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Why (as in yaverbaum)
because it was reminiscent of the Lionel trains that my dad had bought for me, HO scale (half the scale of O), because it had the most commer- cially available equipment and lent itself best to the making of realistic scenery, and N scale, to create forced perspective but mostly because I could then say that I had built my railroad in three scales.
With Kathy’s encouragement, I capped off a tradition that must have emanated from my mother’s professional photographer father, Harry Caplan (the Harry after whom, according to my mother, due to a conspiracy of “the Yaverbaums,” I was not named). Over the years, the “tradition” had worked its way from my first camera, a Brownie 127, which I recall using to immortalize a polar bear when my grandmother took me to the zoo, through (in order) a Polaroid instant camera, which I received from the owner of Camp Anawana for having somehow sur- vived the rigors of my bar mitzvah and its attendant celebration; a Minolta SR-T 101, my first single-lens reflex, with which I took my earliest pictures of Danny, Peter, and Rachel; and a Nikkormat and a succession of other Nikon film and slide cameras, which increased in complexity and cost as Danny, Peter, and Rachel also increased in com- plexity and cost. The tradition had been capped off, I thought, with a Hasselblad, my first medium-format camera, a very expensive instru- ment. But the Hasselblad, which took unbelievable film and slide pictures, managed to get itself stolen when we finally moved to Roxbury. So Kathy talked me into replacing the purloined Hassy and buying for myself, as a “retirement gift,” a medium-format digital Leica, which is the best camera that I have ever held.
While we lived at 180 West End Avenue, we were city dwellers who enjoyed nearby Central Park; contended with Food Emporium, Fairway, Zabar’s, and H&H Bagels; ate takeout food; dined out frequently; enjoyed the Met and the Philharmonic; and did a lot of traveling (pri- marily in Europe and Africa), with the last trip in that period being a cruise! I confess, taking a cruise, which we had never done before (I don’t count as a cruise our necessary stay on a ship as we visited the Galápa- gos), is just something that I could not conceive of doing. First of all, it was something that old people wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and being
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