Dr. Metablog

More About My Father

My father had many admirable traits. He was absolutely honest -- "honest to a fault" even. He had a fine sense of humor. He was compassionate and though he affected stoicism, he was deeply romantic and emotional -- tears came easy to him. He was a self-effacing but diligent worker. He was a fine, graceful athlete -- basketball, tennis, baseball (a catcher!) His social views were progressive. I never detected a jot or tittle of bigotry in his conversation (in fact, words that denigrated racial or religious groups were unknown in our home. When I heard words like "goy" on the street, I had to do some research to find out what was meant.) He was a thoughtful man, a wise man, a realist and not an ideologue. He was an affectionate father and husband. He never provoked a soul and had no enemies. He enjoyed his life.

I profited immensely from observing these excellent traits in action.

But perhaps because of his impoverished first-generation beginnings, he was never at ease in the world. Yes, he was comfortable at home and in his backyard garden and among his circle of friends, many of whom he had known from childhood. He was comfortable walking to the BMT at Newkirk Plaza, taking the subway to Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and practicing his profession, where he was much respected. But he did not like to step out of his milieu. He couldn't fend for himself. Here's an extreme but telling example: one day, when I was ten or so years old, as we were walking home, probably from the schoolyard, he stopped in front of the local A & P and said to me, "Your mother wants a quart of milk; you go in and buy the milk. I'll wait outside." Which I did, of course; I was used to running such errands. My father couldn't go into a market without stress. He could buy a newspaper at a candy store or kiosk, and he could bring home a loaf of rye bread from Ebinger's bakery, but I never once saw him in a vegetable market or a fish store or a butcher shop. When my mother died in 1978, he had to hire people to shop for him. And someone to cook, because, as the saying goes, he couldn't boil water. Because of his discomfort when out of his routine, he was a classic stick-in-the-mud. He couldn't travel. He never learned to drive a car. In his relations with others, he was totally passive. He allowed my mother to organize his social life and after she died, he became completely isolated. He hated change. Once when I visited him late in his life, when he was in serious arthritic pain, he complained about the station to which his radio was tuned. It was one of those "twenty-four hours of news" stations that repeated itself every few minutes. I said, "Why not change the station?" He said, "Aw, it's already set there." 

I tried very hard not to imitate these less-than-admirable habits. 

Jot and Tittle

First of all, let us dismiss the notion that Charles Dickens invented a pair of persnickety punctilious accountants and named them Jot and Tittle. Sorry, it could or should have been the case, but it's not so. Nevertheless, both "jot" and "tittle," often found in each other's cozy company, have stories to tell.

Take jot, for example. In the masterful "seduction scene" in Shakespeare's Othello, Iago first torments the Venetian general and then pretends sympathy: "I see this (i.e. his nasty sly hints that Desdemona has been a-bed with Cassio) hath a little dashed your spirits." Othello responds defensively, perhaps a tad dishonestly: "Not a jot, not a jot."

The noun "jot" is not obsolete but it's not common either. What is a jot? A tiny bit, a shred, a whit, a speck, a scintilla, a mite, a trace, a skoch, an inkling, a dollop. Smaller by far than a mere smidgeon. But in its root meaning, was a jot a measure of liquid, such as an ounce? or of weight, such as a gram? A measure of distance?  A measure of time: "I'll be with you in just a jot."

Professor Google tells me it's none of those things and that I am entirely off track. "Jot" is alphabetic; it translates the Greek "iota," the smallest letter -- no more than a single straight line, a minimal minim. And therefore Othello might just as well have said (the words are cognates), "Not an iota, not an iota." He might have said it, that is, if he hadn't spent his dearest action in the tented field engaging exclusively in broils and battles, but instead had studied at some North African classical academy.

