UNCIVIL UNIONS

Gigantic in the news is the proliferation of separate sleeping quarters for married couples and civil unions. Legally joined people are opting for separate beds, separate bedrooms, and in the most extreme cases, separate wings of the house.

None of this should surprise anyone. Why the hell would men and women--to cite just one form of marriage-- expect to dwell in the same bed, when they originated on Mars and Venus, respectively. Alien status would suggest different beds, if not different planets, or so one would think. Besides, studies have shown that married folk enjoy more intimacy in their separate sleeping quarters.

As just one example, Duracell's stock price is up over 40% since the separate bedroom phenomenon surfaced. Those energized bunnies keep going long after they're separated from their lovers. Pleasuring and Solitaire seem to be The New Doubles.

For some time now, contractors have built McMansions with two master bedrooms--often in different zip codes. It's enough to give you restless leg syndrome. Now, when young children have to throw up in the middle of the night, they are torn over which parent's bed they should do it in. Pity the poor parent who misses out on this bonding experience.

Of course, the reason given for the new bedroom exodus is excessive snoring, thrashing, and flossing. After ten years of interrupted sleep, elbowed backs, and meaty string, couples have reinterpreted their vows, parted the covers, and headed for the promised land.

Who ever said love was easy? And since when is a good night's sleep a reason to banish your life partner? Most continue with conjugal visits, but for many, intimate contact is limited to text messages. Could the offending spouse change? It's like the old joke: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One--but the bulb has to really want to change.

Though my snoring has been compared to a chainsaw on Quaaludes, my wife and I are able to co-habitate on the same Posturepedic. This is largely because of the two dogs and two parrots that separate me from my wife's retribution. Sleeping with one's pets can remind couples of why they got married in the first place: to save themselves from the chuckle monkey histrionics of pre-marital love.

It's true, the dogs growl when they're disturbed, and the parrots are grumpy in the morning, but over the last 6 years, I can count the number of times they've bitten me on my left hand. Well, actually, I just count the scars. Sure I wish the parrots were house-trained, but I can say from experience, there is no better bed buffer than two grouchy wolves and their bitchy avian sisters.

In short, there is no reason why sleep depravation should ever lead to sleep separation. Separation is known to lead to divorce, and it's not necessary. Far less Draconian measures could be employed. Consider the following interim measures before moving down the hall:

1. Crazy Glue a sock to your lover's tonsils.
2. Ask your sleepless lover to wear elbow pads.
3. Snap the meat from the floss before drying it on the bedpost.
4. Sleep during the day.
5. Up your lover's life insurance to $4 million.

And as always, remember the kids. You are modeling the behavior you expect to see in them. Second thought, buy your lover a separate house. Seriously though, why feed your teenagers' suspicions by sleeping apart from your spouse? Despite what they think, it is possible to be middle-aged and intimate. Or, at the very least, civil.

MANIFEST DESTINY

To anyone who knows this joint, Chappaqua is dripping with US presidents. It seems that everywhere you look, you see another national leader. I predict presidential libraries will soon outnumber restaurants in this small, cozy hamlet on the banks of the Saw Mill River. History has played strange tricks on this town, and there seems to be no end in sight.

Our favorite son, Liberal Republican Horace Greeley, the famed editor of the New York Tribune (who urged people to follow their manifest destiny and head west–beyond Ossining), ran for the presidency of the United States against the Radical Republican incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln's victorious general-turned-president.

Despite the Democrats throwing their support for him, Horace Greeley lost the presidency in a landslide in 1872, but lost by only slightly more popular votes than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lost by in 2000.

Greeley had married--get this--Mary Cheney, who then became Mary Cheney Greeley. Mary Cheney Greeley had medical problems and died before her husband’s electoral votes could even be counted. Therefore, we old-timers in Chappaqua still consider Greeley the honorary winner against the hard-drinking and ill-mannered ex-Civil War general.

Soon thereafter, Greeley was defrauded of his investments and lost control of his beloved New York Tribune to Whitelaw Reed, the owner of the New York Herald. Greeley died in Pleasantville saying, "You son of a bitch, you stole my newspaper."

