Found Objects, Vol. 3

Miniature visits with items that shout at me and say something about the world they occupy. Today: a birth-day card.

Photo ©Ted Anthony, 2019.

GOING THROUGH SOME cartons of my mother’s ephemera on Memorial Day weekend a few years ago in the dusty garage of the house where I grew up, I came upon a single 3x5 card — a favored canvas of my father’s.

Typed upon it was a whimsical poem about language, my parents’ specialty and profession. The piece was written by Christopher Morley, a newspaperman, essayist and sometime editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, another favorite of my father’s.

I am not lying when I say it is about language. But drill down a bit, and it’s about a human activity even older than that. It is called “Inscription for a Grammar,” and it goes like this:

There were two cheerful pronouns
And nought did them disturb:
Until they met out walking,
A conjugative verb.

The pronouns, child, were you and I,
We might as well confess
But, oh, the mischief-making verb
I leave to you to guess.

Morley and writers like him — Bennett Cerf, H. Allen Smith, Dorothy Parker, the often libating, typewriter-wielding, stiletto-witted American literary caste of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s — were rocket fuel for my father’s approach to language, humor, overall demeanor and life in general.

It does not surprise me in the least that this piece of writing captured his attention. Like him, its genius is not in what is said but in what is not. It is smart and suggestive, audacious and mellifluous — a drive-by shooting of a poem whose impact is not in its recitation but in the echo it leaves in its wake.

As you read it and reread it, one thing becomes clear: This is a poem addressed to an offspring from its parents. Which is why, right there in that dusty garage north of Pittsburgh on a damp afternoon in May 2019, the signoff that was typed below the poem made me stop breathing:

Ed III 4–17–68

Ed III, teaching linguistics a few months before he typed the 3x5 card.

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AT THIS POINT, there are three things you should know:

• My full name is Edward Mason Anthony IV.

• My father, then, was in fact Edward Mason Anthony III (though he also went by Jr.).

• And I was born on the morning of April 16, 1968, a day before the 3x5 card was typed and, presumably, handed over to my mother postpartum. At the time of my birth, my father was 45 and my mother 43, so I was an unexpected accident — presumably the product of some “mischief-making verb.”

On that afternoon, though, it resurfaced as a gift: sitting quietly, lurking among other papers in a box of my mother’s for months, years, decades, and finally presented to me on that Memorial Day, nearly four years after he breathed his last labored breath at age almost-93.

A very tardy birth-day card, if you will, from a dead man whose intellect was decimated by dementia yet who manages to still start little conversations with me now and then, at the most unexpected of moments.

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