On Quotes

John K. Taber

Posters are fond of pithy quotes. One of my favorites was Homines id quod volunt credunt (Men believe what they want) supposedly from Caesar’s Commentaries. It doesn’t take long in a newsgroup to learn that Caesar was right. Oh, true, posters argue their point with logic or rage, but in the end, they believe what they want. I confess I used the quote to the point of exasperating my readers before I finally dropped it from my signature.

The problem using pithy quotes is that the poster has practically never read the work from which the quote is pulled. Sometimes the quote comes from another post or email. Sometimes from a web site providing quotes for any occasion so that the poster doesn’t have to do much reading to find a poet or statesman or philosopher to voice the poster’s view. Sometimes from an important personnage, living or dead, such as Petronius Arbiter, or Toqueville, or Ronald Reagan. And, I confess, I never read Caesar’s Commentaries, and I am simply unable to tell you if Caesar really wrote Homines id quod volunt credunt or not. I just liked what the quote seemed to say.

A frequent contributor to a mailing list I subscribe to used a quote that flabbergasted me. It was

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), French poet.

Baudelaire happens to be one of my favorite poets, but I did not recognize the quote. There is no way, I thought to myself, that Baudelaire could write that. He didn’t write a lot, but the poems he did write sound nothing like that. One of his poems, "The Jewels", is one of the most sensuous poems in any language. When The Flowers of Evil was first published, Baudelaire was prosecuted by the French Government for harming public morals. He was fined, and The Jewels was one of several poems that had to be expunged from the book. He celebrated sensual pleasure, and here we have a banality in praise of work? No way.

I asked the mailing list contributor for the citation. After a few exchanges I learned he got the quote from a quote site, http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/t/time.html from its TIME category. Indeed, the quote truly was Baudelaire. It was taken from his Journaux Intimes (Intimate Journals), which I had not heard of. The web site used a translation by Christopher Isherwood.

So, it was off to the library for me. I got the most authoritative edition I could find, because for reasons beyond this post I felt that the Isherwood translation had textual problems.

It turns out that Intimate Journals is a collection of Baudelaire’s odds and ends. One part, , “My Heart Laid Bare”, in which the quote occurs, actually began as notes for a larger work that Baudelaire never finished. He was fond of Poe, and cribbed the title from one of Poe’s works. Baudelaire intended a shockingly honest work baring his soul and feelings, or at least interesting a publisher enough for an advance, but it never amounted to more than some notes to which Baudelaire added entirely unrelated jottings as the original purpose of the notebook was lost. He also kept notebooks with details of household expenses, angry outbursts against his mother, and so on. After Baudelaire’s death, these disparate notebooks were bought by a private collector, and after the collector’s death were forcibly united and published under the title of Intimate Journals.

Baudelaire had syphilis, was dying, and terrified of going insane. The entry after this quote is his prescription recipe from his doctor, which was laborious, but copied out with desperation, as if he meant to follow it scrupulously. In those days, prescriptions for syphilis were pretty imaginative if of little value.

Sartre wrote a scathing review of Baudelaire, drawing in large part from Intimate Journals damning it for its banality. He is quite right, it is banal, like the quote on work. But Sartre ignores Baudelaire’s mental agitation as his death neared (not to mention failing to judge Baudelaire’s poems as poems). The poet was literally frightened out of his wits, and willing to try “working hard” as his step-father must have often admonished the Parisian dandy, as if somehow that would help. It was as if Baudelaire were saying “Yes, Doctor, yes. I will follow your prescription recipe to the letter. Yes, Father, yes. I will work hard and forgo pleasures.” Plainly, Baudelaire was demoralized.

It would have been better to leave Intimate Journals unpublished out of respect for Baudelaire’s established greatness, but such is the appeal of any scrap written by one of the most important poets of modern times that I don’t suppose the poor man’s privacy could have been protected.

The quote that for good reason I doubted came from Baudelaire nevertheless was his. But the context was missing. Did the mail list contributor know anything about the context? I doubt that he ever read a word of Baudelaire’s poems. Perhaps he never heard of Baudelaire. I suspect he felt that quoting a “French poet” magically lent importance to his posts. The reader was supposed to be impressed.

However, great writers have better things to do than provide posters with banalities, even if conveniently arranged and categorized on a web site someplace.

Posters should not quote for decorative reasons without having read the work in question, and hopefully with an understanding of the whole thing. Perhaps Caesar never wrote the quote I used — there are a lot of bogus quotes on the internet. Perhaps Caesar did write it, but was quoting an adversary to refute his cynicism, for all I know, instead of commenting on internet practice.

If you don’t know the stuff don’t quote it.

Real Spätzle

© John K. Taber, 1999

Sonja, my wife, did not learn to cook when she was a girl growing up in Stuttgart because of the disruption of ordinary life by the War. But even in War she learned to make Spätzle in spite of spending most of her days living in, or running to, bomb shelters.

Spätzle, a kind of homemade noodle, is the national dish of Schwabia, where it is widely made to the point of being a standing joke. It is also popular in Alsace, which confuses some people into believing that Spätzle is French. It isn’t originally, it is Southern German, and in particular, Schwabish. Probably the confusion is due to the fact that Alsace has changed nationalities numerous times in the long history of France and Germany so that the food there draws on the genius of both French and German cooking.

In the old fashioned way of making Spätzle, the homemade dough is spread thinly by knife on a wooden board with a handle, like a cheese board, and the knife is used to cut thin lines of the dough. Then the line of dough is flicked into a pot of boiling water. It is an art, the idea being to create thin, light noodles. Your reputation as a Schwabish housewife depended on your Spätzle flicking skill, and some women developed a motion that is just a blur to the eye. Nowadays, use of a Spätzle machine is almost universal, a kind of press that looks like a huge garlic press. The dough is placed in the press body, then pressed through holes into the boiling water.

Personally I prefer Spätzle made the old-fashioned way. I think the machine compresses the dough so that the texture of the noodle is not as light as it is when hand flicked. If Sonja hadn’t emigrated to Texas, she would have switched to the machine much sooner, and I never would have tasted real Spätzle made the old-fashioned way. For a long time after Sonja emigrated, Spätzle machines were not available in Texas, though you might have found them in New York or San Francisco.

Northern Germany uses the potato as its staple starch, and in Northern Germany, Spätzle is almost unheard of. Schwabia is part of Southern Germany, next to Bavaria, but still quite different. Schwabia, except for size, reminds you of Texas. The dialect is unique, and there are lots of stories, jokes, and even local theater based on the Schwabian dialect. Northern Germans are called “Prussians” regardless of whether they are from Prussia or not, just as Northern Americans are called “Yankees” in Texas, regardless of whether they are Yankees or not.

