Recently in indulgences Category

My father was a doctor, a general practitioner--G.P.--as his type was called back then when it was very common. Regular patients called him "Dr. Bill," instinctively combining honorific with nickname to indicate their respect and affection. At the age of 12 he had emigrated from Russia to the States with his mother and siblings, his father having preceded them. His name is listed in the archives at the Ellis Island Museum: "William S. Bernstein, Russian (Jewish)."

His first job in America was driving a laundry truck. Needless to say, he was rapidly learning English and simultaneously attending school. His formidable mother commandeered the notion that the Jews were "the people of the book" and gave the claim her own interpretation. (Originally, "the book" meant only sacred texts.) But my grandmother, as practical as she was pious, knew that a successful formal education was essential to making one's way up the ladder economically and socially. Her husband fully, and sternly, agreed. With rueful amusement, my dad told the tale of going to his father to announce with delight that he had received the grade of 98 percent on an important math test, only to receive the reply "And what happened to the other two percent?"

In due course, my father earned an undergraduate degree at Cornell University, a medical degree from Long Island College Hospital, and hung out his shingle. From the time of my earliest recollections, his office and our family living quarters were under the same roof in a workaday Brooklyn neighborhood. He made house calls, even in the middle of the night if the situation required it, and if the poorer people who consulted him couldn't afford even his modest fees, he didn't charge them.

Though he may not have been a specialist, like a surgeon, he had a specialty: He was a crackerjack diagnostician. Example: Our local friends tended to congregate casually on our front porch. My parents and I were sitting there one afternoon with a bunch of them when Herbie Bass strolled by. A sturdily built fellow in his mid-twenties, he was the son of a woman in my mother's mahjong group. Flashing his splendid smile, he stopped to say hello, but didn't take the seat offered him, making it clear that he was about to move on to a more exciting scene. My father, with his keen analytic eye, didn't waste a moment on small talk or even on a "How are you?" "Come with me," he commanded Herbie, hailed a cab, half dragged the astonished young man into it, and away they drove, at law-breaking speed. Later that day we found out that my father had sensed that Herbie was bleeding internally from an ulcer. Any delay and he might have been dead. Instead, thanks to my father, he lived, and eventually--irresistible smile flashing, olive skin glowing, hazel eyes glinting--married the girl he was no doubt on his way to see that fateful day. Or so I like to believe.

Shortly afterward, Carl Feldman, a self-effacing man who lived down the street in a shabby house, was diagnosed with a cancer rushing toward its terminal stage, and my father had a long talk in our living room with Carl's lovely wife, Jeannette. (Faint southern accent, jet hair, dark wondering eyes, and skin like that of a peach, with a velvety texture and a pink tint at the cheekbones.) Her looks were so delicate, her manner so gentle, it seemed criminal to tell her the terrible truth of the situation. But my father did, within my hearing, as it happened. (Patients and their dear ones never objected to my presence, even in the consulting room. I must have seemed so young and innocent as to be invisible or uncomprehending.)

My father told Jeannette about her husband's prognosis as sympathetically as could be possible under the dire circumstances. And he adhered to it, insisted upon it unwaveringly--science was science and hopeful lies were anathema--during a miraculous six-month remission, in which Carl would sit on a bench in front of his home every afternoon, playing in the sun with his two beautiful little daughters, replicas of their mother, if more lively.

When Carl finally died, my father didn't attend the funeral, as a devoted family doctor in that time and place would be likely to do. My father didn't go to funerals; he couldn't bear to. He was an assiduous servant of Life, enemy of Death, and did not lend himself to Death's pageants. He told me once that he had been spurred to become a doctor after watching a half dozen of his siblings die in infancy from diphtheria in the Old Country.

Of course eventually he had to go to his own mother's funeral or never face his family again. (Five other siblings had survived, married, and procreated. The entire clan, presumably by fiat, gathered together every Sunday afternoon at my imperious grandmother's apartment.) At the synagogue for the services, I remember my adamantly non-observant father, leaning stiffly forward on the front bench reserved for the chief mourners, eyes fixed on my Orthodox grandmother's raw wood coffin as, in the ritual symbolizing bereavement, the rabbi pinned a strip of black grosgrain ribbon to his lapel, then slit it halfway through with a large sharp-bladed scissors. And I remember his striding angrily away from the soggy burial ground the moment the graveside rituals finished, a high wind riffling his thinning hair and the slashed ribbon, tears streaming down his craggy face.

My father was not given to crying. The only other time I saw him breaking down like that was after he examined my glamorous Aunt Flossie, when she came to him, too late (was her delay due to modesty? to fear?) with bleeding from the vagina and he found her far advanced with cancer in her "women's parts," as the family would say later. While the patient dressed in his office downstairs, my father joined her husband (my beloved Uncle Harry), who had waited out the examination with my mother (his younger sister), and me (the child who silently absorbed everything) in our living quarters above. As he climbed the stairs towards us, I leaned over the banister and saw that he was weeping. Tersely he delivered his diagnosis, referred to an operation that clearly held out no hope, and poured out two shots of his best whiskey for himself and Uncle Harry. I don't remember hearing the usual Jewish toast as they raised their glasses and downed their first aid for shock in the customary single gulp: Le'chayim! (To life!).

My father's own death came too soon. He was only 59. Chronically overworked, he tried to overlook his developing heart condition, resorting occasionally to nitroglycerine tablets for the angina and, absurdly, pacing the living room when he remembered he should exercise. Even after his initial heart attack, he might have been spared if he hadn't insisted upon rising from his hospital bed to supervise a pressing project--the building of a nursing home inspired, ironically, by his new-found interest in geriatrics. It wasn't until a decade later that I realized how alike we were (I'd always assumed I took after my artistic mother, who was also easier to love), determined to work until we dropped to fulfill our vision of what could be accomplished with zeal and luck.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

During a time in my life when I was feeling sad and isolated, and my own immediate circle--splendid, stimulating, and supportive people though it contained--was not offering me a certain kind of sensibility I craved, I had the maverick idea of augmenting my circle of friends with people I did not know but who were writers like me, so in some way kindred souls.

These writers might have lived in times and places very different from my New York contemporary situation, but all such were permissible, the whole affair taking place in my imagination. There were some writers, of course, whom I never thought to annex, though theirs was work of genius--the ancient Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, Proust (whose epic I actually disliked), Dostoevsky. They were irrevocably distanced from me by the grandeur of their work. But what about Sappho, Marivaux, Mme. de Sévigné, Trollope, perhaps, in his Barchester vein; Willa Cather, and, surely, Turgenev and Chekhov. Those I seriously entertained.

Jane Austen, whose work I idolize, remained a borderline case when it came to "friendship." I couldn't bond with her through her masterwork, Pride and Prejudice--perfection discourages personal intimacy--but I could get close, perhaps, through Emma, whose heroine is rich in commonplace human flaws, and certainly through Persuasion, which promises that one's heart's desire may not be fulfilled in the bloom of one's youth, but belatedly, in maturity.

Actually, the idea of appropriating writers as friends took definite form when I glanced at the pile of Babar books stacked on our dining room buffet--a couple of well-worn ones from my own childhood that I had read to my two children, others bought just for them, and then, when my offspring aged out of pachyderms in clothes, still others that I bought for myself on successive trips to Paris, allowing myself just one each time, to draw out the pleasure of acquisition. Besides writing about dance, I am a children's book writer and delight in having magical books for the young close to hand. I am currently reading these gorgeous large-format Babar albums--sight-translating the text from the French--to my two local grandchildren. Jean de Brunhoff (the author/illustrator of these wonders), I thought, he is my friend. And then I began to add other writers for children to my list. The category--of innocence, openness, and a belief that anything can happen--speaks to my soul.

Some of these writers I read as a child, some for the first time only once I had my own children to read the stories to. You will have your own list. You may even still have the books. My distinguished friend and dance-writing colleague David Vaughan once told me that the mark of a truly cultivated adult is his interleaving on his bookshelves the books he read and loved as a youngster with books he acquired later that were written with adults in mind.

I can't resist providing a list of the writers and the books of theirs that made me think we might be soul mates.

First, some of the blessed ones who write for the very young:

Margaret Wise Brown: Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, of course. But don't forget The Dead Bird. At kindergarten age, our children begged to have my husband or me read it to them because it invariably made us (just the adults, mind you) cry. One of our grandchildren, hearing the story for the first time when a kindergartner, commented gravely, "Yes, that is exactly how it is with death." And don't forget Little Fur Family. It fits into the palm of your hand and a two-year-old will understand it intuitively. It depicts the perfect love in which parents can immerse their child, giving him the courage to explore the "wild wood" beyond the cozy safety of his home, to which, of course, he can always return.

Arnold Lobel: If you've had anything to do with a child, you know about the "Frog and Toad" books--absurd and amusing adventures with their own pitch-perfect childhood logic, amounting to a mini-saga of friendship that endures despite (or because of) the quirks that might make the amphibians incompatible. Now try Uncle Elephant. A little elephant's parents, out for a sail, encounter a storm and are presumed drowned. Old Uncle Elephant, wrinkled and rheumatic, arrives to take over the child's care. Rescued, the parents return. Uncle Elephant quietly mourns the days he spent with his nephew: "They all passed too fast."

Else Holmelund Minarik: The quintet of Little Bear books, ingeniously illustrated with Victorian-style crosshatched drawings by Maurice Sendak, who would blossom as both writer and illustrator in his own Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. Minarik's series is acute to the importance of a child's fancies, expeditions, friendships, and overly ambitious projects, in which parents, and grandparents too, are essential for understanding, support, gentle supervision and--it goes without saying--unconditional love. The beauty of Minarik's texts--as is true with so many memorable children's writers from the mid-twentieth century on--is that none of these generic concepts are preached outright; they are in the books' very nature, the climate of feeling in which events transpire, the code of behavior that prevails.

Elementary schoolers through middle-aged children will naturally want more complicated fare--longer and denser texts, harder words, more complex concepts--though the younger among them may not yet have outgrown animal protagonists.

A. A. Milne: Winnie-the-Pooh and its companion volume, The House at Pooh Corner: Some folks, especially in our hardened times, find the books' charm off-putting. To these naysayers, the imaginary personalities and adventures of the stuffed animals that their little-boy companion creates and joins seem--well, twee. The author's son, on whom the boy, Christopher Robin, was based, recalls in his memoirs that the books blighted a good part of his schooldays and adult life.

But three generations of my family have loved them and we're not planning to stop. We even discuss which character each of us most resembles, one claiming to be the donkey, Eeyore, always looking on the dark side of life; another, the übermom Kanga, ministering a tad too protectively to her easily excited toddler, Roo; yet another, Tigger, whose bravado far exceeds his knowledge and skill. Myself, I favor Pooh, the "bear of very little brain," who nevertheless is a born poet (of a sort). On the birthing of his works, he comments, "It isn't Easy . . . because Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you," advice I have frequently passed on to my student writers.

The most poignant scene in The House at Pooh Corner is Christopher Robin's farewell to Pooh as he is about to start school--in other words, a reluctant premonition of the end of carefree childhood that the boy, not entirely clear on the matter himself, announces to his beloved bear as "I'm not going to do Nothing any more." My daughter read the passage aloud to the audience at her graduation from Hunter College High School. One auditioned for this "Inspirational Reading" gig by choosing a text and delivering it to a jury of one's classmates. She was awarded the privilege for her selection and her heartfelt yet unsentimental recital. On Commencement Day there was hardly a dry eye in the house.

I beg you to ignore the Disneyfication of the Pooh books. Instead, take your kids and grandkids to see the play-battered original toys featured in them, prominently ensconced in a glass case that the New York Public Library has transferred from the Donnell Library Center to the Children's Circulating Room at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library.

