indulgences

Just when the Seventies were starting, I looked up from my overlapping worlds of academia, motherhood, and housewifery and decided I wanted to write about dancing. Having managed to publish two pieces—both, fairly accidentally, about Twyla Tharp’s early ventures—in little-read journals, I proceeded, with the faith of the innocent, to disperse these samples among the bigger guns, offering them my services.

Bill Como, Dance magazine’s editor in chief, as a staff member told me later, rescued my maiden efforts from the pile of unsolicited manuscripts about to be returned to sender and said, “Have this girl come in and see me.” Apparently, he was in the habit of browsing through the slush pile, as it was called, to see if there was anything worth retrieving. (My informant and I decided not to get all feministic about his applying the word girl to me, although my old-fashioned c.v. indicated that I‘d earned the right to be called a woman.)

So there I was, sitting across the wide desk from him in the old West 47th Street office, staring down at the little silver buttons on my emerald-green Marimekko (my best dress), because I didn’t have enough chutzpah and professional sophistication even to make eye contact while he asked me, “Well, what else can you do?” I can cook, I thought wildly to myself, I’m absolutely terrific with small children, I have this original idea about the relation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet . . .

Suddenly some force with which I had little conscious acquaintance at the time made me transfer my glance from my lap to his suave, Italianate face and bluntly name half a dozen dance figures—the handful I knew anything about. “I can write about them” I declared, simultaneously realizing this was just about the biggest lie I’d ever told. “Write about these three,” Bill ordered, naming his choices, “and don’t bother me again until the articles are done.” Brusque words, belied by eyes that were kind. Then he stood up, indicating that our brief interview was over.

What with my ties to my university (where I was crawling toward a Ph.D.), family life (which included a boy and a girl child, still quite small), and a case of writer’s paralysis that was part Mallarmé’s terror of the blank page and part appalling inexperience, the assignment took a year and a half. It was, however, the beginning of my professional career.

Bill took chances on people, you see. He could sense something in a neophyte—a spark of talent coupled with huge measures of desire and tenacity. On the basis of that, as I often said in the busy years that ensued for me as a regular contributor to the magazine, he gave me enough rope to hang myself. He let me write in my own peculiar way and trusted me to teach myself, with time, to do a little better. He let me take on subjects no other editor in the field would have considered, let me indulge my obsessions, let me see the dance world from my own idiosyncratic angle. I’ll never cease to be grateful to Bill for “finding” me—plucking me out of nowhere, as it were—and for the magnitude of the opportunity he offered me, the generosity and trust it implied. Along the way he counseled, heartening and admonishing; he talked dancing to me; he encouraged me to appreciate the beauty of the simple declarative sentence. Most apparent, though, was his gift of the space—in both its literal and figurative meanings—in which to write.

Toward the end of the Seventies, he gave me another substantial opportunity—editing the criticism for the magazine. I did possess editorial skills, acquired through work on high school and college publications, and I was obviously a reliable type, but I hardly think Bill realized as he took this second chance on me, that I had visions for the department far exceeding the matter-of-fact job description. Included in my probably impossible dream were: a significant upgrading of the writing; the development of the writers by considering with them what they might like to write about, including genres that were not in their area of expertise; a concerted effort to have an ethnic mix among the reviewers; and so on. And on.

My tenure certainly caused Bill moments of exasperation; I hope he thought the results weighed favorably in the balance. For me it was a heady adventure. My nine-year editorial stint with the magazine taught me a great deal about writing, collaborative effort, and the harsh practicalities of keeping a publication viable. In the course of it, I got to work with writers like Joan Acocella, David Vaughan, Mindy Aloff, Sally Banes, Jennifer Dunning, and Eva Yaa Asantewaa—to name just a few of those singular voices whose contributions I looked forward to each month as if they had been written solely for my edification and delight. Throughout, Bill’s patience and permissiveness were extraordinary, and when I finally left the job for new and grander commitments, he had the grace to treat my move as a manifestation of growth, not disloyalty.

In temperament and the conduct that exposes it, Bill and I were at opposite ends of the spectrum. He had a terrible temper and thought nothing of letting his high-voltage tirades spill over the low partitions of our office, where the staff worked in small cubicles. (Only he and the publisher had spacious, individual offices.) One day, Bill suddenly became furious with me and, for the first time in our acquaintance, let ‘er rip, shouting (abusively, I thought) about my allowing—indeed, strongly encouraging—the reviewers to be fully truthful in their evaluations. Of course my stance was central to my strategy of making the magazine’s criticism independent of influence—from the companies being reviewed and, for that matter, from him. Ears perked up all around us.

“Can we go into your office?” I asked Bill quietly. Turning his back on me, he headed for his station of command. I followed.

Once inside, I asked, “Can we close the door?” He nodded his consent, no doubt baffled by my behavior.

I closed the door firmly, then said to him with equal firmness, but without raising my voice, “I’m willing to discuss policy with you whenever you like. You are my boss. But nobody is allowed to speak to me the way you just did. Nobody. Except my mother, and she usually thinks twice about it.”

With that curtain line, I turned my back and left the room. From then on, Bill treated me with careful respect.

Admittedly, Bill and I were an odd match. We must have disagreed about three-quarters of the issues that came our way. Our artistic taste was light years apart. Just for instance, he was a Béjart guy; I was a Balanchine gal. (Need any more be said?) We had radically conflicting views about the function of the critic (reporter or supporter?), about aspects of professional behavior, about what a magazine might be and how it should be run.

Ideally, what would follow here is the assertion that we respected each other’s opinions. I can’t say that. I think we often thought the other was either as wrong as anyone can be or, more charitably, crazy, and that he/she would suffer the dire consequences of these misguided views or, more charitably, eventually see the light. No, what we felt for each other wasn’t anything as morally elegant as respect. It was unabashed love. As far as I can explain it (there’s a primal level on which love is blessedly unfathomable), it was based on the thing that had brought us to our respective trades—a guileless, ecstatic passion for dancing. We recognized that in each other immediately, honored it for nearly two decades, took a pleasure in sharing it that increased in resonance with passing time. It kept, and continues to keep, our connection unbreakable, surviving even his death.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

My first memory of steps dates back to my childhood–extreme infancy, to be exact. Science tells us we don’t remember the earliest part of life, and no one I know has ever claimed to. So what makes me think that I can remember–actually feel again–the slow bump, bump, bump as my beloved Aunt Ann, my mother’s elder sister, cradling me carefully in her arms, descended to the street via the front steps of the hospital in which I’d been born just a few days before?

Friends tell me I must have made up that memory a few years later, inspired by my father’s amateur photograph of the event, which had taken a place of honor in our family album. But I don’t remember the descent pictorially, just viscerally: Bump, bump, bump, as my tiny, relaxed body, swathed in a warm mist, thanks to a cozy blanket of fleece, moved with slow, steady, rhythm, down one level to the next. Of course, as Aunt Ann carried me, I didn’t know she was my aunt, or even what an aunt was, but a quarter century later I named my daughter after her. I leave it to you to decide if that first, primal memory could be true. As for me, I think what I think and I know what I know.

Once a child can crawl, he soon moves on to the challenge of staircases. Ascending them isn’t too difficult, essentially in crawl position, admittedly made somewhat more challenging by the upward tilt–don’t even think of this on steep flights–and next in upright position with the support of a banister on one side and a watchful adult with quick reflexes on the other. In both cases, if possible, the child should be encouraged to look straight in front of him, never behind. It’s a long way down.

Descending a flight of stairs often enters a baby’s repertoire first, because the easiest technique is to descend backwards in what is, again, essentially crawl position, simply tilted to match the staircase’s slant. An observer standing at the bottom of this flight of stairs sees the cute little bottom, well padded with diaper under the eager toiler’s workaday outfit; this is the well-deserved reward for the caretaker who had the patience and watchfulness to teach the stair-crawler the trick in the first place.

According to this era’s baby books, the appropriate congratulation to the child for success in this maneuver–and most any other physical achievement–is “Good job!” so as to reinforce the idea that achievement at a particular task (or failure, to be greeted with a cheery “It’s coming along”) is not misunderstood by the child to be a judgment about his or her identity as a whole. And here I was, saving “good job” for winning a Rhodes scholarship.

Before you know it, the child is a toddler, and, having mastered walking to a reasonable, if erratic, degree, often acquires a two-step stool that puts him or her at the right height to use the bathroom sink. My own pair of offspring used one-step affairs, coated in gleaming enamel–one yellow, one red–with wheels imbedded in one side that let them go scooting across the floor, propelled by their legs and feet. Turned over, the objects became flat-topped stools with a hole for carrying them about from wild hallway races to a more decorous washing-hands-before-dinner position. These stools were pieces of invention and plain sleek beauty–at a hefty price–so popular with “advanced” parents of the sixties. When my kids outgrew these handsome devices, they were passed on to younger kids in our circle, so, a generation later, I had to start from scratch for my two granddaughters, preschoolers, who lived nearby. Fortunately, the need arose when I was in my vintage phase, and I found at a church sale a battered wooden affair from, I’d guess, the 1930s or ’40s that sported nursery rhymes with illustrative pictures, all faded by time and use. My daughter (the little girls’ mother) and I loved it a lot. To hell with the Bauhaus. This one had the charm of yesteryear.

Is there some mathematical law dictating that a child will always jump from a height two steps higher on a stoop than his or her grandmother considers even marginally safe? What impels children to start doing this? The perilous jumping lasts, in my experience, for two years and then vanishes forever, with many a skinned knee to show for it. With barely concealed pride.

