The Age of Ignorance?

There are times, I must admit, when I regret having been born so long ago. I had not planned to live so long. Ninety-two at last count. The funny thing is that growing older does not mean growing smarter.  With each passing day I learn how little I know, how great are the gaps in my education. 

My family was old fashioned.  It was a given that females were not to be well educated.  My brothers were brilliant scholars, teaching, editing and writing books.  I knew from childhood that this was to be their destiny and never envied their education at Harvard and Columbia.

Unfortunately, I was never gifted in the fields that were open to me: cooking, for example.  To this day I comfort myself with the thought that my friends came to my place for my company, not for my culinary arts.  Both my brothers were splendid cooks.  One, the elder of the two, a retired professor, once advised me, “Tina, never learn to cook.  Stay the way you are (incredibly inept near a stove).  This way your friends will always feel superior to you and love you.”  His advice did not include  “Keep a bottle of Pepto Bismol handy,” but I do – just in case.

Another thing that I was supposed to learn was sewing.  My mother, who designed clothes and sewed beautifully, bought me a fine sewing machine and I dutifully attended the course offered by Singer.  Though I was the least talented member of the class, I persevered.  For many years I made my own clothes.  The garments were passable – as long as nobody turned them inside out and inspected the seams.  Moral: never remove your clothes before witnesses.

Dancing was also on the required list of my future accomplishments. I had a pleasant face and a stocky body, hardly a winning combination on the ballroom floor.  In desperation I was sent to a school for professional dancers: Ned Wayburn’s. At twelve, I was the only amateur in a group of tough, hard-working chorus-girls-to-be.  Wayburn provided the choreography and chorus lines for the musicals of that era.  My Scottish governess sat among the hard-faced stage mothers.  A strange sight indeed. 

The two-hour session on Saturday mornings had four sections, starting with acrobatics, followed by tap dancing, musical comedy and ballet. Acrobatics appealed to my tomboy nature but the ballet finale was utter torture.  I guess my mother figured that I would never be graceful, but that when I grew older I would manage to walk across a ballroom floor without breaking a leg.

Strangely enough, I always had a very good time at dances, though I seemed to be ignored by the tall, handsome boys on the stag-line, and was a great favorite of the shortest, most pimple-faced ones in the room. I think they felt comfortable with a girl who was almost as awkward as they.  I must state at this point that I eventually captured and married, at 21, a really tall, handsome man, who was a very fine dancer.  Of course, if we’d met on the dance floor the story might have had a different ending.

I was a child of the Depression.  My mother must have guessed that I would not marry a wealthy man.  The idea of being a secretary did not appeal, but she talked me into taking a crash course in typing and shorthand.  My brain and my fingers never had much rapport on the keyboard. Same problem with the piano. Shorthand was almost as difficult. It was very hairy trying to take dictation from my boss, a terrifying woman clothes designer who kept suggesting that I take a “refresher course” in typing and steno.  What could she expect for ten bucks a week?

Many years later, at the Greenwich High School, I did take that refresher course in typing.  It came in handy at the local magazine where, as the editor, I pecked at the typewriter for 11 years.  I always worked head-down, never had the guts to take my eyes off the keys. The ideas always came easily.  It was the execution that was painful.

Even today, at 94, after trying to cope with the computer, and writing three novels, I feel that I very much need to take a special course:  how can a rather willing, but slow, learner successfully survive in the Age of the Internet?  Even the strongest of egos can wilt when matched against the unpredictable actions of a ruthless machine.  As I said before, I was born too early.