E. B. White: Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. One can barely choose between the two--and why should one have to? Still, I, my daughter, and her elder daughter (the fourth generation--my mom being the first--of our family's obsessive readers), give precedence to Charlotte's Web. My son-in-law demurs. "I don't know about girls," he says, "but for boys it's Stuart Little all the way." Within a perfectly ordinary surround, both stories treat the bizarre--a spider who can spin out words with her web, a feisty mouse as the child of a human family--with matter-of-fact calm, as if it, too, were perfectly ordinary. Both are written in an English so plain and clear, it serves as a beacon to neophyte and seasoned writers alike.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House series, to which my daughter introduced me when she was in grade school and which became a perennial re-read for us both. These nine books constitute the saga of an American pioneer family--fraught with danger, poverty, hard work endured wordlessly, the simplest homemade pleasures, and an often unspoken yet constantly evident loving mutual commitment despite the vivid differences in the characters' temperaments. The story is rendered through the eyes of a young girl (the author), who grows to adulthood in the course of the series.

The writing's immaculate matter-of-factness--you can learn to build a log cabin from this text!--often mysteriously accumulates to deliver a terrific emotional punch, as at the very end of the first book, Little House in the Big Woods. When young Laura questions Pa about Auld Lang Syne, the tune he'd just played on his fiddle for the family gathered close to the hearth on one of those "long winter evenings of firelight and music," he explains that the words mean "the days of a long time ago."

But Laura "thought to herself, 'This is now.' She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago."

The immortal Lewis Carroll double-feature, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It was my mother, really, who was obsessed by Alice, and she read it aloud to me over and over again. I found it fascinating, somewhat frightening, and, as I grew up, crammed with hidden messages--about puberty, about chess, about the way daylight reality slips so easily into nightmare, even madness, and, mercifully, about how a slip of a girl can be equipped to confront life's mysteries if she possesses curiosity and courage.

C. S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. My enthusiasm for this well-nigh perfect book--perfect as a fantasy adventure, perfect psychologically--didn't extend to Lewis's Narnia series as a whole. As my then pre-teen daughter said when she got terminally discouraged halfway through, "It was getting too religious." But a passage in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, describing the attempt to test the mettle of the eldest of the four child heroes and heroines and redeem the one among them who isn't instinctively good (or timid or righteous), made me, a pacifist, see the physical thrill--and sometimes nobility--of combat unto the death as few pieces of writing have done:

Peter did not feel very brave; indeed he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do. He rushed straight up to the monster and aimed a slash of his sword at its side. That stroke never reached the Wolf. Quick as lightning it turned round, its eyes flaming, and its mouth wide open in a howl of anger. If it had not been so angry that it simply had to howl it would have got him by the throat at once. As it was--though all this happened too quickly for Peter to think at all--he had just time to duck down and plunge his sword, as hard as he could, between the brute's forelegs into its heart. Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare. He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair. A moment later he found that the monster lay dead and he had drawn his sword out of it and was straightening his back and rubbing the sweat off his face and out of his eyes. He felt tired all over.

Louisa May Alcott: If you didn't cry over Beth's death in Little Women, forget Alcott; she is not for you. If you did, and certainly if, like me, you re-read the book annually for decades, be sure not to miss its sequels, Little Men and Jo's Boys. Nothing can touch Little Women, in which the Alcott family biography is transmuted into novelistic drama and perception. Still the sequels have wonderful moments and continue the story of three of the four Victorian sisters who became so real in the first book, we're avid to know what happened to them afterward.

Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows. Set in a luminous natural landscape dominated by a river and woods, animal characters, each true to his breed--most prominently, Rat, Mole, and Toad--still display a glorious assortment of human feelings and foibles. The earnestness of these figures, and all the minor ones, too, in being wholly themselves is one of the paramount joys the book provides.

The irrepressible, irresponsible, wholly self-involved Toad's mercurial interests and his escalating vehicular ambitions are ingeniously balanced by the contemplative wisdom of Rat and the almost febrile sensitivity to nature of Mole. Together these two evoke the virtues of a calm, simple life, taking things--and appreciating them--as they are; respectful of the fact that nature, enlarged by imagination, can be terrifying as well as beautiful; responsible and effective when real danger arises; and always their brothers' keepers.

P. L. Travers: The Mary Poppins books. The first three are by far the best, and they are divine. On a Spring Break trip to California to visit a college classmate in her parents' home, I was assigned a then-uninhabited children's bedroom furnished with commodious bookcases sheltering the grown-and-gone children's early reading. There, I stayed up til dawn, night after night, in a private orgy of re-reading Mary Poppins. I remember nothing else about that trip, not even, I confess, the name of my undergraduate friend. Mary Poppins, however, subsequently became my model for grandmotherhood: Hold the kids up to strict standards of behavior and take them on magical adventures. To this day, I crave a carpet bag and a parrot-headed umbrella.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden and A Little Princess. It's tough to choose between them. Most of us come down on the side of The Secret Garden, but my novelist friend insists that A Little Princess has had a deep influence on her life. She explains, "Even when the heroine, Sara Crewe, is reduced [in the book, she loses her fortune] and is no longer a princess on the outside, she refuses to let her own sense of her identity falter. I am still a princess on the inside, she thinks. If you behave that way," my friend continues, "it gets you through troubled times. Then maybe the people around you will finally see your worth." She adds with typical ironic reservation, "Maybe not." (This essay is for that friend, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who has never let me down.)

J. R. R. Tolkein: The Hobbit. I can't claim to be a fan--and certainly not a friend--of Tolkien, who has had almost every kid I've known in his thrall, but I have finally succeeded in reading The Hobbit through to the end, after several tries. In the adventure/fantasy category it's clearly one of the Great Books but, alas, this is not my genre.

Admittedly, the encounter of the story's unlikely hero--or at least central character--the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, with the eerie Gollum is something I would kill to have written. Just for starters, try this: "Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum--as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face." Having no companion to talk to but the occasional about-to-be-devoured victim, Gollum talks to himself, in a chilling whisper and cracked syntax, calling himself "my preciousss."

Apart from this haunting creature, which resurrects childhood nightmares for me, what fascinates me most about the book is the fact that, just when you think the story is winding down to a conventional triumph of the good, Tolkien offers a startling change of tone. Bilbo, who generally prefers homely comfort devoid of disturbing incident, lets his recessive gene for risk and excitement induce him to join a danger-fraught expedition to conquer a terrifying, evil-doing dragon. Once this feat has been accomplished, human nature--in this case represented largely by dwarf, goblin, troll, and elf nature--being what it is, politics and greed rear their familiar heads, until you think Tolkien is talking either about today or the whole, more often than not dismal, story of the human race. Entertainment shifts to philosophy, without entirely losing the attributes we expect when we're merely being regaled.

Natalie Babbitt: Tuck Everlasting. You might call this a Bildungsroman but for its disarming lack of self-conscious significance. A ten-year-old suffocatingly protected girlchild, naturally yearning for independence, adventure, and "the chance to do something that would make some kind of difference in the world" is initiated into life on a broader scale. The means contains elements of fantasy that are entirely believable because of the matter-of-fact way in which her tale is told.

Through an accidental encounter with the Tuck family, Winnie Forster discovers the secret of the hidden spring from which the Tucks, decades ago, had accidentally drunk and become immortal. She also meets sheer evil in the form of a sly operator--the man in the yellow suit--who wants to possess this secret Fountain of Life solely for pecuniary reasons. The Tucks consist of paterfamilias Angus Tuck; his wife, Mae; their elder son, Miles, whose wife and children had abandoned him once they decided that never aging is a sure sign of witchcraft, and his kid brother, the 17-year-old Jesse, who still thinks immortality can be a joyous adventure and who begs Winnie to wait until she is 17 too and then drink from the spring so that they can enjoy life together forever.

As the dramatic plot unfolds--leavened with near-palpable description of weather and place--our slip-of-a-girl heroine slowly but surely comes to understand the horrors as well as the privileges of a life that goes on without end, and, in the process, demonstrates extraordinary courage and loyalty to the family she has come to love. In the end, after the full life suggested by the inscription on her gravestone, it's clear that she chose life's final blessing: death.

The truth about all these books--and at least a dozen favorites I haven't mentioned as well as the ones that primarily engage boys--is that, if you're susceptible to them, they make you feel as if they were written for you alone. Which is why, almost by definition, you consider the author your friend.

POSTSCRIPT: On finishing this essay, I felt so remiss in underappreciating books especially enjoyed by boys, I wrote to a number of male friends (and people connected to them) asking about their favorites, from childhood through adolescence. I received a slew of replies. Here they are, with the writers' permission and the slightest bit of editing.

CHRISTOPHER CAINES (dancer, choreographer, writer, editor):

As someone who has worked for eight years in children's books, I can tell you the boys' books vs. girls' books divide is alive and well in every sales and marketing and editorial department in every publisher in this land. The PC police should get real jobs and live in reality!

Most important to me were: "The Chronicles of Narnia" (C. S. Lewis); the series by Sonia Bleeker on Native Americans (maybe not "politically correct" today); and "The Egypt Game" (Zilpha Keatley Snyder).

By the time I was about 11 or 12, I read adult books.

DEBORAH JOWITT (dance writer, teacher, mother and grandmother of boys):

Thinking back to my son's preferences, I don't remember any books specifically for boys. Toby liked books that I think many girls would have liked too (not the all-pink variety, though).

BEN KATCHOR (writer/cartoonist):

My favorite reading material as a child was comic books. Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Tintin. All approved children's literature found in the library and bookstore was suspect and boring at some deep level.

MARK MORRIS (dancer, choreographer, opera director):

The books that meant the most to me as a boy were: all of the Curious George books (H. A. and Margret Rey), from which I learned to read, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder [Little House] books, which were first read to me in elementary school.

I loved the Pippi Longstocking books (Astrid Lindgren), "Island of the Blue Dolphins" (Scott O'Dell), "Alice in Wonderland" (Lewis Carroll), "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (C. S. Lewis), no comic books. I still worship Dr. Seuss.

"Half Magic" (Edward Eager) was a big one. There was a series of them eventually and they were all very good. "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle). "Bridge to Terabithia" (Katherine Paterson), which they made into a horrible movie. I also remember loving the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series.

I casually asked some boy friends of mine and here are their cut and pasted replies: The Boxcar Children books (Gertrude Chandler Warner and her successors); "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (Roald Dahl); "The Education of Little Tree" (Forrest Carter); "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" (E. L. Konigsburg); "Goodnight Moon" (Margaret Wise Brown); "James and the Giant Peach" (Roald Dahl); "Katy and the Big Snow" (Virginia Lee Burton); "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (C. S. Lewis); "Little House on the Prairie" (Laura Ingalls Wilder); "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel" (Virginia Lee Burton); "Sideways Stories from Wayside School" (Louis Sacher); "Tuck Everlasting" (Natalie Babbitt); "Where the Wild Things Are" (Maurice Sendak); everything by Lloyd Alexander.

GEORGE DORRIS (dance writer) & JACK ANDERSON (poet, dance writer):

Jack and I spent a few minutes after dinner to think of books we enjoyed as boys. It depends a bit on how you define that term, but since you go up to 18, all of these apply, although by 16 I was reading so-called adult books, on the Times' best-seller list. So here we go, in no particular order, but starting with several younger ones. I've put an initial after those only one of us delighted in.

"Freddy the Detective" (Walter Brooks) / J says some of the follow-up books too
The Oz books (L. Frank Baum)
The Hardy Boys series (Franklin W. Dixon et al.) / G
Books by E. Nesbit: "Five Children and It" / J's favorite; "The Story of the Amulet" / G's favorite; "The Railway Children" / G's sister's favorite
"The Good Master" and "The Singing Tree" (Kate Seredy)
Albert Payson Terhune's books about dogs / G
Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Treasure Island" / G; "Kidnapped" / J
Historical novels for boys by Edward B. Hungerford / J
"Ivanhoe" and "Quentin Durward" (Walter Scott) / G
"The Last Days of Pompeii" (Edward Bulwer-Lytton) / G
"Quo Vadis" (Henryk Sienkiewicz) / G
"George Washington's World" (Genevieve Foster) / J liked several other books in the series as well
Books by Richard Halliburton: "The Royal Road to Romance," "Richard Halliburton's Book of Marvels: the Occident," and "Richard Halliburton's Second Book of Marvels: the Orient"
Books by Howard Pyle / J
"Van Loon's Lives" and "The Arts" (Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon)
Books by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys" and "Tanglewood Tales" / J; "The House of Seven Gables" / G
"Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (Jules Verne)
"The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers" (Alexandre Dumas, père) / G

Enough for a start?

