Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister? Read online

  “That very satisfying and dismaying crack is actually a miniature version of a sonic boom as the very tip of the whip—which is called the ‘cracker’ or the ‘popper’ and is actually a tuft of thread or string or nylon—moves faster than the speed of sound and actually breaks the sound barrier. The speed of sound in air is 760 miles per hour—which is Mach 1—so the very tip of the whip is actually going faster than Mach 1. Only whips with crackers or poppers make that sound. The whip is probably the first man-made object to actually break the sound barrier.”

  ME:“Do you use a whip on, like, a lot of your clients?”

  “My service is a telephone service.”

  “Oh. So would you use a whip so your clients can hear you use it on the phone?”

  “I would. I would use the whip on the phone because some people love to hear the whip. I was talking to a client and I started whipping a chair and pulled a muscle in my back and was out of commission at the gym for three weeks. I always tell women who work for me, if they don’t have a whip, that they can duplicate the whip crack by quickly clapping together blocks of wood.”

  “What kind of whip do you use?”

  “I will often use a dogsled whip. It is actually very beautiful. It is just a black whip, and it is used to control a team of dogs. It is perfect because it is not too long and it is thick enough so that it will sound ominous if it needs to sound ominous. I wouldn’t want to go out on the patio and be dealing with a really long whip or a bullwhip because it would put my shoulders right out of commission.”

  “If Jupiter is made of gas, do we have to drive all the way there to fill our car up?”

  —THEO RUSSELL, age three, Brooklyn, New York

  Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City:

  “Jupiter is indeed made of gas, but unfortunately, not the kind we would want to put in our cars. The word ‘gas’ that we find in ‘gas station’ is short for gasoline, just as ‘phone’ is short for telephone, and, of course, ‘Theo’ is short for Theodore. Gasoline is an energy-packed liquid that your car’s engine uses to get you from one place to another. The gas on Jupiter is real gas, like the air you breathe, except Jupiter’s gas is made of mostly hydrogen and helium. By the way, if you combine hydrogen and oxygen, you get rocket fuel. So not cars, but spaceships of the future may stop at Jupiter one day to refill their rockets.”

  “How far up can my balloon go before it pops?”

  —ELLIOT APPLEBAUM, age six, La Jolla, California

  Donald R. Pettit, astronaut, who spent five and a half months orbiting the Earth as the science officer on the International Space Station:

  “First off, it depends on what kind of a balloon—we have Mylar birthday balloons and we have the classic rubber birthday balloon, and the physics will be completely different. The Mylar balloon will have a constant volume as it goes up in the atmosphere because it is a rigid structure. The rubber balloon expands.

  “Take a Mylar balloon .8 meters in diameter. Its volume is a quarter of a cubic meter. You fill that with helium. Its density is going to be constant—it weighs what it weighs, its mass stays the same. Let’s make a guesstimate of 50 grams of helium, and the balloon weighs about 25 grams, and it’s got a volume of a quarter of a cubic meter, so now its density is fixed at 300 grams per cubic meter. At 13,500 meters—44,000 feet—the balloon would stop rising because the density outside is now equal to the density of the balloon. What would probably happen is it would stay up there for a few days, the helium would diffuse through the Mylar and it would slowly deflate, and it would start to come down. The Mylar balloon would have about 10 psi pressure across it and it could also rupture at a seam.

  “For the rubber balloon, I’m assuming zero-point-eight meters in diameter, a quarter of a cubic meter when filled, and it’s filled with helium. I’m assuming it has the same mass as our Mylar balloon, so it has the same density, 300 grams per cubic meter. Since this is a zero-pressure balloon, made out of rubber, it will expand in proportion to the decrease in atmospheric pressure. In concept, it could go up to real high altitudes; however, you are going to reach the structural limit of the rubber that makes the balloon and it is going to pop. I did a little research and I’m thinking the rubber balloon will probably pop at around 28,000 feet due to the rubber getting brittle from the ©40® Celsius temperatures and then rupturing as it tries to further expand. The highest you’ll find a commercial airliner, just to compare, is about 40,000 feet.”

