I am a roach, too

Could Emma Roach have lived in New York's Chinatown?  (S.P.Tiley photo, c. 2007)

Fortunately, even in the 1950s and 1960s, parents didn’t totally know what their kids were doing. 

My best friend and I used to play in my grandmother’s bedroom. Why? That’s where all the good dress-up stuff was. But also, there was a telephone.

We decided, one day, that we’d do better than her cousins, who lived next door, did. They would call a candy store and ask, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” Prince Albert, for the uninitiated, was a brand of tobacco, and it came in tins and, I suppose, other forms of packaging. The answer was usually, “Yes, we do.” To which the cousins would reply, “Well, you’d better let him out before he suffocates.”

They also called random people and said it was the utility company and asked them to go see if the streetlight was on. Don’t recall what the rejoinder was supposed to be.

We wanted to be more creative than a couple of dumb boys. We got hold of the New York City telephone directory―in those days, one volume was sufficient for all five boroughs―and looked up interesting names. We found two: Emma Roach and Otto Lung.

Naturally, we called up the first name.

“Hello, is this Miss Roach?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Don’t feel bad. I am a roach, too.”

And then the second:

“Hello, is this Otto Lung?”

“Yes, it is.”

(Big intake of breath) “Ah, I can breathe again.”

That last was the punch line from a very popular TV commercial for a very popular antihistamine.

Years―decades―passed. I moved away, went to college, married, went to grad school, divorced, remarried…and moved back to New York, to Manhattan.

Emma Roach used to live there!  And so did Otto Lung.

I looked for Miss Roach in the phone book, but had no luck. I did find an Otto Lung. Was it the same Otto Lung from so long ago?  Could it be?  Would I call?

What do you think?

Old dog, ludicrous new tricks

A bona fide Holy Well, about four miles from my house. Note the road--yes, an actual UK road--approaching it. Note its massive width. This holy well is not dedicated to the patron saint of old Yank drivers living in England. If there is such a saint, please let me know.

If you had an old dog--a dog that had served you well, protected you and your family, was healthy and happy and still entertained you with her amusing tricks--would you demand that she learn new tricks just because you could?

Only if you were (tick one): A) an idiot B) a sadist C) the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) of the United Kingdom.

If you ticked all three (excuse me, but in the interest of reforming my Yank habits, I am using tick rather than check)....If you ticked all three, you would be right, although only C is truly demanded. Why, then, would you tick the other two? Because the examiners of C tend to issue trick instructions to applicants taking their practical exam, i.e., road test. I know this because:

A) On the written test (aka Theory Test, UK), there was a question regarding T junctions for which two answers were given in the official manual in different sections and BOTH were offered in the multiple choice section, but there was no way to choose both. Choosing one, however, gave you a 50-50 chance of being right. Or being wrong, as the case may be, and as my case was, giving me only a 98 on the test, not the 100 I was after.

B) My driving instructor told me today that, when negotiating a roundabout (US English: dealing with a traffic circle) the rule is that any exit from it that is directly opposite where one enters is taken from the left lane; any exit beyond the one directly opposite your entry is taken beginning in the right lane with a right turn signal, then moving to the left lane and issuing a left signal after the exit before that one...but never before that! Lest anyone mistake your intent, you see, and decide to crawl up your royal butt 100 yards early.....pant, pant, pant....but I digress.

So, my driving instructor said: "During the practical, if the examiner says (regarding a could-be-straight, could-be-slightly-right spoke off the roundabout wheel) 'Continue on this road,' then you are to regard the exit as a left/straight exit and enter from the left lane with left signaling throughout. If he says 'Take the second exit in the roundabout,' when referring to that self-same exit, then take the right lane in, signaling right, and moving over to the left after the previous exit, having checked the mirrors and given the left turn signal."

One exit, two ways to get there, two possibilities of instruction from the examiner, all the better to confuse someone already dealing with roads Americans would regard as cow paths, shifting one's perceptions and shift hand from right to left, and the demand for "green" driving practices. In effect, green driving means driving at the highest possible rate of speed in the highest possible gear. UNTIL one comes to a turn, at which point one is to make the turn in first gear (slammed right down there at 7-8 mph from 50 or so) without stalling out, double clutching, using a hand-over-hand technique on the steering wheel, but after using all three mirrors multiple times before, during and after the turn, and not hitting the cyclist who has just hit a cow pat and swerved out into the pothole in front of you, which you would ordinarily go around if a 16-wheel articulated lorry (tractor trailer to Yanks) had not just come around the next bend and was barreling toward you, its wheels barely missing the potholes on BOTH sides of the road.... (Solution: Back up a little into a "pulling off place" so the lorry can go whizzing by.)

