York Preparatory School - NYC

I have the privilege of teaching a course called “Ethics” to our seniors. Most teachers think their class is the most important, and I am no exception. “Vanitas, Vanitas, omnia Vanitas!”

What the class has become–and this is a work in progress that has changed every year for many years–is an increasing attempt to get students to debate each other on the choices they might make in difficult and, admittedly, strange situations. I do try to present a historical curriculum of ethical philosophy, but that only provides the backdrop to the sort of questions that noted philosopher Philippa Foot first posed at Oxford when I was there. She asked: “What would you do if faced with a downhill runaway trolley that left unchecked would kill five people, and you had the choice to divert the trolley onto a siding by pulling a switch, thus ensuring the death of only the one person on that siding?”

Trolleyology, or quandary ethics, as this type of dilemma is called, assumed more reality after 9/11. Would you shoot down hijacked planes heading for Manhattan before you knew (although probably you could make a very intelligent guess) where or what they intended to hit? This is an intellectual exercise that keeps on giving. It (for just one of many examples) morphs into arenas like “Spelunkology”, which asks whether you would blow up a fat man who has blocked your exit from a cave where you and your friends are trapped as the water rises. (You conveniently have with you a stick of dynamite.) You can use Trolleyology as a jumping off point to debate basic questions about redistribution of wealth. Is it permissible to take from the rich and give to the poor?

Along the way, there have been many recorded legal cases to discuss with the students. My favorite is Regina v. Dudley and Stephens, a Victorian case in England in which starving sailors on a shipwrecked lifeboat ate the cabin boy to survive. There is a line in the trial transcript which, describing their eventual rescue, actually reads: “After breakfast, a sail was sighted on the horizon.” One wonders what part of the cabin boy constituted breakfast.

Dr. Foot, back in the day, asked: “What if the only way to stop that runaway trolley and save the five people was by pushing a fat man off a bridge onto the trolley tracks (and to his certain death)?” To the queasy who did not like the idea of physically pushing someone, she gave the option of the fat man sitting on a trap door which dropped him when you pressed a button. I could go on with different scenarios but similar dilemmas.

Trolleyology, in the end, leads to the most fundamental questions about family, discrimination, and medical choices. The great Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Appiah wrote: “Being deluged with trolley problems is one of the professional hazards of modern moral philosophy.” Certainly, the multiplicity of dilemmas on Trolleyology can lead to boisterous discussions among the students. The seniors seem to divide into groups–the libertarians, the utilitarians, the liberals, and the “I think this but I don’t know why” group. Since there are never right or wrong answers to most questions in Ethics, I frequently feel like a ringmaster as students argue in debates that are only stopped by the end of the period (and, which I hope, continue among the class members when I am not there.)

One of the main objectives of the course is to try to get students to think creatively (or, to use a most common cliché, to “think out of the box”) and to consider issues that they have never had to think about before. There is some method in this madness, because the “old” days of one career for life may be a thing of the past for many of our students. The reality is that just when today’s young thinkers have learned one set of skills, they may need to switch jobs, learn a whole new skill set, and (here is the point) face totally new problems. Technological advances promote new career paths as they render others obsolete.

I am lucky that this is a terrific senior class, most of whom are not afraid to speak up in front of their peers. If I had to generalize, I would say that they are more conservative than my cohort was at their age. They seem to (back to my Latin quote about my vanity) enjoy arguing about difficult problems, which augurs well for their futures. They challenge each other–and me–with vigor and intelligence, and they keep me on my toes as they perform intellectual gymnastics to further their arguments.

So, a man walks into a doctor’s office where there happen to be five patients in desperate need of different organs due to some strange trolley accident. The man, who is in perfect health, wants a flu shot, but if the doctor cuts him up he could save all of his five patients. What to do?

Socrates’ wife, Xantippe, was apparently such a nag that her name has become associated with that of a scolding wife. Shakespeare refers to her in this way in The Taming of the Shrew. The truth is that the reports of her badgering all come from Socrates’ followers, who offer an account of his patience with her even after she emptied a full chamber pot over his head.

I have a totally different view of Xantippe. What a pain in the neck it must have been to live with a man who never argued back! What a complete nightmare to live with a calm and pious philosopher like Socrates! I cannot imagine a more doomed scenario for a marriage than one in which one of the partners will never answer back or engage in a quarrel. I mean, is that not part of the reason why someone marries you?

