises.

In a world of conspiracy theories, let me offer this: I think Putin found this to be an opportune time to murder Navalny, especially with the Republicans in Congress doing all they can to halt further financial and military aid to Ukraine, the sovereign nation in which Russia invaded and is involved in a brutal war. Thanks to the rapist's Republicans, it's a perceived show of American weakness for Putin. Now was the time to strike and rid himself of the annoying Navalny.

Hey, it's a small world, and it's getting smaller. Everything is connected and it's easy to draw a line from Putin to Navalny's death to the war in Ukraine to obstructionist and recalcitrant Republicans.

 It's how you undermine democracy.

•   •   •

In something of an invisible story, we learned on Thursday that a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov (geez, more Russians) has been indicted by the Justice Department for lying to Special Counsel David Weiss, who is investigating the so-called Hunter Biden/Burisma scandal.

Smirnov allegedly lied to Weiss about Hunter Biden, thus putting the Republicans'  ongoing impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden into question.

The GOP was counting heavily on Smirnov's testimony to help impeach Joe Biden, but now all of that seems to be in question. What a clown show.

Republicans are so beside themselves that they are now calling for an investigation of the FBI.

When nothing goes right, investigate the agency that protects you. It's not the first time Republicans have called for this when something explodes in their faces.

That's how you undermine democracy.

 

Swifties, er, Chiefs 31, 49ers 21

I really don't have a dog in today's Super Bowl fight, but my level of interest in what otherwise might be a "meh" game for me accelerated proportionally when singer Taylor Swift entered the picture.

That's because Swift – whose boyfriend, Travis Kelce, is a standout tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs – is sending any number of extreme right wingnuts into tailspins and nose dives. Their claim is that the Super Bowl is rigged, and it's been rigged in an effort to allow Swift-Kelce to conduct their psy-op where if the Chiefs defeat the San Francisco 49ers, the pair will use the post-game celebration to endorse President Joe Biden in his re-election bid over Mafia Don (see here).

Mostly, I just want to see if this actually happens. That is really my primary interest in the game. I love conspiracy theories. Hells bells, I'm still trying to figure out if Paul is really dead or not.

Two weeks ago, the Chiefs defeated the Baltimore Ravens 17-10 to win the American Football Conference title, thus sending them into the Super Bowl. Suspicious enough, since Baltimore was a preseason favorite to win the Super Bowl this season, much less the AFC title.

Then, last Sunday, Swift claimed her fourth Album of the Year award at the Grammys (no artist has ever won four), thus reinforcing the conspiracy. Swift-Kelce are winning everything, and not only that, they're vaccinated liberals.

So there. The outcome of today's game is a foregone conclusion. Therefore, so is the election in November. Place your bets. Never mind that this year's Super Bowl is being played in Las Vegas (which should germinate a whole bunch of other conspiracy theories in its own right).

I do anticipate an interesting game, despite all the sideshows. Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes, at the age of 28, is the youngest QB to play in four Super Bowls before age 30. Not even Tom Brady has done that.

If nothing else, Mahomes brings a ton of Super Bowl experience to the game. What will be interesting to see is if the Chiefs' receivers catch the ball. Dropped passes was an issue for them earlier this season. Not so much now.

If the Chiefs win (and they will, because the NFL has rigged all this), Mahomes is a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame.

San Francisco QB Brock Purdy has the ability to shred the Chiefs defense if he's not pressured , but that remains to be seen. The pressure on Purdy will be part of the chess game between the lines.

Kelce, for his part, is one of the best tight ends in the NFL. But, for that matte, so is San Francisco's George Kittle. But Kittle doesn't have Taylor Swift on his side. But he has his own social influencer, wife Claire.

The 49ers have an amazing running back in Christian McCaffery, a former Panther who could be a game-changer all by himself. I don't know how he does it. He finds holes in the line. He catches passes. He blocks. He plays the game as if he's receiving instructions from God. So Divine Intervention could be a factor.