William Jefferson Clinton landed on the shores of the Saw Mill soon after serving 8 years as our 42nd president. Like Horace Greeley, Bill Clinton had supported liberal policies towards the settlers who, by 1992, were reasonably well-settled.

While he was president, Bill called for an end to racial discrimination, reformed welfare, prosecuted a successful war, and in turn, was prosecuted over his veracity in non-job related indiscretions. Ultimately, he was found not-guilty by the Senate. Bill left a sizable budget surplus to the man who lost the popular vote to his vice president, "Get out of Mary Cheney's father's house" Al Gore -- but who won anyway. I hope I'm not confusing you.

Anyway, Bill Clinton, of course, had been married to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who quickly became the first Arkansas woman to win statewide office in New York, by winning her Senate seat. In fact, she was the first woman from New York to win statewide as well. During her first term, Hillary started a dialogue between liberal-leaning downstaters, and the more conservative upstaters, finding the common ground that paved the way for her landslide reelection victory in 2006.

Now, Hillary has declared she's in the presidential race to win. With more working candidates than working voting machines, Hillary will have a tough fight ahead, but many in Greeley's home town think her success, providence. For some time now, our impressive parades have attracted not only stray dogs, but the national media as well.

Winding down King Street, past the Greeley homestead and onto Greeley Avenue, one gets a sense of history in the making. There, ahead of the Cub Scouts and Brownies -- the tubas and the fire trucks -- the veterans and the ambulance corps -- quite possibly marches the first woman president of the United States!

Horace Greeley would have been pleased to know that the souls he sent west not only survived life on the frontier, but prospered. It is fitting that, 128 years later, two of presidential caliber would return from the territories to carry on his presidential dreams. It was manifest in our destiny.

RIND STONE COWBOYS

Wow, was it dark when my alarm went off. We've got to stop fiddling around with this Daylight Savings thing. Even the sun was caught off guard this morning. Another breakfast by flashlight.

Back when my daughter was table height, she refused to eat the crusts of her bread. This was particularly disturbing when it came to my celebrated French toast. What became known as freedom toast, I'd cut into ninths, two cuts vertically and two cuts horizontally, which stacked two high produced eighteen pieces. Since my daughter wouldn't touch the pieces attached to the crusts, only the centermost two pieces were palatable to her.

So, for years I've eaten the outermost sixteen pieces -- which explains why Al Gore and I share the same tux size. Now, however, my daughter is going on fifteen, and still she has not made peace with her bread crusts. Even though I completely de-crust the French toast before cutting it into ninths, she still refuses to eat the perimeter pieces. According to her, the outermost pieces, though crust-free, were once married to the crusts, and are therefore tainted and unfit for consumption.

Where does this aversion to food extremities come from? I've always eaten the whole package, leaving no prisoners. Whether apples, pears, potatoes, or bananas, I eat the whole thing. Waste not, want not, I believe. I will admit, pineapples are tough on the stomach--if not the throat--and Gouda is better without the red waxy part, but it's never killed me. Besides, it adds bulk and leaves me satiated.

I had a roommate once named Chuck who thought that bologna rinds were natural casings-- that is until they showed up as a plastic ball on his stomach X-ray. The X-ray tech thought it was stones. His gastroenterologist thought it was a rubber band ball he had swallowed. The doctor wasn't all that relieved when he learned the truth. Chuck became known around school as the Rind Stone Cowboy.

My daughter, however, would peel her grapes -- if she ate grapes. She doesn't like any fruit, presumably because of its contact with the outside world--the peel. To me, the outsides are the best part. No, with the exception of oranges and coconuts, I don't waste a thing. I was taught not to waste food.

For example, after I finish de-boning a cooked chicken, forensic scientists would have a hard time finding trace DNA on the carcass. Dinosaur fossils have more organic material than my chicken bones. I even drill out the wishbone with my Black and Decker, for its marrow. My wife, a soup maker, has complained about this for over 20 years. The sorry soup bones she gets from me result in broths clearer than water.

I've learned never to say: Honey, isn't this soup a bit thin? And I have a "stock" question for dinner guests: "What flavor would you imagine this soup to be?" It does save on dishes however. We can just dip our tea bags directly in our soup bowls.

