When You're Here, You're Family!

I think it was the Olive Garden restaurant chain that explicitly used the motto: "When you're here, you're family!" But really, it seems to be the implicit goal of most restaurant owners to make their customers feel like family.

There has been a long-running Chicago TV show called "Check, Please!" It features average citizens giving their reviews of local restaurants. Each round of reviews is preceded by a visit to the restaurant that will be the next subject of discussion, including an interview with its owners. There is a remarkable uniformity about these interviews. Almost without exception, the first thing the owners/chefs say is that they want each and every customer to feel at home walking through the door. They cite that urge towards hospitality as having been their primary motive for opening their restaurants in the first place. They wanted to share the food of their respective cultures, or the recipes of their grandmothers, with a larger circle of friends. And they assure the interviewer that that's how they regard each and every customer - as friend and family member to be invited inside - to be treated to a personal, heart-warming culinary experience around the table.

I'm not sure how often I've actually been embraced that way when I've entered a restaurant. But the good intentions of making me feel at home are everywhere in the world of gastronomes. Which leads me to wonder - why are restaurant owners the only ones who strive to deliver such a hearth-and-home experience to customers? Why isn't such warmth exuded by all kinds of shopkeepers and service providers? Why don't computer store technicians and plumbing supply store owners fling their arms wide when I enter their shops, and seek to get to know enough about me to cater to me with personal friendliness? Why don't booksellers discretely circulate around me as I browse, asking me if I'm pleased with their assortment of titles and if I have any suggestions for improvement?

Well, I understand that too much such personal attention might become intrusive. It might smack of that  stereotypically annoying clothing store clerk who hovers about, jumping in to assert, "That muumuu you're holding - it's you, dear! And aren't you lucky - it's on sale today!" I also understand that "breaking bread" together has traditionally represented the family bond. Anyone who is invited to partake of a shared meal is being included in the host's family circle in a way that a tailor who fits a suit for a man is not apt to be including that man among his honored intimate associates.

But why don't grocers and butchers come forward to pat me on the back, assure me of how welcome I am, and express a sincere hope that I enjoy my visit? After all, those last vendors are also in food-sharing professions.

So the question remains - why are restaurateurs the only ones to so uniformly state the goal of making customers feel at home? Furthermore, why are they the only ones who so consistently say the object of their business is to share something of their own traditions and family histories with their customers? Why don't all business people look upon their ventures as opportunities for a kind of creative self-expression? Why don't other types of entrepreneurs besides chefs consider themselves artists - not the kind of artist who suffers alone and misanthropic in a cold garret, but the kind of artist intent on bounteously, joyously sharing creative offerings with the rest of the world?

When my parents and I ran our printing business, that sort of sharing was actually what we initially believed doing work of any kind should and would be all about. After we got over our most dire need to accumulate enough money to get by - we really didn't care about making money at all. We viewed our business as a way of interfacing with others. We thought of our office door as a gateway that would connect us to the outer world. It was our way of giving tangible shape to our days, our skills. We implicitly intended the business to be a way of making a package of the lifetimes of anecdote and experience we had gathered, of tying it up with a bow, and of presenting it to our customers as a gift of ourselves. We expected that our customers would approach us with corresponding intentions. We viewed the arrival of every customer as the opportunity for a shared adventure in personality.

For some reason though, we were almost never able to put our relations with our customers on that basis. Our customers viewed their time with us strictly as business, as a mutual means of making as much money as possible as fast as possible. That was their only goal in coming through the door, and they assumed it was our only goal in dealing with them. They didn't approach us as they would enter a restaurant - with an intention of getting a warm greeting and of having a friendly, familial encounter. In fact, some customers wanted to make the exchange as impersonal as possible. They would come in, plunk the copy they routinely needed printed for that week on the counter, then leave before we'd even gotten a chance to get to the door to see them. With us they wanted a job done, cut and dried - nothing more. They hurried away, and we were left in their dust.

Sometimes this mismatch of expectancies really floored us. Occasionally we'd think we had made a more personal connection with a customer. On his repeated visits to our shop, one customer had confided his fears about his new born son's health. The little boy had been born with retinoblastoma, a form of eye cancer. The doctors felt it might be best to operate, but at that time at least, the delicate surgery had a high chance of leaving the child permanently blind. Our customer was racked by having to make the decision - to consent or not to the operation. Then, after he and his wife had decided to let the doctors go ahead, they were left suspended in agony, waiting for the outcome of the operation.