But I digress again. This is really about roundabouts, which also pop up on one-lane roads; these should be approached as above using the left or right sides of said lane, as appropriate. There are also roundabouts with three lanes coming into them. MOST of these major roundabouts will have road markings such as a left arrow saying "Extr" (which any idiot would know meant Exeter) and a straight arrow saying Lskrd (which any idiot would know meant Liskeard, even if they didn't know how to pronounce it) and a right arrow saying Tav'stk (which any idiot would know meant Tavistock, pronunciation obvious.)

Got that? Got that part about feeding the fucking steering wheel through your hands at dead slow in gear with no clutching around acute corners, while swiveling your head through all three mirrors like Stevie Wonder on speed? Got the part about signalling at the right place, which means before your turn/exit but after any encroaching roadways on the side of the road you're headed, even if you've never been down that road before and hey, one patch of muddy track that's a street looks much like any other muddy patch of track that's a farm driveway, which doesn't count in the Signalling the Globally Perfect Moment sweepstakes.


Now then, here's another factoid or two. I have been driving for 46 years--as my instructor said, longer than he's been alive. I have never had a moving violation citation (the single one I ever got was dismissed after I pointed out the speed trap, etc., in court and agreed to pay of the State of Virginia, literally, a bounty for being STUPID enough to bother driving through a speed trap), and the only insurance claims I have had were when a deer committed suicide on my Geo and a fat lady who claimed she was going to her lung transplant doctor slammed the back of my Hyundai Accent with her monster pickup truck at the end of a controlled access highway exit.

I generally drove between 15,000 and 25,000 miles a year, in environments as disparate as New York City--Manhattan, often--and rural Georgia. And I've been doing it for 46 years.

I concluded something today, thinking about today's Drive and Despair session; I am an old dog. A safe dog, but an old one.

I was taught, by a Kennedy nephew who taught driving at my high school, to handle the steering wheel like Mario Andretti and the gear box like it was a precious Faberge egg. And now, for the next five weeks with the intent to pass this freaking test on round one, I'm going to endanger myself and everything on the road convincing my mind and body to handle the steering wheel like an old lady driver and the gear box like Mario Andretti.

Nuts.

Dinner with Frank Lloyd Wright

Kentuck Knob, a Frank Lloyd Wright house now on the National Register of Historic Places. (Wiki Commons)

One of the things missing in England is Frank Lloyd Wright. There is an installation of a room he designed, an office, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but I’ll need a lot more reasons for a London trip than viewing a single room, even if it was by Frank Lloyd Wright. London, contrary to popular belief, is not close to every other place in England. First, there are the miles and miles of two-lane roads with little motorway involvement. Second, Cornwall is about 200 miles from London. Plus one has to pay 12 pounds a day to the government to take one’s car into the city itself…But I digress.

I have always loved Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs because they are so perfect not only architecturally, but in their underlying ethos. Wright’s Usonian house idea always intrigued me; these were marvelous houses meant for the middle class, and not the filthy rich. There are only about sixty of them standing today, but one was in the Baltimore neighborhood where I lived for six years. You can see it here.

There were also, nearby, the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses, modern cubes with oddly attached roofs and stacks of glass bricks here and there on the façade, seemingly with no rhyme or reason. (I use the term façade with my tongue firmly in my cheek; to Baltimoreans, the word is fakade. I swear.) I didn’t name them Frank Lloyd Wrong houses. My late good friend the Rev. Jeffrey Proctor called them that after he moved to Baltimore; he, too, was fond of Frank Lloyd Wright, and had a lovely sense of humor.

However, this is about neither the Frank Lloyd Wright house in my larger  environment all that time, nor the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses I had to drive to get to Starbucks.

It is about elitism, and how bone-deep it seemingly is in the American moneyed class. The Old Money class, that is.

