Dirty Money?

            Two recent news items have come together in my mind and forced me to think about the idea of filthy lucre.  The first is actually an anecdotal report from a friend of mine who recently spent some leisure time in Greece.  Through a friend of a friend she was invited to join a crowd of the glitterati for a day or two’s island-hopping aboard a huge and expensive yacht belonging to an international celebrity.  Among their hops was an island where an even richer guy has developed a commercial playground offering a kind of permanent “spring break” venue for Euroyouth: a sort of Coney Island as designed by the Magus—thousands of scantily clad, boozed up kids “dancing” in a shallow pool.  The second episode, this one prominent in the press, was the effort by protestors to force the Louvre to remove the name Sackler from the wing of the museum the Sackler family largely financed.  Some of the Sacklers, who have been huge philanthropic donors, especially to museums, have amassed a fortune in the pharmaceutical business on the sales of Oxycontin.

            Is there such a thing as “dirty money”?  The term “filthy lucre” is after all biblical.  Milton called gold the “precious bane,” or poison.  There is a long history of very rich people with troubled consciences trying to make symbolic restitution through charitable bequests.  This practice has undoubtedly on more than one occasion been encouraged by the charitable recipients.  One of the great gems of Italian Gothic art is the Arena Chapel in Padua, famous for its Giotto frescos.  This building is also known as the Scrovegni Chapel.  The Scrovegni family was alleged to have made its fortune out of usury.  Usury was the lending of money at interest.  Though now called “the American way of life”, it was regarded in the thirteenth-century dawn of contemporary banking practice as a horrible sin.  It is believed that a Scrovegni heir undertook the chapel project in hope of expiation of the sins of his sire.  The Franciscans, whose iconography provides the decorative scheme of the chapel, were particularly ferocious in their denunciation of usury.  Somewhat later in the fourteenth century Chaucer’s venal friar encourages money gifts as actual evidence of repentance.  “For unto a povre ordre for to yive”—thus does the poet ventriloquize the friar’s thoughts—“is signe that a man is well yshryve”.  There is a very fine Victorian church in a small city in the southern English Midlands.  It has a proper ecclesiastical dedication to some saint or other, but it is known locally as “Phipp’s Fire Escape”, Phipps being a local beer baron who had bankrolled the new building in response to charges from Temperance agitators that he was largely responsible for the scourge of working-class alcoholism in the area. 

filthy lucre in an old Dutch misericord

            At least two distinct questions are raised by these anecdotes.  One of them—can financial contributions to worthy causes expiate the unworthy means by which the money was accrued?—is a theological question I lack the competence, no less than the inclination, to approach.  The second, fully relevant even in our relentlessly secular age, is this: Is there such a thing as dirty money?  This seems to me by no means a question easy to answer.  We might begin in the manner of Aquinas by arguing that there must be dirty money since, in the account of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, the ecclesiastical authorities refused to accept for the Temple treasury the thirty pieces of silver thrown down by the repentant Judas because it was “the price of blood”—literally the statutory financial recompense for manslaughter.  The consensus of early philosophers and theologians alike, however, was that things, inanimate objects, were morally indifferent.  A knife could be used to cut a loaf of bread or to cut a man’s throat—the morality of the action was determined by the use to which the knife was put and the human volition animating that use.  The ecclesiastical authorities who would not put “the price of blood” into the Temple treasury were willing to use it to purchase land for the burial of paupers.

            Here the examples of my opening paragraph become relevant.  I presume that neither yacht owners, nor playground developers, nor the manufacturers of Oxycontin have done anything illegal.  But whereas the most conspicuous private consumption of the super-rich elicits at worst private disgust, the public philanthropy of the Sacklers becomes the occasion of international protest.  As an avid museum-goer, one of whose favorite venues is the Sackler Museum of Asian Art in Washington, I am extremely grateful to be able to see, along with any other interested art lovers, beautiful things that I would never have the opportunity to see were they to be monopolized by rich collectors.  The Sacklers could have spent that money on a yacht or a Greek island, or probably a small flotilla of yachts and a small archipelago, for their own private use and enjoyment.  There would have been no protestors in Paris, or, I dare say, anywhere else.  The public use to which they put a large chunk of their private fortune seems to me unequivocally to be preferred, from the moral point of view, to any number of private uses they could have chosen.