Imagine the scene: Here is Xantippe, going through the bother of filling the bucket. At best she got very dirty water, and—let us be honest—she also probably urinated in it. It must have taken her some time to fill the thing. She waited for him, and looked forward to the row she would have. He came home and she positioned herself carefully above his head (if you go to Wikipedia you will see there are various works of art of the event) and, bingo, she emptied it. And nothing happened! No recriminations, no protest, no concern! I can understand why the Athenian Senate sentenced him to the hemlock. Who would want such a bore around the place? I think, at least, he owed it to his wife to say some words of complaint.

The moral of the story is obviously that you should never marry an always-good-tempered philosopher. That works both ways. A calm wife who never argued back would be just as dreary. Husbands, imagine you fill up a chamber pot. (Okay, you can fill up something more contemporary if a chamber pot is not at hand.) You wait, you pour, and nothing! I say that is grounds for marital abuse by your wife. Where is the humanity?

It is the same with children. We don’t have the equivalent of Xantippe, but imagine a child that never answers back or gives you grief; no, don’t waste your time, they don’t exist. But if they did, how boring would your life be? No one would have children. We would have to buy animals instead. At least a cat is moody, and dogs tend to chew furniture (I know about these things).

There you are, waiting for your child not to make his or her bed so that you can save a small bit of their allowance to use for a book you want to buy, and the child makes the bed perfectly. So you “short sheet” the bed, and the child makes it perfectly again. And again! It would be enough to drive a parent into an old folks home where they know the other inhabitants are ornery and annoying, and a good quarrel is available at any time.

In the end, it is also the same running a school. If there were no problems, there would be no need for people like me. Who needs a headmaster if everything is going perfectly? I could only screw up the wonderful machine. No child to help deal with difficulties, no parent who is not parenting, no faculty member who failed to fill some responsibility. I would be sitting in my office looking at the walls, wondering what on earth I was doing there, and thinking that maybe I should seek employment in a different field if only to relieve the tedium.

So Xantippe, you may be known in history as a shrew, but I, for one, understand the incident with the chamber pot and, had I been there, would have cheered you on.

Ronald P. Stewart, Headmaster
E-mail: rstewart@yorkprep.org

Happy New Year from your local friendly dinosaur.

Yes, I am a dinosaur. I was born during the Second World War and evacuated from London soon after birth because Hitler began dropping V2 rockets on my home city. I grew up in a country that had food rationing and yet pretended it was a great power. I lived in a household that had no television and yet would gather around the radio every week to listen and laugh together to programs like “The Goon Show” with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harold Secombe. The only electric gadget in my room was a light bulb. We had one phone in the house (which I never used) and one bathroom.

When I first went to school, I was two years old and travelled with my four-year-old sister to the school on two trolley buses (we had to change from one to another). We went alone. My parents never thought we would be in danger. They worried more about my tendency to lose things. My gloves had a long string that connected them to each other through the arms of my coat.

I joined the public library when I was four and went there increasingly until it was a daily event by the time I was I was fourteen. On that fourteenth birthday, my school allowed me to attend with long trousers (grey flannels); until then, I was only allowed to attend in short trousers (grey flannels).

I went to a university that required a high proficiency in Latin to enter. Regardless of whether you were going to study physics, poetry or, in my case, law, you had to have passed a difficult national exam in Latin. At that university I had to wear a shirt and tie and an academic gown for every university function, which included dining at the college as well as going to tutorials or exams. I proudly wore a long gown because I was a scholarship winner, which is all very well until you start riding your bicycle with it on.

I am a dinosaur because in every school I went to, we had to stand up silently when the teacher walked into the room. We used nib pens, which we dipped in ink pots to write with.  We wore uniforms with regulation school socks (now that is a uniform!).

I am a dinosaur because I grew up in an age when no one took vitamins, sleeping pills, or tranquilizers; all they did was smoke and drink (I didn’t say it was a better age, just a previous age).

