* * * * *

This is not a good day. The Fat Guy is driving me to the vet. At least he brought treats. The Pretty Blonde brought tissues. She’s got tears in her eyes. I wonder what for?

I feel old. My hips are killing me. I can barely stand up and walk anymore. My nose is shot. I can’t smell any difference between the kitchen and the backyard. Glaucoma’s nearly blinded me, and I haven’t heard anything since the last Super Bowl. At least The Pretty Blonde came with us.  I’m glad she’s sitting on the floor petting me. Helps calm my nerves. The Fat Guy is talking to the doctor. He says I’m fourteen years old, which is almost ninety-eight in dog years. I still look better than he does.

I remember the first time I saw The Pretty Blonde. It was almost ten years ago. I was five and living with an elderly couple who couldn’t take care of me. She brought me home to meet The Skinny Kid and The Red Headed Kid, only they were a lot smaller then. So was The Fat Guy.

At least The Fat Guy is coachable. It only took me one morning to train him to let me out to pee. One week later, The Fat Guy came home early from work because some planes flew into some buildings. Seems like yesterday. When was yesterday?

The doctor is giving me a shot to calm my nerves. This feels good. Calm is my mantra. That’s why I don’t chase balls. Or squirrels. And if you’ll excuse me for saying, barking is WAY overrated. I bark twice a year, just to let you know I still can. Give me some food, a Law and Order rerun, and a soft carpet, and I’m happy. Some dogs like to play, but not me. I’m a lay dog.

Darn, these hips. Walks are cool, or at least they were. It used to be fun to run alongside The Red Headed Kid and the Skinny Kid. They both got real good at running. Guess I taught them something. The Fat Guy and The Pretty Blonde used to walk me around the neighborhood, talking about their kids, their jobs, their dreams. Life stuff. I tried to listen, but mostly I peed on a few bushes, smelled the flowers, and flirted with that sexy Husky up the street. I miss it.

I’m getting really sleepy. So what else is new? I take a dozen naps a day. Life is good at home. All I have to do is eat, sleep, and wag my tail. I love these guys.

The doctor is taking out another needle. I don’t mind, though. The Pretty Blonde and The Fat Guy are both on the floor, petting me, telling me how much they love me, and what a good family member I’ve been. I may be a dog, but you can never hear that enough. How come The Fat Guy is crying? The World Series hasn’t even started yet.

Well I’ll be doggoned. Will you look at this? Nothing but green grass, sunshine, and all the doggie biscuits I’d ever want. Booyah!

So this is what Heaven is like.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

In the sixth grade, the Boys’ Vice-Principal threatened to suspend me from school unless I stopped carrying around The Catcher in the Rye I think because it had the word “fuck” in it. Since the Boys’ Vice-Principal hadn’t read the book – and I don’t think he’d ever read any book – he couldn’t tell me why.

But Mrs. Gordon was cool. She let me keep the book at my desk and read it at recess as long as I kept a brown wrapper over the cover.

I think J.D. Salinger would have liked Mrs. Gordon. She wanted to save me from the world’s vice-principals, the guys who wanted to train you in obedience to idiots and introduce you the adult world of fear and punishment. Mrs. Gordon wanted to protect the need of a child to run free.

That’s, of course, how the word fuck got into Salinger’s book. For the 5% of you who haven’t read it, the main character of the book, Holden Caulfield, tries to erase the f-word off the wall of a New York City school. He doesn’t want little kids like his sister Phoebe to see it, that somehow it would trigger an irreversible loss of her childhood innocence:

I thought Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.

Which is where the title came from. Salinger’s Caulfield, pushed to the edge of his own youth and directed to prepare himself for the job market, could see for himself only one career: as a catcher in the rye. He imagined a bunch of kids playing away happily in a rye field, but a field on a cliff’s-edge. Every time a child, lost in their game, would drift toward the edge, Caulfield’s job would be to catch them before they fell.

Any other job would just turn you into a “phony,” that is, an adult. All adults were phonies, even the nice ones, who took jobs they hated, taught textbooks and catechisms they didn’t believe and lived lives of self-inflicted disappointments, while pretending it was all OK. Then with phony grins, they’d demand that you join their painful parade of delusion and decay.

Nearly half a century after I covered up Salinger’s book in a carefully folded brown wrapper, I thought I’d read it to my twins. They were now eleven, in the 6th grade.

