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“You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t come,” sang Bruce Springsteen many moments ago. But sometimes it comes and catches you off guard. Perhaps once a decade you are gifted a sentence begging completion or a question inviting the perfect answer, and if you don’t spit out the mot juste you spend the rest of the day cursing on the staircase, pained by a bad case of l’esprit de l’escalier. (And that about exhausts my C-minus college French.)

You never know when or wherefrom these pitches are coming. I doubt that even Oscar Wilde could hit much above .500 in this league. I’m probably closer to Cornel Wilde, but I have driven a few into the gaps.

Let me explain.

Last spring I was toting a garden-shop tray that my wife was filling with plants. She was in search of a favorite herb. We split up, she going left and I right down a long aisle. I found the herb and exclaimed, “Dear, thyme is on my side.”

She rolled her eyes. In an otherwise empty greenhouse I could hear the flowers groan.

Our town’s library has a clerk whose forename is the same as Lewis Carroll’s heroine. A fellow patron queried me on a matter far beyond my ken. But I knew just the person to see. So I channeled Grace Slick: “Go ask Alice. I think she’ll know.”

It was another tree falling in a laughless forest, but once again I felt inside the warm glow of sufficiency, of meeting the moment.

Of course there are flubs. Like the time someone asked me if Paul Kurtz, the late publisher of Prometheus Books, were still around.

The ball had been set on the tee. All I had to do was take the easy swing: “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”

But I whiffed. Or to shift the metaphor from offense to defense, I let the ball go through my legs like Bill Buckner in the 1986 World Series.

That grounder will never come again. But it doesn’t pay to dwell on one’s failures. A heart of darkness isn’t my style.

As Buckner himself said, “The dreams are that you’re gonna have a great series and win. The nightmares are that you’re gonna let the winning run score on a ground ball through your legs. Those things happen, you know. I think a lot of it is just fate.”

Years after the Kurtzian error I was in Pub Hub, our friendly neighborhood coffee shop fronting an abandoned old factory. (Pub Hub closed last month, to my sorrow. God how I love the dingy and haunted halls of that building, and the comforting sodality and character-driven plots that made that shop so homelike.)

Anyway, I was chatting with my friend Ian, whose odd footnote — we all have one — is that as a young boy he was babysat by Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs.

It was Valentine’s Day, a fact whose relating is as much a violation of Chekhov’s law of the unfired gun as is the Natalie Merchant reference. Neither signifies. But then what’s wrong with an unfired gun?

Ian asked the barista if Pub Hub had any fingers of his favorite yellow-peeled fruit for sale that morning. Alas — or happily, for me — the stock had been depleted. Like an annoying jokester out of the Roaring Twenties, I trilled, “Yes, we have no bananas/We have no bananas today.”

The baristas were too young to get the reference. Hell, only a centenarian would nod in recognition. But I had learned that ridiculous song in grade-school music class, along with such other long-buried anachronisms as “Cotton Needs Pickin’” and “Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill,” and when, half a century later, the moment came for its deployment, I was not found wanting.

The earliest instance of my drawing upon an embarrassingly large inventory of pop (rarely high) culture finishers to once-in-a-lifetime setups came when I was a teenaged stockboy at Super Duper, the Buffalo-area grocery chain. I was desultorily stocking shelves in the detergent aisle, probably thinking about girls or baseball or girls who play baseball, when a woman pointed out that the shelf dedicated to the “ancient Chinese secret” water softener was bare.

I had by this time in my young life seen enough TV commercials to shout down to the store manager, “Bob, we need more Calgon!”

I’m sure this reference is as obscure today as adverting to Dylan Mulvaney will be in 2070. Sic transit etc.

These moments appear out of the blue, unpredictable as a fireball flashing in the sky. I may never see another. Then again, maybe when I head into town later today I’ll meet a stranger who says, “My name is Snake Plissken.”

I’ll be ready.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2025 World edition.