My father’s father,  a quiet man named Eliyahu who lived as a silent shadow, as he lives now seventy years after his death, grew up in a dirt-floored farmhouse in Connecticut.  The farm was outside Hartford.  I recall a childhood visit to my father’s aunt and uncle on that farm, as far as I can tell.   The aunt was named Elsie, and they had at least one cow.  There was a cartoon cow in TV commercials at the time named Elsie the Cow, the adorable mascot of Borden’s, I think it was, which is why I remember Aunt Elsie’s name.  I don’t think I met her more than a couple of times, maybe twice.  Her husband might have been named Uncle Peter.

I remember that visit to the farm, which I always associate with Elsie the Cow, mostly for the moment I stood behind their actual cow and watched as the cow’s tail lifted stiffly, slightly above eye level, to reveal a puckered star shaped asshole, like a giant asterisk, actually.  To my amazement the asterisk began to get bigger and bigger.  I could not look away.  It became gigantic and I instantly saw why.  A large cow plat dropped out of it on to the ground.  It fell straight down and landed safely in front of me, followed by the same mesmerizing procedure and another.  To a boy raised far from livestock of any kind, this impressed the hell out of me and I remember it clearly more than fifty years later.  

The modest farmhouse had regular floors when we visited, but my mother had been there when the floors were still dirt.  The point is, the farmers on this farm were not the kind who lobby Congress, hire illegal immigrant hands to do the dirty work or get paid huge subsidies not to grow certain crops.   This working farm was out of a life I’d only seen in black and white photos taken by WPA photographers during the 1930s, regardless of the upgrade to the floors.  My grandfather had grown up literally dirt poor and when his step-mother clouted him, he fell on to a dirt floor.  

After my father left the army he was loathe to return to Peekskill, which is not hard to understand.  He went to live in Connecticut, where he also had family.  I suppose the fact that he had a few uncles and aunts up there made it attractive to him.  I have only the haziest knowledge of this period of his life.  It appears, doing the math, not to have been a very long period, since by 1951 he was already at Columbia, a graduate student in history, struggling with Richard Hofstadter’s ego, after completing a four year degree at Syracuse.

“He was pumping gas up in Connecticut,” Eli told me once.  “He was also pumping his landlady, this young shiksa widow he was renting a room from.  Drove his mother insane, as you can imagine.  He’d just come out of the army and he’s wasting his life pumping gas and making love to a shiksa several years older than him.  Tante Chava wasn’t having it and she sent me up there to bust it up.”  

Eli told the story like his insane aunt’s reaction was completely logical and her command to go ‘bust it up’ the most reasonable thing in the world.  

“I went up there and gave him a good talking to, you know, I straightened him out.  I told him he was wasting his life, and we packed him up and I got him the hell out of there.  He then got accepted to Syracuse and did very well there and was on his way.”  

Funny to remember my father’s still bitter words on the last night of his life — about how he and his brother were slated for trade school to prepare for the menial jobs their talents fitted them for.

I have a few old black and white photos from my father and mother’s earlier lives, preserved in a shoe box and never put into any of the dozen large albums my mother assembled of all the A-list photos, that suggest another story entirely.  The story of my father’s first romance.   The first two are here.  

The thought of unearthing and scanning the other two is a bit unnerving to me, since they are somewhere in this impossible tangle of papers, boxes, books, CD cases, clothes, drawings.  But, as they are each worth many thousands of words, and shed an important and rare light on the protagonist of this book, I will try to find them.  

In one, my father is being visited at college by this pretty, almost cartoonishly Christian-looking woman.  It suggests there was an enduring relationship between them, or at least hopes for one.  She made the long trek up to Syracuse to visit him at least once.  I assume the photo was taken in Syracuse, since I don’t recognize the building they are posed in front of as being on the Columbia campus.  

In the other photo my father is smiling with a happiness unrivaled in any photograph of him.  It is springtime in the photo, he is on a picnic blanket, struggling good naturedly with a pretty young woman.  His glasses are off, meaning he could only see a very short distance.  It is likely the young woman has just pulled them off of his head, since he was rarely without them.  A thin arm is around his neck, as though trying to choke him.  He has a pretty good grip on the slender blonde’s waist.  She, also laughing, is diagonal across the picnic blanket.