When it seemed sure the outcome of the operation would have been determined, we called to ask about the little boy. Since the man had so often unburdened himself to us, we felt somewhat included in his circle of friends. However the voice that greeted our inquiry was anything but friendly. In fact, it had an edge of actual hostility. "Um, who are you again?" he demanded to know. We stammered out an explanation of ourselves - "the people who do your printing, our shop, across the street from the post office, the printing and mailing of your flyers for your antique sales…" He softened somewhat in recognition of us, but we could tell he was still baffled by our call and considered us as outsiders taking an undue interest. Nevertheless he did answer that it had been good news. The surgery had gone well and the infant had already been fitted with eyeglasses. He would likely have to wear thick glasses all his life, but that was a small price to pay for his having acceptably good eyesight. Our customer delivered the information to us, and the conversation was awkwardly ended.

A couple of other follow-ups with other customers went pretty much the same way. We'd assumed too much familiarity. Even more devastatingly awakening for us though was the reaction we got from a regular customer to whom we offered a holiday bottle of champagne. We had thought we'd open it on a "special occasion." But since those occasions never seem to arrive, we decided it would be more fun and fitting to give the bottle to Mordy. He had become the customer we most looked forward to seeing. He never plopped his copy down and ran out the door. He always paused and really seemed to see us, rather than looking right through us with his sights on what he had to do next. He was that rare kind of person who truly conversed. He listened and talked sensibly to the point, rather than telling about his Civil War re-enactments after we had just mentioned the tomatoes growing in our garden.

So with a twitter of excitement, we readied the bottle by putting it in one of those bright tin foil bottle bags that liquor stores used to give out free, but that now can only be bought. We eagerly anticipated the look of pleasant surprise on his face when he received this unexpected token of rapport.

But things didn't go as we anticipated. My mother and Mordy chatted as usual, then when she sensed the holiday visit was winding down, she turned, clutched the prettily wrapped bottle that had been waiting on the desk behind her, and a little awkwardly, handed it towards him with the deprecating air of thrusting forth a bauble. She accompanied her presentation with some trite, but sincere ramblings about how we always appreciated seeing him and how we hoped he had a bubbly holiday season…

She was thrown from this shy, schoolgirl ride by a sudden fence of repulsion. Mordy's face had turned wooden. He pushed the offering back toward her and said, "Oh no, I never accept gifts from business people. I make it a policy never to accept gifts from people I'm giving business to. That sort of thing can get out of hand, you know. I don't want to be put in the position of taking bribes. So thanks, but no. Please keep it."

My mother stood there, stunned beyond words by this refusal. It was so ludicrous. Mordy had been our customer for over ten years, bringing a page of copy for us to print for his engineering society meetings every month. There was no chance that his level of patronage would ever be increased or decreased. The same twenty dollars we could expect to make from him monthly would hardly warrant any attempts at bribery to maintain.

Well, it was possible that Mordy himself realized how silly his little outburst of rectitude had been as soon as he uttered it. My mother thought she had seen a quick clouding of regret in his eyes. Perhaps his "No!" had just been a reflex reaction. Perhaps he'd been so used to having larger blocks of business solicited from him by real companies, that he was just automatically geared to refusal. But once he'd made such a point of the rejection, he couldn't go back on it.

However, that still left the wound of his basic assumption. The deepest cut he'd made was the one from the knife that sliced into us as "business people." So we weren't on any sort of more sociable standing with him after all. We never had been. We never would be. We certainly would never be granted license to fling wide our arms in the manner of a fat, jolly Santa of a restaurant chef, and consider Mordy to be virtual family, come to our table for conversational sustenance. Both Mordy and my mother stood there frozen for a moment, locked in their irrevocable estrangement.

With a mumble of amelioration, my mother took back the bottle. We put it away carelessly. By the time we finally opened it ourselves years later, it had turned to vinegar.

But that seems to be the way of the world so far. Restaurateurs are granted the right to assume familial relationships, especially with their regular customers. But the people in most other professions neither give nor expect to receive personal attention as they go about their "strictly business." Their work is in no way viewed as a way of making a personal offering of themselves. Their exchanges remain essentially mercenary transactions, as between prostitute and john. Any attempts to go outside those limits come across as weird, untoward intrusion.

Although, it struck me that such distancing might not be absolutely the norm after all. After I had pretty much retired from the business and rented the premises out to a young printer, I was amazed at how he and his customers immediately met each other on a more jovial footing. The arrival of a customer was for him more an occasion for socializing than a matter of business. I wondered how he so readily put customer relations on that basis. He seemed to just naturally fall into camaraderie with the people who entered his shop, in a way my parents and I had always dreamed of, but had never achieved.

