Dolley Madison lived in an age that knew little about diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, and contagions swept off many, as they did in Dolley’s first family. The young were particularly vulnerable, and it was quite common for only half the children in a family to survive until adulthood. Death was known from an early age as brothers and sisters often died. Grief was common.

Early deaths still happen, of course, but not as frequently, and that made me wonder about the effects on the psyches of those early Americans. I have heard it said today, “She never got over the death of her son.” “He never got over the loss of his little sister.” But back then, the majority of the people experienced such a death. If such an event today affects the psyche of the parent or sibling, didn’t it have similar effects back then? How did such losses affect not only the individuals but a society where they were common? Did the prevalence of early deaths make that society fundamentally different from ours?

Dolley, although she had to suffer the tremendous grief of the early deaths of a child and a husband, did not endure what many other women of her era did—the constant cycle of childbirth and nursing and childhood deaths.  Martha Jefferson was twenty-three when she married Thomas Jefferson. In the next ten years, she had six children. Only two survived more than a few years. Weakened by the frequent childbirths, Martha was dead ten years after she was married.

The younger of Martha Jefferson’s two surviving children, Mary, married and bore three babies, only one of whom survived into adulthood. Weakened by the last childbirth, Mary Jefferson Eppes died when she was but twenty-five.

The other surviving child, Martha Jefferson Randolph, lived until she was 64 and gave birth thirteen times with eleven of the children surviving to adulthood, but the stories of Thomas Jefferson’s wife and their younger daughter were common ones of the times. How did it affect the psyche of the women of the age that they were expected to have large families knowing the probability that they would suffer the heartbreak of a dead infant? And how did it affect them knowing that the frequent childbirths could bring an early end to their own life? How did this psychic weight affect those around them?

(Continued on May 28)

On our recent visits to the homes of early Virginian presidents, our guides and the exhibits revealed that each of those presidents held views opposing slavery. Although Washington never publicly condemned the institution, in private communications he indicated that he opposed slavery and said that it was morally wrong. Jefferson stated that slavery harmed both the enslaved and the owners, and he proposed gradual emancipation. Madison at the Constitutional Convention advocated an immediate cessation of the importation of slaves. Monroe labeled slavery a “blight.” Even so, each owned slaves and benefited from the institution. On the visits, I wondered again about the conflict between their words and their actions. But on this trip, I also learned more about Dolley Madison and for the first time I considered her intellectual journey.

I had known only that Dolley Madison was married to James Madison and that she was a famous for her social skills. The guide at Montpelier confirmed her ability to draw people out and to get her guests talking with each other even when they were political enemies. The guide also told the spouse and me other things about her that we had not known.

She was born in North Carolina to Quaker parents, Mary and John Payne, Jr., and Dolley was raised a Quaker. The prosperous family moved to a Virginia plantation when Dolley was an infant, but in 1783, when she was fifteen, her father, inspired by Revolutionary War ideals and his Quaker faith, freed all his slaves and moved the family to Philadelphia, where he failed as a merchant. In a short time, the family went from prosperity to penury.

When twenty-two, Dolley married John Todd, a Quaker lawyer in Philadelphia. Two sons quickly followed, but when the youngest boy, William, was three months old a virulent yellow fever epidemic hit Philadelphia. Dolley’s husband and her son died on the same day, and her husband’s mother and father died shortly thereafter. Dolley’s father had died a year before and her mother had moved to Virginia to live with Dolley’s sister. The twenty-five-year-old Dolley, without means of support, was alone in Philadelphia with a young son to support.

Along came James Madison. The federal government was then meeting in Philadelphia, and Madison represented Virginia in the House of Representatives. The story has it that James was introduced to Dolley by Aaron Burr, Madison’s college classmate. Less than a year after her first husband died, Dolley married James Madison, who was seventeen years older than she and had not been married before. Dolley’s young son, Payne (really John Payne), became part of the Madison household, but Dolley and James had no children of their own. This reminded me that George Washington also married a widow who already had had children. George and Martha Washington, like James and Dolley Madison, had no biological children of their own. Clearly Martha Washington and Dolley Madison were fertile so the failure to have children seems to have rested with George and James. I wondered if there was any significance in that fact.

