WHY WE MOVED FROM ONE UNIVERSITY TOWN TO ANOTHER IN 1,000 WORDS OR LESS

1. We met in Cambridge (Massachusetts). He was a 73 year old psychiatrist with a private practice. He also taught one class a semester at the Harvard Medical School. I was a 69 3/4 year old civil litigation lawyer by then practicing at a small firm in Boston that permitted a four-day work week. The other day a week I would trundle my laptop to the Boston Writers Room (where there was no laundry or internet to distract me) and try to write something that wasn’t a brief or a memorandum in support of a motion.

2. He hated Cambridge because it reminded him of his marriage to his second wife, who still lived in their Cambridge house, which she had obtained during an acrimonious divorce. Everywhere we went reminded him of something that had occurred during the marriage, or someone they had met when they were still, as it were, “together.” So from the day I first knew him, he wanted to leave. A psychiatrist can practice anywhere, once he obtains a license from the state he has moved to.

3. I didn’t hate Cambridge at all, but would have been willing to leave except I was chained to Massachusetts as long as I needed an income stream. It’s not that I loved my law practice so much. (I didn’t, really.) But I still needed money, having begun life as a single woman after a second divorce with a net worth of zero at the age of sixty. Moreover, my right to practice law wasn’t portable without sitting for two days of bar exams all over again, except to a few states that had reciprocity arrangements with Massachusetts. And even then, who would want to hire a 70-year-old lawyer without a book of business or knowledge of state law? So we stayed put where I was licensed. In my condo on Brattle Street.

4. There are lots of interesting foreign movies, concerts, exhibits and lectures open to the public when you live where Harvard is. (Moreover it sounds very classy to have a Cambridge address, especially on Brattle Street, if you care about that sort of thing. And yes, I confess, I did care, at least a little bit.) Right across the river in Boston — take the Red Line to be there in no time — is also Symphony and the Boston Ballet and three theaters showing road company versions of New York plays and musicals. Not to mention outposts of Saks, Lord & Taylor, Neiman’s and Barney’s, where it’s much easier to shop than in the mother stores in New York and Dallas. So it was really great to be in Cambridge, if it weren’t for the black ice in winter, and the miserably hot and humid summers, and Bill complaining loudly about how the grass would be greener somewhere else.

5. Then three of our combined five adult children wound up living in New York. Also both my financial advisor and accountant opined that I had frugally put by enough so that if I remained frugal I could retire and live till 102. (After that, if I were lucky enough to have an “after that,” I would need to get by on Social Security.) We could leave! But where should we go?

6. Clearly, New York itself — secretly in my heart for all those many years since I’d left it — was out of the question. We could probably afford no more than a studio in a good Manhattan neighborhood or a small one-bedroom in a not-good one. And we needed more space than that, so that we could get away from each other for a while. Where then? For reasons best known to himself, Bill suggested New Mexico or North Carolina, arguing that if we lived near a university in either of those states it wouldn’t be so bad to be so far from the Northeast where we both had grown up. For reasons I made perfectly understandable — the three children in New York, one of his in Switzerland, and one of mine in Florida — New Mexico was a geographically bad idea and North Carolina had nothing going for it as far as I was concerned except girlhood memories of having read Thomas Wolfe, who had left the state himself as soon as he could and was now, in any event, dead.

7. Then one sunny afternoon during our 2004 summer vacation on a tiny Greek island in the Dodecanese, Bill mentioned Princeton, New Jersey. Eureka! An hour and a half from New York and 3/5 of our children (not to mention my soon-to-be first grandchild). Home to a major university (think Princeton), the Institute of Advanced Studies (think Einstein), Westminster Choir College (think free concerts). Home to McCarter Theater, which brings in five plays a year, plus ballet, concerts by world-class instrumental soloists, jazz, and three operas. The university has its own art museum, theater, and Richardson Auditorium, a perfect acoustic venue for Princeton’s resident string quartet, for free concerts by the University Orchestra and for not very expensive subscriptions to the Princeton Symphony Orchestra). And New Jersey is historically a blue state. (We didn’t know Chris Christie was coming down the pike.) It even had a Whole Foods! How could we go wrong?

Princeton University in the spring.

This is the historic (and picturesque) part of campus. There is strikingly modern architecture elsewhere.

8. It took us over a year. (Selling Cambridge real estate, buying Princeton real estate, and like that.) When we finally moved, he was 78 and I was 74 1/2, which people sometimes say was brave, given that we knew no one here. But would it have been less brave to go on slipping on black ice at the risk of breaking elderly bones, and (in his case) go on being reminded of an unhappy past lived in Cambridge neighborhoods?

University Chapel. Convocation and Commencement ceremonies are held here. There are half-hour organ concerts open to the public at noon throughout the academic year.

A late April flowering. Outside a reading room of the library. (I think.)

9. Anyway, what’s done is done and here we still are, nine years older. When people ask why Princeton, I sometimes say — because it’s easier — we just threw a dart at a map. If we really had, it would have been even braver of us. But I guess it’s too late to try that one.

Between Firestone Library (left) and the University Chapel (right).

McCosh, where English and American literature classes meet.

MEDITATION CONTROVERSY: PLEASE BUTT IN!

[A little more than two weeks ago, I posted a piece about meditation which included a long quotation from Jack Kornfield, founder of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center and a renowned leader of Vipassana meditation in the United States. The general response to such a long TGOB piece was quite gratifying. However, it seems I remain Pandora after all these years. I could not leave well enough alone and sent the post through email to the most difficult (although rewarding) WordPress blogger of whom I am aware — William Eaton of Montaigbakhtinian. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Perhaps no more than a “Thank you” by return email.

It’s not entirely apt to say curiosity killed the cat, but my curiosity in this instance produced a lengthy comment on the blog post itself. Never one to let another have the last word if I can help it, I had to reply. Alas, the last word was not yet in sight. A week later, my reply received a reply of its own, even lengthier than its author’s first comment. By the time I had a free moment to reply to the reply to my reply to William’s original comment, more than two weeks had elapsed since the original post, and between us we had produced a juicy intellectual to-do — I call it “controversy,” he calls it “dialogue” — which no one other than the two of us will probably read because it’s slipped down too far below subsequent TGOB posts of a lighter, more accessible nature.

And so I present for your reading pleasure (or pain), the selection by Kornfield which many of you have already seen (and can therefore skip if you have), followed by the Eaton/Mishkin skirmish. I’ve not included again the gracious comments on the original post from Gerard Oosterman, PreciousPen1955, Helena Sorensen, ShimonZ, Nancy and HilaryCustanceGreen, since they were all peaceable.

This will be somewhat heavier going than you’re used to on TGOB, but please slog on to the end if you can, and then speak up! Participate! Help make it a free-for-all, fun-for-all posting experience, even though it’s already running 4194 words!]

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WHY MEDITATE?

by Jack Kornfield

Here is a story told about the Buddha shortly after he was enlightened. As he was walking down the dusty road he met a traveler who saw him as a handsome yogi exuding a remarkable energy. The traveler asked him, “You seem very special. What are you? Are you some kind of an angel? You seem inhuman.” “No,” he said. “Well, are you some kind of god then?” “No,” he said. “Well, are you some kind of wizard or magician?” “No,” he replied. “Well, are you a man?” “No.” “Then what are you?” At this the Buddha answered, “I am awake.” In those three words — “I am awake” — he gave the whole of Buddhist teachings. The word “buddha” means one who is awake. To be a buddha is to be one who has awakened to the nature of life and death, and who has awakened and freed one’s compassion in the midst of this world.

The practice of meditation does not ask us to become a Buddhist or a meditator or a spiritual person. It invites us to fulfill the capacity we each have as humans to awaken. The skill of becoming more mindful, and more present, and more compassionate, and more awake is something we may learn sitting on a meditation cushion, but this capacity for awareness helps in computer programming, playing tennis, lovemaking, or walking by the ocean and listening to life around you. In fact, to awaken, to be really present, is the central art in all other arts.

What is that which we can awaken to? We awaken to what Buddhists call the dharma. Dharma is the Sanskrit and Pali word that refers to the universal truths: to the laws of the universe and the teachings that describe it. In this sense, finding the dharma is quite immediate. It is the wisdom that is always present to be discovered.

It is different than waiting for God to come down to us in a cloud of glory, or a big spiritual enlightenment, or a wonderful, otherworldly experience. The dharma of wisdom, what we can awaken to, is the truth that is right where we are when we let go of fantasies and memories and come into the reality of the present. When we do that and pay careful attention, we start to see the characteristics of the dharma in the very life in which we live.