An unpleasant thought from the Scrovegni Chapel

            There were huge intellectual changes between the time of the Scrovegnis and the beer baron Phipps.  But even in Victorian times many people believed in a version of the Last Judgment, and acted upon that belief.  They sought a “fire escape” through conspicuous public good works.  By the time of Jay Gatsby,  one of our earlier and distinctively American start-up legends for whom a strange romantic yearning has replaced traditional morality, protocols of social snobbery might make one eager to conceal the sources of one’s wealth, even if they were legal.  "I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either one now."  Still I find it hard to credit the idea of dirty money.  I have a few twenty dollar bills in my wallet.  I have no idea whether their last temporary users were stick-up men or sex traffickers.  Obviously, I hope not, for aesthetic reasons if no others, but the bank-notes themselves are indifferent tokens in a conventional sign system.  They have no moral status independent of the use to which I put them.        

The Arkansas Toothpick Test

Earlier in the year, the legislature of my home state passed a resolution making it official.  The Bowie knife is the official state knife of Arkansas.  I actually didn’t know that there were official state knives, but in this instance the legislative effort was fully justified.  The nickname of the Bowie knife has for at least a century and a half been “an Arkansas toothpick.”  In 1837, at a session of the House, in the middle of a debate concerning the taxation of wolf pelts, the Speaker stepped down from the podium and, using this implement, stabbed a fellow representative to death.  While one can hardly take pride in such history, one can and must find some comfort.  When I hear about “unparalleled political polarization” or “unprecedented refusal to seek legislative compromise,” I can subject the evidence to the Arkansas Toothpick Test.  So far nothing that has happened or not happened in the admittedly disgraceful 115^th and 116^th Congresses—public approval ratings ranging between nine and thirteen percent—has passed the Toothpick Test.

I try to apply the Toothpick Test also to the increasingly numerous incidents of supposed “constitutional crisis” in our political reports.  We are in that huge swath of the North American continent that is just emerging from a ferocious heat wave, and I had for a couple of days a slight viral something or other that I dare not offend by taking lightly.  Luke and his two kids, accompanied by their older cousin Cora, left for Montreal Saturday morning, and enabled by General Motors refrigeration engineers, reached their destination safely before nightfall.  Settling into a Sunday indolence I dignified as therapeutic, I spent a long while reading the “Weekly Review” section of the Times.  Almost all of the actual Op-Ed pages are taken up with blistering denunciations of President Trump and/or the entire Republican Party.  There is nothing very new here, and that is the point.  The New York Times, by any rational judgment one of the world’s great newspapers, has become as partisan, repetitive, and fulminating as all the rest of the national press.  The Times is of course “left.”  Many other voices are on the “right”.  They shout at, and about, each other.  The PBS “News Hour” sort of continues its brave façade of impartiality, but with increasing difficulty.

I have discovered that there is a great deal of chatter on the Internet concerning the question of civil war--whether one is possible in current America, whether it has not already begun.  Not all of the chatter is entirely loony.  Our actual Civil War of the 1860s, which was by no means without its ideological complexities, was motivated with a certain clarity.  It was sectional and closely related to the distinctive economies of North and South and in particular the southern agrarian economy and the institution of slavery that enabled it.  A very large part of the wealth of the southern states was in human property.  The Framers of the Constitution had notoriously attempted to accommodate the institution of slavery without exactly enshrining it.  Political unity, however attenuated, was a goal so desired as to enable a kind of cosmic wishful thinking, from which one might say we have not yet entirely broken free even today.