Antonio would sit there, endlessly confabbing with the people who came through the door. For their part, his customers would stand at the counter, bantering gleefully with him, without ever once looking at their watches or giving any sign of having other places to go. They would spin out mutual tales of themselves as if they were at a bar instead of a counter. What was Antonio's secret?

Well, it's true that his relationship with his customers was more backslapping than true friendship. Many of his "customers" were literally drinking buddies who would come over from the pub. Any idea of having printing done was incidental to their visits at best. In turn, Antonio often only had the most limited intentions of rendering any serious service. He too was on deck to socialize, to make the office a venue for idle chatter. While my time in the business had lacked any personability, his lacked any serious accomplishment. My ideal of using one's business as a means of marrying the art of friendship with artisanship wasn't realized in either instance. Entree to that sort of happy combination still generally seems to remain the preserve of restaurant owners.

But why does that have to remain the case? Why can't we enlarge our expectations of what we can get and what we can offer in return when we go into the office of a lawyer, a doctor, a used car salesman? Why can't we add another line or so to John Lennon's imaginings and re-imagine the role of all kinds of small business owners, service providers, and professionals? "Imagine all jobs made joyful and worthwhile" - by their humanity. Imagine being greeted with sincere warmth and interest by all these entrepreneurs, whose real goal in this re-imagined world is to open their doors to a better understanding between themselves and their customers. Imagine all workers intent on making an art of the services they offer, and all customers and consumers responding in kind. Then when our exchange is over, what's really been accomplished is that we have creatively abided in each other's company a while.

I wistfully imagine going into my accountant's office and being received into a warm, welcoming atmosphere. Perhaps she even has a fireplace in her office, with a log burning on cold days. There's a comfortable lounge chair by the hearthside, and while I wait my turn to have my forms filled out, I'm offered a complimentary glass of wine. When I'm ushered up to her desk, she unfurls a spread sheet in front of me like a waiter in a fine restaurant prepares a fresh table by unfurling a linen tablecloth across it. She knows me and remembers me by all my getting and spending, but especially by my charitable contributions. As she reviews this list of deductions, she once again notes that I donated a goodly sum to an animal shelter. She asks how Autry, the singing cat I adopted from the shelter, is doing. We lower our voices and conspiratorially exchange information on how to circumvent the cost of having to get a veterinarian's prescription by ordering Revolution, that most effective of flea medications, directly off the Internet from a source in New Zealand.

When all my tax forms are filled out, we both lean back in satisfaction with a job well-done. The accountant says she looks forward to seeing me next quarter. But I needn't wait until then to come in. She beams, "Come in anytime, whenever you have a question, or just to visit. And remember - when you're here, you're family!"

Imagine!

A Train Runs Through It

Edna St. Vincent Millay apparently enjoyed train travel. She wrote these famous line that roll the reader along with her wanderlust:

                                          My heart is warm with friends I make,
                                           And better friends I'll not be knowing;
                                           Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
                                                     No matter where it's going.

I've found that I perhaps enjoy the idea of train travel more than the trips themselves. I once took Amtrak's Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco and back, booking a roomette. Going through the vast emptiness of Nevada at night, looking out my window at the miles and miles of nothing except glimpses of the Milky Way, became almost a mystical experience. I became one with the lullaby rocking of the train… the rocking, the clicking. The greatest onomatopoeia in any language is the Spanish word for "railroad," if you rightly roll your "r's" - ferrocarril…ferrocarril…ferrocaril…

The stops we made also gave me a sense of going back in time. There were the wood-beamed train stations out west. I felt I was stepping off into the year 1880 in Elko, Nevada. A clutch of taciturn, raw-looking cowboys was huddled on the platform, their breath made visible by the cold morning air. Some flakes of snow started to drift down. And it was the Fourth of July! At those altitudes, anything is possible. Then there was the harrowing one-inch-from-the-edge ascent through the Rockies, overlooking the Donner Pass. Watch out! Don't lean over! That shift of weight might plummet us off into the same deadly fate as that Donner Party of old.

Yes, it was breath-taking, thrilling - at times. But there was a certain numbing boredom about it too. I was glad each way when the trip was over and I was back on solid ground, relieved of any twinge of motion sickness, able to read, eat, move around expansively again. I wasn't sure that the romantic idea of train travel would be enough to sustain me through too many more long journeys.

