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

  “Why is the road always wet in car commercials?”

  —DEAN, after watching one

  Jim Lesser, executive creative director, BBDO West, the advertising agency for Mitsubishi Motors:

  “The automotive industry is constantly on the lookout for ways to make cars look better on film, and one of the things you always have to contend with is that, in the daylight, concrete and asphalt look very gray and flat. So what you do is wet down the pavement, and as a result the pavement gets much more black, and it allows the car to pop off of it in photographs. When you shoot a car commercial, you actually have at least one large water truck to spray down the road. It looks like a street sweeper but it is a water tanker, and it has these little spray nozzles, and it wets the road. You then roll film and drive down the street, and it looks better. It is similar in movies: you’ve got to create a distinct look and make the place look somehow magical. There is a film called Black Rain with Michael Douglas. There are a lot of rain-slicked streets at night, and the purpose is to add mystery and depth and moodiness to the environment. With a car commercial, you are also trying to add moodiness and emotion, because we’ve all watched cars driving down the street every day of our lives and it’s not all that exciting in real life.”

  “Why is red for stop and green for go?”

  —WYATT HARTE, age three, Brooklyn, New York

  Carl Andersen, manager of the Federal Highway Administration’s Arens Photometric and Visibility Lab, Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center, McLean, Virginia:

  “Robert Stevenson, who was very active in the British lighthouse service, was looking for an alternative color to white—most lighthouses had a white beacon—because he was building a lighthouse near to one that already existed, and he was afraid that ships wouldn’t be able to tell which lighthouse they were looking at. Of the light sources and colored glasses available at the time, he found that red was the next most intense light—that was the color that would be seen from the greatest distance. So red was adopted in maritime signaling as an alternative to white lights, and was later adopted by the British Admiralty in 1852 for the port-side running light on steam vessels.

  “A vessel observing that red light at night on another ship had to yield right-of-way to that ship. Green was adopted for the starboard-side running light: vessels seeing the green light on other ships had the right-of-way. When railroads were developed, engineers adopted this existing system as meaning stop and go. Then as motor vehicles began to appear, engineers adopted railroad signaling. And in 1914 Cleveland installed the first red and green traffic control light. It had nothing to do with a perceived cultural reason. It just happened to be, with the technology at the time, the light sources at the time, and the glasses, that red provided the next best available light to white.”

  Children zero in on contradictions. Boys may be attracted to things with wheels, but it took a girl to notice an interesting fact about New York State driving laws: a child must be strapped into a booster seat in the family car until age seven, but not while riding in the back of a yellow school bus.

  “How come you don’t have to use a car seat in a school bus?”

  —LUCY BARRY, age six, Purdys, New York

  Nancy A. Naples, commissioner, New York State Department of Motor Vehicles:

  “Children under four years of age have to use car seats on a school bus. In 1987, the New York State Legislature passed a law that requires companies that build large school buses to install seat belts for each seat. The law says that all of your friends that ride with you on the bus, and your bus driver, too, have to wear seat belts. When you get on the bus, remember to put your seat belt on and wear it until the school bus comes to a full stop.”

  I appreciate Commissioner Naples taking the time to respond to little Lucy’s query, I really do. But like many public officials or employees of major corporations who would only answer via e-mail, there is a certain blandness in her reply, as though it had been created by a committee. Also, I must point out, she didn’t answer the question. So I went elsewhere.

  Michael Butler, regional president, Automobile Club of New York:

  “One-word answer: compartmentalization. The backs of school bus seats are high. The child can only go so far forward and backward in an accident. If they go back, the back of the seat will protect their head against whiplash. If they go forward, then they are going to have the same effect because of the seat in front of them. They can’t go too far forward. Most buses today have to be equipped with a seat belt lap belt, which protects the pelvic area and keeps their butts to the break of the seat, which is where the bottom of the seat meets the back of the seat. In some instances in special-needs buses, they do have child seats for additional protection, but that’s in a specialized situation, where there might be handicapped children. The typical accident in a bus would not involve a rollover; it would be a low-speed crash, and a lap belt is sufficient protection with compartmentalization because everything is soft all around the child. When I was riding a yellow school bus, the seat came up to the middle of your back and that was it.”

  “How many bullets does a machine gun shoot?”

  —JOE ROSEN, age five, Montclair, New Jersey

  Gunnery Sergeant William E. “Gunny” Bodette, Jr., Second Marine Division, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina:

  “The M240G machine gun, the preferred machine gun for the Marine infantry, can fire 650 to 950 rounds per minute. It’s called the cyclic rate. We’ve got 50-caliber machine guns that can fire 450 to 550 rounds per minute. We also have another machine gun that is called the M249 SAW—squad automatic weapon—and that can fire 725 rounds per minute. Those are the basic machine guns that the Marine infantry uses. The only drawback to carrying a machine gun now is the weight of some of them. The machine guns that we use now are extremely accurate and they really do bad things to bad people. All Marines are cross-trained on how to use a machine gun. The standard issue for most Marines is an M16. That fires a three-round burst. They used to fire fully automatic, but we were wasting too many rounds to kill one enemy.”