But I couldn’t. In his 1956 book, Salinger had railed against a post-war world of boys in school blazers trying to get to “first base” with their steady dates. America itself was an adolescent, and despite the police beatings of marchers in Alabama, despite the “drop, tuck and don’t look at the flash!” drills we did weekly in Mrs. Gordon’s class to prepare for the Russian nuclear attack, America was still weirdly, optimistically child-like.

We knew then that the world could only get better: we would go to the moon and eventually, vacation there. JFK announced the Alliance for Progress and poverty would end in Appalachia; and Paul McCartney wanted to hold our hand. Every nasty meanie, like the police in Selma, was met by a legion of victorious innocents led by Martin Luther King. So we all held hands in a circle while Pete Seeger strummed “We shall overcome.” Everyone would get a scholarship; and we really, truly believed we would overcome.

Even the social critics – Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac – were just big, mischievous kids.

Yes, there were a bunch of old phonies like Joe McCarthy and the Boys’ Vice-Principal, but their days were numbered.

Then we fell over the cliff.

A bullet through the skull replaced Kennedy with Nixon. We shall overcome was replaced with the vicious “Southern Strategy;” the Cold War exploded in hot jungles; then came the idiot wasteland of the regimes of Ford and Carter and Reagan and Clinton and Bushes, a degenerative march as the machine of America rusted and died.

And here we are today, begging for spare parts from China and my daughter glued to YouTube videos of Lady Ga-Ga’s crotch, and my son slicing off a cop’s head in Grand Theft Auto and a President, telegenic and painfully hollow, playing the lost and ineffectual shepherd over an electorate divided between the terrified and the greedy. In place of prophets, we are offered a caravan of kvetching clowns piling out of the Volkswagen on MSNBC.

Jerome David Salinger 1919-2010

Well, it’s better than a real job, but no less “phony,” no less of a petty illusion.

I’m holding this book, the brown wrapper lost who the hell knows when, and I know it would just be laughable, inscrutably ancient to those wisened, worldly children of mine.

I’ve put it back on my shelf.

You stand on the cliff edge and there’s no one left to catch.

I have read that sages in every era have mourned their time’s descent from past intentions and glories. Perhaps all these sages (including Palast and, immodestly, me) are fuddy-duddies.

Perhaps, in the present instance, not.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The Stupidification of America continues unabated.

Irving R. Levine died Friday, an intelligent journalist whose thoughtful, clearly articulated reports educated and explained difficult political and economic topics for almost 50 years. But the obituary I read focused on Levine’s bow tie and middle initial rather than on the caliber of his reportage. America craves infotainment.

Written by the Washington Post‘s Patricia Sullivan, it reads like something out of Obits for Dummies. Almost half of Ms. Sullivan’s 666-word review of Levine’s worthy life dwells on the minutiae that made him a character rather than the work that made him a respected journalist. Some excerpts:

WASHINGTON — Irving R. Levine, the balding, bow-tied correspondent for NBC News whose insistent use of his middle initial amused viewers even as he informed them of economic news and world affairs, died Friday at the Washington Home hospice of complications from prostate cancer. He was 86.

Levine’s unabashedly old-fashioned delivery, his bow ties and his middle initial made him a distinctive personality amid the younger, blow-dried correspondents.

He owned 103 bow ties, and he had the longest-running signoff in television news. “Irving R. Levine, NBC News, Rome,” took a full six seconds, a producer once said, and Levine could turn the word Rome into three syllables.

One busy news day, as NBC Nightly News producers were struggling to shave seconds from the program, Levine was asked to drop his middle initial. “I’d rather drop the ‘B’ in NBC,” he replied.

In 1981, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush noted the “sex symbols” at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “Diane Sawyer, Jane Pauley, Leslie Stahl, Irving R. Levine. … Wherever Irving goes, female groupies beg for a lock of his bow tie.” Eight years later, actress Candice Bergen, in the role of a TV news anchor on the sitcom “Murphy Brown,” was said to have had “the hots for Irving R. Levine.”

He accepted multiple jests in good humor, and in 2001 he wrote an essay in the New York Times welcoming the return of the middle initial with the election of George W. Bush as president.

Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Nancy J. Levine of Washington; three children, Jeffrey C.B. Levine and Daniel Rome Levine, both of Chicago, and Jennifer J. Levine of Chevy Chase, Md.; a sister; and three grandchildren, all of whom use their middle initials.

News reporting used to be intelligent and unbiased (think Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley, John Chancellor, et al.). There was once serious talk of drafting Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”) for a presidential run. Now we have Fox News and MSNBC vying for the anchor-clown award.