The comparative clarity of 1860 is gone today.  Today’s war-gamers generally speak of Blues and Reds, but these groups are by no means identical to our two main political parties which, we are forced to note, have in a sense exchanged valences from the Old Days.  The differences between the groups are still to a degree regional, but by no means cleanly so.  Economic, social, educational, and cultural disparities and divergences play a major role. The role of race, so prominent in popular rhetoric, is actually rather opaque.  The salient differences between 1860 and now are dramatic, and include the following.  Our populated territory is now huge.  Its population is huge.  It is also about eighty percent urbanized.  Comparatively few Americans today have any direct role in their own food production.  There is a vast armory—hundreds of millions of guns—distributed among the population.  All sections of the country are dependent upon cooperation with others, but this is particularly true of the cities, which in gross generalization tend in their political organization to the Blue, often dark Blue.  Were there (God forbid!) an actual new civil war, such factors could preclude organized armies in uniforms and most other things we think of when we think “war”—most but the horrors, that is.  And they reveal large advantages for the Reds.

Several political commentators have spoken of a metaphorical “civil war” already underway.  But the violent political discourse of past few years has invited even some of my intelligent and knowledgeable compatriots to imagine not metaphors but frightful realities.  I should have thought that one 1858 was sufficient for our nation.   The Impossible, it appears, perhaps isn’t after all.  We are perhaps closer to the discourse of the Arkansas Toothpick than I had imagined.  Toothpicks remind me that today’s unpleasantnesses begin with an early dental appointment; but just as soon as I get back I intend to watch the appearance of Mr. Mueller before his congressional inquisitors.  On PBS.

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Stamp-ede

      

 Some raw materials

          Like most of the other good things in my life, my involvement with the “arts of the book” was a serendipitous development.  In the early years of my teaching career at Princeton I found myself charged with the leadership of an undergraduate residential college.  We sponsored social events, visiting lecturers and other gatherings that we advertised chiefly through broadside posters.  We had a modest budget, and printing costs seemed very high to me.  I had the thought that if I went over to the undergraduate typography lab I might find the equipment and the instruction that would allow us to make our own posters.  One thing led to another, and by 1970 Joan and I were the proprietors of a private press and the new best friends of several aspiring poets.

            It is but a short step from printing sheets for a book and binding them in a finished form.  Though I never aspired to be an “art” binder, I did master the basic techniques tolerably well.  I bound the hand-painted copies of one of my own scholarly books, now a valuable rarity.  More friends appeared—little old church ladies with disbound family Bibles, undergraduates with over-read copies of the favorites of their childhood, Winnie the Pooh or Le petit prince.

I took up the challenge of odd-sized remnants of binder’s board, especially as that commodity kept increasing in price.  So I developed a lively trade in coasters, religious votive images, and place mats.  We have Chaucer place mats, Giotto place mats.  For my son Luke, an admirer of Chagall, I made a set of Chagalls.  Like most other American boys of my generation I went through an early phase of stamp-collecting.  It went nowhere, and I soon lost interest; but it meant that like most other boys of my generation I continued through adolescence and early youth to have somewhere among my stored possessions a few hundred worthless but panchromatic postage stamps from the thirties and forties.  I made a particularly successful table decoration cum trivet covered in stamps; and it is still usable, if barely, after twenty-five years.  The idea behind this was originally etymological.  While living in Italy for a while in the seventies I came to appreciate what I should have grasped in English from the Stamp Act—namely the eventual identity of printing and stamping.

The original prototype after decades of bearing the weight of hot casseroles 

About fifteen years before that we had inherited a mighty if moldy antique dining table—total surface with all leaves in about twenty-five square feet.  Eventually, in consultation with my granddaughter Sophia, then aged about nine, it was agreed that what that table needed was a huge protective cover made of triple sheets of heavy binder’s board and covered with lacquered postage stamps.  So I began buying up junk stamps at yard sales and on eBay, where they used to sell by the pound.  The stamps piled up, but the work of art never quite did.   "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”  Sophia, who recently celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday, is now a high tech exec resident in the trendiest part of Brooklyn and Living the Life.  Twenty-five square feet of pasted stamps is no longer high on the agenda for her either.

