When you're no longer the leader of the pack

“It happens to lots of leading men as they fade into supporting roles,” writes Larry Tye in a new biography of Satchel Paige. “Loneliness sets in, along with sadness. There is more time to remember all you have achieved and to wonder why others have forgotten.” Kind of makes me glad I was never a leading man.

*

I cannot believe that some of the most valuable video in history -- the moon-landing tape -- was accidentally erased by NASA. No wonder there are conspiracy theorists.

*

I finally saw the film version of "Mamma Mia!", then wondered why.

*

A new book says Jacqueline Kennedy had a romantic relationship with Bobby Kennedy.  RFK has also been linked to Marilyn Monroe. Gee, when did he find the time to be ruthless?

*

I may be the only person in the world whose favorite Paul Simon song is "Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War." But that's because the song mentions the "deep forbidden music" of the Penguins, the Orioles, the Moonglows and the Five Satins. Oh, for the days of doo-wop.

A voice that evokes memories of The Voice

For decades, he lived and sang in the shadow of his famous father. While Frank Sinatra took the bows in packed stadiums around the world, Frank Sinatra Jr. sang for  sometimes sparse crowds in out-of-the way, no-name lounges. It wasn't that he didn't have a great voice -- he did and does -- but inevitably comparisons were made with a singer who defied comparison. And it didn't help that, early in his career,  Frank Jr.'s very real kidnapping was tagged a hoax by the lawyer for the guilty party. But after his father died, the younger Sinatra's fortunes improved. That was evident in an appearance at Rhode Island's Twin River Casino last Saturday when he packed a very big hall and won a well-deserved standing ovation. Unlike when his father was alive, Frank Jr. nowadays mainly sings numbers associated with Ol' Blue Eyes in a voice that is as close to his dad's as anyone is going to get. In a sense, that is too bad because the non-Sinatra songs he began the concert with were excellent, yet the audience response was tempered. The people, of course, comes for the songs and the memories of the greatest entertainer of the 20th century and that is why the place was jammed. As Frank Jr. replied when someone asked if he'd ever played in Rhode Island before, when he was young and seeking his own path, "I played in places you don't even know existed."

*

When I was driving to the concert, my text-to-speech GPS told me to "take the Lincoln Ree exit." I puzzled over that until I realized that Gina the GPS was translating "RI" as "Ree." She must not be from these parts.

*

Finally getting a sunny day and spending it at the zoo with my grandson -- it doesn't get a whole lot better than that.

*

Speaking of the zoo, the people who run it recently made a bogus claim that budget cuts would lead to closing the zoo and euthanizing animals. That reminded me of that wonderful National Lampoon magazine cover picturing a dog with a gun to his head. The accompanying words were, "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog."

Some use a fist and some use a smile

I was a fifth grader walking home from school when suddenly an older boy grabbed my cap and began flipping it in the air, taunting me all the while. "Hey," said his companion, "don't bother the kid. Let's give him back his hat." He took the cap from his friend and held it in front of me. But when I reached out to get it, he slammed his other hand into my stomach, making me double over. The twosome, it turned out,  was a well-practiced tag team of bullies, who had pulled that cruel trick perhaps dozens of times. After that incident, it took a while before I was again able to trust my fellow man, or at least my fellow boy.

*

When we grow up and have jobs and relationships, all but the fortunate few experience a lot more pain than the above-mentioned punch in the solar plexus. The inflicter of that pain doesn't even have to make a fist and, in fact, may be smiling as he or she delivers the figurative wallop. When that happens, think of the lyrics of "The Mary Ellen Carter," a song that on the surface is about saving a sunken boat:

And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling b**tards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

*

Now that Robert McNamara is dead, it will be extremely hard to find an American male with his hair parted in the middle.

*

"Hawaii Five-0" had the greatest TV theme music ever.

*

Aretha Franklin has grown quite big, but her voice remains even bigger.

*

Grover has always been my favorite "Sesame Street" character. In fact, I do a pretty fair imitation of him.

Sparkling memories of the Fourth of July

In my memory at least, the Independence Days of my late childhood were always sunny and hot and wonderful. Wonderful because many of them were spent at my aunt and uncle's big, old house in Connecticut, where fireworks were still legal. After a seemingly endless ride in those pre-superhighway days, we would arrive in Somers, a town so small that every resident's birthday was printed on the calendar. My brother and I would quickly renew acquaintances with our cousin, Jackie Brennan, who was my age, and off we would go to the corner store, named Flossie's. We would spend our life savings on firecrackers and for the rest of the day devise daring, creative and, in retrospect, dangerous ways to set them off -- under bottles and on the hoods of passing cars, for example. Sometimes we would ignite a whole package, and, as the day waned, an entire brick. At night, the grownups would put on a show with fountains and rockets, a show that in many ways was more marvelous than the professional, big-buck spectacles of today. Then came the Fourth when we arrived to find that fireworks had been declared illegal, a move that undoubtedly prevented injuries and saved lives, maybe even our own. But in all the years that followed, I have never had an Independence Day that could hold a roman candle to the firecracker-flinging Fourths of my late childhood.

*

Yesterday my wife took me to see the movie "My Sister's Keeper." Watching children suffer is not my idea of a good time. If it hadn't been pouring, I would have walked the quarter-mile to BJ's warehouse and spent the remainder of the movie time roaming the aisles.

*

I can't remember who wrote it, but my favorite description of the Rat Pack (Sinatra, Martin, Davis and Bishop) labels them "baggy-eyed, boozed-up, middle-aged men trying to make it New Year's Eve forever."

