Category: life in USA
Foreign Tongues
Part I When my public school introduced me to French, in 1960-something, I discovered a French-language broadcast from Montreal. Radio, then, was still mostly AM—Amplitude Modulated—and FM, Frequency Modulated, was in its commercial infancy; the radios in our house didn’t have it. When FM did debut on the newer radios over the next four or…
The Price is Weird
Part III If there was some time you could go back to, what would it be? My friends and I sometimes kicked this question around, before we had families and on occasion after that event. It’s been a long time since any of those occasions. I suppose that gradually our attentions were simply captured by…
The Price is Weird
Part II In his 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” author Thomas Piketty observes a curious phenomenon about prices: Throughout the 1800’s, novels reported the incomes of their main characters—servants and peasants, not so much—as a way of benchmarking their social positions. Incomes also revealed something of family history for the gentry, because people…
The Price is Weird
Part I ITEM: My family settled into a house in the 1950’s that featured three bedrooms, French doors with lead-glass panes separating dining from the first living room, a second living room, and electric sconces around both. It had a semi-finished attic, a garage, and a tiny back yard. I don’t know what the down…
Daddy
We lived in a half-duplex in West Hazleton, Pennsylvania until early February 1954. I think a large object in the cellar was a coal furnace, but our heat came from the kitchen cast-iron coal stove, and something called a “heat-o-lator” in the living room, which was some kind of coal firebox with a protective sheet…