Lacking risers, the staircases in our own house are lethal. A riser, for folks who have happily managed to avoid the lingo of architecture, is the vertical piece between two horizontal steps (treads, as the trade calls them). Architects love to omit risers, so as to give the staircase space more light and make it seem lighter in weight as well. Lovely visually, but at our place a small enough child can slip straight from the third floor to the basement. (To increase the danger–and, granted, the floating effect–there is sheer empty space between the banisters and the treads.)

We had to carry our grandchildren up and down these staircases until they were three or four and far too heavy for a grandparent to make the trip with the preschooler in his arms. When we reached that stage, Staircase Rules were drummed into the kids’ heads: Don’t use the stairs without a grown-up. Don’t use the stairs when you’re wearing only socks; you might slip. Don’t carry anything when you’re going up or down. Hold on to the banister. No playing on the stairs and no dashing up or down them.

“Why would anybody build stairs kids can’t use?” the youngest grand asked, in a tone more hostile than plaintive. We finally stopped reiterating the rules when her elder sister got two numbers to her age, but their visiting friends still have to be reminded occasionally. It’s a miracle–not that no one has fallen, but that the children are still speaking to us.

When I was a child, our family and a neighbor’s took the Battery Park ferry to the Statue of Liberty and climbed the 546 steps (from ground level to the top of the crown) inside the Brobdingnagian sculpture. It was a glorious adventure, climaxing in the view from the top and ending, when we finally got down, with a lavish picnic. Sure enough, the following day brought formidably aching muscles, hot baths, intermittent bed rest, and melodramatic groans. One of the adults in our group had pointed out that we could use an elevator that would take us painlessly as far as the top of the pedestal on which Lady Liberty stands, armed with book clasped close to her bosom and torch held high, thus saving 192 steps. We children had retorted as one, “But it wouldn’t be the same.” This is undeniably true.

The authentic game is related to baseball, I read recently. Girls in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush, at least when I was one of them, played a simpler version. Basically you took turns throwing a pink rubber ball (classically a Spaldeen, as we called the Spalding company’s specialty), from a stance on the sidewalk toward the stairs of a house stoop. Brownstones, with their high flights, were favorite sites.

An ordinary throw that hit the stoop and was allowed to bounce just once before you caught it got you 10 points. Easy stuff. The value of hitting the edge of a step with your ball, catching it without allowing it to bounce on the ground as it slammed back to you, was 100. Both parts of the 100-point feat were tricky. Not often succeeding, they carried great cachet, partly, no doubt, because of the danger factor. Those off-the-edge-of-the-step missiles packed a wallop on the rebound, and you might get hit in the face. Sometimes you failed to catch the ball after it had bounced once, and it dribbled gaily past you, along the sidewalk and out into the street. Then the only honor was not to run into the street after it and be mowed down by a passing car. There were, needless to say, no points awarded for caution.

It was lovely to play after dinner, in summer, when the sun set late. In the slowly fading light, the throws became harder to aim well and any competition the game had aroused in full daylight imperceptibly gave way to the mood of a languorous dream. All too soon though, our mothers were leaning out from their kitchen windows, calling us in to bath and bedtime, no doubt relieved to see that another day had passed in which no child they knew had crossed paths with a moving car.

When we had a whole afternoon before us and no one had to go off to a piano lesson or the orthodontist, whoever achieved the remarkable tally of 1000 points won the game. Mostly, though, these games never reached that definitive, triumphant conclusion. Getting there became too tedious. When we lost interest, we’d just drift off into another of the pastimes that, today, seem to exist only in memory.

How old was I then? Eight? Nine? Ten at the most. I was walking down the staircase in our two-story house. The steps were carpeted, the thick pile absorbing nearly all footfalls. I stopped, hearing voices from a little sitting room below: my mother’s and the varying sopranos and mezzos of two–or was it three?–of her friends from the neighborhood. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their voices were warm and cheerful, a springtime medley of chirping birds. I heard them but they hadn’t heard me. They couldn’t see me either; a wall divided the staircase from the room they were in. I thought, This is what it’s like when you’re dead. The world goes on doing what it always does. Except that you’re not there. I felt hollow. I was gone, and no one seemed to notice.

As a teen on summer vacation, I often spent an entire afternoon reading yesteryear’s French classics in the old MoMA Sculpture Garden. It was one of the cheapest ways I knew to feel truly sophisticated. I had been given a year’s membership in the museum, so the experience was entirely free, apart from the price of an espresso from the refreshment cart. The MoMA garden had chairs, but I preferred sitting on one of the wide stone platforms that also varied the heights of the terrain, suggested different areas, and were low enough to serve as steps. Such a rare and elegant perch seemed more in keeping with Racine’s cadences, which, reading his nobly impassioned scenes or reciting them sotto voce, was like swirling a sip of superb brandy inside your mouth.

Two summers later found me reading all afternoon in Washington Square Park during the season’s break at Barnard (my alma mater, too high-toned for summer courses) when I attended the more plebian NYU to earn credits that would let me begin my master’s degree while still an undergraduate. For some reason, I thought this acceleration would be practical, but perhaps there was a romantic aspect lurking behind my behavior as well. Once you slipped away from Barnard’s all-female student body, there was no telling whom you might meet.

So after classes all morning (we were squeezing semester-long courses into six weeks), I would retire to the huge circle with a fountain at its center in the park that’s a Village landmark, which had a few graduated rows of steps in concentric circles on its inner side. As rumpled old men played chess nearby, young mothers aired their babies (while their husbands, no doubt, labored over their doctoral dissertations), hippies played their guitars, Jules Feiffer-style dancers scurried to their rehearsals, and Judson Church tirelessly championed liberal causes, I sat and did the day’s assigned reading.

One afternoon I noticed a handsome older man who watched me from a polite distance for over an hour. Every ten minutes or so I raised my eyes furtively from Chekhov’s heart-rending short stories–or was it Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes?–then methodically continued my reading. Finally–it was nearing sundown–I finished my task and closed my book. The man took this as his signal to approach close enough for conversation.

“Hello,” he said. “You seem to be finished with your work. May I walk you home?”

Maybe his good looks, to say nothing of his suave manner were merely lures. He was also at least fifteen years older than I. Even to my relative innocence, his proposal felt like Not a Very Good Idea. And I was sure he had no idea that the home he offered to walk me to was deep in Brooklyn and inhabited by my very protective parents.

“No, thank you,” I said in what I hoped was a tone of sophisticated hauteur and went briskly on my own way. I wonder why I still remember this.

My present to my daughter for her high-school graduation was two weeks in a single European city. She chose Copenhagen; she’d heard good things about it. I’d made many friends there on working-and-playing trips before that and, of course, when Anne and I arrived, all those friends asked us to dinner. I had never quite realized, before that trip with my daughter, how many of my friends lived in fifth-floor walk-ups. We always arrived at their door panting.

The most intimidating staircase in Copenhagen, though–admit it, the scariest–is the one that spirals around the outside of the steeple tower of Vor Frelsers Kirke (Our Savior’s Church). Of course we climbed it (we were extremely thorough tourists), I trembling with terror though I tried not to reveal it to my teenager; Anne herself increasingly blithe-spirited. Did I mention that the winds were high that day? Finally, Anne stood on the very top step, her long chestnut hair blown into rivulets. I stood, now frozen by fear, two steps below her and took her picture. I behaved as if I needed the lower perch to take the photograph but, truth to tell, I couldn’t mount a step further.

At 10, my youngest grand is the girl her early childhood promised: tall, slender, willowy, strikingly pale, and now a crackerjack athlete, with extraordinary eye-hand coordination and surprising physical stamina.

When she was not quite four, it was one of my grandmotherly duties and pleasures to collect her from her preschool on West 121st Street once a week at midday, ferry her by subway (the Broadway bus took forever) back to my house on West 96th, and entertain her until returning her to her parents for dinner. After making this trip myriad times, it occurred to me that instead of boarding the subway at 116th, as directed in the “official” parental instructions, we could shorten our walk by boarding at 125th Street station. So one (exceedingly hot and humid) day we tried. Turns out 125th is an elevated station. Go know.

I can’t tell you how many steps we had to climb to reach the platform, but toil away the child did (she being too heavy to carry even part of the way up), without complaint. Not at all to my surprise, she even took the discouraging circumstances in good humor, pretending we were scaling Mt. Everest, and so on. I should have known; she has always been a cheerful traveler. The only time I’ve heard her admit to exhaustion was when we sat on a park bench, trying to get our strength back in the middle of a far too long walk we attempted one day. “I wish I had a stroller,” she mused aloud, “or a wheelchair.”

In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum added to its wonders a beautiful, compelling fountain, created by WET Design, and a handsome structure of concrete amphitheater-style steps, overlaid with wood, for comfort, on which you can sit to contemplate it.

Shaker-plain in construction, spectacular in action, the fountain consists of two parallel rows laid out in a long, subtly curved horizontal path. From nearly invisible outlets at ground level, jets of water spring skyward, then retreat, the plumes of water falling straight back upon themselves, to end in a grand splash, only to rise again.

The magic lies in the orchestration of the event. The amount of water and the force with which it’s driven into the air varies from Lilliputian and gentle, making you think of a bubbling brook, to towering thrusts toward the heavens, suggesting energy of the highest power, and, of course, several heights and pressures in between. The arrangement of which streams of water go high, which go low, which in between–and when–results in stunning pictures etched on space: of curves, waves, unpredictably sloping lines, and pageants of synchronized marchers deploying their most inventive stunts. Remember, all these ephemeral images are composed of single jets projected unerringly upward. (Andy Newman, writing in the New York Times, called the effect “liquid fireworks.”) Returning to their source, single drops of water from the vertical jets register as colorless transparent jewels of all sizes, each incredibly clear-edged, suspended for a microsecond between earth and sky.

Occasionally the spouting water disappears entirely, as if resting before its next exploit, while the viewers on the amphitheater steps, perhaps in complement to the sudden nothingness, grow particularly quiet. Could they be wondering, as I was at first, if they’d imagined the whole display?