  “Why are planets round?”

  —EVA LAFORGE, age five, New York City

  Preethi Pratap, Ph.D., astronomer, MIT Haystack Observatory, Westford, Massachusetts:

  “Planets are round because gravity pulls them together. Gravity exerts its force equally in all directions, so planets form a naturally round shape. But you have to have enough mass to have gravity. For example, asteroids are not round, they are all kinds of weird shapes. That’s because they are not big enough: they don’t have enough mass, and hence they don’t have enough gravity to pull it into that round shape. The three definitions of a planet are that it is round, that it orbits the sun and that it has cleared all things in its vicinity, that it has a clear orbit.”

  “Why do things look bigger when I get closer and smaller when I’m far away?”

  —LUNA GINSBERG, age three, Austin, Texas

  Joel Meyerowitz, award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in more than 350 exhibitions around the world, and whose books include Cape Light and Aftermath: The World Trade Center Archive:

  “When an object—your hand, your mother’s face or something big like an ocean liner—is close to your eye it appears to be big because it fills your vision, or what you could call your visual field. As your mother, who has just kissed you good night, stands up and walks out of the room, her face and then her body seem to get smaller and smaller.

  “There are two ways to understand this. The first is the physical reality of the object. Your mother’s face is ten inches high, and when her face and yours are next to each other you get the full impact of a ten-inch face; when she stands up and is three feet away from you, you can now see her face and half her body, and when she stands in the doorway you see a small face on a tall body. Her face is still ten inches high and if you went over to her with a ruler you would see that is true.

  “Then there is something called the ‘angular diameter,’ which is a way of measuring something from a fixed point (you in bed). As the object you are looking at moves further away, the angular diameter gets smaller. Do an experiment: put a soccer ball, or a book, or any object you like on a shelf and tape a piece of string on top and on the bottom, then bring the two equal pieces of string to a point in the middle of the room. Now you can see, and this is the second way to understand this problem, how the rays of light coming from the top and bottom of the ball are reaching your eye. Can you see how the space between the strings gets bigger as you get closer to the ball? That’s the angular diameter. Measure it at one-foot intervals and you will understand why things look smaller when they are further away.”

  When we are small, The Future holds considerable interest; little do we know how much bill-paying and commuting is involved. The very word suggests cars that fly, and colonies on the Moon, and a world without war or sickness—that, or a barren wasteland depopulated by plague or obliterated by thermonuclear weapons. Either way, it’s pretty interesting.

  Questions about The Future are hard to answer with any accuracy. Who really knows what’s going to happen? At best, they are guesses. But one kind of question about the future can indeed be answered with some certainty: questions that were asked by children years ago.

  Lisa and Bill are friends of ours; Bill and I worked together at my last newspaper. Lisa’s first husband, Philippe, was French. They had a son, Noel. Lisa wanted to name him Cassady, after Neal Cassady from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, but Philippe said “Non!” to that—he disliked all things American and didn�
�t speak English.

  Noel grew up in northern California; they moved there because Philippe, a street artist who made jewelry from horseshoe nails, thought business might be good in San Francisco. For whatever reason, and there seemed to be several likely ones, the marriage didn’t work out. Lisa and Philippe split, and Lisa raised Noel on her own. They moved around a lot as she went from a tiny newspaper to a small newspaper to a mediumsized newspaper, and she worried that all this moving around was taking a toll on her son; that, and the absence of his non-English-speaking father.

  When Noel was in sixth grade, he and Lisa lived in Freestone, on the Bohemian Highway, and he attended The Harmony School in Occidental. This was 1986. “It was the greatest address I ever had,” Lisa said.

