Flight Risks

Mr. Fruchter: Thanks for this kind note. I shudder to think that something I wrote could ever curtail one’s revels in author-aggrandizement. While an East Thirty-Third Street–Hudson River–Roosevelt Island trek constitutes no huge yo-yo for pigeons, who often go between five hundred to nine hundred miles nonstop, the resolute protagonist of Anna Rubin’s Gram wouldn’t be so impractical. Which is to say that you’re right; in the throes of deadline, I did manage to confuse my rivers. Blame should be assigned, in toto, to my lovely and hardworking editors, who clearly have much to learn about the flight patterns of homing pigeons and about their correspondent’s grasp of basic geography.