My mother has always held her father up as a paragon of genius, if not virtue, and my childhood was cluttered with her tales of Papa's brilliance. "He has four degrees!" Mum would tell us. "A bachelor's degree, not just one, but two masters degrees, and a doctorate." We heard many stories of the remarkable Papa and his stint as an English professor in Buffalo during Mum's early years, before he left his family. But Papa always lived far away from us, and we saw him only once a year, when he would descend on our household and hold court for four or five days at our kitchen table, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and expounding at great length, and with a great deal of vehemence. His favorite subjects were politics, history, criticism, culture and thoroughbred horse racing, but when I was little, he usually would delay calling his bookie until we children were playing outside. Our personal encounters with him taught us that his voice was gruff, he knew a lot of stuff, and he gave extremely hard birthday spanks.

         Papa and his first wife divorced when I was a baby, and he soon married Eva. This second marriage worked out well, in part because they shared a hobby to which they devoted a large amount of time: they both loved to argue. Since each was a keen observer of human behavior, they accumulated lots of ammunition to use against each other, and one might well pity any poor noncombatant who wandered in. Their charming garden apartment in Laurel, Maryland, decorated with Eva's artful touch, and filled with books, papers, toys and artwork, could be a verbal minefield! 

         When I moved to Philadelphia at the age of 23, I took advantage of Amtrak and began visiting them.  My first trip down, Papa was to pick  me up from the train station in Washington. As soon as I got off the train, I spied him, a short man only five feet tall, with a full head of wavy gleaming white hair, and wearing glasses supported by his overly generous nose. His arms were crossed over his chest, and one hand supported his chin as he scanned the departing passengers.

         "Hi, Papa," I said.

         "My God!" he responded, his agnosticism notwithstanding. "I wouldn't have known you! I would have walked right by!" He hugged me and gave me one of those wet kisses I remembered from my childhood.  

         "Eva's making dinner, and she wants me to get you home in a hurry, so we'll just take a quick drive past the Lincoln Memorial.  It's best to see by night." Lincoln was one of Papa's two favorite Presidents (the other was Jefferson), and anytime we were in the District together, he always took me to see it.

         During the drive home, Papa demanded to know what was new with me. I told him, interspersed with his pointing out  which exits from the Baltimore-Washington Expressway led to interesting sites.

         Back at the apartment, Eva, wooden spoon in hand, came hurrying from the kitchen to greet me. At four feet, ten inches, she was shorter than Papa, an attractive woman with short dark hair always beautifully coifed, intense red lipstick an imposing bust, thin but muscular legs and tiny feet  pointed outward. She immediately embraced me, giving me one of her sloppy wet kisses which I also remembered well from my early childhood.

         "Just look at her, Eva!" Papa said. "She is the image of her grandmother!" I have been told all my life that I resemble my maternal grandmother Evelyn, Papa's first wife.

         "What are you talking about, Pat? She doesn't look a thing like her!" Eva said.

         "She doesn't look a thing like her? She's the very image!"

          "I don't think she looks a thing like Catherine!" Eva said, citing my paternal grandmother.

         "Not Catherine! I'm not talking about Jackie's mother!" Papa's voice was loud and irritated. " She looks like her maternal grandmother! She is the picture of her at that age!" 

         "Hmmph," Eva answered. "I  certainly don't see it." And they were off into a heated discussion of whether I resembled anyone in the family, and if so, whom.
We nevertheless managed to eat the generous dinner which Eva had prepared - Waldorf Salad, and Swiss steak, followed by lemon chiffon cake and accompanied by coffee, coffee and more coffee. As Eva  pressed me to have some ice cream too, she also put out a plate of candy and cookies.

         "When I was a boy," Papa said, "we lived across the street from a bakery. Sometimes my mother used to get their day-old cookies for us. They were sugar cookies, very plain, very cheap, but, oh, did I love those cookies! I've never had a better cookie in my life!"

         "He always says that," Eva told me. "He doesn't know a thing about good cookies! These are very nice cookies, Pat!"

         Papa took one, broke it in half, and ate a piece. "Good enough for what they are," he said. "But not like those! Sometimes those cookies were just in pieces. As a special treat, my mother would put them in bowls for my sister and me, pour hot cocoa over them. She'd let us have them for breakfast! We ate it with a spoon. Now, those were good cookies! I've never had any other cookie as good as those were!"
    
        "He's always going on about those cookies!" Eva said.

         We stayed up late, sitting at the kitchen table, talking and drinking coffee right until we went to bed, with intermittent arguments between Papa and Eva erupting and subsiding.

         The next morning, Eva, in dressing gown and slippers, greeted me and posed a question about breakfast. "I'm going to make hot cereal," she said. "Which do you like better? Oatmeal or cream of wheat?"

         "Oatmeal," I said.

 Eva stamped her foot. "Oh, darn!" she said. "Your Poppa loves oatmeal, and I make it for him all the time, but I like cream of wheat better! If you had said cream of wheat, I could make that for breakfast this morning, but now I have to make oatmeal again."

         "Cream of wheat would be fine," I said. "Make the cream of wheat!"

         "No, you said you like oatmeal better," Eva said. "If  you liked cream of wheat better, you would have said so. Darn! It's always oatmeal!"