And of course, there are innumerable variations on Spätzle. Thaddäus Troll, the Schwabian humorist, writes: “There is Spätzle in the soup, or buttered, or fried. And there is wheat Spätzle, potato Spätzle, milk Spätzle, cheese Spätzle, roasted Spätzle, cabbage Spätzle, liver Spätzle, ham Spätzle, spinach Spätzle, sausage Spätzle, cucumber Spätzle, apple Spätzle, sour Spätzle, and Spätzle soufflée. And when there is no more Spätzle, there are noodles.”

In Stuttgart, the major Schwabian city, I once overheard a “Prussian” exclaim in exasperation “Will you have Spätzle, sir, will you have Spätzle, sir” mocking the waiters in the local restaurants, “Doesn’t anybody have potatoes here?” The answer is, not very often.

In this country, Sonja learned to cook. She learned dishes to serve Spätzle with. From a formidable old Hungarian, she learned the dish for which Sonja is still famous, chicken paprikash, which is perfect with Spätzle. She had to listen to the old lady’s stories of her marriages and amours, her wheelings and dealings, especially with men, and had to serve for free in the old lady’s restaurant. Eventually, Sonja’s perseverence won out, and she got the dish.

Chicken paprikash with Spätzle became our family’s special occasion dish. A family visit isn’t complete unless it is served. Our children invite their friends for chicken paprikash and Spätzle. But of course that’s not the only dish. From an unpromising start in the War in Germany, my wife went on to become a fine cook in America.

One day, Sonja tried Spätzle in a Dallas restaurant that claims to be Austrian. For some reason in Texas if a restaurant is German, they serve wurst and not very good potato salad. But if the dishes are at all continental, it is advertised as Austrian. The menu is limited, but good. Normally, we do not try Spätzle even if it can be found, but perhaps it was the recommendation of German speaking friends. Or, perhaps it was a fateful day.

Sonja thought, these Spätzle are better than mine! She never let on while we were there. She remained poker-faced. I was not aware of it, but a suspicion had crossed her mind. As soon as we were home, and without a word to me, she pulled Kochen wie die Schwaben (Cooking like the Schwabs, ISBN 3-570-01031-7) to check the recipe. It had never occurred to her to check the recipe. Why should she? This is a dish she knows as well as her name. Do you consult dictionaries to spell your name?

But there it was. 3 Eier (3 eggs) to 500 grams of flour! When she was a girl watching Spätzle being made, it was the War. All her life she had been making wartime Spätzle with one egg to 500 grams of flour, not real Spätzle with three! And she had taught so many friends over the years how to make “real” Spätzle, and at the age of 65 she learns it was wartime Spätzle instead of the real thing.

Of course, she had to try the real recipe with three eggs. Personally, I like the real Spätzle much better. But the kids didn’t. For them, wartime Spätzle is the real thing, not peacetime Spätzle. And if you think about it, it is a hard philosophical question to tell which is more “real”, the Spätzle made in peacetime or the Spätzle made in war. Of course, you may think that the real is only what we are used to. But that is a daring statement. What about the things we are not used to, but are quite real nevertheless? Real Spätzle is perhaps a Zen riddle.

So, here is the recipe for a version of real Spätzle, translated into American measurements and directions. I expanded the directions for readers who may not be familiar with handling dough.

Spätzle

Ingredients translated from German measurements

1 level cup all purpose flour unsifted. You will need extra flour on the side to adjust dough consistency.
1 egg (yes, one egg to one cup of flour is peacetime Spätzle. One egg to three cups of flour is wartime.)
½ tsp salt
¼ cup – 1 cup of water. You will use about ¼ cup of water but need extra water on the side to adjust dough consistency
1 TBS cooking oil

The proportion for peacetime Spätzle is about one egg per cup of flour.

Instructions

When working with dough it is smart to have extra water and flour on hand, so that dough consistency can be adjusted as needed. Especially for this recipe which was in metric measurements from a German cookbook, where I have reduced quantities, so that the American quantities don’t quite match.

Mix the flour, egg and salt into a dough, adding the water as needed. Don’t dump all the water in! Don’t overwork the dough or it gets tough. Add water a little at a time while mixing dough to achieve the right consistency. Use about ¼ cup to start. If the dough gets too thin, add some extra flour. Consistency should be smooth but not rubbery. It may be a little sticky.

Bring a large pot of salt water to a boil. Add the oil. Wet a wooden board with cold water. The board should have a handle, a cheese board will do. Put a piece of dough on the wetted board, and with a table knife, spread some of the dough, as if you were spreading peanut butter. Then with the edge of the knife, cut a thin line of dough and flick into the boiling water. Repeat rapidly. When the Spätzle swims on top of the water, it is done. Use a sieve to scoop out to a warmed platter. If you’re not fast enough, don’t worry, just make small batches.

Or, do what the Schwabs do today, use a Spätzle machine.

Use a slotted spoon or a sieve to scoop the cooked Spätzle out.

Serve buttered, or with an entrée with sauce or gravy. It’s really good with chicken paprikash or goulash.

Wartime Spätzle is the same, except with two to three times the flour per egg.

An Old Lady in the Park

© John K. Taber 2000

The sun broke through the clouds Labor Day after days of rain. And since it was the last day of a long weekend, the last free day before school, the last day of the annual fair, and a beautiful day, the Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver was crowded. Folks there call it the PNE, which sounds like “P n’ E”. Sometime early in the century an exhibition was held on the grounds. Today, it is a park, and the fair is like a state fair in the US.

Around lunch time the tables around the food stands were full, except for one occupied by an older oriental woman whose age was hard to tell.

“Could we join you?”

“Yes, of course” she smiled, and shifted to make plenty of room for us.

We sat down to eat. She was talkative and when my wife asked where she was from, she replied that she was born in Canada. Her parents were from Japan. Before she finished high school she returned to Japan to visit her family’s relatives. Then the War broke out preventing her return to Canada.

She got a job teaching English to schoolgirls, which she liked very much.

Eventually, her relatives informed her that it was time for her to marry. “But I don’t want to marry” she protested. Her relatives patiently explained that she must marry, and that they would arrange a good match. The groom turned out to be a soldier in the Imperial Army. They were carefully introduced to each other, and appeared to like each other.

I asked “How did it turn out?”