Dolley and James stayed in Philadelphia until, in 1800, the federal government moved to that literal swampland that became the city of Washington. The Madisons lived in that new town until 1817, as James first served as Secretary of State under President Jefferson and then two terms as the country’s fourth President. After his retirement James and Dolley moved fulltime to the Madison family home, Montpelier, a large plantation with many slaves.

Hearing this, I wondered what Dolley truly thought about slavery. Did she think about her various families’ different relationships to slavery? Her father felt so strongly about the institution that he freed his slaves and thereby completely altered his and his family’s life. Without slaves, Dolley’s life must have changed radically from the wealth and comfort offered by a Virginia plantation to the poverty of a failed Philadelphia merchant life. Did she resent what her father had done or had her Quaker faith imbued her with same principles as her father? Did she, too, see slavery as evil and in contradiction to the ideals of the Revolution?

She and her first husband had no slaves, but what was her reaction when she learned that Madison had household slaves in Philadelphia? Or when she realized that her new beau owned hundreds of slaves at Montpelier? Of course, she may not have been in much of a position to object to Madison’s slaveholding, but somehow, as did many others in this era, including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, she must have made an accommodation with that institution.

After James Madison died, Dolley Madison was again in poverty. Part of the reason was her son. Payne never “found” himself, we were told. He never married nor had a sustained career. He flitted from one enterprise to another running up debts, which James Madison paid. As a result, Madison mortgaged Montpelier. After Madison died, Dolley moved back to Washington and had Payne manage the plantation, but he did so disastrously, and Montpelier had to be sold shortly after he took charge.

After hearing Payne’s story of never being married and deeply unhappy, I wondered if he had been gay. I said something to the spouse, and she had had a similar thought. Of course, I have no real knowledge that he was, but if Payne was gay, what was his life like? Would it be surprising that he was deeply unhappy and became an alcoholic?

Dolley not only sold Montpelier, she also sold all but a few of Madison’s slaves whom she took to Washington. Her poverty continued, however, and she periodically sold her household slaves to maintain her comfort. Although she was revered in Washington, abolitionists denounced her for these sales, especially because they happened in Washington, the nation’s capital. How did Dolley feel about these criticisms?

(Continued on May 25)

He was far more educated than his formal education would suggest. A high school diploma ended the father’s educational credentials, but he knew lots about history and geography and physics and politics and sports. He knew things about words that few knew. He taught me, correctly, that the preferred pronunciation for “err” was ur not air. The noun was air-ur, but the verb was ur. (This made me realize that there was a certain irony whenever someone says, “To air is human.”) He made few grammatical mistakes and got upset whenever a letter from one of his kids mailed from college had one.

I don’t how he learned facts about the moon or the physics of archery or the importance of Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech. It is entirely possible that a high school education in his day was at a much higher level than it is today, but I think what was behind his surprising knowledge was that he simply liked to learn. However, I am somewhat puzzled what he used for sources. He did not read books. (When I was well into adulthood, the father visited me in New York, and we walked to the Brooklyn Bridge. I told him that there was a very good book about the Bridge’s construction, and he took my copy of The Great Bridge by David McCullough when he went home. A month later, he sent it back to me. I found a note from him tucked inside: “I read the whole book.” It was the only book that I ever knew he read.) Other than Reader’s Digest, some golf publications, and maybe True, he seldom looked at any of the magazines that were in the house. On the other hand, he was an avid reader of newspapers. Two came to us daily plus another one, heavy on Wisconsin politics, came weekly. It isn’t just nostalgia when I say newspapers were better back then. You could learn more from them than today. The father certainly did.

