Most aphorisms are self-evident, such as a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,

and the one about glass houses and throwing stones, and the mice playing when the

cat is away, and as you sow, so shall you harvest. And as I get older, the ones about living

in the moment and seizing the day and not crying over spilt milk feel very profound.

I remember a day 50 years ago when I had lunch with my hero, S.J. Perlman in Minneapolis, when he was to give a reading,

and I was to introduce him. I was stunned by admiration for S.J. Perlman's writing, such as the paragraph, I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at

bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom smashers, and a beautiful girl,

and a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not, who writes the nation's laws.

I admired elegant wackiness like that, having grown up among devout Christians,

who, even in dinner table conversation, tried to sound like the King James translation.

They wouldn't have written a paragraph like his about the mad scientist if you'd gotten them drunk, sat them on a bundle of dynamite,

and set the timer to ten minutes. I knew Pearlman's work from the New Yorker magazine and also from the Marx Brothers movies,

great lines like, don't wake him up. He's got insomnia. He's trying to sleep it off.

Pearlman didn't know me from Adam or an Adam smasher.

I looked at him and I tried to compose a great compliment, but nothing was good enough.

And then a man told Perlman that I had been published in the New Yorker. And Pearlman leaned across the table,

and he started complaining about the magazine on its miserly payments, its confounded editing,

its clueless fact checkers who ripped into comic fiction as if it were a doctoral thesis.

And it was the ultimate honor to be treated as a fellow working writer by the great S.J.

Perlman.

I had been prepared to kiss his ring, and he talked to me as a colleague

in his line of work, the honor of equality. His illustrious past did not matter.

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