DAVID VAUGHAN (dance writer, archivist for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, performer);

I don't know if I can be of much help, since for one thing my childhood reading was all done in England. My absolute favorite of course was Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows," which I used to read about three times a year, as well as another of his books, "The Golden Age." The Doctor Dolittle books. I suppose the Andrew Lang Fairy Books wouldn't count. Maybe the Biggles books (W. E. Johns) and "Just William" by Richmal Crompton and all its sequels. And I used to devour The Gem and The Magnet, two weeklies with stories about boys in public schools--see George Orwell's essay "Boys' Weeklies."

NANCY DALVA (book critic for the New York Observer, producer and writer for "Mondays with Merce," a website series for the Cunningham Dance Foundation):

My boys liked anything to do with dinosaurs, the Boxcar Children series (Gertrude Chandler Warner and her successors), the Redwall series (Brian Jacques), "The Hobbit" (J. R. R. Tolkein), "The Once and Future King" (T. H. White), Star Trek novels, Roald Dahl, and Kurt Vonnegut, the earlier in the list primarily read by the elder son (himself now a writer), and the latter two being favorites of the younger (who had and has a mordant sense of humor and a philosophical bent).

Both read comic books, and Calvin and Hobbes collections (Bill Waterson), though these are not technically books. Neither liked any of the books I loved as a girl, by the way. Well, my younger son, did like the Eloise stories, come to think of it. The mischief factor. When they were very little they liked Margaret Wise Brown--"Goodnight Moon" for Adam and "The Runaway Bunny" for Robert, who also was keen on a book I just loved called "Fritz and the Mess Fairy" (Rosemary Wells). My own favorite book as a little girl was Marie Hall Ets's "Mr. T. W. Anthony Woo, The Story of a Cat, a Dog, and a Mouse."

P.S. My father used to read Rudyard Kipling to my brother. I was not as keen as he was.

JOAN HSIAO BROMLEY (former investment banker, former public policy analyst, former Ph.D candidate, currently a teacher of fifth graders and mother of two boys and a girl):

Here are a few quick thoughts. Our sons, Jimmy and Peter, both really enjoyed "Where the Red Fern Grows" (Wilson Rawls) although Jimmy refused to listen to the end, because he guessed where it was headed and "Little House in the Big Woods" (Laura Ingalls Wilder), although neither was crazy enough about for me to read them the whole series. Peter wasn't crazy about "The Phantom Tollbooth" (Norton Juster) either.

OK, you know my Jimmy well enough for me to divulge what he might keep secret now. There were fully two years, I believe, during which we chased around branch to branch within the Seattle library system for ALL the (old) Nancy Drew mystery stories (various authors; Mildred Wirt Benson wrote 23 of the first 30). He knew exactly where they were kept in each library. I still remember his joy and hope there'd be "new ones" when he spotted a clump of yellow spines. Similarly, he LOVED "Anne of Green Gables" (Lucy Maud Montgomery)--but then didn't continue with the series, not sure why.

My husband, Jim, remembers that, as a boy, he greatly enjoyed Betty Macdonald's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books; Beverly Cleary's Ramona books and especially her Henry Huggins series; all of the Hardy Boys series, and "The Phantom Tollbooth." But our sons really DIDN'T like any of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggles and think it's AWFUL that I might have considered naming one of them "Ramona" before we knew they were to be boys. They didn't make it through even one Hardy Boys mystery, despite receiving many over the years as gifts. Still, lots of the boys I am currently teaching can't stop reading these things. I do have very fond memories of all three males in our family enjoying much of Roald Dahl's work together every evening.

ROBERT GRESKOVIC (dance writer, teacher):

I'm afraid I wasn't much of a reader as a child, nor was my brother, nor any other male relative in my family. I'm not proud of this but 'tis so. So I can't really help.

My friend Curtis has recently acquired a number of Horatio Alger books as vintage items. I'll pass this along to him and he may have something real to tell you.

CURTIS ROBERTSON (General Aesthetic):

When I was a kid, my teachers periodically placed orders on our behalf with Scholastic Books, and there was a series of books I liked about a bespectacled boy genius named "Encyclopedia Brown." Each book had a half-dozen or so mini-mysteries that were all fairly benign. They had nothing to do with murders or anything, but were more along the lines of stolen baseballs and the like. I enjoyed them, because as a fairly precocious kid, I appreciated any celebration of brains I could get my hands on, considering the fact that the real-life kids I knew tended to discount that in favor of sporty skills.

A couple of years ago I came across some old editions of books by the 19th-century writer Horatio Alger. My grandfather had told me about these books when I was young, because they came out about the time he was a kid.

Even today people are probably somewhat familiar with them, since the phrase "it's like a Horatio Alger story" has long been used to characterize the lives of great men who rose from humble beginnings. The typical hero of Alger's books is a poor boy whose wastrel father has left him and his mother to fend for themselves, and who has to defend her from abuse and and/or financial ruin.

In one of the handful of these that I have a copy of, the boy has his own small private ferry in which he transports people for a modest sum. One day a rich man from the city boards it with his baby; the baby falls into the water and the boy saves its life. Then the rich man hires him to work at his bank and the boy falls in love with and marries the rich man's daughter and rises in the bank and lives happily ever after as a direct result of hard work, devotion to his mother, and the courage to dive into the treacherous water to rescue a baby.

Along the way, the local spoiled brat (jealous of our hero's general ability to make friends and have the girls swoon) frames the boy for a crime, possibly in concert with our hero's freshly-sprung-from-jail drunken father, and the goldbrick spoiled brat's action is found out and his family's entire fortune compromised.

Back to what I read when I was young: Two books by Robert McCloskey about an affable boy called Homer Price, which took place in a tiny rural town. I don't remember anything about his adventures, except a few weird details, but they stay with me even now.

I also enjoyed reading the Wizard of Oz books. There was a set of hardcover editions of them in the library of one particular classroom of one particular teacher I had in 6th Grade.

In 7th Grade, I read Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," "Little Men," and "Jo's Boys," as well as several Edna Ferber novels, including "So Big," "Show Boat," and "Cimarron." I also read "Cheaper by the Dozen," written by a couple of the children (Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey) of an efficiency expert who decided that it was actually more economical to have more children than to have fewer.

When I was a tiny tot, my mother read Raggedy Ann and Andy books to my sister and me. We enjoyed them immensely, but they weren't particularly gender-specific.

Other than that? The Doctor Dolittle books (Hugh Lofting), "Charlotte's Web" (E. B. White), the whole Seuss oeuvre, and, when I was very little, a book about seven blind men who were all shown an elephant, each one touching a different part of it. Therefore each had an entirely different impression of what an elephant was; one thought it was a tree, because he had felt only one of the legs. The one who had felt the side thought the elephant was a wall. It made a great impression on me.

DAVID GORDON (co-director with his son, Ain Gordon, of the Pick Up Performance Company[s]):

Very favorite three children's books in young Ain's life: Eugène Ionesco's "Story Number 1," "Story Number 2," and "Story Number 3."

After that he was into British Goons records. We would hear him laughing in his room.

DAVID GRAY (consultant to non-profit organizations):

Oh boy...yeah, I was a huge fan of Dr. Seuss books, still am! I read them to our two sons. I'm amused to see what catches their eye. For me it's the design of the spaces, the crazy architecture, and the flamboyant colors. The closest I've seen in real life is Venice where the Byzantine mixes with Western styles and the mooring poles for gondolas are each painted in their own crazy-quilt style to indicate who owns the pole--very Seussian. My younger boy just loved the Sneetches and the machines by which Sneetches added and removed belly stars. He would make machine-like noises and trace the path of the Sneetches with his finger as they "raced round and about again."

Another book that really resonated for me as a child was Robert McCloskey's "Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man." I'm not sure what was so appealing--maybe the colors and the care and detail of the old guy taking care of his boat. Then there were the whales and their apparent upset, only to find that they were, in their way, fashion victims (though I don't think that's the way I would have worded it at the time!).

We were also fans of the C. S. Lewis Narnia books. We're way too irreligious to have noticed the Christian philosophy, but we sure liked swords and battles and being King and being transported to alternate worlds.

NICHOLAS STRAUSS-KLEIN (Feldenkrais Practitioner, musician);

My wife Jen's brother loved Matt Christopher books. I was a huge Richard Scarry fan, and my three-year-old son, Henry, is too!

I'm sure you've been pondering Harry Potter and Thomas the Tank Engine stuff.

ED SULTAN (former banker, currently arts volunteer):
I'm pleased to respond to your request for the titles of childhood book favorites of the Sultans (the group reporting includes me; my sons, David and Peter; and David's sons, Harry and Isaac).

Here's the list in no particular order: The Alex Rider series (Anthony Horowitz); the On the Run series, the Everest series, and the Island Series (Gordon Korman); "Leon and the Champion Chip" and "Leon and the Spitting Image" (Allen Kurzweil); the Underland Chronicles series (Suzanne Collins); the Childhood of Famous Americans series (various authors); the Olympian series (Rick Riordan); the Humphrey series (Betty G. Birney); "The Enormous Egg" (Oliver Butterworth); the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series (Kathryn Lasky); "Arnie, the Doughnut" (Laurie Keller); "The Black Stallion" (Walter Farley); the Hardy Boys series (Franklin W. Dixon et al.); "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel" (Virginia Lee Burton); "The Story of Ferdinand" (Munro Leaf); "Harry the Dirty Dog" (Gene Zion); "Where the Wild Things Are" (Maurice Sendak); "The Borrowers" (Mary Norton); the Curious George books (H. A. and Margret Rey); "Island of the Blue Dolphins" (Scott O'Dell); "James and the Giant Peach" (Roald Dahl); the Secrets of Droon series (Tony Abbott); "The Dangerous Book for Boys" (Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden); "The Big Book of Boy Stuff" (Bart King and Chris Sabatino); "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (Mark Twain); "Treasure Island" and "Kidnapped" (Robert Louis Stevenson); "Tom Brown's Schooldays" (Thomas Hughes); "The Little Lame Prince" (Dinah Maria Mulock Craik).

ROBERT JOHNSON (dance critic):

Oh, I think I read the usual. Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island," "Kidnapped," and "The Black Arrow." Arthur Ransome's adventure/mystery series, starting with "Swallows and Amazons"; Jack London's "The Call of the Wild." Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, maybe Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe" and "Quentin Durward." Perhaps "Two Years Before the Mast" (for the nautically inclined). The Hardy Boys??? What a jumble! Oh, and I suppose Kipling's "Jungle Book" qualifies, too. "Robinson Crusoe" (Daniel Defoe) and "The Swiss Family Robinson" (Johann David Wyss). I was personally most fond of "The Three Musketeers" (Alexandre Dumas, père).

Hope this dog-eared list helps!

THOMAS PHILLIPS (writer and musician):

My personal favorites (not necessarily just for boys): "Winnie the Pooh" (A. A. Milne); "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad" (Homer, in prose translations); "Stuart Little" (E. B. White); "Bambi" (Felix Salten); "The Jungle Book" (Rudyard Kipling); "The Catcher in the Rye" (J. D. Salinger); "My Name is Aram" and "The Human Comedy" (William Saroyan).

When I was young I read mostly sports novels and stories--nothing that's still popular.

I didn't read it until I was grown, but I think Willa Cather's "My Ántonia" is a great frontier story, every chapter an adventure.

