One

Verla Flowers Dance Arts

I asked for dancing lessons when I was nine.

My mother—I called her Maxine—used to take me to see various touring companies at the Seattle Opera House, a series called Sol Hurok Presents. On one of these outings, we saw the great flamenco dancer José Greco, a gorgeous New Yorker with a big nose and a big basket. Flamenco excited me—it was sexy, virtuosic, stylized, and very alone—and, perhaps inspired by my mother’s love for all things Spanish, my immediate reaction was “I want to do that!” My sister Marianne, nine years older, may also have been influential. She’d had some ballet lessons, doing jazz numbers to boogie-woogie, and was just starting pointe classes (which was also when she stopped). But that technique caught my eye. After one of her classes, I crammed my feet into Tupperware juice glasses so I could imitate her by walking on pointe in the front room. My sister thought I was going to die.

So my mother, seeing I was serious, opened the phone book and found a teacher, Verla Flowers, who taught Spanish dancing. Verla—always just Verla—was from the old school, the Depression era. She’d danced on the vaudeville circuit and studied with famous people, including Matteo, the American-born choreographer, a master of Spanish dance (who only recently died at ninety-two). There’s a Verla Flowers in every single town in America, but her school wasn’t just “Dolly Dinkle,” the term embarrassed dancers use for their hometown dance school, a phrase I’ve never liked. Verla was well connected in Seattle, with friends who ran Cornish College of the Arts, the preeminent performing arts establishment.

Verla had an amazing beehive that was loopy and tall—it wasn’t one big puff—bold, big, and auburn. Her hair was done fresh once a week, and you could tell what day of the week it was by how far it had collapsed. She wore comfortable muumuus—this was a long time ago—and had different shoes for every dance: black character shoes for Spanish class and big silver tap shoes with jingles. She’d taught herself a lot of the classic repertoire on the piano. Her daughter taught also, and there was a devoted husband, Ted, who did odd jobs and drove people around.

She seemed old to me because I was young (she was fifty-two when we met, older than my mother), and we were friendly in that intergenerational way. Though flamboyant, she was old-fashioned, big on manners like a strict mother who makes her children wear neckties to church. Above all else, however, she needed to keep her students, so she couldn’t afford to be one of those vicious ninety-year-old classical ballet teachers from Russia, the kind you can’t ever get rid of. There aren’t a lot of the crazy ones left anyway, because you can’t touch the students anymore, let alone hit them with your walking stick.

She taught all over Seattle in satellite studios, church halls, and so on, but her own studio—Verla Flowers Dance Arts, where she taught hula, tap, and “toe dancing” (as people used to call dancing on pointe)—was north of the zoo in the Greenwood area. At my very first lesson, a private lesson, we learned a well-known flamenco solo form called a farruca, traditionally performed only by men, a dance of intense footwork and quick steps. I learned a couple of phrases a week. I still know most of them, and thirty-five years later, some of that very first dance made it into my own dance Four Saints in Three Acts, to music by Virgil Thomson.

Verla’s Spanish dancing lessons, every Saturday for an hour and a half, were so exhilarating, so much fun, that I couldn’t stop practicing on my own time. I’d do a move forever until I got it down. Immediately, I was a full-on committed perfectionist, purely because I was doing something I really liked. Verla saw something in me right away and quickly picked me out. I was new, I was eager, and I was a boy. Basically it was pretty much free—and it often is if you’re a young male, because there’s a paucity of dancing boys, partly because you’re required to wear tights and therefore everyone thinks you’re a sissy. And I was a sissy, but I was bolder than everyone else. I was also gifted, a quick study, good rhythmically, and smart, and she soon tricked me into taking ballet classes to keep me interested and busy. There was also some kind of arrangement with my mother for making and sewing costumes, the barter system in action. And as soon as I was old enough to know more than the other students, Verla had me teaching. She didn’t teach ballet herself; she had other young ballet dancers for that. And if there was a ballet number in the recital, I’d get the only boy’s part.

