Charm

Did my mother teach me to be charming or did I pick it up from studying her in action all the years of my childhood?  I am said to be charming, and, indeed, I recognize it in myself.  Independent testimony, in this case, from classmates from ten to fifteen years of observation, is unanimous in underscoring my mother's charming manner.  Charm and deploying my sense of humor got me through the teen age years when other boys were disarmed from being hostile toward me, the colossal freak queer in their midst; they never quite got it that charm is just as aggressive and often hostile as their instinct to toughness and bullying.  When I entered upon a professional life, first in graduate school studying for the PhD degree, and then when I started teaching it was difficult for me to adjust to the males who dominated this new world who for the most part were entirely impervious to my charm, were really ignorant of how charm worked, not expecting clearly enough to find or respond to charm in a male. The charm was tied into my sense of humor; that they sometimes got, although the chair of the Stanford department, himself an old line WASP and as such utterly alien to a sense of humor, used to ask colleagues if in fact perhaps I were a Jew.  The chair at Yale, Frank Brown, appreciated me for my bizarre points of view, in fact, invited me to come to Yale after a dinner party where we sat side by side and traded nonsense with each for several hours.  Yes, Stanford was a tough nut to crack; the department was small enough that I was at the table for all departmental meetings and never impressed but only mystified the literal minded, matter of fact elderly persons that it had pleased Fate to give me as colleagues. I was saved by another junior colleague, a man from the Boston working class Irish, and as such, mischievous and subversive of authority and tolerant of my manner if not always appreciative of it.  I traded all that for a stint as chair at Boston University charged with building up the department, where at first charm and a sense of humor were all I needed with the group of youngsters I assembled as colleagues.  I generally puzzled faculty from other departments who were often New York  liberal Jews who considered me irrelevant politically and socially naive.  Charm did not work on them, and a few years later it certainly did not work on the new president, John Silber, a man of ferocious aggression and bluntness.  Charm, perhaps, was going out of style.  Still, my husband who came into my life about the time I was wondering if I needed to rethink my social manner, was much taken with my charming ways, remarking often that this had not been on offer in his family home on Staten Island.  He was not only amused by it, but mystified at how much benefit it accrued to me, and sometimes annoyed that his open and honest ways were no match for charming Charlie, as for instance, as I think I have recounted elsewhere in this blog, the time a representative on a United Airlines desk setting up a flight to London from Dulles arbitrarily gave us two first class cabin seats after she had been subject to what Richard pointed out was a barrage of charm--and I thought I was just chatting with the lady to pass time!  Recently I had a fabulous, funny, and ridiculous conversation with the nurses making up the surgical team for my open heart surgery.  Clearly this was before they put me out.  It was a delight that these same ladies came to my room to bid me farewell four days later when I was released from the hospital.  Ah. fun and games!  Let the party continue.