But it just so happens that at the moment Luke and Melanie, accompanied by young John Henry and his even young sister Hazel, have been visiting us from Montreal.  We have had many happy high jinks, including a brilliant stay at the beach alluded to in my last non-post.  Melanie has now had to return north on pressing domestic business, but Luke and the kids are here for a few days more.  Casting his eye upon the original and by now very well-worn postal “trivet,” Luke came up with a brilliant idea.  How would it be if, when he takes off for Montreal on Friday, he were to have among his luggage a set of six brand-new postal table mats—a surprise gift for Melanie?  We have so many stamps that each individual mat could be “thematic”, reflecting Melanie’s feminist, ornithological, historical, and archaeological interests.  There is a lot of work involved in such a project, especially when undertaken under time pressure; and we agreed there must be a division of labor.  Luke generously volunteered to be the “ideas man”.  That is, he will identify the six themes and select the roughly hundred stamps for each mat.  Once the idea has been achieved, there is the scut work.  Funny thing, that.  My job is to glue the cut boards to the proper thickness, prepare the flour-and-water paste, apply the pasted cover papers to the dried boards, and see to it that they dry under pressure so as to remain absolutely flat.  My genius son will then tell me which stamps to affix (with a watery paste).  I presume I shall also be responsible for going to Home Depot to get some polyurethane and to Jo-Ann’s Fabrics for some kind of spongeable backing.  Remember, these things are made to have food spilled on them.

That this can be achieved within three days seems unlikely.  I have no photographs of the finished articles to mount with this post.  But with a little luck I might be able to add one or two during the next week.

Away from My Desk

When I was a student at Oxford so many years ago, all undergraduate teaching in the Arts was conducted by the magnificently inefficient “tutorial method.”  The student actually wrote a weekly essay on an assigned topic and then read it aloud to the tutor.  The tutor responded on the spot with verbal criticisms, usually an amalgam faint praise, withering criticism, and engaging if irrelevant commentary on the latest news, the comparative claims of certain eighteenth-century composers of the second or third rank, or the pleasures of “stalking” (whatever that was) in Scotland.  Of course not having an essay, though a fairly frequent occurrence for idlers, was simply not done.  A wastrel friend of mine, finding himself in that predicament, claimed that he said the following to his tutor: “Last week, an essay; next week, an essay.  This week, copious notes.”  Well this week I’m going to be at the beach with my grandkids.  Having left my own devices, I’ll probably stalk a seashell or two,  Allow me to wish some similar pleasure for you.

Butler Park

I have just returned from a medically mandated mile’s stroll through the min-paradise across the street from my house, and I am thinking that even war might have an upside.  The end of the Second World War and the rapid demobilization of large numbers of men from the Armed Forces inevitably caused certain disruptions in American higher education as it did in so many areas of our national life.  Many colleges and universities had lost a sizeable part of their normal cohort of male students to active service.  Many others had diverted important segments of the scientific research toward the War effort, or actually become the homes for specialized programs born of military necessity.  By the end of 1945 these institutions were faced with the challenge of returning to an imagined “normal” while at the same time honoring the special needs and circumstances of returning veterans.  Provisions of the “G. I. Bill of Rights,” passed by Congress in an anticipatory gesture in 1944, would considerably increase America’s college population, especially at state institutions, but there was an impact within the Ivy League as well.

At Princeton there had been many young men who either left campus to serve or deferred admission to do so.   They were now wanting to return—older, more mature, and (in a fair number of instances) married.  The Princeton authorities were almost prepared to cope with the challenge of comparative maturity in the student body, provided it was kept at a reasonable level, but married students had them flummoxed.  Where were these people to live?  There was a trustee emergency, there was a faculty Task Force, and there was the Butler Tract.  Beyond the fringe of the campus, and at that time practically beyond the town itself, was a goodly chunk of empty land, hustled for the University by a devoted alumnus named Butler early in the twentieth century, and upon it the University built a small village of modest frame row houses in which to shelter its married heroes.  The tract lay along the east side of South Harrison with two township streets, Sycamore on the north and Hartley on the south, defining it.  Within the tract itself the new housing was laid out along little roads named Devereux, Eisenhower, Halsey, Marshall, and King—and if you don’t recognize those names, you need a refresher course in American military history.

