Ogden Nash<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Yet Mom knew Dad subscribed to The New Yorker,<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Why did Dad get The New Yorker<\/i> back then? I would think it was that he loved to read and that good literature and good reportage fascinated him.<\/p>\n
Dad unlike Mom never said, but he likely would respond that he read The New Yorker<\/i> for the articles.<\/p>\n
That’s my Mother’s Day thought. -30-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-lessons"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":142,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/05\/leash-life\/","url_meta":{"origin":147,"position":0},"title":"Leash life","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"May 18, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Wednesday, May 18, 2005: Instead of speaking out of turn, here is a Brick. While sketching with some others in Gulley Park at twilight, a family approached: a mom, two boys and a dog tethered to one of the kids. Intelligent kids, you could tell.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":103,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/11\/a-perfect-day\/","url_meta":{"origin":147,"position":1},"title":"A perfect day","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"November 7, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Monday, November 7, 2005. Now I can understanding the irritating habit of young brides to have everything \"perfect\" on their wedding day, the heck with the confused groom and the beleaguered parents. Birthdays are like that. At least for me, every year I want my\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2389,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2010\/11\/begetting-books\/","url_meta":{"origin":147,"position":2},"title":"Begetting Books","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"November 4, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"It's been some three decades since I last watched them do it, and I can't quite replicate it. I wish I could multitask like my parents, who excelled at the feat before it had a name. There's one round of activities of theirs that I envy. They could read mysteries\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5001,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2014\/12\/ends-do-not-justify-mean\/","url_meta":{"origin":147,"position":3},"title":"Ends Do Not Justify Mean","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"December 7, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"This \"119\" fight in my hometown could've just offended me like the reasonable person I think I am. But it enrages, rekindling a pair of memories. While I support full nondiscrimination in my community and country, when proposed this summer Fayetteville Ordinance 5703 \/ Chapter 119 Civil Rights Administration fell\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Promotional sticker from the producers of Hair, circa 1971. The Pollock Archive.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hair-sticker-1000x2-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":101,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/11\/pinned-in-public\/","url_meta":{"origin":147,"position":4},"title":"Pinned in public","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"November 12, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Saturday, November 12, 2005. Two observations from a luncheon. OK, two and a half. This is long; sorry. It'd make a dandy underpinning of a story or play, and be clearer, but it's taken me a lot of years for one hour today to merge\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":45,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/01\/taking-or-accepting-responsibility\/","url_meta":{"origin":147,"position":5},"title":"Taking, or accepting, responsibility","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"January 28, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Friday, January 28, 2005: Recalling a dream is not where I want to go with Brick. But what the heck. It's a Brick. It doesn't go anywhere until heaved. That's Krazy Kat's downfall, he realizes just as he sees one heading toward him from Ignatz\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}