With a Safeway less than 10 blocks away and a small neighborhood market 2 blocks away, it would seem a rare occurrence that a call would be made -- one house to the other - to borrow something. For the Staring-Hobel household, borrowing gave us the excuse to come over, say hello and watch the Moore-Dantzker household at its best. Front door unlocked, television on in one part of the family area with kids watching (some Dantzers, some not), computer terminal on in another part of the kitchen, sometimes Jackie playing a computer game while cooking, sometimes Lizzie, hardly ever Steve. Megan or Christina around, Bruce quietly smiling, Emily and Alicia upstairs, Nick (early on with his bag of candies, later with his friends watching TV), Mitts for years, then Mitts and Hudson and then Hudson lying on the couch. Steve having recently walked in with groceries from the store (having cornered the market on Danon coffee yogurts), still listening to his book on tape, and having bought Moore quantities (food enough for 20 to eat for 2 weeks). A quick trip to the refrigerator for the ingredient I needed, and a few minutes for talk and to watch the hustle, bustle. Great fun. I often came with something made in our house (I would like it to be clear that Diana made it and I simply carried it over). Coals to Newcastle (dinner to Chez Panisse), if Jackie was cooking. And, there appeared to be some special norm of reciprocity that required that I carry back more than I delivered.
Of course, the borrowing was not one sided. The telephone would ring. It was Jackie. “Do you have any extra [you name it and she seemed to need it for one of those complex recipes she would try]. We’d say yes and soon the doorbell would ring. Steve would pull off his ear buds and come in.
Now, Steve has long noted the Moore Interval, which we understand to represent the time between the first goodbye and the time the Moore family (principally Jackie, her sisters and her parents) actually get in the car and leave. Steve didn’t really have a Moore Interval, which begins when the person gets up to leave. Rather, he practiced The Dantzker Delay. This was the time between the first moment when he arrived to get what he was supposed to get and the time when he actually got it. Whether he came for a child (when Nick and Alex were young and played together, or when Hilary and Liz were young and played together) or a food ingredient or a chair for a party, he would often arrive and before picking up the child, food or furniture, the talk would begin -- something he heard, something we heard or read, some funny situation, a question to him about the Civil War or WW 1, discussions about cars, about travel, about his adventures when young traveling around the world, about politics, about backpacking, about Mitts’ latest cat food stealing adventure or just about anything.
Imagine the tension we faced. Loving Jackie, we imagined her standing in front of the stove awaiting the egg she needed, setting the table for 16 and wondering whether her guests arriving soon would need to sit on the floor, or wondering if her child and husband had been kidnapped. Should we push him out of our house and stop a delightful conversation or should we let the moment continue? Sometimes we were strong and nudged him out the door. Other times, we simply gave in to the pleasure of his company. As the guilt began to build, the telephone would ring. We wouldn’t even have to answer. It was time for Steve to leave. The child called from upstairs, the food put in his hands, the furniture pulled out of the closet. We always anticipated the next time we would talk, laugh and engage.
Steve wasn’t always so in the moment. Steve learned -- somehow - that he could make time move more slowly. As we all know, he was incredibly smart and his mind was incredibly quick. Yet, he seemed to live a fuller life not by moving nonstop to catch every moment, but to allow the moments to come to him; he seemed, (excuse the rewrite of the cliché) to take the time to stop and think about the flowers. We miss Steve in so many ways. He will always stay with us, especially in those moments when we take the time to reflect on the day, to laugh at the absurd world we live in and when we - in our own way - try to execute The Dantzker Delay.
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