“The marriage? Oh, very good. He always said that marrying him saved my life.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “My godmother was Italian, and in those days, Italians arranged marriages. One day she came home from work, and there in the living room was a strange older woman whom she had never seen before with a young man. He looked awkward and uncomfortable as if he didn’t know what to do with himself. The strange woman made over my godmother, ‘Oh, how pretty you are. What a nice girl you are.’” Then she disappeared into the office with my godmother’s father and closed the door, leaving my godmother and the young man baffled with each other.

We always thought it was a business deal. The woman emerged finally, gathered her son and left. The father asked my godmother if she liked the young man. As she explained to my mother years later “Comare, what could I say?, I never saw him before but I had to say something nice to be polite.”

I told the Japanese lady it was a bad marriage, twenty years of misery for both of them before they finally divorced.

“Oh,” she said “I am so sorry to hear the marriage didn’t work.” She meant it. We agreed it turned out bad because the motive was business not the welfare of the young people with both families looking out for their youngster’s interests. I thought of dynastic marriages for the sake of political interests, for reasons of state, that must have been nothing but misery. Like Catherine the Great’s marriage to the idiot, Tsar Paul. Supposedly, she conspired in his murder.

It occurred to me to ask where she was in Japan.

“Hiroshima” she said. She pronounced it hi-RO-shi-ma, not hi-ro-SHI-ma like we do.

It was our turn to look concerned.

“Oh, no,” she said. “My husband was posted to Manchuria. He always said marrying him saved my life” she repeated. She had gone with him.

But “her girls” as she called her students, were different. Before her marriage she led her girls downtown weekly for some sort of civil defense duty. “Hiroshima” she explained “was all wood and paper. It was how the homes were constructed.” If Hiroshima was bombed, it would burn in a fire storm. Everybody was thinking conventional bombing, and how to protect against it. She didn’t say, but I gathered her girls must have perished in the bombing.

“My wife was bombed too” I said.

She looked surprised. “Oh, where were you from?”

“Germany.”

“It must be the politicians who cause these things” she said trying to account for things she could not understand.

We had finished eating and it was time to go on.

“Arigato” I said, “thank you” instead of “goodbye.” The old lady beamed.

“Duo itashe-mash’te” (you are welcome) she replied. And we left.

The sun was in full splendor, the temperature was comfortable, and it was a fine day at the fair.

Nothing to Write Home About

© Copyright 2000 John K. Taber

Stephen O’Shea mentions in Back to the Front (ISBN 0-380-73167-3), a contemporary reflection on WW I, that “nothing to write home about” originated in the trenches of WW I.

Today, the expression means “nothing significant enough to write about.” Back then, it meant “nothing that the authorities will allow us to write home about.” Something we must not tell the folks.

In hindsight the expression seems sardonic. A ghastly event, thousands of lives snuffed out in a moment of raw mayhem, is nothing to write home about.

Like the Kindermord. O’Shea walked the length of the Front, recording dreary monuments whose purpose he thinks was to let our leaders escape blame for their misrule by memorializing the victims of their misrule. At the Northern end of the Front is the German monument to the Slaughter of Children at Ypres. German boys at the start of the century joined a sort of sweet, idealistic organization, sort of like our Boy Scouts called Wandervogel (wander bird). Hiking, camping, singing folksongs. O’Shea says their motto was rein bleiben, reif werden (to stay pure is to mature). Rein bleiben (to stay pure) must have meant no masturbation.

They were eager to help the war effort. And at last their chance came. Desperate, the German high command hurled these volunteers at the British as the German offensive bogged down. Arms linked, singing German folksongs, which are among the loveliest tunes in the world, these kids marched across No-man’s Land to the waiting British machine guns.

What did they sing, I wonder? The songs my wife learned as a little girl?

Alle Vögel sind schon da
Alle Vögel, alle!

All the birds are here already
All the birds, all.

Maybe that was too childish. How about?

Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust,
Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust,
Das Wandern!
Das muß ein schlechter Müller sein,
Dem niemals fiel das Wandern ein!
Das Wandern!

Wandering is the miller’s joy
Wandering is the miller’s joy
Wandering!
It’s a sorry miller
Who never thought of wandering
Wandering!

Some 44,000 are buried at the German memorial to the Kindermord.
In an identical manner, O’Shea says, Iran hurled idealistic young Moslems at the Iraqi forces at Basra in our own time. “God is great!” they chanted as they charged the Iraqi.

The Kindermord was nothing to write home about.

A happenstance irony is that the Kindermord took place near the Flemish town of Passendale (Passchendaele). That means Passion Valley, that is, the Valley of the Passion of Christ, or Crucifixion Valley.

On the British side O’Shea tells of the members of the London Regiment who cheerfully charged across No-man’s land kicking a soccer ball. Maybe somebody thought of the Duke of Wellington’s “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

1200 men were dead within an hour. The ball bounced a few times, then stopped.

The soccer ball was nothing to write home about.

There are many such stories.

Mail home was censored. The authorities, British, French, German, and later American, in no way wanted the truth of the Front and the War to get home. It was forbidden to write anything that might demoralize the Home Front, which was fed with propaganda from the newspapers, optimism from the military, and lies from the government. The French called it le bourrage de crâne (skull stuffing).

Censors made sure you didn’t. Perhaps you could not determine exactly what was forbidden or allowed, but everybody understood. If there were doubts, you played it safe and kept your mouth shut. Everybody knows how that is done.

A few did not such as E. E. Cummings and his friend William Slater Brown. The French imprisoned them, but that is another story that Cummings tells in The Enormous Room.

Most of us understand what the authorities want of us, and do not disobey because the penalties are too great. The soldiers cooperated with the authorities. I’m sure that many of them rationalized the censorship. The mismanagement, the incompetence of the leaders, the demands upon the people and the indifference to the people’s well being, the butchery of the war, are trivialized so that in the soldier’s mind, all that seemed truly nothing to write home about.

O’Shea uses Madonna’s song “Papa don’t preach” as a leitmotiv. Wherever he is along the former Front, from someplace the song is blaring. O’Shea does not explain its significance. Here and there throughout the book, he records that “Papa don’t preach” is playing.

Despite the monuments, each nation taking care of its own, despite the endless tallies of names of the dead and missing, or maybe because of them, the War is meaningless to the present generation. Millions killed, and somehow it doesn’t matter. A historian could explain what was important, why it was important, why we should care. But it’s preaching. The young listen politely, but tune out. The past is not communicable. It becomes irrelevant.