In fact, Shakespeare either didn't know or didn't use the word "iota," which seems not to have entered English until a generation after he ceased putting quill to paper. On the other hand, Shakespeare was mighty fond of the word jot, which he employed at least twenty times (though never so notably as in Othello), always to denote a small quantity and frequently to appear as a partitive: "jot of promise," "jot of ceremony," "jot of color," "jot of pleasure," "jot of blood.'" Shakespeare's "jot" can even signify a moment in time: "No, faith, I'll not stay a jot longer." (His "jot" is always a noun, never the converted verb meaning "to write a few words quickly.")

Shakespeare undoubtedly knew the word "jot" from its famous and mysterious appearance in Matthew 5:18. Here's the familiar King James Version (1611): "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The phrasing is almost the same in the Geneva Bible of 1576 -- the translation that Shakespeare himself knew and used. "For truly I say unto you, Till heaven and earth perish, one jot or one tittle of the Law shall not escape, till all things be fulfilled."

I don't know what "all things" are and I certainly don't know what is meant by "fulfilled." But why should I, since Jesus's prophesy has long baffled trained professional theologians. But I do know that the pairing of "jot and tittle" has become proverbial.

What, then, is a "tittle." No, it's not a very small female breast. Nor is it a diminutive seabird, though it's not difficult to imagine a rocky south Atlantic island frequented by the "Lesser, or Little Tittle." In actual fact, it's a stroke of a pen -- and one that's even smaller than an iota. Specifically, it's the dot over the lower case "i" or lower case "j." Or, in an extended sense, any simple diacritical mark. 

Shakespeare used "tittle" just twice. The first was in Love's Labor's Lost in a passage in which Shakespeare makes game of affected language. Pompous Don Armado de Adriano compares little things (the woman he woos) to greater things (himself) "Shall I entreat thy love? I will. What shalt thou exchange for rags? robes; for tittles? titles; for thyself? me." What a difference a "t" makes! "Tittle" makes its second, almost inadvertent, appearance in The Winter's Tale as an element in the dismissive reduplicative "tittle-tattling." Both of Shakespeare's tittles acknowledge that the word is an inherently silly one. Is it accidental that a number of words that resemble tittle are frivolous or infantile: babble, toddle, tattle, prattle?   

"Tittle" smacks of triviality. It lacks heft. It would have been a literary disaster, a catastrophe of the first order, if Othello had responded to Iago not with "Not a jot, not a jot," but with "not a tittle, not a tittle." 

[October 29]  Otis Brown responds: "Dr. M.: you've forgotten the most famous Tittle of all: Yelberton Abraham. How could you?

[November 2]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds:

 

A Few Words About My Father

Here's a memory from my youth. Let's say it's the early '50s. I'm a thoughtless, self-absorbed adolescent, nominally studying at Erasmus Hall but in fact not paying much mind to schoolwork. It's a Sunday dinner, so I've probably just come home from playing several hours of schoolyard basketball or softball. We're at the dining room table. Roast beef, possibly. There's a desultory conversation, but then my father, Emanuel, savoring the loaded table, observes, right out of left field I thought then, "I don't think we could eat better food." He paused. "Perhaps fancier, but not better."

I didn't know what has prompted his observation but it made enough impact on me that I retained it in memory for now these seventy years. I doubt that any of the five of us dissented and I suspect that we continued to stuff ourselves with meat and roasted potatoes and (inasmuch as it was the 50s), some sort of soggy canned vegetable. But now, almost seven decades later, I think that I have a better understanding of Dad's spontaneous celebration of the roast. I also think that I know why that particular moment has stayed in my mind when so much else has long since evaporated. After all, Dad was not given to gratuitous compliments, certainly not to the food on the table. My father was neither a gourmet nor a food critic (I've written about his eating habits elsewhere). I now know that he wasn't commenting on the preparation or the presentation of the food. He was savoring its inherent quality -- its grade A choiceness -- wait, not just its quality so much as its abundance. But even more specifically, when I think back, he was enjoying the knowledge that he was able to provide such a bountiful dinner for his family.  