Here is Levine at work in 1971 (starts at 0:40):

Irving R. Levine deserved better (click here for a more thoughtful review of his life and work…written before his death).  He was a careful, serious journalist.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

-

*    *    *

But perhaps these two Great Men were not born on the same day. Darwin’s birth was in a time zone five hours later than Lincoln’s. If “date of birth” is defined by calendar, then the two men were born on the same calendar day. But if Baby Abe was born later than 7 p.m. in that little log cabin near what is now Hodgenville, Kentucky, then it was already February 13 where Baby Darwin lay in Shrewsbury, England. Similarly, if Infant Charles took Breath One earlier than 5 a.m., then it was still February 11 in Kentucky. Accordingly, to be safe, I am posting this a day early.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Up here in the country, the world gets a used-up look a day or two after a February snowfall. Dust drifts over the fields from the dry roads, the corn stubble begins to poke through, and the plows have left a margin of gritty slush and knocked down a mailbox or two. All the more reason to look for those moments just after a snowfall, when the snow is not yet public, when it has only been tracked by an animal or two out on the ice and in the fields.

I never see a truly straight track. There is always a bend in it, as if curiosity was a kind of lateral gravity, always pulling the creature off course. But then I remember that “off course” is a human conceit. Judging by the tracks I see, there is no going so hard that one has to go straight. I can’t begin to guess what was gathered in the meander of a “foxprint” along the river ice. The fox knows, and that’s enough.

I don’t know why the sight of fresh tracks in the snow elates me. Perhaps it’s just the reminder that, minus the human footprint, this is still a world of animal trails. Over the fields, the hawks are laboring in an absence of updrafts. Is that how the year divides for them? A season of thermals rising over the dark earth, and a season when the snow seems to capture the wind and hold it down? Out on the lake-ice, the anglers are sitting on upturned buckets, the bold ones having snowmobiled to their holes. And yet they tested the ice with no more sophistication than the deer I saw walking across Piney Creek in Wyoming a week ago. You ease out onto the surface and see what gives.

I’ve grown used to the sullen light at last, and I find myself hoping for another storm, another chapter in a private winter. But the south-facing slopes are starting to melt quickly, and the skunks are almost certainly starting to think about breeding. Soon the male skunks will be out on the roads, and February will have come in earnest.

John Updike 1932-2009

chullo hat

[Updike] was, above all, a maker of sentences, one of the very best. You can read him for his books, but it’s better to read him for his sentences, any one of which — anywhere — can rise up to startle you with its wry perfection.

…which well describes Klinkenborg’s own writing.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Having been mesmerized by Feynman’s brilliance and wit during his talk on Relativity a couple of weeks earlier, we 26 science/math nerds were energized when he began by asking us to…

“Imagine that you have a machine into which you can insert your hands, and everything you do is replicated at the other end of this machine by another pair of mechanical hands, but at one-tenth scale. Forget about friction, mechanical slop, and so forth.”

Eyes wide, we all did that.

“Then, use that machine to build an identical machine, so that your mechanical hands build another that is one-tenth the size. Hook them together in series, and repeat this four more times, so that you have a chain of six. At the far end, your actions will be reduced to by a factor of one million. Now build a replica of a Black & Decker power drill with a quarter-inch drill bit. Insert the bit and then drill a hole in a piece of plastic. At the far end, your one-millionth-scale power drill will drill a one-millionth-scale hole in its tiny piece of plastic. Right?”

He looked out at us for a response. Was this a trick question? Was it even an interesting question? We knew he was he driving at something, but not one of us knew what that was.

Before you read further, ask yourself the same question: what happens at the small end of your machine?

[Quiz show thinking music goes here.]

[...continues...]

[Time's up.]

The answer is…nothing. No hole.

Some actions do not scale down.

Feynman explained: “Let’s say that your full-scale power drill operates at 3,000 rpm. That means that a quarter-inch bit, which has a circumference of pi times a quarter-inch–just over 2.3 inches–lays about 7,000 inches of cutting edge against the plastic per minute. That’s more than enough to cut through plastic. But the circumference of the tiny drill bit is 2.3 times ten to the minus six, and since it’s still operating at 3,000 rpm, you have only 7 times ten to the minus three cutting inches hitting the plastic per minute, one-millionth as much. Clearly not enough to cut through plastic.”

We sat silently digesting this.

“Size scales, angular velocity does not. To get equal cutting edge against the plastic, your tiny drill would have to rotate one million times faster than the big drill.”