But a few places I visited more recently made me realize that I could have my cake and eat it too. I could have the pleasure of that rolling ferrocarril refrain, without being confined to actually going anywhere. I just had to stay in railroad towns that have a track running through them and a steady flow of freight making its way to distant points. I stayed in motels not far from the tracks in two such towns that are both lulled and enlivened by the rhythm of the trains coming and going.

One of these towns was Revelstoke, British Columbia. There's no passenger train service to this jewel of the Canadian Rockies anymore, so I got there by Greyhound. But the sound of the freight cars chugging through town provides a steady, reassuring heartbeat to life there. 

Trains still define much of the town. There's a train museum by the tracks which includes much of the often cruel history of the building of the Canadian-Pacific Railway. Wherever you go in the area, you see reminders of how Chinese laborers were worked to the bone building the railway, were confined to squalid ghetto parts of town, and then were discarded and left to die when they were too old or ill to do a long day's labor anymore. Some relatively fortunate workers were able to make it out of that most dangerous grind by advancing into laundry jobs. That work had its own hazards though. It involved handling scalding hot irons that had to be regularly re-heated over burners. A very few of these workers managed to advance further to become waiters in, and then even owners of Chinese restaurants.

All this history of prejudice and poverty was on display at the train museum. But then there was also the gleaming brass achieve of the train cars themselves. They had some old Pullman cars appointed as they would have been in the heyday of train travel, in the 1940's, with a rose on every dining car table. An "old-timer" was at the controls of a retired lead car. He showed tourists what all the levers and dials were for and told us the difference between running steam engines and the more modern locomotives.

From there, I explored the newer downtown area. Revelstoke was featured in a psychological thriller starring Malcolm McDowell called The Barber. In that film, they showed the town as retaining some of its old mining and railroading atmosphere, with wooden plank sidewalks and swinging saloon doors. I didn't see any such Wild West remnants though. The downtown stores all tended to be typical modern boutiques. Except for one. There was one really distinctive storefront along this main street. It housed a player piano/nickelodeon museum owned by a British couple who had made the maintenance and exhibition of these extraordinary music-makers their life's work.

After I had paid the modest admission charge, they offered me a cup of tea as I took the guided tour. I was both charmed and a little disappointed at the same time. I was charmed by the Agatha Christie Miss Marple aspect of these two transplants from Britain, but I was disappointed when they tussled with each other a bit over who would do the chore of guiding me around. "Well, I took the last one," the husband gently protested. So I fell the lot of the wife.

Since it was rather late in the autumn, there were hardly any other tourists in town, which meant I got a private showing of all the rare old pianos. The wife played them or set them in motion for me, one-by-one. She cited pianos or harpsichords from the 1700's that had the capacity to produce the same gamut of special effects that the most souped-up keyboard of a modern rock band can produce. With the flick of a switch, you could activate brass, percussion, or string accompaniments to your playing, all in a variety of styles and rhythms. Of course, these embellishments were accomplished with intricate mechanics rather than with electricity. The place was a little pocket of exquisite craftsmanship in a world of disposable plastic. If you ever pass through Revelstoke, I can recommend the Nickelodeon Museum on First Street to you.

Then I crossed to the other side of the tracks and meandered up through the residential hillside. There was a poster at the start of this winding road, with red "X's" showing spots where grizzly bears had been sighted. Walking along, part of me hoped I'd get to see a grizzly bear - but a larger part of me hoped I wouldn't!

There was the most eclectic assortment of houses imaginable along this way. There'd be a shanty next door to a brick mansion. Trailing from one of the more impressive homes was the compelling sound of a bagpipe. I walked a short distance up the house's flower-lined driveway to pause and listen a while. It seemed likely someone was inside practicing on the instrument, although whoever it was needed little practice. He or she was already pitch-perfect. The rallying drone made me want to stay on. "The pipes, the pipes are calling…" But after a short while, the playing came to an abrupt, self-conscious halt. I wondered if the person inside had spotted me in the driveway and didn't wish to perform for an uninvited audience. So I reluctantly walked on.

I ventured a little farther afield and took in a tour of the big hydroelectric dam outside of town. The dam generates electricity for a large part of the Okanagon Valley area and beyond, so security was tight. I took a cab onto the grounds, and both the cab driver and I had to show passports as ID. A guard then came out with a mirror on a stick and checked the whole undercarriage of the cab as well as probing through the trunk and every nook of the car's interior. Once I was inside at the Visitors' Center, I had to relinquish everything - purse and wallet and all. But past that checkpoint, I was free to wander through the generating plant at will, on a "self-guided tour."