Upon discovering the fountain, serendipitously, my elder granddaughter and I began to combine a fountain viewing with our usual excursions to the museum itself, or to the Botanic Garden, just next door. But little by little I realized the fountain alone was a major destination, so the youngster and I have agreed on 45 minutes watching the fountain before a visit to, say, the museum’s outstanding Egyptian and African collections, its American art, and its period rooms or to the famous cherry trees and atmospheric walks through contrasting aspects of nature in the Botanic Garden, finishing with a second 45 minutes of fountain contemplation. I suspect the time at the fountain may need to be increased further; she leaves it so reluctantly, as if parting with a friend about to move to some faraway place, whom she may never see again.

Invariably she watches the fountain with a mesmerized look on her face.

“Are you hypnotized by the fountain?” I asked, teasingly, one day.

“No,” she replied, highly serious. “I am trying to figure out the pattern.” I think she has her work cut out for her. The complex order of the water’s antics seems either to have a very long loop or works in some way at random. I have just discovered, though, that the fountain is occasionally on at night. I can’t wait to witness that scene in her company.

To my mind, the best element of the renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center is the cluster of high-rising steps just outside it, facing the building, thus shielded from the street, and angled in sections to complement the overall design–Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s.

Gloomy is the only word for the original architecture, though the auditorium had decent acoustics. Now the building looks like a glass spaceship with pointed sky-piercing protuberances, blinding when the sun strikes it and, with every wine glass in the interior café visible from the street, utterly devoid of privacy. It is the spitting image of today’s culture. For me, the makeover’s redeeming feature, which may even have been an afterthought, is those outdoor steps. They humanize the portentous renovation. Children clamber over them. Unassuming-looking folks consume the sandwiches they’ve brought with them. Lovers of all ages sit close, side by side, murmuring to each other. Friends exchange information, opinion, and mere gossip with animation. Loners read, knit, or stare meditatively ahead, as if they were considering the trajectory of their lives. That clever arrangement of stairs turns it into a communal front stoop.

At the close of Apollo, George Balanchine’s incomparable early ballet, the trio of muses the young god has played with and gravely judged as part of his growing from birth to manhood–Terpsichore, Polyhymnia, and Calliope–follow him in a line as he walks solemnly to a stark staircase, which we see in profile, and ascends it. When he reaches the top step, they all stop, like a procession of figures in an ecstatic frieze, and stretch one gently curved arm toward the heavens. You’re not likely to see this anymore because, late in his career, the choreographer cut both the opening of the work (Apollo’s birth) and that last passage (both dependent on the staircase), ostensibly to remove any narrative from the piece. But if you saw it back in the day of–oh, so many remarkable things–you can imagine it, and I frequently do.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

My mother must have had a decent command of French. Sometimes, as I was growing up, she’d refer to it, though always briefly and casually, as if the subject had little importance. All I ever found out was that she had taught elementary–perhaps even intermediate–French as well as English literature (using a textbook called From Beowulf to Thomas Hardy) at New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn in the 1930s. That was before my father and then I came into her life and changed her career to that of housewife and mother.

But she had kept some of the French textbooks she used (which, since her death, I harbor for nostalgia’s sake) and in our basement two deep drawers of a rickety bureau were crammed with several hundred unused picture postcards displaying French “places of interest.” I wanted to ask her, but couldn’t : Did she have no time to put the postcards in order? Would looking at each of them be a series of stabs to her heart? Could it be possible that she didn’t care anymore about the sites they showed?

More evidence: When I was very young, my mother would often lie on the living room couch for an hour in the late afternoon, reading (she was an indefatigable reader), as she rested between sieges of her household labors, which included assisting my father with his medical practice–conducted under our roof–as nurse, receptionist, and cleaner. If I wandered through the living room during this repose, she would occasionally, like a kindly sergeant, fond of his youngest, least experienced cadet, issue a simple command in French that I would rush to fulfill, as if the foreign language turned it into a critical military mission. She taught me what her “orders” meant and I memorized the meanings swiftly. The only command I still remember was “Apportez-moi un verre d’eau, s’il vous plaît.” (Bring me a glass of water, please.) I assume now that she used the formal rather than the familiar you to enhance the gravity of the errand.

You might say that these French “lessons” were trivial, but I think not. They planted the seed.

My formal study of French, if it can be called that, began in junior high school, with a Miss Brenner. I assumed she was American, because her French accent was atrocious. That was obvious even if you didn’t have a lot to go by. She spoke in a dreary nasal monotone and if she had a love of French or a sense of excitement about learning it she kept these feelings at home. My first few months under her tutelage were a nightmare because I couldn’t rid myself of my idée fixe that there was an exact French equivalent for every English word, so that one need only memorize several thousand of these equivalents and arrange the foreign words in the same order as one did the words in one’s mother tongue. It was my own mother who gently disabused me of this naïveté and, in the process, enhanced my sense of wonder about foreign languages. French and all the others did not comprise single words set in a universally observed pattern, but a unique manner of speaking, even a way of thinking.

I managed to get through my two years with Miss Brenner with my attraction to French intact and moved on to Samuel J. Tilden High School, where I worked my way up to the most advanced (not very) course in French given by a Dr. Schwartzback. He was a coarse-voiced, grumpy guy of a certain age who didn’t seem to have much more enthusiasm for French (or, for that matter, teaching) than Miss Brenner did. I discovered recently that he grew up speaking German and earned his living teaching it when he emigrated to the United States. Because of the American anti-German sentiment generated by World War II, he was forced to pursue his career instructing Brooklyn adolescents in French. All I recall from the year I studied with him was a far closer reading of Cyrano de Bergerac than that play deserves. At graduation, I was awarded the French medal–on qualifications that, today, a mere month of diligent work with Rosetta Stone could easily surpass.

Still, once I started college, French remained my language of choice. Why, I’m not sure. Perhaps because of my mother’s affection for the language and its culture, which was, apparently, largely fostered by her recollection of a summer of study abroad before she married. She did nothing to further her fondness for the land or its lingo, apart from luring me into its pursuit with a few sentences gorgeously pronounced and helping me realize that a foreign language was a world of its own. Or perhaps I remained steadfastly attracted to French because so many aspects of its culture were held to be the acme of glamour at the time, and glamour proved a powerful magnet to me in my innocent youth. I confess that, even today, it exerts its pull.

The college placement exam for French, however, was nearly my undoing. I’d chosen to attend Barnard, the all-women’s undergraduate division of Columbia University, mostly because it was in New York, which I knew and loved as an artistic mecca. Barnard was a member of the Seven Sisters, the equivalent of the Ivy League, presumably the top-ranked of the country’s men’s colleges (gender segregation still being rampant in the fifties). Because of its exalted position, Barnard refused to depend on the evaluation of the heterogeneous assortment of high schools its first-year students came from and certainly didn’t think of asking the students themselves what level they thought suited the modest skills they had acquired thus far. I was certain I belonged in third-year French, which would have had me reviewing and extending my abilities in matters of grammar and vocabulary, while challenging me with brief, reasonably accessible passages from the literature for which France is rightly celebrated. But no.

My grade in the exam probably fell on the cusp or just a point or two over it into the next level–“French Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present,” or some such title. This was a year-long survey course that, if you survived it, qualified you to study in depth each of the centuries and significant literary movements it covered all too swiftly. Since I had no expectation of surviving it, though, I didn’t worry about the future, only the present, which seemed to me hopeless.

The instructor was a Mme. de Wyzewa, a frail-looking elderly woman, with an equally frail voice. For 50 minutes, three mornings a week, she stood before us and lectured in her native language, barely audible but with razor-sharp diction, occasionally turning to scrawl a hard-to-spell author’s name or some birth and death dates on the dusty blackboard behind her. Everything about her–her pinched face, her wispy grey hair, her faint voice, her shaky handwriting, even the passing hints she exuded of formidable erudition–seemed made from chalk dust. More disconcerting than this ghostliness (which I now see as a mix of pathos and dignity) was the fact that I didn’t understand a single word she said. Today, a student with this problem would stride into the office of the French Department and insist upon being dropped a level, into a world of comprehension. Not then. In my undergraduate days, the domain of teaching was ruled by professors and administrators. A student had little or no say.

My solution was to scribble phonetically every word I could make out at the lectures. Then, in the course of the day I would–usually in the company of my dear friend Helen, who shared my plight and response–spend nearly two hours trying to make sense of our phonetic scribblings. (Helen’s face, capable of launching a thousand ships, did nothing for her here.) Suddenly, however, after six weeks of our absurd, frustrating labors, in a flash, we understood everything, even the subtleties our elusive professor had been trying to impart. The light had dawned and we loved French forever. I can’t understand how or why this happened, but I don’t care. Perhaps the magical illumination was a miracle. We certainly needed one.

Although I was officially a writing major in Barnard’s English Department, I made sure to spend plenty of time in the quarters of the French Department, just hanging out to exercise my spoken French (preferably while smoking Gauloises) and taking courses with a number of the instructors. The professor who made the strongest impression on me was Renée Kohn, a native Parisian who was doing a decade-long stint in New York.

Students, especially young impressionable ones, are extra-sensitive to how their teachers look. Barely a decade younger than Mme. Kohn, my classmates and I easily fell prey to her particular beauty. She combined a modest version of the sophistication that French women seem to be born with and the luminous innocence of a child. Small and slender, she’d brush off any praise of her figure that the bolder girls might offer privately with, “Oh, but I’m not like you Americans, with your beautiful legs.” She had a point. I think that several of us who studied ballet gave her cause–not for envy, but for longing.