Melville isn't really for kids, but I bet I would have been fascinated by "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno." "Billy Budd" is very dense but has enough adventure and mystery in it to hold a boy's attention if he's a fluent reader.

And speaking of adventure, I never read it but my 86-year-old cousin Dick says he and his teenage friends loved "Scaramouche" by Rafael Sabatini--a swashbuckling story of the French revolution.

JEFF WEINSTEIN (cultural critic):

I don't recall reading really young children's books. We had no books in the house except for library ones and those from a Doubleday Book Club for children, which I devoured: "The Swiss Family Robinson" (Johann David Wyss), Hawthorne's "Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys" and "Tanglewood Tales," anything I could find by Poe (yes, adult), Jules Verne. I saw the Hardy Boys on Walt Disney TV; why bother reading them? I read comics, all kinds. All my real children's book "reading" was done on TV. (My spouse, John Perreault, says about the same, but radio for him.)

My mother read Shakespeare to me, she claims, as I sat on her lap and watched TV. (I was three, four.) I am not certain of that, because she often stretched the truth.

BEN ACHTENBERG (documentary filmmaker and distributor):

The books I remember most fondly (and still reread from time to time) are the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, written in the 1930s. I believe they've been republished in paperback, but I don't know if anybody reads them. Wikipedia says yes, and that there's a bit of a tourist industry to visit the sites in the English lake country where most of them take place. We visited the area when our son, Jesse, was maybe 12. We stayed in the summer house inhabited by some of the fictional children--very exciting for me; for Jesse, not so much, though he thought the books were OK.

Interestingly, in the context of your question, the books have very strong and adventurous female, as well as male, characters.

Another recollection for you: When my father was dying--fully competent and rational, but very tired of being sick, he had decided to refuse any further medical treatment--and my brothers and sister and I were sitting with him, he asked us to read him his all-time favorite book: "Treasure Island."

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Why I live in New York. New York City, that is. Manhattan, to be exact. Dirty. Dangerous. Expensive (so much so today that people who once thought of themselves as middle class now fear they're only a few ladder-rungs above the have-nots. And the number of have-nots is heart-rending. But still . . .

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood and time suited only to people with a deep tolerance--or even need--for boredom. (Boredom precludes risk and can be very soothing.) I was not one of them. Even before I had two numbers to my age, I would often sit at our kitchen table and gaze through the window that looked out on the corner of the street and think, in a sort of melancholy stupor, There must be somewhere else.

There was, and not that far away. It was called Manhattan. From my house, an hour on the bus and subway would get you there. As a young teen, I began to explore it. Eventually, in my early twenties, I came to live there, through a combination of stubborn perseverance and destiny.

For me, one of Manhattan's chief lures--the one people live elsewhere to avoid--is its rich mix of people. The first time I picked up the elder of my local grandchildren at the public school she had entered that week as a kindergartner, my eyes welled with tears when her class marched out into the schoolyard. Not only were the African-American, Caucasian, and Asian races just about equally represented, the blending of these groups that has occurred was evident in their looks, which often suggested that the human race was being gloriously renewed, even reinvented.

Several grades later, I asked this granddaughter who, in her class of 28 or so, spoke a language other than English at home. She named seven, citing the language they used with their parents and siblings--Russian, Spanish, Chinese, French, modern Hebrew, and Korean among them--and reminding me that she didn't know about everyone in the class, only her friends.

Despite the poverty of the school--the middle-income parents willingly provided the most basic school supplies for the less fortunate children as well as their own--it was rich in its pupils, in some very savvy, dynamic, and empathic teachers, and in the steady acting out of its motto: "One family under the sun."

Upon hearing the official announcement that our country had gone to war with Iraq, I figured that a third-floor window--the highest I had immediate access to at the moment I heard the news--was too low for a successful death leap, and anyway suicide was a romantic, self-indulgent notion for someone in my relatively safe circumstances. On the other hand, I couldn't pretend that nothing world-shaking had happened and get on with my usual writing, housekeeping, grandmothering, and exercising at the gym. (George Bush's suggestion of going shopping--a favorite of his since the 9/11 catastrophe--was patently obscene.)

So the next morning I went to the Metropolitan Museum. I walked to the Met through Central Park, which was as verdant as ever, a comfort in itself--trees are rarely affected by remote human disaster--and looked at some of my favorite pictures. On the walk home, I felt amazingly ready to face reality with the equanimity necessary to attempt constructive action. The question of whether or not my subsequent attempts at "constructive action" have done anything to better the state of the world remains moot.

Central Park is my backyard, half a block away from where I live. It is replete with diversions, as any tourist guide will tell you. A native New Yorker (admittedly bridge-and-tunnel in my first youth), I long ago absorbed (and today regularly revisit) the highlights the guidebooks emphasize--among them the Shakespeare Garden, free theater at the Delacorte, rowing on the lake, the zoo, and the carousel--and appreciate many smaller charms. Do you know the Whispering Bench?

Most subtle and important: the park is a solace. Over the years, running, jogging, or just walking on the sooty pedestrian track that circles the reservoir, you come to see that seasons go on but their route is cyclical, while your life is linear. Why noticing that it's "autumn again" or "another spring" is a comfort, I can't say exactly, but it seems to put things in perspective. Perhaps the promise of eternal renewal allows you to imagine that your present difficulties will be resolved or, if not, be absorbed tolerably into your life's journey, even enrich it.

Bordering the park, on both Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, are a seemingly infinite number of museums you can drop into for a short impromptu visit when you've had enough of outdoor delight and consolation. The forbidding admission prices posted at the biggies--the Met and the American Museum of Natural History, for instance--are easily avoided if you can't afford them or think the tariff is a bit steep unless you plan an absurdly long visit. Read the deliberately fine print on the signs at the ticket desk. Turns out those high charges are only "suggested" (because of the government support these institutions receive). You have to pay something, but a penny will do. I usually give a dollar for each person in my party. If you already know this, tell someone else on the ticket line, preferably someone who does not look wealthy. Museums in general have free hours or even days, so arrange your schedule accordingly. I am particularly fond of the fact that the Jewish Museum has reconciled itself to staying open on Saturday by charging no fee on the Sabbath, when an observant Jew should not be handling money, let alone seeking secular bustle and artistic intoxication instead of the quiet spiritual contemplation prescribed for the day on which Yahweh rested.

When you live right near this host of museums, visiting one needn't be a major excursion. It can be a casual affair, like a short call on a familiar and particularly fascinating neighbor. When my children were very young, I would tell them that we could stay half an hour, tops, at the Met on these brief visits, look at a few pictures or sculptures or other objects, and buy one postcard. (The limit to the single card increases its value to the child, and choosing one from many refines the youngster's awareness of his or her individual taste. Then we had to go, I'd say, but we would come back soon. As we did. This tactic kept their appetite sharp until they were ready for longer sojourns. One of my grandchildren, though, preferred a long look around even at a tender age. To this day, she enjoys wandering through gallery after gallery--"getting hopelessly lost," as she gleefully puts it--in the process discovering dozens of things that attract her--sometimes for unfathomable reasons (until she explains them). These explanations have really opened my eyes.

This is getting to be less and less true, alas, as mall-dom descends upon us--Starbucks, the Gap, Duane-Reade, and that ubiquitous golden-arched burger chain I prefer not to name--but New York has traditionally been rife with small, weirdly irresistible places. Chief among them have been dark, disorganized little shops containing almost nothing you'd want except for that one fabulous item--like the charming French dessert plates illustrating the fables of La Fontaine that I once found half-hidden in the dusty clutter.

Just what I needed! My toddler son, you see, invariably announced his finishing the contents of a small dish by slinging the plate joyously into the air, from which position it crashed to the floor and was instantly reduced to smithereens. No amount of reasoning with him could eradicate the habit. He had destroyed just about all of our smaller dishes in this way--and I snobbishly refused to have my children dining from plastic tableware--when, in an obscure shop in our neighborhood, I found over a dozen of those fable plates, every one depicting a different tale, which I happily acquired for 75 cents each. When, years later, I saw what they cost in a Paris flea market, I realized I was in possession of a valuable treasure. Today, I sometimes see them in museums.

To my credit, I continued to use the plates daily, though I admit I stopped putting them in the dishwasher because they are faience, which chips easily under mechanical duress. My son, for no reason I could discern, treated them with the utmost gentleness from the get-go. Perhaps he was fascinated by the sight of animals in clothes, at least half of them up to no good.

These days New York's public libraries have deteriorated significantly from the era of my youth, when they seemed to me outposts of Heaven. It's not just that the continuing automation of the system, albeit useful and necessary, has eroded some of their charm. The real problem can for the most part be laid at the feet of our government, which supports culture and children's needs so poorly.

The libraries are grievously understaffed and some of the existing low-level aides seem subliterate, while the children's rooms are, faute de mieux, used by the working poor as free, reasonably safe after-school havens for their offspring, with the librarian--if one is on hand--reduced to keeping order amongst the rowdier kids. This task is not necessarily well matched to a librarian's skill set. Besides, how could a second-grader be expected to keep still--physically and vocally--for two to three hours after a day exercising similar restraint at school?

Despite its decline, I love the public library. I love the democratic idea behind it of making books available to everyone, flush and broke alike. I like being in the presence of thousands of volumes, each harboring a unique message to enhance or alter my mind, my world. I admire these bastions of culture bravely holding out in what may well be a losing battle.

I have (had, as we shall see) three favorite Manhattan libraries. When it comes to the system's main site at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street--the old building with its wide outside staircase on which readers and office workers picnic in warm weather, guarded by the life-size marble lions, Patience and Fortitude--it's the Rose Main Reading Room that's synonymous with library to me. I've used it since I was in high school. Its atmosphere seems conducive to research: the prevailing hush, broken only by whispers; the lavish days-of-yore use of wood; the long oak tables where, at evenly spaced intervals, the heads of scholars, students, and the simply curious bend over the books they hope will reveal the secrets they want to penetrate, both faces and texts illuminated by lamps with glowing green glass shades.

Then there's the Jefferson Market branch in Greenwich Village, housed in a venerable, striking, and peculiar edifice converted into a library in 1967. This was the one I took my children to when they were little, and not just because it was near our home at the time.

A landmark building, it had been designed in the Victorian era by Frederick Clarke Withers and Calvert Vaux. Vaguely inspired by Gothic architecture, it boasted an extravagance of turrets, and an asymmetrically placed, extra-tall clock-and-bell tower perfect for sequestering princesses who need some punishment or at least a time-out. Since the Victorian aesthetic prevails--for instance, in the imposing palette of russet, ivory, and black of the exterior's construction materials and the general air of Too Much--it makes subscribers to the Bauhaus style wince. Still, it has a presence that was greatly admired in its own day and encourages fantasy in ours.

Originally, the place was used as a courthouse, When it eventually fell into terminal disuse and decay, neighborhood denizens saved it from being razed, and its interior was converted to use as a library by Giorgio Cavaglieri, who left many of its original features intact.

My children adored its outward, medieval-castle look and, especially, its interior, complete with high stained-glass windows, winding staircases, exposed-brick walls with concave niches, and stone portraits and flowers like the ornaments that beguiled them at The Cloisters. The collection and librarians in the children's room were very good, but it was the place itself that mattered most.

My third favorite was the Donnell Library Center (everyone called it, simply, The Donnell), which closed as the first part of an overall transformation of the NYPL system--on September 1, 2008. The transformers' declared purpose is to "expand and reshape [the Library's] services as it moves forward in an era of changing use and information needs." Statements like this, which include expressions like "new state-of-the-art facilities," make me very nervous. The Donnell, we're informed, will emerge as "a new library that opens in 2011 as part of a development project with Orient Express Hotels." Very nervous indeed.

