An American Childhood. Annie Dillard
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his cuffs were full of snow, and there was a prow of snow beneath them on his shoes and socks. Some trees bordered the little flat backyard, some messy winter trees. There was no one around: a clearing in a grove, and we the only players.
It was a long time before he could speak. I had some difficulty at first recalling why we were there. My lips felt swollen; I couldn’t see out of the sides of my eyes; I kept coughing.
“You stupid kids,” he began perfunctorily.
We listened perfunctorily indeed, if we listened at all, for the chewing out was redundant, a mere formality, and beside the point. The point was that he had chased us passionately without giving up, and so he had caught us. Now he came down to earth. I wanted the glory to last forever.
But how could the glory have lasted forever? We could have run through every backyard in North America until we got to Panama. But when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal, what precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory? I brooded about this for the next few years. He could only have fried Mikey Fahey and me in boiling oil, say, or dismembered us piecemeal, or staked us to anthills. None of which I really wanted, and none of which any adult was likely to do, even in the spirit of fun. He could only chew us out there in the Panamanian jungle, after months or years of exalting pursuit. He could only begin, “You stupid kids,” and continue in his ordinary Pittsburgh accent with his normal righteous anger and the usual common sense.
If in that snowy backyard the driver of the black Buick had cut off our heads, Mikey’s and mine, I would have died happy, for nothing has required so much of me since as being chased all over Pittsburgh in the middle of winter—running terrified, exhausted—by this sainted, skinny, furious redheaded man who wished to have a word with us. I don’t know how he found his way back to his car.
Our parents would sooner have left us out of Christmas than leave us out of a joke. They explained a joke to us while they were still laughing at it; they tore a still-kicking joke apart, so we could see how it worked. When we got the first Tom Lehrer album in 1954, Mother went through the album with me, cut by cut, explaining. B.V.D.s are men’s underwear. Radiation makes you sterile, and lead protects from radiation, so the joke is . . .
Our father kept in his breast pocket a little black notebook. There he noted jokes he wanted to remember. Remembering jokes was a moral obligation. People who said, “I can never remember jokes,” were like people who said, obliviously, “I can never remember names,” or “I don’t bathe.”
“No one tells jokes like your father,” Mother said. Telling a good joke well—successfully, perfectly—was the highest art. It was an art because it was up to you: if you did not get the laugh, you had told it wrong. Work on it, and do better next time. It would have been reprehensible to blame the joke, or, worse, the audience.
As we children got older, our parents discussed with us every technical, theoretical, and moral aspect of the art. We tinkered with a joke’s narrative structure: “Maybe you should begin with the Indians.” We polished the wording. There is a Julia Randall story set in Baltimore which we smoothed together for years. How does the lady word the question? Does she say, “How are you called?” No, that is needlessly awkward. She just says, “What’s your name?” And he says, “Folks generally call me Bominitious.” No, he can just say, “They call me Bominitious.”
We analyzed many kinds of pacing. We admired with Father the leisurely meanders of the shaggy-dog story. “A young couple moved to the Swiss Alps,” one story of his began, “with their grand piano”; and ended, to a blizzard of thrown napkins, “. . . Oppernockity tunes but once.” “Frog goes into a bank,” another story began, to my enduring pleasure. The joke was not great, but with what a sweet light splash you could launch it! “Frog goes into a bank,” you said, and your canoe had slipped delicately and surely into the water, into Lake Champlain with painted Indians behind every tree, and there was no turning back.
Father was also very fond of stories set in bars that starred zoo animals or insects. These creatures apparently came into bars all over America, either accompanied or alone, and sat down to face incredulous, sarcastic bartenders. (It was a wonder the bartenders were always so surprised to see talking dogs or drinking monkeys or performing ants, so surprised year after year, when clearly this sort of thing was the very essence of bar life.) In the years he had been loose, swinging aloft in the airy interval between college and marriage, Father had frequented bars in New York, listening to jazz. Bars had no place whatever in the small Pittsburgh world he had grown up in, and lived in now. Bars were so far from our experience that I had assumed, in my detective work, that their customers were ipso facto crooks. Father’s bar jokes—“and there were the regulars, all sitting around”—gave him the raffish air of a man who was at home anywhere. (How poignant were his “you knows” directed at me: you know how bartenders are; you know how the regulars would all be sitting around. For either I, a nine-year-old girl, knew what he was talking about, then or ever, or nobody did. Only because I read a lot, I often knew.)
Our mother favored a staccato, stand-up style; if our father could perorate, she could condense. Fellow goes to a psychiatrist. “You’re crazy.” “I want a second opinion!” “You’re ugly.” “How do you get an elephant out of the theater? You can’t; it’s in his blood.”
What else in life so required, and so rewarded, such care?
“Tell the girls the one about the four-by-twos, Frank.”
“Let’s see. Let’s see.”
“Fellow goes into a lumberyard . . .”
“Yes, but it’s tricky. It’s a matter of point of view.” And Father would leave the dining room, rubbing his face in concentration, or as if he were smearing on greasepaint, and return when he was ready.
“Ready with the four-by-twos?” Mother said.
Our father hung his hands in his pockets and regarded the far ceiling with fond reminiscence.
“Fellow comes into a lumberyard,” he began.
“Says to the guy, ‘I need some four-by-twos.’ ‘You mean two-by-fours?’ ‘Just a minute. I’ll find out.’ He walks out to the parking lot, where his buddies are waiting in the car. They roll down the car window. He confers with them awhile and comes back across the parking lot and says to the lumberyard guy, ‘Yes. I mean two-by-fours.’
“Lumberyard guy says, ‘How long do you want them?’ ‘Just a minute,’ fellow says, ‘I’ll find out.’ He goes out across the parking lot and confers with the people in the car and comes back across the parking lot to the lumberyard and says to the guy, ‘A long time. We’re building a house.’”
After any performance Father rubbed the top of his face with both hands, as if it had all been a dream. He sat back down at the dining-room table, laughing and shaking his head. “And when you tell a joke,” Mother said to Amy and me, “laugh. It’s mean not to.”
We were brought up on the classics. Our parents told us all the great old American jokes, practically by number. They collaborated on, and for our benefit specialized in, the painstaking paleontological reconstruction of vanished jokes from extant tag lines. They could vivify old New Yorker cartoons, source of many tag lines. The lines themselves—“Back to the old drawing board,” and “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it,” and “A simple yes or no will suffice”—were no longer funny; they were instead something better, they were fixtures in the language. The tag lines of old jokes were the most powerful expressions we learned at our parents’ knees. A few words suggested a complete story and a wealth of feelings. Learning our culture backward, Amy and Molly and I heard only later about The Divine Comedy and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and still later about the Greek and Roman myths, which held no residue of feeling for us at all—certainly not the vibrant suggestiveness of old American jokes and cartoons.
Our parents reserved a few select jokes, such as “Archibald