To understand Dad's spontaneous overflow of emotion, it's necessary to recall the facts of his own childhood. From what I've gleaned, the family in which he grew up must have been among the poorest in America, the very bottom of the economic ladder. His father worked in a factory -- which was just a large room behind a storefront -- as a roller of cigars. It's well documented that in the first part of the 20th century, cigar-rollers were one of the most exploited and most underpaid of American workers. Grandpa's wage when Dad was growing up, he told me, was $9 per week. The family, the six of them (the parents Isaiah and Eta, the children Max, Sol, Mollie, and Manny) lived in a sixth floor cold water walk-up flat -- that is, in an apartment in a tenement up six flights of stairs (no elevators), water but no hot water. I don't know how many rooms in this apartment but it didn't matter much, because, Dad said, they all spent their time in the kitchen, which was the only room they could afford to heat. 

Dad's mother, my grandmother Eta (she's Yetta in her naturalization papers) didn't speak much English and I can only remember one conversation with her -- just a short while before she died in 1962 at age 89. It was a struggle for her to speak my language but she managed to say two memorable sentences about her early years in America. She said, with pride, "we was poor but we was clean," and (very relevant here) "we always had what to eat."  That sentence of hers --"we always had what to eat"-- was said with almost exactly the same valence as my father's "I don't think we could eat better food." For grandma, putting food on the table for six individuals was achievement enough. It was a triumph. Grandma didn't speak of her diet in the old country, but from her height (4'10") and that of her husband Isaiah's (5'1"), I can guess that food was an issue and that dearth was common. I also suspect that the sixth floor walk-up might have been luxurious compared to the standard of living in StaryConstantin in Ukraine.

But to my father. He had no difficulty acknowledging the poverty of his early years. I think, looking back, that he had some pleasure in knowing that he had overcome the hardships of his youth. If he didn't have a jacket in the coldest of winters, well, he had a sweater, and that was enough. I only remember one complaint, and it wasn't about his family. During World War I, students in P. S. 122 were lined up on the side of the room and were instructed to offer their donations for the purchase of War Bonds. When they surrendered their dimes or quarters, they were allowed to sit down.  But Dad was required to remain standing because he didn't have even a nickel to donate. "Wasn't that a cruel thing to do to a child," he said to me.

But poverty did not distort my father's personality. He was the precise opposite of the stereotype of the upwardly mobile overachiever, grasping for more and more.  He was actually rather contemptuous of such people. He said to me once, "Anyone can make money if he makes it the whole business of his life to do so." And I also remember an instance when I overheard a conversation among his friends about how much their stocks had gained. After they left, my father said, 
"When the stock market is going up, everyone's a genius." He himself never had an extra dollar to invest in stocks. But enough is as good as a feast.

He was the person least interested in material goods that I have met in my entire lifetime. He had no possessions and craved none. He was a real estate lawyer in a world where clients squabbled over inches, but his opinion was "Nobody owns anything. Maybe you can say you have a lifetime lease, but that's all."

Here's another piece of wisdom that offered, and one from which I've profited. I think I can quote this verbatim. "Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend. And never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend. People like to help each other."

Another Film Noir: The Brothers Rico (1957)

 

 

It's not the most artistic poster (way too crowded a field) but it's a heck of a movie. It's a familiar film noir subject: guy (in this case), Eddie Rico, a former mobster, tries to go straight, but his past catches up with him. The first couple of scenes establish him as legitimate businessman and husband. In fact, the director, the ever-reliable Phil Karlson, pushes the Code envelope when Eddie and Alice (Dianne Foster) wake in separate beds (as required by the Legion of Decency) and he reaches over and lays his hand just an inch  or so from her benightgowned right breast. (Makes me wonder how much negotiation was required with the censors: "Can he put his hand here? How about here? Above? Below?") And then when Eddie playfully asks Alice why  she married him, she answers rather forthrightly, "I was a girl. I wanted to be a woman." Whoa, how did Karlson slip that one through?  Did the censors not understand?