  For a class project, Noel had to write his autobiography and put it in a little book with drawings. Lisa, who kept everything her son ever wrote or drew or made, flipped through it not too long ago and found a section marked “Futuristic Questions.”

  Will cats ever get extinct?

  I wonder if people will start installing escalators in their house?

  I wonder if the speed limit will ever be 95?

  I wonder if pizza will ever be hazardous?

  Twenty years later, the questions, and the singular imagination behind them, gave Lisa real insight into the mind of her eleven-year-old boy, now a father himself. “We were moving a lot,” she said. “I was having a really hard time keeping it together, and I think he developed this inner life.

  “He was so happy and so content in the book,” she said, “and it kind of amazes me that he found so much pleasure even though I thought our life was so stressful.”

  “Will cats ever get extinct?”

  —NOEL AMAND, age eleven, Occidental, California

  Ted Daeschler, Ph.D., paleontologist, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia:

  “Yes, because in the long view, everything goes extinct. If we look at the past, we see that evolution has helped animals change with their changing environments; however, there have always been extinctions. Not to freak people out, but judging by past performance, all animals in the form that we know them will go extinct and be replaced by something very similar or totally different; certainly the species that we have in our world today will not be here forever.”

  “I wonder if people will start installing escalators in their house?”

  Tom Saxe, Vice President for Worldwide Engineering, Otis Elevator Corp., East Hartford, Connecticut (the company also makes escalators):

  “I don’t think it will ever happen. Escalators are expensive to install, they have a lot of moving parts, they need a lot of energy, they make a lot of noise. There are the steps, a handrail that has to move, a large motor with a large gearbox that is used to drive it, the whole support structure, tracks for steps to ride on, a controller that you have to activate to start and stop it. An elevator just has the cabin and a counter weight, typically, and a motor with a pulley on it, so it is a very simple system. You see it much more, people installing elevators in their homes. The escalator is really designed for a lot of people, when you want everything to be somewhat opened so they can see, like in a mall.”

  “I wonder if the speed limit will ever be 95?”

  Ed Fischer, Oregon State traffic engineer (oversees speed limit setting for the state):

  “I don’t think ninety-five is realistic today; we would need a significant change in vehicles and roadways to make it safe. But if you’re optimistic about future possibilities, it is not impossible. In very limited and controlled applications it very well may be possible. There have been proposals for eighty-mile-per-hour limits in Arizona; and it wasn’t too many years ago that Montana proposed no speed limits at all in certain cases. I can imagine a futuristic application of vehicle control technologies on roadways that have been designed for one-hundred-mile-per-hour speeds where a very high speed limit might be possible. However, given the limitations of our highways, our vehicles and our drivers, I believe that the only places we could have speed limits greater than the design speed (usually seventy miles per hour for most rural interstate highways) would be on very long, flat and straight sections of interstate highway without a lot of traffic.”

  “I wonder if pizza will ever be hazardous?”

  Tony Muia, founder of A Slice of Brooklyn Pizza Tour, Brooklyn, New York:

  “Pizza is actually good for you. Take the tomato sauce. Lycopene, which occurs naturally in tomatoes, is an anticarcinogen. Studies have shown that intake of tomatoes and tomato-based products is related to elevated blood lycopene levels and a lower risk of a variety of cancers. As for the mozzarella, how bad can it be? It’s got your milk, it’s got your protein. Sounds good to me. And as for the crust, you got your wheat, your gluten. Still sounds good to me. You could probably go with a whole wheat crust, which would actually be a bit healthier, but then I don’t think that’s real pizza.

  “Now don’t get me wrong, pizza has not been healthy for some people. In 1989, in St. Louis, a Domino’s pizza delivery driver ran a red light and struck a car driven by forty-nine-year-old Jean Kinder, who suffered injuries to her head and spine. That’s when Domino’s did away with its delivery-in-thirty-minutes-or-you-receive-the-pie-for-free policy. In the early nineties, at Original Pizza in Brooklyn, three men got into an argument with a pizza maker. They blinded him by throwing flour in his face, then shot him in the head. The pizza maker fought back with a wooden pizza paddle, but was pronounced dead at the scene.

