The Grand Surprise by Leo Lerman

Author:Leo Lerman [Lerman, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49574-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

NOVEMBER 12, 1970 Earlier in the evening talked to Caroline Kennedy about what is medieval and what is marvelous about the Middle Ages. She is thirteen-ish, laconic, and sort of tough-voiced. Doesn't sound like her ma and certainly not like her father. Peter [Beard] says she's very sharp, bright. She's to have an exam tomorrow, and could not go to the Cloisters [medieval collection].59

Shopping bags, in my grandfather's day, were necessities for the poor and lower-middle classes, or for the very eccentric. No lady or middle-class person would carry one. They were not of paper then, but of oilcloth or strong canvas. Grandfather Goldwasser carried two ofthem—oilcloth—to contain fish, greens, tea, coffee, cocoa. And this is where I first saw their virtue. Many years later, I carried shopping bags of cloth instead of briefcases or attaché cases. Then I wrapped Christmas presents in paper shopping bags. I believe that I was the first to do this. Now almost everyone, even the rich, carry shopping bags— paper, string, plastic, cloth. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art has an evergrowing collection of them. Shops give them away, since these bags advertise.

Grandpa Lerman was a small sour man with sore-rimmed rheumy eyes and always wracked by asthma. Grandma Lerman was a potato dumpling of a woman who always slept in her dirty diamond earrings and was embraced only by her seal stole. I never saw her without her shekel [wig], save once, and then found her hair a beautiful white wavy crop. I was slapped by my father for exclaiming at the shekel: “Look! Grandma's hair!” The old lady (she was probably in her fifties then, younger than I am now) was in her bath, in a tub in the kitchen.60

A sense of joy, élan, and vitality is incredibly attractive and even transfigures into beauty people who are actually quite plain. That is why it is almost impossible for one generation to understand certain beauties of the preceding generation. Rut was thought beautiful by so many who saw her in the twenties and thirties. She wasn't. She captured the vitality of that moment. Had she continued to convey that specific vitality during her later life in New York, she would have been a dated, ridiculous woman, but she matured it into a style suitable to those latter years.

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