In memoriam: The Donnell, as I knew it, had the most agreeable children's section imaginable. From its entrance, you turned left to the room for books that circulated, right to the room holding the books that stayed put for research--or simply for reading in situ on a rainy afternoon. The premises were neither too large nor too formal to intimidate young readers; they exuded an air of comfort. Small exhibitions, some changing, some seemingly permanent, provided a charming addendum to the low book-crammed shelves. Years ago, a Laura Ingalls Wilder display made me weep when I looked at the manuscript of one of the Little House books--handwritten on a humble yellow legal pad. And then there was the vitrine of Mary Poppins artifacts (like the green umbrella with its parrot-head handle) and, most celebrated of all, the glass case harboring the original plush animals, battered by play and love, that once belonged to a boy called Christopher Robin and inspired his father, A.A. Milne, to write Winnie-the-Pooh.

On my last, child-accompanied visits to the Donnell, I encountered a young librarian named Rebecca. As she got to know my grade-school companions, she gently elicited from them the kind of stories they liked to read, then volunteered (but carefully did not impose) her suggestions of books that might appeal to them. It seemed as if she had read--and relished--every volume in the place. And she obviously recognized each of the children she helped as a unique personality, worthy of the utmost respect. I hope the Library doesn't misplace her in its reshufflings. She is what I'd call state-of-the-art.

The park I know best besides Central Park is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, adjacent to the wonderful Brooklyn Museum, in the borough--must we call it outer?--in which I grew up. Wandering aimlessly through the Garden is one of the best ways to experience it, but the highlights are marvels in and of themselves.

The most magical for me has always been the cherry blossoms, the fragility of their petals auguring the brevity of their life--a week or two at most, even without an unlucky day of high wind or pelting rain. Many of the trees are planted in two allées, each consisting of a pair of parallel rows, and this arrangement is the most breathtaking. But all of the groupings, others more relaxed and sinuous--some in the vicinity of the allés, others scattered through the park--contain different breeds of cherry, so that the various sections bud, flower, and spill their petals to the ground at different times. The overall effect of the Garden's cherry trees is an example of nature simultaneously tamed and relaxed, blossoming and withering, providing lessons in both beauty and life itself.

If you lie on your back, looking up at the blossoms against the blue sky, the picture is unearthly. You can lose all sense of the pedestrian world we walk in as your mind succumbs to the illusion that the heavens are flowering. When the sun is in the right position, the dull reddish-brown of the cherry-tree bark flames into a glowing reddish copper that seems to shout, "Glory, glory, glory!"

One of my most vivid memories of myself as a child, is sitting on the grass beneath the trees, playing with my Japanese paper dolls, who had clothes folded so that each costume had a front and a back. You slipped the doll into it sideways. I don't recall making up elaborate stories for these dolls, though they obviously constituted a family. The human figures and their two-sided outfits provided complete joy on their own.

Though it can fell the allergic, the Cranford Rose Garden demonstrates the skill of breeders who were convinced that the ancient five-petaled rose, almost always pink or white, was a paltry thing compared to what could be engineered. Their results will be considered miracles by some, overkill by others. The Garden cultivates 1200 different types of rose and leaves it to the spectator to decide if the display is a tribute to human ingenuity or to God's imagination.

The Garden's formidable website obligingly charts the development of the cherries in the spring and that of the roses as summer approaches and flourishes. This information can be useful at times; at others, more than you need to know. There's a lot to be said for coming upon delight serendipitously.

The hot house (an enormous glass conservatory now retreaded as the Palm House, a highfalutin site for upscale social events) was filled with exotic plants organized according to their various native climes, each section accorded its appropriate weather--dry, humid, extra hot--which gave the human visitor a frisson as he passed from one room to the next. Each section contained species certain to leave the spectator slack-jawed; some didn't even look like plants. The desert department was formidable, a venue where the vegetation was often equipped with its own defensive weaponry and cacti masqueraded as stones.

Still, what I relished most about my childhood visits to the hot house with my mother was her gently running her finger along the central ribs of the Sensitive Plant's delicate foliage so the leaflets would fold up in response (and not open for over an hour--we'd go back and look). This was strictly forbidden--ominous signs were prominently posted to that effect--but she surreptitiously did it anyway and I delighted in her daring. Now that I think of it, her only criminal tendencies were horticultural. On another visit to the Garden she helped herself to a tiny clipping of an unusual plant, deftly stowed it away in her handbag, and cosseted it at home until she had raised it to a sumptuous adulthood, in every way equal to, even surpassing, what the Garden had achieved.

What was once the hot house is still flanked on either side by long rectangular water lily pools in which large koi (ornamental carp) swim, rising from a murky depth to an inch below the surface to flaunt their true colors: vermilion; white with irregular vermilion spots, an occasional slate grey. Floating imperturbably on the surface of the pools were the flat green lily pads, the flowers springing up from them in their incandescent hues: fairytale periwinkle; show-offy fuchsia; pure, calm cream; tender violet; severe white; frivolous pink; insistently cheery yellow. My mother and I, along with any other members of our excursion, would make a game of choosing her or his favorite--only after prolonged examination, deliberation, and some argument since the rules of our game had it that no single color could be claimed by more than one person. Oh, the irony of conflict in Eden!

Usually our visits concluded with the Japanese Garden, a picturesque evocation of Eastern horticulture oddly situated--and thriving--smack in the heart of Brooklyn. People often held their weddings there. The site was sheltered by an undulating wall of fragile wooden palings, allowing the bridal party and its guests a strange kind of semi-privacy. There were openings at intervals, for folks without marriage on their minds to view the stylized landscape, so one could easily peek at the nuptials, and we certainly did. The most ravishing bridal pairs were Japanese-Americans, wearing traditional Japanese dress, for whom the landscape seemed created--almost like a set design--no matter how far they were, geographically, from their ancestors.

Everything bad you hear about New York City's subway system is true. The trains don't go where they're supposed to go, especially on weekends, or indicate if they're planning to go there expresswise or locally. Info regarding the current weekend, holiday, or "just because" route indicated on the slew of posters slapped up on the tile walls of a given station is, more often than not, beyond comprehension, or just dead wrong. Once, on the subway platform, as a conductor leaned out the window of his stopped train with an air of perpetual resignation, I asked him where his train was going next. He replied mournfully that he had no idea, that he was waiting for instructions.

All this, we've been told for several years now, is due to the MTA's tearing up many a station and miles of track, presumably for repair work, which is proceeding at a pace that would make a snail look speedy. The system's loudspeaker announcements about matters such as how to get, say, from the Bronx to Brighton Beach on a Saturday--seemingly via an improvised route involving three different trains and an emergency bus shuttle at the end--are indecipherable. In hot weather the stations make terrific substitute saunas, but getting naked is forbidden along with a long list of other infractions, no doubt derived from actual passenger behavior. Have I forgotten to say that the system is filthy and rat-infested?

Nevertheless, it's a genuine city thrill to be on board the D train as it crawls over the Manhattan Bridge at twilight, the city's nightlights beginning to twinkle, or hurtles without a stop (stand with your kids in the first car for the full experience) from 59th to 125th streets. Another small but potent subway delight: If you're changing from the 1 train to the A to get to The Cloisters, the 168th Street station, where you make the switch, has you traverse a little underground bridge where the aforementioned kids, their grown-ups nervously making sure they don't pitch over the railing, can look down at the tops of the trains as they rush along the gleaming tracks.

Lovers of minor beauties of bygone days relish the old mosaics set into the walls of the stations. (The new ones are a nice idea but they don't hold a candle to the old examples in subtlety of color or design.)

And as for practicality, the subway is still the fastest, cheapest way to get you anywhere in town. Even the mayor claims to use it.

New York is a water city. Have you walked over the Brooklyn Bridge? A grandchild and I do it every summer. I read aloud to her as we travel by subway from uptown Manhattan to Brooklyn; then we walk over the bridge back to Manhattan in order to face its skyline as we stroll. As everyone knows, the architecture of this bridge is magnificent--at once heroic and harmonious--but it is most so when you absorb it as you progress through it. My companion and I stop at a bench at the (clearly marked) midpoint to rest, consume our homemade picnic lunch, and call her mother and a couple of other parties who might care--to tell them we are sitting exactly-in-the-middle-of-the-Brooklyn-Bridge.

Last summer, as usual, all the familiar icons hove into view as we walked, looking far and wide about us, but we could hardly make them out; shrouded as they were in a dense fog.

"I'm sorry," I said to my young companion. "We can come again on a brighter day."

"Oh, no, don't mind," she replied, her eyes riveted on the faintest ghost, intermittently invisible, of the Statue of Liberty. "It's better this way."

Two summers ago I took the same child's younger sister to the New York branch of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, ensconced at Battery Park in the old U.S. Custom House, a formidable Beaux-Arts building. There terrific Native American exhibitions are complemented by the building's luxurious interior, which includes venerable marble; voluptuous brass banisters snaking over twin spiral staircases, and, at its heart, an enormous oval rotunda topped, high above, by a concave oval skylight of clear glass.

The museum makes a marvelous excursion. Our own outing also got a splendid coda when I realized we were right near the Staten Island Ferry.

"Want to take a quick ferry ride before we go home?" I asked the child.

"Sure!"

It had been raining, but she had her hooded slicker on and I had an umbrella. By the time we boarded the ferry, though, we were in the middle of a lashing storm.

"Want to go out on the deck?" I asked recklessly, certain she'd be too timid.

"Sure!"

And so we did. We were the only passengers who dared confront the storm. I closed my umbrella, which was completely useless against the stinging sheets of rain and fierce winds blowing every which way, kept a very firm grip on the child, who was as slender and light as a fairy, and looked at her drenched cheeks, pink from the slap of the water, and those gray-blue eyes, bright with the glee of serendipitous adventure.

Another ferry takes you to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, where, among the compelling displays that pull no punches about the émigré's lives, you can find my father's name listed amongst the thousands who entered America there: "William S. Bernstein, Russian (Hebrew)"--Jews were not fully recognized as Russian citizens. He was twelve years old when he arrived. At home he spoke Yiddish. In New York he got a job driving a laundry truck. A decade later he entered Cornell University and went on to become a physician. The American dream, you might say. In his late forties, he started learning Russian, planning to use it one day when he visited his birthplace. He died before he achieved that, but he was inordinately proud of his last linguistic accomplishment: reading all of Tolstoy's War and Peace in Russian--very, very slowly.

I haven't said a word about my town's theaters, music, food, sports facilities (for doing, learning, and viewing the pros), people-watching, the "ethnic" neighborhoods, and day trips (which open a world of additional venues). Space simply does not permit. Anyway, the reader may have an entirely different New York, so I leave the rest to her or his imagination, choices, and, I hope, pen--and conclude with my husband's claim that he, too, loved living in New York. I asked him why. He named the kinds of things I've already mentioned.

"But you rarely do any of them," I said, baffled.

"I know," he replied, "but I love knowing they're there."

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

A young girl of my intimate acquaintance, let's call her Eve, decided at the age of three or so that, when she grew up, she was going to be a boy.

She liked to play pretend games. You may remember them from your own childhood--those acted-out narratives, full of exciting incident, that have an endless life, with plots and characters repeating variations on a few themes presumably of deep significance to the players. In her "pertends," as Eve called them, she invariably assigned herself the role of a man or boy. She was Joe. She was Nick. She was Doug. When I was her abettor--being a great fantasist myself, how could I not indulge her excursions to imagined worlds?--it took me a while to convince her that I like being a girl and so sometimes wanted to play a girl role. But Eve is a generous, tolerant soul and eventually let me be Helen or Jane.

Her kindergarten friends were nearly all boys. On her long, swift Atalanta legs, she ran around the playground with "the guys" in wild games of tag. With her pale coloring, slender build, and unconscious grace, she resembled a Victorian illustrator's idea of a fairy. She concealed her rippling cornsilk hair firmly under a baseball cap until she persuaded her parents to let her cut it short, then shorter. In truth, she still didn't look like a boy. She looked like Peter Pan.