I grew up in a family where meals started not with grace, but with a reminder of the starving kids in Tanganyika. In my family, nothing went to waste. I was a human dishwasher, leaving the plates shiny before they even left the table. I did it for the kids in Tanganyika. It was my job to beef up the kids in Tanganyika.

Kids today are different. My daughter has no feeling for the world's hungry, like me. In fact, she told her Global teacher that I'm the reason for the worldwide food shortage.

A LITTLE JAKARTA STREET KID

When you're running for president of the United States as a Muslim-sensitive African-American whose first name rhymes with Iraq, middle name rhymes with its monstrous dictator, and last name rhymes with the world's most wanted terrorist, the best defense has to an offence. The first thing you need to do is get a good PR agency and start working on the negatives.

For instance, how is this Black Muslim Terrorist Dictator thing going to play in the South. Secondly, how are you going to convince people that everything you ever learned about internationalism, you learned before the age of 10. Nothing is impossible to package and in this case, starting with less than nothing is a good start. You need to build a story.

Born in Hawaii and abandoned by his Harvard-educated Kenyan father at the age of 2, Obama moved with his Kansan mother at age 5 to Jakarta, where he briefly attended Muslim schools. By the age of 10, he was back in Hawaii living with his maternal grandparents.

Between the ages of 6 and 10, I was living in Great Neck, Long Island, and when I wasn't peeling the asbestos off the pipes in the basement, I was over at my friend, Jimmy's house patiently building IED's out of millions of emptied cap gun caps.

I certainly never thought about my indigenous culture and the intricacies of worship in the impoverished landscape of a gentile living among the Orthodoxy of Great Neck, Long Island. I was too busy wrapping sewage pipes in dirty magazines. I'm sure they're still there.

Somehow, between kindergarten and the 4th grade, Obama became a statesman. It's a compelling story, especially for those of us who were plinking cars with pea shooters while guiding our bikes through burning leaves.

I do remember one seminal moment when Jimmy told me how babies were made, and I still can't believe it. I dismissed the preposterous notion, assuring Jimmy that God would never do it that way. But I sensed it was just weird enough to be true. God, for sure, does have peculiar ways and babies are bizarre.

However, there was no way God was going to talk my Mom and Dad into anything as nasty as what I was hearing. Anyway, He was too busy consoling them at the time: my younger brother was a baby when he died, and though I thought he looked weird--what with the big head and the little feet--my parents and older sister were clearly upset.

They dropped my sister and me off at our grandparents and to this day I remember pondering the strange way in which God forces us to make babies-- then takes them away: "What the hell was He thinking?"

Obama witnessed the Muslim call to prayer and described it as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset." Abandoning my Christian upbringing, my appreciation for religion trended more towards the smoked whitefish and lox served at Danny Lebberfeld's house every Saturday morning.

Smoked Whitefish on an onion bagel is one of the prettiest smells on Earth at sunrise. But I never learned a thing about getting along with other cultures. Even Danny beat me up regularly--and we both shared a Judeo-Christian Great Neck background!

I was certainly not ready to run the world before the age of 10. Indeed, my 5th grade teacher wasn't sure I was ready for her area of expertise. Angry at being locked in the cloakroom over some small indiscretion, I stapled all my classmates' garments to the wall (a feat I repeated in college). Ms. McDade was not pleased, and told my father so. This was no way for a Principal's son to behave.

But according to Obama, "My experience growing up in Indonesia or having family in small villages in Africa--I think it makes me much more mindful of the importance of issues like personal security or freedom from corruption." Tell me about it. Danny's mother bribed me not to tell mother of my beatings -- with smoked fishes, capers and onions. For that brief moment my teeth broke through the fresh bagel and into the smokey flesh, Danny's throttlings were a distant memory.

This is why Obama will make a great president, and I will make a great voter. He is the sum total of all his experiences, and those experiences were rich -- not in the cream cheese sense--but in the worldly sense. Whether living in the USA, or abroad, Obama saw the world as an outsider and could appreciate its potential. I saw the world as an insider, thinking everything outside Great Neck was Port Washington.