Six-page handwritten letter on thin airmail paper, roughly 6\"x8½\", unlined.<\/p>\r\n
\r\nPhiladelphia<\/p>\r\n
Sunday morning<\/p>\r\n
about 5 am<\/p>\r\n
Hello.<\/p>\r\n
Went to bed early with a headache, now it\u2019s gone & so is my desire to sleep. So I\u2019m writing my monthly notes on the foster kids & having lots of good ideas of the kind you wake up with in the middle of the night & then forget by morning \u2014 or you find a pencil, write it down, & in the morning
xxx<\/strike> find immortal lines like this one that Dorothy Parker produced:<\/p>\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\n<\/p>\r\n
Hogamus higgamus<\/p>\r\n
Men are polygamous<\/p>\r\n
Higgamus hoggamus<\/p>\r\n
Women monogamous<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
<\/p>\r\n
pretty immortal, huh?<\/p>\r\n
Anyway, here we are in good old old Philadelphia, the only city in the land with a proto-Nazi for a mayor. It\u2019s really slow\u2014we watch a lot of TV and I\u2019ve cleared out two years\u2019 worth of old newspapers from the living room. (My mother puts them aside to read thoroughly, and then spends all her time with her crazy dog\u2014who is
xxx<\/strike> fortunately in the kennel for the nonce \u2014 what\u2019s a nonce? \u2014 and never gets to pick \u2019em up & read \u2019em \u2014 she saves the whole paper for one article, instead of clipping.)<\/p>\r\nJed & Joaquin are having a great time \u2014 they love having an upstairs & downstairs, and there are good parks & woods & lots of science museums & copious quantities of bagels.<\/p>\r\n
I\u2019ve had the chance to look through all my h.s. & college notes, no trace of the one paper I wanted to look up, but there are some pretty interesting things. Quite a few books I\u2019ll be needing.<\/p>\r\n
Didn\u2019t get a chance to thank you properly on the phone for the suitcase full of treasures. The collar & cuffs-&-collar set for the grey dress were terrific. I love that old blue and old lace \u2014 tho I\u2019ve never corm anything like it before, I can\u2019t wait to try. They feel very soft & gentling of one\u2019s appearance. (does that make sense?) The boys loved the books. Jed finished Popeye in about an hour, and was mad for Tales to Tremble by \u2014 tho I think it was too sophisticatedly scary for him, & he gave up. Joaquin loved Popeye, too, and is delighted with the notebook. The rest of the clothes were lovely (particularly those slippers \u2014 what fun to have pointy toes!) but
xxx<\/strike> mostly didn\u2019txxx<\/strike> fit in style or size \u2014 a lot<\/u> were little girl sizes & I have some friends who were delighted with \u2019em. Another friend and I always share such goodies \u2014 she\u2019s very petite & people give her stuff that\u2019s way too big, while lots of people think I\u2019m smaller than I am because I look so young. So we have a good & profitable partnership in that area.<\/p>\r\nOh, the umbrella is so great! Only it hasn\u2019t rained! And the suitcase itself is marvelous. You wouldn\u2019t believe (maybe you would) the stuff I crammed into it. It was really heavy, too, but behaved itself perfectly well, easy to carry, a good traveler.<\/p>\r\n
Do you know the Post Office deadlines for Christmas packages? I\u2019d like to be able to get Paul & Linda\u2019s in the mail so they\u2019ll get it by Christmas. Probably will be too late by the time I get back \u2014 but maybe it\u2019ll be a lucky year.<\/p>\r\n
Hope you\u2019ve had nice visits with all your various company. I\u2019m sure Paul was delighted at the chance to visit \u2014 what kind of convention did he go to? Did your sister & her husband come for some special reason, or was it just a vacation?<\/p>\r\n
Vacations sure are nice \u2014 nice when they\u2019re over, too.<\/p>\r\n
Oh, I forgot: I herewith (hereby? Herein? anyway\u2026) return to you some of the airmail stationery you thoughtfully included. So thank you in a circle.<\/p>\r\n
much love<\/p>\r\n
Marcy<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
Amusing Google Docs OCR errors:<\/p>\r\n
\r\n
- pointy toes: pornity foer<\/li>\r\n
- Christmas packages: Cleathers paekaajes<\/li>\r\n
- much love: hunch line<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n
Notes<\/h2>\r\n
\r\n
- Philadelphia<\/dt>\r\n
- Dunno why we were visiting Marcy\u2019s mother\u2014possibly a mix of just plain vacation and looking for the papers that Marcy mentions in this letter.<\/dd>\r\n
- I suspect that this was the first Philadelphia trip that I (just barely) remember. Mostly I remember watching and enjoying the movie of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang<\/cite> on TV, and some kind of game that involved Batman and riddles (? I think?), which was my first encounter with the riddle \u201cWhat goes up a chimney down, but can\u2019t go down a chimney up?\u201d Which I was very confused by.<\/dd>\r\n
- poem<\/dt>\r\n
- Huh\u2014I too had heard this attributed to Dorothy Parker, but it turns out that (a) there\u2019s little or no evidence for that attribution, and (b) it has also been attributed to a lot of other people, including William James. Also, (c) a common thread in the attributions is the written-just-after-waking aspect that Marcy was referring to but that I\u2019ve never heard before: \u201cA recurrent theme occurs in tales that profess to describe the\r\nconstruction of the verse. The composer experiences a hypnagogic\r\nstate, sometimes drug-induced, and when he or she emerges from the state the poem is examined with anticipation followed by\r\ndisappointment that is shown or implied.\u201d For more about attribution, see a 2011 mailing-list thread<\/a>.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201conly city in the land with a proto-Nazi for a mayor\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- Would that there were still only one such city.<\/dd>\r\n
- old newspapers<\/dt>\r\n
- In 1989 or so, iIrc, Grandma Ethel had a roughly three-foot-tall stack of newspapers in one of the rooms of her house.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201cwhat\u2019s a nonce?\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- Coincidentally, I\u2019m posting this letter only a week or so after learning that nonce<\/i>, which is innocuous but old-fashioned in the US, is an insulting slang term in the UK.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201cbooks I\u2019ll be needing\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- I\u2019m guessing that this was because Marcy was planning on going to grad school.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201ccorm\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- \u2026I don\u2019t think that Marcy meant to write corm<\/i> here, but I can\u2019t tell what else this word might have been. Maybe she meant to write worn<\/i>, but I\u2019m pretty sure that\u2019s not the word she wrote.<\/dd>\r\n
- Tales to Tremble By<\/cite><\/dt>\r\n
- Tales to Tremble By: A Collection of Famous Stories of Haunting and Suspense<\/a><\/cite>. I remember the cover illustration, but I don\u2019t remember reading the book. Also a little surprising that I was enthusiastic about it, because for as long as I can remember, I haven\u2019t liked horror fiction or other scary things.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201cyour sister & her husband\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- Both George and Helen had married sisters, so I\u2019m not sure who this was in reference to.<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A letter from Marcy during a trip (with me and Jay) to see Marcy\u2019s mother in Philadelphia. \u201cVacations sure are nice\u2014nice when they\u2019re over, too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-marcy","category-hearthlight"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1668"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1712,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668\/revisions\/1712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}