But I believed in Eve's earnestness in becoming a boy. I was convinced by an outing with her and her elder sister to a Chinatown emporium that sells thousands of things you didn't know you needed. There we discovered a cache of tiny old-fashioned advertising cards. Flimsy bits of paper smaller than a Metro card, most of them pictured sentimentally lovely Asian women of the 1920s or 30s. A few, instead, showed exotically uniformed warriors of yore poised for battle. About 300 cards lay in a small wicker basket. Ten for a dollar. I told the girls they could each choose ten. Methodically, they examined each and every card. Eve's sister found them irresistible and had trouble limiting her choices to ten. Eve found only two she wanted. The guys with the spears, of course.

Oddly enough, Eve's passion to be a member of the opposite sex peaked with a seemingly trifling symptom: a hatred of pink. The color was anathema to her. She noticed it constantly--on people, in shop displays--greeting it with noises of disgust. Her sister would join in with relish, pointing out a gossamer blush-tinted bridesmaid's gown displayed in the window of a tailor's shop, and declare, "Now there's something for you, Eve," and the two would produce a racket of "Euew! Gross!" between attention-getting giggles.

After a while, however, Eve, gifted for art as well as baseball, found that she had no objection to using pink in her paintings. It was now offensive only in clothing. Since she bought all her clothes in the boys' department, she was not often threatened by rosy hues. I did enjoy pointing out to her one day a twenty-something person of the male persuasion sporting a t-shirt that declared, full-frontally, "REAL MEN WEAR PINK."

These days, now approaching the end of first grade and her second season as a Little Leaguer, Eve is softening on many fronts. She's thought it through carefully, it would seem, and decided she is a girl and that that condition is fairly permanent--a given, really. Lately she's even been planning names for her children. The roster of offspring, apparently, will include representatives of both genders. So Joe and Jane have a chance of being born into real life, as Eve scrupulously defines the opposite of her "pertends." Still, the prospect of becoming a mother takes second place in her imagination to another deeply felt plan for her future. She intends to be a writer. I haven't the heart to dissuade her. Yet.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

The old French saying is all too true: After a certain age, a woman must choose between her face and her figure.

The added flesh that diabolically accretes to one's middle with the passing years will keep the face attractively plumped out. Cut calories to preserve the figure and the face grows pinched and wrinkled. As with so many issues in life, you can't win, but you can choose.

I chose the figure without hesitation, having a well proportioned willowy one, with the great legs I inherited from my mother. My face, on the other hand, is ordinary except for my green eyes, which are very nice, if I say so myself.

Why such a fuss? you may ask. Do purely physical appearances, over which one has minimal control, really matter? You bet they do. They count tremendously. If you doubt it, just study romance (in fact or fiction) or, if you'll indulge my fatal attraction to the field, dancing. A dance fan--like me, like you, perhaps--can hardly ignore a performer's looks.

A student of mine in a dance-writing course asked one day if, in a critic's evaluation of a performer, bodies counted. Yes, Virginia, bodies--and faces, too--count. They're not everything, mind you. Galina Ulanova, for instance, the unforgettable mid-twentieth century star of the Bolshoi was built like a peasant, yet her soul shone through. The face doesn't need to be beautiful--Ulanova's matched her body--but it surely benefits from certain qualities that go into making what we call a good "stage face": large, widely spaced eyes, a mobile and expressive mouth, a general look of openness to experience. Maria Tallchief, Martha Graham, Patricia McBride--all had glorious stage faces. And a dancer with a tight, miserly-featured face is often--not always, but often--emotionally unable or unwilling to offer the viewer those attributes that go way beyond technique.

All this applies as well to the field of pedestrians. Just as, philosophy is continually telling us, it is important to be able to put a name to something, it is essential to see how a thing or a person looks and recognize our reaction. We respond quickly and deeply to a person's appearance and draw from it many conclusions--some of them true; a few surprisingly false, as it turns out; others that will acquire a complex subtlety should we develop an acquaintance with the person. But, admit it, that first look produces a profound, often long-lasting, response. This is so obvious, I think we can leave it at that and close the book.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

No elegance is possible without perfume. -- Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel

When I arrive at my friend Renée's house in Paris, she is knitting a small fleecy white garment. She embraces me, holds it up, and says, "It's for your grandchild-to-be." I'd written her that my first grand was on its way.

"You will be a wonderful grandmother," she declares.

Frankly, I see no reason why I shouldn't be. I adore children, always have. Playing and adventuring with them is one of my top three delights, and they respond to me in kind.

"And your grandchildren will remember you forever," Renée continues.

Well, now that's something else entirely. I see no particular reason why anyone should "remember me forever," least of all the young, who are typically absorbed in their own affairs. So I ask, "Why is that?"

"Parce-que vous êtes parfumée," she replies with wisdom-of-the-world assurance. (Because you wear perfume.)

Despite her use of the formal "you" in her native French, an old-fashioned indication of respect that she employs even with her beloved daughter-in-law, Renée, once my professor during her New York years, has become one of my most cherished friends--profoundly cultivated, innately elegant, and, far more important, a mistress of empathy.

As for the wearing of perfume, I come by it rightly. My mother always wore a fragrance, most often Ann Haviland's spicy "Carnation," while her elder sister, for whom my daughter is named (so you can imagine how I adored her), favored "Wood Violet," which echoed her sweet, self-effacing personality.

When I was about fourteen, growing up in deep, dark Brooklyn, my mother started taking me with her to the discount-perfume shop she patronized and allowing me to chose a scent for myself. I was finicky to the point of absurdity. At one session, the saleswoman, having proffered countless samples, all in vain, said, "Tell me, my dear, exactly what would you like your fragrance to smell like?"

"Soap," I answered on the instant, then immediately corrected myself. "I want it to smell as if I actually--naturally--smelled like that." (Our soap at home was Ivory. It did have a nice, fresh scent and, what's more, it floated.) I can't recall what we finally settled on that day. Fairly soon, though, rebounding from my "natural" phase, I moved into the realm of "Calèche," "Cabochard," "Antilope"--all three the antithesis of girlish, a mode I had come to despise.

In my later teen years, when I wore my clothes black, my long hair loose--Veronica Lake-style, my mother called it--and took a full ten minutes to layer my lashes with black French cake mascara, I wore Lanvin's "Arpège," it being so much more sophisticated, I still think, than "Chanel No. 5," synonymous with Gallic chic in the mind of the general public.

I can't believe I remember all this--I who have such indifferent recall--except for the things that constituted the pillars of my imagination: for instance, the names of all the dancers in the New York City Ballet when I first saw the company.

At college, inspired by Renée, with whom I studied medieval French literature, I wore Lancôme's "Joyeux Été," until the firm discontinued it. For me, that move was little short of tragic--I was far less disconcerted by the loss of a boyfriend that coincided with it. Eventually, I compromised for a while with the same house's "Magie Noire," but it wasn't it, and when a thing isn't it, it might as well not exist. For me, there's no such thing as a Mr. Almost Right in the realm of scent.

Just before and after my marriage, I wore Worth's "Je Reviens" (which used to be colored blue and stained your clothes, if you weren't careful). The name means "I will return." "Is that a promise or a threat?" my eventual husband used to joke.

And then, once I had begun writing about dancing, I discovered the old Guerlain fragrances. My favorite was "Mitsouko," not least because it had been Diaghilev's scent. Now favored by both men and women, it was introduced to me by my fellow dance writer Sally Banes and worn for decades by Balanchine's right-hand-woman, Barbara Horgan. I abandoned it finally when the formula seemed to become more synthetic or something that made it not quite true to itself.

After the eclipse of Guerlain, I practiced a kind of serial monogamy, returning to old favorites for months, even years, at a time. More successfully--since the old scents or I had changed and thus lost our affinity with each other--I discovered new creations. Some later-breaking favorites: The original Vera Wang fragrance that had no name except the designer's. "Armani for Women," a brash (and, in my case, deceptive) statement of cosmopolitan self-assurance. Issey Miyaki's "L'eau d'Issey" (back to the pure and subtle realm of floating soap). Calvin Klein's "Eternity" as well as the same firm's "Truth."

I haven't yet succumbed to the new fad for scents that evoke herbs, fruits, even sweets ( and exotic combinations thereof), concocted to gratify our time's raging lust for novelty. Are they merely perverse or perhaps the next step--after the "Poison" phase--in the feminists' repudiation of the innocent florals? After all, a Woman Warrior can hardly go around town (or to bed) smelling like a rose. Or so I assumed until, I was tempted recently by, of all things, Bulgari's tender, shy Rose Essentielle.

I don't know why people complain about the long waits at the airport nowadays. This limbo of ostensibly lost hours provides the perfect occasion to wile away time guiltlessly by trying out new fragrances--that is to say, new states of being. When you're surrounded by a just-discovered evocative aura, anything could happen. Anything.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

I am in Paris with my husband. I have convinced him that he wants to accompany me to one of the city's legendary flea markets. It is way, way out on the edge of town, a lengthy pilgrimage on the Métro, past stops with names like La Fourche (the fork, as in a road, which it is), Montparnasse-Bienvenüe, Gaîté, Plaisance. Eventually we arrive.

I shop; he watches. After nearly two hours of this, even I--the indefatigable seeker after the old and unusual--get tired. We exit and collapse onto the low, narrow concrete ledge in which the hefty chain-link fence that separates the market from ordinary life has been embedded.

We are both exhausted and the sun is turning brutal. What's more, we're both hungry, a state that can lead to cranky in a matter of minutes. (Has anyone ever studied the effect of low blood sugar on intimate human relationships?) The two of us sit there gathering strength for our next move, which should be lunch--a croque monsieur and a beer, say, if we can find a café that's not too seedy. Meanwhile, my husband has closed his eyes and retreated into the semi-comatose state of men haplessly extended beyond their tolerance.

Suddenly, some 200 yards away, I see a woman walking toward the market. She's nibbling on something she holds in her hand. If we were in the States, I'd assume, from the look of the thing, that it was a hotdog roll. But we are not in the States. We are in the land called Delicious.

As the woman comes nearer, I realize that it's pastry she's holding. Even nearer: Pastry of a lightness and flakiness that are the province of French baking. Very close, just about to pass us: The sublime pastry is coated on top with a gleaming stripe of icing the color of café au lait and filled with a silky-looking cream a shade paler.

"Come on, come on," I say to rouse my somnolent husband. I'm standing now, tugging at his hand, pulling him to his feet. "A coffee éclair! It looked fabulous! We'll just walk in the direction she came from," I urge, pointing to the woman now visible to us only from the back. "The bakery can't be far away." And it isn't. Just about two and half blocks.

"How do you know these things?" my husband asks wearily, as if his question were rhetorical.

"I know everything about things like coffee éclairs," I reply with considerable--if somewhat defensive--dignity. I may not know much about math or science, but I do know literature and dancing and coffee éclairs." (I choose not to reveal to my husband that, as an Agatha Christie addict, I've deduced that the point of purchase must have been close enough for the pastry not to have been fully consumed when the woman passed us.) My husband just shakes his head as we enter the fragrant shop.

Since I'm in charge of French in our marriage, I do the ordering: a coffee éclair for me, a chocolate éclair for him. He dislikes coffee, but I knew chocolate would be available, it being the default mode for éclairs. He pays. He understands foreign money. When I'm alone, I just cross my own palm abundantly with silver and extend it to the seller, hoping he's honest.

Not surprisingly, this is the most delectable éclair I have ever tasted. And it continues, in memory, to hold first place to this day, despite the passing of so many tastings and so many decades.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

The dress on my back, the cloth on my dining table--unique, beautiful, old, and absurdly cheap. "Where'dja get it?" the appreciative and envious exclaimed. Gerry's, of course.

I came across Gerry and his goods plowing my way home through a street fair devoted, as these events are nowadays, to the peddling of tube socks, junky electronic gizmos, bras and bikinis ostensibly name-branded, off-brand sheets, discontinued makeup and food as likely to kill as to nourish you.