He knew, however, that his learning was limited. His regret at not having a college education was evident. I asked the brother about memories from our childhood, and one of his replies was how the father stressed the importance of a college education. If you had asked me when I was four or five, I would have told you that I was going to college. Perhaps that may not seem remarkable, but many of my father’s friends did not have even a high school diploma. Some of their children, my contemporaries, did not finish high school. Their parents may have stressed a good job, but that could have meant being a tool and die maker or a bookkeeper, but they did not stress formal education. The father did. There was little doubt that his three children were going to college, and that had to make him something of an outlier in his social circles.

He sacrificed for our educations. He got a second mortgage on our quite modest house to help finance our educations, but he never mentioned that to us. I only learned about it much later. Sending his kids to college was not an easy thing, but he was not a father who reminded his children of all the sacrifices he had made for them.

We were told the importance of a college education time and again, and the sister, the brother, and I all got good college and post-college educations. He never said it, but surely the father must have felt that if he had gone to college, he would have had a better job with more income. We were not told, however, to get a college education to make sure that we were ready for a good job. It was not go to college and get trained as an accountant or a schoolteacher or for a marketing career. He never suggested that we should treat college as a high level vocational school. The chief point to the education was simply to learn as much as we could about . . .everything.

I, too, like to learn. I am proud of that and think that quality helps define me. I want to believe that it one of my best innate qualities. But perhaps it is not something I discovered for myself. Perhaps I got it from him.

I asked why would someone name their daughter Chastity? Wouldn’t that lead to jokes as she grew up? Would anyone name their daughter Promiscuous? The daughter looked at me intently and said, “Some people are named Randy.”

I heard the President speak against gun-free zones. Does that mean that people can bring handguns and semi-automatic rifles with bump stocks into the White House?

Isn’t it un-American to be all excited about a British royal wedding? Why is it that friends who mock those who follow the Kardashians spend a lot of time learning about the royals?

“Fathers have become sympathetic, and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.” William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

The spouse says that she can’t get into Frank Sinatra because she can’t sing along with him. Even so, she is enthralled by Ella Fitzgerald.

A friend who grew up in Oklahoma told me that at every high school football game and other sporting events he attended growing up, the crowd, after the Star-Spangled Banner, sang the showtune Oklahoma. I wonder if all this singing of a Broadway song is the reason why so many gay people come from Oklahoma.

I was heading to the escalator at a local Target. A man carrying more stuff than I offered to let me go first, but I insisted that he proceed.  When I got to the escalator with him in front, I realized that the escalator was not functioning.  I said to him, “But I expected you to get it to work.”  He immediately replied, “That’s just what my wife says.”

“In [her] worldview, it seems that one has the police to protect one’s property, Rush Limbaugh to protect one’s pride, and God to take care of the rest.” Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

When I first learned to type, I was told to leave two spaces after a period. Then with computers, I learned that it was now proper to leave only one space at the end of a sentence. I have tried to adopt that new style and usually, but not always, succeed.  But in the last month I have seen reports of a study that has concluded that it is better for readers if there are two spaces. Now I am just confused.

On the recent trip to James Madison’s Montpelier, I examined its exhibits about the “three-fifths clause.” Often today we tend to see that provision in the Constitution as saying that slaves were only three-fifths of a person, but that was not the constitutional point. The clause, which is in Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, states, “Representatives [for the House of Representatives] and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” Free blacks were thus counted the same as whites, as were indentured servants. The number of slaves, although that term was carefully avoided, were multiplied by 60% and added to the free population for the apportionment of Representatives.

Southerners at the Constitutional Convention were not stating that slaves were only three-fifths of a person. For apportionment of the House of Representatives, they wanted slaves to be counted as whites. It would have meant greater representation for the South. Northerners, not surprisingly, resisted their being counted at all. The result was the famous three-fifths compromise. Thus, southern states had a greater number of Representatives than would have been the case if slaves had not been counted at all, but less than would have been the case if slaves had been fully counted. (Slavery existed in the northern states at that time, but the number of slaves in the North was minuscule compared to the South.)