*

Everyone has a cellphone. My 5-year-old grandson has a cellphone.

*

When I was dating my wife, one day I said, "Linda, if I were a Carpenter and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby?" She married me anyway.

*

For someone who can't carry a tune and whose singing voice sounds like the squawk of an angry penguin, I spend a lot of time thinking about songs and singers.

*

In days of old, I would hve several drinks and go wild. Now I have one drink and go beddy-bye.

Nothing new under the sun, or on the air

Long before Conan O'Brien's nightly zaniness, another comedian of Irish descent from the Boston area also made audiences howl with laughter. His name was Fred Allen and his medium was radio. Like O'Brien, Allen (1894-1956) had a variety show that over the years took on  different names but kept the same wackiness. As with O'Brien's show, news stories were fodder for jokes and routines, there was a sidekick (his wife, Portland Hoffa, who would greet him with a hearty "Misssss-ter Allll-llennnn!") and characters galore, not all of whom were politically correct (Mrs. Nussbaum, for example). But while O'Brien thrives on TV, Allen never made a successful transition from radio. Under the bright lights, he looked old and tired and baggy-eyed, and he seemed to lack the verve he brought to radio. But where would O'Brien's show -- and those of his predecessors -- be without the pioneering absurdity of a very funny man named Fred Allen.

*

A couple years back, I nodded off during the movie version of "The Da Vinci Code," so it was only fitting that the other day I nodded off during the sequel, "Angels & Demons."

*

My favorite Michael Jackson song is the poignant "She's Out of My Life." And you can't even moonwalk to it.

*

Homer Simpson is my role model.

*

I love the Heineken TV ad featuring a bunch of drunks singing in a taxi.

Exhaustion, thy name is Maxwell

Whew. My wife and I have just spent three days taking care of our 5-year-old grandson, Maxwell. Or maybe he was taking care of us. In any event, here's what he did:

* Built a Lego city in about an hour. That same task would have taken me a month. That is, a month before I gave up and threw the pieces against a wall.

* Went to Canobie Lake Park in Salem, N.H., where he rode the bumper cars (the Dodgem) six times in a row, often ignoring the traffic because he was busy looking up at the mechanism that causes a spark and propels the cars.

* Announced a career change. Instead of being a train engineer, with his grandparents as his assistants (presumably shoveling in the coal), he wants to join the State Police and operate the command center that is located within a police truck.

* Slept fitfully for a couple of hours, sending the bedsheets and pillows flying, then slept like a motionless angel for a couple of hours, then repeated the process.

* Instructed the plumber on how to tame the disaster that occurred when our outside faucet wouldn't shut off and our yard was being flooded. The plumber appreciated Maxwell's  instructions, acknowledging them with an angry grunt.

It was a marvelous three days, and I think I will recover nicely after an uninterrupted week of sleep.

*

A couple of decades ago, when my daughter (a.k.a. Maxwell's mother) was about 13, I was practicing Michael Jackson's moonwalk in our kitchen when she looked up and said, "Why don't you be like other fathers and play chess or something."

*

Now that the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is coming up, expect to hear from many great pretenders claiming that they were there. If all the people who say they attended the music festival were really there, the ground would have caved in, sending the attendees to the center of the earth.

*

I never see anyone smoking a pipe anymore. I abhor smoking in any form, but I always thought pipe smokers looked kind of cool.

*

My wife prefers to bring junk into the house by going to yard sales. I prefer to bring junk into the house by ordering on eBay and elsewhere. We heartily disapprove of each other's methods.

It was once filled with magic

I remember the dawn of television. I remember chairs lined up in an appliance store so people could sit and gawk at the pictures coming from this new wonder. I remember black-and-white pictures so small that some sets had a magnifying glass in front of the screen. I remember Tuesday night trips with my family to the local social club, where I could be in paradise watching Uncle Miltie while chomping on a nickel’s worth of pistachio nuts. I remember a friend named Bobby Kaminski, whose family was the first in the neighborhood with a TV, inviting me over to watch “Howdy Doody” and me wondering how he could ever leave the house with this magic box in residence. I remember when only three channels were available, and those channels showed a test pattern, or nothing, for much of the day.

I remember tri-colored transparent plastic sheets that people taped over their screens to give the illusion of color TV. I remember announcements that "the following program will be broadcast in compatible color."

I remember watching TV for almost three days straight when John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were shot to death. I remember watching hours of 9/11 coverage, then turning off the TV with a sigh and playing some soft music instead. I remember the tears in the eyes of many audience members when on election night Barack Obama proclaimed to a Chicago crowd, “Change has come to America.” The TV screen was now giant and wide, the picture was in incredible-looking high definition, and the number of channels to watch was almost uncountable.

Yes, I remember the dawn, and fruition, of television. I also remember life before TV, but that’s a story for another day.

Speaking of TV, one of the dumbest shows ever was certainly “Superman” starring George Reeves. To this day, I cannot understand why Lois Lane, Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, etc., never made the connection between Clark Kent disappearing and Superman arriving. I mean, those people worked for a great metropolitan newspaper, didn’t they? Oh ... maybe that’s why they never figured it out.

And speaking of newspapers, the Boston Globe appears on the brink of taking away lifetime job guarantees. I guess a lifetime just ain’t what it used to be.

When I was maybe 4 years old, I was gathering flowers (most likely dandelions) in a field when a couple of old ladies walked by. “Oh, isn’t that sweet," said one. “He’s making a bouquet for his mommy.” But she was wrong: I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to do with the flowers. I was just collecting them because collecting things for no reason is what I did, and do.