Her long hair was worthy of a Renaissance princess and accordingly a legend in the college. She wore it in one thick braid that she pinned (not a pin showing, naturally) over her head like a coronet. Rumor had it that, if she left her hair unbound, she could sit on it, which, as I discovered much later, was so.

If you praised her as a teacher, she’d brush off the compliment as if she truly believed she didn’t earn it, laughing a little and saying, “Oh, It’s just my hands. I guess I move them a lot, and my students think they’re graceful.”

In truth, she was a memorable teacher but not one of those stellar professors whose insights pierce your brain like an electric shock. What she gave us was essentially her love and admiration for the literature she shared with us. Many of us, stirred by the deep feeling she had for her subject, pored over the texts she assigned so that we could discover the source of her delight and, eventually, cultivate our own.

In a one-on-one conference, she was the epitome of empathy, without relinquishing her duty to correct you and to urge you, kindly but very seriously, to greater effort. Invariably she left you with the impression that it wasn’t she who demanded the effort but the language and the literature themselves.

After I had graduated and she and her family moved back to Paris, we wrote to each other occasionally, then, as time went by, more often, and gradually we became friends.

The snobbery of the French–and of Parisians in particular–is legendary. Erik, a Danish colleague of mine, let me and my husband borrow his minuscule pied à terre in Paris for a couple of summery weeks when he wasn’t using it. No matter that the sofa had to double as a pullout bed for two, which often startlingly snapped shut when we were asleep in it, and that the dining table served in off hours as a desk, being the only sizeable flat, firm surface in the place. No matter that the “shower” was not an enclosure but simply a shower head installed in the corner of the ceiling of a kitchen so tightly packed with culinary essentials that it was impossible for one of us to open the oven door to extract a roasting chicken at the critical moment while the other was bathing.

The enchantment of leading a primitive domestic life in these quarters was increased to sheer bliss by the fact that the apartment lay at the foot of one of the most ravishing and abundant open-air food markets in all of Paris. Because of it, we dined and picnicked luxuriously. I tried to conduct all my market transactions in French–for fruit and vegetables; seafood, chicken, and meat; butter, cheese, and pastry out of a fairy tale–letting my husband handle the money (to this day, I can’t understand foreign money) and constantly forgetting that one kilo does not equal one pound but over two.

Having a temporary domestic base then gave us the notion that we should do our laundry at the local laundromat. So one morning, lugging our bundle of washing, we stopped off first at a tiny household-supplies store to buy the liquid detergent and fabric softener we’d need. The detergent transaction went fine; the small cluttered shop carrying the usual U.S. brands. The softener, though, nearly caused an incident in international relations.

I had looked up the word in Erik’s French-English dictionary before leaving the apartment. I muttered it to myself all the way to the store and, once there, asked politely in French for some assouplissante. “Comment?” (What?) was the shopkeeper’s reply, as if he had been addressed by an idiot. “De l’assouplissante, s’il vous plaÎt, monsieur,” adding the “please” and the “sir” to help matters along. “Comment?” he repeated, his tone indicating that my request was utterly incomprehensible and possibly insulting. After a third round of the same, he raised a thick, grubby finger to his grizzled head as if the light had dawned, despite my incapability. “L’assouplissant!” he corrected fiercely. I had made the word feminine instead of masculine by mistakenly adding that final e that makes the t before it something you pronounce instead of dropping. In France, all nouns have a gender, even “fabric softener,” which, for no reason I’ll ever fathom, is a boy.

My confidence utterly shaken, but bravely continuing in my obviously imperfect French, I then asked the shopkeeper what we owed him, requesting him to write the sum down in numbers because, as I told him, my husband was in charge of the money and, hélas, did not speak French.

The French sense of the relationship between the sexes, which lags at least a century behind the times compared to the situation in many a developed land, has a certain charm, though it would certainly horrify most urban American women who identify as feminists. The French still echo the traditional belief that the man ranks higher than the woman by birthright; thus she is expected to defer to him. Interestingly, both genders tend to accept this assumption comfortably.

Here’s my favorite example: As I’ve mentioned, the only flat, firm surface of any size in our borrowed apartment was the dining table/desk. When Erik turned over the keys to us, he pointed out a folder in the desk drawer that contained typed instruction sheets covering everything a guest might need to know about the place–in Danish, French, English, and (could it have been?) German versions. Erik was very generous, as I’ve said, and had an international bevy of friends who, like me and my husband, were deeply grateful for a place to stay on a visit to Paris.

Erik assumed, quite reasonably, that his clear, detailed written directions would suffice, but for some reason he emphasized aloud to us the fact that the table could be used for anything, since its surface was impervious. Today I realize he must have meant that, when the versatile piece of furniture was in dining mode, a fairly warm serving dish could be placed upon it without requiring a protective trivet. The surface imitated wood but was clearly in the resilient-plastic family.

One day I had an accident, spilling a large glass of red wine over the only really good dress (white, as fate would have it) I’d brought with me. Acting instantly–after all I was the daughter of a doctor and a seasoned housewife–I gave the garment first aid, beginning with, believe it or not, a rubbing with dampened salt, followed by soaking in cold, soapy water with a dash of bleach, then a thorough rinsing, wringing, and hanging out to dry on a sunlit clothesline. To my astonishment and relief, I had persuaded the stain to disappear.

But then, of course, the dress had to be ironed. A rummage through the kitchen cabinets produced an iron but not an ironing board, which would have taken up far too much space in Erik’s compact dwelling. Using what I thought of as my ingenuity, I spread a large bath towel over the desk, laid my dress on top of it and blithely ironed away. I was about halfway done when my husband came back from a walk, took one look at what I was about, and said in his stern-warning voice, “Are you sure you can do that?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied, with the slightly diminished confidence I was beginning to feel. “Erik said you could do anything on this table.”

My husband relieved me of the iron and yanked dress and bath towel off the table in a single swift pull, looking for all the world like Brando with the tablecloth in Streetcar. Bared, the fake wood of the surface revealed what looked like large patches of sickly gray clouds. Boy, were we in trouble!

We hied ourselves to a nearby hole-in-the-wall shop that seemed to deal with wood finishing and the like. We said bonjour–the mandatory prelude to any French shopping transaction–to the proprietress, who, as I suspected, turned out to know almost no English. So I proceeded to lay the problem before her as best I could in French. Apparently the difficulty was judged to be a grave one because the well-padded woman with cropped hair, work shirt, denim overalls, and the sturdy low boots favored by construction workers called over her co-proprietress, physically and sartorially her clone–they might have been sisters or lovers–for a consultation. I got asked how my accident could have occurred; my answer was duly greeted with incredulity, but eventually with a reasonable promise that something might be done with light sanding and unguents to rehabilitate the furniture.

At this point, my Frenchless husband chimed in, in English, with some details about the incident and queries about the repair (since he would be carrying it out), which he evidently thought might be helpful to all concerned. I broke in to explain the obvious to him and the co-proprietresses: the fact that they had no language in common, but if they’d allow me to be the go-between, I’d be glad to translate. Whereupon the first woman reprimanded me sternly with the French equivalent of “Be quiet, Madame, Monsieur is speaking.”

Long after graduating from college, with its academic approach, I learned Danish, and then I decided really to learn French, not simply the formal language of France’s heavenly literature that dominated our college curriculum: La Chanson de Roland, which made me (a confirmed pacifist) understand why men, especially, found glory in war; Joseph Bédier’s reconstitution of the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseut; the sonnets and odes of Ronsard; the essays of Montaigne; the tragedies of Racine; the comedies of Molière; the letters of Mme. de Sévigné; the fables of La Fontaine; the plays of Marivaux; the children’s tales of the Comtesse de Ségur. . . .

Understand that this is just a random sampling that ignores the moderns and is skewed by personal taste. College French had introduced me to these and other texts in which I’ve reveled ever since. A lab course, to which I had applied myself obsessively, had polished my accent. But what I coveted now was conversation–the simple ability to take my place in those exchanges, some casual and trivial, some deeply intimate, in which people revealed themselves to one another through words. As I had done with Danish, I thought up a handful of ways–homemade and occasionally eccentric–in which this might happen. I’m still working on this method, vastly preferring the organic quality of self-taught means to formal instruction.

I read French children’s books of increasing difficulty, pronouncing the words inside my head. In Manhattan, my home town, if I spot tourists looking puzzled over a map and murmuring worriedly to one another in French, I’ll ask, in French, if I can help them–and do. I haggle in French in the flea markets on trips to Paris. Once a price has finally been agreed upon, sellers, to relax the conversation, often ask me where I’m from. “Guess,” I say with a smile, They never guess America. My biggest compliment so far has been, “Not Paris, but another part of France.”

Renée hasn’t the stamina for house guests anymore, other than her immediate family, but for years, once our friendship had developed into nearly annual stays of a week or two with her and her husband, she and I talked about nothing and everything. When I was in residence, we’d often meet unexpectedly in the long book-lined corridor that ran through her apartment when I returned from hours in the museums. She’d say, “You must be tired. Come and sit down,” and lead me into her bed-sitting room overlooking a terrace filled with plants and birds, which she tended assiduously.

There we’d talk for an hour or more, à batons rompus (at random), as Renée put it, over espresso, an addiction we had in common. Through those conversations–in French until I’d exhausted my linguistic tenacity, in English (which she spoke fluently) when the subject matter outdistanced my vocabulary–we forged a bond that, as far as I’m concerned, will exist until I die.