I am a dinosaur because I do not fully understand this world. I can use a computer for simple tasks, but I cannot do what most current twelve-year-olds can do with it. I never carry a cell phone because I find them intensely annoying when they go off at a time when they should not go off. I take a baby aspirin every night because my doctor tells me to, although I really have no understanding of what it will do for me. I am clearly a foolish dinosaur.

I am a dinosaur because my value system is not the value system of the age I am living in. That is not to say it is better or worse; it is just hugely different. Perhaps we should not go there because it may make me sound like a prude. Most dinosaurs of my generation were (not all are still alive).

I am a dinosaur who lives in New York and loves what he is doing.

Happy 2011 from those of us born in 1944—your local friendly dinosaurs.

I have learned this about puppies: they are not as angelic as they look. When our puppy Timmy first came to live with us a few months ago, I thought we would not be allowed to keep him. A doggie version of the Prophet Elijah would come down in some sort of doggy chariot and tell us (probably in a compassionate voice) that they had made a mistake, that Timmy was really an angel, and that he would have to go back to Heaven because he was just too good for us. Well, I have changed my mind; I am beginning to think we might not be seeing Elijah any time in the near future.

Now that Timmy has run around with every dog in Central Park, given a squirrel a literal heart attack (it fell dead out of the tree where Timmy had chased it, I kid you not!), invariably returned from Central Park looking as though he had been through a mud bath, harried and then eaten any ants he can find in our backyard, made “mistakes” on our carpets, wheedled food out of strangers by playing the “cute card, ” torn up papers, gnawed at chair legs, and destroyed “indestructible” toys, I suspect that Heaven will wait.

That I always considered myself a Labrador type of guy and that Timmy is a poodle is already something I have learned to live with. He doesn’t look like a poodle because we have not engaged in topiary on him, but a poodle he is. That means he is smart enough to run our house. He also does very good impersonations. In the incident with the aforementioned dead squirrel, we were in the country when Timmy spied the innocent little rodent. He immediately did a very passable impression of an English pointer. He stopped still, slowly lifted a paw in the direction of the squirrel, and then, in exquisite slow motion, each foot being gently and silently placed on the ground in sequence, advanced upon the hapless animal. At the last moment, he changed into his impression of a Doberman, lunging and barely missing the squirrel with a roar. The squirrel got away only to fall out of the tree a minute later, dead from terror.

Actually, I am quite proud of his impersonation of a bird dog when he chases pigeons. I have to confess I am not a New York pigeon lover. I think of them as “flying rats.” I recognize that sounds harsh, but I have been known to urge Timmy on to chase them when the opportunity arises. To date, he has not given a good impersonation of an eagle; he hasn’t got the flying bit down yet.

He has convinced our veterinarian that he can read. Again, I am not joking. The other week we got a card addressed to Timmy at our home. It came in the mail. To Timmy, our address! And it reminded Timmy that he needed his six-month shots very soon. My son is a veterinarian (I have the vet school bills to prove it), and I thought they were a profession of intelligent people. Either I have clearly made a mistake or (surely not!) Timmy can read.

Your child may have told you that Timmy comes to York Prep on most days with my wife at around 8.00 a.m. to be petted and adored by the sixth and seventh graders. He has his timing very well worked out and leaves after the mid-morning break when the students have to go back to class. The good thing about poodles is that they have the non-allergic hair or fur (I never know which is which), so our students do not sneeze or get a rash after they stroke him. He does not bark when classes are in session, does not bite children, and on Friday when I walked him through the lobby where we were having a bake sale, he calmly threaded his way through a hundred children.

Obviously, Timmy has lovable puppy qualities, and I have to remember not to anthropomorphize him as much as I do. One has to put up with his peccadilloes (even embrace his mischievous nature) and not expect an angel. Now if I could only find my left slipper…

Ronald P. Stewart, Headmaster
E-mail: rstewart@yorkprep.org

When I was very young, we used to say when insulted, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” You don’t hear that so much anymore because we have learned how powerful words are and their ability to inflict pain. Verbal bullies, who use the Internet to send messages of hate, well know what they are doing. They intentionally cause distress and, frequently, mock that distress by sharing the insult with “friends” on Facebook or some other social networking site. They hurl insults in a distant way rather than face to face. In the old days you saw your enemy on the battlefield literally nose to nose. Today, you can sit in Missouri and kill people in Pakistan. So it is with social networks and verbal cruelty. No wonder the invective has ratcheted up.

