Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day, I’ve got a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way, was the song in my head when my mother came to get me out of bed, it may even have been a crib and she would have had to lift me out, since this was still in the Spanish bungalow, in my little room with the window facing the front lawn on which I was never to step foot since it was a precipitous slippery slope down to a precipice that hung ten feet or so above Haight Avenue Extension.
It was awkward that everyone else, even make-believe children in stories, lived on streets, roads, lanes, avenues, even ways, whose names, if not downright jolly, like Cherry Street, were comfortingly evocative, like Collegeview Avenue, or practical, like Main Street or, at worse, meaningless, like Forbus Street. Not only were I and Joannie Ehrdreich, who lived across the street, possibly the only children in the world whose address was an extension, but the name of the so poorly devised as to have to had our embarrassing extension tacked on to it was a sentiment acknowledged by everyone to be bad and to be avoided at all costs. It didn’t matter at all that the terrible name was spelled with different letters, it was still the same word, nor that it had been called Haight Avenue in honor of a person of that name. So much the worse for them.
After I had sung my little reveille, “How clever of my beamish boy!” is not what my mother said. A phi beta kappa math and physics major at Cornell, my mother was a dedicated realist who had worked out conversational formulae which enabled her to both maintain her principles and her identity as the charming and sociable Martha Reifler, even when a Serious Subject arose despite whatever efforts she had made to evade it. For example, in the matter of God, she would carefully make a distinction between atheism and agnosticism, with the tacit (but false) implication that, of course, she was in the latter camp.
Thus Martha Gold Reifler, with the precise honesty which she and my father wielded so deftly in order to convey their well-deserved and attractive self-esteem to others, told me that I had not made up the song, which is what I had assumed, but that it often could be heard on the radio. A note of wary admonishment made it clear that she wasn’t at all sure that I really believed the song was my own invention, and that she was concerned that I might be carrying into what, until just a couple of years earlier, had been an ideal nuclear family— of two— a strain of self-aggrandizement that emerged from time to time among the Reiflers (nothing like that was to be found among the Golds) which, if not nipped in the bud, could be a source of future embarrassment.
It was not long, only an hour or two, before what had been the beautiful morning to a beautiful day became a morning of dismay, when once more the WKIP disc jockey spun “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and I became vaguely aware of the existence of the subconscious and its character as a dirty cheat.
It was awkward that everyone else, even make-believe children in stories, lived on streets, roads, lanes, avenues, even ways, whose names, if not downright jolly, like Cherry Street, were comfortingly evocative, like Collegeview Avenue, or practical, like Main Street or, at worse, meaningless, like Forbus Street. Not only were I and Joannie Ehrdreich, who lived across the street, possibly the only children in the world whose address was an extension, but the name of the so poorly devised as to have to had our embarrassing extension tacked on to it was a sentiment acknowledged by everyone to be bad and to be avoided at all costs. It didn’t matter at all that the terrible name was spelled with different letters, it was still the same word, nor that it had been called Haight Avenue in honor of a person of that name. So much the worse for them.
After I had sung my little reveille, “How clever of my beamish boy!” is not what my mother said. A phi beta kappa math and physics major at Cornell, my mother was a dedicated realist who had worked out conversational formulae which enabled her to both maintain her principles and her identity as the charming and sociable Martha Reifler, even when a Serious Subject arose despite whatever efforts she had made to evade it. For example, in the matter of God, she would carefully make a distinction between atheism and agnosticism, with the tacit (but false) implication that, of course, she was in the latter camp.
Thus Martha Gold Reifler, with the precise honesty which she and my father wielded so deftly in order to convey their well-deserved and attractive self-esteem to others, told me that I had not made up the song, which is what I had assumed, but that it often could be heard on the radio. A note of wary admonishment made it clear that she wasn’t at all sure that I really believed the song was my own invention, and that she was concerned that I might be carrying into what, until just a couple of years earlier, had been an ideal nuclear family— of two— a strain of self-aggrandizement that emerged from time to time among the Reiflers (nothing like that was to be found among the Golds) which, if not nipped in the bud, could be a source of future embarrassment.
It was not long, only an hour or two, before what had been the beautiful morning to a beautiful day became a morning of dismay, when once more the WKIP disc jockey spun “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and I became vaguely aware of the existence of the subconscious and its character as a dirty cheat.