I am starting to suspect that Richard Serra has a sense of humor. Could this be? Will someone else go look at "Union of the Torus and the Sphere", 2001, and tell me if I’m wrong? If I’m imagining things? It’s at Dia: Beacon, wedged into a room not much larger than it is, and it leans, it swoons to the side. I thought it looked ridiculous, crammed in that space, and then when I walked around I thought it was actually, kind of magnificently, funny. Because it was elegant but dangerous but not dangerous and heavy and all Serra-like, serious, but then you had to squeeze by and it was like when you’re at a party and there’s someone hugely drunk talking to other people with her back to you, blocking the way to the toilet, and you can’t get her attention so you try to sneak behind her but then she steps backward and falls on you and throws her drink on you and pins you to the wall and gets your toe. And says sorry.

Which reminds me that the other day I was racing through the supermarket under deadline, deadline being making it home with the groceries in time to get the groceries from the car to the house to the fridge and also hand off the children to my parents with sufficient time to gas up the car and make it to our seats at the Mets game for the opening pitch. I was under pressure, but when am I not, when do I wander through the supermarket aisles thinking What will I do with myself today, all I have is time? Anyway, I was rounding the corner from the beer aisle into the dairy aisle with a full shopping cart and I went a little bit, a tiny bit wide into the dairy aisle, thanks to the weight of the cart and the speed I was going at, and screeched to a halt quite close to a stooped elderly woman who was not under pressure, and doesn’t understand the way people drive through town these days etc. “I took that a little wide,” I said, smiling apologetically. She corrected me: “A little fast.” And I said, as I walked down the aisle, “Thanks. Bitch.”

Now I’m entranced by the idea of Richard Serra, who never, ever smiles for pictures—please see the MoMA bio picture of him—having a sense of humor. Not a wry sense of humor but an actual sense of humor, so when I get home from a hard day playing tennis and running errands and tell Richard Serra, who is out back at the grill, that if they made a documentary of my morning it would be called An Inconvenient Poop, he puts down the tongs and laughs.