  “Why do clouds make shapes?”

  —JIO KAMATA, age six, while looking out the car window at clouds on the way home from school in Aizumi, Tokushima

  Prefecture, Shikoku, Japan

  Gavin Pretor-Pinney, author and founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society, based in London, which has five hundred members in thirty-nine countries:

  “Meteorologists divide the infinite varieties of cloud formations into ten basic types. Not all of them make shapes—some are just too blurry and indistinct to have any clear edges to them. But the ones that are best at it are the sharp-edged ‘cumulus’ clouds, which are the fluffy cotton-wool tufts you see on a sunny day. Cumulus often look like elephants. This is because these clouds can develop vertical towers, borne on rising columns of air called thermals. As the cloud reaches the ripe old age of ten minutes or so, its droplets can start to evaporate away at the sides, leaving a central trunk that curls upwards as it is blown along in the wind and looks like the trunk of an elephant. This might be why ancient Hindus and Buddhists believed elephants to be the spiritual cousins of clouds.”

  “Where does wind come from?”

  —STEPHEN DINISO, age ten, Floral Park, New York, on a windy afternoon

  Jeff Warner, meteorologist, Penn State University, State College, Pennsylvania:

  “The Earth, because it is a globe, heats unevenly; it does not heat the same at the equator as it does at the poles. That leads to the formation of zones of high and low pressure. At the ground, then, that difference in air pressure causes the air to start moving. Air has properties of a fluid, like water, and much like water wants to flow downhill, from high to low, air wants to do the same. So where there are areas of high pressure—meaning lots of air—air wants to flow from that zone of high pressure to a zone of low pressure, where there is less air or less weight of air. That starts the wind flowing. That motion of air at the surface is what you f
eel as wind. There are other things that happen that cause it to blow in certain directions—like the Coriolis effect, an apparent deflection to the right, in the northern hemisphere, of things that are moving above the ground that are not in contact with the Earth—but the main reason for the wind is the movement of air from high to low pressure, which is called the Pressure Gradient Force.”

  “Is a rainbow hot or cold?”

  —EDIE STURMAN, age four, Los Angeles, California

  Bryan Busby, chief meteorologist, KMBC-TV News, Kansas City, Missouri:

  “I can see why the question comes up, since the colors in a rainbow cover the entire spectrum—from shades of ‘red hot’ to ‘ice cold’ violet. Remember the seven colors in order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Take the initials from these hues, and it throws you back to your elementary school art class teacher’s method for remembering the sequence—ROY G. BIV.

  “Rainbows are caused by the sunlight reflecting off individual smaller cloud droplets—leftovers, if you will, after the rain. Each one of those droplets acts like a tiny prism, and breaks up the sunlight into the visible spectrum of color. In general terms, since a rainbow usually forms after the rain, and usually a rain cools the surrounding atmosphere, a rainbow would be cool to the touch, if you could grasp it in your hands.”

  “Does water have symmetry?”

  —BRONWYN SELL, age six, Brookline, Massachusetts

  Rebecca Campbell, artist, Los Angeles, California, whose paintings include numerous images of water, whether in a swimming pool or a black stream in wintertime:

  “Yes and no, because one of the primary qualities of light and of water is that they act as mirrors of whatever their context is. Water in a lake is giant and vast and solid, almost, and water running down your body after a shower is fractured and moving and small. So in terms of symmetry I think of water as a reflection of whatever it is doing at the moment. A drop falling off the end of your nose is symmetrical: it reflects its environment and the journey it’s taken; it has gathered itself into this droplet. The water around a person who has just fallen into water, and has dislocated water, is completely asymmetrical. In some ways, water is whatever you ask of it.”

  There are lots of jokes about why a ship is called a “she,” most of them sexist, like this poem I’ve seen variations of above the urinals of nautical-theme restaurants and next to the bottles in nautical-theme bars:

  We always call a ship a “she” and not without a reason,

  For she displays a well-shaped knee regardless of the season.

  She scorns the man whose heart is faint and doesn’t show him pity,

  And like a girl she needs the paint to keep her looking pretty.

  I asked Robin Woodhall, a former captain of the Queen Elizabeth 2, and he piled even more variations on this theme, including: “When going into port she always heads for the buoys. She shows her topsides, and hides her bottom.”

  Finally, one of his successors took me seriously.

  “Why are ships ‘she’?”

  —CLAIRE CURRAN, age five, Baldwin, New York

  Captain Christopher Rynd, master of the Queen Mary 2, anchored off Cannes on the French Riviera:

  “The old tradition is thought to stem from the Romance languages’ word for ‘ship,’ which was always referenced in the feminine. For this reason, Mediterranean sailors always referred to their ship as ‘she,’ and the practice was adopted over the centuries by their English-speaking counterparts.”

  5.

