Now the house is fixed up May’s way; the velvet curtains are drawn back, and there are bright curtains and new paint in spots and everything is gay. Her friends come and carry her off to luncheons and musicales and exhibitions of paintings; in the evenings we read some of the fifty magazines that I take, or play the word game called Scrabble, which she has taught me. She is ahead one day, and I the next.
III
Ordinarily I do not attend luncheons or dinners—my diet of rice and fruit cuts down my social life. But as I write, my wife and I have just returned from a trip to the East that was one long round of luncheons and dinners. (I kept to my diet—and probably left a trail of puzzled waiters behind me.)
Some months ago the New York chapter of the American Newspaper Guild wrote to inform me that a Page One Award in Letters was to be presented to me and invited me to attend the ceremony late in April. Then, shortly afterward, came a letter from Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, telling me that the UAW was also giving me an award—at its annual convention in Atlantic City early in May—and would like to present it to me in person. I could scarcely resist two such invitations.
The trip by air was a miracle to me. I had made only two short flights before. Now I saw the whole of the United States spread under me like a map, and I marveled at the nearness of the mountaintops and the vast spread of the plains. On the bare, brown deserts I observed great black spots, and I puzzled my head as to what could be growing on a desert floor; until I realized suddenly that these were the shadows of clouds, also beneath me. It was fascinating to observe how the shape of every spot corresponded exactly to the shape of its cloud. In the Middle West the farms were all laid out in perfect rectangles with the quarter sections clearly distinguishable; but as we got farther east, the irregularities increased until everything was chaos, including the roads.
All kinds of enterprises like to make use of celebrities, and the airport was no exception. The management, learning of my age, had taken the precaution to send a wheelchair to the plane. When May saw it she said to the porter, “You get in and let him wheel you.”
My son, David, was on hand with his wife and his car. An engineer, he publishes pamphlets about his technical discoveries of which his father is unable to understand a sentence. One of the problems he has solved is that of spinning a plastic thread so fine that one spool of it would reach all the way around the world. Both May and I are fortunate, in that we can love and admire our “in-laws.”
The American Newspaper Guild presented me with a handsome gold figure, which now stands on our mantel. The citation runs as follows:
Page One Award in Letters to Upton Sinclair, author of hundreds of books and papers, including The Jungle and The Brass Check, over a span of 60 years, all of which contributed immeasurably to the advancement of democracy and public enlightenment. 1962.