One of the first characteristics of the dharma that shows itself in meditation is impermanence and uncertainty. “Thus shall you think of this fleeting world,” it says in one Buddhist sutra. “A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, an echo, a rainbow, a phantom, and a dream.” The more quietly you sit, the more closely you observe, the more you realize that everything you can see is in a state of change. Ordinarily, everything we experience seems solid, including our personality, the world around us, our emotions, and the thoughts in our mind. It is like watching a movie; we can get so caught up in the story until it seems real, even though it is actually made of light flickering on a screen. And yet if you focus very carefully on what you are seeing, it is possible to see that the film is actually a series of still pictures, one frame after another. One appears, and then there is a slight gap, and then the next one appears.

The same thing is happening in our lives. Because that is so: nothing in our lives lasts or stays the same for very long. You do not have to be a very adept meditator to see that everything is changing all the time. Have you been able to get any mental states of any kind to last very long? Is there anything in your life that stays the same?

This brings us to dharma’s second law. If we want things that are always changing to stay the same to get attached to them, we get disappointed, we suffer. Not because we should suffer — this is not something created to punish us. It is the very way things are, as basic as gravity. If we get attached to something staying the way it is, it does not stop changing. Trying to hold onto “how it was” will only create suffering and disappointment, because life is a river and everything changes.

So when we start to see the laws of nature — that things are impermanent, that attachment causes pain — we can also sense that there must be some other way. And there is. It is the way that can be called “the wisdom of insecurity.” This is the ability to flow with the changes, to see everything as a process of change, to relax with uncertainty. Meditation teaches us how to let go, how to stay centered in the midst of change. Once we see that everything is impermanent and ungraspable and that we create a huge amount of suffering if we are attached to things staying the same, we realize that relaxing and letting go is a wiser way to live. We realize that gain and loss, praise and blame, pain and pleasure are part of the dance of life, given to each of us, born into our human body. Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring for them in a flexible and wise way. In meditation, we pay attention to our body with care and respect.

When we ask, “What is the nature of the body?” we can see that it grows up, it grows old, it gets sick sometimes, and it eventually dies. When we sit to meditate, we can directly feel the state of our body, the tensions we carry, the level of tiredness or energy. Sometimes being in our body feels good, and sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it is quiet, and sometimes it is restless. In meditation we sense that we do not actually own our bodies but rather we just inhabit them for a short time, and during that time they will change by themselves, regardless of what we want to happen. The same is true for our mind and heart, with its hopes and fears, the grief and joy. As we continue to meditate, we learn to relate more wisely to what Zorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe.” Instead of fearing painful experiences and running away from them, or grasping after pleasant experiences hoping that somehow by holding onto them they will last, we come to realize our heart has the capacity to be present for it all, to live more fully and freely where we are. When we realize that everything passes away, not only the good things but the painful things as well, we find a composure in their midst.

….You can learn that you do not have to fear that which is painful and you do not have to grasp for that which is pleasant. We have often been conditioned to believe this way, but as we meditate, it quickly becomes apparent that grasping for what is pleasant or fearing things that cause us pain does not lead to peace, and it does not lead to happiness. The truth is that things change whether we want them to or not. Becoming attached to things as they are or pushing things away that we do not like does not stop them from changing. It only leads to further suffering.

Instead, in meditation we discover a natural, open-hearted, and non-judgmental awareness of our bodies and our feelings. We can gradually bring this kind and open awareness to witness all that’s in our minds. We learn to see and trust the law of impermanence — this means we begin to see the world as it is really is. In the midst of it all, we begin to see how we can relate to all of it with compassion, kindness, and wisdom.

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[Now here are the four comments this post is about. Take courage in hand and speak up!]

WILLIAM EATON
Thanks for calling my attention to this, Nina. And best of luck with your group meditation!

That said, I must be my curmudgeonly self (and while noting that I have meditated off and on for going on 40 years now, and I’m now trying a new technique that I devised on my own). My curmudge is this: I was happy with the lines from Kornfeld and the Buddha when they were about being “awake.” And trying to be awake then might involve reading Marx or Freud (or working with a good psychotherapist), or many, many other, diverse actitivities.

But then I get to Kornfeld’s “Meditation teaches us how to let go, how to stay centered in the midst of change.” And all the stuff after that about letting go, being non-judgmental and accepting. This does not seem to have much to do with awake-ness, but rather with managing the many enraging aspects of life and managing them in a way that does not involve expressing one’s anger (something that is now taboo). Perhaps someone would say, in our rapidly changing, impersonal world, it is better to learn how to not get too bent out of shape by change than to be “awake.” That I can at least understand. But awakeness, in my book, involves recognizing that change (and mortality and consciousness and our inter-dependence) does indeed bend us out of shape!

I remember going to a yoga class on a Friday evening, and the young teacher proposed that we students begin by letting go of everything that had happened during the past week (i.e. all the “bad stuff,” the enraging stuff). That pretty much ended my yoga career (which had been offing and on-ing for 25 years or so). What did letting go of the bad stuff, the enraging stuff, have to do with being awake? It had more to do with being asleep, with not paying attention to the lives we are living, in which, of course, there is plenty of bad stuff and good (and unclassifiable).

I have also been, since adolescence, an off-and-on attender of Quaker meeting. Here’s another religion that, unfortunately, seeks to suppress anger and its expression, but, as a result, going to meeting can be an excellent way of becoming aware of one’s anger and of other people’s, and of the problems of consciousness and interdependence. An awakening form of group meditation?

This is not to say our anger and the human predicament are all we should be awake to, but rather that awakeness should be to all: to the good and the bad–the “real two,” I’ll call it, after this passage in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: “Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.”

Best, Wm. (Montaigbakhtinian.com)

April 14, 2015 at 3:02 p.m.

*********

NINA MISHKIN
Wow, William! You sure do like to stir the pot! I have indeed read Marx and Freud (although quite a long time ago), worked for twenty-four (discontinuous) years with two good therapists, and even attended several Quaker Sunday Assemblies here in Princeton, on the representation of a Jewish acquaintance of mine that Christ would not be mentioned, which proved to be both wrong and (for me) a deal breaker. But as it was I who invited you to read this post (curious perhaps as to your response), I’m reluctant to go mano a mano with you about it.

Nonetheless, may I suggest that the contradiction you identify between both being “awake” and “letting go” is only apparent? I can’t speak for your young yoga teacher — I was always terrible at yoga myself, even at Kripalu counting the minutes until it would be over. But what Kornfeld seems to mean by “awake” is “aware” — and what he wants us to “let go” of are the fantasies and memories in which too many of us spend our interior lives, so that we can then be truly aware of what is happening now. He is not a perfect guru by any means. But I do understand him to be speaking of meditation as able to affect for the better the state of our interiority, which then affects how we conduct ourselves in the world. And it has been my experience, even without meditation, that one can recognize and deal with the infuriating aspects of the life we are living more productively and with less harm to and suffering in ourselves without the heat of blinding passion which you seem to favor expressing.

It is very difficult to develop the “wisdom of insecurity” that Kornfield advocates as a goal. It is very difficult to be non-judgmental — that is, accepting — of our mortality and the impermanence of everything we love. You seem to be saying we shouldn’t even try. I feel we have to try. It’s too painful otherwise. That said, I would be extremely interested in hearing about the meditation technique you’ve devised on your own. Is it a secret? Or do you share?

April 14, 2015 at 6:00 p.m.

*********

WILLIAM EATON
Hi Nina. A value of writing and of conversation is that helps us continue to advance our thinking (which is not to say to make progress, nor to say that we ever reach an end. Rather, one interpretation gives way to another, as Bakhtin pointed out.) So my next reflection (which would have to take the place of any “secret” I might have) would be that meditation these days by and large (which does not mean exclusively) serves a medicinal purpose: helping to calm us down, take a break from the action. This can certainly be useful, but, like a lot of such medicines, in doing this work, it inevitably dulls our awareness. Yes, it is good to keep in touch with the fact that we are, in the cosmic scheme of things, next to nothing, and thus that our trials and tribulations are, on some level, without significance and our judgments absurd. But I would not have this keeping in touch involve losing touch with our lives in the world of appearances, let’s call it. In this world we do indeed have trials and tribulations. We do indeed make judgments, continuously, and we have to. You write of the too-painful. Yes, that, too, is part of human life, and to seek to escape from that is to seek to live one’s life less fully, (I often find myself in contentious dialogue with a line from Dag Hammarskold: “Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible — not to have run away.” To include from the “too-painful” is what I am here proposing.)