The fact is, Verla saw in me a prodigy, someone worthy of her extra attention and time. While my mother was working, I spent all day at the studio; I’d help Verla teach, take classes myself, or simply wrangle the younger kids. At the end of the day she’d take me to the greasy spoon around the corner for a grilled cheese or a patty melt. Somebody told me there was always a secret bottle of vodka in her desk. I never saw her take so much as a sip.

THERE HAD BEEN earlier performances.

In kindergarten, we did a production of The Three Billy Goats Gruff—my first performing experience. I was a Billy Goat, but I did something naughty and found myself relegated to Troll under the Bridge (which I would now consider a better part). This was the first in a litany of humiliating theatrical demotions.

In another show, a journey quest, I played the part of a wise old owl. Someone asked me, “Are you my mommy?” My line was “No. Please go over there and ask them!” But instead I improvised a joke: “Scram, Scrambled Eggs!” I got in terrible trouble and ended up recast as a rock. Not until the third or fourth grade did I manage to keep a part: the unnamed narrator, the victim, in The Pit and the Pendulum.

So I started putting on entertainments of my own, improvising scenes and doing shows in the living room or the backyard. I cast all the neighbor kids and forced my parents to watch. I was very bossy: that was me.

My sisters remember a big hit when I was about ten, at Franklin High, the school down the street where my father taught and that I was later to attend, for some kind of international dinner—these were the days of pancake breakfasts and spaghetti feeds at which they’d fix different foods and present some examples of “international” entertainment. I was quite good at Russian dance by then, and I think Dad, who’d been with the family to see me dance and play balalaika at the local Russian center, suggested that his son represent Russia. Grandma and Maxine sewed me a costume with balloon pants, and I kicked my legs very high, to my parents’ pride.

Dressed for a Russian number with the Seattle Russian Balalaika Orchestra, 1967. (Courtesy of Maureen Morris)

BY THE AGE OF TEN I must have had the requisite ballet chops, because Verla drove me down to Portland, Oregon, to audition for a bit part with the Bolshoi Ballet, the legendary Russian company that often visited America. During their tour, the Bolshoi would come to a town and audition local children, a good public relations idea to this day. The particular piece I was auditioning for, Rehearsal, starts at the barre in the studio with little kids, progresses through training, and, as if in time-lapse, ends with the adult professionals from the company. The real draw would have been Swan Lake; Rehearsal would have been part of a repertory show.

It was a big trip away from home, and I was in Verla’s charge, which my mother wouldn’t have worried about for a moment, even though it was my first time out of town without family. We shared a room—Verla was strict with lights-out and said her prayers, which I didn’t like—and she took me to the audition. I got the gig; we rehearsed for a week and then performed.

I’ve since met dancers all over the world of every age who were in Rehearsal. Richard Colton, a great dancer with Twyla Tharp, did exactly the same part somewhere else in the world via precisely the same audition process. And it was a very big deal for me at that age—a professional performance, probably two or three shows—simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. Everyone was speaking Russian, giants wearing weird clothes, makeup, and perfume that couldn’t mask the smell of sweat. Some of them must have been famous, but I don’t remember their names. The performing was magic (one of my roles in Rehearsal was pretend sprinkling with a watering can, which is how they kept a wooden floor from being too slippery in the old days before rosin), but I don’t remember much about it, and I don’t remember the music at all. My family drove down.

A year or so later, Verla took me to another audition—the cutoff was fifteen and I was underage, by far the youngest—with the result that I was chosen by José Greco, the José Greco, my original inspiration, to go on his own two-week workshop in, of all places and names, French Lick, Indiana, a strange derelict resort at a hot spring where they’d rented a scary old hotel for cheap. My mother and I flew: my first time on a plane.

French Lick, which didn’t observe daylight savings, was hot and humid like I imagined the South to be, with mosquitoes and fascinating fireflies. I have no idea what José Greco was doing in French Lick, but it certainly wasn’t for the money. He was simply trying to get people interested in his kind of dance on the basis that you don’t know what you hate until you’ve tasted it. He wasn’t performing a cliché of flamenco passed down to him. José was the original from which the cliché derives.