It was probably more than 30 years ago that I first became friends with a couple who lived in a swell house on Manhattan’s East Side. It was filled with museum-quality furniture and paintings. After I moved away from NYC, when I was their weekend guest, I awoke to a Courbet hung above the dresser in the room I was assigned. It certainly was fun, too, to be served the de rigueur East Side watercress soup followed by a chicken wing and a mushroom cap at the elegant dinner parties the couple hosted, parties where one might easily meet Nepalese princes and princesses, among other people born to the ermine. (At West Side parties, one actually got fed real, life-sustaining food, although those soirees lacked the monkey-suited serving guys one would encounter on the East Side.)

Still, I quite enjoyed going on the New York Garden Club tours each spring as a guest of my friend’s mother. I got to see Zubin Mehta’s house and garden one year. On those days, we always had lunch at the Summerhouse, a very preppy spot on the upper East Side.

Once, my friend and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be, as she ALWAYS put it, “culture vultures.”  I was keen to see the new installation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Francis W. Little House II Living Room.  “I can’t stand that stuff,” my friend intoned. “If you want to see it, I’ll just go and wait for you outside.”

I did want to see it, and I did see it. No accounting for taste, I thought, and thought nothing of it.

But now, on reflection, and coupled with a later incident, I have decided her distaste was not aesthetic, at least not totally, but cultural/class-based as well.

The other incident?  While disagreeing with my political views, my friend’s husband told me I was childish and used the term “you people” to denigrate my opinion. I ended the friendship over that, and not before time, I think.  

I suspect I was the house oddity for the couple, the unaccountably well-raised member of the middle-class, decently educated, slightly traveled, and with a knowledge of which fork to use. But I didn’t fit intrinsically into their world, just as Frank Lloyd Wright, with his ideas of a decent bit of ground and some lovely furnishings for all, didn’t fit. (NOTE: Wright wasn’t a universal egalitarian. His ideas descended only down through the middle-class, but that was better than most architects of his day, who thought only about the wealthy and their needs).

Regarding its Wright room, the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the house from which it came “is composed of a group of low pavilions interspersed with gardens and terraces, which, in plan, radiate from a central symbolic hearth.” Wright took into account the architectural/cultural lexicon of a few thousand years, making the ancient concept of the cultural heart/hearth move onward through the Roman vernacular of rooms for specific uses, to the thoroughly modern concept that a home should be an organic whole.

That is not so, of course, in the homes of America’s upper classes. They are not now, and never were, organic wholes. There would have to be separations so that servants would not forget their place, so that mere tradesmen should be forced to use a rear entrance, while invited gentry used the front. (Visiting the house of George Bernard Shaw last weekend, I learned that he refused to use the servant bells in his house; he both believed and lived his socialist ideals, in direct contravention of British upper crust mores, which the American upper crust was aping.)

Upper crust houses have not historically featured flowing spaces, meant to put residents and guests at ease as in a Wright house. Rather, the upper crust manse will feature defined and delimited areas, entry to which denotes one’s position in the hierarchy of the family or in society at large. Admission to the kitchen meant one was a servant; houseguests, of course, could also enter to get a glass of milk before bed and so on, being temporary “family.”

Usonian houses did have separate dining rooms, or at the very least, dining areas. And the kitchen itself conformed to the upper class ideal; it was place where the work of cooking and cleaning up was done, and was not appropriate for guests. Not because kitchen work is inferior and should be reserved only for servants, but because dinner guests are to be pampered and honored in return for the conversation and liveliness the contribute to the occasion. Although he was an egalitarian, Wright drew the line at imposing a host’s tasks on guests--a line I do retain in common with my ex-friend--and kept the kitchen where it belongs, as a separate room.

Unlike my friend, I could easily live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, should I ever be fortunate enough for the gods of civilization to bestow one upon me. And everyone, from the man cleaning the gutters to Prince Charles, would be invited in the front door and given some refreshment on the good china.* Indeed, it has never once occurred to me to treat tradesmen/women any differently than I would treat Prince Charles. As my mother used often to say, they all put their knickers on one leg at a time. (Actually, she said, “What, they pee perfume?”  We got the message.)

Her message was that it doesn’t matter who you are, but what you are matters very much. Who you are is denoted by whether you live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house,  a mansion on Manhattan’s East Side, a Frank Lloyd Wrong house, my house, or a tent. Or your car, these days. One’s estate is not what one is; it merely represents one’s current state of finance, something that changes over time for everyone. Everyone. Even my fine friends had to sell some paintings to afford schools for their kids, darn fine schools, but still….And in the end, when they couldn’t afford the inheritance taxes on that fine East Side pile of bricks, they had to rent it out and move to the hinterlands.