 gone but not forgotten

This was in 1945-46, and it was officially designated “temporary housing”.  The brief glut would run its course within five years; new on-campus dorms would be built.  But….as the Graduate School expanded, and as more married graduate students appeared on the scene, Butler morphed into “Graduate Married Housing”.  Wildly popular.  And then, after about twenty more years…the town of Princeton was well on its way to join the Upper East Side, Georgetown, San Francisco, and a few other select beauty spots in a race for the title of Most Unaffordable Place on Earth.  The Butler Tract was, in turn, the greatest rental bargain in town.  By 1988, when we moved into a house across Hartley Avenue, trying to control get-rich-quick subleasing deals had already become a nightmare for the University real estate office.  Thus about the year 2010, when the University had built a compensatory lavish Graduate Housing complex lakeside, the authorities announced their intention of razing Butler to the ground.

But by now Sycamore Avenue to the north was well populated by town NIMBYs who had enjoyed seeing their $75,000 houses advance to the statutory Princeton million.  There were Concerned Citizens, letters to the editor, lawyers.  There were tedious meetings where an architect from the university subjected herself to the mau-mauing of “stakeholders” animated by a dark hermeneutics of suspicion.  I was never a NIMBY.  After all, what was being proposed was going to be in my front yard.  But the large majority of my fellow stakeholders didn’t believe for a minute the University’s promise that for the foreseeable future the tract would be left open parkland.  One overwrought lawyer prophesied that even if they did keep their promise, the fate of the Butler Tract would undoubtedly be that of the blighted ruins of Atlantic City: tent encampments of the homeless, and crack dens.

                                                                                                                                               

            Slow forward through tedious consultations and the enrichment of various lawyers.  The University of course “wins”, shrouds the site with eight-foot high blinders, and engages in a year of nearly parodically environmental-friendly demolition.  Month after month.  What seems like thousands of truckloads coming and going, but about as discreetly as Mack trucks go, or for that matter, come.  Eventually they take the fences down.  Dis-ap-point-ed! Except for the old military streets, their sidewalks, and their street lights—all preserved and functional—it looks like any other bulldozed stretch of Route One awaiting its shopping center.  But then various agricultural machines arrive and do their things.  In the spring the whole place explodes with healthy grass and literally thousands of wildflowers.  A herd of deer takes up residence in a large open field.  Many of the old trees reveal a previously unnoticed magnificence.  Well-equipped professional grounds crews show up periodically to mow and tend the peripheral swaths of flourishing lawn.  At night the street lights still illuminate the silent sidewalks with a comforting glow.  The park area is blocked off from vehicular traffic but is absolutely open to cyclists and walkers, large numbers of whom immediately begin marching around it with evident pleasure.  And these are the kind of people who do pick up their dogs’ poop--mostly.  Among them are many geriatrics, pregnant women, convalescents and other unconventional hikers.  Since I am among the last group I have not yet dared to penetrate to the most distant center of the field of daisies, but I already doubt that I shall find a crack den when I finally do.  I recognize many of my smiling fellow walkers, mostly my neighbors.  Some of them reside on Sycamore, and their already overpriced houses have just gotten another little realtor’s goose on account of their “proximity to a beautiful park.”

The Little Foxes

Many years ago, knocking around in my pickup truck, I came upon some abandoned garden allotments that seem once to have been a part of an abandoned apartment complex.  The fencing had long since been removed, and heavy equipment had been driven around the place, ripping up some cinder blocks and railroad ties used for making raised tomato beds and leaving the detritus, along with some bent and ruined Home Depot metal garden stakes, in an ugly pile.  One memory of the garden remained: a straggly Concord grape vine broken and desiccated in its main branch, but still sustaining five or six scrappy colonies of green where smaller branches had fallen to the ground and taken root.  I cut the umbilical cords on the most promising of these, dug it out by the roots, and took it home.  From that propagation I now have in my yard at least a dozen vines, two of them huge and arboreal, the others more or less trellised,  Sometimes my granddaughters and I make grape jelly, though in recent years it’s been all about the wild raspberries, and the birds usually get the grapes.