It was dancing all day—I studied flamenco, ballet, and jota with the older kids—and I was in heaven. Everyone around me spoke Spanish, though it wasn’t required of me, and there was a wonderful ballet master who taught classical comportment. My mother probably watched some rehearsals and read a lot. My memory of the other kids is hazy, but I made one friend, a girl of fourteen. She played the accordion and wrote me letters afterward, always signing off with “Accordionly yours.” I remember begging my mother to buy me finger cymbals on the pretense that I needed them for a particular kind of Morisco dance, a zambra. It was a lie; I just wanted the cymbals.

I left French Lick exhilarated. I’d been fully challenged. And I’d started to get crushes on boys there, so that was part of the exhilaration. And I went back home, and back to Verla’s. I was eleven, and dancing was already all that mattered, at the expense of almost everything else, even my own well-being.

Nothing hurts when you’re a teenager, and if it does, you recover fast. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dancing on a hard floor or outside. It’s only later, when dancing starts to feel bone-shatteringly difficult, that you get the Princess and the Pea Syndrome. There was, however, a serious early problem, supposedly career ending, from which only chemical intervention saved me. When I was twelve, I was trying too hard without understanding quite how things work, and I developed incredible Achilles tendonitis from overuse and underarticulation, from abusing my body by dancing too much. In ballet training, and in fact in all dance training, the tendency, when learning something new, is toward endless repetition, and the accompanying mentality is “if it hurts, it’s good for you.”

The nurse told me straight: “You should do something other than dancing; you don’t have the Achilles tendon for it.” The doctor gave me cortisone shots directly into the tendon. The problem with cortisone is that though it cures whatever ails you immediately, you then have to use ever-greater quantities to get the same result (as with heroin), so it’s very damaging. Nowadays a doctor probably wouldn’t prescribe it for a twelve-year-old. Luckily for me, no one thought twice about it back then.

By the time I was fourteen, Verla was encouraging me to choreograph when I really had no right to. She wouldn’t even ask what I was going to do; she’d just give me a place on the recital, and I’d make up whatever dance I wanted. These recitals happened annually—three hours long—with two hundred six-year-olds, a few of them peeing on the stage, older students (who were even worse), and then the better ones to finish the show. She’d allow me about fifteen minutes, for which she’d give me carte blanche, not to mention the time to rehearse with people I was taking class with.

Verla was my sponsor, and later she sweetly referred to me as the son she’d never had. I never lost touch with her, and she saw all my early dances. One of her daughters took over, and to this day whenever I perform in Seattle, Dance Arts alumni show up: “Remember us from Verla’s?” They’re sixty-plus now. Go figure.

My own school in Brooklyn, the School at the Mark Morris Dance Center, is meant to be like Verla Flowers Dance Arts, a dancing school rather than a conservatory. We teach you to dance from the ground up.

SEATTLE HAD VERY DISTINCT neighborhoods back then, but Mount Baker, where we lived—south of downtown, past the baseball stadium, before the airport—had a little bit of everything. This was before “multicultural,” and our neighborhood was constantly changing, though slowly becoming predominantly African American. My best friend (from second grade) was Peter Tudor, whose parents were Barbadian, strict Episcopalians. His father, Winfield, with his beautiful lilting accent, was a countertenor in that glorious compline choir at St. Mark’s.

In the seventies, there was a huge influx of Thai, Cambodians, and Lao, refugees from the Golden Triangle, and the signs in the grocery stores became much more exotic. I remember my mother standing at the bus stop, like the Queen Mother, the white lady with a purse, with five or six young Hmong women on the ground around her with their incredible needlepoint and their hats, babies tied to their backs, as though Mount Baker were a village in the Mekong delta. One particular apartment complex had been derelict for years—home only to junkie squatters—until these families moved in. They turned the blackberry patch into a terraced garden where they grew their own vegetables. We’d comment on the beautiful poppies. Then the news broke that they’d been busted for growing opium. The grandmothers sat outside with their long-stemmed pipes, smoking, right by my sweet mother’s house.