I am also concerned that in our devotion to calming practices we are at times, and without pay, coping internally with anger that might otherwise be put to socially useful purposes: fighting the machine, we might call this. Or raging at the dying of the light, to borrow a phrase from Dylan Thomas. The sociologist Norbert Elias wrote about how, with the development of the conscience and super-ego, human beings took on the work of self-control rather than this being done by external agents. (E.g.: We “beat up ourselves” more than we get beaten — or while we also get beaten.) My sense is that “the machine” now has a vast secondary machine attached to it — the machine of meditation teachers, yoga classes, spas, therapists, etc. The point is for us to work — NOT at our jobs, in our families, in our commercial dealings and political lives — but to work internally on getting rid of and not expressing our anger.

Suppose, for example, that I were working for a large bank or Internet company, and it was paying me $100,000 per year, and I was spending $10,000 per year on classes, therapy and retreats. And perhaps my employer was chipping in a little via health-insurance coverage. And much of this money was being spent so that I would be a good worker, so that I would not get angry at the angry things at my job, or would keep this anger inside. (And then go to a therapist to be treated for depression which is typically caused by repressed anger.) All this may be necessary to stay employed and keep the sushi on table, as we used to say. But I would have people be aware — yes, aware — of the system in which they were involved, the work they were being called upon to do, and were in fact doing.

Not to repeat my first comment, but it is from the above perspective that I liked your Kornfeld’s focus on awakeness/awareness, and I continue to like some of the message you report — the being truly aware of what is happening now. Though I would not have us let go of our memories, but rather explore them; nor would I renounce our fantasies, but rather have us recognize them for what they are and recognize our need for them — as a way of dealing with the “too-painful.”

My personal meditation technique is of minor interest, just a gimmick really, but I would close with this basic point. Americans are caught in a problem-solution view of life and of “ethics” (how to live). At one extreme this involves us in various approaches to death (and to medicine) that seem to have as their implicit goal immortality. But mortality is an aspect of the irresolvable human predicament. (Become immortal we would no longer be human.) There are other aspects of our predicament besides mortality. There are the challenges of being a social animal, dependent on others. There is consciousness, having to live with an overlarge brain. There are more transient “predicaments” such as capitalism or the multivarious weapons, military and otherwise, of modern technologies. For me awareness must include being aware of these things, and of the unanswerability of our most fundamental questions, the unrealizability of our most fervent dreams.

Perhaps someday I’ll post in Montaigbakhtinian an old essay, “There is No Solution.” For the moment I’ll close with these three bits from a favorite book, the British sociologist-psychotherapist Ian Craib’s “The Importance of Disappointment”:

(1) “This kind of illusion is often bound up with a kind of counselling or therapeutic evangelism: the not-quite truisms of ‘it’s good to get things off your chest’, ‘it’s important to have somebody to talk to’ and so on. Talking [AND BLOG POSTING & COMMENTING!!] can clarify, can replace impulsive and possibly destructive acting out, it can be a medium for making decisions, but it is not an alternative to conflict and suffering.”

(2) “There are, then, a number of aspects to integration that can make it a not-so-attractive prospect from the point of view of those who see psychotherapy as offering solutions, happiness and satisfaction. It means becoming aware of and suffering conflicts; becoming aware of and putting up with what I have described as authentically bad aspects of relationships, and of the self; and it means coming up against and recognising the limits of one’s abilities and the very real fear of disintegration that that can bring.”

(3) “The movement towards external and internal reality makes life both easier and harder; energy involved, in this example, in denial is released . . . and can be put to other, more productive purposes. The price is experiencing a real and appropriate fear; perhaps the best description of this dimension of psychotherapy is of learning how to suffer.”

Yrs. in dialogue, Wm.

April 20, 2015 at 1:48 p.m.

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NINA MISHKIN
Hi again, Wm. After some reflection, I’ve decided to respond once more, although I must confess I don’t believe we are still “in dialogue” — if we ever have been. You have now written an interesting short essay, at some remove from the original post, which takes as its springboard a few words in my reply to your first “comment” (about what may be too painful to bear) and then soars into a stratosphere of your own concerns, which seem to focus on preserving anger and misery at the human predicament. I would point out that Dylan Thomas, who you reference as urging us to rage, rage against the dying of the light (and as far as we know did not meditate) medicated his own pain with such an excess of alcohol that he was dead in his thirties. I might also observe, as I did in my earlier reply, that we engage more effectively with the “predicaments” of being — as you say — social animals or of capitalism and the dark side of modern technologies when we are calmer and less the victims of our own “monkey minds.” Which is what I take Vipassana meditation and Jack Kornfield to be about for rank beginners like myself.

I agree “there is no solution.” On the other hand, we have to live (as best we can) with what there is. I also agree that happiness is not the goal of psychotherapy, but neither is a steady diet of suffering (except perhaps for very strict Freudians). If I were making $100,000 a year doing work promoting ends of which I did not approve and were unable to find another way of earning an adequate living (that would support and educate my children, for instance), I would consider $10,000 a year well spent to keep me enjoying what there was to enjoy in those parts of my life left over from the wage-earning (such as sushi, and posting essays in Montaigbakhtinian).

In some ways, despite the impressive range of your reading and vocabulary, I find you to be rather an esprit simpliste in your responses; it has to be all either black or white. I too have been called that in my salad days but I’m trying to rectify this attitude towards what I’ve experienced and observed while there’s still time. Not to make bad jokes about the fifty shades of grey one can achieve by mixing black and white, but surely learning how to suffer is not the only thing life must be about.

Finally, I ought to point out that we are typing away here some two weeks after the original post, with the result that you and I are probably alone by now in reading what we have each been at such pains to write. Perhaps I should now open it up to those few followers of TGOB who may have the patience to put up with us and maybe even want to join in. If I re-post our friendly skirmishes, aka “dialogue,” It would be interesting to see what sort of comments we might get.

April 26, 2015 at 11:42 a.m.

AND NOW — IF YOU’RE STILL WITH US — IT’S YOUR TURN! DON’T BE SHY. TELL US WHAT YOU THINK.

NOBODY GOES HUNGRY AT OUR HOUSE

We have three bird feeders hanging off the railing of our kitchen back deck. I try to keep them filled with black oil sunflower seed. They’ve been emptying with astonishing rapidity, considering the small size of the several species of bird who come to feed, usually a seed at a time.

The culprit, of course, is one extremely clever grey squirrel. (Or perhaps fungible grey squirrels take turns.) He climbs from the ground and attaches himself upside down to a feeder, where he can considerably lower the level in one feeding.

Poor little guy. Why shouldn’t he have his own grub so as not to rob the birds? Yummy unsalted peanuts from the supermarket. As soon as he discovered them, he went to work:

HE ATE AND ATE.

My taking pictures from behind the sliding glass door didn’t scare him a bit. He looked me right in the eye and went on munching.

MUCH MORE DELICIOUS THAN BIRDSEED!

At last he’d had enough.

TIME TO LEAVE. (AND TELL THE OTHERS?)

That night it rained. What do squirrels do when it rains?

(NOTE NEAR-EMPTY FEEDERS THAT WERE FULL THE DAY BEFORE.)

Guess we’re going back to the store today.

BONUS FOR FOREIGNERS: WHY ENGLISH IS SO HARD

OR, DO YOU WEAR BEET ON YOUR FEET OR BOOTS ON YOUR FOOTS?

[Multiple Woes With the English Language]

[Following up on the success of yesterday’s post with Anglophone readers of TGOB, I present more of the contents of the envelope I was given upon volunteering to tutor an international student at Princeton University in English conversation. As was pointed out by one reader yesterday, none of this is funny ha-ha if you’re learning English from a book. On the other hand, it remains funny peculiar (note the two meanings of word “funny”) even if you are a beginner. The following poem about the pitfalls of English plurals was first printed in David Booth’s “Spelling Links: Reflections on Spelling and Its Place in the Curriculum,”Pembroke 1991.]

*******

WHY ENGLISH IS SO HARD

Anonymous

We’ll begin with box, the plural is boxes.

But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.

One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese.

Yet the plural of mouse is never meese.

You may find a lone mouse, or a whole nest of mice.

But the plural of a house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of a man is always men,

Why shouldn’t the plural of a pan be called pen?

The cow in the plural may be called cows or kine.

But a bow, if repeated, is never called bine;

And the plural of vow is vows, not vine.

If I speak of a foot and you show me two feet,

And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?

If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,

Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

If the singular’s this, and the plural these,

Should the plural of kiss ever be written kese?

We speak of a brother and also of brethren,

But though we say mother, we never say mothren.

Then the masculine pronouns are he, his, and him.

But imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim!

So English, I think you all will agree,

Is the funniest language you ever did see.

HINTS ON ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION FOR FOREIGNERS

[I take no credit for what follows. It’s part of a package of materials I was given last week after I volunteered to do one-on-one tutoring in English conversation for the Davis International Center at Princeton University. My international student for the next five months will be a visiting scholar from China, who has come to work at the Princeton Plasma Physics laboratory.

International students at the University must read and write English at an acceptable level or take a remedial course. Being able to speak so that others can understand is something else. And then there are the idioms! I’m meeting my student for the first time later this morning, and so won’t know what his conversational problems may be until then. In the meanwhile, however, here’s something for you to enjoy. We anglophones are so lucky!]

***********

I take it you already know

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble but not you,

On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.

Well done! And you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word

That looks like beard and sounds like bird,

And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead —

For goodness’ sake don’t call it “deed”!

Watch out for meat and great and threat

(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)

A moth is not a moth in mother

Nor both in bother, broth in brother,

And here is not a match for there

Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,

And then there’s dose and rose and lose —

Just look them up — and goose and choose,

And cork and work and card and ward

And font and front and word and sword,

And do and go and thwart and cart —

Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!

A dreadful language? Man alive!

I’d mastered it when I was five.

T.S.W. (Only the initials of writer are known)

HISTORIC CABBAGE SOUP

Don’t worry; the soup in this picture was made just a few hours ago. It’s the recipe that’s historic. I was aiming for the cabbage soup my Russian mother used to serve when I was a little girl. Since she probably learned how to make it from her mother, that would put the recipe back to the last years of the nineteenth century. (Whether or not my grandmother acquired it from my great-grandmother, thereby making the recipe even older, is purely speculative.)

Oddly, my mother always called this historic soup “borscht” even though there were no beets in it. Whatever. It tasted very good. Competitive to the end, she managed with sly evasions never to give me the recipe. Which may have been just as well, because I recall that what she did was a complicated all-day affair involving a huge pot and “goluptsi” (little birds) cooked in the soup. And complicated all-day cooking is not for me, irrespective of the taste thrill at the end. What are “goluptsi?” Big cabbage leaves wrapped around a seasoned combination of chopped meat and rice. The soup would be the opener, the little birds the main course.

So the recipe I’m referring to here is not exactly my mother’s (or grandmother’s). However, something that looked as if it would taste very much like their soup eventually showed up in “EAT!” — a cookbook published by the Parents and Teachers Association of Public School 166 (Manhattan) in March 1975. I was a P.S. 199 parent of two boys at that time and therefore felt obliged to buy “EAT!” (Especially as I had two recipes included in it myself.)

The soup in “EAT!” was called “Reena Kondo’s Cabbage Soup.” The contributor of this recipe, known to us all as Miss Kondo, had been my younger son’s kindergarten teacher the year before. She was of Polish-Jewish descent, and I am quite certain the soup recipe had come to America one or two generations prior to reaching her, probably also through the maternal line, thus escaping annihilation in the Warsaw ghetto.

Instead of goluptsi, Miss Kondo’s mother and/or grandmother had added a few pieces of cut up beef and carrots. I have omitted them. I have no recollection of cooked carrots in any maternal soups of my childhood, and my mother would never have wasted a good piece of beef by boiling it in soup. However, stripped of these decadent refinements, the following reconstructed recipe will taste remarkably similar to what I was lapping up at the kitchen table in Washington Heights in the 1930’s. It makes at least three suppers-in-a-bowl for two adults as a main course. Easy-peasy too. And remember: cruciferous vegetables are very good for you.

[P.S. If you can’t find sour salt anywhere, squeeze four or five lemons, salt the lemon juice heavily, and add the salted juice to the pot.]

RECONSTRUCTED CABBAGE SOUP RECIPE, CIRCA 1900

1 head of white cabbage

2 14 oz. cans diced tomatoes

handful (or several handfuls) of white raisins

several pieces of sour salt (to taste)

Regulär table salt (to taste)

Honey and/or brown sugar (to taste)

2 apples, peeled and cut into eighths

Cut the cabbage into small pieces or shred it. In sizeable pot, cover the shredded cabbage with cold water and add all the remaining ingredients except the apples, which should be put in towards the end. Cooking time is about two hours, but after an hour or so begin tasting and adjusting the salt, lemon juice (if you’re using it) and sweetener till you achieve a sweet/sour taste you like.

I don’t know about Reena Kondo, but my mother always served it with a big blob of sour cream on top. I use yogurt. (Goat’s milk yogurt, to be precise, but we’re peculiar. My mother didn’t know about goat’s milk yogurt.)

At the table, mix with your soup spoon. Serve with black bread, French bread, no bread.

If you were to make it tomorrow (Thursday), you’d be all set through Saturday. Who wants to be in the kitchen too often, now that it’s (nearly) spring?

PATIENCE, PATIENCE

SPRING IS COMING.

BUT NOT QUITE YET.

SO WHEN ALREADY?

NEVER MIND WHAT YOU USED TO LOOK LIKE

DO THE BEST YOU CAN, AND ENJOY IT.

WHY MEDITATE?

I’m not a spiritual person. Never have been. I’m not calm, I don’t take life in stride. I find it hard to start new things and hard to stop things I’m doing, or to say goodbye. Although I can love specific people fiercely, I can’t truly say my heart is full of loving kindness for all mankind. While I tolerate a lot, when the worm finally turns, it turns. And like an elephant I never forget.

That’s not to say I’m proud of these qualities. I’ve always wished it weren’t so. Unfortunately, that’s the self I’ve got, despite the wishful thinking. (Definitely Type A, and medicated for hypertension since the age of 43.) But I have tried to change. I first signed up for eight sessions of meditation at the local Y at a time when I was much younger, living modestly in Manhattan with two small children in grade school. I thought it might quiet me, make me nicer and better. I even thought I was going great guns in that class. (Probably an inappropriate metaphor for a would-be meditator, but you know what I mean.) Then during comment period afterwards, I put up my hand and asked the leader if it was supposed to feel almost like an orgasm in the head because that’s how I had felt a couple of times — and everyone laughed. There went any sense of progress. (Not to mention those kinds of feelings.)

Subsequently, I occasionally bought a small book on the subject and read it on the toilet (because small books lend themselves to short reading periods), but never found the time or inspiration to pursue the subject more deeply after leaving the bathroom. Until Bill came into my life. Bill had spent several unhappy years between wives seeking peace and wisdom at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, where he had sometimes fallen asleep during exceptionally long meditations but also did enough of the shorter ones to know he wasn’t very good at it although he admired those who were. (He has, like me, a mind like an unruly horse.)

However, after the first flush of geriatric passion had somewhat ebbed for us, we did try meditating side by side in our living room for several weeks, an electric timer letting us know the moment of release. Then we discovered Netflix, a more meretricious method of passing the past-prandial hours, but much easier. Also with Netflix we could hold hands.

Let me cut to the chase. Last spring we joined a neighborhood Community Without Walls, thinking we perhaps needed to connect with some real people other than each other. Half a year later, I was eventually invited to a session of dreaming up group activities that weren’t just eating together, sing-alongs, scrabble and going to movies. Out of the vasty deeps within my aging self a question bubbled up: How about meditation?

And thus it was that I am, at least for now, the facilitator of a group of, so far, four ladies plus a married couple who are willing to meditate together once a week in my living room. (Bill has promised to join us and not fall asleep, but didn’t want to come to the first meeting till he heard who was there. Is that frivolous, or what?). One of the guests has assured us there is more power when people meditate together.

What do I know about meditation that enables me to “facilitate” these sessions? Enough to buy a very good app for my i-Phone of six twenty-minute meditations led by Jack Kornfield, one of the co-founders of the Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge where Bill used to doze between bouts of would-be mindfulness. After preliminary who-are-you-and-what-are-you-hoping-for chat at the initial meeting, I played the first one — a mindfulness meditation for beginners — and it was a success! Everyone wants to do it at least once more next time, before we move on to the second meditation on the app.

But next time, I’m going to begin by reading something aloud before I press “play” on the mindfulness meditation again. It’s an excerpt from one of Kornfield’s books included for reading on the same app, and it’s so good I’m going to copy out most of it it here. It may be my age that makes me at last receptive to these words, because only when you’re getting old do you, perhaps reluctantly, recognize the truth in them. However, everyone in my living room will be as old, or nearly as old as I am, so that won’t be a problem. If you’re a relative youngster, you may want to go away until I post something more amusing. On the other hand, the Kornfield excerpt is a great answer to the question at the top of this post. It also presents a great project to tackle before, ah, time runs out. Are you up for it?

WHY MEDITATE?

by Jack Kornfield

Here is a story told about the Buddha shortly after he was enlightened. As he was walking down the dusty road he met a traveler who saw him as a handsome yogi exuding a remarkable energy. The traveler asked him, “You seem very special. What are you? Are you some kind of an angel? You seem inhuman.” “No,” he said. “Well, are you some kind of god then?” “No,” he said. “Well, are you some kind of wizard or magician?” “No,” he replied. “Well, are you a man?” “No.” “Then what are you?” At this the Buddha answered, “I am awake.” In those three words — “I am awake” — he gave the whole of Buddhist teachings. The word “buddha” means one who is awake. To be a buddha is to be one who has awakened to the nature of life and death, and who has awakened and freed one’s compassion in the midst of this world.

The practice of meditation does not ask us to become a Buddhist or a meditator or a spiritual person. It invites us to fulfill the capacity we each have as humans to awaken. The skill of becoming more mindful, and more present, and more compassionate, and more awake is something we may learn sitting on a meditation cushion, but this capacity for awareness helps in computer programming, playing tennis, lovemaking, or walking by the ocean and listening to life around you. In fact, to awaken, to be really present, is the central art in all other arts.

What is that which we can awaken to? We awaken to what Buddhists call the dharma. Dharma is the Sanskrit and Pali word that refers to the universal truths: to the laws of the universe and the teachings that describe it. In this sense, finding the dharma is quite immediate. It is the wisdom that is always present to be discovered.

It is different than waiting for God to come down to us in a cloud of glory, or a big spiritual enlightenment, or a wonderful, otherworldly experience. The dharma of wisdom, what we can awaken to, is the truth that is right where we are when we let go of fantasies and memories and come into the reality of the present. When we do that and pay careful attention, we start to see the characteristics of the dharma in the very life in which we live.

One of the first characteristics of the dharma that shows itself in meditation is impermanence and uncertainty. “Thus shall you think of this fleeting world,” it says in one Buddhist sutra. “A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, an echo, a rainbow, a phantom, and a dream.” The more quietly you sit, the more closely you observe, the more you realize that everything you can see is in a state of change. Ordinarily, everything we experience seems solid, including our personality, the world around us, our emotions, and the thoughts in our mind. It is like watching a movie; we can get so caught up in the story until it seems real, even though it is actually made of light flickering on a screen. And yet if you focus very carefully on what you are seeing, it is possible to see that the film is actually a series of still pictures, one frame after another. One appears, and then there is a slight gap, and then the next one appears.

The same thing is happening in our lives. Because that is so: nothing in our lives lasts or stays the same for very long. You do not have to be a very adept meditator to see that everything is changing all the time. Have you been able to get any mental states of any kind to last very long? Is there anything in your life that stays the same?

This brings us to dharma’s second law. If we want things that are always changing to stay the same to get attached to them, we get disappointed, we suffer. Not because we should suffer — this is not something created to punish us. It is the very way things are, as basic as gravity. If we get attached to something staying the way it is, it does not stop changing. Trying to hold onto “how it was” will only create suffering and disappointment, because life is a river and everything changes.

So when we start to see the laws of nature — that things are impermanent, that attachment causes pain — we can also sense that there must be some other way. And there is. It is the way that can be called “the wisdom of insecurity.” This is the ability to flow with the changes, to see everything as a process of change, to relax with uncertainty. Meditation teaches us how to let go, how to stay centered in the midst of change. Once we see that everything is impermanent and ungraspable and that we create a huge amount of suffering if we are attached to things staying the same, we realize that relaxing and letting go is a wiser way to live. We realize that gain and loss, praise and blame, pain and pleasure are part of the dance of life, given to each of us, born into our human body. Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring for them in a flexible and wise way. In meditation, we pay attention to our body with care and respect.

When we ask, “What is the nature of the body?” we can see that it grows up, it grows old, it gets sick sometimes, and it eventually dies. When we sit to meditate, we can directly feel the state of our body, the tensions we carry, the level of tiredness or energy. Sometimes being in our body feels good, and sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it is quiet, and sometimes it is restless. In meditation we sense that we do not actually own our bodies but rather we just inhabit them for a short time, and during that time they will change by themselves, regardless of what we want to happen. The same is true for our mind and heart, with its hopes and fears, the grief and joy. As we continue to meditate, we learn to relate more wisely to what Zorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe.” Instead of fearing painful experiences and running away from them, or grasping after pleasant experiences hoping that somehow by holding onto them they will last, we come to realize our heart has the capacity to be present for it all, to live more fully and freely where we are. When we realize that everything passes away, not only the good things but the painful things as well, we find a composure in their midst.

….You can learn that you do not have to fear that which is painful and you do not have to grasp for that which is pleasant. We have often been conditioned to believe this way, but as we meditate, it quickly becomes apparent that grasping for what is pleasant or fearing things that cause us pain does not lead to peace, and it does not lead to happiness. The truth is that things change whether we want them to or not. Becoming attached to things as they are or pushing things away that we do not like does not stop them from changing. It only leads to further suffering.

Instead, in meditation we discover a natural, open-hearted, and non-judgmental awareness of our bodies and our feelings. We can gradually bring this kind and open awareness to witness all that’s in our minds. We learn to see and trust the law of impermanence — this means we begin to see the world as it is really is. In the midst of it all, we begin to see how we can relate to all of it with compassion, kindness, and wisdom.

BORING CONDO TO-DO LIST

I’m not really a house person. I did help occupy a house for eight years in Duxbury, Massachusetts, when I was still the mother of growing boys and had a (second) husband reasonably good at fixing things that broke. But apart from that, I’ve spent all of my childhood and most of my adult life in urban apartments, where there are supers you can call when things go wrong.

Bill is the first to admit, with a candid smile, that he’s not handy. So when we moved into a suburban condominium townhouse here in Princeton, it was reassuring to know the grounds and the leaves and the snow and the gutters would be taken care of by the condominium association. I could put my mind to more productive and satisfying matters than property maintenance.

Little did I know. Yes, the association takes care of the outside. (And charges extra when the winter weather’s really bad.) But there’s also the inside — the part we own. Why just in the past month or so, while I’ve been beguiling myself (and hopefully you) with seductive blog posts about times gone by, the present has gone on making its destructive inroads into the status quo.

All the electric plugs in the master bathroom have given up the ghost. That means the comforting little night light now fails to go on at night. My electric toothbrush has stopped working. After I wash my hair, I have to plug my hand-held hairdryer into a socket by the bed where’s there no mirror and I can’t see what I’m doing. TO DO: Call Gold Medal for electrician. After said electrician replaces the electric plug (for $145 plus tax), he is sure to find some other expensive thing to fix while he’s here. He always does.

Bill helped himself up from the “guest” toilet downstairs by grasping a handy towel bar and pulled it out, dislodging some plaster in the process. Now the “guest” towel hangs by a dowel protruding from a partially open hole in the wall. (Can we invite real guests to do their business in such an unsightly venue?) TO DO: Call Don for appointment to make repair estimate. Don is the nice man who helped another nice man take to Cranbury Books many of Bill’s excess books at one time piled up in the garage. On that occasion, Don claimed ability to do all kinds of construction or repair work in the home and thrust his card at me. No job too small! (He said.) Any port in a storm. (I say.) What will Don charge, I wonder.

Condo association has just voted that all dryer vents must be cleaned every three years. Copy of paid invoice should be filed with association office by June 1. (What will they do if I fail to comply? Evict me?) TO DO: Call guy recommended by condo association management company, which has negotiated special price of $69 plus tax with this person, based on volume. (There are 52 units for him to work on.)

The winds of March blew out the pilot light in the gas-powered fireplace. This morning, a cold one, I wasted half an hour on my knees (cushioned against the hard floor by throw pillows) — peering into its dusty innards and pushing switches marked “on,” to no avail, although the cats loved the dusty innards and acquired a dusty coating themselves. TO DO: Brush cats before they spread dust everywhere. Then call local fireplace guy to get pilot light on again. The last time he was here (and reproached us for the dust, but who dusts inside a gas-powered fireplace?) — his help and reproach cost $125 plus tax.

