Harriet Moffatt

To Mike

You are my big brother.  We are from the same place.  You are older, and a boy.  You are smart and skilled.  I have always looked up to you and wanted you to notice me.

Companion of my childhood: frog-catcher, star-gazer,  Tarzan-vine-swinger.  You were always out ahead of me somewhere:  building, doing, being clever, using your words, traveling.  You helped write a math book while still in your teens, you corresponded with a Viking researcher, you hiked and biked the length of New England before it was cool to do so.  You could cook, do calculus, build a paper and balsa wood  hot-air balloon (and fly it and crash it), and of course you drove the family car before I did.  You visited different churches until you found the one you wanted to join.  You became and stayed close friends with some of your teachers.

Your appetite is prodigious.  You used to cook a second dinner for yourself, before going to bed, back in high school days.  You were always partial to staying up late then sleeping thru part of the day.

We have the same hands and feet.

You are funny and witty, also as well-spoken and well-written as anyone I know: a true man of letters.  You have pursued comedians all your life –and were always ready to replay a Peter Sellers movie, a Monty Python video, or a Woody Allen favorite.  Before that, there was Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, James Thurber, Tom Lehrer, the Threepenny Opera, Spike Jones…I think you craved the balance that comedy gave to the darkness that accompanied you for most of your life.

When you were at Oxford, England studying, I came to visit, and we ate the hottest food I have ever had at a  curry place…You took me punting on the little river that ran thru the town, we drank mead cider, then I illegally spent the night in your all-boys dorm, in the morning I had to leave by climbing over a high wall with broken glass encrusted in the top, WITH my suitcase in hand!  Another time that year you visited me at the home of my French “family” in Normandy, and in one dinner you cleaned out their cheese plate, which was intended to feed the family for at least a week!

Before Alex and Jacob, you parented Alan and Sasha.  I would see you hand out and play and joke with the, take them on hiking canoeing and skiing adventures and later to the far side of the world for larger adventures.  You cooked for them and there was incessant conversation.  I believe you once said that maybe you should have taught sixth grade instead of college.  Except: you hadn’t a clue what to do with girls!

You spent 15 years after college getting advanced degrees.  We lamented that you might remain a student forever!  But then you joined the Rutgers faculty, for a distinguished career as an Anthropology Professor.  You lived in a hut in an Untouchable village in Tamilnadu, India, then later studied these same people by commuting from Madras on a motor bike.  You wrote a book about them, then later, a popular anthropological book about New Jersey college students, doing the research by going undercover in the dorm, passing for a college student yourself!  I heard you speak on this book in Amherst, Mass.  The girls in the audience wanted to know why all your anecdotes in the book were about boys.

Books: you love them.  You told me that, as a kid, after reading your first chapter book, you felt as though you had just gotten a key to THE WORLD.