“I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and I love you all to heck,” I sang aloud one afternoon while engaged in one of my favorite pastimes, stepping on ants. This sport’s prime venue, literally my stomping ground, was the flagstone terrace above the sunken driveway, where every morning the milkman came to the kitchen door, recycling (although he had no idea that is what he was doing) the Emmadine Milk bottles, which were oddly shaped, with a bulbous mouth into which could be inserted a small right-angle spoon (provided by Emmadine) to block the milk below so the cream could be pored off, and occasionally the egg man, a gruff, grizzled, disheveled rural Jew, whose dissimilarity to the two types of Jew I was familiar with, the clean, well-scrubbed one who played golf, wore natty clothes and spoke like Jack Benny and the older aspiring middle-class Eastern European one whose English was not so good, tantalized me with the possibility that there might exist a not utterly uncongenial way of being an adult.
What drew me to the song, A Bushel and a Peck, was its wit – the rhyming of “peck” with “heck” was the cat’s pajamas to a five-year-old – but it was its simplicity, the ease with which it could be reiterated, that rocketed it to first place in my hit parade. As for its sentiment, like many, many songs – far too many, it seemed to me – it revolved around a particular grown-up word that eluded decipherment. I wish I could say that it all became clear as my mother suddenly stepped out the back door and I found myself singing it to her, but “I love you, too, my darling boy” is not what she said. Instead, looking off into the distance, absorbed in the problem of how best to deal with what was in store for her, now that she had a son who sang silly songs to himself, she remarked, “That’s nice.” After she returned inside, I resorted to another of my favorite activities, fetching stones from the garden and throwing them over the ramparts of the terrace, while imagining the destruction they were wreaking on the ants on the driveway twenty-feet below.
What drew me to the song, A Bushel and a Peck, was its wit – the rhyming of “peck” with “heck” was the cat’s pajamas to a five-year-old – but it was its simplicity, the ease with which it could be reiterated, that rocketed it to first place in my hit parade. As for its sentiment, like many, many songs – far too many, it seemed to me – it revolved around a particular grown-up word that eluded decipherment. I wish I could say that it all became clear as my mother suddenly stepped out the back door and I found myself singing it to her, but “I love you, too, my darling boy” is not what she said. Instead, looking off into the distance, absorbed in the problem of how best to deal with what was in store for her, now that she had a son who sang silly songs to himself, she remarked, “That’s nice.” After she returned inside, I resorted to another of my favorite activities, fetching stones from the garden and throwing them over the ramparts of the terrace, while imagining the destruction they were wreaking on the ants on the driveway twenty-feet below.