Opinion

The annual Spring Sports preview appears in our sports pages today. When we scheduled it we thought we better come up with a better name, because by the time it was in the paper it would no longer be a “preview,” so we named it Spring Sports Spotlight, which has a nice ring to it, even thought it turns out that it really is a “preview” due to our long national nightmare: March and early April. (Okay maybe not national, but that phrase is fun to use to exaggerate something).

Spring leaped out at us in New York last week — suddenly one day it was 80, just like me — it sprang at us shang a lang lang as once we’d sung so we were sprung from the steel corset of winter and I took a couple of Londoners to lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station where, when I was 11, I ate my first oyster on a trip from Minnesota with my dad. I saw him eat one and so I ate one and I trace my independence back to that 1953 oyster — when you eagerly devour something that would disgust your beloved aunts, you’ve taken a step toward becoming your own person.

A lot of discussion these last couple weeks centers on the City’s role in providing child care. That role is one cities around the state are wrestling with as the need seems to be on the increase. It appears that more and more home child care businesses are abandoning the service due to increased regulations and aging providers. We’ve been told that several of our community providers are planning to retire in the not too far distant future.

Sometimes people ask me how I write so much each week. Well, I’ll tell you how — in the wrong order.

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I said I was going to get a little political again. Little did I know that another school shooting would occur, providing a ready topic. Three 9-year-old students and 3 staff members at a private school in Nashville, Tennessee lost their lives due to gunfire.

I went down to the Bowery one night last week to see Aoife O’Donovan sing to a ballroom packed with young people standing for two hours and whooping and yelling — I sat up in the balcony and whooped and yelled too — and what the woman could do with her voice and guitar was astonishing, utterly fabulous, and for a man my age to be astonished is remarkable, she was competing with my memory of Uncle Jim handing me the reins to his horse-drawn hayrack and my grandma chopping the head off a chicken and seeing Buster Keaton perform at the Minnesota State Fair and also Paul Simon at Madison Square Garden and Renée Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier, but there she is, Aoife, in my pantheon of wonderment.

Friends and neighbors: On Thursday, March 16, Senate Democrats forced a bonding bill to the Senate floor for a vote. This is the only bill that requires a 3/5 majority vote (41 votes) thus requiring seven Republican senators to vote for the bill. It failed to receive the necessary votes for passage.