         Despite my assurances that I would be glad to eat cream of wheat, Eva grumbled throughout preparing the oatmeal, cooking it for a very long time the way Papa liked it. However, after we all had eaten a hearty bowl of hot cereal, Eva brought out the second course. "I got some rum buns!" she announced happily, setting a box on the table in front of Papa.

         As she got plates for us, Papa opened the box. "What happened to these?" he asked. I peeked in, and saw five plump buns with generous icing, and a sixth bun without a top half. 

        "I wasn't hungry enough to eat a whole bun, Pat," Eva said, "so I only took half. You know I don't like to overeat!"

         "But you took the top half," Papa said. 

         "That's the part with the icing, Pat, and you know that's the only part I like," Eva told him. "I left the bottom half in case anyone else would want it."

         "Who would want the part without icing?" Papa demanded.

         "Lots of people don't like very sweet things," Eva said.

         "Who?" he shouted.  And they were off on another argument.

         After breakfast, Papa left for the racetrack, having told me that I wouldn't enjoy it. "It's too smoky, and you'd get bored," he said, while gathering his racing papers and notes and the lunch which Eva had packed him. Eva announced that she was taking me to the Hirschorn. "You took that modern art course," Eva said, "so I'm taking you to a modern art museum."

         Pleased with her thoughtfulness, I was excited to see what the Hirschorn offered. As we toured the museum, Eva would comment on the various art pieces. "That is the stupidest looking painting! Whatever were they thinking of!" or "Why would anyone ever create anything that looked like that? It's just foolish!" Long past the point where it would have surprised me, Eva confided, "I just hate modern art! It makes no sense!"

         "You know, Eva, I like lots of different kinds of art," I said. "I would have been happy to go to look at other kinds of art."

         "No," she said. "You took that modern art class, and I wanted to take you to a place you'd really enjoy."

         When we all had returned home, Eva began to prepare meatloaf for dinner. I offered to help, but she said, "No, go talk with your Poppa!" He and I sat at the kitchen table, Papa giving me a rundown on his day at the track,  he and Eva occasionally disagreeing over some detail.  When dinner was ready, I was assigned a seat with my back to the bay window so that everyone would be in good position to see the evening news on television while we ate. Papa and Eva always watched the news, and all conversation stopped so that we could hear the opening story. The news anchor had barely finished his first sentence when Papa started. "Did you hear that?" Papa shouted. "Did you hear what he said? Those goddamned sons of bitches in Congress!"
        
       "Be quiet, Pat," Eva said. "I can't hear him."

       "Be quiet!" Papa thundered. "She tells me to be quiet! We all have to be quiet!"

       "Ssssh!" Eva hissed.

       "Ssssh!" Papa echoed. "Now she's shooshing me in my own home!" He appealed to me. "Do you hear that? She's shooshing me! I can't make a sound in my own home!"

         "Pat, you stop that! We're missing the whole story! Can't you just be quiet?" Eva demanded. "He does this all the time," she told me.

         "Quiet! Quiet!" Papa shouted. "We have to be quiet so Eva can hear the news! Eva wants to hear the news!"

         "Ssssh!" she hissed again.

         "Ssssh! Sssssh! Ssssh!" Papa imitated,  as loudly as he could, finger to his lips. "Eva wants to hear!"

         They lapsed into a moment of silence, until Eva heard something she felt called for a remark. "Can you believe that!" she said.

         "Quiet! Quiet! Sssssh!" Papa shot back. "You hear all that noise she's making?" he asked me.

         "I just said -" she began.

         "I thought you wanted to hear the news!" Papa roared. "Quiet!"

     Eva turned to me. "He drives me crazy with this," she said. "He's crazy about the news. Do you know what he used to do when Nixon was President?"

         "That bastard!" Papa said.

         "No," I answered Eva as quietly as possible. Luckily, the program went to commercial break, so the shooshing abated.

         "When Nixon was President, and your Poppa used to get up early in the morning to hear the news,"  she began.

         "What do you know about it?" Papa asked. "You were asleep!"

         "How could I sleep through that?" she demanded. "You woke me up every morning!"

         "She likes to sleep half the day away!" Papa said. "I'd just get up at my usual time."

         "Five o'clock in the morning! He gets up every day at five o'clock in the morning!" she said. 

          "Sometimes earlier," Papa corrected.
          
          "That's true," Eva admitted. "But when Nixon was President, what did he do? Every morning he'd begin shouting as soon as he got up."

         "I did," Papa agreed. "Of course I did!"

         "'Give me some news!' he'd shout, and I'd tell him, 'Pat, be quiet, you'll wake the neighbors!'"

         "And I'd tell Eva," Papa said, "'Don't talk to me about the GD neighbors! I want some news! I want to know if the bastard has resigned yet!'"

         "He was shouting!" Eva said. "At five in the morning! Every day! 'Has the bastard resigned yet?'" She began to giggle.

         "It is one of the great satisfactions of my life," Papa said, "that, at least so far, the bastard hasn't outlived me!" Then the commercial break ended, and they resumed arguing, each asking me to take sides and declare the other to be the troublemaker. 

         By the time they returned me to the train station late Sunday afternoon, laden with the sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs and cookies Eva thought I might need for my 90 minute train ride home, I was both stuffed and exhausted. 

         But, for reasons I can't fully explain, I was hooked, and I soon came back for more.

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