February 24, 2014
With panic about the snow storm Wednesday mounting (some think as much as ten inches will fall), I did what any reasonable person faced with the twelfth snowstorm of the season would do: I ate and drank.
I cooked giant ravioli stuffed with chicken and herbs, then made a sauce of several cloves of garlic sautéed in Italian olive oil till crispy brown, into which I plunged the ravioli. A bunch of fresh arugula thrown in served as the salad course, chased with a half bottle of Bordeaux from Cadillac. Dessert was fresh blackberries, followed by a pint of Talenti Southern Pecan gelato garnished with Calmyra figs. I can be as austere as a Carthusian in my eating habits, but when winter hangs on too long, I am Rabelaisian.
A friend lent me two books that reflect our mutual obsession with making ends meet: Frugal Is Not Cheap, and Still Life With Breadcrumbs. The first is the memoir of an accountant who has shaken herself free of the credit-card mentality that plunges so many into a lifetime of debt; the second is former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen's novel about a 60-year old woman, a celebrated photographer, who finds her celebrity no insurance against the rising cost of living in Manhattan, taking care of her mother and raising her son alone.
As I just wrote a short story along the same lines (never having known of Still Life), it is evident that the novel's strain is part of zeitgeist of Baby Boomers. Writing about " the old" as fully-developed human beings (with lusts and yearnings) is becoming more and more acceptable. Quindlen is more skillful than I am in evoking a setting a scriptwriter could make a movie out of and she's received favorable reviews for the book in outlets as distant as London's Financial Times. She's put her stamp on later life, which has optimism and underlying resilience going for it. There are no "bad guys" to blame for the penuriousness of her heroine, unless it's her financial advisor, who failed to explain that her expenses were rising even as her income was declining. He, however, is not a character in Still Life, and I'm a killjoy to mention him.
On the other hand, in Memoir Of The Bookie's Son, a remembrance of Buckley Offitt, a Balitmore bookmaker many believed the smartest bookie in the country, Sidney Offit, his son, never asks for our indulgence. His father made the money to support Sidney, his brother Benson and their mother, by taking bets on horses, an illegal activity until the Kefauver Commission and Off-Track Betting destroyed bookies' livelihood.
Offitt, who came to New York and succeeded, brings to life the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had a unique skill handicapping horses, and made it his life's work. That is "life's work" in the way Picasso thought of painting, Hemingway of writing and Gene Krupa drumming. Arrested late in his career, he fixed a judge, the policeman giving evidence and the prosecuting attorney --without a qualm, because he believed that the laws prohibiting gambling went against human nature. However, he never took a bet again after the case against him was dismissed for lack of evidence. (Which suggests he read odds very well indeed.)
What is significant about the book is its depiction of childhood as it once was: a family matter. Sid and his brother Benson go to Baltimore schools, spend the summers at camp, and listen when their parents say something. They might read books or go to a movie, but the Baltimore they live in operates by Baltimore's rules, not those of the Internet or broadcast news or cable television or IPhones.
Sidney grows up to become a New York writer, milking his background the way Pete Hamill milked his to write his novels and memoirs. These men were grounded in the college of the streets, and having survived the course, were better adults for it. Basic lessons about how human beings will behave in variety of situations were illustrated daily, and more forcibly than any textbook.
In further contrast to Quindlen's novel, "Q", composer, musician and arranger Quincy Jones' autobiography, a widely celebrated book when it first appeared a few years ago, starts out similarly, but then vaults into the stratosphere of celebrity. It is probably true that when he was a boy, Jones and his brothers had to eat fried rats because that was the only meat his grandmother could lay hands on to feed them. Jones earned every moment of his success, but hearing him tell the story of his ascendancy doesn't make me feel he has any lesson to impart. Whereas Sidney Offitt's tale of his father --a man who always insisted "The world doesn't owe me nothin'" offers a study in character annealed in the crucible of Baltimore's back streets. Buckley's parents were Old Country in values and outlook, wanting to "fit in" in their adopted country; but their son turned to lucrative use in an illegal activity his mathematical bent, becoming in the process "his own man".
The story of his son's discovery of his father's uniqueness, and his father's uncompromising acceptance of the parameters his choice of profession obliged, makes Memoir Of The Bookie's Son more uplifting than Q's tale of ascent and stardom. Then, too, Q is about defining success by the number of flashbulbs that go off when you walk onto a stage. Memoir of the Bookie's Son is about a life conducted very much off-stage, necessarily off-stage. Buckley Offitt, "maybe the biggest bookie in the country", preferred to be invisible, preferred to be discreet, because in the business he had chosen, that preference reflected his sagacity. Memoir of the Bookie's Son is about how the way a man conducts himself becomes an example to his children, whether what he does is within or without the law. Reading it has been one of the small pleasures of this winter.
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