But you know what? They are doubtless still referring to those they perceive to be of lesser estate as “you people.” The great unwashed. Yup. The rest of us.  I’m one of “you people,” and proud of it.

But I still wouldn’t mind if the gods of bricks and mortar dropped a bona fide Frank Lloyd Wright house in my back garden.

* Ludicrous thought, as is “good silver.” If you and your family aren’t good enough for the good china, who is? Reverse snobbery…against yourself. If you don’t regularly use the silver, you’ll have to polish it by the time you get it out of the drawer. Far better to regularly use your “stuff” I think.

Love-Hate Affair: Unions in America, up close and personal

NOTE: Union firings rise during Republican administrations. (Wiki Commons)

I grew up in a household in which the eldest male, my grandfather, was a Republican accountant who believed only in business and making one’s own way. He espoused the truisms of the time: it’s not what you know but who you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps…and so on. He was a successful man, and a bold one, having moved his wife and three teen-to-20s daughters into a house in a German neighborhood during WWII; his name was Harry Stillman. Any way you look at it, he wasn’t likely to be welcomed by a neighborhood friendly to the Nazi regime.

The second eldest male was my father, a man lacking even a high school diploma who nevertheless had secured a technical job with the Bell System. He was smart, though, and unaccountably cultured. He liked opera and red roses and mahogany wood. But Nicholas G. Box was a member of a union, the Communications Workers of America. He credited them with the excellent salary and benefits he had, at a time when all my friends’ fathers worked very hard for a lot less in the way of emoluments. My high school guidance counselors thought we were rich because my parents drove late-model cars, I never lacked for money for school trips, and my clothes--and I had more than most, being somewhat interested in fashion at the time--were not bought at the local 1960s version of Wal-Mart, but at mid-level department stores.

Union bugs

We were not rich, but we had much more than the families whose breadwinner did not belong to a union. My father was not bold; he worked hard and kept his mouth shut. And he appreciated his union. 

For many years―because I had been infected with 1960s knee-jerk liberalism (since transmogrified, I hope, into something more compassionate)―I believed my father was wrong, that everything in life really depended upon one’s own initiative, as it had for my grandfather. Harry had gone to college but didn’t graduate. The family story was that he pushed over an outhouse with one of the early female students in it and got expelled. I figure it was something a lot more rascally than that, in truth. (He never pulled a punch. When one of my uncles complained of a headache, Gramp would calmly tell him it was impossible since he had nothing to get a headache in.) But Gramp worked as both an accountant and a chemist in New York State’s dairy industry anyway, and set up a milk cartel that took 50 years to break. The cartel, oddly enough, favored the producers―the farmers―and not the milk industry. And after he retired, the school he didn’t graduate from, the State University of New York at Albany as it had become―asked if they could claim him as a graduate. Answer: Hell no.

As it turns out, both of my father and maternal grandfather were, in their own way, self-made men. And both, obviously, were champions of the laboring class and the small business class; Grandpa never worked for a Kraft-size organization, but for co-operatives and small packagers of milk products. And there was that farmer-friendly cartel!

Old Dixie never died

It took moving to Georgia to attend graduate school at the University of Georgia in Athens to shift me from dyed-in-the-wool anti-unionist (despite my other liberalism) to union supporter. My first job, at the (Athens) Daily News, exposed me to the horrors that constituted the working man’s life in Georgia, a rabidly non-union state. I was badly affected by the plights I came across almost daily in developing stories for the newspaper. Since I was still taking courses while working, I went to see a university shrink. (I should have realized that what one gets for "free" is worth exactly that.) Perhaps the plenitude of Bulldog images decorating the shrink's office should have been a clue. However, what he told me after my revelation that the local business culture disturbed me, sickened me really, was that I had a “Joan of Arc complex.”

I didn’t laugh out loud; my mother had raised me to be polite. But I left that man’s presence as quickly as I could, never to return. I’d like to say that I got over my distress about the workingman's plight, but I didn’t. Indeed, I became a bigger and bigger union supporter, at the same time also favoring independent actions to improve one’s own life whenever possible. 

