Third generation is the charm: reflections on cherry pie and slide rules

When I was a kid, my siblings and I would ask my mother to tell us bedtime stories about her childhood. "Tell us a story about the Olden Days," we would say, night after night, and she would oblige with sepia-tinted tales about life on the Indiana farm or in Hyde Park, Chicago.

The stories that stuck with me most were wonderful adventures foiled by tragedy, like the time my mom and a friend decided to make a cherry pie, so they picked the cherries from the tree on the farm all by themselves, and they made a pie crust all by themselves, and they filled up that pie crust and baked that cherry pie all by themselves, and then no one in my mom's family would even taste it.

(Years later, when I brought up the story and wondered how her family could have been so callous, she said "oh, didn't I mention that the cherries were full of pits and worms, and I'm sure we didn't add any sugar, and we made the crust from flour and water and it was like grey paste? I didn't even eat any of it." I had somehow deleted all of that in my childhood indignation.)

Then there was the story about when my mother, as a little girl, got her very first helium balloon. This was after World War II, because during the war, all the latex was going to the war effort instead of to wonderful frivolous things like balloons. As she was crossing the street, with the balloon tied safely around her tiny wrist so it wouldn't float away (or so I imagined), that wonderful very first balloon popped. Popped! O cruel fate!

(Years later, after I had a child of my own, my mother observed that unlike my own son, my siblings and I had always cried and cried when balloons popped, and she had never understood what was up with that. I asked how we could not have cried, in light of her poignant story of post-war balloon loss. "It was just a balloon," she said.)

One memorable story was less tragic and less sepia-toned, at least to me if not to my mother. As I remember it, the story went something like this: "once upon a time, long ago in the olden days, when my sweet-sixteen birthday rolled around, I hoped for the usual things a 16-year-old girl wants for a birthday present. A pearl necklace, or a new bicycle, or maybe a pony. Something pretty or fun. But I didn't get a pearl necklace, or a new bicycle, or a pony. Instead, my parents gave me a slide rule."

Perhaps I am mis-remembering, and I didn't hear that story until my own sixteenth birthday was approaching. In any case, because my mother has a sense of humor, I too received a slide rule when I turned sixteen: a six-inch long ca. 1936 Keuffel & Esser Ever-There No. 4097D in a slim leather case. Fifteen months later, when my sister had her sixteenth birthday, she too was gifted with a slide rule ("only because it was tradition," she confirmed last night via email).

My sweet-sixteen Keuffel & Esser Ever-There No. 4097D

I am proud that the coming-of-age slide-rule tradition began with women, passed from my mother, as the first recipient, to her daughters. Family lore does not record whether my mother's brother received a slide rule for his sixteenth birthday, and as far as I know, my older brother's slide rules were not affiliated with his sixteenth. (Yes, "slide rules," plural. He reports, "I think I was given more than one because I think I lost more than one.")

My mother broadened the tradition to include menfolk and rites of passage other than birthdays when I married S. She felt it was important to properly welcome my husband into the family, so she gave him a big, fancy, vintage engineer's slide rule with a sturdy leather holster to call his own: a 14-inch long duplex Engineer's No. 1510 in fashionable plastic-coated bamboo, made in Japan, presumably by Relay/Ricoh, for the US market, no date.

S's hefty Engineer's No. 1510 is more than twice as long and twice as thick as my diminutive Keuffel & Esser Ever-There. Surely there's a Master's thesis waiting to be written about slide rules and gender.

My father was a math professor. He owned a slide rule and knew how to wield it. When I was young, I enjoyed playing with its smoothly gliding bars, but by the time I was old enough that a slide rule could have helped with school math, the world had begun its shift to TI-30s and wasn't looking back.

Neither my sister, my husband, nor I ever learned how to use our slide rules. My sister's probably migrated to my parents' attic decades ago. For the past 20 years, S and I have kept ours in their leather cases, tucked away in a desk drawer (his) and in a box in a closet (mine), unused.

Until last week. My son, just thirteen months shy of his sixteenth birthday, is learning about logarithms at school.

