Page 59 - WhyAsInY

WHo are tHese PeoPle? (Part 2)
(Much later, my commuting to my desk in Manhattan, spending the requisite time there, and then returning by train to Scarsdale for fifteen years might have seemed much the same to an unbiased observer.) But memory is a funny thing, and that picture might have formed during some other visit to the zoo, one without Grandma. Or it might have formed because I took and kept a precious photograph of a polar bear with that Brownie.
Grandma would also babysit me. (As far as I was led to believe, no one else could handle the task, although my cousins Peter and Johnny would also try, with mixed results; many years later, I would learn that my cousins’ primary incentive to babysit me was that they were thereby afforded the opportunity to sneak into my father’s office and peruse what I’ll politely call a special section of my father’s medical library.) I retain a vivid recollection of Grandma celebrating one New Year’s Eve with me, at which time, after watching A Night in Casablanca with me, she taught me to bang my mother’s pots together at what I thought was mid- night. For years I believed this activity to be customary, and to this day I associate New Year’s Eve with Marx Brothers movies, pot banging, and Grandma. However, although I looked for Marx Brothers movies on New Year’s, expecting their antics to be automatically shown on Decem- ber 31, I was disappointed finally to figure out that they were not a permanent part of the year-end ritual in America. But banging pots together was.
The best story relating to my grandmother’s views on propriety (or, perhaps, to the views of others with respect to Grandma’s old- country sense of propriety) is actually more about me and, to a lesser degree, about my mother than it is about her, but I’ll tell it here anyway. Picture the scene: Grandma is playing her usual game of mah-jongg at our home with my mother and two of my mother’s friends. I am a seven-or-so-year-old who is always attracted to groups and is almost always a bother. So I am kibitzing, if that word can be conjoined with mah-jongg, and the adults are semi-aware of my presence, at least at first. My mother apparently makes a mistake and spontaneously evalu- ates the situation: “Shit!” she exclaims. Well, Grandma visibly stiffens,
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