Once again, I was alone, one of the last tourists of the season. To get to the viewing platforms above the big generators, I had to walk through a long, dank tunnel that ran under the big lake reservoir created by the dam. Water was seeping ominously through the pores of the surrounding concrete, puddling on the floor. I could sense the weight of all the water above and around me - pressing in against the walls of the tunnel as if it might bulge and buckle them at any moment. I hurried on through to the elevator at the end of this subterranean (or submarine) passageway.

Beyond the generators, visitors could walk outside to the parapet walls overlooking the massive concrete construct of the dam itself. I have never seen the Hoover Dam, but it's hard to imagine that it could be much more impressive than this Revelstoke Dam. The escarpment of concrete sloped over 500-feet to the tumble of waters below. It made a hypnotically dangerous ski slope of a curve going down, almost daring the person who had started as a casual sightseer to end by taking a fatal plunge.

So there had been plenty to see and do in Revelstoke. But somehow it was the coming and going of the trains that made the most lasting impression on me. My motel was about two blocks from the tracks, just the right distance to be lulled rather than rattled by the steady migrations. As the trains came and went, emitting their occasional muted whistles, they sent a gentle, subtle rumble of vibration through my surroundings, settling me into a peaceful sleep.

The second train town I visited recently was Springfield, the capital of the State of Illinois and the place where Abraham Lincoln practiced law the longest. I was finally seeing the City, after a delay of more than half a century. Most Chicago students are treated to weekend junkets to Springfield when they graduate from grade school or high school. However my class had its scheduled trip cancelled because we were deemed to be too savagely unruly to be let loose on an unsuspecting world.

Truly though, many of my classmates depredations had not been comical. When people cite the more recent shootings and other acts of violence in schools as unique signs of the violence of our times - they forget that one of the hallmarks of the 1950's and  60's was "The Blackboard Jungle." Those were the days of switchblades and vicious gang rumbles and ransackings. The geography teacher in our grade school had been blinded in one eye by a carelessly hurled switchblade. One of my classmates had had a fingertip amputated by that weapon of the day. Then when our class had been let out for an afternoon field trip, many of them had run amok in the neighborhood, committing so much vandalism that the school board might still be paying reparations.

So "No Springfield trip for YOU!" I had to arrange my own trip there decades later. But I'm glad I finally did get to go. Springfield really puts the Lincoln in the State motto "The Land of Lincoln." While a lot of the Lincoln-related attractions in Springfield are geared to tourists, most have avoided becoming kitschy recollections. For example, the Lincoln Library does have a lot of "family-oriented" entertainments aside from the place's repository of books. But its hologram show is truly touching, invoking spirits from the past in diaphanous 3-D. The show had a twist-ending that left me pondering the nature of reality.

I was surprised to learn that Springfield itself has been losing population, fading from its days as a transportation hub and as a center of mining activity. Some of its main streets are now as boarded-up and destitute as Detroit's. Outside the peripatetic attendances of the Governor and other politicians who come to the Capitol Building when the State Congress is in session - the year-round residents have been forming a shrinking club. Many of these people cross paths daily as they work in one capacity or another in the Lincoln trade. It's hard to find a local resident who hasn't participated in a Lincoln re-enactment at one time or another. If they weren't the right types to play the leads of Abraham and Mary Todd themselves, they could still participate by playing lesser known figures in Lincoln's life, such as his stepmother Sarah Bush, or his law partner, William Herndon.

My favorite Lincoln site though was one that wasn't on our regularly scheduled tour. I made my way by myself into Lincoln's restored law office on the second floor of an old brick building on one of Springfield's main streets. It was furnished with the kinds of wick lamps, writing desks, law books, quill pens, and the other appointments, that would likely have been found there in Lincoln's day. Lincoln historians had taken care to recreate the smallest likely details of the scene, including splashes of ink on the walls and over various papers left lying around. The guide explained that Lincoln was very indulgent with his boys, letting them play as wild and free as they wished in his office. To the occasional dismay of clients and law partners, this playtime often came down to rough-housing that included hurled ink bottles. As a result, some potentially vital clauses in legal documents would get obscured on a regular basis.