"Logarithms?" I said brightly, when he told me. "Let me show you something."

I opened the top right-hand drawer of our roll-top desk and pulled out his father's marital slide rule. We removed it from its holster, and E and I went online to learn how to use it.

"This is SO COOL," E said, as he figured one square root after another to within two significant digits; "when the power goes out after the Zombie Apocalypse, I can calculate numbers without a calculator! Let's do another!"

He asked why we had such a fascinating object. I told him about his grandmother's sixteenth birthday, how she had wanted a pearl necklace or a new bicycle or a pony, and how she had gotten a slide rule instead, and then I fetched my own sweet-sixteen slide rule.

"That is sooooo cute," he said, picking it up.

"Yeah. It's not as fancy as papa's though," I said.

"But it's really cute. It's so small!," he squeaked in admiration.

I put an arm around my delighted child, pointed to the two slide rules on the table, and quoted from the Woozy Works: "Someday, son," I said, "all this will be yours."

And thus it came to pass that a questionable gift for a bright-eyed girl on the cusp of womanhood almost sixty years ago is finally bearing fruit, two generations later. This metaphorical homemade cherry pie will not just be tasted: to paraphrase Sir Francis Bacon, it will be chewed and digested. And thirteen months from now, my son will receive a slide rule to call his own.

"One day, son, ALL THIS WILL BE YOURS." My grandfather Mitch shows my uncle Bob the splendor of the junk in the barn; from Woozy Works: The Nearly Complete and Mostly Unexpurgated Writings of the Blue Spanch (1996).

Nominalization du jour

S and I went to an event last night in a building that is known locally as "The Green Weenie." I didn't have my camera with me, or I would have taken a photo of the signs posted on the walls near the elevators. Fortunately, my friend N works in the building, so she sent me a photo today.

I like this sign for many reasons. First, why upgrade an elevator, when you can make an upgrading go on to it instead? Note that the author writes "going on to," not "going onto," so there should be no confusion about what the upgrading is doing. I like that potential elevator users should "feel free to use the three other elevators"; perhaps the other elevators are usually off limits, which would surely make the upgrading particularly popular. That the three other elevators can be used throughout the building, rather than just in the elevator shafts, is a special bonus.

Marital strife

Driving to work this morning, I heard on the radio that money is the number one topic couples argue about. A quick Google search yields assorted articles on the internets that confirm this claim, including some that say fights about money are a decent predictor for divorce. Sitting in my car, I thought: S and I are not a typical couple.

We rarely fight about money. In fact, neither of us can think of a time in the 24 years we've been in love that we've fought about money. We didn't fight about money when we were freshly-married graduate students relatively strapped for funds, nor when we had real grown-up jobs and started making major life-altering decisions about expensive things like raising a baby and buying a house. We've been lucky: our parents and jobs got us through our undergrad degrees, and jobs and assistantships got us through grad school. We've been lucky never to have had to make tough choices about whether to eat or pay bills.

We're also lucky that after 24 years together, we still make each other laugh, we still share fundamental values and goals, and he's still ravishingly gorgeous (his crows feet still make me swoon, and his delicately greying sideburn tips are ooh la la). We've negotiated a reasonably healthy balance between work, family, and household chores. He works a regular 24/7 academic job; I have a flexible mix of part-time and freelance gigs. He covers kidcare when I'm at work evenings and weekends; I cover kidcare during the week. He loads the dishwasher; I unload it. He tunes up my bike once a year and inflates the tires as needed; I organize every aspect of our socials lives. He loves his family by making snazzy breakfasts; I love my family by making snazzy dinners and angel food cake. He takes out the trash; I generate it. He dances with the vacuum cleaner; I take the cats to the vet. We're a Myers-Briggs match made in heaven.

