Slow Hand

During the summer break after my first year in college I got a job working with a guy who sold Family Group Portraits.  The way it worked was that we, the door-to-door sales people, would go to a neighborhood to sell time slots to have a professional photographer come to the house and take group and individual portraits.  He would set up a background and take a variety of shots.  Then several weeks later a "proof passer" would come out and show slides of the photos and get the customer to order as much as they could.   We, the salespeople, sold a coupon and got to keep the money the customer paid for the coupon.  We had to sell them at the suggested price which was about $12 because they wanted the customers to be committed to the photo shoot.

The Crew of salespeople would consist of Benny Kane, the sales manager, me and  one or two other guys.   They were all unique and interesting individuals and Benny Kane was no exception.  He was from New Orleans and a pure character.  One of the things that Benny was good at was buying lunch.  Before the shift we would stop at a Jack in the Box, or somewhere like that, and I would usually just want a cup of coffee.  Benny would always insist that I at least get a sweet roll or something.  I would tell him I already ate but he would act like it was going to hurt his feelings.   Then in the middle of the day when we stopped for lunch he would choose somewhere like a Sizzler Steakhouse and we would all order steaks.   When we got to part where we were supposed to pay he  would say "Hey Marc, it really is  your turn, I bought the last time.  You don't expect me to pay for all of your meals", or something like that.  He pulled off this routine quite a few times and even though I could have objected a little more aggressively I usually let him get away with it.  There is no telling where he is now but I hope he is doing all right.

A few years ago, a friend invited me to a nice place and insisted on me ordering a nice dinner.  I tried to order a hamburger but he insisted.  He said "Don't worry, its on me.  I am buying!  We had a nice meal and then right before the check came he had to go to restroom.  He was in there no less than 15 minutes.  The check came and I found myself sitting at the table with that check for what seemed like a long long time.   It was a pretty good plan he had but he was dealing with a knucklehead of my caliber and when he came out of the restroom his grin seemed to turn to an expression of shock when the check was still there. 

We experienced some memorable restaurant check experiences with a couple we used to know about 25 years ago.  We got along with them just fine but when we went out to eat with them paying the bill was always a memorable event.   At the time we were on a pretty tight budget and there was this particular Tex-Mex restaurant that would have a special on fajitas for 2 on a particular night of the week.   We would order the fajitas which came with the typical side orders like beans, pico de gallo, and tortillas.  We would order water and since there were also chips and hot sauce, we could eat a nice meal for a decent price.   Our friends would also order the fajita special but they would also buy drinks, order extra cheese, sour cream, and  the result was that they were spending a large percentage more than us.  The fellow would keep saying, "have some cheese" or "have some sour cream".  It was beyond simply being polite;  he would make an issue of it and hold the bowl of cheese up and try to pass to me.  I would always say,  "no thanks".    Then at the end of the meal they would always grab the check and calculate what half of what the bill was.   One time I pointed out that since we only had the special, then our order was $12.95 plus tax, or whatever it was.  The response was "Oh maybe we should have brought a calculator".   In the end we always ended up paying for half the bill but for some reason we would sort of forget about it and then next time it would happen all over again.  

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that over the years I have been accused of being "cheap" enough times that I wonder if it isn't true. 

John McPhee

I have some of my dad's old books.   One of them is called "Giving Good Weight".   It isn't a story but instead a collection of "pieces" that were published in the New Yorker magazine back in the 1970s.   The first "piece" is the one titled "Giving Good Weight" and they used that for the title of the book also.  The title refers to New York farmer's market vendors who used analog scales, the kind with a needle.  Nowadays they would use digital scales so the term is probably obsolete. "Giving good weight" referred to when the vendor would give maybe 3 and 1/4th pounds of a particular vegetable or fruit for the price of 3 pounds. 

The book doesn't have a story and would really equate to nothing more than ramblings if the guy who wrote it wasn't a good writer and probably an interesting dude. 

Here is one passage from the book about a particular variety of onion:

   ...Onions. Onions. Multilayered, multileveled, ovate, imbricated, white fleshed, orange-scaled onions.  Native to Asia. Aromatic when bruised.  When my turn is over and a break comes for me, I am so crazed with lust for these bulbous herbs- these enlarged, compressed buds-that I run to an harvested row and pull from the earth a one-pound onion, rip off the membranous bulb coat, bare the flesh, and sink my teeth through leaf after leaf after savory mouth-needling sweet-sharp water-bearing to the flowering stalk that is the center and the secret of the onion...

Most people who would like to be able to write would spend hours to come up with something like that but it still wouldn't be like that.  It would, in most cases, seem contrived or silly.  Even the Pros who get paid to write these days don't write like this guy.  Besides the fact that I find the book entertaining, I also like the idea of reading from the same physical  pages that my dad read from at some point and probably found interesting or somehow otherwise worthy of appreciation.


I had never heard of the guy and reading his book that was published in 1979 made me wonder what it said about him on the internet.   It turns out he is a Pulitzer prize winner and had written quite a bit since then.


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/john_mcphee/search?contributorName=john%20mcphee

John McPhee began contributing to The New Yorker in 1963. Since then, he has written more than eighty pieces for the magazine, nearly all on distinctly different topics. These have included an account of a stint with the Swiss Army, a Profile of a prep-school headmaster, an examination of modern-day cattle rustling, and a Profile of Senator Bill Bradley during his days as a Princeton basketball star, as well as four long articles on geology.
Following two years of writing for television in 1955 and 1956, McPhee joined Time magazine, where he wrote about show business until 1964. He has taught writing at Princeton University since 1975, and was awarded Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award for service to the nation in 1982.
McPhee has published twenty-eight books, most of them based on his New Yorker writings. Like his articles, his books do not have in common any established themes but, rather, encompass the varied topics that have interested him over the years. Among them are “Annals of the Former World,” (1999), which won a Pulitzer Prize; “Assembling California,” (1993); “Looking for a Ship,” (1990); “The Control of Nature,” (1989); and “Coming Into the Country,” (1977), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Most recently, McPhee published “Uncommon Carriers,” (2006) a collection of pieces profiling freight transportation workers.
McPhee lives in Princeton, New Jersey.