He then described several other oddities about “smallness,” but I was still thinking about that little drill.

Feynman was a fountain of unusual insights. I wish I could remember what else he said.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

I had been selected as one of 26 boys to attend the Summer Science Program (SSP) in Ojai, CA. SSP was formed in 1959 in association with Caltech, Stanford, Harvard-Smithsonian, UCLA, and several other institutions. Still operating today, SSP is one of the world’s oldest and most academically challenging summer programs for top high school science students. Its mission has always been to select extraordinarily promising high school juniors, those most capable of careers in the academically challenging sciences, and immerse them in, inform them about, and intrigue them with scientific, intellectual, and career options. Using astronomy as a focus because it is rarely taught as a formal high school course, SSP’s ambitious summer program almost always pushes these students beyond anything they have previously experienced and gives them a taste of real research, inspiring most to seek careers in the sciences.

Feynman began his talk by commenting, “Some people say that only seven people in the world truly understand relativity. That is incorrect. There is only only one.” He paused for a moment, then continued with neither a smile nor wink, “Me.”

His talk was challenging; the light of clear understanding did not illuminate my thoughts. Humbled, I looked at my fellow SSPers. Most seemed as lost as I, but a few asked brilliant questions that Feynman answered with expansions that made the questions relevant to larger topics. After an hour, Feynman asked if we had any more questions…questions on any scientific topic. For the next 45 minutes, he demonstrated a brilliant command of everything a group of teenage nerds might be curious about. Captivated by the exchanges, I had been silent. Finally I thought of something to ask.

“Professor Feynman, there’s a probability problem that I’ve been unable to solve. My father plays a solitaire game where you turn over the first card and say ‘Ace.’ If it’s an ace, you lose. You then turn over the next card and say, ‘Deuce.’ If it’s a deuce, you–”

Feynman interrupted, “It’s about e to the fourth to one. ”

“Huh?”

“The odds,” Feynman continued, “are approximately e to the fourth to one. That’s just about 55-1 against winning.”

“You’ve played this game?” I asked.

“No, I just figured it out. Let me show you.” He picked up chalk and wrote rapidly, explaining as he put up equations and symbols that I really didn’t comprehend. When he finished, he turned back to me and said, “I was wrong when I said ‘approximately.’ Actually, e to the fourth to one is correct.”

Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe said of Feynman, “There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician.”

Feynman died 20 years ago. He was the smartest person I ever met. He came back to give a second lecture that summer in 1960. I’ll describe it in my next post.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

My parents were flesh to me, as were both grandmothers. I never knew either grandfather, but they are romance and tragedy to imagine. My mother’s father married cold, burned to gamble, and died self-handedly a fervent Socialist; my father’s married better, yearned to gambol in Yiddish theatre, and also died too young. Neither was fulfilled. I can’t know them; they are a thin dream. And in their dry traces, I find myself…reliving. We are ever children, and ever children of our parents, even as our parents become children to us. After my mother’s mild stroke, I became caretaker in both relative-directions.

Beyond grandparents the flesh turns to mythology. Of the eight greats, there are only three of whom I know anything. My father’s father came to America in 1897, and from him comes, in a bizarre fashion, the Cotler name (cf. blog post Ellis Island Vignette). My mother’s mother, not a Cotler and therefore blessed with the ability to tell a story of normal length, lovingly described her parents to me. First because they were flesh to her, and she could still feel their gentle touch deep into her last decade…and second because I am named for them both. But my grandmother is gone now, and all I have of her parents are two photographs and a few adjectives imparted to me as a child. Earlier than these three I have only names and a single anecdote of a three-greats-grandmother. Before that is my vanishing point.

For all of us, beyond a few generations the ancestors are just names and stories, devoid of emotional content except for the hubristic nonsense gained by reaching back to the family tree branch on which sits that one man on the Mayflower or that one woman who was third in line to the Hapsburg throne. Far more important is the African woman we call Mitochondrial Eve, our matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA), the mother of us all. This is not a new discovery. Researchers first postulated a common ancestor based on mitochondrial DNA transmission in the 1980s.

