Brick

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pollock

Sun­day, May 8, 2005: An ode to Mother’s Day. It’s the first one since Mom passed last November.

I’ve started read­ing a new, and per­haps the only so far, full biog­ra­phy of Ogden Nash. Here is a lede that won’t work in my even­tual news­pa­per review of it: It’s more about me. So it goes here and not there.

My mom and dad noticed one another at Fort Smith High School in the late 1930s. Yet, they never really got together for well over a decade, mar­ry­ing in 1954.

For one thing, Dad was drafted and went over­seas for World War II. For another, Mom mar­ried a Cincin­nati boy she met at col­lege and had two chil­dren by him (he served state­side). Such things kept Mom and Dad apart for years.

Yet Mom knew Dad sub­scribed to The New Yorker, which he had sent to his posts in cen­tral Asia, back home in Fort Smith, then dur­ing the Korean Con­flict to his apart­ment in Wash­ing­ton and finally to Fort Smith for the rest of his life, to 1985.

So Mom sub­scribed to the weekly, too. She felt she con­nected with him sur­rep­ti­tiously this way, read­ing what he was read­ing, think­ing what he was think­ing, at about the same time as well.

So together-but-apart they read Alexan­der Wooll­cott and Wol­cott Gibbs, Thurber and White, enjoyed car­toons of Arno and Addams, the sto­ries of John Cheever, the jour­nal­ism of John Hersey and, always, Ogden Nash. That’s what Mom would say, and did say: This was her rec­ol­lec­tion of this part of their romance.

Why did Dad get The New Yorker back then? I would think it was that he loved to read and that good lit­er­a­ture and good reportage fas­ci­nated him.

Dad unlike Mom never said, but he likely would respond that he read The New Yorker for the articles.

That’s my Mother’s Day thought. –30–