People were baffled why O’Shea was walking the Front. “You’ll get sore feet” a French kid tells him.

After recounting the mindless slaughters at Passendale, early in the book, O’Shea sums it up in this remark:

As I sit on a bench waiting for the bus back to town, an ice cream truck rounds the corner, bells ringing. The children of Passendale step out of the doorways and run for their treats. There is shouting in the streets. The rays of the late-afternoon sun catch the hair of one boy, sending a sudden shower of gold down the barren thoroughfare…

It is an obvious reference to Polish Poet (and Nobel winner), Wislawa Szymborska’s poem Reality Demands, whose crux lines are:

Where not a stone still stands
you see the Ice Cream Man
besieged by children.

Her point is that in spite of all the horrors in history, life goes on.

In a way, the popular meaning is right. Despite preaching papas, World War I, the Great War, is nothing to write home about.

Mumblety Peg

© John K. Taber, 2000

                    We passed the School, where Children strove
                    At Recess--in the Ring--
                                        Emily Dickinson

I remember many games in my childhood, games for boys, games for girls, and some for both. I played Mumblety Peg, Buck Buck, Ring-O-Leevio. Girls played hopscotch, jacks, skip rope. Hide-and-Seek and Giant Steps both could play.

We had games for the street or the empty lot, and games for school recess, games for the field and for the woods. There were games for different ages, and for the seasons.

We played stick ball in the street. The ball was an old sock wrapped with friction tape. The bat was a sawed off broomstick. If you hit it into old lady Pizzorusso's yard, it was an automatic out, because she cursed you in Italian and wouldn't let you retrieve the ball. If you hit it over the billboard it was an automatic home run because it could not be retrieved in time. Jemality could hit so hard that the ball not only cleared the billboard, it cleared the street on the other side of the billboard, and landed in the railroad embankment. The manhole was first base. There are only home plate and two bases in stick ball.

Another great street game was Kick the Can.

At school we played Red Rover and Buck Buck. And Mumblety Peg. Because I went to a school that was almost all Italian immigrants, we played this delightful Italian counting game where to a rhythm each pair of boys threw out from one to five fingers, stamped a foot, and yelled out an Italian number from two to ten trying to guess the total. Sometimes a boy would get mixed up, throw out one finger and yell sette, which was impossible. Then everyone laughed. The fun was the rhythm and guessing right, but nobody kept score, which is why I liked it.

The girls had many skip rope chants, some for single skipping, some for Double Dutch, a team game with two ropes that emphasized rhythm and cooperation. I still remember one of the chants:

Down by the river
Down by the sea
Johnny broke a bottle
And blamed it on me.

I told Ma,
Ma told Pa,
Johnny got a spanking,
So, ha ha ha.

Girls resent the greater freedom that boys enjoy. They feel it is unfair, and their resentment is expressed in the chant.

Before my mother died, I got her to teach me the skip rope chants she remembered from Manhattan where she grew up. She never lost her New York accent her whole life. Yet it was different from a Manhattan accent today. People don't realize it, but accents change over time. Here's a Manhattan skip rope chant from about 1910.

Marianna, Marianna
Ha ha ha,
Kissed her fella
On the Broadway ca'

I told Ma,
Ma told Pa,
Marianna, Marianna
Ha ha ha.

You need a New York accent for that chant to work. I suppose many people would not know what a Broadway car was. They were the old trolley cars.

An Italian immigrant chant was

Margarit-a Margarite
Go wash your feet
The Board of Health
Is across the street.

I mentioned Mumblety Peg to a guy at work, and he remembered playing it in his boyhood, but he had it confused with another knife game, Splits. We played Splits in the field. It requires a hunting knife, so could not be played in school. However, in the country, (I also lived in the country for a short time) boys did carry hunting knives, and Splits was played in the schoolyard.

I do not see kids playing the games we played when I was a child. I do not know what happened. All these games are gone.

From time immemorial, from the dawn of man, there has always been a Childhood Republic, free of adults, where these games were passed down from child to child without adult interference. There is a painting by Brueghel of peasant boys and girls at play in the Middle Ages. And if you look carefully you will see they are playing the same games we played. No adult teaches these games to a child. They are learned, and must be learned, from other children.

Children do not play these games anymore. Even the memory of them is gone except for an occasional older person such as myself, or certain scholars who specialize in childhood games, chants, and counting out rhymes.

I live in a nice, friendly town. Not one child has ever seen Mumblety Peg. The children do not play at all except in organized team sports, sponsored by organizations and supervised by adults. If a boy pulled out a pocket knife for Mumblety Peg, he would be jumped by horrified adults. His parents would be summoned to explain his offense. Jack knives are forbidden.

I do not know what happened, what broke the chain of time of the Childhood Republic. Sometimes I wonder if maybe middle class children never played unsupervised games of their own device. Maybe only peasant children and poor city children played such games, and the lack I think I see is an illusion that means only that I am now middle class.

But I'm not sure.

The New York Times had an article "Many Schools Putting an End to Child's Play"; by Dirk Johnson; 4/7/98. To the horror and against the protest of child development experts schools are eliminating "unstructured" play. It quoted a little girl who had to play with a computer but who wanted "to sit outside in the grass and look for ladybugs." The article said that the Cleveland Avenue grammar school, brand new in Atlanta, was built without a playground. Schools have no recess so a playground is unneeded. A principal said that recess was a waste of time.

It isn't unstructured play that is being eliminated. Natural children's games are highly structured with certain things done at specific times, to the accompaniment of obligatory words which must be just so. Natural children's games have their season and place, which every boy and girl has heeded since the beginning of time. There is a season for marbles, it cannot be played just any time. No child's game can be played just any way. There are words and rituals and ceremony to be observed.

It is independent structure that is being done away with. Children are prohibited from learning the socialization and negotiation skills needed to structure their own time and their own activities in their own way. Instead, the socialization and structure is not their own, it is someone else's and it is imposed upon them.

We are raising children to function well as employees, to believe they are achieving their goals when they are only fulfulling an anonymous superior's quota, and to think they are happy when perhaps they aren't. We are going to be an organized people of helpless persons.

Friends of ours are without nearby grandparents, and besides they are not on good terms with the real grandparents. They are quite concerned to do well by their children and when they failed to get their oldest girl in the very best school in Dallas, they were crushed. But they at least got their children into another private school.

Every year, the school has Grandparents day. The school requires grandparents to attend, and our friends were at wits end to comply. So they asked us to be grandparents for the day. I work, but my wife agreed the second year they asked us. They must have been desperate.

