Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to re: LOL!

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Mary Anne — (archived)

"Reading about", yes. Grandpa believed in liberal arts. He also introduced me to Pascal and Plato, though not in the same afternoon. I believe he laughed at the way I said those names because he was surprised and because it was, well, cute. He never mocked me in his life.

Grandpa also believed in reading Shakespeare aloud to children, his favorites being Hamlet and Macbeth, though I still have, somewhere, a 45 he gave me with Maurice Evans reading the funeral orations from Julius Caesar on one side and Puck's last speech from a Midsummer Night's Dream on the other. And Longfellow, and William Cullen Bryant (whose poem "Thanatopsis" he would recite at length, much to my grandmother's distress), and the Cavalier poets. He liked them, even though they were all heathen Protestants.

He believed direct election of Senators undermined American government and that Franklin Roosevelt was a threat to the nation.

He taught me storytelling using traditional tales. In his great bass voice he would stomp around the dining room, accompanied by the screams of my sisters and me, bellowing, "Fee Fi Fo Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman! Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grrrrrriiiiiiinnnddd his bones to make my bread!"

I have some of his other phonograph records, which include an exquisite collection of harpsichord music by Rameau and an assortment of works by Arnold Schoenberg.

He never finished high school, and made his living working on the railroad. He read voraciously. He took me to the library at 4 to get my own card, and told off the librarian there who said I was too young to read. (He taught me himself, when I was about 2, using the New York Daily News as a text because the type was big and the words were simple.)

He served in the AEF in World War I, which I knew while he was alive; he was a machine gunner, a brutal and dangerous combat assignment, which I didn't know until after he died.

He was a complicated man, but I never realized how much this was true when he was alive. He was my teacher, my playmate.

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