Point of View: At Least Be Brief

Richard Barons was leading a historical tour group late in the afternoon on a recent day. I was inside The Star reading in The New Yorker about Joe Gould, whose oral history really did exist, waiting for some interviewees who were not to show, and invited them in, unlocking and drawing back the weighty door.

“The paper’s been here — well not exactly here where we’re standing — but it’s been in existence since 1885,” I said. And, after waiting a beat: “And so have I.”

“The funny thing,” I said to Mary afterward, “is that nobody laughed.”

They’ve been talking about us getting Twitter accounts here lately — Titter would be a better word — and I confess I’m resistant. I just want to know enough technologically to get by.

“Nobody takes notes anymore,” our daughter who’s in the newspaper business said the other evening as I handed her a margarita.

“Well, I do,” I said. “Not that I can read them.”

I still remember fondly the time a Newsday reporter, who later took offense that I’d described him as “tweedy,” got into it with an East Hampton Town Board member who said the reporter had misquoted him when it came to his views on the (late lamented) Bypass.

I looked on, fascinated, as the reporter, his notebook having been flourished, said he happened to have the notes of that conversation at hand, and proceeded to thumb through the pages until he found what he was looking for. . . . “Ah! Here it is. . . . ‘When asked for his opinion on the Bypass, Councilman White . . . umm, uhh. . . . Councilman White said . . .’ ”

I resolved to throw away all mynotes after that, mindful of what an editor once told an interviewee who complained, to wit, “It may not have been what you said, but you should have.”

Equally delightful is the speaker at a public hearing who later says (and I’ve actually heard this) “that may have been what I said, but it wasn’t what I meant.”

One strives to be creative within journalism’s four-W-one-H straitjacket, and so it is that I find myself at 4 a.m. thinking of new voice messages. Then I try them out on Mary, who insists that they not only be witty but brief, knowing my tendency to go on.

The latest is this: “This is Jack Graves, the sports editor. I’m either stepping up to the plate, looking for a sign, or catching in the rye. Please leave a message.”

As Oscar Wilde said, “Life’s too serious to be taken seriously.”

At least I think he did.

Seriously.