Easter programming is glutting all the channels and there’s a Tom Hanks movie on – I don’t know if it’s the first one or the second one growing out of that book about finding some holy relic. The details escape me easily. They don’t etch themselves into my brain. Fairy stories from my childhood are more indelible than these fanciful tales.

My late cat, Scratch, (white, yellow eyes), was the dearest thing, but not too bright. At the loft he would jump onto the top of the refrigerator from where he could reach out and bat the light pull. He spent hours there batting the cord with this intense idiot’s look on his face because he was solving a puzzle. And that’s how I feel about these intense searches for the true meaning of something that supposedly happened thousands of years ago and somehow these primitive types without indoor plumbing and definitely no toilet paper, are still influencing what we think today.

When I was 12, I had a moment of intense disquiet because I had started thinking about the universe and where it came from. I couldn’t figure it out and broke into a cold sweat. So now I am thinking if there is a God, was he born? Where did He or It come from? It would seem that, like ants, who cannot conceive of the complexities of human life, we are the ants of the universe.

I called Inese in New York and her sis, Lolita, was there from Washington, D.C. She worked for years at the Library of Congress and then retired but loves the city so she stays. They were going to go out for dinner to Patsy’s Italian Restaurant on West 56th Street where a Mafioso was gunned down a while back. Inese lives on West 59th St. so they can walk it. Enjoy, I said. and wished I could join them. And, of course, I picked her brain a bit because she and her sister both, have been on the ride I am on now.

Speaking of Mafioso, some friends drove us around Nokomis near Sarasota a couple of years ago. They drove us to Casey Key and showed us a house once owned by John Gotti. It was white stucco and fortress like, right on the beach. I thought it was fantastic. No one sneaks up on this house.

That’s all.

xx, Teal