“Harlem was called the Big Apple before New York City was, and it was intended in those days to convey that it was the jazz capital of the world. It was an expression used by jazz musicians. There’s a showbiz saying, ‘There are many apples on a tree, but only one Big Apple.’ I don’t know exactly when it shifted to the whole city, but eventually it did. I think there are other versions, but that’s the one I accepted when I was mayor and related to people when they asked. Now, I could also say to you that New York City is the international capital of the world, of finance, culture, communication, commerce, and calling it the Big Apple conveys that.”
“Why is the rat there?”
—ANTONIO PAPA, age four, East Williston, New York, after passing a construction site with a giant inflatable rat on the sidewalk, surrounded by men with placards
Stephen McInnis, political director, New York City District Council, United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America:
“It is directed at the employer—he or she is the rat, not the workforce. We put it out there because the employer (a contractor or subcontractor on site) is paying substandard wages in unsafe conditions. Unions have always had picket lines, but they generally don’t catch the public eye anymore. The inflatable rat is an attention grabber—people stop and look, they talk about it, they take notice. This works well especially at commercial properties: no one wants the rat in front of their building because it draws too much negative attention. The rat really rattles other tenants, who then complain to building management, who then may encourage the lease-holder to utilize quality union contractors. We’ve found it effective in various corporate campaigns as well.”
“What was it like to live in the 1940s?”
—SAVANNAH KELLY, age five, Milpitas, California
Irene Stapinski, Jersey City, who was born in 1931 (and is my mother-in-law):
“It was great. I was a kid; I didn’t take the war that seriously. I mean, my friends and I knew it was frightening, but we didn’t really understand the bad part of it. We just knew that we were all cheering for the Americans and that the Nazis were bad. Everybody was so patriotic. We had all sorts of things going on in the neighborhood; they brought a captured Japanese submarine to Journal Square to help sell war bonds. If we went to the movies and we brought aluminum or pots and pans or rubber balls—anything useful for the war effort—we got in for free. I was fourteen when the war ended. There were parties in the streets for almost a year.
“After the war people started to have more money and live better. They were able to buy refrigerators and have gas stoves. I was sixteen when we got our first refrigerator—in fact, I bought it. Before that we had an icebox. I bought it when I went to work at Chase Bank in New York. I was a secretary. To go to New York was a big deal, a dream for someone who graduated from high school and wasn’t going to go to college. After work we’d stay in town at least once a week. We’d shop, we’d go uptown, we’d go to the movies. We’d go over to Brooklyn to swim at the St. George Hotel. Nobody had a car so we didn’t have to worry about driving. There was no fear of murders and everything else, like we have now.”
“Why do you never see baby pigeons?”
—HALLIE SIFTON, age four, Brooklyn, New York
James F. Avery, co-treasurer and secretary of the National Pigeon Association, Newalla, Oklahoma, which was founded eighty-six years ago and has more than two thousand members around the United States:
“Because they can’t fly, first off, and you’ll never see them unless you go where they are nesting. In New York City, that’s under bridges, signs—I’ve got pictures people have sent me of nests on fire escapes. Anywhere like a cave—eaves on houses, buildings. They don’t want you to be able to walk up and carry off their eggs and babies; they’ve got to hide from predators, which in the city can be cats, dogs, hawks and people—the biggest one. I’ve even seen nests that are just a few twigs, really; the eggs will be just lying on the ground. They don’t build a very good nest, pigeons. It might keep the egg from rolling off the ledge, see, but that’s it. The squabs will be there three to four weeks before they can fly. You probably are seeing young birds, you just don’t realize it because young birds are the same size as adult birds. If you see one out there chasing other pigeons around, it is a baby begging its parents to feed it. They can fly like adults, but they are only seven to eight weeks old.”
“Mommy, why when you were little was everything black-and-white?”
—ISABEL PHILLIPS, age six, New York City, looking at pictures of her mother as a little girl in an album
Bob Shanebrook, photographic film products specialist (retired), Eastman Kodak Company:
“Even though there was some color photography before the turn of the century, black-and-white was much more prevalent up until the early 1960s because it is a much simpler process. Black-and-white is one image on the film and then on the black-and-white print. Color is a blue record and a green record and a red record—these three colors emulate the human visual system. Organic-synthetic dyes are needed for color film, and a lot of work was done with them around World War II: they wanted to do infrared photography, to take pictures through atmospheric haze. Then, after the war, companies had to figure out how to make the film in quantity, and how it was all going to work in the commercial developing and printing process. It took time. The main crossover from black-and-white to color film, commercially, was around 1964.
“But you know there is still a human need that is not fulfilled by color; some people still prefer black-and-white. Even if you look at the new digital cameras, many have a special button where you can take pictures in black-and-white. Or you can print color pictures in black-and-white. There is still that aesthetic; people have a desire to have a black-and-white image.”
“What’s a record?”
—HILARY CARLSON, age seven, Litchfield, Connecticut, after being told by her mother: “You sound like a broken record.”