It was high summer and the weather was stupefyingly hot and humid; the wares, depressingly tacky. Suddenly I spied, manifesting itself like an oasis-in the-desert mirage, a long rickety table heaped with fabric that all but spelled out "vintage" in neon light. I spent the next three hours there, pawing through the mound, finding things, among a crowd of enthusiasts. From them I learned that the scruffy youngish man in charge was called Gerry and that he and his offerings appeared irregularly--this was part of the mystique--at such fairs.

Every Sunday morning in the next month, I went out hunting for the elusive Gerry's "show" (as I found he called it), sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Eventually, I got on a semi-secret phone-alert list that made me privy to the dates and venues of upcoming shows, relayed by a disembodied young female voice. From then on, on the next designated date, fifteen minutes before the appointed hour, I would join the faithful gathered at the indicated Upper West Side locale, waiting in a state of anticipation comparable to that of a very young child on the morning of his birthday. I was rarely disappointed.

Here's how the maverick operation worked: From the back of a roomy SUV, Gerry, the sole proprietor and impresario of the enterprise, drew a large collapsed trestle table and set it up in the street. Then, with the help of a few volunteers from the eager crowd, he removed dozens of giant trash-bagged bundles from his vehicle and piled them high on the table. They formed a veritable mountain that loomed high over the heads of the participants. Only after the last bag had been stacked did Gerry give the signal that his low-end boutique was open for business. We, his clients, then precipitously threw ourselves upon the bags, ripped them open, and began rooting through the loot.

Just before the opening gun, Gerry had thrust at each prospective shopper a large plastic bag of an institutional royal-blue hue. A horizontal oval cut out near the top of the bag created a handhold. In these circumstances, however, you grabbed your bag, slung it over your arm, and pushed it way up to the elbow so you'd have both hands free. Digging for treasure chez Gerry was definitely a two-handed job.

What, exactly, was in the mountain? Delicate christening gowns, an amazing number of them. Spunky daytime dresses that women wore before jeans were declared to be the uniform for ordinary life. Cocktail dresses, ball gowns, and tuxedo jackets (which today's women know look fabulous over their uniform of white t-shirt and faded Levis). Tablecloths galore, sometimes with matching napkins, in every size imaginable--from bridge-table squares to banquet-length double damask. Towels of every ilk, including those divine European linen ones with the owner's initials embroidered at a corner in red cross-stitching. Yesteryear's baby clothes and kidwear, a study of which would make a fertile dissertation subject for a budding sociologist. Undergarments that included pantalettes from the Victorian era and peach-colored corsets your grandmother might have worn (both find rakish uses today). Hats, shoes, and gloves (occasionally the white kid "Opera length" kind that reaches from impossibly slender fingers to above the elbow). Shards of ravishing embroidery, beading, or lace--all sheared from their original location but considered by some unknown salvager--bless her or him!--too wonderful to jettison.

The basic endowments for your initial search through this merchandise were a keen eye, speed, and ferocity of purpose. The idea was to stow away in your increasingly heavy blue bag anything at all that spoke to your imagination. The elimination process would come later.

Everything was "used," of course. And nearly all of it was old, some of it, as I've indicated, seriously old. Rips, frayed edges, not quite obliterated coffee or wine stains, and other signs of age often made the garment--or linen item--somehow more precious, the way wrinkles give a mature face character. Occasionally I bought examples of meticulous mending, an art that has vanished in today's throwaway culture. The love, labor, and deftness with which a hole in an antique linen sheet had been repaired never failed to pierce my heart.

In the world of Gerry's, age was a plus. His customers seemed to agree that clothes were better "back then," whether they thought "then" was the Sixties and Seventies or the Thirties and Forties. (I admit to the insufferable snobbery of believing that fashion--in a classical sense that includes wearabililty and grace--ended in the Forties.) Clothes were certainly better made back in the day.

Among my favorite acquisitions were black and midnight-blue dresses from the Twenties through the Forties that became mainstays of my "look," and then, skipping ahead to the extravagances of the Seventies, a killer-flamenco dress--several pounds of flirtatiously ruffled black lace that I never wore but took out to revel in at least twice a year. My oddest find from the stylish past? Two pairs of men's white suede summer oxfords with those characteristic perforations--very Great Gatsby. They were almost brand new, and they actually fit.

A small percentage of Gerry's offerings were actually theatrical costumes. Another small percentage--one I cherished--comprised extremely old items. A wisp of a white finely embroidered handkerchief, at least two centuries old, from the look of it--you could, as they say, read a love letter through it and time had lent it a faint sepia cast--had managed not to give up the ghost in the ravages we perpetrated on the dense, twisted pileup of cloth. I rescued it, washed and ironed it with scrupulous care, and took it to Renée, my dear friend in Paris. Utterly in sympathy with it, she had it framed and hung it in her bedroom, in the company of leather-bound books equally antique.

Where on earth did Gerry get his stuff? Of course we were curious, but in vain. He was cagily vague on this subject, even if questioned directly. "Oh, here and there." Costume-museum cast-offs was one of the most shocking and unlikely sources he'd mention when pressed further, though the nature of his more compelling holdings hinted that he was telling the truth.

Gerry's clientele was largely female and divided between two subsets: those who dressed with debonair éclat, looking to add to their holdings, and those--collagists and quilters among them--who converted their acquisitions radically, giving them a completely new identity.

Regular Gerry's customers got to know each other and, while frenetically mining the fabric mountain for items that would suit them, always took the time to find things for their sisters. "Who's into lace?" one might call from one side of the heap, holding high a gossamer white cloud, then pitching it across the towering stack toward the ebullient voice that replied. Or, "Mirelle," uttered in a shriek of pleasure, "you're gonna love this!" and the said Mirelle's arm would shoot up--palm cupped, fingers splayed--to catch the soft missile being flung in her direction.

The only motionless figure I ever saw in this crowd was Sienna, a ravishing child about seven years old, with red-gold hair falling to her shoulder blades and curling in pre-Raphaelite tendrils around her pale face. She was exquisitely poised and unusually silent. By contrast, Estella, the middle-aged grandmother in charge of her, was an earthy, loquacious type with gypsy looks. Physically and temperamentally, they seemed entirely unrelated. I guessed that Estella was buying for a modest private resale enterprise, perhaps to put bread into the child's mouth.

At one Gerry's session, I insisted upon buying Sienna a winter coat that the gods had obviously designed, a half-century back, with just this eerily lovely child in mind. Executed in black poodle-fur, with a neat little collar and a double row of buttons parading primly down the front, it was cut to hug a slender torso, then flare out at skirt level as if whipped suddenly by a November gust. Perfect in its propriety, imaginative in its fabric, meticulous in its tailoring, it was fit for the heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess in her days of good fortune.

To return to the Gerry's ritual: Once you felt you had fully inspected the hoard of stock (this took at least an hour and a half), the next step in the selection process was to dump the contents of your blue bag out onto the adjacent sidewalk and inspect it, piece by piece, to see which items you really must have or die.

While you did this, another client might hover nearby, politely if sometimes pointedly waiting until you, the original claimant, were done considering a good percentage of your items. The observer wouldn't touch a thing until the moment seemed right to inquire, "Can I look at your discards?"

A cooperative client (and most were) would then sort her haul into three distinct piles that she indicated were, as far as her own taste and needs went, Keeper, Maybe, and Forget It. The waiting observer was entitled to examine--and stash in her own blue bag--anything in the Forget It pile. By an unspoken courtesy, she would shoulder the responsibility of returning the items she didn't want back onto the still-looming mountain on the trestle table--unless yet another hopeful connoisseur of discards stood waiting (body motionless, avid eyes scanning) behind her.

Of course these rules, which evolved logically from the needs of the situation, were written nowhere and spoken about only when a newcomer to the process, at a loss as to how the system worked, asked for initiation. The conduct of the whole affair was a convincing argument for letting women run a nation's government.

Decisions about household linen--whether for table, bed, or bath--can be made by eye and feel alone. Sheer guesswork prevails in choosing articles of clothing you plan to present to your near and dear. But garments you may allow to enter your own wardrobe must be tried on, though an intuitive few can look at a lavish night-life costume or a sober pencil-slim skirt and know if it will fit them flatteringly. Most of Gerry's clients needed to try on the clothes that had snagged their attention and so created dressing rooms of an invisible architecture on the sidewalk, close to the building line, as if having a bricks-and-mortar structure only inches away from your all but naked body somehow preserved your modesty.

A typical Gerry's customer, you see, would arrive at the scene clad in the usual flea market costume--jeans or shorts that had seen far better times, a ratty t-shirt, and a banana pouch to hold the bare necessities (money--needless to say, Gerry accepted only cash; a bank card for getting more money; a Metro card; a piece of i.d.; a comb). The savviest among us learned to skip regulation underwear--bra and bikini pants, an outfit the New York police consider adequate for the beach but insufficient coverage smack in the middle of town--and substitute some sort of cat-suit arrangement cut back to biker-shorts height on the legs and singlet sleevelessness on top.

No mirrors were available, not even the usual flea market looking-glass, shakily angled against an unreliable support, so cheap it reflected you with fun-house distortion. With luck, shop windows, if a shop's interior was dark enough, would provide a murky likeness.

Other than that, we used our own finely honed instincts about how a garment felt on our body and our sister shoppers' opinions. "What do you think?" we'd ask, presenting ourselves dead-on to the friend we had brought to the scene or an acquaintance we had made on the spot, then revolving in slow motion to be inspected from various perspectives.

Nearly always, the negative responses combined truth with tact. The positive ones, in their enthusiasm, were less decorous. "It's totally you. You'd be insane not to take it." Or, "If you don't take it, I will--and cut it up into a dozen pieces and make pillows." The dismantling threat often convinced the doubtful model of the garment that it was her moral duty to extend its life intact. Pillows could come later, after she had worn it to death in its original form.

Once a client had winnowed her holdings to the pieces she really wanted, she stuffed them back into her blue bag, deposited any further discards that hadn't been gobbled up back on the heap, and placed herself at the end of a line of people that led up to Gerry.

The line could be long, but the pricing system had the swift efficiency of a guillotine. One by one, you'd remove the items from your bag and Gerry would tersely quote a price. "Three bucks." "One." "Five." "Ten." On each item, the shopper was allowed only one of two responses--yes or no. Haggling was forbidden. If you answered yes, Gerry scribbled the number down in a notebook that had seen much service. If your response was no, Gerry took the item and tossed it back on the heap. Once everything in your bag had been priced, Gerry added up the numbers in his notebook, announced the result, and you forked over that many dollars. The entire process clocked in at under three minutes.

You then scooped your yeses back into your blue plastic sack--or, if you were a Big Buyer, like Estella, into one of those ubiquitous plaid zippered shopping bags you'd presciently brought along--and moved on to the nearest Starbucks for a restorative dose of caffeine.

Needless to say, once the madness of the moment had subsided, some of our purchases would turn out to have been mistakes. But, as my frequent companion on these forays--Andrea the quiltmaker, author, swimmer, and Ph.D. candidate--points out, sighing with nostalgia, the entertainment value of The Gerry Experience was reward enough for the lavish investment of time and the ridiculously modest investment of cash.

Nostalgia? Yes, after several madcap years, Gerry's enterprise folded. Not even his most persistent regulars could trace the man. Having created his unique delight for a time, he was gone--like Mary Poppins. Dozens of us fans were left broken-hearted--and with Sunday mornings once again at our disposal. Finally we might have time to clean our closets.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

I've always thought of myself as an addictive personality, but life is forever proving me wrong.

Take alcohol, for instance. My father--himself only a social drinker, and not much of one at that--introduced me to an occasional dab on the tongue of very good scotch when I was a mere child, so that, as he put it in his raspy voice, I wouldn't make a fool of myself when I got older. The Scotch tasted foreign and, in the parlance of my tender years, yucky. At the same time it seemed one of the accoutrements of the adult world, a realm I aspired to, childhood as I perceived it being a claustrophobic thicket of arbitrary rules.