The cleaning ladies, a Polish mother and daughter ever-vigilant against moths, saw one fly out of my closet and another out of the upstairs litter box, which is filled with corn-based litter. With Slavic looks of reproach difficult to withstand, they are strongly urging that next time they come they should empty my closet and scrub it from top to bottom with noxious-smelling substances, after which they will replace my clothes, probably hanging them in the wrong order. For this I will have to pay them extra, and then rearrange everything after they’re gone. No, I am not a total wimp. I did refuse to replace the litter with a non-natural brand. If moths want to feed where my pussycats defecate, so be it. TO DO: Purchase noxious-smelling substances at hardware store on Tuesday, when there’s a senior citizen discount.

I have agreed to host a new group of would-be meditators on Tuesday afternoons. We live in a no-parking-on-the-street neighborhood. There’s room for only one car behind our two in the driveway. If there were less “stuff” along the sides of our garage, Bill’s car — slightly smaller than mine — would fit. Then there would be room for four carpooled guests in two cars to park behind mine. TO DO: Call youth who works part-time in hardware store and ask if he would like to make extra money by helping move heavy “stuff” from garage to basement. Neatly. Discuss with Bill how much to pay him. Discuss with Bill how to make sure he’s neat. (He wasn’t, last time.)

Please notice there’s no “TO DO: Write next amusing TGOB post” on this list. Now you know why.

AD BIZ FOLLIES: CODA/ENCORE

I may be pushing the envelope here, especially since the previous post in this series failed to bring a symphony of pings, but I couldn’t put away those tear sheets of print ads, demonstrating skills no longer marketable because television has swept away the market, without at least one last fond glance of farewell. It’s a glance at a campaign I’d quite forgotten until it turned up in that stiffening black leather ad portfolio while I was gathering the illustrations for the five posts preceding this one.

I liked doing these particular ads then; having rediscovered them, I like looking at and reading them now. They gave the finger to all the fashion advertising that took itself so seriously and made my working life such hell — and got away with it. The client, Zero King coats and jackets for men, ran them for over a year, with apparent retail success. Which may just show it really didn’t matter what any of us in the “ad biz” were doing with or writing about ready-to-wear (except for getting Art Director Association awards, where it mattered too much), as long as the ad had a good clear photograph of the merchandise in it.

The campaign came about because Zero King brought an interesting request to Mervin & Jesse Levine, the agency where Jerry Fields landed me a job in June 1961. Could the agency do a campaign on the cheap using photographs already shot for next year’s in-house catalogue? No hiring fancy fashion photographers, no elaborate studio set-ups, no expensive team meetings to devise award-winning campaigns.

Never one to turn away a client, however small its contribution to the profit picture, Mervin handed this thorny problem to his art directors. (He had two, plus a Creative Director who’d been an art director himself. Careful readers of this blog with good memories may recall the second half of “Sex in the Office,” in which I exchanged longingly horny glances and some determinative dialogue with this very Creative Director.) Creative Director and numero uno art director were otherwise too occupied to mess around with stock photos of menswear; they had big profitable accounts, like Ship ‘n Shore, with which to wrestle. Stingy Zero King ended up on the second art director’s desk.

The second art director’s name — the newly legal name I knew him by — was Marty Scofield. He was in his late twenties, had blondish-brown straight hair that kept falling over his blue eyes, a light smattering of freckles on the bridge of his tip-tilted nose, and fresh rosy cheeks. From the look of him, you’d have sworn his parents came from England or Ireland. But as he confided later, he was really Martin Skolnick — or had been, until his last name kept him out of every big ad agency to which he’d applied after graduating with distinction from Pratt, the art school that hatched so many New York art directors.

At last someone in Personnel at J. Walter Thompson, who must have liked the look of him, suggested he lose the “Skolnick.” When he did, she hired him. He discovered he hated giant ad agency culture. So here he was, working for Mervin, who would not have minded a Skolnick on his premises, but it was too late to change back.

Marty wasn’t exactly thrilled with small ad agency culture either. (He was also gay, although well closeted, which may have contributed to his quietly jaundiced view of our nonsensical occupation.) It doesn’t take long for the disaffected to find each other. We were already lunchtime friends. Marty took one look at the Zero King photographs and called me up. (He could have walked around the office to where I sat, but then he would have had to walk back again. Better I should do the walking.) He had superimposed one of the photos on a blank piece of paper and drawn a cartoon figure of an admiring woman next to it. Wasn’t it one of the ten commandments of 1960’s fashion advertising that we should sell no garment without alluding to its sex appeal?

Marty’s cartoon was right up my alley. I could be nutsy too. We chuckled our way through a whole series. And what do you know? Zero King was perfectly happy. For the price of the magazine space and a small markup representing a tiny percentage of our salaries, they had a national campaign. Creative Director, who also had to sign off on it, lifted an eyebrow. Then he shrugged. Let’s run it up the flagpole, he said, with stunning lack of originality. (How could I have been eyeing him so lustfully?) As long as I worked in all the merchandise details and the price, it seemed we were okayed for take-off.

Success breeds intimacy. As Marty and I laughed together (not too loudly) we grew closer. By now I was divorced. One Sunday, he invited me up to Connecticut to see where he lived. He actually owned a whole house. In my limited experience, out-of-office socializing wasn’t much done between co-workers; I began to think I might have been wrong about him.

With savings from his J. Walter Thompson salary, he had bought an eighteenth-century farmhouse which had been much underpriced because it had a ghost. He was now slowly restoring it. By hand. With the help of his friend. He walked me from room to room, explaining what he’d already done and what he planned to do next. “A real ghost?” I asked. “Well, there are sure some strange noises in the attic at night,” he said. “And on the stairs.”

“Aren’t you scared to live in a house with a ghost?” (I would have been.) “He hasn’t done anything to us yet,” said Marty. He was thinking of the ghost as a “he.” I would have supposed an eighteenth-century ghost to be a lovelorn “she.” We left that one unexplored.

Following a very good dinner, which he had cooked ahead of time, we sat by the fire. His friend, who’d been away visiting his parents that weekend, would be back later that night. It became awkward. I knew he liked me. I liked him, too. He was a couple of years younger than I was, but under other circumstances we would have kissed. Instead, we looked into each other’s eyes for what seemed quite a while. Then he looked away. I said I’d better be going. He became solicitous about my driving back to the city in the dark. “I’ll be okay,” I said reassuringly, not meaning the driving. What had been such a lovely day had turned so sad. He looked sad too as I closed the car door and drove away.

Afterwards, I would ask how the house restoration was coming. We both also talked in a general way about my visiting a second time, on another Sunday. But he never specifically invited me and I never specifically suggested it. So I never saw what the house looked like when he and his friend finally finished it.

About a year after I left Mervin & Jesse Levine for more money at Altman Stoller & Chalk (another Jerry Fields placement), I received a letter from the Virgin Islands. It was from Marty. He had sold the fully restored eighteenth-century house in Connecticut, said goodbye to advertising, and with his equity bought a bed-and-breakfast in St. Thomas. He didn’t say whether or not his friend was still with him. He did invite me to come down on my next vacation. By then I had met the man who would become my second husband and the father of my two children. I suppose we could have gone down to St. Thomas together, except we’d already put a rental deposit on a Wellfleet bungalow. And the following summer we got married and went to Bermuda. I must have answered Marty’s letter but can’t remember what I said.

Now that it’s the twentieth-first century, I’ve been able to find almost everyone I worked with during my years in advertising on the Internet, usually through an obituary but not always. Marty’s the only one who’s disappeared. I’ve tried Skolnick and I’ve tried Scofield. Nothing. He’s gone to earth. All that’s left are his zany sketches for Zero King. (Another reason I like the ads so much?)

But Zero King — that’s another story: A man with a taste for vintage can still pick one up on e-Bay. Maybe not exactly a style I’ve just shown you. But something equally as appealing to the woman in your life.

In closing, let me add that if you should miraculously run across Marty, either digitally or in real life, do let me know. I’d love to hear how he’s doing.

AD BIZ FOLLIES (#4)

19th century Majarahah’s bed of solid sterling silver.

[For earlier posts about my adventures in late 1950’s-early 1960’s advertising, see “How My Life as a Mad Woman Began,” and “Ad Biz Follies (#1), (#2) and (#3.)]