Now there is a verse in the Song of Songs (2:15) that has had a certain significance in my academic work.  In the King James Version it is this: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”  In medieval Christian exegesis the “vineyard” was widely taken to be an allegorical representation of the Church.  The little foxes spoiling the vines were therefore a figure of the heretics who troubled the Church.  So widely was this allegory accepted that various actual “heretics” started tocall themselves “the little foxes”.  I would occasionally mention this curiosity in lectures.  But of course the danger of concentrating on an allegorical sense is that the literal sense may be forgotten entirely.

Our back yard is something of a wondrous menagerie, which is one of the reasons it so delights young children.  Rare is the summer day in which one does not see deer, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, groundhogs—all in addition to birds in abundance and variety.  This year, since I have had temporarily to abandon cultivating my vegetable garden at the bottom, animal life is more abundant and more bold than ever.  The “garden” itself, of course, is rapidly reverting to Stage Two Jersey Jungle.  And on the adjoining open common ground new bird and animal life is becoming more abundant.  On a couple of occasions a small flock of wild turkeys have paraded past the gap in the liminal stone walls.  And foxes, of which there have always seemed to be at least one happy family,  now seem more numerous.  Indeed, one can rarely walk about the Common Ground without spotting a fox.  We now suspect that a foxy family has taken up residence on our own property, or very near it.

The other day Joan called me to the windows at the back.  Look, there is a fox walking along the stone wall!  And so, indeed, there was.  The wall is quite a long ways off, and the fox was obviously still a juvenile, but there was no mistaking the pert manner and the ramrod horizontality of the tail that is so characteristic of a fox on the run,  But the attitude of this critter was more like a fox on a runway—at a fashion show.  This fox was walking along the top of my stone wall as though it were I-9.  Later on I spotted an adult fox on the open lawn at the bottom of my neighbor’s contiguous property.  There is a memorial bench about seventy-five yards out into the Common Ground.  I sometimes sit on it, and look up from there to the back of my wall; this big fox was simply sitting there, Fido-like, looking back at me.  Later still, I finally got the gumption to bushwhack my way into the temporarily abandoned garden to reclaim a couple of tools.  There I found a mysterious shallow pit, apparent evidence of some barely begun or abandoned mining operation.  But even then I didn’t put it all together.

What I am calling the “garden” is pretty well fenced in against deer, and for decorative purposes I have some of my grapevines trellised against its upper reaches, with the leafing tendrils beginning at about five feet from the ground.  On one side, where the wire fencing comes close to the abutment of the stone wall, the vines are already heavily fruited with still very under-ripe grapes.  Well, a couple of days ago we looked out to see that our young fox was not simply promenading along a wall.  He (or she) was standing on it, using it as a ladder to get at such of the green grapes as were reachable from the corner of the wall abutment.  The little foxes spoil the vines!  I was able to confirm this later by an on-site investigation, which revealed evidence of a few ravished green clusters.  In a flash of further biblical insight, I grasped also the meaning of the small-scale mining operating in the fallow tomato patch: “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests…”  But it was from an ancient secular writer that I took my comfort: Æsop.  I couldn’t really resent the vulpine foraging.  Those must have been very sour grapes!

One Father's Fathers Day

In my birth family the celebration of Mothers Day was distinctly muted, and Fathers Day got no notice whatsoever.  No specific and coherent argument was raised against it, but it was neither a traditional religious holiday nor a national patriotic one, and it just never became an actual thing as opposed to a convenient excuse for the Western Auto Store to advertise its tire sale.  I do remember one linguistic debate as to whether the proper form was Fathers Day, Fathers’ Day, or Father’s Day—all three of which appeared in a single tire advertisement.  A little anthropological research will soon reveal a probable connection of days dedicated to both mothers and fathers with various medieval Christian religious observances.  When I married an English woman, I became aware of Mothering Sunday.  I thought Mothering Sunday was a very cool name and almost certainly must have had something to do with the medieval cult of the Virgin, although in Britain it had become thoroughly Protestantized.  Fathers Day does have some antecedents in various festivals honoring Saint Joseph, though if its development had been a little more orthodox in terms of Catholic theology it would have been called Step-Fathers Day.  We find a related problem in the elaborate forty-two step genealogy at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel, though that has provided us with many marvelous artistic renditions of the beautiful “Tree of Jesse.”  In any event, it was only when both of our sons married delightful southerners, one from South Carolina and the other from Tennessee, that I started getting due acclaim for my relatively commonplace achievements as a progenitor.  I must say that I now find it very pleasant indeed to have salutes to my paternity coming in each year from various parts of the world.  Usually.