When I was young, I planned to learn six languages before I died. I had even them picked out: French, ancient Greek, Yiddish (because of my ancestry), Japanese, Italian, and American Sign. Now, many decades and two foreign languages later, I realize how hard it is to acquire another tongue if you can’t live in a heartland where it’s spoken almost exclusively and its sounds fill the air. But I have at least learned that absorbing a language that is not your mother tongue opens worlds of imagination and adventure. It swells the soul.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Every once in so often, a friend or colleague asks to read the manuscript of a children’s book I’ve written and am trying to place, The (True) Life Story of a Dancing Cat. A number of these readers subsequently report that the story made them cry in the subway. Although I’ve published over two dozen books for young people, this is the only fiction that deals with dancing (my more visible beat). It has been sold three times and each time–talk about bad luck!–catastrophe kept it from being published, though I was allowed to keep the advance twice (some indication, I assume, that the publishing powers find it worthy). Equally relevant, I still believe in this book–it makes people cry in the subway, for goodness sake!–and am still trying to find the right home for it.

Aside: This is how the underground crying comes about: The absurdly busy New Yorker grabs the daily sheaf of mail (yesterday’s, since delivery is chronically late) out of her all too tiny metal mail box as she leaves her all too tiny apartment for duties and adventures in the Great World. She leafs through it rapidly on her walk to the subway, culling the ads and catalogues and depositing them en route in a public trash bin. (I’m told this is illegal.) Then, once entrained, she reads the few pieces she cares about. I like to think that Sylvie (as my story is informally called, after the name of its feline heroine) makes the reader weep–in public, in a hellhole like the New York subway system!–because it conveys the poignancy of a life in dance, with its ecstatic moments, its inevitable heart-breaking ones, and the vision of beauty and intense feeling that fuels a dedicated artist’s unswerving pursuit of her or his trade.

Surely most of you reading this right now are familiar with being reduced (or is it elevated?) to tears by a passage in a ballet–not just once, but every time you see it. One of these, for me, occurs in the wedding scene that closes August Bournonville’s A Folk Tale. Here, after overcoming all sorts of threatening medieval magic, the fresh young lovers are united in a surround of innocence and rose petals, each modestly claiming himself or herself unworthy of the other. The dulcet purity of this scene and its prevailing gentleness are utterly persuasive. No wonder that, even today, Niels W. Gade’s Wedding Waltz from the ballet’s score opens the dancing at Danish marriage celebrations.

The same moving identification may be true for you with bits of poems, novels, and plays. For certain paintings–like Rembrandt’s self-portraits from his spirited youth to the year of his death at 63, when his face seems to have crumbled from decades of piercing evocations of human bodies and souls. For films that go deep. I remember that, years ago in New York, two festivals of films by the incomparably subtle Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu ran simultaneously in New York. People I knew seemed to go to these screenings every day, as I did. When the lights went up at the end of the films, there they were–highbrow artists and intellectuals–unabashedly mopping up the tears streaming down their cheeks.

I believe that these tears have nothing to do with personal sentiment. Yes, they are personal, but they are not sentimental. They are the result of a work of art’s touching your personality, expressing something central to you that you, perhaps, thought hidden or embarrassingly unique, and setting it forth with gorgeous clarity, delicacy, and intensity for all the world to revel in. In a sense your tears are the tears of thankful recognition.

Of course some works will move you beyond the realm of tears–art that makes an unarguable statement, written as it were in stone, to which we must all accede, about the nature of human experience and the architecture of the universe in which it takes place. The Giotto frescos in a small church in Padua, say. Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco and Graham’s Primitive Mysteries. Passages in King Lear that relentlessly increase in intensity as the reader ages. Scenes from the work of the towering nineteenth-century Russian writers–Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov–in response to which one can only bow one’s head and say yes. But that is a subject for another day.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

On Christmas morning last year, I walked the reservoir track in New York’s Central Park, since the gym was, naturally, closed for you-know-who’s birthday. Hundreds of people, most of them armed with cameras, were strolling around the loop in the delicious sunshine. Few of them were speaking English. I stopped to chat with a family of Danes who were typically unaffected, friendly, and charming. Ten minutes after our conversation, I realized I had been using the wrong word for and.

Well, my Danish is admittedly rusty, but with a little application, I can retrieve it, such as it was at my personal best. The last time I needed to do so, I reread four volumes, translated into Danish, of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series. The saga of an American pioneer family in which the author grew up has delighted several generations of youngsters world-wide. That’s my Danish reading level–a nine-to-twelve-year-old’s. I can also manage simple novels for adults–Tove Ditlevsen is an open book to me–as well as Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, albeit struggling desperately with the most complex ones. In conversation I’m pretty good–for an American. One-to-one and face-to-face conversation, that is; I make friends at parties but live in terror of round-table meetings and phone calls. I have a keen ear, and therefore a decent accent, so Danish listeners think I’m more capable of expressing myself in their language than I really am.

When I set out, in middle age, to learn Danish, I conveniently forgot that, in my early twenties, I had failed miserably at acquiring German, on which Danish is firmly based. Just a couple of years out of college and newly married, I tackled German only because I would have needed it to earn my Ph.D. in literature. You can understand why I and other American Jews of my generation may still retain uncomfortable associations with the German language. I also thought that it was an “ugly” tongue–harsh and guttural–but that was mostly because I experienced merely six weeks’ worth of it before I quit; I had never read (or heard) Germany’s great Romantic literature.

It helps to be in love with a language or at least in love with the people who speak it when you’re trying to make it part of yourself. At least that’s how it was with me, first with French (love of the language) and later with Danish (love of the people). Having neither motivation to sustain me with German, I abandoned the course I’d enrolled in after that ridiculously brief encounter. A few years, two children, and an M.A. later, I realized I didn’t want to earn a Ph.D. either. My bourgeois, pre-1960s upbringing had instructed me that a young woman in my position had two career choices–homemaking and teaching. And so I became a housewife (leaving professordom to my husband), a stay-at-home mother (which I’ll be glad of forever), and, a decade later, still an innocent, but widening my horizons a jot, a dance writer.

Whatever put it into my head to acquire Danish? Here are my reasons, in descending order of importance:

One: I first visited Denmark for the 1979 Bournonville Festival held on the 100th anniversary of the great choreographer’s death. Copenhagen is a balm to an overtaxed New Yorker, and I kept returning in the next few years for work and play. During those sojourns, forging many friendships, I came to know the Danish custom of intimate conversations by candlelight. (There was plenty of time for them, for sure; in winter, twilight sets in at 3:00 in the afternoon.) In these sheltered personal encounters, I discovered, one got to know one’s companions’ innermost thoughts and feelings–their “secrets”–and, once I’d mastered the rudiments of Danish, I in turn, at heart a reserved person, could confess mine, since I am of the belief that anything you say in a foreign language doesn’t count (just as anything you eat abroad will put no superfluous calories on your frame).

Two: At that unforgettable festival, I fell instantly in love–both with the choreography of August Bournonville and Copenhagen itself. The Royal Danish Ballet, given its unique profile by the nineteenth-century ballet master, was still producing dancers who were specialists in his buoyant, fleet-footed classical technique, where bravura feats are modestly veiled by the desire to express the joy of dancing. These performers also proved that one of Bournonville’s central achievements was to depict, always with enormous empathy, a wide range of human character and human relationships. As for the city of Copenhagen, it seemed to me an earthly incarnation of a fairytale kingdom.

Three: What’s more, I liked languages. At the blithe, visionary age of 20 I had planned to learn a half-dozen foreign languages before I died. I can still remember what they were: Japanese, Italian, ancient Greek, Latin, Yiddish, and American Sign. After an initial six-month struggle in junior high, I had found that I had an affinity with French. I had also been the star of my high school class in elementary Spanish, which isn’t saying much, but in those days you needed to have two foreign languages to get into the Seven Sisters colleges (the female equivalent of the Ivy League, which was where I was apparently heading). Recalling these easy successes, I assumed that acquiring Danish would be no problem.

Turns out that what I’m good at is Romance languages. When I embarked upon my Danish caper, I simply repressed the fact that I had, long before, precipitously abandoned German. I was also blissfully unaware of the fact that Danish was then spoken as a native language by a mere five million people, most of whom, these days, are fluent in English. From a practical point of view the acquisition of Danish would be entirely useless to me. But then I wasn’t–for that matter, am still not–practical.

To make sure I carried out my plan, I revealed my intention to a number of Royal Danish Ballet dancers who had become friends. That way, I figured, I wouldn’t dare cop out, for fear of embarrassment. I was so full of my own purpose that I neglected to understand their response. It was, to a one, “Oh, really?”

Deaf to the Danes’ implication that I’d proposed climbing Everest in flip-flops, I set about finding a course, a Danish 101. There weren’t any in my multilingual city, it turned out, except, as I discovered belatedly, a very simple introductory one at New York University, the content of which I’d already mastered by the time I discovered its existence.

“Would you like to learn Finnish?” asked the young woman with Valley Girl intonations, who answered the phone at Columbia U. when I was doing my initial search. I was so put off by her assumption that one language could substitute for another, as if it carried neither weight nor personal resonance, that I couldn’t resist informing her that Finnish was not a Scandinavian language like Danish, was not even in the huge Indo-European family, but in a more obscure group that contains Hungarian.

I’d just about given up when, discussing the upcoming oral history project I’d concocted on the Royal Danish Ballet and its Bournonville tradition, I mentioned to the Danish consul general in New York that I needed to find some way to learn his native tongue. (The interviews for my project were to be in English, but I thought that knowing some Danish would help with my research and, besides, be a friendly gesture.)

“Oh, you want Anita,” the consul general declared confidently.

Who was Anita? A lovely woman in her thirties, it turned out, as benign as mild summer sunshine, whose smile alone could vanquish depression. She worked in a high-end secretarial capacity at the consulate. She took pupils privately, at home. Her fee was entirely reasonable, but after some fifteen lessons from her, my budget for such ventures ran out. We remained fast friends, though, for a long time.

