“Never Eat at a Place Called Mom’s”

A Collage for Len’s 50th Birthday, or “Never Eat at a Place Called Mom’s”

By Virginia K. Nalencz, a.k.a “Mom”

Here’s the first question Christina asked me about Len: “Was he always this funny?” Yes, he was, hence my title which seeks to combine a reference to the visual arts, much loved by Len (Caravaggio!), with his signature humor. I feel reasonably certain that I am not the “Mom” in Len’s litany of adages (“Never play cards with a man named Doc,” u.s.w.) because he sometimes pronounces a home-cooked meal to be a “flawless masterpiece” (admittedly this is also what he says about the Terminator movies) and he often asks for family recipes, as in an email last fall when he and Christina were spending a weekend at the lake: “Quick question: can you share your recipe for potato leek soup? We went to the farmers’ market yesterday and decided that this would be on the menu. You can send the message encrypted if you don't want the NSA to share it with Chelsea Manning.” I see in Christina’s account of their first date (“Cat woman…) that he brought this spirit of waggish criticism to their relationship, right off the bat.

What was in the air in April of 1970? One element was the first Earth Day; I see the resonance of that event in Len’s concern for the earth and all its creatures. The other event or rather its image that floated into the human consciousness around this time was the photo “Earthrise” taken by an astronaut aboard Apollo 8, the photo that changed the way earthlings saw the world, that showed us that we were all on one fragile spaceship, interdependent. Len absorbed the image from A Big Blue Marble, a PBS show that his age-mates may remember. After Sesame Street? Before Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood? I picture him in corduroy overalls crawling on the floor in the apartment in Chicago, in Hyde Park, propelling his Matchbox cars at top speed, behind the chairs, over the bookshelves, humming meditatively “The Earth’s a big blue marble when you see it from out there…Crash! Boom!” I think that even when he was absorbed in the Matchbox car races, he had an inkling about the Earth that continues to inform his philosophy.

The Vietnam War (called the American War by the Vietnamese, as Len, a globalist and a scrupulous observer of point-of-view, would note) was raging. Len’s father, who opposed the war, had joined R.O.T.C. in college in order to avoid being drafted until he finished law school. If the R.O.T.C. finesse failed and war hadn’t ended by 1972, he’d committed to serve in the Air Force, hence Len’s second birthday, and his dad’s 26th, were celebrated in Salt Lake City, an hour away from Hill Air Force Base.

A collage calls for juxtaposed snippets. Some readers of this birthday website will know all or most of what Len is and believes and practices. This is how Len looks to me as he turns 50:

*a LATINIST, Len embodies pietas, in the sense of filial duty, like one of the epic heroes about whom he wrote in his dissertation, pius Aeneas. When his father was dying, Len virtually carried him on his back as Aeneas carried his father Anchises out of flaming Troy. He took time off to be with his dad during chemo-time. He sat with him, asleep and awake, in the hospital and at home. Seeing that the meds his father took were keeping him up at night when he would “catch up on work,” moving restlessly from room to room, Len said, “That laptop is too heavy for Dad to carry; let’s get him a new one, a lightweight.”

After the death of his grandmother, my mother, he called to tell me about a poem he’d seen on the subway that reminded him of her, a maternal figure ironing a tablecloth, “as if it were the flag of a nation that no longer existed.” A caring son, brother, friend, he has not coincidentally done scholarly work on the concept of inheritance.

*a LINGUIST, his Italian retains a whisper of Latin American inflection, on account of his having learned it during a year of teaching in Quito. Later, in a job application written while teaching English to recently-arrived Latinas in Connecticut he noted, “Bridgeport is not in the Andes but I like teaching and I’m keeping my Spanish sharp.” He can get around in French (Aaron and Veronica may disagree). He spent a college summer studying in Rome with a group led by Father Reginaldus, the Vatican scriptor, during which time Latin was, truly, the lingua franca. Recently he’s been studying Quechua, translating the poetry of an Andean people into English.