  “Then there’s Lucchese mobster Ralph (Raffie) Cuomo, who founded the original Ray’s Pizza in New York City in 1959 and went to prison for using his landmark Prince Street pizzeria to sell heroin along with pies. He and about thirty others were part of the ‘Pizza Connection case,’ in which the men were charged with running a heroin ring from several pizza shops. But you didn’t hear that from me. As we like to say in Brooklyn, there are three secrets to living a long, healthy life: you don’t see nothin’, you don’t hear nothin’ and you don’t know nothin’!”

  3.

  That’s Gotta Hurt

  Warm blood, watery eyeballs, icky substances that come out of their noses and ears: children are obsessed with their bodies, their first true possessions. They wonder what’s beneath their skin, and why their skin is the color it is. They are especially intrigued by the changes that take place for mysterious reasons, like wrinkles that develop in water, and why they have items growing on their bodies that don’t seem to have any immediate value, like the hair on their head or above their eyes. Their bodies are a great bottomless well of questions.

  They are also entranced by the concept of pain—experiencing it, causing it, understanding it, watching someone else suffer from it. All the objects of the world are lined up in their heads in the order of how much pain they would cause if thrown from a truck or dropped from a cliff. The body is a target waiting to be carved up, flattened or smashed. You are asked to recount various painful episodes of your life, especially those that left scars:

  “Did it hurt when the doctor took out your…what was it?”

  “My appendix.”

  “Yes, did it hurt?”

  “Well, I was asleep.”

  “Whew. That’s lucky.”

  Pain need not be fatal to be engaging to a child: while it has got to hurt to be consumed by lava, or attacked by a shark—which, we have learned in our nighttime reading, tends to take only one bite out of you before swimming away—minor pain like the burning of eyes by shampoo or the stinging of a bee also fascinates, at least after the screaming has stopped. Dean may be a sophisticated child of the millennium, but he laughs just as hard as his great-grandfather must have when the Three Stooges beat the crap out of each other, even though he claims not to like black-and-white movies.

  Look at the paper cut. This phenomenon holds a special place in the hearts of children, and it’s easy to understand why: it’s truly remarkable that something so flimsy and malleable possesses the power to
lash out and make you bleed.

  Dean and I were on a train once—we were going to Chicago to see the T-rex named Sue at the Field Museum—when he suddenly put down the book he was looking at. “Daddy—I got a paper cut!” He held his finger up proudly. I leaned close. I squinted. And there, on his finger—I think—was a tiny smudge of red, quite possibly the smallest paper cut in recorded history. Either that or it was a piece of lint.

  I wondered if I should pull the emergency brake.

  It makes sense that children are entranced by the concept of pain because they cause an awful lot of it when they get here. Or so I have been told. Helene reminds me of this from time to time. “Childbirth is like being turned inside out,” she’ll say. I try to imagine this, but all I really have to do is close my eyes and think back to the scene of the crime.

  She’d been in labor for nearly three hours that November morning, the sky and the river still dark outside the window. We were in the brand-new obstetrics ward of New York Hospital. Our room had wood paneling and a big television on which the film Sabrina, starring William Holden, Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn, was playing. The nurse and I were trying to enjoy it, but Helene kept interrupting for more ice chips. Also, the wails of women giving birth in other rooms drowned out key bits of dialogue.

  I was being careful to remember everything that I saw, everything I heard, because I know children ask about the details of their birth when they are older. I was also born in New York Hospital, in May 1966, just a few years before it became standard for fathers to be let into the delivery room. My mother doesn’t remember much about it except the time (10:15 p.m.) and that my father brought her a roast beef sandwich with Russian dressing and a beer after I was born, and it was one of the best things she’d ever tasted.