I did a public reading for the first time in a little over four years last Thursday, for the launch of the winter issue of Collectanea*, which published a personal essay I wrote about my grandfather, a painter who died in 1999, in its winter issue. It was enormously gratifying. Afterwards, a designer friend and I were talking about it, and agreeing that most of us who pursue creative work—most people I know—but haven’t elected to become actors or musicians or performance artists or, I don’t know, politicians, are in fact frustrated performers. I know that a performer’s heart lurks somewhere inside of me, for sure, so it’s incredible to have a brief opportunity to share what I do and what I care about with people in a live, real-time environment.

The other readings were all strong, but the last one was really something special. Marvin Gelfand, a New York historian and tour guide, delivered an oral history about boyhood and baseball in 1940s Brooklyn, recalling his immigrant family in South Williamsburg and his love, despite being a passionate Dodgers fan and Yankees hater, for Lou Gehrig, the Iron Man. Watching this fragile, eloquent gentleman in his 70s, in a bleach-splattered red sweater and blazer, gazing up at the ceiling through tinted glasses and trying to control his trembling body and his emotions as he recalled hearing Gehrig’s legendary 1941 farewell speech at Yankee Stadium—”Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth”—was an unexpected gift.