On my first date--age thirteen, at the "nightclub" of a Borscht Belt hotel--my youthful swain asked me what I'd like to drink and suggested an innocuous just mildly spiked lemonade affair suitable for young virgins. Duly cognizant of the dangers of imbibing a substance I'd never tried at home, I rebuffed his cautious proposal and requested a scotch and soda. Scotch was the only alcoholic beverage I knew besides wine. Wine was my mother's preference. My mom always claimed scotch tasted like shoe polish. What bizarre experiment could have brought her to that conclusion?

A couple of decades hence, having turned into a dance journalist, I became aware of the heavy drinking indulged in by a couple of my colleagues. (I myself learned in time that there are some performances--I call them "double-scotch events"--that might easily drive one to drink, but it's hard to review them coherently in a state of advanced intoxication.) So fearful was I that I might become similarly undone, I observed an annual two-week total abstinence just to make sure I had "demon liquor" under control. I did, Puritan that I was.

Take smoking, then. I took it up at college, having already been raised in a cloud of secondhand smoke. Both my parents were two-packs-a-day consumers--and my father a physician, no less. My sense of the glamour of smoking came, of course, from the old movies (Now, Voyager, for instance) and the fact that my minor in French led me to hang out with the most chic professors in the school. When I could afford those hyacinth blue packets, I bought Gauloises. The rest of the time, I resorted, as my French idols did, to Camels, reputed, perhaps falsely, to carry the heaviest load of nicotine and tar available. I never inhaled.

Next, in short order, I graduated, married, and duly produced a baby. (That's how we did things back in the day--took care of lots of the heavy stuff before we reached the age of reason.) I found that I was relaxed enough to smoke only when I sat down to nurse my infant son. One day, after he'd lost his crib hair, I noticed to my horror that still-glowing ashes from my cigarette were falling onto his dear bald head. I quit smoking then and there. No withdrawal symptoms arrived to plague me, and I rarely missed cigarettes. The glamour of smoking had lain with my cinematic and Parisian models; a sleep-deprived housewife and nursing mom simultaneously trying to earn her master's degree in English lit has, by definition, lost her passport to that world. I spoke a lot of French to my infant, just to keep my hand in and secretly adhering to the theory that a foreign tongue can be imbibed with one's mother's milk. My son, as it turned out, did not confirm that theory. He was a scandalously early talker--spoke in sentences, indeed paragraphs, before he could walk--but, though he'd obey a command in French if caught unaware, his utterances were firmly confined to English.

I didn't do drugs either. Not even recreational ones. I didn't work up the courage to try until I had two half-grown kids, and then I felt that if I was instructing them to say no, I had to follow the rule myself. Eventually, the aforementioned son, home on holiday from his name-brand college, where he had tried out a number of controlled substances, brought me, at my request, a cache of marijuana. I put it away carefully to save for "the proper occasion" and, predictably, managed to lose it. From time to time I look desultorily through my drawers and files, in the faint hope of retrieving evidence of a misspent youth I had never managed to have. My daughter took after me. Arriving home after a college party--she attended the same institution as her brother, whose description of the very same party included a gaudy menu of pharmaceutical refreshments--she asked me mournfully, "Why doesn't anyone ever offer me a controlled substance?" I sympathized and explained, "You're just not the type."

My addiction of choice--or, rather, necessity--is pitifully harmless: caffeine. How else, I often wonder, could I have survived the rigors of devoted child-raising coupled with a (I use the word advisedly) career in writing about dance? I have quit, cold turkey, several times, the main withdrawal symptom being a piercing headache that no aspirin can ameliorate. I'd stay off all sources of caffeine--even chocolate--for weeks, even months, then relapse, relief far outweighing guilt. My most memorable succumbing was through an intensely rich double espresso bought from a celebrated restaurant's outdoor cart in Little Italy. I sipped it slowly, with the deepest pleasure, walking down Grand Street. After five minutes, everywhere I looked, colors jumped out at me, more vivid than anything that has ever hung on MoMA's walls. Marvelous stuff, coffee. To paraphrase Sydney Smith's paean to tea: Thank God for coffee! What would the world do without coffee? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before coffee.

Over the years I decided that there must be a gene for addiction. This was simply a fantasy on my part, but lately researchers have been looking seriously into the possibility that some people are simply born vulnerable to indulgences capable of destroying body and soul. I know for sure that there's a gene for understanding the digital world, another for attaining whatever mathematical capabilities follow the memorization of the multiplication tables, and yet another for a sense of geography that keeps one from getting lost the moment one leaves home base. I don't have any of them. I'm good with children, I have a keen eye for style, and some people even think I can write.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

It happened in Copenhagen. Hans Christian Andersen tells us that magic and imagination flourish on Danish soil, and the tourism industry builds on that proposal at every turn. My own frequent visits to Wonderful Copenhagen and its environs--for work and play--make me suspect there's some truth in the idea.

One Friday, many summers ago, the Danish friend with whom I was staying told me about an upcoming weekend fair of vintage items (one of my fatal passions) and offered to drive me out there--god knows where, to hell and gone--in her zippy little white car. We took off the next morning, early, for the opening, so as not to miss a single treasure. Of course it was raining. It seems as if it's always raining in Denmark, or has just rained, or is threatening to do so, or is expressing its melancholy indecision with a fine drizzle.

The fair was a pretty high-end deal, being annual and indoors. Typically, it featured articles for the home: china, silver, glass, mid-century modern furniture--for all of which Denmark is justly celebrated. Historically, however, dress has not been the culture's forte. Until recent decades, dowdiness and dull convention were the norm, considered a virtue perhaps. Yet here it was, hanging high from the top of a door, askew on a wire hanger, the dress that made my heart leap up with Wordsworthian delight, the dress that seemed created for me though it was surely a product of the Thirties, the dress that ignited my usually feeble streak of greed so that all I could think was Mine! Mine! Mine!

It was made of heavy black crepe with a dull finish. The top, including the long sleeves, was encrusted with jet beading and scrolling embroidery boldly laid out in an elaborate design that conjured up leaf and blossom without portraying either literally. The proportions of this magnificent bodice suggested that the garment was intended for a mature lady in possession of a large mono-bosom. I am more delicately endowed. I imagined the original owner of the dress looking like my grandmother in full regalia: majestic and bulletproof.

The skirt was appropriately more reticent, but not without its own subtle dignity. A wide panel of pleats hung front and center. From the waist to the bottom of the pelvis, the pleats were sewn down; below, they flared free. The hemline, grown uneven with time, reached to what I guessed would be midway between the calf and ankle worn by a woman of average height.

Running down the back of the dress, as I was to discover, were twenty-six small buttons and complementary loops, all covered in the fabric of which the dress was made. This was what I've learned to call a "husband dress"--"Hon, would you do me up down the back?" Even if you're very flexible, and I am, once the dress is on, you can only make the top half dozen and bottom half dozen closures, leaving a goodly number of your vertebrae naked to the gaze of society. Husbands and other sorts of housemates not always being around when you need them, I once, en route to one of those affairs requiring "festive dress," had to ask a cab driver to do the job. But I'm getting ahead of my story, revealing that the dress became mine. Eventually. Let's rewind.

Through the half open door from which the dress hung, I could see a tiny disheveled room occupied by a group of mostly unshaven guys of assorted ages in rumpled, none-too-clean work clothes. They were obviously taking a break over coffee, cigarettes, and shots of whatever relieves the pain of getting up at dawn to ferry wares to such a fair's site.

A far more chic woman of a certain age, the epitome of Danish bourgeois style, emerged from a nearby booth offering mostly old porcelain and linens. Gently, she made it clear that she was the proprietress of the dress. "May I try it on?" I ventured. The look on her face suggested that no one had made such an outlandish request before. But she recovered her aplomb, along with the familiar Danish good manners, then scanned the scene and asked, "But where?"

I had shed my physical modesty years before, through quick changes in the wings of the Henry Street Playhouse, where we teenaged dance students performed. There I'd learned that the human body essentially comes in two types with typical variations on the theme, and that once you've viewed several of each genre, you've seen all there is to see.

The seller took alarm at my why-not-right-here? wave of the arm at the public space in which we stood and immediately shooed the men out of the coffee room, put me, the dress, and my friend inside, and firmly shut the door.

I shed my ramshackle flea-marketing outfit and tried the dress on. It was, of course, far too big for me, but it hung just right from the shoulders, and it felt as glorious as it looked. My friend and I emerged from our makeshift dressing room, sought out a full-length mirror (a grand-scale antique, also for sale, at a neighboring booth). Thus provided with a reflection, I turned swiftly and erratically from side to side to catch a glimpse of myself, as if caught unawares, in this foreign costume. Still I couldn't say yes (or, for that matter, no). I adored the dress, but somehow the idea of buying it and actually wearing it seemed to be too much. As they say nowadays, I just couldn't commit.

I managed to say a regretful, rather shame-faced no to the seller, who had the grace to remain expressionless. I apologized to my friend, who only shrugged, used to--indeed, indulgent toward--what she clearly thought of as my peculiar ways. We made a desultory tour of the balance of the market and headed home.

In the dead of night, I lay in bed, obsessing about the dress. It was not merely wonderful for its own physical self. It also harbored an uncanny evocative power. It made me think of Virginia Woolf. I was fully aware, from studying pictures of Woolf (I am a recovering fan of her work), that the dress was not really like her wardrobe at all. I simply knew that I would feel like Virginia Woolf when I wore it. God knows why. I have a man's dressing gown (sumptuous maroon figured silk, floor-length on me) that makes me feel like Balzac. And I loathe Balzac's novels. I just like the idea of him, writing away, at the epic Comédie humaine, to be sure, but, better yet, composing dozens of letters every day as well, longhand of course, fueled by the contents of his constantly refilled porcelain coffee pot, the creditors at the door.

Desire won out. I got up, walked down the hall, and knocked cautiously on my friend's bedroom door. "Ja, hvad er det nu?" (Yes, what is it now?) replied a very sleepy voice. "I can't get that dress out of my mind," I began, standing hesitantly in the doorway. My friend sighed, as if she had known how it would be all along. Summoning up my courage, I went on, "Would you consider--I know it's asking too much, but . . ."

So back we went the next morning, my patient, generous friend and I, in her gleaming white buggy. The excursion was again conducted in the perennial light rain that does wonders for the skin and, coupled with the all too few hours of daylight in the Scandinavian winter, plays havoc with the psyche, making depression many natives' default mode. En route, the rain began to come down hard, indeed emphatically. Accompanying it, came my heart-hammering, belly-gnawing fear that the dress had been snapped up after I had abandoned it the day before. Which, I thought bleakly, would only have served me right. I deserved to be the victim of sartorial retribution.

The dress was still there, thank goodness. Can you believe I insisted on repeating the trying-on ritual, including shooing the men out of the coffee room? (This time 'round they seemed to have accepted the disruption as part of their generally unhappy fate or the very nature of life. The Danes are philosophical folk.) Can you believe I still took a long time to consider if the dress wasn't too strange a costume for me, one of those mad errors that slips further and further toward the darkest recesses of one's closet until an adolescent grandchild commandeers it for Hallowe'en. Then I began to wonder if I could really afford it, not merely as a statement of personal style but in terms of budget. I was a paradigm of indecision. Finally my friend, who may indulge fantasy life--she is, after all, a ballerina--unleashed her practical side and came to my rescue. "Buy the dress," she said firmly, "and let's go and have lunch."

Once having made the decision, we did a little ritual bargaining about the price. (In Italy, I'm told, if you fail to haggle in such circumstances, the seller is disappointed.) I applied my limited Danish to the task, my friend chiming in, charming in her native tongue. The proprietress remained firm, however, and by now I'd realized that if I left a second time without possessing this garment, I'd have been criminally negligent--towards my desires and towards the magnificence of the dress.

I have since worn it for two decades on what I think of as Occasions of Elegance. It cost $60.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias