The Moth (21 page)

And I write back, “Lots of love, obviously.”

And he writes back, “No, Dad. It means ‘laughing out loud’!”

“No it doesn’t.”

“Yes it does, Dad.”

And, of course, it does. It’s all it means.

Well, I was miserable. Not only had I been totally misunderstanding the degree of ridicule that Luke had been shooting at me for six months, but I was going to have to repeal six months’ worth of “LOL.” I was going to have to go through every single person I’d sent an instant message to and apologize for having made fun of them in the midst of their suffering. And I thought to myself,
This is the real nature of every communication
between parent and child. We send them lots of love, they laugh out loud at us, and we don’t even know they’re doing it.
We stopped instant messaging each other.

And then a couple of months later, Luke and I went off on a trip together. And my computer broke, and I had to send something in to work, so I said to Luke, “Luke, can I use your computer?” And he said OK.

“Well, just give me your password so I can get on.”

He said, “Eh! I don’t want to give you my password.”

I said, “Luke, why don’t you want to?”

He said, “Well,
you
give me
your
password.”

“Well, my password is you—Luke94. Your name and the year you were born.”

He said, “Really?”

I said, “Yeah. So tell me, what’s your password?”

And he said, “It’s, uh, Montreal Puck.” It wasn’t exactly “Dad,” but it was pretty close; it was something that we had shared, and that secretly he had encoded as his way out into the world. It was as though he were packing his suitcase, but he was packing it with something that I had given him.

And from that night on, when we got back to New York, we started IM’ing each other again. And every time we would, we would include it—LOL. Because here’s the thing that I think is true, what I’ve learned, and that is that through all of those months when Luke was laughing out loud at me, and I didn’t even know it, he never thought there was something strange about our miscommunication. He never stopped to think that there was something wrong about the way that I was using LOL. Because, if you think about it, there are very few times in life when saying “I’m laughing out loud in your presence” and saying “I love you a lot” aren’t really close enough to count.
They’re not exactly the same—if they were we would never grieve when someone we loved died. But in most of the exchanges that we have, between ourselves and our children, saying “I’m laughing” and saying “I love you” are a reasonable hit, a near miss, good enough to carry on with.

And so now every night, the last thing we do, me from my bedroom and Luke from his, is to send each other an instant message, and we always end it “LOL.”

“LOL, Dad!”

“LOL, Luke!”

And it doesn’t matter what it means. It means laughter or love, or whatever it might mean at that moment to us.

Adam Gopnik
has been a writer for
The New Yorker
since 1986. He is the author of the essay collections
Paris to the Moon
and
Through the Children’s Gate,
both of which include many of his pieces from the magazine, and also two children’s novels,
The King in the Window
and
The Steps Across the Water.
His other works include
Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
and
The Table Comes First: On Family, France, and the Meaning of Food.

MARVIN GELFAND

M
y story goes back sixty-two years, to the autumn of 1940. I won’t fill in the blitz and Wendell Willkie running against FDR for the third term. The story, such as it is, took place in a sprawling borough by the sea, Brooklyn, in a neighborhood tucked into the northwest corner on the East River, known as Williams
boig
, to distinguish it from Williamsburg, the colonial restoration.

My parents were very late immigrants to the United States. My mother came with nine siblings in 1930. My father had come in the 1920s, it seemed—that side of the family never disclosed much. I have a feeling he did something infamous, because World War I was involved, and the borders changed, and then there was the Russian Civil War and Lenin attacked the Poles, and you know, God it was terrible. Who knows what people did to survive?

But he never told stories like Herbie Kleinman’s father, who was a baker with a baker’s great belly. You know, “I sewed jewels into my underwear and snuck out of Odessa!”

So they married and settled in Williamsburg, where my
mother’s family lived, where the Satmar live now, the very pious Jews. My family was not pious in that energetic way.

We lived in the part of Brooklyn that had row houses, not
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Williamsburg—Betty Smith’s Irish tenement Williamsburg—but a row house that had been lived in by the Brooklyn bourgeoisie. It had been broken up into not floor-through apartments, but half floor-through, and we lived in a succession of them.

I was overprotected. I was treated as if my parents had had a child before I came along… and that child had died.

My parents had come here as much out of fear of what had happened as what
was
happening, and what was
likely
to happen in Europe. They escaped the worst of it, but there was a mixture of hope to be sure. America was called
the Golden Medina
, and there were so many great success stories: David Sarnoff, Eddie Cantor, you know, I could run the list now.

But their fears were great. My father worked terribly hard—left early, came home late, I hardly ever saw him. He went along with my mother, who said, “No bicycle for him.” We could afford it. We had boarders who helped pay the rent, like Mr. Lichtenstein, who was a retired watchmaker. So it wasn’t the money.

But a bicycle? “You could fall!”

Roller skates? Well the hills in Williamsburg weren’t great, but there was an incline, and “You’d lose control and you’d be on Bedford Avenue and those buses…”

And playing marbles in the gutter, that wasn’t dangerous, but I’d be amongst the common ruffians. My parents were not educated, they were not rabbis, but they had a sense of themselves. I can’t think of the proper Yiddish word—doesn’t matter. You lived a fine and dignified life. And most of the people
around us were noisy and sat outside on the stoops in their undershirts. So I couldn’t do those things.

As it turned out, I loved school. And though I was not the master of the streets, the second day I went to PS 122, I came home and said, “I will walk to school by myself.” Four blocks, two avenues, past the big armory to PS 122.

Going to school and coming back, the streets teemed with activity. Laundry delivered, big electric-driven trucks with chain drives, the bakeries, Dugan’s delivering rolls, the milk from Sheffield Farms on Heyward Street. I even remember horse-drawn carts. The Italian vegetable and fruit man came with an old nag, who was just two steps this side of the glue factory.

And then there were so many other people. There were street singers, and I remember the cutler, who ground knives. He would come peddling with a big stone wheel in front of him and a bell. He’d get to the middle of the block and hit the bell. All the mammas knew what the bell meant, and they came scurrying out of the houses with their aprons wrapped around scissors, knives, and the funny little chopping things that they used for “soul food”—chopped liver. You could hear the whirring, the screeching noise, and see the sparks as the stone whetted the metal.

So the streets were safe and full. Still, no bicycle. No roller skates. No scooter made of a stolen box, attached to old roller skates.

But the thing I craved most, because I loved books and reading, was a library card. The boarder taught me Hebrew when I was about two. I puzzled out the Yiddish paper once I figured out you read it from back to front. And we didn’t have much English in the house, but there were ketchup bottles.

I knew that the books were in this big, very elegant building with red brick, limestone, and marble, just a few blocks away,
near Eastern District High School and the YMCA, the civic center of that part of Williamsburg.

But I couldn’t get my mother to walk me over and get the library card, ’cause anything involving public institutions reminded her of Brest-Litovsk in Poland, where every uniform meant danger, including the police, and every public office meant procrastination and insult and bribery and curses and humiliation. And of course walking that way also took you to the elevated train on Broadway—just a couple of blocks more—that took the men like my father across the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan to work, as many of them did, in the garment center. My father was a furrier.

So two things frightened her: the men’s world and the public world. And she wouldn’t do it.

But I came home from school one day, and I had the ultimate weapon:

“Teacher says.”

I listened to the teacher.

I said, “Mom, teacher says to get a library card.”

For some reason you had to show a gas bill. I guess they thought maybe you could forge rental receipts, and maybe electricity was not as widespread as I thought. Or maybe it was democratic—somebody who owned a house paid a gas bill as well as someone who rented. I don’t know.

But we took the gas bill over and found the appropriate desk. You had to be able to write your name or print it, and I was frightened because I never had the Spencerian copperplate hand that of course all the girls picked up. But with my tongue sticking out in concentration, I wrote my name, showed the gas bill, and got a temporary library card. Thirty days later, the permanent card came.

I don’t think I took out picture books. Because words were what I was interested in, and I would list them, and go over to the big dictionary and schlep the pages over, you know, looking for words.

My parents, in silent partnership with this great republic in which they had the most tenacious toehold, insecure in language and so much of American ways, had gotten me, in that unlaminated card, my ticket out of ghetto-mindedness. Unknowingly, somewhat unwillingly, they had given me a chance to satisfy my curiosity, such a powerful instinct for a lonely, lost, and rather sullen child.

And with it, in time, after Doctor Dolittle and the boys’ editions of Kipling and Stevenson and Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and, of course, Mark Twain—I haunted libraries—it was Dickens and Orwell and de Tocqueville. So that in time, and I’m proud of this, I’d achieved an
independence of mind
. And thanks to my humble self-extinguishing parents, enough of the
independence of spirit
that has to sustain independence of mind.

A line of poetry, which I’m not much given to, came to me. It’s a line of Shelley’s, and I think my parents would have loved it:

To hope and hope and hope till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

They did. We must.

Marvin Gelfand
was a longtime New Yorker, born in Brooklyn. A product of the public schools of the city and the state of New York, he taught economics at the university level, was a literary editor at
The Washington Post,
freelanced as a book reviewer, and wrote speeches and orated for many, many worthy losing candidates. For years he lectured, consulted, and led walking tours about the history of the city of New York. He died in 2011, and we miss him.

PAUL NURSE

I
’m a geneticist. I study how chromosomes are inherited in dividing cells. But my story tonight will have more to do with my own genetics.

I’m English. I was brought up in the 1950s and 1960s in London. My family wasn’t very rich. I had two brothers and a sister. My dad was a blue-collar worker. My mum was a cleaner. My siblings all left school at fifteen.

I was different. I did quite well at school, and I passed exams, and I somehow got into university, got a scholarship, and then did a Ph.D.

I wondered,
Why am I different to the rest of my family? Why did they all leave school at fifteen?
And I didn’t really have much of an answer, but I felt a bit unsettled about that. I wondered about it occasionally. But I carried on with my life. I got a job in a university. I got married. I had two children, Emily and Sarah. And, you know, just got on with things.

Then my parents, who were living in London, retired to the country, and we used to visit them regularly; but the truth was it was a bit boring, you know? They lived in the middle of nowhere. Nothing much happened there, and my kids got a bit bored. One day when we were visiting, Sarah, my eleven-year-old, had a project at school. And the project was family trees.

I said, “I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you talk to Grandma about her family tree?”

So we got there, we had dinner, and then off Sarah trotted with her grandma to talk about her family tree. Five minutes later, in came my mum, absolutely white.

And she came over to me, and she said, “Sarah’s been asking me about my family tree, and I have to tell you something that I’ve never told you.”

I was in my thirties by this time. She said, “I never told you… I’m illegitimate.” She’d been born in 1910. Her mum wasn’t married. She’d been born in the poorhouse. She wasn’t from a wealthy family. She was brought up by her grandmother, and her mother had married somebody else, who I’d thought was my grandfather, but that wasn’t the case. My grandfather was unknown. So I’d lost a grandfather.

Then she said, “And actually it’s the same for your father too.”

So in two sentences, I’d lost two grandfathers. Well, this was a bit of a shock.

And then I began to think about it, and I thought,
Well, maybe this is where I got some exotic genes, and they sort of recombined, and that’s why I’m a bit different.
And then I remembered that my middle name was Maxime, and I got it from my dad, who was called Maxime William John. And, you know, he was a sort of farmworker in the country. That’s where he came
from, in Norfolk, and I tell you in Norfolk, farmworkers are not called Maxime usually. This is a French-Russian aristocratic sort of name. So I began to imagine that perhaps I had an exotic grandfather, a French-Russian aristocrat, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And that was why I ended up how I was.