Humpty Dumpty, in my favorite quote from my favorite book, said: “When I choose a word… it means just what I choose it to mean.” Alice did not buy this and neither, unfortunately, can we. If you call someone a pervert or a slut, those words have power and cannot just be withdrawn. They can leave marks like physical attacks.

But words can change in their meaning. And sometimes they simultaneously mean different things to different people. That does not mean Humpty was right–“marmalade” does not mean “tomorrow”–but his statement does reflect the emotional power of words.

I am still surprised that groups have arrogated to themselves certain words. They have grabbed them. My favorite example is “gay.” I used to think that meant “cheerful” without any reference to sexual orientation. Now it means something entirely different although, for the record, I have known both cheerful and sad homosexuals and heterosexuals. Maybe in this case, “marmalade” is becoming close to “tomorrow.”

Similarly, “pro-life”: does that mean that those who think a woman has a right to make a choice are anti-life? No one on either side is anti-life! And “natural birth”! Who chose that one? Are not all births a natural process (no matter if forceps or other surgical instruments are used)? And why, too often in education, does “diversity” only refer to race? “Race” refers to race, but diversity refers to, well, diversity. Thus at York we have a pianist who is a prodigy, a diver who is in the top ten in the country in his age bracket, children of poverty and wealth, children whose family structure is different from the norm, children who….you get the picture. Diversity is diversity.

I dislike some words. I dislike the word “hate.” I dislike it intensely, but I am not going to say I hate the word. There is a word for the kind of statement I just made but, ironically, I have forgotten it. I dislike the word “toleration.” The “Test Act” of 1871 in England (known as the “Toleration Act”) allowed non-practicing Christians into the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It is a good thing that I applied after that Act. There is nothing equal in toleration. It is a one-sided use of arrogance posing as kindness. When a country club tolerates Catholics, it means it allows them in but specifically implies they are not equal. If they were, the “toleration” would be redundant. I remember an argument I had with a student from a university in the Southern US, when we were both at Oxford, who proudly told me that his school allowed inter-racial dating. I told him no such thing exists: humans date humans and we are all members of the human race. I was being disingenuous: I well knew what he meant and was trapping him into admitting his prejudices. I hope my words had more power than his words.

Jonathan Miller said on stage (in Beyond the Fringe) that he was not a “Jew,” but merely “Jewish.” A funny line, but there was thought behind his humor. If we could get away from labels that differentiate us into almost tribal groupings and move towards the recognition that we are all humans (I obviously like that word) with common insecurities, then maybe we would have less suicides, less angst, and more fun.

So words have far greater power than most of us acknowledge, and they cannot just be “taken back” once said. Sticks and stones won’t break my bones, but they surely can mess with my mind.

Ronald P. Stewart, Headmaster

E-mail: rstewart@yorkprep.org

I have discovered that no matter what electronic reading device you buy, as soon as you mention which one you bought, someone will tell you why you purchased the wrong one. About two months ago I bought a Nook from Barnes & Noble. I have spent enough money there that I think it should be Barnes & Noble & Stewart, but I digress. I purchased a Nook because I was leaving the next day on a trip and did not want to “schlep” (if you are a New Yorker and need a translation, then you are not the New Yorker you think you are) a whole load of books. So I bought the little reading machine, downloaded about five books and off I went.

Within hours, I was told that I would have been smarter to have acquired a Kindle, or perhaps even an iPad. The problem with the Kindle was that Amazon (another firm that could be called Amazon and Stewart) has to send it to you, and this Nook was rather in the way of an impulse purchase. My impulse occurred in the store at 66th and Columbus which is more conducive to impulses than having to order online. The iPad is something that Jayme subsequently bought and loves, but it does too many things for me. I like one piece of equipment to do one job. I understand that more. For me a toaster should just toast and a microwave oven should microwave, but I digress again.

It is true that there is no backlighting to the Nook (or the Kindle for that matter) but you can buy a very cheap little light that clips on to the top of the device and read in the dark quite comfortably. I say this because Jayme is very proud of her backlit iPad and I am equally proud that my machine cost a quarter of the price. But I am digressing yet again.

