The statuary gives him back the paper, and points out, with his pocket rule, the words, 'beloved and only child. '

Dad looked straitlaced in his short-sleeved white shirt, skinny tie, and plastic pocket liner holding a pen, a notebook, and sometimes a slide rule.

My father, who was trained in engineering at M. I. T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation's math skills.