Of course, it seems outrageous today that states could have more power in the national government because they had large numbers of slaves, people without legal rights who, of course, could not vote, but we should remember that the country was not a democratic one. In most, if not all states, a man could vote only if he held a certain amount of property, and this comprised only a fraction of white males, even though all were fully counted in the apportionment. And, of course, women could not vote, even though fully counted. And throughout our history even until today, children and non-citizens, who cannot vote, are counted for apportioning the House. Representatives have always represented more people than just those who can legally vote.

The three-fifths clause in the Constitution not only meant that large slave states would have greater power in the House than other states, it also assured that the presidency would be largely controlled by Virginia at the beginning of the Union. As we have been reminded at least twice in the last two decades, the President is not elected by the people but by electors. The Constitution provides, “Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” Southern states not only had more Representatives because of the three-fifths clause, they also had more electors.

This effect of the three-fifths compromise had important consequences. For example, Jefferson beat John Adams for the presidency in 1800 and won 73 electors while Adams won 65. However, if slaves had not been considered in apportioning Representatives, the Montpelier exhibit showed that Adams would have had a majority in the electoral college. With the three-fifths clause, it is not surprising that four out of our first five presidents called Virginia home.

As I pondered this information, I wondered how our country would have been different without the constitutional compromise. I also wondered if Jefferson ever thanked God or Providence or the stars for the institution of slavery not just because of the privileged life that institution afforded him but also for his Presidency.

(To be continued at random times.)

The spouse and I recently took a trip to Charlottesville, Virginia, and visited the presidential homes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Jefferson’s Monticello and Monroe’s Highland Plantation (now called Ash Lawn—Highland) are a few miles apart in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Madison’s Montpelier is a forty-five minute drive away. Six weeks earlier we had gone to George Washington’s Mount Vernon. We were struck by many things including the fact that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all owned hundreds of slaves.

We noted also that the guides at each of the homes referred to slaves as “enslaved people.” The informational placards at all the homes also refrained from using the word “slaves.”

I asked a guide at Montpelier about this. She replied that we should be seeing those in bondage as individuals with multi-dimensional lives. They should not be defined solely by their status as slaves. Thus, “enslaved people” is the preferred term. I understood that, but while better capturing the humanity of those in slavery, it also, at least to me, undercuts the force of slavery as an institution.

“Enslaved people” sounds too much like “indentured servitude,” a temporary and often voluntary condition. Yes, we should see the enslaved people as part of the humanity of which we are all part, but we should also recognize that the white slave society existed because it saw the slaves as less than fully human. You can say and even believe that “All men are created equal,” but you can own others only if you believe that those others are not fully human. We should see those in bondage as human, but realize that many who founded our country could not recognize the complete humanity in them. And perhaps then we might reflect on how many today do not see others who have different skin colors or eyes through the lens of “All men are equated equal.”

All the homes now deal more forthrightly with slavery than on a visit decades ago and admit freely that those presidents could live their affluent lives only because they held others in bondage. The homes now try to provide some understanding of slave lives. Montpelier has an extensive exhibit called “The Mere Distinction of Color” that is informative, profound, provocative, and moving. Monticello and Montpelier show us the primitive cabins where the slaves lived. A sign at Jefferson’s home taught me a lot. It stated that the slaves were allotted only eight pounds of cornmeal and one pound of pork a week. (It is hardly surprising that slaves often tried to steal meat, and Jefferson’s smokehouse was carefully, if not always successfully, locked.) But I doubt that no matter what I might see or read, I can ever truly understand what it was like to be an enslaved person.

On the other hand, for a more complete understanding of slave lives in their context, I wish I had a better understanding of non-slave lives at the country’s founding. Visiting the homes, I got some understanding of the luxurious lives of the presidents, but I know little about how ordinary people of that time lived. I assume, but do not know, that many northern farmers were only eking out a living. What were their accommodations and diet? What was the life like for the majority of the whites in the south at that time?  In a number of southern states, a graphic at Montpelier revealed, blacks comprised up to 40% of the population. Since people like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe owned up to 300 slaves, the vast majority of the whites in those must not have owned slaves. What was life like in a slave society for the whites who did not own slaves? What were their attitudes towards enslaved people and slavery? How did they regard those who owned hundreds of slaves?

