Not My Type
January 17th, 2007 by 
Madeleine Robins
I’m a snob. I’m a snob about a lot of things (American Idol? Really? Why?), but one of the things I am a snob about is type. I come by it naturally: my father was a graphic designer, and there were books and books of type samples and type design in his studio (he designed the odd face in his time, too) and many of his friends were designers or artists, so type was sort of a language around the house. And then, my brother letters comic books for a living. And I spent a good part of the eighties designing catalogues and users’ manuals and that sort of thing (on a computer–I am not good enough at translating what my brain wants into something my hands can carry out). I like nice looking type–I do all my writing in Palatino, a graceful, old-fashioned serif face, and change it at the last possible moment to Courier, which I detest but know is preferred by publishers’ production departments. Sound crazy? Sounds like snobbery to me.
Our local pharmacy closed its doors last week, selling all its prescription rolls to a competitor. This should be an unmixed blessing: Rite Aid (the old pharmacy), to which we transferred all our scrips when we moved to San Francisco from New York, was inconvenient as to parking, and the store had been looking a little down at the heels in the last six months or so. But my first thought was: eew. Their logo is ugly.
Read More »
Posted in Art, Daily Life, Mad | 
9 Comments »
I’m in Cleveland visiting my mother. She is 91 and lives in an assisted living place here. She has dementia. It doesn’t appear to be Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. She’s had MRIs and even been tested to insure it isn’t tertiary syphilis. (They apologized to me, but frankly, I think our parents are a bigger mystery to us than we ever suspect. Although I wasn’t surprised she tested negative.) She lost memory first, and then cognitive abilities. Her language has been impaired for a few years now—she has trouble with nouns. Before I moved to Texas last November, I saw her twice a week and although she has forgotten most of the family, she always recognized me, even if she didn’t have any language to describe our relationship. She would tell me about how her dad came from down there up to here and then he went up (she gestures with her hands to indicate someone going upstairs of climbing) and then bam, down he went. She’s very sweet, which although charming, is not a characteristic my mother ever exhibited. In my family, when the going got tough, the men got out of the way and the women took care of it. My mother was impeccable, competent and occasionally difficult.