The textbook Anita used, all one could readily find at that time, was written in 1958 and began with several easy-to-read accounts of the lower-middle-class, lower-middlebrow Hansen family, where the Mrs. was firmly kept in her housewifely place. Being an obsessively conscientious student, I nearly memorized the brief texts, and they drove me nuts. “She deserves,” declares Mrs. Hansen’s spouse, deigning to escort her to a local dance, “to get out and enjoy herself once in a while, since she has so much to take care of at home.” He continues in a women-will-be-women tone about how his mate likes pretty clothes and craves an occasion to show herself off in a new dress. The combination of Mr. Hansen’s taken-for-granted male authority and unthinking condescension still rankles with me today.

Anita’s personality, however, was a boon. She had no actual teaching skills, unless you count–and I did–warmth, optimism, and a reasonable degree of patience. Still, early on, none of that mattered significantly; my problem was the language itself, which rebuffed me. The pronunciation is a killer; Danes themselves call their language “a disease of the throat.” I couldn’t hear the rhythm or song in the speech pattern and still suspect there is none. Many rules of the grammar seemed punitive and absurd, like the one that requires you to invert the natural order of noun and verb in a clause that follows an introductory subordinate clause. Got it? I didn’t, but I refused to give up. Eventually I told Anita I would like to meet some of the New Yorkers she’d taught because I couldn’t believe an American could master her language.

So Anita gave a party in her tiny apartment. The food was Danish and magnificent–the traditional three kinds of herring, paper-thin slices of rare roast beef, liver pâté et al., with pickled beets and cucumbers to accessorize them. Danish beers and Aquavit flowed freely, loosening people’s tongues. The former students, utterly congenial, constituted a rich assortment of types, but they had all learned Danish for one of two basic reasons–work or love.

A star among the group, Judith Thurman, who won a National Book Award for her biography of Isak Dinesen, told me breezily, “Oh, don’t bother about learning any of the genders for the nouns. You’ll understand what you need to know without them.” But she was already a whiz at languages, could find her way around in at least a handful, I gathered, and was, moreover, clearly an adventurous soul. There was one guy to whom Danish just seemed to have come naturally; he spoke it with the casual ease of a native. Anita told me later that when she gave him a new noun to learn he infallibly intuited its gender. She suspected he had, unbeknownst to himself, some Danish ancestors who’d magically passed on to him the echoes of their voices.

I think it was at this party that I first heard the old saying “The best way to learn a foreign language is on the pillow.” Not having a Danish lover at my disposal, I had to resort to more pedestrian arrangements.

Most of my methods for learning Danish were improvised. Even before Anita there was the Berlitz book–a pocket-size item a much-traveled cousin sent over the night before I left for Copenhagen for the first time. It contained practical information, a quartet of picturesque walking tours, and a list of useful vocabulary enhanced by an audiotape so that you could hear the words pronounced. For the rank beginner, the difference between written and spoken Danish was overwhelming. Nevertheless, between trips one and three to Copenhagen, I assiduously memorized everything but the section on cars. (I loathe being in a car and I don’t drive.)

Nothing one learns is useless. On that third trip I had an appointment to discuss my oral history project with the head of the Royal Theatre, in the hope of enlisting his support. He had specified the date and hour of our meeting and instructed me to identify myself at the stage door when I arrived, saying he was expecting me. Back then, however, the stage doormen, for reasons best known to themselves, pretended not to understand a word of English.

In vain, I tried to explain my presence and my purpose in English, my panic accelerating, because I had been told it is a grave offense in Denmark not to arrive exactly at the moment one is expected, whether it be for a business meeting or a dinner party. Finally my agitated brain retrieved an applicable sentence from the Berlitz book. It was the curtain line of a scene of escalating tourist discontent with hotel accommodations. Boldly, I declared in Danish, “I would like to see the manager.” Duly intimidated, one of the guards phoned upstairs. The head honcho’s secretary appeared immediately and delivered me to her boss, who was laughing.
Concurrent with and continuing long after my Anita period, there were the index cards. I never left my house without a 3″ x 5″ soft plastic box that held several dozen of them, each with a word I was trying to memorize, written in Danish on one side, English on the reverse. I worked these homemade flash cards on subway platforms, in the trains, during intermissions at the ballet, and waiting on line anywhere. I had, at last count, some 2,000 cards, and they each got their turn to be taken out into the great world. If people peered over my shoulder for too long as I used them, I’d turn to the ogler and quietly say “Danish,” which seemed to serve as sufficient explanation.

One man in a trench coat, who looked very CIA and watched me long enough to make me nervous, replied to my one-word elucidation by explaining in turn, “Actually, I wasn’t curious about what language it was. But I’m in a business that manufactures index cards, so I like to find out how people use them.”

During this stage of my studies, I paid Anita to make audio tapes of the words and expressions on the index cards. She’d say the word in Danish, leave a silent space in which I could repeat it aloud, then reiterate the word so I could see how my pronunciation matched hers (or failed to), then give the English translation. Making such a tape requires skill (in clarity, timing, and so forth), while it’s as brain-deadening as peeling a great many potatoes. The chore is worthy of listing on an application for sainthood. I listened–and responded–to the tapes while performing domestic tasks and, as the French call it, ma toilette. Since I detest earphones, I let the sound have the run of the house. My husband claimed he was picking up Danish by proxy.

Anita’s last effort in the tape department was a long dialogue on situations I expected to encounter when I stayed at the home of a generous colleague on one of my visits to Copenhagen to do the oral histories. I wrote the script; Anita translated and recorded it. The result worked like the bilingual vocabulary tapes with the relevant pauses. This tape allowed me to practice the Danish for: “What will you be doing today?” “I’m going to the theater tonight and will be home late.” “Shall I get some groceries for tomorrow? Will your friend be here for dinner?” “No, thank you, I don’t want any cognac. Don’t you remember what happened the last time?”

When I traveled to Copenhagen after some dozen lessons with Anita, she insisted that I visit her parents, who lived in a suburb of the city: the father from whom she’d obviously inherited her life-celebrating personality, and her mother, who managed a pleasant welcome, but was clearly suffering from chronic depression, and withdrawn because of that. Temperamentally, they were a Jack Spratt couple. But we had a wonderful afternoon.

We used their sparse English, my as yet pitifully limited Danish, primitive mime, and great good will. Fueled by copious amounts of delicious strong coffee with Demerara sugar and heavy cream and feather-light pastries galore, aided by the two-volume Danish-English, English-Danish dictionary we placed on the coffee table, Gyldendals Røde Ordbøger (Gyldendal’s Red Word Books), without which no respectable Danish home is complete, we spent hours in conversation although we essentially had no language in common.

Anita’s father showed me around his pride and joy, his magnificent garden and greenhouse (the latter lined with grape vines clinging to the glass ceiling, pendant with fruit). He insisted upon sending some of his tiny snowdrop bulbs to me in America (this is, I think, illegal), where they bloom annually to announce that spring is on its way, undeterred by the heavy snow that the sky may still drop on their delicate heads. Albert Rasmussen is dead now, but whenever those unquenchable flowers appear in my back yard, I think of him and his unquenchable spirit.

One of the rewards of learning Danish is the response of the native speakers once you can utter even a few Danish phrases. As my dance-writing colleague Jack Anderson put it, “They kiss the hem of your dungarees.” One evening in London I made one of my very rare trips backstage to congratulate the Danish dancer and ballet master Peter Schaufuss on the premiere of his revival–retrieval, really–of Frederick Ashton’s Romeo and Juliet for the London Festival Ballet. Created in 1955 for the Royal Danes, the work had long been considered lost, but Schaufuss’s mother, Mona Vangsaae, had been the original Juliet (with his father, Frank Schaufuss, as Mercutio and young Peter playing the Nurse’s mischievous page). The celebrated ballet master and character dancer Niels Bjørn Larsen had notated the choreography at the time of its creation using a method of his own invention, supplemented by his amateur film, and Ashton himself was drawn into coaching the ballet he’d created three decades earlier. Schaufuss had imported a number of Danish dancers to lend rich life to the senior character roles and to supervise the mime, an RDB specialty.

I had just enough Danish at that point to string together a couple of original sentences of enthusiasm and praise in the backstage hubbub on opening night. Schaufuss was gratifyingly astonished. Then, holding fast to my arm so I didn’t vanish into the crowd of well-wishers, he called out to his compatriots, “Kirsten, Niels Bjørn, Far (father), come over here.” When they complied, he turned to me once more: “Say it again, Tobi, say it again.”

Over the years, to further my conversational skills, my husband and I invited four young Danish women to live with us, sequentially, for a period of weeks or months. One of them even returned a second time, she enjoyed our household (or the excitements of New York) so much. The deal: They got a room of their own, board, warm attention, mothering when necessary, excursions to the theater, and introductions–with me as the happiest of guides–to New York’s small, quirky attractions that tourists don’t have time for. In turn, they were to lend a hand with a few minor household chores the way a daughter would and to give me an hour’s conversation in Danish–preferably with corrections–over an early breakfast. I came to feel simultaneously like their friend and a favorite aunt and have remained in touch with them ever since, as their lives have expanded into careers, lovers, husbands, and children, with the predictable joys and griefs of those attachments.

The first, Eva (pronounced like Gardner’s first name), was a beauty, something of a narcissist, and very effective on stage, where she made her career. She could be silly and fun, too. From her I learned the Danish words for ladybug (mariehøne) and nervous breakdown (nervesammenbrud)–which she uttered spontaneously in a single brief sentence as she, my daughter, and I lay in the sun-drenched grass at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, annoying the insects that look like Fabergé enamels by tickling them with blades of grass.

Her successor was Marchen, laid back but always game for adventure, who, after her time with us, traveled down the Amazon under ramshackle conditions to learn Portuguese simply because she found the language beautiful. She had the natural singing voice of an angel and a tolerance of her quixotic parents that I thought admirable. It was she who assigned to me as required reading two books by Astrid Lindgren that are not part of the justly beloved “Pippi Longstocking” series.

