Robbie/Timeline RMCC

A Timeline of my life and and self-formation

Starting Up, 1939-1965

Birth: August 17, 1939.

Father: Franklin T. McClintock, "Joe" to friends and family, worked as a midlevel executive on financing large industrial projects through the Wall Street investment bank, Harriman, Ripley, & Co.

Mother: Margot de Bruyn Kops McClintock, "Margo" informally, worked near Herald Square in the Garment District, designing a line of junior-miss dresses and suits sold nationally in mid-scale department stores.

My birth nearly killed my mother, owing to a catastrophic loss of blood in an emergency Cesarian operation. As an infant, she had contracted polio and spent a year-plus in a sanatorium in Bismarck, ND, which left her with a gimp arm, a short leg, a strong will, and, I discovered, a constricted cervical canal. More. . . .

1939 to 1942: A Prince of the Park

I, and my nanny, Woz, aka Rose, squeezed into my parents' apartment on Gramercy Park, replete with a large terrace, a coveted view, and their routines of engaging work and gregarious lifestyle. For my first 3 years, that apartment, and the flow of activity that took place there situated, my initial lifeworld—a bunch of givens where I began to sleep and to eat and to walk and to talk, acquiring my initial efforts to cope with circumstances of time and place. The apartment was scaled and furnished, loosely Art Deco, for socializing among Depression era, upwardly-mobile professionals, circa 30 to 40 in age. It came with a rarity, a key to a private, block-sized space straddling Irving Place where I spent my time outdoors, a prince of the park, wheeled about by nanny in my carriage, sporting absurd finery and cooing with gushy bystanders. I have no actual memories of my life there then, but I like to think I would be having some reservations about it. Big-smile pictures of me dressed to the nines suggest someone learning to excessively please. And perhaps my cultivating a knack for quietly sousing myself on drinks carelessly set on low tables by standing guests intent in their conversations suggested a sophisticated despair in the making. From infancy on, we all adapt to our lifeworlds, working with their good and their bad, whatever those may be. At the age of 3, I had the basics was ready for a change with which I might turn active, a self-directing agent in a very different lifeworld. which, Thankfully, it came about.

1942 to 1943: A Different Lifeworld.

As I later heard it, in 1942, the austerities of the war and the constraints of out-grown living arrangements prompted my parents to change our living arrangements radically. I doubt that they explicitly consulted me in the matter, but I like to think that I had some subtle, tacit influence on the depth and extent of the changes they initiated. While we had lived there, the Gramercy Park apartment had not been the whole of my world, for Woz and I would accompany Margo and Joe to various places for short weekend visits and longer times in the summers of '40 and '41. I would experience those forays as transient departures from our urban routines, often pleasing but sometimes a little confusing—intimations of alternative lifeworlds. One destination seemed somewhat recurrent. And there, Margo and Joe didn't relax convivially as elsewhere they would. Instead, they busied themselves with projects in and about this strangely vacant house, while Woz, who had barely ever in her life been out of the city, nervously kept me too much aside from the action. Nevertheless, I would eye what was going on around me and with some excitement added "the farm" to my sparse vocabulary. In August, I had a little party for my 3rd birthday with my urban friends, whom I didn't really know, and shortly after that I learned that we were moving away from Gramercy Park to live fulltime at the farm.

How might an energetic 3-year-old intuit the possibilities of life at the farm relative to nascent prospects set by his urban agenda? For my parents, adults, the prospect of moving to the farm came with continuities set in their well formed 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. Making it into an attractive retreat weekends and summers had become their shared avocation, my father the planner and my mother the manager. My involvement came late, of course, and I could only begin as a passive participant in the endeavor. A picture surely captures such expectations. It showed an adult crowd partying on the back terrace at the farm, celebrating my baptism in a local Episcopal chapel, since often passed but never entered. I was in the center, an infant asleep, held awkwardly in the arms of my godfather, CEO of the investment bank for which my father worked, a person I had not seen before and would not see again.

For my first 3 years, conventional necessities—comme il faut, the way it's spoused to be—structured my life, as they had structures the lives of my parents and the lifeworld they created. And on the surface, neither I nor they would have reason to expect things to become very different with the decision to live at the farm. The idiom, comme il faut, literally says "as it is necessary" and comes to refer to what is conventionally required because in settled social circles, many conventions take on an appearance of necessity, requiring those who will conduct themselves effectively to follow the conventional expectations astutely. But the phrase can turn very ironic when life necessities diverge from the social necessities. With the move to the farm, I became alert to these ironies as they arose and took advantage of them to center there, for better and for worse, my own independent lifeworld.

1943 to 1945: Gaining Some Control

We live life, each and all, in the face of necessities. Our powers of self-definition arise, not from the fortuitous absence of necessities, but from our ability to understand and to exercise opportunities to influence how they impinge on us purposefully.