The first floor of this building had also been restored to its 1850's function as the town's post office. Since my family and I had run a mailing business, I've always been especially interested in postal history. I learned a lot on this visit to Lincoln's ground floor, things I hadn't learned even in the excellent postal museum that's part of the Smithsonian complex in Washington, D.C. The Washington Museum emphasizes the hardships involved in delivering letters in the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries and into the 20th century when young pilots such as Lindbergh flew rickety biplanes through fog and dark to land their cargo of mail at airstrips barely lit, sometimes still by gaslight. Many of these flyers crashed and were killed seeing that the mail got through this way.

But this little Springfield storefront re-creation emphasized the hardships of mailing letters in Lincoln's day.  Back then, you were charged more exactingly by the weight of your missive. Few people could afford to be extravagant about adding the slightest extra fraction of an ounce to their letters. So they wrote on onionskin, and even avoided using more than one sheet of that for their chatty letters by cramping their handwriting small, first horizontally across the page, then vertically over the first lines. They might use a slightly different tint of ink or use a lighter pressure when they over-wrote. But some of the letters still became drudgingly difficult to read.

Back on the regular tour, we took in the larger highlights - of Lincoln's tomb - and then, the train station where Lincoln gave thanks and bid farewell to the people of Springfield as he set off on his mission as the country's newly elected President. He was to come back along those same train tracks barely five years later, carried from Washington to Springfield by train. I thought of a Tom Waits song lyric - "It was a train that took me away from here, but a train can't bring me home." In Lincoln's case though, the train did carry him both ways.

I was once again lucky in the location of my hotel in Springfield. My room was right across the street from the Lincoln Hotel which had an illuminated circle at its rooftop, painted with Lincoln's image. This medallion of gentle light was like a full moon watching over me. And once again, my place was just near enough to the tracks to let me be lulled by the rumblings of the freight cars through the night. That sound is as piercingly nostalgia-producing as a round of "Auld Lang Syne" - or "Waltzing Matilda" - or a distant bagpipe.

As I lay there, that long rolling through the night trailed a train of melancholy remembrances - of our 16th President - and of my own life. But at the same time, there was, as ever, something hopeful, reassuring in the sound. It promised places to go, more things to see, a pulling through to another morning. And so I fell into the same peaceful sleep I'd enjoyed in that distant realm of Revelstoke - myself made safe and fast in counterpoint to the ever onward moving ferrocarril… ferrocarril… ferrocarril…

Let Her R.I.P. - The Art of the Epitaph

I've seen many collections of witty or telling epitaphs, and I've known people who make a hobby of roaming cemeteries to find interesting epitaphs. Sometimes they make rubbings of epitaphs that give funny or historically enlightening send-offs, or that are on the gravestones of famous people. So when my parents died - first my father and then two decades later, my mother - I gave a lot of thought to epitaphs for them. I didn't want to simply have them lying their labeled with their expiration dates.

I think I managed  distinctive, arresting summations for both, summations they'd probably approve. But when I've visited at their separated graves (the cemetery didn't have adjacent plots available), I've found no sign that anyone has ever come over to take a rubbing. That's despite the fact that my father is in a high-traffic, high-visibility area of the cemetery, in a spot my sister-in-law, then a new mother, initially greeted with the enthusiastic relief of, "That's great! It's near the washrooms!" But even though at least one of my parents has such a prime location, no one ever seems to have noticed the epitaphs. No one has ever contacted me to inquire further about their meaning or applicability. So I'll tell the story of them here.

My father lies under the rather jaunty, enigmatic assertion:

The Bright Ones Can Stay Home

That derived from an instruction one of my college professors issued, and that became a byword and family joke among the three of us. I didn't go away to college. I attended the school that had sprung up just down the street from me. There, at what is now Chicago's Northeastern University, my math teacher decided to have a review day for the students who were still lagging.. She said that those who already knew the material needn't attend that class session. Then, less tactfully, she rephrased her instruction as, "The bright ones can stay home."

That had been the only major class I'd had that day, so I indeed stayed home - the whole day. When my father saw me lounging about the house, he was curious. He asked why I wasn't in class as usual. "Oh," I told him, "the teacher is having catch-up review. She said 'The bright ones can stay home.'"

It was one of the few times I ever saw my father laugh with genuine warmth - at something that wasn't simply the slapstick cruelty of a Three Stooges gouge-in-the-eye. He was laughing at the alacrity, and perhaps the downright chutzpah, with which I had assumed myself into that charmed circle of "bright ones." My mother soon caught the hilarity of it. It became a catch-phrase and family joke among us three. After that, whenever one of us was spotted shirking a duty or simply lazing about when there was work to be done, another of us was bound to chide, "The bright ones can stay home, eh?"