Dick Clark, former disk jockey, and longtime host ofAmerican Bandstand and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve:
“Long before there were iPods, MP3 players and CDs, there were records. A record was a sound that was preserved on a flat piece of vinyl that was then placed on a turntable that revolved at 78, 45 or 33 1/3 revolutions per minute (RPM). A needle was then applied to it, and through amplification it reproduced the original sound that was recorded.
“Most records included music. When you stop to think of it, recorded music has become the ‘soundtrack of our lives’—every moment we may recall, whether it be happy or sad, is accompanied by some music we listened to at the time. Though it was many, many years ago, I remember to this day the very first record I purchased: I Can’t Get Started by Bunny Berigan. My first buy of a rock ’n’ roll record was Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley & His Comets. Since then I have accumulated thousands of individual pieces of music that encompass every conceivable type created.”
“How many hours of TV will turn your brain into ‘mush’?”
—ANNA GAWLEY, age six, Danbury, Connecticut
Jeff Zucker, President and Chief Executive Officer, NBC Universal Television Group:
“How much you watch is as important as what you watch and how you watch it. There’s lots to watch on TV that is there just to be fun, and that is okay, but if you watch hours and hours of that and you lose the time you should be doing your homework or going out to play, then your brain might get very mushy. TV is just one part of the media. If you watch TV that informs you or stimulates you or excites you, or increases your understanding of the world, if you watch TV with your family and talk about the shows with them, then TV can actually be part of what makes your brain smart.”
ME: “You have four kids. What kinds of rules do you have for them and watching television?”
“We let our kids watch TV as long as they’ve done their homework or taken their baths or done whatever else they need to do. Then they can watch some TV and have fun with it.”
; Kids pick up their parents’ interests, or are at least interested in them. I may have been the only kid around with the Beatles in his family’s photo albums, but practically everyone in my generation was raised with the Beatles on the turntable. Whether we stayed fans into adulthood or not, the band’s music certainly touches us. And we pass this on to our children. My friend Jere’s daughter asked him a question that has long vexed him. I wondered who could answer it—a rock historian? One of the surviving band members? Perhaps even the chief suspect herself? I wrote a letter and put it in the mail as a long shot, but soon enough, an answer appeared in my in-box.
“Why did the Beatles break up?”
—ELLA HESTER, age eight, Brooklyn, New York
Her father, Jere:
“Yoko.”
Yoko Ono:
“Because they all grew up, wanted to do things their own way, and they did.”
6.
The Language of Life
When I really think about it, when I’m feeling confident and everything is going well in my life, I truly don’t care how much my children measure up to other children. It is not that important to me where they go to college, or what they end up doing for a living. It is only important to me that they be happy and that, like me, they find something they enjoy doing so their salary is not the main reason they go to work every day.
When I really think about it, that’s how I feel. But it can be a challenge: the comparisons to other children are everywhere, the measuring-ups either obvious or subtle, and no matter how much I promise I won’t play that game, sometimes I do.
It reminds me of when I was single and in my early twenties, with no girlfriend and none on the horizon, and everywhere I looked there were photographs of women in bikinis on the covers of magazines. Or of the dieter confronted with images and descriptions of food every time he or she turns on the television. You try to put it out of your mind, this thing that obsesses you, but you can’t, because forces beyond your control put it right back.
It started just moments after Dean was born. The nurse whisked him away, touched him here and there, looked at his fingers and toes, and then announced that his “Apgar score” was 9. A second nurse wrote it down. “Does that mean he’ll get into Harvard?” I asked. No one laughed.
This was the first of a million tests. The next came at the doctor’s office, where Dean’s weight, height and head circumference were compared with those of millions of other children around the nation. The computerized chart, longer with each visit, showed his height was average, while his weight was very low, in the fourth percentile, which upset his mother—from then on, she was not happy unless he was eating or had eaten very recently. I tried to reassure her by pointing out that he was holding his own in the head-circumference department, and was even a little bit advanced in this area. But this failed to comfort her. In fact, she started to worry that his head was getting too big.
The Apgar scores and the weight and head-circumference comparisons were only the beginning. You worry that your child isn’t crawling on time, or walking, or toilet training, or tying his shoelaces, or drawing, reading or writing. You worry about how your child holds a pen, that he cries too easily, about how much he knows.
So I’ve come up with some self-defense mechanisms. When Dean ends up on top in these comparisons, that’s great; when he doesn’t, I can always rationalize.
Remember the boys who knew the inner and outer planets? Well, once the solar system was safely hung in Dean’s room, signaling the end of our planet-identification period, my thoughts returned to them.
They were eggheads, I decided, obviously drilled so rigorously by their parents—morning, noon and night, perhaps even while they slept—that their social development was being stunted. They knew the planets, sure, but at what price? They were awkward and unhappy, mentally closeted in their little self-contained planet worlds, unable to interact properly with the children around them. Not only that, they were rude and unkempt, and were no doubt spiraling toward serious addiction problems. Hadn’t one of them been arrested for knocking off a liquor store?