There were Catholic kids (the girls had pierced ears; nobody else did at that time), a lot of Japanese GI war brides, and a more affluent Jewish community on Mercer Island. These little places had been trolley stops with their own identities; now they’re all part of a larger homogenized Seattle. Columbia City—now slightly chic, with its own jazz club—was the location of the library, where I was taken for story time on Saturdays, and the funeral home, where I’d wait outside in the car with my next-door neighbor, Nona Weatherford, while her father, Jim, the undertaker, popped inside and did something with a cadaver. Mrs. Weatherford died horribly young of a burst aneurysm; I saw her carried out of the house screaming.

My grandma shopped at what is now the delightful bustling tourist-filled attraction of Pike Place Market. Back then it was a dangerous, intense no-man’s-land, full of fishermen, drunk grifters, and scary hobos. Nonetheless, that’s where my tiny grandmother Mabel took me to buy clams and oysters to fry. She knew everyone down there. Occasionally we’d go to the thriving Chinatown to a particular chicken butcher. Unlike a lot of kids nowadays, I knew quite early on that chicken was an animal.

MY PARENTS, BILL AND MAXINE, coincidentally both from Montana, had met in Denver; they both worked for the military. Dad was always a teacher, then of navigation, and he’d been in Europe for the war, noncombat, an eyewitness to history at the first General Assembly of the United Nations in London on January 10, 1946. Maxine had excellent clerical skills and was a secretary and court recorder.

They moved to Seattle, the destination of choice for every Montanan who wants to get away from their hick ranch town. It was either there, Minneapolis, or North Dakota, but Seattle was the big getaway, and they got away. Maxine moved with her parents via Spokane, where they ran a soda fountain. She used to talk about driving from Montana to Seattle, a round-trip we made every summer to see her brother, my fabulous uncle Jim, who lived in Great Falls, which could at least lay claim to being an actual city.

With my sisters, 1958. (Courtesy of Maureen Morris)

They moved into our family home in 1950—two years after the birth of my oldest sister, Marianne, and two years before Maureen. I wasn’t to arrive for another seven years, born into a whole neighborhood of girls of my sisters’ ages; I was such a local highlight that my own sisters had to get in line to hold me. Marianne, who always seemed of a previous generation, a beautiful Breck girl, wasn’t a huge presence in my youth. She moved out as soon as she could, at eighteen, when I was nine, went to the University of Washington, got an apartment, married young, and then moved into the house where she lived for years. That left Maureen, five years my senior, and me living with my parents.

Marianne, Maureen, and Mark Morris. The alliteration must have appealed to my parents; perhaps it was my mother Maxine’s idea; her mother, after all, was Mabel. And I was nearly called Meredith Morris, a very good man’s name, particularly if you’re Welsh, which was my father’s heritage. (All Welshmen think they’re good singers, as did he—but he wasn’t. He was, however, a loud and enthusiastic singer, traits I inherited.)

In the early eighties, in one of my workshops before I had my own company, I met a woman, Rachel Murray, who later danced with me for a while. She said she’d just seen a psychic; at the time Seattle was nothing but lesbian psychics. The psychic had told her she was going to meet someone with the initials MM who would go on to become a great choreographer and dance artist, surpassing even LL (meaning, she assumed, the choreographer Lar Lubovitch, one of my first employers when I later moved to New York City). Very Nostradamus. Can NN be far behind?

I KNEW NO OTHER HOUSE growing up. Always wallpapered, a grayish-green lattice with big squares; always carpeted. The fireplace had built-in bookshelves, and the décor was true to the period: tall bottles filled with colored water. Maxine had a flair for something Spanishy, which is no doubt the reason she took me to the flamenco concert that changed my life. There was a dining and living room, with room dividers, and a large kitchen with a back door where an actual milkman left actual milk.

My first memory is sitting on the living room carpet, as only children can, feet on the outside and knees touching, and peeing my pants when I was old enough to know better. I felt myself warming; then I walked upstairs in that way that means you have to go, or just went, to the bathroom. Upstairs, there were three bedrooms: my parents’ at the front, Marianne’s, then the room I shared with Maureen, where we had bunk beds. She’d lift up the top mattress and pour water on my face when I least expected it. As soon as Marianne left, Maureen took her room and I had my own bedroom until I moved out.