Nonetheless, we do fight. Early on, we had relationship-threatening difficulties with time. Given our backgrounds, that came as a surprise to both of us. He's German, yet he defies all stereotypes about German punctuality. (He might explain that punctuality is a Prussian virtue, and he's not Prussian, he's Bavarian.) I'm U.S. American and grew up with a mathematician dad who back-calculated, based on traffic density and wind speed, precisely when we needed to leave the house in order to reach our destinations on time. My inherited obsession with punctuality and S's lack thereof almost broke us up on multiple occasions, until I realized he was operating on European Metric Time (100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour) and I was operating on American Standard Time (60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour). I put together a conversion table and made copies for both of us, and it's been mostly smooth sailing since then.

Our challenges are different now, so many more years into our lives together. The most frequent cause of our most turbulent arguments these days? Antecedentless pronouns.

S is a wonderful man who comes from a long line of wonderful men who are genetically predisposed to have conversations inside their heads while thinking outsiders can follow along. He knows exactly what he means when he talks about it, them, and that, while I'm usually clueless. I realize I sound like I'm blaming S for our strife, but I have evidence that it's us, not him: our son carries on the patrilineal tradition, and he and S can have five-word conversations consisting almost entirely of antecedentless pronouns, conversations of which I understand virtually nothing, while they clearly understand everything and take action accordingly.

Consequently, S and I often fight about that. Literally, that. Not whatever that refers to, since that as often as not has no clear antecedent, but that itself. Presented with an antecedentless pronoun, I'll bristle and ask, chillingly, "What's that supposed to mean?" And S hears not "beloved, to what antecedent did you intend the pronoun that to refer, and did you perhaps forget to state that word out loud?" but rather "how could you possibly say such a thing?" We're usually well into a heated argument before the lightbulbs go on and we realize we're yet again fighting about a missing antecedent, at which point I usually say something rude like "[S.I.G.H.] If you're going to f*ing use pronouns, you need to give them f*ing antecedents."

To my knowledge, no studies have been conducted that indicate arguments about antecedentless pronouns are predictors for divorce, so I think our relationship will probably survive this (as well as this).

Ethereal love

Someone is currently attempting to auction off a heart-shaped potato on eBay for one million dollars. The header declares, "PERFECT Heart Shaped Potato! One Of A Kind! Unique!" Scroll further down, and the ad insists "This is not a joke! Its really a heart shaped potato!"

Aside from the warning signs (the capitalized preposition Of and article A in the header, the confusion between its and it's), not to mention the apparent overpricing (there's also an "old heart-shaped potato chip" up for auction, with slightly better punctuation, a starting bid of only $29.99 plus $5.50 shipping, and a fine classic scam text claiming proceeds will go toward a tank of gas to enable a tornado-relief volunteer to drive to Pulaski, Virginia)--aside from all that, the seller is lying. How do I know?

Heart-shaped potatoes are not unique. I have my own heart-shaped potato. Well, had. To celebrate Will and Kate's nuptials, and because I was hungry, I diced it and pan fried it this afternoon. May the young royals' love last longer than my potato. S and I bought the potato together in March, but he was out this afternoon, and as I already said, I was hungry, so I ate it myself; I trust our love is strong enough to carry us through this lapse in judgment.

For the record, I wasn't searching heart-shaped potato listings on eBay because I wanted to auction my own potato--I just wanted to know the going rate for my lunch.

Miscellanea

I've been busy this month. On January 23, I'll be accompanying the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Durham in a performance of Leonard Bernstein's fabulous Chichester Psalms. The concert will be at Judea Reform Synagogue, as part of the synagogue's 50th anniversary celebrations. In addition to spending extra time practicing, I've also been teaching some writing workshops for grad students in the Engineering School. Thus, dear reader(s), I trust you will understand the recent lack of blog posts. Today, however, I bring you two exciting tidbits that I hope you'll find were worth the wait.

Tidbit 1

The writing workshops have made me refreshingly more attuned to things like this Tom's of Maine toothpaste tube:


In case you can't read the blurry photo, the text says (in part):

"Embrace the Power of Mother Nature! At Tom's of Maine that means we use authentic and effective natural ingredients.^[1] We use zinc citrate sourced from zinc--a naturally occurring mineral and xylitol, a natural ingredient derived from birch bark or corn.^[2]"

^[1] Did you catch the missing comma after the introductory element? Tolkien left those commas out all the time, which I'm told is common in British English. Since Tom's of Maine is located in Maine, U.S.A., I hold the company to American English standards for comma usage. Aside from that, can anyone tell me what an "inauthentic" ingredient would be?

