For winter vacation some of my friends went skiing or they visited one another. I turned down invitations to Detroit and even one to New York. I took the early bus home on a Saturday morning. By two o’clock I was ready to share my learning. On the bus I arranged my notes. A few hours after I got home, I began to give Gootie a taste of college. She removed all the dishes before I put my thick book on the table. I pretended I was the professor looking out at a packed auditorium. Gootie blew her nose and gave me her full attention.
“I’m not trying to change what you believe,” I told her. “I’m just going to tell you what’s true. You can believe whatever you want –we’re going to talk about science.”
She nodded. “Everyone wants to know what’s true,” she said.
“We’re going to discuss evolution, how the world became what it is today.”
Gootie leaned back in her chair as relaxed as if she had just come out of the bath. She had dressed for my arrival, even to the point of wearing her black shoes with a quarter-inch heel.
“The world is very old,” I said. “There have been many changes in natural history.” I had an immediate problem. There were no Yiddish words for the geologic ages, so I used the English words “Ordovician” and “Mesozoic” and “Cambrian,” but I said them with a Yiddish accent.
She was impressed. “Such words,” she said. “You have to be smart just to remember them.”
I decided to switch to pictures. In the geology textbook I pointed to a graph comparing the age of the earth with the appearance of humans.
“That’s why the Torah is better than your book,” she said. “In the Torah God talks about people. He doesn’t have to tell flies to get married or to follow the Ten Commandments.”
“Nobody’s saying this book is like the Torah,” I said. “It’s just a schoolbook. There are thousands of books that explain evolution.” I had to use a roundabout phrase for evolution, “How things came to be as they are.”
Gootie turned a few pages in the book. “Did they pay someone to write this?”
“Of course,” I said.
“How much?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”
“That’s what you think,” she said. “He’s some wheeler-dealer, making money by telling you that rocks outlive people and that babies come from mothers. He’s making money telling you things that were an old story to Adam and Eve.”