1. My Papa

When the nippy days of mid-November came we cleared a few circular areas, like enormous saucers, in our frost-bitten garden and lined them with a heavy mattress of straw. Bushels of apples, pears, onions, potatoes, parsnips, beets and cabbages were poured in to be covered with another thick blanket of straw. Then the beds were covered with the earth we had accumulated while digging the saucers. On top of this dirt was a layer of stable manure, which had to be scraped off if the winter turned out to be mild.

Every two or three days, throughout the rough weather, some hapless member of the family was elected by acclamation to brave the blizzard with a shovel and a tin bucket, and burrow into the edges of these caches. That part of it was no fun. But our buried fruits and vegetables kept surprisingly well.

By the middle of March, every house with a cellar reeked of decaying apples. Not even the attar of sauerkraut could compete with the apples. In most households it was customary to use first the apples that were farthest advanced in their decomposition, but the people never quite caught up with this relentless disintegration and were forced by their own theory of economy to eat rotting apples all winter.

My papa often said that it would be more sensible to sort out the ailing apples and throw them away. He was a firm believer in taking one’s losses manfully and promptly before they grew to disaster proportions. He was no spendthrift but he saw no sound economy in supporting lost causes or in saving rotten apples by eating them. I never knew anyone who spent less time fretting over misadventures, and I have my papa to thank for bequeathing to me, either by blood, precept or example, the effortless incapacity to worry very long over something that failed to come off as I had hoped. In my youth there was much made of the virtue of perseverance. Hang right on, shouted the orators. Never let go! See it through!

My papa was not so imprudent as to debate this matter in public but he had a private belief that perseverance involving sacrifices that stood no chance of ever paying their own way was no virtue at all. Of the old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” Papa once remarked to me, “Well, twice, maybe: after that, let somebody else try it.” I still believe that Papa had something there. The stirring challenge of the dauntless poem “Excelsior!” always left me cold as the youth who bore the banner with the strange device. Onward he went, through snow and ice, passing up all creature comforts, not pausing even when his girl begged him to come in and thaw out his frozen toes; and at length, completely spent, he arrived at the tipmost, topmost crag where he planted his banner. So what? In the spring the dogs nosed him out of the slush, and that was that.

Of course my papa was all of sixty-two before I was old enough to take much notice of his principles. It may be that when he was a youth he, too, was willing to come at life the hard way; but I doubt it.

In his attitude toward me and my little brother he was always kind and just, but he never played with us, never tossed a ball in our direction, never helped us fly a kite. Sometimes, in summer, when Mama suggested driving down to the river for an early evening picnic, Papa cheerfully consented, but ate his supper in the back seat of the surrey while we spread our tablecloth on the grass near by. He didn’t like to sit on the ground and he detested ants. When supper was over, he was for going home. Supper was what we had come to do: having done it, we might as well go home. Mama wanted to linger until dusk, but made no protest. I feel sure that Papa never meant to be inconsiderate. He just couldn’t see any sense in our sitting out there on the riverbank, fighting mosquitoes, when we would be so much more comfortable at home. So we would drive home, for it would be no fun for Mama to insist on our remaining longer if Papa was getting restless.

Now if this were all I had planned to say about my father, it would be an incomplete and cruelly unfair portrait of this quite remarkable man who—had he stuck resolutely to one trade—might have gone far. But I feel that the time has come for me to talk about my mama.