*a MARXIST, GROUCHO MIXED WITH CARL. As a community organizer, Len worked with fervor and a pure, serious commitment to the hotel and restaurant workers whose cause he served. Now, in addition to his regular teaching, he teaches as a volunteer with the Bard Prison Initiative whose graduates prove that incarceration need not doom a person, that reading and study can give a person a new life. Last year, Len checked in after a dark and stormy night when he’d taught his class in Renaissance lyric poetry in a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. “Bard class went great. It gives me energy to drive four hours twice a week to teach in a prison. Odd, no? And yet I speak the truth.” He goes out on the NYC streets with friends to protest injustice, not forgetting to notice when fresh kale is on display at the farmers’ market along the way.

The other Marxism appears in a photo from ca. 2000 [see Gallery II], Len, Alex, and Greg sit, lined up on a bench out on the deck at Camp N on a bright summer day. Without a word, they touch their chins simultaneously, re-creating a movie still summed up in Groucho’s question, “Is that one man with three beards or three men with one beard?”

A photo [ Gallery II] sent by Ariel Magnus hints at another Marxist moment. At the lake, circa 1995, three Nalenczes (i fratelli in Len’s terminology) in tennis whites gather next to the Argentinian visitor who holds up a baseball mitt, probably the aftermath of a doubles’ match that was interrupted by the Marxist interpretation of how to react to a ball hit wide. I fratelli would instantly drop their racquets onto the court, field the ball, and whip it around the infield before you could say, “Advantage: Team Len.”

Groucho’s Marxism lends itself to anecdote while Karl’s does not. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Len lives his life this way. No wonder Mt. St. Vincent has recruited him to launch a program in “Law and Social Justice.”

*an ANTI-NARCISSIST, Len makes conversations and events about the other person. You, if you’re the lucky one talking with him. When his students at the College of Mount Saint Vincent read Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” with an attentive eye on Gregor Samsa’s need to keep his job, Len wrote an essay, “Kafka and the Nurses,” about what he’d learned from them.

*he PAYS ATTENTION, in the way described by Simone Weil as “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It’s no wonder that he’s a Bird. As a member of the Order of the Third Bird, he has inaugurated a new branch of this ancient and curious practice of devoting “sustained attention to a work or object made to be seen.” Len’s innovation, Project 404, seeks to extend that attention in a time of distraction by traveling to the place where students live now, on their devices. He hears the nuance in tones—he’s a Bird, after all. He plays the trumpet. His brother Greg said the other day, “Len sent me a trumpet solo as a ringtone; he said he’d played it out his window.”

*Len has an UNERRING SENSE OF DIRECTION along with an omnivore’s appetite in literature. In April of his last year at Princeton, I drove from Philadelphia one afternoon to join him at a talk by the novelist Martin Amis. Guiding me through the maze of campus parking, Len pointed to a sign. “See where it says ‘Do Not Enter’? Drive down there.”

* he knows how to REASSURE. While he was teaching in Ecuador in the mid-1990s, before easy cellphone contact, when long-distance was a luxury, he left a voicemail for his father and me. “There’s a border war with Peru, but nothing to worry about…”

*a HUMANIST, Len loves poetry, and dogs. Dante and Seamus, good boys.

In conclusion I want to swerve from the dog’s breakfast (a positive indicator in Len’s lexicon) of voices above to direct address, a variant on a letter I sent to Len on his 25th birthday, celebrated in Quito where he was teaching U.S. literature at the Catholic University of Ecuador. “When I first saw you on a rainy night in Chicago at about 3: a.m. on April 29, 1970, you were a marvelous child. Now you’re a marvelous man.” I think the same on your 50th birthday, twice as much.

Happy Birthday, dear Len,

Love,

Mom

An imaginary birthday gift for Len: an apartment in Rome, in Trastevere, along with instructions from Scottie on Star Trek telling how to beam himself across the Atlantic on weekends without contributing to carbon emissions, to which Len would not contribute heedlessly, despite the lure of bella Italia. (see Better than Cake section)

Backstory: in 1993 when a turn in real estate fortunes allowed his father and me to think about buying a summer place, Len suggested, instead of a place at the lake we’d visited for many summers, an apartment in Trastevere. Eventually I think he was happy with Camp N (see “photos of Len with fish”); I’d like to be able to give him his first choice as well.