^[2] I think they meant "We use zinc citrate (synthesized from naturally-occurring zinc ore) and xylitol (a natural ingredient derived from birch bark or corn)," but hey, I'm not a chemist. By the way, isn't saying "we use zinc citrate sourced from naturally-occurring zinc" kind of like saying "we use water sourced from naturally-occurring hydrogen and oxygen"?

Tidbit 2

While driving home the other day, I happened to observe that if the sum of the digits in a number is a multiple of 9, the number itself is evenly divisible by 9 (an extension of the similar tidbit about numbers being divisible by 3 if the sum of their digits is divisible by 3). This is old news to mathematicians, but brand new news to me. I don't know about you, but I feel empowered knowing, without doing any long division, that one trillion four billion seven hundred thousand five hundred one is divisible by 9.

My mathematician dad would want me to understand why this works, as opposed to simply knowing it works. I never appreciated that attitude when I was a kid bumming help from him on my math homework--in fact, I distinctly resented it--but I appreciate it now. So here you go, dad:

One trillion four billion seven hundred thousand five hundred one
= 1,004,700,501
= 1*(1+999,999,999) + 4*(1+999,999) + 7*(1+99,999) + 5*(1+99) + 1
= 1 + 4 + 7 + 5 + 1 + (a bunch of numbers divisible by 9).
Thus, if 1 + 4 + 7 + 5 + 1 is divisible by 9 (it is) then 1,004,700,501 is too.

In case you're wondering, I was thinking about nines because I've been doing a lot of Ken-Ken recently, a habit that started as a way to procrastinate finishing the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which, incidentally, I finished on Dec. 31, 2010).

Senators and grammars

When E was born, we called my parents and told my mother she was a senator again. She first became a senator when my brother became a father. He had asked her what she wanted his children to call her. She was thinking of words like grandmom, grandma, granny, etc. and said she didn't really care, so he decided to call her senator.

For better or for worse, senator didn't stick when E came along. For us, she became Grammar Jean.

Grammar Jean and Gramper (by extension) Hiram are visiting us this week. Thus it is that we get to hear poetry from Walt Kelly's Pogo, which my mother committed to memory in her earliest youth and is inspired to recite as occasions demand.

"Do you herd sheep?" my gra[mmar] said;
My grandpa leapt in fright.
"That grammar's wrong to me!" he cried.
"'Have you heard sheep?' is right."

Grammar in Esgaroth

My friend Susan, who is well versed in religious and epic texts in assorted languages of old, insists I would appreciate Tolkien's prose more if I were better read in Middle English and Icelandic. Every sentence I threw at her, she read smoothly, without batting an eye or stumbling over a single missing comma.

So I decided to continue on with open mind after the death of Smaug in Esgaroth by Bard's last and best-aimed arrow [<--see what I in the narrative, that unfolds within the improvisational mind, have learned about strings of prepositional phrases!]. Full on the next paragraph I fell, and read aloud with epic voice these sentences: [<--apologies for the colon, I'm new at this]

"[The wind] twisted the white fog into bending pillars and hurrying clouds and drove it off to the West to scatter in tattered shreds over the marshes before Mirkwood. Then the many boats could be seen dotted dark on the surface of the lake, and down the wind came...No, dagnabbit. Wait a sec...and down the wind came...and down the...Ah, got it...and down the wind...came the voices of the people of Esgaroth lamenting their lost town and goods and ruined houses."

Reading with the epic voice helps.

Grammar at Bag-End

A geek's confession: I have never read The Lord of the Rings, and I only know The Hobbit because my fifth grade teacher read it out loud over several weeks of "quiet time" in 1977.