It was not the mission of the presidential homes to explore such questions, but the visits made me wonder about them.

(To be continued on May 16.)

Rice also gave a more prosaic example than Shakespeare of how a staged play can be more powerful than just reading. He tells of how as a youth he saw Sherlock Holmes. Professor Moriarty is about to trap Holmes in a room, when Holmes douses the light. Moriarty tells his henchmen to follow the lit cigar Holmes has been smoking. When the lights are switched back on, Holmes has escaped. He had put the cigar on the sill of one window and escaped out the other. “It may all sound rather ridiculous, but it would be impossible to exaggerate the effect it had upon the audience. Shivers and exclamations of apprehension were followed by relief that expressed itself in delighted laughter and sustained applause. I saw the play [decades ago], . . . but I shall never forget . . . the excitement of that scene.”

I, too, remember a collection of moments that can only occur in the theater. As with Rice, they have occurred in plays both sublime and the humble, and one was also in Macbeth. Patrick Stewart was starring, and even though I have read and seen the play several times, Stewart’s portrayal made me emit a stunned gasp when Macbeth first sees Banquo’s ghost. The theater had taken my breath away. (Patrick Stewart, as well as Ben Kingsley, were in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night Dream that so affected me half a lifetime ago, but I remember neither from that production.)

One memorable moment was in a play in a small theater with a small audience. I remember nothing about the play other than a few moments by an actor whose name I no longer know, but he once did the Dunkin’ Donuts ads where he was obsessed with getting up early to make fresh doughnuts. In this play he did a monolog on hammer toes that was funny and mournful and touching not only through his voice but also through his face and shoulders and belly.

I remember Scapino with Jim Dale. (Carol Channing was in the audience, and she sat, as Carol Channing ought, with wide eyes and her mouth open during the entire performance—that was at the uptown Circle in the Square Theater where audience members can see each other—with a bevy of good looking men around her.) A running gag throughout the play was that any character exiting the stage would say “Ciao!” Then everyone on stage, seriatim, would say “Ciao!” As intended, this chorus started to get laughs, even though I doubted it would have seemed funny on the printed page. The magical moment came after this was done for the dozenth time. After the litany of “Ciao”, the sweetest “Ciao” you ever heard came from the front row of the audience. It was from the sweetest-looking six-year-old, beaming boy you ever saw (this was a matinee). The cast could not help themselves; they struggled not to, but they broke up in laughter, and we in the audience broke up, too, laughing a prolonged and uproarious thank-you to the entire enterprise knowing that we had seen something unique.

There have been many more special moments since I started going to plays, and there have been many special productions. I now go to the theater a couple dozen times a year, and something important or magical or special does not always happen, but it happens often enough that I continue going. And for this I thank Alan Downer’s course and Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Without both of those experience, I might never have gone to the theater as much as I have. I would have missed much.

I save Playbills, those little magazines you get when attending the theater.  At the performance’s conclusion, if I can’t find mine, I feel a bit unsettled and try to find a discarded one. When I get home, I stack the Playbills on a shelf of the table next to my morning reading chair. They amass there for what I consider a season—from September until the following summer. Then I move them to a bookcase in my office where I place them on top of last season’s accumulation. Why I do this I do not know. I certainly don’t catalog them. When I move them, I may glance at them, but I seldom look at them after that. I just have them.

I get the Playbills, obviously, because I go to plays, and part of the reason I go to plays is because of Professor Alan Downer. I took his course in modern drama in college. We saw a few classic movies—I seem to remember M and Treasure of the Sierra Madre–but mostly we read plays. I found almost every one of them interesting, and I still remember many of them. On the other hand, I don’t remember any specific lecture by Downer. They must have been informative, however, for I feel as though I have a solid grasp of the development of modern drama, and that had to come from the Professor.