During the nearly three years Ed and I had been in New York, I had no discretionary money at all. We did own a joint savings account, consisting mainly of the sale proceeds of my many college and graduate school books and also of the good used furniture my parents had given us for beginning married life. But we had agreed neither of us would touch that money. Moreover, I wasn’t entirely sure where we had stashed the bankbook. As for my salary, once I began paid work at Gilbert Advertising in January 1958, I used to hand over all of it, less five dollars a week for transportation to and from work. At first it never occurred to me not to. After all, Ed had been managing the money and paying the bills since we married. And we barely squeaked by as it was.

In the beginning, of course, he’d been working too, so the money he managed came from both of us. But now, although I had become the only breadwinner, he remained the money manager. Every Saturday, he would hand back thirty dollars just before I trundled the shopping cart off to the A&P for the weekly marketing; unfortunately, it all went on necessities, almost down to the penny.

Then things at home became increasingly unpleasant. (More detail might darken this light-hearted account of advertising nonsense were we to tiptoe down that path so we won’t, at least not here.) I may still have clung to the belief marriage was supposed to be forever, but I did finally acknowledge to myself I needed some ready cash Ed didn’t know about. Not necessarily to do anything with. Just in case. Unfortunately, my relaxed months at Harold M. Mitchell, Inc. Advertising for $6,500 a year (see #3 in this series) provided no wiggle room for putting something aside.

I was therefore pleased to receive a whispered call at work from an employment agent at Jerry Fields, the mega guru of “creative” placements in Madison Avenue’s ad world. (The term “creative” in the ad-speak of the time meant copywriters and art directors, and was not necessarily descriptive of the quality of their product.) The agent had heard of something for me at a place called Leber & Katz. More later. “Heard of something?” What did that mean?

A second whispered call soon came from an excited Judy F., formerly with Jerry Fields but now branching out on her own. There was a perfect opening for me at Leber & Katz! She had Lester Leber on the other line and could she make an appointment for me to to interview with him that very evening? Innocent little girl. (Me, not Judy F.) Even if Lester Leber had turned me down, I would have been in trouble. He didn’t. I lied about the salary Harold was paying me — I was beginning to learn how things were done — and Lester offered $8,500. When could I start? How could I refuse?

You’d think I’d been Edward Snowden. Jerry Fields himself was on the line the very next day. He didn’t whisper. How could I violate the basic rule of agency placements when he had been so good to me? (I’d never met or spoken with him.) He mentioned trust. Honor. Principle. It didn’t quite get to “You’ll never work in this town again!” but came close. What he was really upset about, of course, was the commission for the placement. Leber & Katz was going to pay Judy F. for sending me to them, even though their name had first been mentioned to me by a Jerry Fields agent.

I apologized. I pleaded. I said I was new to New York and its ways. I pointed out timidly that the Jerry Fields agent hadn’t actually gotten me an interview. I even asked if I should turn down the job offer. No, no, he didn’t want that. (God forbid Leber & Katz should hear of behind-the-scenes scuffling by employment agents.) The upshot was a stern warning. I must never, ever, do such a thing again. And then came what I didn’t realize might have been a warning of another kind: Jerry Fields himself wished me good luck at L&K. Did he know something I didn’t?

What he knew, or suspected, was that Leber & Katz did not yet have any need for me at all. Once I arrived at their (to me) sumptuous Madison Avenue premises in a building with a Longchamps restaurant on the ground floor, I too was at a loss as to why I had been hired. Was it because they felt they should fill the one empty office remaining along the square perimeter surrounding a luxurious conference room and, on the other side, an impressive paste-up department? Was it because they had grandiose plans for growth and needed to present themselves as a place with two art directors, two account executives and two copywriters, even though the second copywriter was simply waiting around for something substantive to do? Or was it that Lester — the copywriter at the firm — had been to Columbia College and thought on meeting me that if all went well for the agency a well-educated young lady like me might be a good fit?

The firm certainly did go on to become very large indeed. Shortly after we parted company, Lester and his partner Stanley Katz “exchanged” their third partner, the man who managed the office and who I knew as Norman, for Onofrio Paccione, a high-powered art person from Grey Advertising known throughout the industry as “Patch,” a tough guy to work for. They then became, for a time, Leber Katz Paccione. Subsequently, as their billings grew (and Patch departed, perhaps for greener fields) — they were Leber Katz Partners, with billings reported to be as high as $550 million by 1986, at which time they merged with (or were gobbled up by) Foote Cone & Belding Communications in Chicago and were known thereafter as FCB/Leber Katz Partners. Musical chairs on a multi-million-dollar scale. But I was not involved in any of that. Just thought you’d like to know where they were headed.

The fact is that when I arrived in late June 1960 I had nothing much to do in my new place of employment. There was still some fashion copy to write for ads already photographed, freeing up Lester to join Stanley in chasing the big packaged goods accounts that would eventually disentangle them from fashion sold in department stores and enable profits to metastasize. But it didn’t take me long to produce the minimal verbiage required to accompany gorgeous photos or to explain, briefly, why a consumer should want to buy something for which she had no real need. As in:

WHOEVER YOU ARE, be unscrupulous. Connive. Pretend to the wealth of a princess with Marvellissimo, Marvella’s precisely simulated pearls of genuine brilliance. Who’d suspect such cunning — from a lovely charmer like you? Triple-strand necklace, with stone-set clasp of semi-precious Carnelian, Lapis, or Jade Quartz, $22.50. Ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, etc. At the finest stores.

The Understanding Mother knows that “Littlest Angel,” the bra that expands as a girl develops, belongs in her daughter’s wardrobe. A beTween ager may still be “flat on top” but need the emotional reassurance of a bra. Teenform helps you say, “Mother understands.” TEENFORM, Specialists For The Formative Years.

I spent a lot of time trying to read Proust in the women’s bathroom with my feet up so no one looking for me could recognize my shoes by peering beneath the door of the toilet stall. That seemed better than sitting in my office with the door open doodling on a pad, or reading Proust openly, even with a pencil in my hand.

There was also some time-consuming flirting with Stanley. He was then thirty-nine, a husband and father of three or four, and owner in fee simple of a nice suburban home in West Orange, New Jersey. He was also the partner who would invite me to sessions in the conference room to plan strategy for presentations to big-name potential clients. I had very little to contribute to these pow-wows, other than to look interested (and perhaps attractive to Stanley), take notes and pass the centerpiece platter of fruit around the table.

After one of these meetings, I found on my desk the next morning a line drawing in pencil, initialed SK, of a male figure reclining on a chaise longue with a female figure feeding him grapes from a bunch dangling from her hand over his mouth. I knew the reclining figure was supposed to be Stanley by the round eyeglasses. Also it was slightly plump (as he was). The female figure wore a suit like mine the day before. If I’d had more work to do, I might have tabled a response in favor of more pressing matters. As it was, I impulsively scrawled, “Yes!” on the drawing, folded it into an envelope and, since he was out of the office, handed it back, sealed, to his secretary.

I still don’t know if she opened it before putting it on his desk. The next drawing that appeared in my office was of an open-mouthed baby’s face; the baby had one tuft of hair coming up off its head, one tooth in its mouth, and one tear on its cheek. Block-printed beneath the face was a single word, “Sorry.” After that, Stanley scrupulously avoided me. No more invitations to strategy pow-wows. (Had I made him feel like such a baby?) And since we had no business reason to be together, I guess that pretty much took care of temptation for him. As for me, I hadn’t really been tempted in the first place, except that the flirting had been something interesting to do. Roundish, owl-eyed and with thinning yellow hair — even if relatively powerful — wasn’t exactly my type. So you might say there was no harm done. You’d be wrong.

Popular wisdom to not mess around in the office wouldn’t have survived as long as it has if there weren’t more than a kernel of truth in it. When Norman, the third partner, decided at the beginning of 1961 that I had not been a cost-effective investment since Lester didn’t really need me, only Stanley could have saved me. Of course, he didn’t. But — as Parolles, the messenger, declared in All’s Well That Ends Well — I am there before my legs.

Despite such tomfoolery, my “employment” at Leber & Katz accomplished two very important things for me, neither connected with career advancement.

(1) With my first L&K weekly pay envelope, I opened a savings account in my own name at a bank near the office. All it took was $25. I could hide this much money from Ed by “explaining” that the rate of social security withholding was much higher at my new salary than it had been before. As he himself had never earned $8,500 a year, he believed me. Thus, every week after that, while matters continued to go south at home, I was able to put away another $25. By November of 1960, I would have $500 all my own. Enough finally to flee.

