Great comment!

My father lived at 505 12th St. His father taught physics at Manuel Training High School (I think tht's the correct name)--including to I.I. Rabi (Nobel winner) and the pilot of the Enola Gay. His mother taught second grade somewhere in Brooklyn.

My father learned to drive probably at least a decade, maybe two before his mother learned to drive. (His father never drove.) I think my father's friend Sam Chavkin, onthe same base, was also from Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn thing led to a problem in fourth grade. My teacher, Saran Morgan Hutchins, was fresh from the West Coast, 23, teaching at the Cambridge Friends School, where I'd probably been sent because of my autism, which my mother had diagnosed when I was 3, but never told me. In any case, it was a great school, and Miss Morgan (she wasn't married yet) was a great teacher.

But one day I got a composition back with a word circled in red. What's the mtter with that?! I asked. "that's not a word," she said. Yes it is, I said. No it's not, she said. Yes it is, my father uses it all the time, he tells us to clean up this jernt!

That ended in a draw, I think, and it was a decade before I realized what had gone down that day. My brother and I still use the word jernt. And people still hear the Brooklyn in me, yes, even at age 70.

Fun fact about Miss Morgan. She was the niece of Ann Morrow Lindbergh. I found that out googling 4-5 decades later. She had none of her uncle's prejudice. She was a lovely and excellent teacher. One interesting other thing about her. It was a very small class, 12 kids. She paid attention to us, and so I assume she knew that I was reading on my own a book about her uncle and his family. I got to the part where the baby was kidnapped, and to the best of my recollection, the book was vague about what happened to him after that. So I asked my parents, and I think they did tell me he'd been killed, but I'm not certain of that.

In any case, I assume that Miss Morgan knew what I was reading, but she never said anything about it. Which, in retrospect, was absolutely the right thing for her to do, for reasons that I can think of and perhaps others that I don't know. I do know that had she told me, I would have been upset since the baby was her cousin, and I loved her, as I did all really good teachers.