My wife played grandmother. She says that some of the children were so young. When I was a child, few of us went to kindergarten. Nowadays, kindergarten is considered too late, and children two and three years old are in school. My wife told me that the children did nothing on their own. Every moment was organized. Some of the children test the limit, and would offer "I want to ..." to the teacher. To which the teacher replied that that was not allowed at this time. The teachers have a practiced putdown for every natural childish urge. The teachers extolled structure. No child at that school was going to look at ladybugs unless told to. Certainly not on its own.

I got the urge to sneak into the School and teach the boys to play Mumblety Peg. I know children are not supposed to learn these games from adults but these are desperate times. It was just an idle thought. I would be arrested, although it would be interesting to see what the charges would be. Corrupting innocent children? Demented Grandfather Caught in Private School with Jack Knife. Claims He Was Only Teaching Boys Mumblety Peg. It would be Huntsville for sure.

No. There is nothing I can do but remember a different time.

Dove Road

© John K. Taber 2002

I have taken to driving Dove Road instead of Highway 114 to get to town. Dove Road isn’t crowded, and it avoids the noise, pollution, and the aggressiveness of the Highway 114 drivers.

Dove Road is an old road, one of the oldest in Tarrant County. Parts of it are still county road. It roughly parallels Highway 114 but is oddly segmented because it was built in pieces in the early days, only as far as needed. Each segment is fairly straight, but the next segment continues at an odd angle. It begins in Grapevine at Dove Corners, and in segments proceeds west through Grapevine, Southlake, and Westlake to Roanoke.

This part of Texas is full of mourning doves. They have a peculiar call, a woo-oo, woo-oo, rather than the coo of the turtle dove. When I first moved here, I mistook the mourning dove’s call for an owl’s. Folks imagined that the call was plaintive, hence the name “mourning.” It must have been the plenitude of mourning doves that caused so many places around here to include “dove” in their names. The area is also known as Cross Timbers because of the thickets of various oaks, mostly scrub oak today, crossing the beginnings of the Texas Plains.

Recently, so-called killer mold (stachybotrys) was found at Dove Elementary School on Dove Road in Grapevine, and had to be cleaned up. That made TV news. The poor girl on local Fox News TV station could not handle Dove Elementary School on the teleprompter, and pronounced dove to rhyme with stove instead of love.

Dove Road was used by Bonnie and Clyde. They murdered two state troopers near the intersection of Dove Road and Highway 114. It is an incident reflected in the movie. According to official sources the officers approached their parked car to assist them, and were gunned down. It was Clyde Barrow’s fingerprints on a whiskey bottle that identified them. There is folklore disagreement where these murders happened. According to some long-time residents of Trophy Club, the murders occurred near the old Medlin barn, now torn down in what is now Trophy Club. They say Bonnie and Clyde stopped to picnic when the officers tried to sneak up on them. But, a local newspaperman says that an old-timer he talked to claims the murders happened in Euless, at least twelve miles to the south. The evidence is overwhelming, however, that the murders happened where the officials say it did.

There was a monument to the officers, Wheeler and Murphy, near the site. The monument was removed for freeway construction, but eventually it was returned. The monument read:

WE THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF
TEXAS
ACKNOWLEDGE AND THANK TROOPERS
EDWARD BRYAN WHEELER
AND
H. D. MURPHY
FOR THE GREAT SACRIFICE THEY
MADE TO KEEP THE PUBLIC SAFE.

TROOPERS WHEELER AND MURPHY
WERE SHOT TO DEATH EASTER SUNDAY,
APRIL 1, 1934 NEAR THIS SITE ON
WEST DOVE ROAD BY THE INFAMOUS
CRIMINALS, BONNIE PARKER AND
CLYDE BARROW. WHEELER AND MURPHY
STOPPED THEIR MOTORCYCLES NEAR
PARKER AND BARROW’S CAR, THINKING
A MOTORIST NEEDED ASSISTANCE. WHEN
THEY APPROACHED, THEY WERE SHOT.

THEIR EFFORTS WILL STAND
THE TEST OF TIME.

MAY GOD BLESS THEIR SOULS.
            ERECTED 1996

This area is developing madly. Perhaps somebody feared that developers and publicists would misrepresent the incident here to sell houses and hamburgers. A Bonnie and Clyde hamburger (meaning with ketchup on it) is not far-fetched. Ponder is only fifteen miles away, where scenes for the film Bonnie and Clyde were made simply because the old Ponder State Bank robbed by Bonnie and Clyde still stands, though it has long since ceased being a bank. The movie crew patronized the Ranchman’s Cafe which has been doing a boom business ever since. Folks drive into Ponder in Mercedes lugging their wine in Igloos with them (Ponder is dry) to eat a steak at the Ranchman’s Cafe. There are even busloads of tourists in this unlikely Texas small town. So fears of mindless exploitation are well-founded, and this monument may help to ensure that an accurate version of the story prevails.

One day, off Dove Road, I noticed Lonesome Dove Road. Immediately, I thought of Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove. Damn, I thought, must be a new tract. Developers will use any name that helps sell houses.

But Lonesome Dove Road is the real thing. A little north of the junction is the Lonesome Dove Baptist Church.

Dr. Quesenbury, pastor of the Lonesome Dove Baptist Church, says that McMurtry was eating in a Fort Worth restaurant and happened to see a church van through the restaurant’s window with the sign “Lonesome Dove Baptist Church.” This is from McMurtry’s own account. The poetry of the name took his fancy. His novel has nothing to do with this area of Texas (it is set along the border), but he made use of the name.

Larry McMurtry may have heard of the church much earlier through his family. One of his uncles was a member of the church.

Ironically, the church is often suspected or accused of stealing its name from McMurtry’s novel.

The Lonesome Dove Baptist Church was started in 1846, and completed in 1847, shortly before Tarrant County was formed, while Texas was still a republic. At that time, this was the frontier, the westernmost church save for a small Catholic church in El Paso.

A band of settlers from Missouri started the settlement in what is now Southlake/Grapevine. The Republic of Texas, fearing Mexican efforts to forcibly retake Texas, made a determined effort to settle Texas with Anglos. Large tracts of land were given away in order to attract settlers, 640 acres to a family. This was one of the tracts available and being wooded it was attractive to the pioneers since the woods provided material for cabins, fire, fences, and implements. Also, there was no immediate problem, apart from thieving, with Indians in this particular area.

The name Lonesome Dove is peculiar, and there are several origin legends. A widely told tale is that a mourning dove flew over the church when it was built. However, the church was named Lonesome Dove before construction started.

