Category: life in USA
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…