The Nook, I have discovered, does not work for me with very long books. I wrote last year (in these “Thoughts”) about my summer’s experience reading War and Peace. There is little I remember of the summer of 2009 except reading War and Peace. I was probably too proud of doing it (Jayme says that I was obsessive about it). It is lengthy (the English like understatements) and I cannot imagine reading it on my little machine.

First of all, it would be very difficult to refer back and forth to the list of characters, the historical notes, and the translator’s notes–things that I don’t know how you read War and Peace without. But I also have found that I have difficulty staying with the Nook for really long and “heavy” works of literature. Great for “Spenser” detective novels, not really workable for Crime and Punishment.

Since I read a lot of the former, the Nook works well for me, and I have been on several trips without a physical book in my hand. In fact, I have found that one overloads the Nook with e-books. In my two months, I think I have about thirty books downloaded. Of course, I have not read all of them, but once I find an author I like, I find it difficult not to download all of that author’s books I haven’t read yet. It also encourages me to troll all the book reviews for new authors.

Somehow you don’t feel such an obligation to finish the book if it is on your machine. Barnes & Noble are very clever about this. They only charge you about ten dollars a book. Obviously, it costs them virtually nothing in printing and distribution costs. Nonetheless, the idea of getting a $25 book for ten bucks appeals to my stingy side, and they certainly make it very convenient to impulse shop for books in your own home.

To make it all the more seductive, they know what you want to read and do not hesitate to tell you. When I was very young (well, fairly young), our family would go to diners where there was a little jukebox selection machine next to your table, and you could pay for the song it would play. And I thought (and here is why I stress the “young” component of this paragraph) that they had a little man in the basement who would interpret how you pressed the buttons and put on the record that you wanted.

Well, I was wrong about that, but I am not sure that they do not have a little man in Amazon or Barnes & Noble who isn’t checking what I read and thinking, “Well, he’ll like this,” because they frequently suggest what I would like to read with considerable accuracy. I have been told it has to do with algorithms, which is all very well for those of you who know what an algorithm is. Most of us wouldn’t know what an algorithm was if we tripped over one

So, to all of you who have one of these electronic readers and want to tell me that I bought the wrong one, let me say that I am sure you are right, but does it really matter? To those of you who are upset at the weight and expense of textbooks for our students, let me agree in hoping that some publisher will soon start putting textbooks online for these machines. And finally, to anyone who is brave enough to read War and Peace on a Nook or something similar, I send you my admiration.

For the rest of us who love escapist reading, who started with Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe and now read about Gabriel Allon and Stephanie Plum, these little lightweight gadgets are, in my opinion, very handy. Both spouses can read the same book at the same time in poor light conditions. Impressive! Perhaps marriages are being held together by the Nooks and Kindles and iPads of this world. But I digress again.

Ronald P. Stewart, Headmaster

E-mail: rstewart@yorkprep.org

Headmaster’s Thoughts - September 2010

(As a note to new parents, I should explain what these “Thoughts” are, and why I write them.  I teach an ethical philosophy class to the entire Senior class. These “Headmaster’s Thoughts” (this is number seventy) are written as my personal monthly homework for the seniors to critique. They can be sometimes amusing and other times controversial and passionate, but usually I just write a topic essay that my students can criticize for whatever reason they wish. Trust me that they happily and frequently attack what I say and how I say it. The “Thoughts” are very often personal, as this one is.)

On a holiday this summer with five very bright and accomplished individuals, three of whom are members of my family, we played the game of answering the following question: “What would you request as your last meal if condemned to death?” When I started with my dream appetizer of “pigs in blankets” (those little hot dogs in puff pastry), my companions realized that I truly have no taste buds and no sense of the joy of good food.

I have talked in previous “thoughts” about my lack of interest in food.  I would argue that I am a casualty of history. I was brought up in post-Second World War London, and the fact is that the food was plain awful.  So, after humiliating myself with “pigs in blankets,” I started to wonder why English food rightfully had such a bad reputation. I believe the answer lies indeed in the history of the country.

I start off with the assumption that the Norman conquerors, who captured England in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings under William the Conqueror, brought with them Norman food and insisted that Norman cuisine be provided for them. I have no idea how bad English food was then, but the arrival of so many rich Frenchmen (rich because William gave them tracts of land as payment for their military support) must have had the impact of merging the foods of the two nations. The English Channel is only 21 miles across between Dover and Calais, and Calais was occupied by the English until 1558, so there seems no reason to believe that you could not get good Calais food in England.

