Childhood Memories of Emily Post

I was leaving the neighborhood in my pick-em-up truck when I noticed a middle-aged woman walking her dog.  She was of what used to be call an average built, but now days would pass for skinny.  What grabbed my attention was that she was wearing some very short shorts. She had bent over from the waist to clean up after her pet, and her derriere, encased in the bare minimum, was pointed directly at me.  I waffled between staring and not looking.

This brought up a childhood memory.  My mother had a book of etiquette in the house.  There are several from that period, but for some reason I remember it as being Emily Post’s book, Etiquette.  It may have well been another author, but that one pops to mind.  They appear to have been fairly popular in the 50s and 60s.  I was obviously old enough to read, but had only been doing so for a few years.  For some reason I became fascinated by this book, and I remember picking it up and reading it for a while multiple times.

I remember a section on bowing and curtsying.  One section that I remember vividly until this day is on how a lady should eat a banana… with a knife and fork.  I thought that very strange at the time as I was young enough to not realize bananas could have a phallic representation.  However, I know now, and I still think that advice was a bit over the top.  I searched the Internet for this particular passage,  but I could not find it.  It did seem that how to eat a banana in public is still a big deal. Google it.  What ever happened to sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?

For my current ramblings there is another section that comes to mind, and that is how a lady should bend over to pick up something.  Of course this was a time when britches and shorts were not so commonly worn by the female of the species.  Dresses and skirts were much more de rigueur, and bending over in them is a whole different proposition.  I have written about this a bit before in my posting: Etiquette Questions. On that search, the proper method as detailed by the invasive Google AI states:

• • • • Turning sideways: Instead of bending forward directly, you would turn to the side.
      • Bending with knees: You would bend your knees rather than at the waist, to maintain a graceful posture.
      • Keeping knees together (or close): Some advice suggested keeping your knees close together when bending down. This was considered a challenging but “ladylike” way to pick something up. 

My mind of strangely connected neurons then began to wonder why my mother would have had this book in our house.  The Occam razor’s answer would be that they were popular in this time period.  Perhaps it sat on the shelf next to Benjamin Spock‘s book: Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.

However, I think the more nuanced answer involves how my parents grew up.  My mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.  My grandmother, while a kind and generous woman – in her own lights, was not a woman with many pretensions.  My father’s side of the family was a bit different.  His father’s father was a fairly well to do, minor politician in a rural Kentucky county.  His mother’s parents were tobacco farmers who made a nice living for themselves.  However, his father was a different story.  To be generous, just about any of my relatives with whom I have talked to about him have very little good to say about him. My father had a very hard scrabble upbringing.  The primary reason he joined the Navy at 17 was to get away from my grandfather.

In the Navy, my father was given a very good technical education on maintaining aircraft.  When he left the military he went to work as a technical representative for an aerospace corporation, and truly saw the world.  He was often working at a high level.  He spent a year in Colombia setting up a repair and maintenance program for helicopters the Colombian Air Force had bought from the company he worked for.  He spent over two years in Tehran (with my mother and younger siblings) doing the same thing for the Iranian Air Force in the 70s when the Shah was still in power.

All this threw him and my mother in close contact with high ranking military officers and government officials.  In my ruminations, initiated by the woman bending over to do the mannerly thing of picking up her dog’s leavings, I wondered if perhaps she and my father felt a bit out of their comfort zone in these situations.  Perhaps she was trying to come up to speed on the genteel way to act in such situations.  Unfortunately, there is no way to know, but I do remember enjoying the book for some strange reason.

So there you have it, a ramble through my cognitive processes.

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