Talk:A&E/1939

Out Takes

How might an energetic 3-year-old intuit the possibilities of life at the farm relative to lonely prospects set by his urban agenda? Lacking sufficient experience, I gave that question little forethought, and I took my time in working out an answer. For my parents, on the brink of 40, the prospect of moving to the farm came with expected continuities set in their well seasoned character and established patterns of activity. They had bought the farm for a song in a deeply depressed market 2 or 3 years before I was born.

Pre-war in New York, a dual-earning, professional couple with a 3-year-old child would be unusual requiring substantial child-care assistance then. And the asymmetry of their dual-earner status furthered their distinctiveness, for Their move was not one that fit the suburban model because the self-expectations of both left neither adaptable to the homemaker role. Both Margot and Joe would commute , leaving Robbie and Woz from 7 am to 7 pm in the place in the country. That's right: I saw this situation largely favorable; Woz did not. She had been incubating her nest egg near to her home in Hells Kitchen, a walk from Gramercy Place. But from rural Pennsylvania, she found catching the eye of a regular guy who would eagerly marry and make with her a home and family of their own an impossible dream.

When we moved to the farm, Margot and Joe had owned it for 5 years or so and used it as their place in the country. As their place in the country, it fit well with their urban aspirations and norms, and we were clearly moving to the country, not the suburbs, in going there full time. They might think their 3-year-old would have analogous expectations, playing around a red barn with a cow and some chickens, and initially many anticipated continuities. But to a surprising extent, children are natural phenomenologists and they take in what they see, quite distinct from the fantasies their imaginations might conjure and the routines normal in their prior circumstances. [**** I'm quite sure, in a somewhat different way for my parents, we need to step back a bit Margo and Joe had bought the farm But I am sure that by the time it became home, I was ready to turn active, exploring the farm and making it my turf!

2/7/2026:

We should note a couple aspects of this experience. First, sometime post war, my little egg scale became obsolete, in part because industrial large-scale suppliers started using high tech weighing systems. , to the wonders of modern veterinary medicine, the metabolism of the average egg-laying hen has shifted up, for typically a dozen eggs seem to weigh 3 ounces more. to a dozen eggs so that grocery stores have discontinued small eggs and added jumbo eggs to the line-up they usually sell. The more important aspect relates tangentially to this inflation, but more fundamentally to the similarity between the whole business with the eggs and my project of digging to China.

2/9/2026:

But to describe those impressions in a way that will enable us to grasp them, I must put them in a highly speculative cultural context that is consistent with the few facts about them that I've been able to garner. To begin, I'll set aside what I think was a misconception. As a child, I thought Marlies and Carl were émigrés from Hitler, but I don't think it would have been owing to Nazi racial policies as those took hold, ever more comprehensively, nor to the ideological repression as Hitler consolidated his power, but could very possibly have been because Carl's art in Germany would exemplify what Hitler called "degenerate art." But I've come to believe that Carl went to New York in the very early 1930s because he found life in Germany stultifying and he found himself unable to support either himself by his art or his art by any other means.

Carl was a wanderer, perhaps better a contented one, one ready to find and cultivate what he fond good wherever life took him. He was born in 1892 just to the west of Frankfurt in a town that has now been swallowed up into the city. He must have had decent schooling and perhaps started serious study in an art school, but then decided to go to sea instead, somewhere within Australian jurisdiction when World War I broke out and was imprisoned as a German in Sydney. Robbie (talk) 19:01, 25 January 2026 (MST)