Another story is that a dove alighted on an early pastor’s shoulder and stayed there during the entire sermon. Dr. Quesenbury, knowing doves, pastors and their sermons seriously doubts its probability.

The founders cast about for a suitable name once they decided to build the church. They had been meeting in each other’s homes, but the congregation had grown too large for that. One proposal was to name it for their original church in Platte County, Missouri. Dr. Quesenbury hasn’t discovered that name yet. Another was to name it the Platte Baptist Church.

According to legend, while debating what to name the church, the members heard a mourning dove call, and somebody remarked “Listen to that lonesome dove.” This is as likely an origin as any. Those settlers must have felt very lonely here. They were on the frontier, with wilderness all around. It was necessary to go to church armed because of lawlessness, and to post a guard during services to prevent Indians from stealing their horses. After the church was built, the back of the church on Sundays looked like an arsenal because of the stacked arms.

Basically, we don’t know why the church was so named. The name, lonesome dove must have resonated to trigger its adoption. My guess is, it must have been already current in folklore. Doves are important in western culture, in the Bible as the Holy Spirit and symbol of peace; and in literature and song as true and faithful love. Perhaps there was a song at the time about a dove that had lost its mate. Perhaps it evoked fidelity under trial. Perhaps it evoked loneliness.

Whatever the reason for the name, McMurtry’s novel also struck a chord. The novel led to a movie, then a TV series, and there are now places named Lonesome Dove all over the United States as a result. McMurtry said that he meant to kill the cowboy myth by showing how ugly the life was in reality. Instead he added to the myth and inadvertently started a Lonesome Dove industry. Dr. Quesenbury says that when the church established its website, Lonesome Dove businesses were all over the Internet, and his church could scarcely find an unused name for itself.

One myth has it that the church burned three times, the first time by Indians. The myth even supplies a date, 1865. But the church burned once, in 1930. It was the Mt. Gilead Baptist Church about ten miles to the west in Keller that the Indians burned. Probably, people conflate the two churches.

This intersection, Dove Road and Lonesome Dove Road, was the heart of a small unincorporated community, informally called Dove Community, right up to the 50s at least. The creek is Dove Branch, still used by the church for baptism. There was a blacksmith shop with one-cylinder engines to drive a conveyor belt. There were a couple of country stores, a cotton gin, a Woodmen’s Hall, and Dove School, all now gone. The Torian cabin in Grapevine, on display like a museum piece, came from here. One of Mr. Torian’s descendents, Bud Tanner, now in his 80s, describes the area well enough so that the listener can almost see and hear those bygone activities.

The Woodmen of the World, almost defunct now, was a fraternal order, like the Odd Fellows or the Elks. One of its benefits was a tombstone. In the old cemeteries around here you may see a tombstone shaped like a tree trunk. These were provided by the Woodmen, and there is one in good shape in the church cemetery of the Lonesome Dove church.

When you drive Dove Road, you should try to see settlers and wagons, old churches and graveyards of pioneer days, and an old, old country lane traveled by horse and wagon, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and modern day refugees from the freeway.
Take your time. This is, after all, a country lane, and the Southlake police patrol it, glad to give out tickets to improve the police department budget. Begin at Dove Corners in Grapevine. Drive through Southlake stopping at the Lonesome Dove Baptist Church. Dr. Quesenbury is friendly, and if he has the time, can show you around. The church has a quilt made by its women members for a fund raiser decades ago hanging in pride from the rear wall. Member names are stitched in with their contributions, 25¢ perhaps or $1.50. Member names are freely spelled, thus Halford is also Hallford. In the church office is an old decanter carried by oxcart from Missouri, and used by the 1840 pioneers for communion.

Follow Dove Road west through Westlake to Roanoke. This is the prettiest stretch of Dove Road, a pure country lane through gently rolling hills and groves. It bisects the Circle T Ranch, some 2000 acres, owned by the Hunt brothers until their bankruptcy. They used the ranch to train thoroughbreds. It won’t remain a ranch much longer though, because it is now owned by H. Ross Perot and is scheduled for development. It is supposed to be upscale, but the past is disappearing. Still, the mourning dove will remain, its plaintive call reminding us of the past.

Cousin Bea

© John K. Taber, 2002

We received an unexpected call that Cousin Bea just died. Perhaps it should not have been unexpected because she was 98, but as she endured so long it was still a surprise. She hoped to reach 100, and almost made it.

I was in my junior year at Berkeley, 45 years ago, when the bell to my apartment rang. At the door was a frumpy middle-aged woman. “Are you John Taber?” she asked. “Yes, I am” I acknowledged. The frumpy woman announced “I’m Beatrice W., I’m your first cousin once removed.” Or, maybe she said first cousin twice removed.

What does one say to an announcement like that? There is a general understanding of aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, and cousins, but with today’s atomized family, the remoter reaches of kinship like second and third cousins or removed cousins are beyond ordinary understanding. “Well, do come in” I said, the only response I could think of on meeting my removed cousin.

That was how I met Cousin Bea. She brought me up to date on the kinship. She was my mother’s cousin, and my mother’s girlhood friend in Manhattan in the period before World War I. Actually, try as Bea might, I didn’t grasp the kinship. Just as the explanation grew crucial, Cousin Bea jumped to another distant relative, and I lost the thread. I took her word for it. Shortly after WW I, my mother’s family moved to California, and eventually contact was lost.

But she had a daughter, Clare, my second cousin, living in Berkeley that I should look up, she said. I had no idea. So I promised I would look her up. Cousin Bea loved to get people together.

And so I met Clare. She was my age, also attending Berkeley but for an advanced degree, struggling as a divorced mother with a four-year-old daughter. We liked each other. Nothing came of that, and eventually Clare married a great guy who pushed and encouraged her to get her doctorate, while I moved to Texas and married a great gal. But we kept up the ties over the years.

My wife Sonja took a shine to Cousin Bea, maybe because she was a direct link to my otherwise lost past. When my aunt died I inherited the family photos. “Who are all these people in period clothing?” I wondered. That’s the trouble with family photos. By the time you inherit them the identity of most of the people in them has been lost. It would help if people dated pictures, and wrote who the subjects are and where the pictures were taken, and on what occasion on the back. But nobody does.

Cousin Bea identified them for us. Of course, some of her identifications were mistaken. Over the years she forgot some and misremembered others. Still, she made a dent in the pile of pictures, though we can only be sure of some of them.