When my father died, I thought of our family joke again and realized it could have a larger encapsulating applicability for him. My father had been quite a gad-about in his youth. He'd worked briefly for Al Capone, designing and printing labels for the bottles of booze coming off Capone's distillery assembly lines. My father had been a minor bootlegger himself, greeted as the life of the party wherever he went. He partied all night, every night. He was a high roller living the high life.

But by the time I came along, several decades later, he had completely reversed course. His experience after the Roaring 20's dwindled to a beaten growl soured him on people. As soon as Prohibition ended, he was persona non grata among all his old pals. He realized how empty all those old associations had been. They'd never wanted him - only the booze he brought. He turned his back on going places and seeing people. He became something of a hermit. He was content to stay home in the circumference of our family printing business. Since we had our business attached to our living quarters, that meant he hardly ever traveled farther than the little candy-and-cigarette store at the end of our block.

Although he wouldn't have recognized or acknowledged any "exotic" philosophy such as Buddhism, he in effect became an advocate of the wisdom of staying home in contentment with and appreciation of whatever a person had in the here-and-now. Unlike most youths who at least initially want to fling themselves out into the larger world, I was generally disposed to follow that more inner path myself. Oh, after high school, I would occasionally become roused by a notion to go somewhere other. I once saw an invitation to Americans to attend college in Japan and I actually started to make serious plans. I got a book on the Japanese language and made lists of "things to take."

My parents would have supported any decision I made, but my father was a little deflating. He wondered why I would want to go all the way to Japan when there was still so much of Chicago I hadn't seen. When I would argue my case in favor of Japan, he would say, "Yes, but have you seen 55th and Halsted?" I really don't think he knew or had any interest in what was at that particular Chicago intersection. I think he just chose the spot at random, perhaps because that conjunction of number and name had a certain poetic ring to it.

I groaned, and continued to champion the advantages of Japan, but much more feebly. I could see his point. In the end, and with quite some relief at not having to go through the trouble of packing and departing, I did stay home and happily attended the college in my neighborhood. But "55th and Halsted" became another catch-phrase in our household, advanced whenever one of us started to entertain some infatuation with the far-flung, instead of pursuing a more deep, abiding familiarity with our own home ground.

So in the end, "The Bright Ones Can Stay Home" seemed the most apt way to summarize my father's last, best philosophy of life.

I'm not as pleased with the epitaph I finally settled on for my mother. It too has a certain summary aptness, but it has a cynical, sour cast that perhaps shouldn't be a person's parting shot to the world. I often think of having her stone re-carved with a more upbeat afterthought, but in the end, her stone will probably remain as it is.

My mother majored in languages at Northwestern University (which is east of the misnomer Northeastern I attended). She especially enjoyed her Spanish classes and the classical Spanish poetry that was assigned reading. She memorized some of the stanzas of Romantic poet Adolfo Becquer, and remembered them. In lieu of lullabies she would soothingly recite them to me years later when I was a child….

             "Volveran las oscuras golondrinas

              en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,

              y otra vez con el  ala a tus crystals -

              jugando llamaran."

Freely translated, that says, "The black doves will come to hang their nests on your balcony and will once again call to you, playfully tapping with wing on your windows."

I was moved almost to tears just a few years ago when (against anything my father would have wholly approved), I took a whirlwind tour of Spain. Our guide was a young woman, seemingly barely out of college. So I had no hopes of her having any familiarity with Bequer or with the Spanish writers my mother studied in the 1920's. But I was wrong! The young guide lit up the moment I mentioned Becquer's name - and she immediately started to recite in unison with me his poem about the lost love to which the doves were witness. When my mother died, I thought I would never hear those lines again - or in fact meet anyone with any memory of them. It certainly would be hard to find any young Americans who could recite whole poems by classic poets so readily ("The Dead Poets Society" notwithstanding). But perhaps they take a different educational approach in Spain - one that puts a slightly nationalistic emphasis on honoring their noted writers, even from centuries past, with remembrance of their words.

However, it was the last line of this Becquer poem, this "Rima" from the 19th century, that my mother invoked most often, not as lullaby but more as lesson. The English translation of that last line reads roughly, "Disenchant yourself of the idea that anyone will ever love you as I have loved you."