While I enjoyed reading dozens of plays in college, I had seen very few–a couple of high school and college productions and only one or two professional companies. I had not yet learned the real power of the stage.

Soon after I came to New York that changed. I was lucky enough to attend Peter Brook’s now legendary Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I learned that night that a script can be read, but that a play must be seen. This was not Shakespeare of the printed word, but the creation of a magical world on the stage. It drew me into that world. It was more immediate than any movie could ever be. It required live actors, a stage, and an audience. I learned that evening that the theater could present an experience that could not be had elsewhere.

When I now experience the powerful moment that only the theater can give, I think of Brook’s Dream, but I also I often think of Elmer Rice, little known today but a prolific playwright from the last century. I was introduced to Rice in Downer’s course where I read The Adding Machine. I have never seen it, even though it is occasionally still mounted, but the play stuck with me. Decades after college, I learned that Rice was a graduate of the law school that employed me, and I then read some of Rice’s writings on the theater. I was gratified to find that he stressed what Brook’s Dream had revealed to me–a play is meant to be seen, not just read. He said, “To read in a stage direction such indications of mood as ‘savagely’ or ‘tearfully’ is surely not the same as to sit tensely in one’s seat while a player strides the boards in simulated rage, or to be moved to tears oneself by the apparent distress of a beautiful actress.” And he gave some examples.

Elmer Rice explained the effect watching Act II, Scene II from Macbeth had on him.  The title character has killed Duncan, but he has not implicated the grooms as planned. Lady Macbeth scornfully leaves to do the unfinished deed. The stage directions say, “Knocking within.” That direction is repeated over the next few lines. Lady Macbeth returns, and she, too, is now covered in blood. Rice continues: “It is dramatic enough in the reading, but the full effect can be understood only when one sits in the theatre watching those two desperate figures in the cold predawn light, he already overcome with guilt and remorse, she hysterically intent upon the consummation of the crime. Then comes the knocking upon the locked gate of the castle; the inchoate fears of Macbeth and the cold disdain of his wife are punctuated by the repeated pounding. Who is there? Will the guilt be discovered? The words convey all that, of course, but they are immeasurably enhanced by the visible and audible situation. No one who has merely read the play can be aware of the intensity of this celebrated scene when it is enacted.”

(Concluded on May 11.)

“Brooke Russell Astor was not in fact the last Mrs. Astor.” Frances Kiernan, The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” George Orwell, 1984.

“The summer after I graduated from high school I discovered that art wasn’t merely a way to fill a blank wall.” Dianne L. Durante, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide.

“The village headman, a man of about fifty, sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, close to the coals burning in a hearth that was hollowed out of the floor; he was inspecting my violin.” Dai Sijie, Balzac and The Little Chinese Seamstress.

“After a late dinner in their Manhattan hideaway on a star-kissed night in the autumn of 1928, Mayor James J. Walker and his showgirl mistress, Betty Compton, motored to Westchester in his chauffeured, silver-trimmed Duesenberg to hear Vincent Lopez’s orchestra play dance tunes at Joe Pani’s Woodmansten Inn.” Herbert Mitgang, Once Upon a Time in New York: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age.

“The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins.” Edward P. Jones, The Known World.

“On October 15, 1948, three weeks before election day and in the midst of the political fight of his life, President Harry S. Truman spent the evening attending a Masonic lodge meeting in Beech Grove, Indiana.” Mark A. Tabbert, American Freemasons: Three Centuries of Building Communities.

“About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.” Jane Austen, Mansfield Park.

“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of all feasts.” James Beard, Beard on Bread.

We were not the first couple to adopt an Asian child, but when she entered our lives, Korean adoptees were not as common as they would be later. Now not just the spouse with her short leg and brace, but the daughter could bring stares and comments when she was with two white adults. (Apart from us she is, of course, less noticeable if she is in a community that has more than a sprinkling of Asians, but sometimes that is not the case. The daughter and I recently took a trip to Peru along with fifteen white people in addition to me. The daughter stood out whether or not she was with me.)