Bea did not like to shut up. She was fine for a visit but I imagine that if you had to live with her you would either flee to a remote part of the country or strangle her.

Sonja was interested in the family relationship. Almost always Cousin Bea’s explanation would get fuzzy, because, I supposed, when we asked for clarification, the interruption annoyed her. So on a visit to us, my wife taped her. After several days of taping, my wife asked Bea if she would like to hear herself. Of course she would. Her face showed her pleasure in listening to herself, and her annoyance at having to shut up to listen to herself. The expression of cross purposes on her face was as perfect a picture of Cousin Bea as any of us can think of.

Sonja, with paper and pencil in hand, kept on interrupting Bea as she mentioned long forgotten relatives to get the relationship down. The arrows and layout are somewhat confusing, but after Bea’s death I could use my wife’s notes and Bea’s writings to puzzle out the relationships.

Cousin Bea had a talent for bringing people together and reuniting them. I remember my mother when she finally saw Bea – they were both middle-aged by that time, and had not seen each other since girlhood. They embraced, and there were tears in my mother’s eyes. “Beatrice!” my mother said with a catch in her voice, “I thought I would not see you again this side of the grave.”

Once a year, Sonja shipped a Weihnachtsstollen (a German Christmas cake) to Bea which my wife baked herself. Cousin Bea loved the Stollen. Maybe it reminded her of her own girlhood in New York. She told us the tale of my grandfather’s sarcastic German term for weak American coffee: Blümchenkafe (flower coffee). By that she said, my grandfather, whom I never met, meant coffee so weak one could see the floral decoration at the bottom of the china coffee cup.

But the last year my wife had to send her store-bought Stollen. We’re not getting younger ourselves, and the Stollen was work. It was imported, and very good, but it was not to Bea’s liking. Bea thanked her, but let Sonja know Bea preferred the real thing, home made.

Cousin Bea was a trencherman. The writings she left dwelt on menus of a bygone era. On a visit to us I was determined to treat her to a rich steak dinner, aged and marbled meat, as in her youth. We took her to Ruth’s Chris Steak House. At the age of 89 she devoured a rare filet mignon, sizzling in butter, with evident pleasure. She loved red meat, she told us. She wiped out the lyonnaised potatos, and polished off the asparagus. She even managed a roll or two. For dessert she had crème brulée. She astonished us, but at the same time we all took pleasure in her pleasure. It was a memorable meal.

Her pictures reveal a beauty in her youth. She was bright and accomplished. She attended Cornell, taking her degree in the Classics – Greek and Latin in 1926. She played the piano very well, probably good enough to be a professional. She continued to play until near blindness kept her from reading the score, and arthritis became too painful to work the keys.

In those days there was not much a beautiful, intelligent and educated woman could do. If she had completed high school she could become a telephone operator. If she had some training she could become a nurse. With a college degree, the only practical field open to her was teaching. So, she taught high school in New York.

Cousin Bea had many adventures some successful, many not. A memorable defeat was her hamburger stand in Florida. In spite of the fact that it was supposed to make her and her husband, Jack, independent and wealthy, they went broke, and had to abandon the stand. Her most successful was her retirement from teaching to Albuquerque. She and Jack picked the location well. In the 70s, Albuquerque was big enough to support elderly people, with an ideal climate for the elderly, near desert, dry and neither too cold nor too warm, and relatively inexpensive.

They traveled a lot around the country, visiting their children and grandchildren, quarrelling with them too. Jack was nearly deaf, which is why I suppose he did not seem to mind his wife’s talking, while Bea’s eyesight was increasingly poor. With Jack’s eyesight and Bea’s hearing they managed driving the US.

Cousin Bea involved herself in the community. She was active in the senior center. She still loved to teach, so taught Spanish to the seniors, one of the many languages she had mastered. She helped organize her church, and once a year was a lay reader of Bible passages, which she read in Greek, a tour de force.

One day at a senior picnic she pronounced something to Jack, who rose as if to reply and fell over dead from a stroke. Death was instantaneous. She missed Jack, but at the same time I suspect she harbored a grudge against him for finding another way not to listen to her.

And so we laid Bea to rest next to her husband.

John J. W. 1903 – 1982
Beatrice B. W. 1903 – 2002
Together forever

Vale, Cousin Bea.

Chushingura; A Review

Chushingura (The 47 Loyal Samurai) is set in the early 1700s in Japan, when the transition from the older feudal system to a more modern centralized authority was nearly complete. The basis of the story is the struggle between doing what is right, according to the honor code of the dying feudal order, or going along with the modern system.

It is a moral story structured as an epic. The story has deep meaning in Japan to this day. Children grow up on Chushingura, somewhat like Shakespeare in the West. There is hardly a Japanese who does not know this story. It was apparently based on real events.

This film is a loving rendition of the traditional epic. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the Japanese movie studio, Toho. The scenes are gorgeous, arranged with utmost artistry.

The epic itself is a revenge story. The hero is the faithful Chamberlain, Oishi, who is a hero of cunning, like our Odysseus, rather than Achilles. There is brawn and swordplay, but the emphasis is on intelligence; the devising of stratagems and careful adherence to them. The movie is paced, with the plot developing slowly, allowing tension to build up like a coiling spring, until the end when the story explodes in violence.

But the hero, Oishi, does not appear in the story until late. The story opens with the wronging of Count Asano, who is the good feudal lord of the old order. The villain, Lord Kira is introduced, and the new order, the Shogunate. The cause of the story is the clash between the upright Asano and the corrupt, indeed despicable, Kira.

The Shogun’s envoys are visiting his vassals occasioning elaborate ceremonies. It is Count Asano’s turn to receive the envoys. The ceremonies are elaborate, and extremely important. An error in protocol means disgrace. Lord Kira is the Master of Ceremony (protocol chief), and Count Asano has no choice but to seek his instructions. Count Asano gets off on the wrong foot by giving Kira a gift, honorable enough but of little value while Kira was expecting a substantial bribe. As a result, Kira uses his knowledge of protocol to humiliate Asano. The protocol for the visit of the envoys cannot fail without Kira also being disgraced, Kira has to cooperate, nevertheless he humiliates Asano on every occasion. Finally, Asano attacks Kira, wounding him. Attendants keep Asano from killing him.

The law intended to end feudal conflict has been broken, and the Shogun orders Count Asano to commit hara-kiri (ritual suicide). Asano obeys the edict in a scene of touching beauty.