Something must have happened between then and Voltaire’s dismissive line about English food—which I have also quoted before—that France has one religion and forty sauces while England has forty religions and only one sauce. Something destroyed the cuisine of a powerful nation, and I think the industrial revolution (at the very time when the British Empire was at its height) was to blame.

It is certainly true to say that Britain was the first country to go through the great industrial revolution of the 18th century and that it was the most industrialized country in the world. The creation of a vast factory system in its urban regions resulted in the flocking of farm workers (they were called peasants in those days, but I think that word is politically incorrect) to cities where their labor was needed. This industrial revolution changed the country rapidly with many negative consequences (including Marx making false future prognostications as he studied the effects in the library of the British Museum).

Without dwelling on the pollution, dreariness of the factory workers’ lives, and the general loss of community that mass urban centers create, one of the clear side effects was the emptying of the countryside of labor and the need to get food to the major population centers where the factories were producing goods.  Small farming, particularly farming of fruits and vegetables, is labor intensive. On the roof of York Prep we have flowers and vegetables for our five bee hives which require a great deal of work.  Seeding, thinning, weeding, watering, and gathering—this is “hand” work and not something that can easily be replaced by machines.

England needed food that could be easily produced, cheaply transported, and speedily prepared in a country where women were now a large part of the factory labor force and had no time for slow cooking. So meats became staple foods. Sheep and meat cattle require few workers to produce a great deal of food.  Better farm machinery made large farms more practical than small ones, and so England became a nation of meat producers.  Vegetables and other products that took more time were imported.  In the 19th century the farmlands of the New World made even meat an economically marginal product.  Only the largest farms could survive the arrival of cheaper meat from America or Argentina and, later, Australia and New Zealand.  Tinned meat was the most easily transportable food, and mass produced breads replaced the artisan loafs of the pre-industrial revolution.

The only consumable that the English could make well was tea, and that was because it was produced in a colony (India) by cheap local labor and is very easy to transport back in bulk to Britain with virtually no spoilage in the process.  Tea, however, does not a cuisine make.

Voltaire was not the only one who recognized that Britain was relying on cheap imported food to feed its people. In both World Wars, Germany tried to starve Britain by destroying the ships that carried food to it. In the Second World War, the U-Boats did an effective job of reducing food supplies and nearly starving the country. Arguably, the United States’ greatest contribution to the British war effort before it entered the conflict in December of 1941 was to have its merchant marine ships run the submarine blockade with food for the British people. Monty Python’s hilarious praise of Spam had a poignant truth.

I was brought up in the decade following the end of World War II. Starved of fresh food during the War, Britain still had to rely on cheap imported food. I remember we were limited to one egg a week, candy and meat were severely rationed, and (in the absence of cream and eggs) the ice cream was so lard-based that it has produced in me (and, I suspect, many of my cohorts) a life-long dislike for the substance.

The restaurants were subject to the same rationing and few patrons had the funds for quality imported meals. In a country recovering from the trauma of six years of fully mobilized conflict, the reconstruction of a massive enemy bombing campaign was rightfully given the highest priority. In practice, therefore, you could not find decent food in restaurants, certainly not the restaurants that the middle class could afford. My family liked to go to a restaurant on Charlotte Street because we were known and therefore given a good table. In the absence of good food, a good table became important. I remember there were two types of soups: thick and thin. What was actually in either soup I have never ever discovered.

By the late Fifties, the British started to return to foreign travel for their holidays. Of course, they found that the food on the continental land mass of Europe was infinitely superior to their own. Gradually, small farming returned, as did sufficient affluence for many city workers to be able to afford good ingredients for their home-cooked food and to demand better food in restaurants. For my generation it was too late. But now you can find great food in Britain, and British chefs seem quite the vogue on American television.

So this is why I have so little interest in food. Historically permanently damaged, I ask for “pigs in blankets” as my last meal. I rest my case!

Ronald P. Stewart, Headmaster
E-mail: rstewart@yorkprep.org

The very first “Headmaster’s Thoughts” blog I wrote for our website was in December 2004. It was a short piece on how much I enjoyed watching our students in their gym classes. Our school has these impressive large windows as you enter, and I like to stand there and watch the action.