(2) I met Serge, the manager of Christofle Silver, a new Leber & Katz account that arrived at the agency in August 1960. The Christofle showroom was on the third floor of a townhouse at 55 East 57th Street that already housed Limoges china on the ground floor and Porthault linens on the second. The company had therefore come to L&K on the recommendation of the manager of Limoges, for which Lester managed some minimal advertising.

Neither Stanley nor Lester spoke French. I still could. (Much better than I do now.) There was therefore no question in their minds that I should be at the initial meeting with the daughter and son of the owner, both soon to return to France, and with Serge, who would remain in New York. (This was before the line drawings of grapes and the one-tooth baby.) My presence probably wasn’t necessary as Serge, at least, was perfectly bilingual (with a charming French lilt), having recently acquired a degree from the London School of Economics.

Born in Paris and therefore thoroughly French, he nevertheless had Polish grandparents and was a Polish Baron, a title of absolutely no use anywhere except to get last minute reservations at posh New York restaurants. He was therefore a problem to the Leber & Katz guys from the start. Lester thoughtfully called him “Sergei,” in honor of his Polish ancestry. Norman called him “Surge,” because Norman recognized no language but English. I pronounced his name the French way and became his favorite. There was also a quasi-private exchange of Shakespeare quotations across the conference table that had nothing to do with what the others were discussing but indicated to each of us that (a) we were both better educated than the others and (b) we both thought advertising was pretty silly. He insisted I be the copywriter on the account.

I’ve already written about Serge — although not extensively — as if he were fiction. (He is Andre de Renski in “Those Were the Days,” which is listed on the Fiction Page to the left. I should probably write more about him; I remember enough for a novella.) Serge sometimes does seem like fiction when I think of him now, but he was quite real, and still is. (According to Wikipedia, he remains alive and relatively well in France; he has written several French novels and now translates American he-man novels into French.) But what was significant about him then in terms of this particular story is that based on his request, Lester and Stanley turned him over to me. An art director named Art Rothenberg and I handled all the Christofle advertising as long as I was at the agency, and I alone was able to extract from him the overdue checks for services rendered. So in a way Serge kept me busy enough to prevent being let go by Norman until I had enough money to leave Ed — which was very important. That he courted me and I thought he might serve as a temporary stepping stone between husbands was also a factor in my decision to leave when I did, but is still another story.

So now we come to the bed at the top of the page. It was a sterling silver bed made by Christofle for an Indian maharajah in the mid-nineteenth century. Both Serge and his employers back in France wanted it in their inaugural ad in America. It was bad, bad American advertising (whatever its appeal had it run in France), but it was unusual. In fact, Christofle liked it so much it continued to appear even after I had parted company with Lester and Stanley. Here’s the ad, in all its glory, torn from the pages of the Times in 1961:

A PLEASURE IN THE HOME

The prolix and troublingly coy copy read:

We trust you do not covet the unusual object below. It is not for sale. An Indian Maharajah commissioned it from us in the nineteenth century, and — as far as we know — passed it on to an heir. All that remains to us is its photograph, which we show you with some trepidation.

For, you see, we do not know you Americans very well, having arrived in your country only recently. In France we take such follies philosophically, with lifted eyebrow. But here, will you be shocked, or (as we hope) interested to learn that this so-called bed was wrought entirely of sterling silver. One thousand pounds of it, including the ladies.

When one reposed upon it, the ladies waved their fans while a music box concealed beneath the springs released the latest Offenbach can-cans from Paris into the Eastern night. (Who could sleep with such distractions?)

As we say, however, to each man his pleasure. And, since 1839, Christofle has been giving unalloyed pleasure to maharajahs, emperors, kings and people who wish to feel like kings. If it is really your pleasure that we make you another such bed, we shall do so.

A last word about the bed. We do take a certain bizarre satisfaction in having created it. For one must admit that it is unique — until such time as somebody orders another. And to be unique is highly characteristic of Christofle.

Is Christofle only for those persons on a maharajah’s annual stipend? By no means. On the next page you see a recent creation in which we take genuine pride. It is called “Duo” and it was designed for us by the noted Finnish artist, Tapio Wirkala. The six pieces are all of heavy silver plate. (Actually they contain more silver than many settings of sterling silver.)

There is now in America hollowware and flatware by Christofle in vermeil, gilded, sterling, and heavy silver plate patterns — all within the reach of every purse. (See below for names of the purveyors.) These lovely things will not be one-of-a-klind, bed-type possessions. But they will be a peerless pleasure, none the less.

And that is because, among the foremost silversmiths of the world, the name of Christofle itself is renowned as one of a kind. Those beautiful objets d’art which proudly bear this name are without parallel, anywhere. They are, quite simply, beyond compare.

A brochure containing illustrations and descriptions of the complete Christofle collection is available on request. Please enclose 25 cents to cover mailing expenses. Christofle Silver, Inc., Ffty-Five East Fifty-Seventh Street, New York 22, N.Y.

CHRISTOFLE Official Table Service to the Court of Kings

It goes without saying Art and I eventually talked Serge into doing something a bit more modern:

GOUT: the French word for taste

There was also a small space campaign for The New Yorker, captioned “eat, drink, and be very, very…with Christofle silver, official service to the courts of kings:”

Art used to take me along on the photography shoots for this campaign, which helped kill even more time. One of these shoots involved a delicious-looking roast chicken on a Christofle silver platter. To keep the chicken looking truly appetizing after its long hours under hot lights, it had been generously sprayed with lacquer and was therefore inedible. You hang around, you learn.

In January 1961, Norman let me go. (I had already left Ed in November, and was now on my own, with a legal separation to protect me from his appearing on my doorstep.) Norman said in my next job I should try to work harder. Norman said I was being fired for cause, so I wouldn’t be able to collect unemployment insurance. (And the agency wouldn’t have to pay its share of it.) I did try to defend myself; I’d done everything I’d been asked to do. Was it my fault all I’d been asked was to babysit Serge?

Spine stiffened by Stanley’s vote to get rid of me, Norman wasn’t buying any of that. He yielded just enough to concede they would give me good references if anyone asked. Norman didn’t know it, but his head would soon roll too — because the renowned Paccione was about to join up as third partner.

Dear readers, surely you’ve had enough. After I had spent four subsequent months at a stop-gap place much like Harold Mitchell, Inc. (but called Herrick Associates — the associates being Mrs. Herrick, daughter Herrick and son Herrick), Jerry Fields himself rescued me. By annoying him when I’d let Judy F. place me in a job, I had implanted myself firmly in his mind. He personally found me the last two agency spots that concluded my “ad biz” career. I spent two and a half years at each of them, my salary slowly climbing with each jump, waddling out of the last job married again and eight months pregnant. So you could say all these follies you’ve been reading about had served a purpose (other than maybe moving merchandise), at least for me.

But I would be remiss to conclude this series without showing you how the Leber & Katz rise to riches began in 1961, soon after I left. Unlike the ads for Serge, these print ads of theirs introducing Lowenbrau beer to the American public were really good examples of the genre. Although I wasn’t there to see for myself, I’m sure Lester and Stanley owed the successful Lowenbrau presentation and subsequent ad campaign to Patch. There may have been some professional back-stabbing and blood-letting beforehand. But hey, that’s how the ad-biz cookie crumbles. The rest was beer-advertising and Leber Katz Partners history:

WHEN THEY RUN OUT OF LOWENBRAU…ORDER CHAMPAGNE.

IF THEY RUN OUT OF LOWENBRAU…ORDER CHAMPAGNE.

NOW THAT YOU’VE SEEN THE LIGHT….TRY THE DARK.

My song is sung. Salut!

ON BEING OLD

(Formerly "The Getting Old Blog")

Month: April 2015

WHY WE MOVED FROM ONE UNIVERSITY TOWN TO ANOTHER IN 1,000 WORDS OR LESS

MEDITATION CONTROVERSY: PLEASE BUTT IN!

NOBODY GOES HUNGRY AT OUR HOUSE

BONUS FOR FOREIGNERS: WHY ENGLISH IS SO HARD

OR, DO YOU WEAR BEET ON YOUR FEET OR BOOTS ON YOUR FOOTS?

HINTS ON ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION FOR FOREIGNERS

HISTORIC CABBAGE SOUP

PATIENCE, PATIENCE

NEVER MIND WHAT YOU USED TO LOOK LIKE

WHY MEDITATE?

BORING CONDO TO-DO LIST

AD BIZ FOLLIES: CODA/ENCORE

AD BIZ FOLLIES (#4)

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OR, DO YOU WEAR BEET ON YOUR FEET OR BOOTS ON YOUR FOOTS?

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