Another early memory is watching my mother make the beds in my parents’ bedroom—twin beds, of course. It was the first time I’d seen the exposed fattened mattress and beneath it the fake satin cover on the box spring, so beautiful and floral that I imagined it must have belonged to Marilyn Monroe. I didn’t precisely know who Marilyn Monroe was, though I knew who shared the same initials, but I did know that she was both famous and beautiful. Given that the mattress was the most sophisticated thing in the world, it was only logical that Marilyn Monroe had lived in our house at some point.

Nothing much else about that house—a standard 1930s bungalow amid many others—was either beautiful or sophisticated, except the bathroom, a relatively large one for such a house, complete with bathtub, vanity (as we always called it), and a porcelain sink. A previous owner, perhaps Monroe herself, had customized it, exponentially increasing its glamour factor with the addition of a bidet. I had no idea what it was for, but that bidet was the fountainhead of my lifelong obsession with water features. I’d fill it, dye the water blue, make fountains, and decorate it all with floating camellias as though it were the set for that magnificent Busby Berkeley number “By a Waterfall” from Footlight Parade, waiting for cameras to bring it to life. At the time, I couldn’t imagine any other use for it, though I did once discover feminine items, syringes and so forth, in the closet. The bidet had to be disconnected when it started leaking.

My favorite room, however, was next door, the smallest room, a toilet with a little window and nothing else. It was exotic (French poodle wallpaper in black, white, and pink), beautiful (naturally), and, above all, private. Once I graffitied on the wall in ink. I thought it was grown-up, cursive handwriting, but it was hieroglyphic nonsense. My mother left it there until the next change of wallpaper, either to torment me or because its mysterious beauty intrigued her.

When I was in trouble, I’d punish the cat—I was the youngest child, but Tom was even lower on the totem pole (and Maureen used to put me in my place by saying, “You’re the part of the totem pole that’s underground”)—by locking him in that little room and turning off the lights. I thought it would be worse for him in darkness (as it would have been for me), not realizing he’d just go to sleep, thinking, “Thank God the kid has left me alone.” Horrible.

THE BACKYARD HAD A RECTANGLE of cement we called a patio (it was rumored to have been a fishpond, of which there was now no sign) and a lattice arbor that sprouted enormous wisteria and out-of-control bamboo. In Seattle, everything grew over. If you didn’t cut it back, it took over the world. Beyond the patio was an alley, impenetrably brambly with wild blackberries. Maxine’s favorite book was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and she was always making secret gardens behind the house. She was a rock gardener and a rose gardener—there were always flowers, which was a big deal—and it was her obsession to have a little tea garden with a pond and pagoda. And mine too. I’ve always had an eye on the East, and it started early on. Japanese influence was everywhere in Seattle, particularly in the gardens. I fantasized about living in the beautiful Japanese tea garden at the Seattle arboretum in my very own pagoda among the mosses, ferns, and koi.

Maxine always had, from the time they were popular until the day she died, a pair of plastic pink flamingoes loitering in the front yard. Her love for them was sincere, though she later conceded they’d become kitsch. My grandma Mabel, on the other hand, favored a dramatic tableau of three little bunnies and a rabbit. She even stooped to trolls. Lawn ornaments are so thrilling to a child.

I spent a great deal of time with my mother’s parents, my darling grandparents, Bill and Mabel Crittenden, who lived nearby. Though they weren’t on the very outskirts of town, it was woodsy, something of a magic forest where they lived what seemed to me a rancher-style existence: squirrels and chipmunks, a potting shed, all rock-gardened in the old-fashioned way, wild with roses and raspberry bushes. They were old, and I’d help out cooking and gardening.

