2. First Day – A Chance Meeting on Park Bench
Monday, now 10 minutes after Noon, Ali walking home from a Hunter College morning class.
Hunter College in the 1940's was in north central Bronx New York, a block west of Jerome Avenue, the north-south running middle-marker between the east side and the west side of Bronx street addresses. Jerome Avenue is enlivened by the sounds & view of a rusty-girder elevated train called the El, like a subway train outside in the street on stilts, which runs down from the Woodlawn Station at the north border of New York City to River Avenue just nearby the famous baseball Yankee Stadium at 161st Street and then goes underground into Manhattan.
Hunter College in the 1940's was in north central Bronx New York, a block west of Jerome Avenue, the north-south running middle-marker between the east side and the west side of Bronx street addresses. Jerome Avenue is enlivened by the sounds & view of a rusty-girder elevated train called the El, like a subway train outside in the street on stilts, which runs down from the Woodlawn Station at the north border of New York City to River Avenue just nearby the famous baseball Yankee Stadium at 161st Street and then goes underground into Manhattan.
Miss Ali walks north on the west side of Jerome, this cool, sunny, early January. Soon she is at Mosholu Parkway, the next north station, the site of an ancient west-east running river bed that once connected the Hudson and Bronx Rivers and separated most of the Bronx from the North America land mass. Now it is an eighth of a mile (c. 200 meters) width of green slopes with many park benches, and a road that passes under Jerome Ave via a tunnel. She walks over it and turns a corner left onto West 209th Street and, she notes, along the side of the street connected to the Parkway, a row of park benches facing, across the road, the apartment buildings. The benches are empty except for a thin old man in heavy black overcoat, blue battered visor cap and worn boots into which are tucked tattered brown pants.
Panhandler?, she thinks but something in the way he smiles up at her elicits her own smile.
“Hello," she says, plopping down beside him on his right.
“I am Dan,” he says in voice cracked from age.
“Like in there with the lions?” she quips, giggling at her silliness.
“Yes,” he says giving her a smile, strange in such a poor old fellow, she thinks.
“I am of the Mosaic Persuasion,” he adds gravely but with a look of good humor. “So my parents named me for that fellow in the Old Testament. And tell me, who are you, young lady?”
Panhandler?, she thinks but something in the way he smiles up at her elicits her own smile.
“Hello," she says, plopping down beside him on his right.
“I am Dan,” he says in voice cracked from age.
“Like in there with the lions?” she quips, giggling at her silliness.
“Yes,” he says giving her a smile, strange in such a poor old fellow, she thinks.
“I am of the Mosaic Persuasion,” he adds gravely but with a look of good humor. “So my parents named me for that fellow in the Old Testament. And tell me, who are you, young lady?”
On hearing she is living in Apt 1A , he says, “Well, I am your upstairs neighbor, in 2A; and please come up to complain if you find me or my wife Margaret making noise.”
There are more questions and answers: he is a writer, unpublished, with interesting theories. Before leaving, she gets invited to visit on Sunday and he requests she bring a New York Times, in order to save him a morning trip for his favorite newspaper.
3. Afternoon Class
Ali takes a seat in the rear. Up front, Professor Edwardes is starting the lecture. Its subject: Why are Americans So Uncultured? Edwardes smiles as he notices her.
“First, I wish to be clear. I do not think Americans are lower IQ or less educated than an equal socio-economic mix of citizens of a similar industrial country. Note the “So” in my title: it denotes relativity. My point is: Given the economic, political & military power of the United States plus its unique history of richness in resources and freedom from external wars, one would expect the best conditions for civilized life, which should mean the world’s highest level of education and culture: a population of university graduates; and top art and music, with high-level democracy.
“But what we have is a nation of captious clods; a generation of dunces; or, as HL Mencken might prefer, a bastion of bumptious booboisie booberie.”
“Look at Mason-Dixon South, still at lynch-level culture; look at middle southwest - Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado - and its cowboy gunslinger culture; at middle America, centered in Ohio and mired in back-home-again Indiana; and then shift far west to the ersatz Hollywood with its California craziness.”
A titter of laughter from the class.
He pauses.
“First, I wish to be clear. I do not think Americans are lower IQ or less educated than an equal socio-economic mix of citizens of a similar industrial country. Note the “So” in my title: it denotes relativity. My point is: Given the economic, political & military power of the United States plus its unique history of richness in resources and freedom from external wars, one would expect the best conditions for civilized life, which should mean the world’s highest level of education and culture: a population of university graduates; and top art and music, with high-level democracy.
“But what we have is a nation of captious clods; a generation of dunces; or, as HL Mencken might prefer, a bastion of bumptious booboisie booberie.”
“Look at Mason-Dixon South, still at lynch-level culture; look at middle southwest - Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado - and its cowboy gunslinger culture; at middle America, centered in Ohio and mired in back-home-again Indiana; and then shift far west to the ersatz Hollywood with its California craziness.”
A titter of laughter from the class.
He pauses.
“Look at the history of European freebooters. Every European from Conquistador to the last Puritan saw this place as a luscious woman and proceeded to rape. So we have a Christian nation of bloody-handed mass-murderers and destroyers of the natives, which partly explains the lynch mobs and the cowboy gunslingers.
“Then black slaves from Africa, whose labor built this country. Slavery corrupted the Europeans into an arrogant, ignorant acceptance of superiority.
“America would do better as a Mid Atlantic/New England state; a southeast Black African State below Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi; and the native American states. Ideally the Mid Atlanticean New Englanders would be teachers in helping the other nations lift themselves from lower level. …”
“Then black slaves from Africa, whose labor built this country. Slavery corrupted the Europeans into an arrogant, ignorant acceptance of superiority.
“America would do better as a Mid Atlantic/New England state; a southeast Black African State below Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi; and the native American states. Ideally the Mid Atlanticean New Englanders would be teachers in helping the other nations lift themselves from lower level. …”
So went Edwardes’ lecture. Afterwards, the Professor beckons Ali to his front desk and asks, “Howzabout a coffee and cake at the cafeteria?” For next, click 12.(4-5) Coffee Klatching & Bronx Egg Creams
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