Friday, April 20, 2012

Autres temps, autres moeurs

My first year in grad school I was invited to a casual dinner at the home of one of my professors. I don't recall what we ate, but it was something easy, served buffet-style, and the eight or ten of us sat companionably around a couple of coffee tables and end tables, some of us on sofas and chairs, others on the floor.

This particular professor was a WASPy New England gent (who wasn't actually a WASP, but with his patrician features, full head of white hair, and marvelous honking voice he might as well have been), and his home suited him: an exquisite old place that managed to be homey and elegant at the same time. There were many things to remark on there--those Oriental rugs were obviously really old! and who painted their entire downstairs Wedgwood blue?--but the thing that blew my mind was when his wife gestured toward the sideboard and I saw two long ranks of wineglasses laid out, both white and red.

I was astonished, first, that anyone owned that many wineglasses. But I'd also never realized that having separate kinds of glasses was a thing: no one in my family owned two sets of wineglassses, nor could I remember ever going to a house where they'd been in evidence; to me, they were the special province of restaurants. The fact that my professor and his wife had laid them out for us grad students, in our jeans and our sweaters, strongly intimated that they hadn't thought twice about it. They just lived in a world where each beverage demanded a dedicated glass.

But I'll tell you what: when you get married, you throw a bunch of things on a wedding registry. And even when you say "no gifts," half your guests still buy you gifts. And someone, inevitably, buys you those sixteen white wine glasses and sixteen red.

And when you get home at 10 p.m. from a long day of teaching and you put on your flannel pyjamas and you eat your dinner of cold pizza standing up at the kitchen counter, you'll be drinking your red wine out of a proper red wine glass. Because a person's gotta have standards.

13 comments:

Dr. Koshary said...

I aspire to this patrician lifestyle of yours someday. For real.

Dame Eleanor Hull said...

Your professor's life, I think, is what my mother always imagined mine should be. Whenever I mentioned having been to a party, she always wanted to know about the table settings, and was so disappointed when it was paper plates and plastic cups (which is to say, every time). A gift registry upon marriage does seem like a good way to collect glassware etc., but Sir John & I skipped that.

Susan said...

If you are like me, however, your ability to *break* wine glasses is infinite, so in ten years time, you'll be lucky to still have eight of each! I actually have proper white and red glasses for the first time, but that's because I bought the stemless kind that are easier to manage!

dr said...

Oh but wait, now you have to get the specially designed glasses for *specific* kinds of whites and *specific* kinds of reds. Bullock and I have started collecting those -- we have four each of two different kinds and two each of two other kinds. Someday, they're going to look super awesome in our bar. :)

And like Susan, we have the stemless kind -- so much easier!

Dr. Virago said...

Somehow the "Virago" got cut off my name, but that last comment was from me.

Historiann said...

Lolz to Dr. Koshary and Susan. I'm a big fan of the $1.50 WorldMart wine glasses. Easy come, easy go, right?

(Plus, white wine glasses never hold enough WINE in them. Go for the 20 oz. stems!)

Susan said...

I should have said that my stemless glasses are $1.99 (I think) from World Market...

i said...

Ah, imitation of our professors' habits as well as of their mental workings... reminds me of Stephen Jaeger's work on charismatic authority.

Also reminds me of a conversation my father and I once had about the appeal of professors' habits. I think I had mentioned to him that I drink my Guinness precisely the way a prof of mine at the time did (i.e., by first scooping a tiny bit of foam on my little finger). I still do, in fact. My dad, who also worked as a prof for 15 years, described the lengthy ritual one of his own profs went through while preparing a cigarette for smoking -- rolling it between the fingers, tapping it, etc. I asked him if he did the same once he started smoking, and he said, "of course!"

This makes me think that Jaeger has ignored the sinful aspects of pedagogical charisma...

Tenured Radical said...

Did that Professor bear the nickname "Ducky"?

I ask because I think it is similar to a dinner I attended as an undergrad.

And I do think that dinner was meant to be a lesson to all of you in professorial good manners: how to bad that some of you would not end up with wives to wash all those glasses.

Flavia said...

TR: to my knowledge, he bore no such nickname, but it's conceivable! I'm pretty sure he was a member of the department in your day as well: an extraordinarily nice man who wasn't on the research fast-track, but who seemed universally beloved, esp. by undergrads. (I knew him primarily from my undergrad days--he mastered ES for a very long time.)

Meansomething said...

I think I might have known this professor once. A medievalist? Was never invited to dinner, though, and never had the opportunity to examine the wineglasses. (I'd have been an undergrad, anyway, and under 21.)

Flavia said...

Meansomething:

Did I know that you were an INRU alumna? Were you ES? Do we actually know each other??

So many questions.

Meansomething said...

I am older than you, so I don't think we know each other, thought we may know a few folks in common. I was SM. :-)