There are actually two types of DNA in our cells: nuclear DNA (which resides in cell nuclei) and mitochondrial DNA (which resides in the mitochondria, one type of cell organelle). Nucleic DNA determines what and who we are. It’s the stuff in chromosomes. Mitochondria are the bodies in cells that produce the energy that enables life. They resemble bacteria, and most scientists believe that a billion years ago they were bacteria…and were captured by other cells, creating a symbiotic relationship that led to higher forms of life. But unlike nucleic DNA, which comes from both sperm and ovum, mitochondrial DNA is passed down only through the ovum. This means that all children have the same mitochondrial DNA as their mothers who have the same as their mothers who have the same as….

If a woman has no offspring or only sons, her mitochondrial DNA is lost. Therefore, by examining the genome of women around the world and using the predictable rate of mutations of mitochondrial DNA (which is actually less frequent than nucleic DNA), scientists have concluded that about 140,000-200,000 years ago, there must have existed a woman to whom every human now on earth is related: Mitochondrial Eve.

This does not mean that she was the only female human alive back then; she is not a Biblical Eve. Estimates are that there were about 20,000 humans in or around her community. Mitochondrial Eve is unique in that she was the only woman living at that time whose line of daughters is unbroken to the present day.

Back beyond the vanishing point is darkness and the prejudice that comes from skin-deep, ethnic pride. Far beyond that darkness was Mitochondrial Eve. And through her we are all African. We are all human. We are all related.

Greetings, cousin.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

I grew up in California in the 50′s, graduating from high school in 1961, only 16 years after World War II ended. So how was it possible that in all my classes there was not one mention of the internment of Americans of Japanese descent?

Some of these forgotten or overlooked episodes eventually do get remembered. Some never do because of politics, prejudice, embarrassment, and in the case of Bulgarian independence, lack of interest. Americans, provincials we are in the main, simply do not care much about Bulgaria…or even know where it is (see above, Bulgaria in green).

The recent declaration of independence by Kosovo got me thinking about the Balkans and how the roads of conquest and domination have passed through southeastern Europe for centuries.

And then I discovered Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, a farm boy born in Pigeon Roost Ridge, Ohio, in 1844, who became the one of the most famous reporters of the 19th Century. His exploits are charted in Famous War Correspondents By Frederic Lauriston Bullard, published in 1914 by Little, Brown and Company, a scan of which I read online.

Januarius MacGahan (1844-1877)

In Brussels, MacGahan met a representative of The New York Herald and talked his way into a job as a special correspondent. His subsequent descriptions of France’s disastrous defeat in Switzerland in 1870 and interviews with leading statesmen of France (Léon Gambetta, Louis Blanc, and Victor Hugo) attracted wide attention in America and Europe. Bullard writes: “The behavior of the young American throughout those days of peril, his courage, tact and industry, made him famous…. He sent out graphic and accurate letters which were copied by the papers of many countries.”

The most famous “embedded” British reporter of the time, Archibald Forbes, said of MacGahan, “Of all the men who have gained reputation as war correspondents, I regard MacGahan as the most brilliant.”

When France surrendered in 1871, MacGahan reported on the resulting anarchic chaos in Paris, narrowly escaping death, and was arrested as a Communist. With France executing scores of Communists, only U.S. diplomatic intervention got MacGahan released. Then, after reporting throughout Europe, in 1873 MacGahan gained international notoriety by dogging and reporting on the Russian army, without Russian permission, for hundreds of miles across the Kizil Kum desert as it attacked Muslim forces in what is now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

(Isn’t this sounding more and more like a Hollywood movie script?)

“Then, in 1876, writing now for the Daily News of London, MacGahan received a fateful assignment to cover the Turks’ pacification of Bulgarian rebels. What MacGahan found in Bulgaria, and his skill in reporting it, would do more than merely inform a curious public. It would change the course of Eastern European history.” (from Januarius A. MacGahan: Daring to Tell the Truth by Joseph E. Gannon, a short, but very well-written account on MacGahan’s life)

MacGahan’s reporting of the Turkish massacre of Bulgarian civilians in Batak (“Between the church and school there were heaps [of bodies]. The stench was fearful. … There were 3,000 bodies in the church yard and church.”) caused Britain, which had been supporting Turkey in order to balance Russian advances in the region, to abandon the Ottoman Empire, leading to the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78) and eventually to the establishment of Bulgaria as an independent country. A reporter now on a mission larger than mere reportage, MacGahan died of typhus in Constantinople in 1877. He is buried in New Lexington, Ohio, under a tombstone that reads: Liberator of Bulgaria.

To this day, MacGahan is remembered in Bulgaria; there is a street named after him in Sofia, the capital. But even though his exploits were well known during his life and for many years afterwards (Theodore Roosevelt wrote of him in Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), he is now almost entirely forgotten except in Perry County, Ohio.