This made me feel better. Of course none of it was true. But you never know what the future holds. I can always dream.
Brenda taught Dean to put on his coat: she would put it on the floor, and he would flip it backward over his head. I was so thrilled the first time I saw him do this you’d think he had just recited a Shakespearean sonnet. Then my sister, in from Los Angeles for a week, saw the backward coat flip and said that she had been planning to teach her son Ronan to put on his coat this way, but that he had figured out on his own how to put it on “the regular way,” so she didn’t have to.
The regular way? I didn’t say anything, but after they went back to the West Coast I found I couldn’t get the notion out of my head. I obsessed about this for weeks. I tried to get Dean to modify his technique, to do one arm at a time sideways, but he resisted—he enjoyed the flip. Up in the middle of the night, thinking about everyone who had ever wronged me in my life, imagining the Planet Boys’ life of crime, I nearly called my sister to curse her out.
It’s not just coats or the solar system, it’s everything. When you encounter a weak spot, you try to fill it.
“Do you know the seasons?” I asked Dean one late-winter morning when he was old enough that he really should.
“No.”
“Oh, come on. You know the seasons. Tell me one.”
“Summer.”
“Right! And what comes next?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. After summer. What happens to the leaves on the trees?”
“They fall down.”
“Right! So, what’s that season? You just said it. What season comes after summer?”
“Fall down?”
“Not quite.”
“Halloween?”
“Oh brother.”
“What does ‘Oh brother’ mean?”
When you’re the father of a little boy, which involves many joys, you do have one rationalization in your back pocket that is ready to be used roughly half of the time—that your little boy has the disadvantage of not being a girl. Girls just seem to be ahead of the game in so many ways when they are little; they are not as apt to tumble spontaneously off stools as boys are. We saw this clearly illustrated the first day we took Dean to nursery school: the little girls took off their coats and hung them up, neatly, and then went to help all the little boys, whose coats were half off, or still zippered and hopelessly tangled around their midsections, or attached to one hand and dragging along the floor.
This girl thing works all the time. My child-development friend Gia, in that noisy Latin-fusion restaurant in New Brunswick, not only gave me a lengthy explanation for why the two sexes were interested in different things, but also explained a few theories about why they learn at different rates. But I don’t care why it’s true, I’m just glad that it is.
A classmate of Dean’s wants to go on the Internet when Dean has never heard of it?
No worries—she’s a girl.
A colleague of mine brags about how her daughter is a green belt in tae kwon do while Dean’s biggest physical activity is kicking air while watching the Power Rangers on TV, and occasionally injuring himself in the process?
Yeah—but she’s a girl.
It’s the most 100-percent-pure-gold boy-raising rationalization on which a father can depend.
Dean’s friend Anna is standing in the school yard, doing her twenty-seven-times tables aloud while drawing a chalk schematic of Robert J. Oppenheimer’s working model of nuclear fusion while Dean chases pigeons through a big puddle?
That’s fine, just fine—I mean, hey, she’s a girl.
But on that day when the rationalizations don’t work, when you realize that for whatever reason your precious child is a little bit behind, it can be very painful. It was especially shocking for us, because Dean’s problem was language and speech, and we are both writers. This wasn’t an area
we’d ever worried about. Sports, maybe, math surely, but not Dean expressing himself.
I remember trying to unlock the coded words of adults myself. My father, when telling a story or making an example, would refer offhandedly and often to Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so—leaving me to believe that this was the world’s most popular last name.
For a child, words—their meanings, the subtle differences between them, and where they come from—are a puzzle, as are expressions whose origins are long forgotten:
“What does ‘From the horse’s mouth’ mean?”
“What is the difference between joking and lying?”
“Why is it called ‘kidnapping’ if you can steal away adults, too?”
In the beginning, with Dean, combinations of words seemed like a distant goal. Just understanding the few he knew was a struggle.
This was just before his second birthday. He had started to spend time with other children at a mommy-and-me class in the neighborhood. It was on Thursdays, the one day we had Brenda, so Helene hadn’t gone more than once or twice. The class was taught by a woman named Rianne, who had a daughter about Dean’s age.
Rianne happened to be an ex-girlfriend of mine. We dated when I was a senior in high school and she was a junior. She went to a different school than I did, a much bigger one, and was generally considered to be the prettiest girl there. She had deep brown eyes and was easily one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. We spent endless hours in each other’s houses, saw Elvis Costello play solo, got lost in the middle of the night in the lower level of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan when it was closed to the public. She was even kind—though surprisingly firm—when she dumped me, which she did on the front steps of her house about two months before I went to college.
This is a danger of living in the same place your whole life: you or your wife occasionally bumps into your old girlfriends, and in surprising places. Helene met Rianne when she became Dean’s first teacher. She encountered another old girlfriend, who shall remain nameless, in the locker room of the gym, where both were naked. “She’s got some big boobs, that girlfriend of yours!” Helene said later that evening, recounting the events and sights of her day.
Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister? Page 9