My family dressed for my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, our house, 1965. (Courtesy of Maureen Morris)

Bill was funny, a real card. He kept the lower plate of his dentures in his pocket and had us kids reach in and get them out, for the pleasure of hearing us scream. One of his other tricks was to disguise himself as a lady, pay a call on a friend, and try to fool them: those were different times. Their house was an Aladdin’s cave of old-fashioned practical jokes and comedy props: a fake mangled swollen purple hand stuck in the door, a cast-iron set of teeth that was actually a bottle opener, an old trolley bell from one of the long gone Seattle streetcars. He’d once been a bit of a song and dance man too, not to mention a radio personality (“Chicken Bill”) combining his natural goofiness with his love for and knowledge of chickens, taking questions on air. But that was in Montana in the 1930s; by the ’60s, he was a little cranky and worn out. Diabetic, he got an infection in his toe but was too embarrassed to admit it, and by the time he was taken to the hospital, they had to amputate his leg just above the knee. That was the start of his decline. He used to get me to water the knee joint of his replacement plastic leg through a funnel, which he thought was a total riot.

Mabel, who was everybody’s favorite grandma (she had twelve grandchildren), worked at Frederick & Nelson, a branch of Marshall Field’s, in the factory dipping chocolates (Frango mints, a Marshall Field’s classic), so she hated chocolate. She took the bus to work from the bottom of the hill. Bill would drive their Corvair down the hill once a day to drop her off and once again to pick her up.

When he died, she moved in with us. She was very shy, but we encouraged her to go to a senior center to socialize, and she ended up dating—I remember someone telling her that a particular gentleman was “gay,” a word she’d never heard before—and she started wearing pants and a chic wig. When she died, she didn’t want her age in the obituary, because she was dating a sixty-five-year-old. She was eighty-five.

She’d been long dead when I found out her story. I was in the bathtub at home, my mother was coming and going, and Maureen was at the vanity (not uncommon) when she told me. Mabel had accidentally shot and killed her brother, Friendly, the golden boy of the family. They were on a picnic, shooting bottles off a fence, because that’s what you did if you lived on a ranch and there was nobody around, and she fired at a bottle just as Friendly was setting it up. She killed him. She lay in bed in silence for two weeks, more or less comatose, and hardly talked or left her room for a couple of years—what we’d now refer to as PTSD. Finally, her family sent her to Spokane to become an au pair, primarily to get her out of the house, but also because local people were mean to her. And that’s where Bill and Mabel met and married, and, after running the soda fountain, they moved to Seattle.

Nobody ever spoke of the shooting. Maureen had found out only after my grandfather had a stroke. She was sitting with him in the hospital as he chatted with my great-uncle Earl, who was visiting from Packwood, Washington. “Mabel was never the same after that,” Bill said casually, and it all came out.

MY FATHER WAS VERY SWEET and kind: a doll. He occasionally wanted to play devil’s advocate, and Maureen remembers him yelling at me once, but though he blew up occasionally, he wasn’t abusive in any way. In his youth, he’d been on the debate team, and as he got older that spirit manifested itself as he became a little more argumentative, but he never struck or hit anything; in fact, there was no real discipline or punishment at all. When I was driving my mother crazy, on the other hand, she’d put her arms on my shoulders and rattle me and I’d laugh. He’d always been hard of hearing—his hearing aids whistled—so he couldn’t tell how loud he was talking, which was particularly embarrassing at the movies. We’d go late, miss the start, then stay the whole way through the credits, as you did, until you’d seen it all. In the rapt silence of the theater, he’d lean over to me and shout, “WHAT DID HE SAY?”

Dad was also a musician; he’d had a dance band in high school and marched in the Rose Parade playing the trumpet. In college, he’d go around with his sister-in-law Eunice armed only with ukuleles. He was quite gregarious and a little nervous—he jiggled in church—and always lovingly supportive, even of things he didn’t fully understand (though he did understand my dancing: we were a family of performers). My mother was glamorous—with her dark wavy hair, she reminded Maureen of Loretta Young—and even though she was quieter, she was very funny; my father was more bewildered. He wasn’t particularly good with money and never made much either.