That might seem a cruel, even a psychotic thing to say to a young girl who is so eager, so hopeful of finding romantic love in the world. I can see any psychiatrists who might read this shaking their heads in dismay at what they'd probably interpret as signs of a Norman Bates mother with a cripplingly jealous attachment to her child. But it wasn't like that at all.

Well, perhaps there was just an iota of self-concern in my mother's occasional interjection of this bitter line from an old poem. She had a mild form of agoraphobia and doubtless was afraid that I would leave her, and she would have to struggle out into the terrifying world on her own.

But for the most part, she was just putting into words what I myself could perceive but might be too dangerously needy of companionship to acknowledge. She might mutter the words when she saw me inclined to pursue an indifferent youth who came late to our date, who honked his car horn hurrying me out to him rather than bestirring himself to come up to the door, and who gave every sign of only grudgingly buying me dinner if he was assured of my delivering what he inevitably wanted. Looking at this parade of calculating, appraising peers, I had to admit what so many foolishly refuse to admit - that unconditional love will be hard to find once you move outside the sphere of good parents. "Oh yes, he slaps me around, but I know that deep down, he really loves me." I was impressed with the destructive illogic of any such attitude early in life, by the reminder of the line from Becquer's poem.

The line might just as well have been delivered by my mother to the world at large though. She did everything effusively for free, while others were always bent over their calculators, figuring what they'd charge. She excitedly considered every potential guest as a State event - while, at best, they squeezed her in between other appointments. Little did they know how much they meant to her as they hurried out the door on their way to somewhere else.

So there her epitaph is carved, hiding its rue behind the original Spanish which I thought it unlikely any relative could decipher and resent:

Como yo te he querido, desengáñate - así - no te querrán

Then how about me? I think I might have settled on my own epitaph. Once again, it's a line provided by someone else. It was suggested to me years ago by Stuart Brent, Chicago's famous bookseller. Brent had his little shop, which often served as salon for the literati, on Michigan Avenue, part of the City's "Magnificent Mile." He became one of the last independent booksellers, holding his own against the chains, the mega-bookstores, and the warehouse operations. He did it by maintaining his personal interest - in every book and every customer.

Sometimes his habit of voicing his own, often crusty, opinions about his customers' reading preferences ran contrary to what most merchants would consider good business sense. When an acquaintance of mine once failed to find L. Ron Hubbard's then best-selling Dianetics anywhere in the store, he rather accusingly asked Brent why he didn't stock such a popular book. Brent roundly rebutted that he didn't want pseudo-scientific drivel like that taking up room on his shelves. However Brent finally relented and agreed to order a copy to satisfy my friend's persistent desire to read "that hack junk." Another, even more antagonistic exchange occurred when Brent called my friend to tell him his order was in, and my friend informed him that he hadn't been able to wait - that he had already bought the book elsewhere. In the wake of the verbal abuse that Brent then dished out, my friend never patronized Brent's store again in its fifty-plus years of existence.

I never quite made it plain, but frankly, I was on Brent's side in this scuffle. I felt on Brent's side in most things. While many of my peers were swooning over the Beatles, I became a Stuart Brent fan. He had a local weekly TV show devoted to book reviews. My mother and I would both watch the show faithfully.

If pinned down, we would have to admit that all his reviews sounded much alike. Whether he was reviewing what was then the latest book of social critique, Riesman's The Lonely Crowd,  or whether he was reviewing a classic such as Eliot's Middlemarch - Brent would trot out pretty much the same observations. He would simply use whatever book he selected for his morning talk as a hook on which to hang his dissatisfactions with modern society.

Brent would even work the same phrases into most of his reviews. He was sure to find in each book-of-the-week some support for his blasts against "mass culture," "group-think," and our current educational system intent on producing merely "educated fools." My mother and I, as alienated as we were from popular culture, reveled in these criticisms.

If Brent couldn't find direct support for his contrarian views in whatever book was under discussion, he would freely go off on a tangent. He always introduced these tangents in the same way. He would preface any digression with the fetching admission - "Apropos of nothing…"

Thinking back on those old TV reviews, I realized that Stuart Brent had handed me my epitaph on a platter. I've never really had a job, and certainly not a career. My school attendance was desultory at best since I mostly learned at home. Therefore, I've never felt had any strong affiliation with a school, a class, a team. I've never attended any religious services. I have mostly eschewed collecting things or having a hobby of any sort. I've generally lived beyond the pale, completely irrelevant to the worldly doings and lives of others. So the phrase will suit me perfectly:

Here lies Marlene Vorreiter

Apropos of Nothing