Insomnia

February 27, 2000

INSOMNIA

My father wandered. At night. Around the house. Disturbed by indigestion and an overactive brain, he would start out in bed, then move from one couch to another, sleeping a few hours at each stand. In the wide awake spells between locations he wrote equations related to whatever problem his section of the Bell Lab at 463 West St was working on. We learned never to throw away the least scrap of paper if it had numbers or an equal sign on it. At each change of station he would go to the kitchen and have a date bar. He was convinced that nothing else could help him sleep. When mother died suddenly, we hit a crisis. He was sleeping less than ever, and needing date bars worse than ever. The original Date Bar recipe didn't come near to what he expected. We didn't know that mother had modified it to suit his diet, and it took a lot of experimental batches to come up with a Diet Date Bar version that passed.
The family asked, 'Why didn't you ask Bammy how to make them?" I had to answer that I had never realized she would not always be here making them. This sounds really stupid, but it's true. We have a small family, with no practice in funerals, and besides, parents are just supposed to be there. We have a photo album of them in their first apartment at # 10 Arden Street, in New York City, where I was born, and which no longer exists. I have trouble relating those pictures to the people I knew, although they couldn't have been much older when I began to know them. It is almost impossible to believe that your parents had an existence that didn't include you. I guess that's the same as saying it is almost impossible to imagine your own non-existence.
Besides how to make date bars, I wish I had asked how it felt to move from a prairie town of 200 people to New York, even with years at Huron Academy, Oberlin and Cornell as steps along the way. I wish I had asked more about riding a pony to school on your dad's land, with your mother for the teacher. She did comment once, in general, when she picked up Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods. "I don't want to read that. That's exactly how it was!" She and Mrs. Wilder were nearly parallel in age and adventures, from the Wisconsin woods to the Dakota prairie, sod house and all.
Susie Magruder, in contrast, the source of the Date Bars, was a Virginian born and bred. She and her retired lawyer husband had fallen on hard times when I knew them. One of their ventures was making and selling sausage. They couldn't bring themselves to charge what the ingredients cost them, and they couldn't stoop to compromising on quality, so the project failed.
Susie's mother did all the cooking, from a wheel chair, which was an eye-opener for a teen-ager. Susie gave me my first experience of true southern hospitality. We were always welcome and there was always something delightful to eat. Instead of being flustered by sudden guests, as I still am, I remember one night they made fudge while we waited and talked. If I tried that, it would either burn or never harden. On one visit, with no fanfare, Susie handed me a lovely, small, old Wedgewood pitcher. " Here, Evelyn," she said, "I've had this long enough. You take it and enjoy it."