Discussion of prudery is relevant, because censorship spoils the ending of the film. It's grim gangland world into which Eddie is reluctantly thrust. Everyone lies, no one can be trusted, every conversation reeks of menace, and violence is ubiquitous and casual. In the showdown, Eddie is wounded and survives, but every element in the logic of film requires that he die. The tacked-on happy ending, in which a headline proclaims that the gang has been destroyed and Eddie and Alice enjoy connubial bliss, is false, and, I think, even insulting to the intelligence of the viewer. Better to ignore it, or, better still, turn off the tv just three minutes before the end, because the first 87 minutes are just terrific.  

Silo (1968)

When we arrived at Dead Elm Farm in 1968, we were confronted with a derelict silo. It had not been used for many years and displayed a Pisa-like lean. We thought it was a hazard and decided to take it down, which we did by the simple expedient of tying one end of a rope to one of the metal rings and attaching the other end to a car bumper. The silo offered little resistance. But once it was removed, we discovered that decades of leaking at the junction of silo and barn had engendered massive rot in the uprights and sill and that the side of the barn was hanging by a thread and would need even more reconstruction than we could possibly have imagined. 

The picture makes it all very clear, but there's a small structure visible at the top and to the right of the silo which I don't remember. What was it?  Perhaps it was part of the primitive venting system that was used to keep hot air from building up in the hayloft. Or a cricket to keep the rain off?

And when did that vent or cricket disappear? What became of it?  I have no recollection.

It was not a functional or useful silo, but it was beautiful in its own way. Though doomed.

Estelle Fendrick's Chicken Soup

Here's a marvelously instructive tale about culinary practice, custom, superstition, religion and how knowledge passes from generation to generation.

We're in the 1940s.

My mother was sitting with her childhood friend, Estelle Fendrick, who was preparing a chicken soup. My mother (this is exactly how she told me the story) noticed that Estelle broke the long bones (the "drumstick") of the chicken before putting them into the cooking vessel. She asked Estelle, why she broke the bones. And Estelle replied, well, it's what my mother did. I don't know why but I'm going to see her next week and I'll ask her why she broke the bones. So the next week, Estelle asked her own mother why she broke the bones, and her mother answered in the same way as Estelle: I do it because my mother did it. But look, tomorrow I'm going to visit my mother in the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale and I'll ask her. So, and here my mother's narrative comes to its climax, Estelle's mother went to visit her own mother and asked her, why did you use to break the bones of the chicken before you put them into the cooking vessel, and Estelle's grandmother thought for a while and then said (and here you have to imagine a very strong old country accent), We had a very small pot.

A New Building on Hackett Hill Road, 1978

It shouldn't take more than a moment, dear grandchildren, to figure out exactly what building is under construction. It's the early spring of 1978 and the house that we've lived in these last forty or so years is rising out of the ground. It may be a little difficult, but if you scrutinize closely, you'll notice the space that has been left for the familiar sliding door (with its prominent header), and also the spaces for the front door and the kitchen windows. The workmen (is that Jimmy Perry up there?) are just starting on the second floor. There's also a large boulder which came out of the basement on the lower right, sitting where it remained for 30 years or so until it was replaced by a much more handsome piece of granite. (The boulder in the picture can now be found, part buried, at the entrance to the new waterfall garden.)

It's a very small house (the footprint is 20' x 28') not because we were in love with small houses, but because we were working with an extremely limited budget.  Believe it or not, the house (including foundation, roof, well, electricity, and septic) cost just $33,000 --very little even in 1970s dollars. That's because we cut every corner that could conceivably be cut: unfinished lumber for framing, second-hand doors, used plumbing fixtures and appliances, plywood flooring in some rooms, etc. etc.  (Almost all these elements have been replaced and upgraded over the years as the family has become more prosperous.)

