dinner-table talk (pp. 638–639)
Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho’s first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man cocking an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee.
Context
Against Troeltsch's henpecked father, a warmer paternal fragment: Stice's earliest remembered Christmas is anchored to his old man — the gag gift (a Phoneless Cord), the eyebrow cocked, the mother laughing. What the son keeps of the father is a look and a shared joke at the very floor of memory. Ortho "loves his folks to distraction," and the raw lets the affection show here in miniature: a boy's first recallable image of his father is of the man being funny. Texture, the fond pole.