But this year the experience was doubly enriched by becoming, in effect, Granddaughters Day.  For an aging couple with shrinking social horizons we still seem to manage a fair number of conflicting obligations or opportunities.  Last week Joan spent several days at a kind of music camp with other members of her string quartet.  This is an annual event, scheduled months in advance, and it is rather intense.  Meanwhile our eldest granddaughter, Sophia, has a birthday just about now.  As it happens, so does her boyfriend Raymond.  So a plan developed.  There would be a joint birthday party for this winsome couple, very low-key, which would consist of a visit to check out their elegant and newly moved-into Brooklyn apartment, followed by dinner at a local eatery of repute, Frankie’s on Court Street.  The only fly in this fragrant ointment was the fact that Joan, still fully occupied with music making, would not be able to attend.  Thus it was decided that I would go to New York alone on Saturday evening.   And since travel is a little problematic for me these days, I didn’t want to try to go and return on the same day, and so elected to spend Saturday night at my daughter’s place on Washington Square, also the home of the two delightful younger sisters of the Birthday Girl.  So a grandfatherly clean sweep, of sorts, overnighted into Fathers Day.

The door-to-door transportation offered by the hail-riding companies is what makes such things possible.  It is expensive, of course, but not prohibitively so on an occasional basis.  This was my first unsatisfactory lift from Lyft.  The driver was an Arabic-speaker, a cheerful and voluble Egyptian, whose only certain word, or rather letters of English, was “GPS”.  His name was Ram, which had rather confused me, as I briefly expected the arrival of a Dodge Ram.  This seemed a little odd, but I am a nouveau uberite and Johnny-come-lately lyfter, and I would not have minded so long as I got to sit in the cab rather than the truck bed.  However Mr. Ram was actually driving a four-door Ford, which I had missed in the fine print.  But he had never before driven it or any other vehicle to New York, and his trusty GPS directed him by unconventional paths.  He was also a nicotine addict.  His first ploy was to offer me a cigarette in the utterly vain hope that I would collude with him in what was, I am sure, a breach of a cardinal rule of his employment.  But there was no collusion.  So censorious was my mien, indeed,  as to drive him to desperate measures.  When we got out on what might be called the open road, he began a program of surreptitious vaping.  It is not easy to vape surreptitiously, especially in an automobile.  The attempt required having both front windows wide open while operating the air conditioning at full blast.  Traffic was treacherous across Staten Island and onto the Verrazano.  Mr. Ram neither spoke English nor appeared to comprehend it in either spoken or written form.  I concluded that my best course was silent prayer rather than vehement remonstrance.  As we bumper-to-bumpered over the bridge he became visibly animated by the spectacular views, especially the glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, and waved his phone wildly with his right hand taking many photographs.  Altogether during this trip he may have had both hands on the wheel forty percent of the time.  But, as you are now my witnesses, I did live to tell the tale, to see Sophia’s nifty apartment, to have some transgressive calamari, and then to spend most of Sunday sedentary or actually prone on a luxurious couch at my daughter’s place.  Occasionally she, my son-in-law, or a granddaughter would briefly stint from their labors long enough to offer me a hot drink, or a cold one.  Eventually I was roused to a bowl of delicious tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.  Now and again I read a few pages of something, or listened to a pod cast on my phone.  If you want to cosset a father on Fathers Day, you can forget the neckties and the cuff links, assuming that you’ve ever heard of a cuff link in the first place.  Just let the old guy lounge around on your couch for the day exuding his indeterminate fatherly aura.  Eventually it will occur to him that, as compared with Mr. Ram, he has had a pretty soft life.   He should count himself lucky that the paternal task of keeping bread on his children’s table never required him to drive around Cairo all day armed with only three words of possible Arabic: Alhambra, Aljazeera, and  al-GPS.