When the daughter was still a toddler, the spouse one day took her to a neighborhood park. A girl, maybe six years old, looked at the daughter and then up at the spouse and then back at the daughter and then at the spouse again. After this had gone on for a while, the girl approached the spouse and stood there for a moment. Finally, she asked, “Is that your baby?” The spouse replied, “Yes.” “Funny,” the girl felt compelled to say, “she sorta came out Chinese.”

I was in Venice on a water bus with the daughter when she was three. A man kept staring at us. He started talking to me in broken English. I gathered he was asking whether the daughter was mine. I replied, “Yes,” but he was not satisfied. He kept jabbering, and since my Italian consists of a few words that might appear on a menu, I did not understand him. Finally, somehow I grasped that he was asking if she truly was my daughter, why was she Asian? I told him that she was born in Korea, and my wife and I had adopted her. His loud and insistent replies indicated that he did not understand. How come she was Asian? I tried to find a simpler way to convey this in English, but he just kept getting louder. He was making me, and others on the boat, feel uncomfortable. Finally, I said, “Wife. Chinese.” He said the Italian equivalent of “Ah” and walked away.

Teaching moments in this family were sometimes different from those in other families. On one occasion—the daughter was five—she and the spouse went to a fast-food outlet. When they had their food and taken their seats, the daughter quietly noted, “Mom, they’re staring at us again.” “Get used to it, Sweetie,” she replied. “It’s always going to happen.”

I am part of a conspicuous couple and conspicuous family, but I do not feel the center of the attention. I am the barely noticed person with The Woman with the Brace or the unremarkable white man with The Asian Female. Perhaps only one time did I feel personally conspicuous because of the family.

The daughter was kindergarten age, and we were in New Hampshire for a week in a rented cottage. I took the daughter to a toy store in the nearby village. The spouse for part of the week was at a scientific conference, and she was not with us. It was a weekday, and I was the only man in the store. A toy vacuum cleaner was a demo, and the daughter starting “vacuuming” the carpeted stairs that went from one level of the store to the next. She went on and on trying to clean each step. I felt that the mothers were all looking at me out of their peripheral vision not because I was a white man with an Asian daughter. Instead, I was convinced they were looking at me and thinking, “Oh, he is one of those men who have traditional notions for girls. Next he is going to tie a little apron on her and bring her to the toy stove.” And I wanted to say, “I would never give her a vacuum cleaner. She has trucks and Legos and I play ball with her all the time.” (The daughter is now an adult, but she still likes to vacuum. Maybe I should have bought that toy for her.)

On this same trip, I decided that as long as we were going to be in a New England village we should experience as much small-town life as possible. I had us do things like go to a church dinner at some ungodly hour like 5 PM (the food was not good; I did not buy this church’s cookbook) and to a chicken barbecue in the town park (the food was quite good, but there was no cookbook). We had gone to both the grocery stores and the specialty food shops and, of course, to the gas station as well as a trip to the hardware store. Towards the end of the week, we were back in the park for a band concert. I stayed with our picnic packings while the spouse and the daughter went closer to the bandstand. A seemingly nice man came up to me and said, “I have seen you around town, and I want to say, ‘God bless you for all that you have done.’ ”  I must have looked dumbfounded. He then indicated that he meant that I must be a wonderful man for marrying a cripple and adopting an Asian.  All I could do was smile politely and say, “Thank you.” But as he walked away, I thought how little he understood. I had not adopted out of a sense of charity, and I had merely married the woman I loved. I was not somehow apart from those two, however, conspicuous they might be to others. The three of us were simply family no matter how others might stare or wonder.

Being conspicuous and part of a conspicuous family, however, must have affected the three of us—our images of ourselves, each other, and a world that often distinctively reacts to us as individuals and as a family. The daughter has written, amusingly and touchingly, about her identity. Perhaps someday I will get her to post about that.