Kathy Ewing

Last week I received an email from a New Yorker named Mark, who had stumbled across my essay about my dad’s acquaintance with Alger Hiss. (Short refresher: At the beginning of the Red Scare, Hiss was accused of committing espionage while serving in FDR’s State Department. He spent about four years in prison for perjury. It was a very big deal at the time.) The name Vodrey came up in my piece; Bill Vodrey, an executive at the Canton Repository, where my dad worked, had attended law school with Hiss. Vodrey introduced my dad and Alger. (Sorry this is so complicated. It gets worse.)

Anyway, Mark was googling the Vodreys, because Mark’s dad had also worked for the Repository, and one of the Vodrey brothers (Bill or Joe) had helped his family out when his dad died. They provided a plane to fly Mark’s family to Arlington for the burial and later lent them their beach home in North Carolina for a few vacations. About to vacation in NC, Mark was whiling away a lunch hour trying to figure out which Vodrey had lent them the home, when Google led him to my piece.

More amazingly, Mark also has a Hiss connection. In the ’70’s, Hiss had delivered a speech at Michican State. Mark’s roommate helped with the speaker’s program there, and Mark got to meet Hiss. He has fond memories of Hiss’s friendliness and kindness.

He emailed me just to convey these serendipities.

By another coincidence, I received Mark’s email (via my new iPhone) while we were in NYC, visiting my daughter. Mark, an attorney, and I met at a Starbucks for coffee on Thursday, providing a restful interlude for this footsore tourist. We had an enjoyable talk about the Rep and Alger and Ohio and other things.

The thoughtfulness of the Vodreys, whoever they are, brought us together. For both of us, this is a mythic name from the ’50s and ’60s when we were children. One or another of these men introduced my homesick dad, hospitalized in NYC for months, to Hiss, who continued weekly visits; helped provide a plane, and later a vacation spot, for Mark’s grieving family; and may have been instrumental in helping my dad get all the medical care he needed. (He was a paraplegic.) My dad and our family also got to fly on that private plane to New York for my dad’s hospitalizations.

Then there’s Alger, who was extremely kind to my dad and gracious to Mark when he was a young college student.

There’s also Mark, who took the trouble to contact me and interrupted his work day to visit with me and my husband.

On the bus to LaGuardia on our way home yesterday, we saw an Asian man frantically feeling around in his pockets as he came on board the crowded bus. A young African-American woman, realizing the guy couldn’t find his Metrocard, stepped to the front of the bus and said, “Here. Take a swipe of mine.”

Tonight I stopped into Presti’s, a comfortable café in Cleveland’s Little Italy with good food, to pick up some takeout after my late-afternoon class. A bunch of older men were sitting together at a big table, hanging out and talking.

“Guess how many hot dogs that company sells a year?”one said to the others.

“Just at the stadium, or all over?” someone asked.

“All over,” he answered. “All their sales put together.”

Someone guessed, and then the man cited the real figure, some astronomical number in the millions. Incredulity all around.

Then the first man posed another question: “How much guacamole do you think they sell?”

Same basic conversation. Low-ball estimates followed by the man’s astounding real figure. Eight billion tons, or something like that.

I smiled at the young woman waiting on me and asked, “Are those guys in here all the time?” She said yes, pretty much every day, and smiled back.

They were kind of loud but not obnoxious. They were affable, cheerful, and good-natured. Enjoying themselves.

What I was thinking was that I have never experienced a conversation like that with a group of women. I have been in plenty of conversations with men exactly like that, sometimes at home with my husband and son. What’s the highest mountain in Europe? What’s the most populous city in whatever country? Where’s the deepest lake? How much guacamole does a particular company sell every year?

This is how men talk about sports. They compare what they know about statistics and careers.

I call this “sharing information,” and, I repeat, I have never been in a conversation like this with women. A woman might say that Mexico City is the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere, and the others agree or disagree briefly, and then we move on. It’s a fact, it can be checked, and there’s nothing more (from our point of view) to say about it.

I first noticed this gender-related conversation style when waiting out the conversations my husband has with other film buffs after movies.

What else did that guy direct? Did he win an Oscar for that one or the other one? Did you ever see his first movie? How many has he made?

Somebody may, at some point, mention liking the first movie or the last movie or the guacamole, and someone else might concur. But pretty soon it gets back to the sharing of information. Did that other movie come out in 1994 or 1995?

I do not mean this as criticism. The men in Presti’s today were enjoying themselves, and it was amusing to hear them. It’s certainly not my place to tell them what to talk about, but I did not want to join them. I want to exit those sports and film conversations. When my husband and son start batting back and forth some suggestions as to the relative land area of Minnesota and Wyoming, I tune out.

We have the internet now. Why not just look up populations and altitudes and land areas and Oscar winners, and talk about something else? I’m missing, somehow, the entertainment value of these conversations.Oh, yes, a male friend told me once—you want to talk about feelings all the time. He said the word with such disdain! That’s right. I would rather talk about feelings. He can feel free not to participate.

Last week, I turned on WCPN, one of our NPR stations, while I was in the car and heard the end of This American Life. The segment concerned the conditions under which Chinese workers produce our iPhones and other technological devices. This just after, as I wrote in my last post, having received a new, exciting iPhone for Christmas. Why, I wondered, did I have to turn on the radio just at that moment?

Mike Daisey, a monologist, reports on his visits to Chinese factories and talks with Chinese workers in an excerpt from his one-man show. A self-described Apple fan-boy, Daisey, like me, had never really thought about how his cherished electronic things were made.

On his undercover trip to China, he visited Foxconn sites–a manufacturer of much of our technology. He saw 13-year-old workers. He saw 20,000 people working in utter silence for 12 or 14 hours or more. He saw dorm rooms with fifteen beds piled into small rooms.

It’s a great program. Give it a listen, and tell me what you think.