Now, nearly seventy “thoughts” later, I have a second set of windows from which I like to watch the action. But the players here are small, fat, and have stubby wings. They are our honey bees. We have equally impressive windows to look out from, but these are at the very top of our two staircases and overlook our school’s roof. From there I like to watch the five beehives we now have on the roof. It is like observing five miniature airports. Bees take off, fly smoothly and easily up towards Central Park, and return overloaded with pollen—awkward “cargo” fliers landing clumsily on their hive’s sill, having often bumped into the flowers that adorn the roof. They are busy, these bees. We already have honeycombs and soon will have honey, lots of it; up to one hundred pounds of honey per hive per year. They are also smart bees. When it gets very hot, the swarm rotates creating a natural fan. I have not seen this but I am told this by our apiarist principal, Chris Durnford. I like the idea.

I like the costumes, too. You know, the beekeeper’s silly hat with the netting hanging from the rim, along with the all-covering jumpsuit. It looks like a Victorian outfit for an eccentric Englishman. (At times I have delusions of being one.) Jayme and I used to be camp counselors in Maine where they occasionally had swarms of black flies. How cool it would have been to have had beekeepers outfits then! We could have braved the storm of flies with aplomb.

At York, we have all the bee equipment, including two smokers. Like the costumes, they have not changed in design in hundreds of years. They are supposed to make the bees go very mellow and not buzz around. A sort of Valium for bees. We haven’t used one yet, but I hope I am there to watch when Chris “smokes” them. I want to see those pollen-laden bees, who are bad enough fliers anyway, get hit with their tranquilizing puffs. Do they just lie down and think deep thoughts, or start singing to the marigolds?

I am told that bees swarm to wherever their queen is. So if wearing your costume you were to remove the queen from her hive and place it on your friend’s shoulder (and hopefully this would be a friend also wearing the get-up), the entire hive of over ten thousand bees would settle on that shoulder. I wonder how much ten thousand bees weigh… I’m not a fan of Halloween, but that would be a real show stopper as a Halloween costume.

I tend to anthropomorphize animals (and insects) and so think that we could learn a lot about communal cooperation from our bees. Even if individually they are not smart, the swarm seems to have a collective intelligence. How unlike us! We are the epitome of self-obsessed narcissists compared to our buzzing friends. They willingly sacrifice themselves when the hive is attacked by stinging with their barb and thus committing suicide. But otherwise, they only wish to be left alone. As a species, the honey bee is not aggressive. He, or she, will not attack without reason. They just want to make honey. They pollinate our flowers. They help our environment. And I like watching them.

Ronald P. Stewart, Headmaster

E-mail: rstewart@yorkprep.org

June 12th was a very big day in the life of the Stewart family. We acquired a puppy.

Lest you think this really is no big deal, I should say that neither my wife nor I had been without a pet since we became conscious beings. We have had dogs, cats, horses, cows, snakes, gerbils, chinchillas (which our daughters bred for a profit of $15 per, no less), hedgehogs (adorable!), rabbit, fish and tropical tank stuff (it is all alive, if you know what I mean), ferrets (five), and a monkey. It was not an accident of life that our son became a veterinarian. Most families need one child to become a doctor to look after them; in our family we felt that a vet would be more valuable.

Our dog of fifteen and cat of twenty passed away at the beginning of the year. I miss them still. As older New Yorkers, we grieved and then made some comments to each other and our friends that without pets, our lives would be freer and we could travel without the guilt we felt when we left them at home (albeit with an army of feeders, walkers, and caretakers). Our knowledgeable friends said it was just a question of time. They knew far better than we did that six months without a pet was an eternity for us. No one was surprised when Jayme announced we were getting a puppy. The only side betting had been on whether it would be a dog or a cat, with dogs heavily favored by the cognoscenti.

A month before the puppy arrived, Jayme started reading every book written in English on puppy training. I only say “written in English” because the Germans have a slightly different approach to the subject (more authoritarian, you will not be surprised to learn) and, fortunately for the puppy, Jayme doesn’t read German. Nonetheless, armed with her information, we took our daughter and son-in-law (you know him as our school principal, Chris Durnford) to Petco to buy the necessary “essentials” before the puppy came.