Thus ends the introduction. Only now is the hero, Chamberlain Oishi, introduced. The fear is that Count Asano’s followers will not accept the results because Lord Kira, the cause of the trouble, has escaped punishment. Remember, these are still feudal times, and there is no assurance that the edicts of the central authority will be respected in the strongholds. It seems to everybody that the corrupt, despicable Kira is in favor with the Shogun, while the good and upright Asano was forced to commit suicide. Yet, a simple rebellion will not do, because the fortune of Asano’s entire clan is at stake. If the Shogun must enforce the law with an army, all of the clan will suffer.

Only total compliance with the Shogun’s wishes, with no hint of revenge, will save Asano’s clan.

Oishi devises a strategy of going along with the system, while intending to exact revenge when the time is ripe. He embarks on an elaborate ruse of rejecting the warrior’s code, and living a debauched life as if by preference.

Three times he is asked if his debauchery is in earnest. Actually, this is a weak point in the film. You should remember that the details of Chushingura are well known in Japan. A Japanese watching the movie already knows the details of the story, just as an ancient Greek watching Sophocles’s Antigone knew the story in advance. Thus, the ritual questioning of Oishi could have been used in the answers to illuminate the storyteller’s view, as Sophocles used them in the Antigone. Everybody knows that Oishi for his own honor will avenge his dead lord, regardless of what he says or does. Yet, Toho tells the story as if Oishi’s eventual acts are in doubt. The earnest samurai questioning Oishi on his intentions seems a little stupid rather than convincing. Still, it does cast into relief the moral question: Will you do what is right, or will you go along with the system?

In the West, doing what is right is presented too easily. The cowboy hero does the right thing, and in the end gets the girl and the farm. The strings in the orchestra swell, and the movie fades into the end. But doing the right thing in Chushingura is not so easy. It is more like the whistleblower who is fired and disgraced, and maybe even sent to prison. If Oishi and the other loyal samurai exact revenge on Kira, their own lives are forfeit. The Shogunate is trying to stamp out feuding. Will you do what is right because it is right, not because of the nice music, and getting the girl and the farm?

In the movie, Kira is the plain villain—greedy, lecherous, and cowardly. It would have been more interesting if Kira were developed. The new system (more centralized authority) is not all bad, in fact it is very necessary, and Kira has some good lines. He says that when a man stops wanting money and lusting after women, he might as well be dead. His lust and greed make him an active old man indeed. He advises Lord Asano to do as other men do, and go along with the system. That’s really not bad advice. As our once Speaker of the House, John Nance Gardner said “If you want to get along, go along.”

It would be interesting to retell Chushingura in a more nuanced version; a humanized Kira, an inflexible Asano, and a dogged Oishi. But that is not this movie.

Eventually the time is ripe. Oishi sends word that Asano’s faithful samurai are to meet in Edo to take revenge. Edo is the classical name for Tokyo. Kira is at his mansion in Edo. Of all, only 47 samurai make the rendezvous. After beautifully choreographed swordplay and mayhem, the 47 faithful samurai take Kira’s head, and march off, not to a Hollywood ending, but to their own satisfaction of having lived up to their warrior’s code. It is understood that they will be ordered to commit hara-kiri for disobeying the Shogun’s edict.

This is a terrific movie, in my view, one of the four or five best films of all time.

Waiting For My Number to Be Called

© John K. Taber 1997, 1999

A Chinese friend recommended Asia Gardens in San Francisco's Chinatown to us for dim sum. It was newly opened and the rage with the Chinese. So, one Sunday morning I packed the family into the car for the trip to Chinatown.

For those not familiar with dim sum, it is either a lunch or a brunch of Chinese hors d'oeuvres, all sorts of dumplings with many different fillings, and many other things. The hors d'oeuvres are served on small plates stacked on carts that attendants roll by the tables. You point at what you want as the carts come by. Supposedly, dim sum means "heart's delight", meaning that you pick and choose the hors d'oeuvres that appeal to you. There is no fixed menu. The used plates are left stacked on your table and at the end of the meal, the waiter determines your bill by counting the plates. More expensive hors d'oeuvres are served on two plates. It is also called a tea lunch because you choose your tea as well. There are numerous Chinese teas. It's noisy, and fun, and a great way to eat.

So here we were in Asia Gardens which was packed. I was very hungry because we skipped breakfast in order to make a brunch of it. There were so many people that we had to take numbers, from 1 to 99 in black, and again, from 1 to 99 in red. Our number was 61 black. There was nothing for it but to wait.

I heard Chinese over the PA but I didn't hear numbers being called, and I began to worry how long it would be before we were seated. They seemed awfully slow. Then it dawned on me that what I heard on the PA were the numbers being called in Chinese. "Oh, my God" I thought, "How was I going to know when 61 was called?" And it was then I noticed that the restaurant was filled with Chinese. The four of us, our little family, were the only Caucasians in the entire place. When I'm hungry I get neurotic easily. I feared they had already called my number, and I would have to wait until they got to 61 red before we could eat. And what if I missed that? We could be in a Chinese restaurant and starve to death!

Then I had a bright idea born of hunger. I showed the guy behind me my number, 61, and asked him what it was in Chinese. "Lok sap yet" he told me. I had him repeat it several times and it is burned in my memory to this day. "Lok sap yet", "lok sap yet". I meant to listen carefully to the PA and I hoped to catch my number as it went by. By the way, for those of you who know Chinese, "lok sap yet" is Cantonese, not Mandarin. There are several dialects of Cantonese commonly spoken in San Francisco's Chinatown. Mandarin is the exception. The guy assured me my number had not been called, and told me the English for the latest number called.

I listened with both ears, and by comparing the sounds over the PA with the numbers that I could see on the tickets being triumphantly waved at the head waiter, I began to catch on to Chinese numbers. It was a simple, very rational counting system. One began with yet (1) and went to sap (10), then counted ten-one (sap yet, 11) and so on to twenty, which was two-tens, two-tens one, two-tens-two, and so on. Very logical and simple. No umlauting of vowels, no shifting of consonants for euphony like our "five" and "fifteen". Just "five", "ten-five".

Hunger is a good teacher, and I began to think I would not need further help to take my place when called. I got so that I could predict the next number. There was a second of static as the PA was switched on and I heard
NG SAP GOW

I recognized 59 (five-tens nine) , and if I understood correctly, the next number should be "lok sap" (six-tens) , then the next after would be mine, "lok sap yet" (six-tens one). Another split second of static, and
LOK SAP

I had that feeling you get when you know you are going to ace an exam. I got the family's attention and told them to get ready, we were going to be called next. There was another second of static, and
SIXTY-ONE