Herbert with Bits of Vernon

Carmen and Julia were grinning conspiratorially as I walked in. I knew that look well enough to be instantly suspicious: Two decades of parenthood create that instinct. You can be at a friend’s house, and somehow, your grown child will make you have to play the Dad role again. But even two decades of parenthood didn’t prepare me for the announcement I got from my daughter.

“I backed Herbert into a street sign,” she said.

She didn’t seem upset, worried, or even proud that her car (by which I mean, of course, the car registered to and insured by me) had collided with street furniture. She seemed, if anything, amused. The same applied to Carmen, who was closer to my age than hers, and who had been her babysitter some fifteen years earlier. But Carmen was off the hook, His babysitting days were long over and he was now a co-conspirator. No, I was the father of college-age woman, and was being called upon once again to play Dad to my little girl.

“Show me,” I sighed, more bemused than irritated.

She took me outside and across the street, barely suppressing a giggle. She pointed into the long grass and stood back to give me a better view. There was a concrete footing with the rusted stub of a metal pole sticking half an inch out of it. And next to it, lying in the grass, was seven feet of metal pole with one rusty end. In the weeds, I read the legend Speed 25 Limit.

“Show me the car,” I sighed, still trying to maintain a facade of stern detachment, but allowing a little amusement to creep in.

She walked me to Carmen’s driveway, where she had parked Herbert, and once again stood back to give me a clear view.

“I thought you said you’d backed into that sign,”

“I did!”

And when I passed my hand across the apparently unscathed rear fender, I did indeed feel a slight scratch about halfway across.

That’s why I bought a Volvo 240 for my daughter. They are boxy looking tanks that will win in any altercation with other cars, or even street signs. Everyone seems to yield to you on the road because a Volvo 240 gives off a “don’t mess with me” vibe. In its old-fashioned rectangular way, it telegraphs the message: “Keep your distance, lesser vehicles. If we collide, I won’t feel a thing, but you’ll be out of commission for a week and cost two thousand dollars to fix.”

Like every car that’s more than 20 years old, Volvo 240s are cheap to buy and cheap to insure. As long as you don’t go to a Volvo dealership, they really aren’t that expensive to service either. And they keep on running for hundreds of thousands of miles.

Herbert is my second Volvo 240 (which is to say, my daughter’s second Volvo 240). Vernon was our first. Vernon was a 1986 240DL with no radio that I salvaged from a family member, who had crashed it and didn’t have the money for repairs. It only cost about $700 to get him roadworthy, and that Christmas, the Christmas after my daughter turned 16, I gave her her first car. She posed for a photograph that Christmas morning, sitting on his hood with a big grin on her face. She was smiling with pleasure and pride of ownership, but also because I’d just told her the trunk had so much room she could hide a couple of dead bodies in it.

Vernon was the color and shape of a stick of butter, and he ran more for three more years, until, at the grand old age of 28 with 343,000 miles on the clock, his exhaust system rusted out and fell apart. For two weeks, I managed to hold the 12-foot exhaust system in place with coat hangers, bailing wire, and prayer, while I scoured Craigslist for a replacement. And that’s where I found Herbert. A newer 1991 model with a working radio and a hand-cranked sunroof, Herbert sounded like the height of luxury. It was snowing heavily when I went to visit Herbert for the first time, and with a three-inch layer of snow on him, he looked glorious. Boxy, rectangular, and with a large square of cleared snow in the top to show off the freshly hand-retracted sunroof. I was instantly in love, and plunked down $800 in cash, ready to deliver another Swedish-built Christmas present to my then college-freshman daughter.

Herbert was missing a few bits here and there. But luckily, Vernon had plenty to spare. I spent another week prying off Jesus bars, switching out light bulbs and covers, and creating a hybrid creature, Herbert with Bits of Vernon, ready to present on Christmas eve.

That all happened three years ago. Julia drives a Prius now, and poor Herbert has been relegated to the role of Dad’s weekend pleasure drive. There’s no shame in that, of course. If you’ve never driven a Volvo 240 from 1991, you don’t know what you’re missing: There’s something about being behind the wheel of a vehicle from the last century, with the sunroof cranked open and the wind in your hair, that makes you feel like a million bucks. It’s easy to overlook the flaking clear coat on his hood, because in all other ways, he’s in great shape. He doesn’t have rust, which is rare for a car of his age. He starts without complaint, even in cold weather, which is more than his owner can boast. He’s the proud bearer of Pennsylvania Classic Car plates, so, while he needs to be inspected annually, he doesn’t need to go through emissions tests. He costs only a couple of hundred dollars to add to my insurance policy. And with a mere 249,000 miles on the clock, I estimate he’s got a lot more life in him yet. He may be big rectangular tank of a car, but he’s surprisingly nimble.

But somehow, I sense that Herbert craves something a little more than what he’s getting now, and he deserves it too. He needs someone who cares enough to replace the cloudy red cover on the rear left brake light. He needs someone to take off the last of that flaking clear coat and give him a nice paint job. At very least, he deserves someone who’ll pose cross-legged on his hood with a big smile, thinking of a trunk so big that it will fit two dead bodies, and a rear fender that has taken on a street sign and won.

The Foxcatcher Horseshoe

“Wrestling is a low sport,” said Jean Lisiter Du Pont to her son. It wasn’t the first activity her son John had pursued with a passion. After graduating with the Haverford School’s class of 1957, John Eleuthere Du Pont threw himself into swimming, and within six years, he was training with the nation’s most prestigious team in Santa Clara. But although he was in the same water as Olympians, it would be presumptuous to assume that he was in the same league as them. He wasn’t even close. In fact, they treated him as a bit of a joke.