Brødrene Løvehjerte (The Brothers Lionheart) and Ronja Røverdatter (Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter) were harder, the former more spiritual, and both as singular as the Pippi books yet emotionally deeper. Always half asleep during our early-morning lessons, Marchen devised a simple, feeble hand signal instead of a voiced correction, which would be too much trouble, to indicate my persistent error of using the wrong order for certain constructions. To this day, when I hear myself making the mistake, I gesture with my own hand, feebly, in her honor.

Next came Anne (pronounced as we’d say “Anna”), shy enough to blush frequently when I first met her. She was the only child of unimpeachably bourgeois parents. I shouldn’t have been surprised “when she eventually rebelled by (or, if you will, matured into) taking on an extraordinarily risky marriage. Other aspects of her–she’s made a fine career in journalism–remain paragons of equanimity. Anne dutifully taught me a goodly amount of Danish, but the most important lesson she gave me was that people are far more complex than you might at first imagine.

The last, Gudrun, was my secret favorite and the deepest-feeling of them all. Towards others, she was empathy itself. Her personal life has been a litany of loss, beginning with the early death of her mother–just before she came to us–and going on to the decampment of her mate. Yet she tries to focus on life’s pleasures (her two daughters, for one thing) and still believes in love. By contrast to the events that have made her, as she puts it, en ekspert i hjertesorg (an expert in heartbreak), her professional success–as an editor–has been impressive, though no more than her talents deserve.

Another aspect of the barter system was the coincidence-laden arrangement I made with Jeannette. We met at a shared table in the dance division of the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center when she asked if she could briefly borrow the dictionary–the Danish-English volume of the Røde Ordbøger –I’d brought with me to aid my research.

“But it’s a Danish dictionary,” I replied, puzzled.

“I know,” she said.

It turned out that she was earning an M.A. in dance studies at the University of Copenhagen and that her mentor there was none other than the colleague who’d kindly let me board with him–Erik Aschengreen, the long-time dance critic for Berlingske Tidende, one of Copenhagen’s two chief newspapers.

During Jeannette’s subsequent six-year stay in New York, she and I often traded an hour of conversation in Danish for an hour of instruction in writing about dance. What amazed me was that I’d edited and taught dance writing for so many years, it didn’t much matter that the texts she submitted to my ministrations were in a language to which I had only a fragile claim. I was startled, too, the first time we shared my press pair of ballet tickets, to see that while I had scribbled my notes-in-the-dark in English, she’d of course made hers in Danish. I suppose that dance, a wordless language, is instinctively translated into one’s mother tongue. Jeannette and I are still fast friends and she has, indeed, published a good bit of writing on dance and other arts as well.

Occasionally I got my comeuppance for the pride I took in my progress, once from Erik Bruhn, whom I had gotten to know slightly way back when. He came to dinner at our house a couple of times and was wonderful with our two then half-grown children; I think he found dining at home with a bourgeois American family a novelty, almost a tourist attraction. Some years later, finding myself seated behind him at the New York State Theater one night, I leaned forward and addressed him in Danish. He turned and, concealing his surprise, said in English, in the deep, cool voice that had made many a heart beat faster: “Very nice. Your a‘s are a little flat, but then most Danes speak that way these days, even the radio announcers.” From this and other such encounters, I’ve concluded that though one may learn the language, one has to be born and raised in Denmark to master the irony.

Perhaps the high point of my pursuit of Danish was my little acceptance speech when I received a knighthood. Because of the extensive writing I’d done on Bournonville and the Royal Danish Ballet, as well as the oral history project, the government took a moment’s notice of me. I was given the choice of journeying to Copenhagen to have the honor presented by the Danish queen or receiving it from the Danish ambassador to the U.S. in Washington D.C. The first choice seemed overkill–time-wise, budget-wise, and keeping-it-modest-wise. I chose to go to D.C., without family or American friends to swell the audience for the event. I did invite a handful of friends from the Royal Danish Ballet, which was performing at Kennedy Center. I knew I would have to make a brief speech of thanks once the medal (which resembled the one I’d received in high school for excellence in French) had duly been pinned to my bosom. Recklessly, just as the ceremony began, I decided to attempt my response in Danish. After I’d done so and the assembled party had retreated to the refreshment table, I took a young Danish friend aside and asked her how I’d done. “B+,” she replied succinctly.

Try as one may to subdue them, one’s proclivities never vanish. Today, though brutally aware of the effort it takes to learn a language other than one’s mother tongue, I may be taking up Spanish again. Starting in September, one of my grands will spend the school year learning a little Spanish, French, and Latin in sequence and then pick the one she wants to continue with through middle school. She has already firmly announced that she will chose Spanish. I was disappointed to hear this; I’d rather hoped for French. I taught her quite a bit of French orally a while back and she was superb at it, with an uncanny memory (typical of children) and an excellent accent (rare). Nevertheless, she’s a gal who knows her own mind. Jokingly, I told her that, if she learned Spanish, I’d learn it with her.

Mischievously perhaps, she took that as a promise, so these days when I go to the gym, I stop to chat with the enchanting Ecuadorian woman in charge at the entrance to the women’s locker room. So far, Maria of the sweet smile and dancing eyes has taught me how to say things like “Good morning/afternoon/evening,” “See you on Wednesday,” and “I don’t have time to study.” (Buenos días, and so on; hasta el miércoles; no tengo el tiempo para estudiar.) It’s not much, granted, but it’s a start. Maria, by the way, mother of six, seems to have decided that I will be most encouraged if she refrains from correcting my mistakes. So I’m on my own remembering that the Spanish word for and is y.

Postscript: This essay was written in 2008. A year later, Lili announced that her language choice was, after all, Latin.

© 2008, 2010 Tobi Tobias

It isn’t easy, trying to buy clothes now that the years have beset the body with flaws. You can’t find garments that cover all of them except, of course, a shroud. But not yet. Sometimes I think I should wear one of those Asian or African or Indian outfits that simply swathe you in fabulous fabric. Then all I’d have to do is develop an undulating walk for allure.

The clothes of my childhood were a different matter. Some of them were memorable for the pleasure they gave me, others because they–I really mean this–left permanent aesthetic scars.

From the ages of about 11 to 14 I had successive dresses (I was still growing, you see) to wear to my cousins’ and friends’ bar mitzvahs. Jewish coming-of-age ceremonies, commonly followed by a secular party–happened at age 13, and, before decorum died, bar mitzvah dresses were invariably executed in navy taffeta, the color being sober, as befitted a religious occasion, but not black, which would have indicated mourning rather than celebration. One of mine had a lavish underskirt of pale pink net. It didn’t show, of course, unless the party’s dancing included a hectic move or two that made the overskirt flare up. But I knew it was there, and wearing that dress was a double sensory experience: I felt the wish of the tulle against my legs and heard the chatter of the crisp, rustling taffeta. I loved that dress inordinately and dwelled on it with secret delight while the rabbi was speaking about far graver matters in which I had scant belief.

Younger, I had a blue and white dotted swiss summer dress. Dotted swiss is a gauzy material with tiny raised dots as if each one had been embroidered separately. The dress had capelet sleeves like a small pair of fairy’s wings that fluttered as you moved or just stood still in a June breeze. Its image is incised on my memory so vividly, at times I think I could go to my closet and find it there still, unchanged, though I have changed so much.

Prepubescent, I had a nubbly wool winter coat in aubergine (you know–deep eggplant purple) that sported big, round, faux-leopard skin buttons and, at the neck, a bow tie in the same leonine fabric. The bow tie was a bit much and my mother and I soon agreed to remove it, but the coat–odd and striking, in its own peculiar way wonderful, a coat fit for the daughter of an artist–was typical of my mother’s taste. My mother’s “profession” was housewifery, but she had the soul of an aesthete. I felt uneasy about the coat at the age I wore it. Only later did I realize it was unusual–even stunning.

Though she produced a daughter who can barely sew on a button, my mom had a phenomenal gift for adorning a plainly cut, monotonal jacket or skirt with her own vibrant designs, which incorporated appliqués, bead work, and embroidery. When ordinary girls were indulging in poodle skirts, a popular cliché that, in its store-bought version, sported a single felt poodle attached to a leash meandering to the waistband, (curling like the telephone cords we had back then), my mother produced a ravishing concoction for me. It was a radiantly colored and ornamented garden of bright blooms that went all the way around a widely flared skirt without once repeating itself.

Before that came the fad of Mexican jackets that sported run-of-the-mill, machine-produced on-the-cheap cut-outs of cowboys, cacti, sombreros, and a bucking bronco with little kick to him. You should have seen the detailed and exquisite handmade version my mother made of the theme. It looked as if it actually spoke Spanish.

I treasured these garments. They made me feel special. But when I outgrew them, my mother insisted that I pass them on to less-fortunate children in the neighborhood, for charity’s sake. To this day I harbor, guiltlessly, the uncharitable wish that I had insisted on keeping them, just to look at. They were that wonderful.

The reverse of the coin consisted of my Aunt Eva’s unwelcome contributions to my wardrobe. She (a stout, prosaic woman, with a blunt face), assisted by another of my father’s sisters, Aunt Sarah (a slender, whining mistress of self- dramatization), were housewives who devoted their free hours to performing good works. Their ongoing project was to make clothes for orphan girls in Israel. Presumably, at least from the aunts’ point of view, they were doing the work of the Lord.

A huge room in Aunt Eva’s house, devoid of furniture and decoration, was devoted to rack upon rack of these garments, in the sleaziest, most tasteless patterned fabric imaginable or in a pastel-hued fake satin that made my skin crawl, each item executed in infinite multiples and hung according to size (2 to 12), the simplest seams bunched and crooked, as if the good Lord had neglected to teach his servants the rudiments of operating a sewing machine.