  Dean and the City

  Having a son of my own made me wonder how my parents dealt with the challenges Helene and I faced now, and with my first questions. My parents were twenty-six; Helene and I were in our early thirties when we had Dean. They went out to a fancy French dinner a few nights after I was born; we got out for a quick drink a week after Dean got home, but all we could do was sit and stare at each other in exhausted, slack-jawed misery as our friends asked us what was it like, what was it really like, to have a baby?

  Dean had tortured us in his first season. I was certain I had been a better baby. I asked my mother about this.

  “You screamed for three months,” she said.

  I don’t remember screaming. What do we remember from our first few years? Just a few disjointed images, some vague feelings and some surprisingly sharp snapshots.

  Photo courtesy Walter Jamieson, Jr.

  I am four, it is spring, and the trees are just filling out. The cars are huge. I’m listening to the Beatles on bulky metal headphones, a record next to me spinning beneath a needle. A pretty babysitter with short brown hair is standing next to a tall piece of furniture with a mirror in it. I’m riding in a seat with folding red metal handles on the back of my dad’s bicycle, and we’re cruising through a park. It is summer, and the trees are full. I’m walking next to a river with my mother, the stones in the pavement little hexagons beneath my feet, the rungs of the black iron railing curving above me. I’m in our apartment: I smell perfume—Chanel No. 5—as my parents get dressed to go out, the light golden on the dark wood floors.

  I’m standing on the sidewalk with my father leaning down toward me and talking.

  Here is what he’s saying:

  “Wen, stick your tongue out.”

  “Why?”

  “Just stick it out.”

  “Why?”

  “Just stick it out.”

  So I do.

  From out of nowhere he produces a piece of dry tissue paper. He wipes it against my tongue, and then furiously scrubs my face with it. He has done this many times before, but I’m still surprised. It makes me want to gag, this feeling of rough paper against my tongue, but it’s soon forgotten as I experience the even more troubling sensation of having my own saliva used as a cleaning agent on my skin.

  Then he lets me go back to what I’m doing, which is watching a crane.

  Cranes were everywhere: the neighborhood of low-lying row houses where we lived in Manhattan was being knocked down, replaced by towering apartment buildings. Spindly towers of steel lattice slanted this way and that, lifting the city upward, and temporary wooden walls—in my memory they are yellow—lined the sidewalks, blocking the views of the vast dirt quarries that would soon be the basements of new buildings. My father would lift me up so I could see through the diamond-shaped holes created for the express purpose of giving little boys a peek at the mysterious world of dump trucks, bulldozers and backhoes rumbling up impossible inclines and spewing exhaust, and the nascent cranes just beginning their ascents.

  We moved to Brooklyn from crane-land after my sister was born. This wasn’t like going to the suburbs, where there was space and trees and lawns, but to another part of the same city where you could afford a house with lots of room because the neighborhood was dangerous.

  Park Slope was run-down, but the houses were big and filled with elaborate woodwork and beautiful raised details in the plaster. My dad took me there on the weekends before we moved; I’d watch in awe as he’d knock down flimsy plasterboard walls with a sledgehammer and send squadrons of cockroaches scattering through the cloud of dust. On the big day, we drove that blue Volkswagen station wagon over the bridge with a round wooden table strapped to the top.

  Here was one of the great sights for a crane-loving boy: off to the right rose the first tower of the World Trade Center, and atop it, four giant cranes. Whenever we crossed the bridge, I checked its progress. Up it went, and I wondered: How would they get the cranes down when they got them to the top of the new buildings, the tallest in the world?

  Any New Yorker who was little when the World Trade Center was being built should remember seeing it grow, and the mixture of wonder and alarm it conjured. I used to puzzle about getting those cranes down, but also something else—the buildings were so high, could a plane hit them? My father reassured me that the towers were lit up at night to warn the planes away, the broadcasting tower on top had a blinking red light and, anyway, airplanes carried rad
ar. Still, I remember a frisson of worry every time I saw them, first one and then the other, climbing a little higher and pushing those cranes farther toward the clouds.

  When the buildings opened, we went to dinner at the restaurant on the top. We were so high up, the people on the streets weren’t even ants. There were no people. There were no streets. The tables were on different levels, with brass railings between them, descending toward the windows, every one with a view.

  That was an exciting night: we were tourists in our own city.

  Little lights of humanity burned below us in buildings that rose from the earth like geometric stalagmites and in houses spread over the flatness rolling to the horizon. Rayleigh Scattering turned the edges of the sky pink and then red, tinting the railing next to our table and the white tablecloth. Then it was dark and it was like we were above a constellation of stars. It seemed at once reasonable and absurd that we were sitting so high up, nearly in the clouds, and that everyone else was down there.

  The place where you grow up has a lot to do with who you are, and it holds a certain fascination for the rest of your life. I asked questions about New York City when I was little, and still do now. Would I be a different person if I’d grown up someplace else? Would I be more patient, or relaxed, or would the calm that I sense in many other places have calmed me to the point where I would cease to be the person I am? If I expressed my emotions in a foreign language, or even another accent, would they be the same emotions?