But I had to face it: without concerted action by a number of people, there are many functions in the economy that will never be bested by individual action. 

Limits to independent action
For example, as a writer, I can―to a certain extent―name my price if I’m any good. But if I were an auto machinist, would that be true, even a bit?  I think not.  It is only in creative and management/executive work that individual action has any hope of success for improving worklife and benefits. In laboring arenas, that's not so true, as anyone who has had a lemon of a new car will tell you; industrial work is essential and needs to be done well by someone who cares, if only because that work is allowing them to live well and raise their families in comfort and dignity. Sometimes that’s all that’s interesting about some industrial jobs; taking the prospect of a decent life out of the equation is not only stupid, but cruel.

And yet, that’s where we are, at least in America’s Midwest, and especially Wisconsin. Those numerous Americans who have always kept America humming are having the wind knocked out of them by a bunch of tuneless, gormless politicians whose understanding of their own culture and world economics makes George W. Bush look like an international affairs genius. And whose self-regard and cruelty make the juggernaut of a Pol Pot look compassionate and expansive, to use hyperbole to make the point.

It is not acceptable to bash unions. It is tantamount to snatching food from babies’ mouths, sending fragile populations into despair and misery and death. It is unworthy of America. And it must stop.

Cat flap or Scilly Isles? Silly question

Romeo, as a pre-teen cat in Maryland

There's turf torn up in my back garden; the consensus is that a badger did it. I quite like badgers, with their striped heads and pudgy brown bodies. I have thought of them, since we moved to England, as sort of like distant cousins of the raccoon, one of my favorite woodland creatures in the U.S.

Not anymore. This morning, the carpenter arrived to install our cat flap. This being an English house of brand-new construction, it isn't three-foot-thick stone walls holding up the roof, but it is four-inches of concrete, then about six inches of air space/insulation, then framing and board and hand-applied plaster.

Not anymore. At least not right next to the french doors leading from our living room to the deck, from which we can see a great deal of the Tamar Valley (thought not the river itself, hidden by rolling hills), the edge of Dartmoor and Brentor, where a 12th century church (St. Michael de Rupe) perches right at the peak. There is now a hole in the walls through which our cat, if he desires, can exit to have a look at the Tamar Valley and Brentor. I don't think he'd be interested in the church, being, like all cats, something of a heathen.

Badgers: There's a reason they're called badgers
But there is the badger problem. The carpenter told us badgers are nowhere near as cute as they look. They'll attack cats and dogs. Oh my. Mr. Cat--real name Romeo--is a lover, not a fighter. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe our wussycat will dash in his cat flap rather than confront a much larger fellow with fangs and racing stripes up the side of his head. Mr. Cat, having been an indoor/outdoor cat for most of his life in rural Maryland, has been an indoor cat now for about 15 months. When we lived in the flat in Tavistock, he could have gone easily out a picture window to the car park, and thence over a wall to other folk's gardens. But if he got around front, he'd have been at the mercy of cars at the top of West Street, where they flew by hoping to get a good space to park before anyone else did. Especially on Friday nights when the young people were eager to bend their elbows at a few popular music pubs. So we never let him out and he got used to it.

But since we moved into the house, he can more easily smell the fresh air. And he hears the birds chirping in the hedgerow that forms the western boundary of the garden. He'd quite like to taste an English robin, I think. When I went out to water some new plants not yet assigned a permanent place in the garden (and awaiting a sunny day for planting for my benefit), Romeo stood up on the french doors and piteously yowled. I know he wants to go out. Badly. By afternoon today, he should be able to. The wonderful carpenter is making a nice little vestibule for the cat in the wall behind the cat flap, with carpet on the bottom. I shouldn't wonder if Romeo asks for a lamp in it sometime. We've already discussed having the carpenter create a little awning, about 18 inches above the deck, over the cat flap so Romeo can sit out there and watch the rain. He loved to sit in the bark mulch behind the plants under our very wide eaves in Maryland and watch the rain. But this is a three-storey house, and the eaves are too high up to protect him.

What we do for love
Yes, it is nuts. We could have had a nice trip to the Scilly Isles for what this cat flap is costing. But this is England, where people are barmy over their pets. Do we need to pretend to be sane Americans about this? Do we need to soft-pedal our devotion to our domestic critters?

Not anymore.