Point of View: The Best Thing

A recent visitor to this office remarked on my books. “There’s everything you should read,” he said as I preened.

Actually, it’s everything I should have read long ago, in my bright college years, but forwent in favor of playing sports each season — soccer, squash, ice hockey, lacrosse — and serving up greasy hamburgers at my snack bar, known as “Gravy’s,” in the basement of Saybrook College.

In one of my ads, posted outside the college’s paneled dining room, I drew myself as Jesus feeding the 5,000, and urged the masses to “Go Gravy’s.”

I was a callow and feckless youth, and, as I saw yesterday in thumbing through an old photo album upstairs, which we are to have painted this week, an unsmiling infant with an odd, uncomprehending look. In all the photos of babies I see these days — my grandchildren among them — all are smiling, smiling broadly. My mother said I ran at 9 months, and that fact, the fact that I was often on the go, may have had something to do with it. Once, she said, she found me at the bottom of the hill atop which our house sat, sitting in the middle of Bennington’s Main Street. Presumably there wasn’t much traffic, it being wartime.

These photos, taken with a Brownie, I suppose, are fading now, and in some cases vanishing. There we are at McGuffy’s nursery school, the pugnacious Georgie Turner eyeing me sideways as I’m looking placidly straight ahead. My father assured me I’d put an end to his bullying about which I complained if once, just once, I’d hit him in the nose with all the force I could muster. 

“Papa! Papa! I did what you said: I hit Georgie Turner as hard as I could in the nose and he’s not bothering me anymore!” I wonder, Georgie, if you’re still alive, and, if so, how life has treated you. . . .

There we are in front of 25 Claremont Avenue in New York City bundled up in the blizzard of ’47. I’m holding Peter Puppy across my chest. He’s snow-covered and sighing, but putting up with it. There’s Puddy, Willie Dobbie, Ingrid. . . . I’ve begun to smile. . . . 

My cousin Margot is sitting regally in a chair, age 3 or so. Her mother, my aunt Mary, used to call her “Madam Queen,” and you can see why. She never had a problem smiling, and she, a breeder of black Labs on the Eastern Shore, and a motorcyclist and sailor as well, is still smiling. And laughing. And very loudly too. 

Which is the best, the absolutely best thing you can do.