The coaching matchups are interesting, too. Kansas City's Andy Reid is near Bill Belichick status, which means don't ever underestimate Reid.

San Francisco coach Kyle Shanahan, like Reid, is also a proven winner, but there's some bad luck he needs to shake. He's been in two Super Bowls – once as an assistant coach – and has lost both. It could all change today.

Having said all this, I'm picking the Chiefs, 31-21.

I really don't give a flip who wins, but it will be interesting to see what happens if the Chiefs do win. In this case, the post game might be more interesting than the game itself.

 

Taylor Swift and the NFL

Really? 

This ongoing negative reaction to Taylor Swift and her boyfriend Travis Kelce enjoying each other's company is the best real-time entertainment I've had in months.

She's a singer, for Pete's sake, and he's an NFL football player for the Super Bowl-bound Kansas City Chiefs. So what?

But I think I know why this is happening. 

Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift in a private moment.

The first instance of blowback came early, I believe, and it came mostly from NFL fans about 13 or 14 games ago when it first became publicly clear that the power couple were dating. If Swift was in the stadium's VIP suite to watch Kelce play, any of the networks covering the game would cut to the glass booth to show us a few seconds of Swift jumping up and down like a high school cheerleader, especially whenever Kelce scored a touchdown. It's the kind of intrusion that television does best.

The thing is, this happened game after game where Swift showed up to support Kelce. It was, perhaps, getting a little tiresome. Predictable even. So what?

The New York Times did an analysis recently that showed Swift, on average, appeared for 25 seconds in each of those three-and-a-half hour broadcasts. OMG. Saturation.

Swift is an international singing star of gigantic proportions. If she wins the Grammy tonight for Album of the Year ("Midnights"), it'll be her fourth trophy in that category. Nobody, and I mean nobody – not Elvis, not The Beatles, not anybody – has ever won four times. She already has 12 Grammys overall, as well as 40 American Music Awards (the latter the most ever by an artist).

And yet, I read where one exhausted NFL/music fan wrote "she is what's wrong with music today."

Ummm, OK. Sure. 

I'm trying to figure out what it is that is so wrong. Swift is clearly a role model for young women, as her packed concerts can attest, giving many young girls a sense of empowerment and direction (she recently encouraged 35,000 of her fans to register to vote). As far as I know, she is not a drug user. I've never seen, heard or read where's she's gotten drunk. Although I am not a person who would purchase her music (I'm still lost in the 1960s), her lyrics are clear to the ear and her melodies, while sometimes repetitive to me, are still catchy.

At 34, she is also a shrewd business woman. She re-recorded her first six albums to reclaim ownership of those songs when she lost the copyright to those masters. Now she has copyright ownership over the new master recordings.

And she's a billionaire.

Is that what's wrong with music today?

The story took a crazy turn after the Chiefs defeated the Baltimore Ravens 17-10 in the American Football Conference title game last Sunday, sending them to the Super Bowl next week against the San Francisco 49ers.

MAGA world, doing what it does best when nothing else works for them, instantly cried "rigged" and "conspiracy" because now Swift will show up at the Super Bowl, the Chiefs will beat the 49ers,  and then Swift and Kelce together will announce their endorsement of Joe Biden over Mafia Don for president during the postgame celebration. It's clear as day.

Kelce's good with this because he's a spokesman for Pfizer and taking the Covid vaccine.

I can't see the NFL orchestrating any bit of this, but I'd bet my last bean dip chip that it's enjoying the free publicity of a megastar in its VIP suites, possibly creating even more football fans to its product.

Maybe even enough to replace the football fans who promised to give up watching the NFL after Colin Kaepernick started taking a knee during the National Anthem years ago.

These boycotts never work out well.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think I might be pulling for the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl, even though I'm still mad at them for beating the Eagles last year. And I hope Swift brings home another boatload of Grammys tonight, just because.

Really.