The Perry County Historical Society has a readable account of his life, as does Wikipedia. There is one biography, first published in 1988 and recently reissued, by Dale Walker: Januarius MacGahan: The Life and Campaigns of an American War Correspondent.

These days, we get Wolf Blitzer.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The first month at Harvard had been manageable, although I had previously read few things more dense than a textbook. The next couple of weeks crosscut my footing with assignments in Aristotle and Piaget, and I began to teeter. I anesthetized my anxiety about insufficient studying by playing contract bridge, and on this particular night I was trolling the halls, searching for a fourth.

I had met and spoken to the chaps in Pennypacker 25 more than once, but they were exotics. They had “prepped” at Exeter, of which I knew little, but since arriving in Cambridge I had been encouraged to understand that it was one of the finest schools in the nation. I hadn’t prepped at all. I had attended Hueneme High School, notable only for its bizarre (why-KNEE-me) pronunciation. Accordingly, I assumed that Henry, Woodrow, Tom, and George were substantially more educated than I.

Woodrow rapidly became a sophomore and left the freshman dorm.

Tom drank himself into increasingly less intelligent stupors..

Henry was friendly, smiled abundantly, and appeared to study frequently.

George W. S. Trow (ca. 1974)

I knocked, entered at George’s call, and invited him to play. He was alone in the room, sitting at his desk, staring at his fingernails or perhaps nothing.

“When are you starting?” he asked brightly.

“Right now,” I responded hopefully.

“Well, if you can wait about 40 minutes, I’d love to play. But I’ve got an English paper due tomorrow.”

There was nothing in his typewriter and nothing on his desk top.

“What’s the assignment?” I asked.

“Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, but it’s only supposed to be five pages, so if you can wait….” He rolled a blank sheet around the platen of his Smith Corona.

Brer Bear, Brer Fox, and Brer Rabbit(t)

“I need some inspiration. Give me a phrase, any phrase, something to help me get started.”

A imp inside me emerged and clapped his hands gleefully. “Neon green lights,” I said without a particle of conscious thought. It was a brilliant riposte. George’s commanding superiority had been met by my own splendid and unpredictable nonsense. I glanced, watching for George to acknowledge my unreturnable cross-court point. A small smile lifted his eyes.

“Perfect,” he said and then began typing furiously.

I dropped my hand from the doorknob and walked slowly and with great curiosity toward his desk. His fingers clacked the keys, the carriage jinked left and left relentlessly, and the bell rang. I looked over his shoulder and read in disbelief:

“In Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, the past, the present, and the future come together like the neon greenness of the not-too-distant dawn.”

At that instant I was both lifted and dropped. I was in the presence of genius, and if expected to compete, I would certainly pale. I slumped and quietly left the room.

Sitting in depression on my bed 40 minutes later, I had come up with no better plan to improve my life. Contract bridge still seemed to be the short-term solution…and I was still one hand short.

I knocked on George’s door, heard the typewriter, and entered just far enough to lean on the jamb.

“Almost done,” he said without turning his head. Four typed pages were spread out on his bed, and he was three-fourths of the way down the fifth page. George’s typing stopped. I waited respectfully.

“I’m stuck,” he muttered. “I need a late-19th Century Russian critic. Someone famous in a small, but influential circle.”

He was thinking out loud, not really asking me anything. He stared at the paper. Finally I spoke. “How about Tudrus Zlutchin?” I asked, spotting a final, desperate opportunity to regain some dignity.

“Who was he?” George asked with some interest.

The hook was in. I set it. “From Nizhni Novogorod. Born circa 1835. Died 1905. His circle was undoubtedly small, but in my estimation, undoubtedly influential. And according to what has been told to me, he was very much a critic. He was my father’s father’s father.”

“Perfect,” George said and jumped back onto the keys. I walked quickly and looked over his shoulder.

He had typed:

“As Tudrus Zlutchin, obscure 19th Century Russian critic once wrote: ‘We are more products of our environment than we are of our parents.’”

George whipped the page out of the typewriter, stood, stretched, and sealed my fate, “Let’s play bridge.”

George’s paper got an “A.”

I remember him fondly and with some awe undiminished by years of very little contact. He was arch and worked at The New Yorker. But during that freshman dorm stint, before our different backgrounds separated us, he gave me what was undoubtedly meant as a compliment: “You are one of the only people who did not go to prep school that I would consider a friend.”

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.