Also important: the house site. It might seem natural and inevitable to you, grandchildren, that the house is where it is. But in fact, there was a long serious debate about where to put it. And here you must remind yourself that in 1977 the area that now contains a house and a garage/barn and three cabins and an orchard of sorts and three or four different gardens was a blank space, a tabula rasa -- just a meadow behind the old West Bradford cemetery.

Four sites were under consideration and three were rejected : the first where Cabin #3 is located, the second, where the barn sits, the third in the back field (but that would have involved a prohibitive investment in a road and the undergrounding of many feet of electrical wire). I made the decision to put the house up on the knoll, with a good view of pond, forest and field, accessible to the road, and with the hope and possibility of a dry basement. The right decision, I still think.  

There was only one road in at the time -- the one to the south of the cemetery. The driveway we now use came the next year.   

There were many adventures and many anxieties in the building of the house, most of them a consequence of the limited budget. It was not an enjoyable experience, but it didn't sour me on the land or the property. I learned a lot.

More on West Bradford in June, 1968

The famished waif with the tousled hair is NGP; the naked one-year-old with the swollen belly is Ben. There's a rain barrel -- why?  There's a gas-powered lawn mower, so brand new that it still bears its sales tag.  There's some black plastic pipe  and what might be a horseshoe on the floor. A couple of white plastic containers. Miscellaneous wooden furniture. There are many cubic yards of hay -- not baled, just loose. 

The potter, oblivious to the chaos and hard at work, is Phyllis. 

It's all happening just inside the big barn door -- an improvised pottery studio.  

Ice Cream -- a Personal History

In the 1940s of ancient memory, it was a rare treat when my father would bring home, on a summer evening, a pint of ice cream to be shared among the five of us. This was in the days of "ice boxes" and before the refrigerators that replaced them had freezer compartments -- so the ice cream had to be consumed immediately. Which it was.  

There was also the Good Humor truck:

 

which jingled its way down East 9th Street evenings and weekends during the summer months. A small boy could wangle a raspberry or grape popsicle for 5 cents or a chocolate covered bar on a stick for 10 cents (if his parents would front the money).  

 

An ice cream cone (single scoop) at the candy store around the corner cost 10 cents. I remember the shock when the price escalated to 11 cents. If the price of an ice cream cone could change, was there any hope for stability in our fallen universe? 

 

Then sometime in the last of the 40s or the first of the 50s the icebox was replaced with a big new refrigerator from Sears with a freezer compartment. Ice cream could now be purchased by the half-gallon and eaten not occasionally and rarely but every single day. It became an evening staple. It wasn't very good ice cream, but I didn't know it then. Pumped full of air, it was the white bread of ice creams.  

 

But even Meadowgold and their like were superior to the "ice cream" that we tasted and rejected in England in the 1970s which was made with whale blubber. 

 

Then came the revolution. Heavenly ice cream emerged from its long Dark Age. Reuben and Rose Mattus of Brooklyn Heights introduced faux Danish Haagen-dazs and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield gave us Ben and Jerry's. A revolution and a revelation!  Following their precedent, many brands of superior ice cream and gelato emerged. But beware, because Haagen-Dasz is now owned by Nestle and Ben and Jerry's by Unilever.

 

Beware also of the various masquerade ice creams that clutter the freezer section of the supermarket. Ice cream made not of cream but of tofu, oats, soy, coconut oil, kefir -- ghastly travesties, all of them.

 

I think we're in a golden age of ice cream. I especially think so in the summer, when we drive down to the Whippi-Dip in Fairlee for some of Gifford's peach ice cream. (Is it bad or good that Gifford's, out of Skowhegan, Maine, is the "Official Ice Cream of the New England Patriots?")  

 

The best ice cream ever: the transcendent rum raisin at Angelo Brocato's in New Orleans. No question.

 

Words of wisdom in the carpe diem category: "There are no chocolate ice cream cones in the next world" (LERM).