But that wasn’t the worst. Aunt Eva gave some of these offerings to me, too, with the patronizing smile of an elder conferring a special sweet upon a child. And my mother actually made me wear them, not just once in a while to please Aunt Eva when we visited her–which we were obliged to do weekly, because Grandma lived with her–but as a staple of my wardrobe.

Visits to that room, from whence the clothes were shipped abroad, remain with me to this day as a waking nightmare. Oh, those poor charity children who would have to wear such dreadful garments every single day–and gratefully to boot!

Uncle Isaac, the kindly, astute man married to my father’s eldest sister, Jenny, provided me with the antidote to these well-meant but hideous aunt-crafted items. Every year, a few weeks ahead of my mid-September birthday, he sent me an enormous flat box containing, between yards of crisp white tissue paper, a half-dozen items of handsomely designed and tailored clothing made by the firm he owned.

The year I turned twelve, it was unseasonably hot on my birthday, and my mother had invited nine of my girlfriends to a formal lunch she prepared and served, pretending not to listen to our adolescent conversation, replete with “secrets” and giggles. Of course, despite the heat, I insisted upon wearing an outfit from my new fall-winter finery, occasionally wiping the resulting sweat from my brow, as unobtrusively as possible, with my linen table napkin. And every year I wore one of Uncle Isaac’s new ensembles on the first day of school. I may have been uncomfortably warm, but I felt elegant, elevated above the tawdry, certainly, but also above the commonplace. I think it was from the refined excellence of those clothes that I learned to recognize and seek out, when I later chose my own, the understated design and meticulous workmanship that gives an everyday wardrobe distinction.

Much, much later I began my two-decade love affair with vintage clothes, acquiring my wardrobe from low-end retro boutiques, thrift shops, yard sales, and the like. I was sparked to do this when I began feeling guilty about even the modest prices of my own garments, seeing the homeless and have-nots lying on the sidewalk in front of my house and the homes of my middle-class neighbors. It is one thing to pity, generically, the plight of the impoverished and unemployable; it is another altogether to step, in shoes that cost too much, over or around just one of them, witnessing their unwashed toes through the gaping holes in their footgear.

Once embarked upon lowering my clothes budget radically, I found that, given my trade as a professional dance observer and my keen interest in the visual arts, I was good at spotting the rare gem lurking on the crammed racks and in the bottomless bins of dross. I found the searching a soothing activity, a veritable tranquilizer. And the finds were a thrill. Soon I realized I was exploring these low-end shopping venues for the sheer fun of the hunt.

The next step was creative, absorbing, and time-devouring–combining my finds into marvelous outfits that had a quality I’ve always cherished: a slight strangeness. For me, the obvious, no matter how luxurious or “correct,” is deadeningly dull.

One of my favorite acquisitions was a copy of a Jean Desses dress made long ago for the lower-middle-class consumer. (Desses was a well-known French designer of the mid-twentieth century, who specialized in draped gowns fit for a Greek goddess.) My vintage copy, labeled with a credit to its inspiration, is calf-length, cut from navy crepe studded with tiny gray-metal stars and an occasional equally tiny rhinestone. Its draping is so subtle and complex–turned inside-out, the dress looks like the labyrinth Theseus negotiated with Ariadne’s thread–it often takes fifteen frantic minutes to wriggle into it and the help of anyone who happens to be in the house.

Once, invited to a dinner party in Paris, I wore it with sheer black nylon hose that had a seam running down the back (you can still find these if you look hard enough), discreet costume jewelry of the twenties, and a well-worn Levi’s jeans jacket. The ensemble created a quiet sensation.

Admittedly, I’m a sucker for anything strewn with minuscule stars that have a quiet gleam to them and appear ephemerally amid the folds or layers of fabric that serve as their sky. All this goes back to a Hallowe’en costume worn once by my schoolmate Judy Aronoff. (I refuse to call her Judith; no one did.) And first you have to understand that Judy’s sixth-grade coterie of girlfriends faithfully arrived at her house early on school-day mornings and rushed up to her bedroom to watch her compose her outfit for the day, carelessly littering the ruffled white organdy bedspread with piles of fabulous discards or gazing intently into the mirror of her similarly-skirted dressing table. The rest of us dwelt in more Spartan environments, albeit more tasteful ones.

One Hallowe’en in our preteens, Judy–angelically blond-haired and blue-eyed, of course–was dressed as a fairy princess. Gently wafting a wand tipped with a crescent moon, she wore a white tulle gown, its skirt multi-layered like the long tutu of a Romantic ballerina, the under layers twinkling here and there with diminutive silver stars. One way or another, I’ve been trying to replicate that costume for more than half a century, hence my attraction to the after-Desses dress. Today I like to think that a child so spoiled and frivolous as Judy came to a bad end, but at the time she was a creature to envy and (though impossible) to emulate.

In a class by itself was a series of dreadful costumes–outfits of subdued respectability acquired for specific occasions on which I was being judged for suitability to fulfill certain roles, roles about which I often had justified doubts to begin with.

Although I got stellar grades through high school, I didn’t want to go to college at all. I wanted to study acting full-time as the first step toward becoming a theater director–a naïve notion, to be sure, though, as a high-schooler, I took a year of acting lessons, read Stanislavsky endlessly, and went, alone, to the Saturday matinee of a different Broadway play every week. Still my parents were having none of that “stage business” as a career choice, and I was too much of a coward to defy them.

Under firm parental influence, I was headed for the Seven Sisters, the all-female colleges considered the equivalent of the elitist, male-only Ivies. Clothing my willowy figure for my interviews in a matching peach short-sleeved sweater and pencil-slim skirt seemed to do the trick. Or was it my top-notch academic record? Or my cultivated speaking voice and flawless, mama-bred manners? Or, my writing skill even on the tissue-of-lie essays on why I wanted to attend Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, or whatever. I was accepted by every single college I applied to.

Neither of my parents was at home the afternoon the acceptances arrived and, without consulting them, I answered yes to Barnard, no to all the rest, and mailed my replies. This wasn’t a rare access of rebellion but a crucial attempt to save my own life. Barnard, at least, was in New York, a hub of artistic activity, the town to which my spirit belonged.

A generation later, I had to acquire the equivalent of the peach outfit in which to accompany my first-born to his college interviews. Unlike me, my son wanted to go to a name-brand school and, believe me, for the Class of 1984 hopefuls, at least, the schools scrutinized the parental escort as well as at the prospective student. For my costume on this occasion, I duly selected an off-the-rack Christian Dior suit ensemble in an ever-so-quietly-chic beige and white. To complement it, I acquired a large woven-leather clutch purse and shoes, both carefully matched to the beige of the suit (matching was still de rigueur). My son, too, was accepted wherever he applied, but I put that down not to the Brooks Brothers corduroy sports jacket and impeccably tailored slacks of his costume but to his uncanny skill at interviews.

Never mind that he was smart and handsome; the boy had–still has–the gene for charming hearts of stone.

A decade later, I was seeking funding for a grand-scale dance history project I’d thought up. The support was not to pay me, mind you–I had undertaken the affair through sheer love and admiration of the Royal Danish Ballet–just to cover the expenses of equipment, travel to Copenhagen, and the like, all parsimoniously budgeted. To be taken seriously when I went begging, I needed a dress that would make prospective donors believe I was – what? A respectable scholar? Mature and conservative although associated with the arts? Worthy of their attention and benevolence, at any rate. Needless to say, I had nothing like that in my wardrobe.

After endless shopping, I found a perfectly fine dress that I could afford. It fit impeccably and, what’s more, the green in its subtle weave matched my eyes. But the activity I pursued in it–convincing, which involved charming, CEO types, often elderly gentlemen, to give me money–made me feel like a prostitute. When the fund-raising period came to an end, thankfully with reasonable success, I burned that serviceable dress with glee, and have never succumbed to such a disguise again. It was my final attempt to wear what I wasn’t.

These days I write, mostly at home, explore New York with my two local grandchildren, go to the gym–and often to the theater–in jeans that have become vintage even if I acquired them, long ago, new. Really old models, just so you know, are much better cut and sewn than up-to-date ones, even from the same brand–and their rugged denim grows increasingly velvety with age. Hardly anyone but the moneyed society that attends opening nights and galas dresses for the theater nowadays, so my concession to the lovely old custom of “dressing up” for such an event–a dance critic, should, after all, honor the artists–is to add makeup and beautiful drop earrings. Crystal, usually–another of my obsessions.

Back when I was a young teen, we’d wash our new 501s several times in scalding water laced with a little Clorox, to make them flatteringly tight and give them a slightly worn look, new being nerdy. After repeating the process two or three times, we’d then don them and walk around for hours, occasionally sitting on the kitchen linoleum to rest and play canasta, while they dried into form-fitting submission, the now-cooling damp fabric clinging to the particular shape of our butts and legs.

“You’ll catch your death of cold,” my mother would say, sometimes angrily, sometimes resigned, whenever she glimpsed us at our ritual. Recklessly or not, we ignored her old-wives’ science. “Colds come from viruses,” we’d declare, tossing our long, luxuriant, adolescent locks.

These harmless clothes fads of adolescents should be respected, I think. They’re fun. They’re ephemeral. They’re creative–a form of self-expression, albeit a group one. Surely self-expression is a kissing cousin of art.

Not so long ago I realized that I was still far more interested in writing than in wardrobe. Perhaps it was as a celebration of this belated bit of self-knowledge that I produced a book peaceably combining the two. It’s called Obsessed by Dress. My editor calls it “a meditation on clothes.” I think–at least I hope–it’s strange and, perhaps, even wonderful.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

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