“He was not even a good swimmer,” said the Olympic gold medalist Donna de Varona, some decades later, in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “He was there because somebody had written a big check."

Such is the peril of being an ambitious dilettante with access to tens of millions of dollars of inherited wealth. You get to indulge your whims, but not earn any respect. Not even from your mother. Jean kept John in check for as long as she lived. She provided structure that any growing child needs… but with John’s frail mental health, she had to provide that structure all through adulthood too. When he married, and fell into drunken threats and abuse, his mother took him under her wing throughout his transition back into the life of a single, extremely wealthy, mentally ill young man.

When he switched from swimming to fencing, flying helicopters, and buying army surplus tanks, she kept him on the straight and narrow. At least she had the comfort of knowing that her son's sporting interests included her favorite sport: Equestrianism.

Jean kept a stable of rare Welsh ponies and took all the local gymkhana girls under her wing. After competing in the nearby Devon Horse Show, all the young ladies of Philadelphia’s Main Line who loved show jumping and dressage would be invited to the Du Pont estate for a party. And John would occasionally stop by, if his drinking had not incapacitated him completely.

The story of John’s eventual descent into madness and murder is well known. After Jean Du Pont died, John lost his ties to order and sanity and became increasingly paranoid. He shot a wrestler who was training at the estate, and he was arrested, tried, found insane but culpable, and spend his last years incarcerated in a mental facility.

His estate lay guarded but decaying until he died, and then his prodigious collections were auctioned off, and the property bulldozed to the ground. The estate is now sprouting high-dollar townhomes and McMansions, but before the demolition began, I gained permission to tour the estate that was about to be demolished. I saw the mansion where the fugitive heir holed up from the Newtown Square police after the murder. I saw the greenhouses. And I went to the stables. In the corner was a pile of old horse shoes. This lot is one of those horseshoes. It was rusty when I pocketed it. I painted it with a rust-inhibiting black spray paint. Then, in a fit of whimsy, I brushed some gold decorative paint over the top, to hint at the huge amount of wealth that had bought the estate that housed the family that bred the horses that wore this shoe, till it was too worn to be used, and was pulled off and tossed into the corner, ready for a visitor to pick up, before looking around to make sure nobody could see him, and slip into his pocket.

This horseshoe stands as stark evidence that phenomenal amounts of money do not bring harmony or happiness to those that inherit them. But perhaps, like horseshoes all over the world, this one will bring its new owners, not unimaginable wealth and everything that goes with it, but a modest measure of good luck.

The Best Buttonholes in Edinburgh

Detail of a hand-made cotton underskirt/petticoat, 1910s-1920s 

My grandmother made the best buttonholes in Edinburgh. She said so herself, but she wasn’t the only one: Everyone else said so too. She had a Singer sewing machine (still in my Aunt Mary’s living room) for straight seams, but the buttonholes were made by hand. The inner end of the hole, the part the button rubs against, is slightly rounded so it can withstand more wear. The edges of the buttonhole are reinforced and beautified by, of course, buttonhole stitch. 

Sabina Cameron, my grandmother, was the seventh of eight children (“Seventh child of a seventh child,” she would say). Her father died when she was three years old, in 1891, and his widow had to take in laundry to make ends meet. The boys went to a school for fatherless boys, but these did not exist for girls, so my grandmother had to leave school at the age of 14, and start working in a dressmaker’s shop. The work must have paid a single girl well enough, because within a decade beautiful postcards with her photograph began to appear, showing her with elegantly coiffed long hair and wonderful dresses that she must have made herself. 

She met my grandfather in 1916 at a dance in Edinburgh Castle, and they married in 1918, at the end of WWI; he had served in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. In their engagement photograph he is staunch and upright in his kilt, wearing puttees, while she sits almost hunched and crooked, like a bit of a siren: the Protestant girl who would convert to Catholicism to marry him.  

After they married, the couple moved to London and then Yorkshire, where my grandfather taught mathematics. Before they started a family—late in life, for those days—he would ride around on his motorcycle and she would ride in the sidecar. This is when I imagine she made this wonderful underskirt for herself: the waist measures about 26 inches, and the drawstring through a pleated section can make it even tighter. Their first child wasn’t born until they were 37, so she could have worn this slender garment for years, but it is so well preserved that it might have been worn only a few times. It shows signs of age but not of wear. 

No one in my generation or the younger wave of home seamstresses does needlework like this. This is a garment that was made to last as long as its owner was beautiful. It has traveled more than six thousand miles from its origins in Edinburgh or London or the West Riding of Yorkshire, across to Colorado, circling back in the past couple of months to Pennsylvania. And it has taken on something of everywhere it has been: The garment smells of scented soap, a bit of English damp, and an overlay of dry Colorado—where we found it carefully folded in a box among my mother’s things, after her death. She left no record that it was my grandmother’s work, but it’s obvious where this hand-crafted garment came from. 

The perfectly even Singer-stitched thread, with occasional hand-stitched runs, pleating the ivory cotton at the waist. The buttons are hand-covered with fabric so they match the rest of the garment perfectly. The waist has no elastic: It has a quarter-inch drawstring made of the same fine ivory fabric. It has three tiers, ending in a hem of two layers, ruffled with horizontal pleats and hand-trimmed, scalloped machine-made lace. It was clearly made by a professional.  

The two buttonholes down the side show that she was at the peak of her skills. 

It’s not at all a stretch to imagine that these buttonholes are the work of the best buttonhole-maker in Edinburgh, making garments for herself, and perhaps thinking of the handsome kilt-wearing groom who walked her down the aisle a few years earlier.