Recently, in post-Harry Potter and Percy Jackson 2010, the eight- and nine-year-old males in my son's peer group have started carrying around assorted Tolkien books. The paperback covers are worn and tattered, mainly from falling out of perpetually unzipped backpacks, but I suspect some of the boys are actually reading the books too.

So I decided it's time for some mother-son bonding: I would nip E's potential cultural illiteracy in the bud, and (long overdue) make up for my own, by reading the books out loud to him.

We are now nearing the end of The Hobbit, and I think I've discovered the reason I never felt any affinity for it. It isn't because most of the book is about a long arduous slog, nor because the peoples of Middle Earth somehow managed to procreate (as evidenced by the existence of characters) without there being any females around. No, even the book's admittedly good moments--like Bilbo's riddle duel with Gollum--aren't enough to make up for its thoroughly annoying grammar.

I've therefore taken it upon myself to decipher some of Tolkien's rules, so that the path might be easier for other wannabe LotR fans.

Rule 1: After introductory elements only weak minds need commas.

Exhibit A: "In spite of the dangers of this far land bold men had of late been making their way back into it from the South, cutting down trees, and building themselves places to live in among the more pleasant woods in the valleys and along the river-shores."

Exhibit B: "Following him they found themselves in a wide hall with a fire-place in the middle. Though it was summer there was a wood-fire burning and the smoke was rising to the blackened rafters in search of a way out through an opening in the roof."

I suppose it doesn't make sense to say it was summer in a wide hall with a fire-place in the middle. Still, I wouldn't have had to back track from "Though it was summer there" to "Though it was summer, there" had Tolkien included a comma.

Exhibit C: "As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes got used to seeing things he could catch glimpses of them whisking off the path and scuttling behind tree trunks."

Fun with back-tracking! Find your favorite introductory element:
a. "As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes got used to seeing things he could catch glimpses of,"
b. "As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes got used to seeing things he could catch,"
c. "As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes got used to seeing things,"

Rule 2: Ambiguous pronoun references add depth to them.

Exhibit D: "Then at last they [Bilbo and the dwarves] said good-bye to their ponies and turned their heads for home. Off they trotted very gaily, seeming glad to put their tails towards the shadow of Mirkwood."

E and I suspected something was amiss when Bilbo's party headed in the wrong direction, and we confirmed it when the hobbits and dwarves sprouted tails.

Rule 3: Separating subjects and verbs over as vast a distance as possible, and recalling thus certain tape-worm-like sentence structures composed by authors in the German language and also sometimes apparently even in English, gets readers' attention.

Exhibit E: "Occasionally a slender beam of sun that had the luck to slip in through some opening in the leaves far above, and still more luck in not being caught in the tangled boughs and matted twigs beneath, stabbed down thin and bright before them."

Rule 4: Remember this, colons are bad.

Exhibit F: "All the time they ate, Beorn in his deep rolling voice told tales of the wild lands on this side of the mountains, and especially of the dark and dangerous wood, that lay outstretched far to the North and South a day's ride before them, barring their way to the East, the terrible forest of Mirkwood."

This is a nifty example because it deals with several of the rules and their exceptions: "All the time they ate, [surprise comma!] Beorn in his deep rolling voice [observe delay of verb] told tales of the wild lands on this side of the mountains, and especially of the dark and dangerous wood, [this unnecessary comma confounds the reader] that lay outstretched far to the North and South a day's ride before them, barring their way to the East, [colons are bad, but a colon would be helpful here] the terrible forest of Mirkwood."

Rule 5: Because an idle mind is the devil's workshop to figure out your meaning, make your readers struggle.

Exhibit G: "The barrels now all lashed together creaked and fretted."

You choose the error: is it (a) lack of commas separating items in a list ("The barrels now all lashed together, creaked, and fretted"), or (b) missing commas around a participial phrase ("The barrels, now all lashed together, creaked and fretted")? (Ooh, ooh, choose (b)!)

Exhibit G occurs about two thirds of the way through The Hobbit, by which point you are no longer likely to be surprised by such comma-less constructions.