Dad was the youngest of six brothers and a sister, and he seemed from another age. He never left the house without a hat, a tie, and either what he called a “topcoat” or the much more casual wool Pendleton jacket (appropriate attire for a picnic). His shirts were pressed on cardboard at the cleaners in the old style. He was rather conservative, and felt guilty about not being sufficiently religious, which would periodically lead him to drag us to the Presbyterian church. His family wasn’t much fun, his brothers were bossy, and he’d been the tender blossom. I even had thoughts about my father perhaps being gay on the basis that he was sensitive, smart, and musical (all those euphemisms) and that he had a bowling buddy I never liked called Bruce, who lived alone nearby.

My father’s ambitions on my behalf were that I learn to type, play the piano, and fix a car, but most of all that I go to college; having “something to fall back on” was extremely important to his generation. Of course I give that same advice to my dancers; it makes perfect sense. The irony is that I never had anything to fall back on, and never even went to college (though I can read). Yet I now have twelve honorary doctorates of which I am very proud—and I don’t think I’d have a single one of those if I’d actually gone to college. In fact, I was very fortunate not to have something to fall back on, because there were times when a more prudent man might have fallen back on it. But it’s still what I tell my dancers, as though I were my father.

He worked at a piano store during the summer but, as far as I could tell, never sold anything to anyone. They’d loan him an organ—a feature of our living room—so he could master it at home in order then to demonstrate it to customers at the store. He played from charts, and though by no means a great technician, he could fake his way through the Great American Songbook. He later taught me to sight-read, though I could only ever do it well enough to accompany Maureen, who had a beautiful soprano. My father and I played together, but I didn’t like his repertoire—“Always,” “Autumn Leaves,” or (for my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary) “I Love You Truly,” vamped on the Wurlitzer with lots of vibrato. His relaxation was to play the organ, complete with sound effects: he pulled out all the stops.

He wasn’t one of those dads who had his own chair. Home from work, he’d read the paper (he didn’t read for pleasure) and fall asleep on the sofa in his shirtsleeves and slacks, and we’d have dinner at six. My mother was a standard postwar cook, frozen and canned food. We ate as a family every night, then watched TV. My mother read all the time. She stopped reading later, when she was a widow, because she couldn’t put books down: she’d never get anything done, even though there wasn’t that much to do. There were books everywhere: On the Beach by Nevil Shute, Hawaii by James A. Michener. My father had a free teacher’s subscription to Reader’s Digest, and we had a shelf full of the Encyclopaedia Britannica like you had to. There was always a copy of a West Coast lifestyle magazine called Sunset lying around with beautiful photography and recipes for chili.

Dad taught—English and typing—at Franklin High, though his job changed to managing what were then called “potential dropouts” (juvenile delinquents or what we’d now call at-risk students). He’d employ them as handymen outside of school. There was always some cute older teenage guy mowing the lawn without his shirt on . . . very sexy, of course.

Later there was an incident—I never knew the full story—some sort of altercation during a demonstration in which a bunch of kids ran riot and locked the principal up. One kid slapped my dad’s face in front of the class, as I know it, broke his glasses, and knocked out his hearing aid. He was profoundly demoralized by the incident, and found himself taken out of the firing line and moved downtown to an office job, responsible for special needs kids.

He never had an alcoholic drink ever, a complete teetotaler. I remember a whispering fight between him and my mother after Marianne’s wedding, for which I lit and extinguished the candles at the gloomy Presbyterian church a few blocks away. There was champagne at the reception—and I heard my father bristling with anger, referring to the bride herself: “Did you see her guzzling that crap?” That was his exact line, hissed through gritted teeth.

My mom didn’t drink either. She’d occasionally, later in life and only at our urging, have a little glass of rosé, the tiniest sip, and say, “My knees are getting weak!”

TWO THINGS I BELIEVED as a little kid: First, that the car automatically turned into any donut shop by the side of the road. “Oh no!” my father would say. “I can’t stop it! We have to have a donie!” Second, that my mother risked her life for me once a week. When we went to church, the reward was McDonald’s on the way home. “Let me taste your french fries,” she’d say, “to see if they’re poisoned.” I’d watch, thinking, “Dear God, what has she done? What if they are? My mother would give her life to save mine!”

Only after her life-or-death taste test was I allowed a fry.