If you have ever been to a Petco, you will know that slightly awed experience one feels when one walks into a single purpose store (pet products) so vast, with so many products for sale, that you feel as though the pet business has quietly become the major factor in our Gross Domestic Product. There are rows and rows of different pet foods. Four rows for dogs, three for cats, and four for assorted other animals. And there are many different products, particularly foods, for puppies, small dogs, medium dogs, and older dogs—each one claiming to be recommended by veterinarians, to be scientifically based, and to be very tasty. I wondered how the vets knew that last quality. Who tastes for a dog or cat? There is dry food and wet food, food in bags and food in cans. Then there are rows of bowls in which you feed the aforementioned food. And water dispensers that Rube Goldberg (that was for the older readers) must have thought up.

The Petco we went to covered several acres (at least it seemed to me at the time). They have an interesting marketing theory. There are no salespeople. You have to choose the products by yourself and then take your over-laden carts to the check-out stands where lines of other people are waiting to check out their over-laden carts. I think Petco has a policy of one employee per acre of selling space. They must make a fortune. Why did my son go into the veterinarian business? Selling pet stuff is surely easier and more profitable than treating pets. He went to fancy schools (I have the bills to prove it), and all he sells are immunizations. But I digress.

Jayme came with a list. (Anyone who has had the privilege of working with her in college guidance knows that she is the most organized person there is). But even her list was not very specific. Apparently you “crate train” a puppy nowadays. But which crate? There are more options than types of donuts at Dunkin Donuts. Actually, there are more options in every category of purchase than types of donuts and, as I mentioned, no one to suggest or help.

Chris found a clicker. This wonderful metal device makes, you may have guessed, a clicking noise. I was quite irritated that he found it first because I wanted to click it and he (in my opinion) hogged it. He went all over the store (and that means something, if you were in that store) clicking happily away, something I would have been equally interested in doing. I was thinking of getting another clicker so that I could compete, but I knew that my wife and daughter would have looked at each other and mentioned the phrase that women do at such times: “Men and their toys!” So I refrained.

I contributed to the entire affair by coming up with items that I had never seen before in my life. I never knew the ways you could hide food from a dog so that it would have to figure out how to eat from the object. You inject (I am not kidding) the food paste into a hollow “thing” (it could be a stone, a book, a small clockwork mouse) and then the animal has to figure out how to get the paste out. I found dog tutus that would make prima ballerinas proud, overalls that looked as though they came straight from the Amish country (assuming that the Amish weighed twenty pounds and had four legs), and raincoats far smarter than my 30-year-old Burberry. None of my suggestions of purchase were taken seriously by the ladies. They seemed to have lost their sense of humor in their discussion whether you needed a soft carrier or a hard carrier, and whether the super-saver-size miracle organic odor remover was worth buying by the five-gallon size.

A great deal of discussion between my wife and daughter (the serious ones, as I shall now refer to them) was about waste product from the puppy. There is a lot of money to be made on urine. I never knew. Even more on solid product, but young people may be reading this piece and I do not want to offend their sensibilities (as Jane Austen would say). Needless to say, we are now well covered in all areas of excretion.

At the end of the expedition, it was time for us to gather together. This is not so easy in a giant store where the aisles act like barriers in a very complicated maze. Chris was the easiest to find because he was still happily clicking away, but I understand there was some concern that I was lost to the group. Of course, I knew where I was; I was in the area that catered to guinea pigs (I like to watch them train for their marathons), but apparently this was not the mission of the day and no one thought to look for me in the guinea pig section.

Gathering up our purchases, I wish I could use that time honored cliché: tired but happy. However, when presented with the bill, I could only think of the fact that the cheapest thing about getting a puppy (by far) is the cost of the puppy itself.

We are about to pick up the puppy and Jayme has a list of puppy-friendly restaurants, camps, (puppy camp?), airlines, veterinarians divided by specialties, and stores. Soon we will have a puppy trainer, acupuncturist, chiropodist, groomer, walker, and psychiatrist.

As I said, June 12th was a big day for the Stewarts.

Ronald P. Stewart, Headmaster
E-mail: rstewart@yorkprep.org