Communication

The recent revelation that the New York City Board of Elections has printed ballots for the upcoming elections with incorrect instructions, reminded me of three personal interactions within the past month in which communication was faulty. The first was with a Verizon technician based in India, whom I called for help in installing a new router. He asked me to use the yellow router cable to connect my router and computer.

In fact the cable is black with a yellow tag. Once I understood what he meant, I plugged the cable into both router and computer, but the desired effect did not follow. "Did you insert both plugs?" he asked. I told him that there was only one plug - the transparent plastic device you pinch in order to insert a cable into a jack - and that I had plugged the other end of the cable into a computer port. "No," he said, "there are two plugs. You insert one into the router and the other into the computer." I was mystified until I noticed that one end of the cable was double-headed, with both a plug and a metal end that goes into the port. Once I understood the construction of the cable, we were able to proceed.

There were several problems leading to difficult communication here. Although his English was fluent, it was sufficiently accented that several times I had to ask him to repeat himself, a difficulty compounded by my defective hearing; he could not see what I was doing; and he mistakenly assumed that I understood the structure of the cable. Background knowledge is assumed in almost all communication and the lack of it impedes comprehension.

In the second incident, the other person was a native speaker of English, we were next to one another, and I had no difficulty hearing him. I was standing on a narrow traffic island on Flatbush Avenue, between Prospect Park and the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, waiting for the light to change, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find a tall, large, middle-aged man standing next to me. Smiling, he extended his arm in my direction and, thinking that he wanted to shake my hand, I took his hand. I wondered if he had mistaken me for someone else or if he had used a ploy, sometimes seen abroad, in which a conman or a beggar approaches a tourist. He was clearly surprised. When I understood that in fact he hadn't wanted to shake my hand, I figured that he wanted to shake the hand of the man on the other side of me. I laughed and gave the first man a playful mock punch. But no, he hadn't wanted to shake anyone's hand. Finally, he spoke. "Look behind you." Then I saw that an old lady with a walker was trying to get up onto the traffic island and that I was blocking her way. Once I understood what he wanted, I moved aside, but why in blazes hadn't he spoken up in the first place instead of using gestures?

The third incident occurred only last Shabbat, when I was looking for the opened bottle of Riesling that I had put into the refrigerator the night before, planning to use it as a back up if our lunch guests finished the new bottle we were serving. "Is it in the cupboard?" asked my wife. "No," I said, "I can only find the unopened one." In fact I was looking at last night's bottle. I had forgotten to put the unopened bottle in the refrigerator the night before. It was, as my wife suspected, in the cupboard, but that only came to light later. In the meantime, I had to open a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon instead, a wine that need not be cooled beforehand. Fortunately, it was just enough.

There are many instances of miscommunication between my wife and me, and no doubt some of them are never discovered. When I consider that we share the same language and rules for speaking it and much of the same background knowledge, I conclude that we should be more surprised than we are when two people with much less in common manage to understand each other perfectly.

Identity

At our annual visit to the Israeli consulate last week, we heard Hebrew all around us. There was an exception, however, a short, sturdy, elderly man who was speaking in slightly accented English. We couldn't place his accent except to be pretty sure that it wasn't Israeli. Because the seats on which we were sitting were close to the reception window, where he was standing, we couldn't help overhear his conversation with the clerk.

He told the clerk that he had fought in the Palmach, the elite combat unit of the Jewish pre-state military force, but that he hadn't lived in Israel for 50 years. Whenever he goes to Israel, he said, he's hassled because he has no Israeli passport, and therefore he wanted to renounce his Israeli citizenship. The clerk pointed out that he could easily stop the hassling by obtaining an Israeli passport, but he was adamant. He didn't want a passport. He was a supporter of Israel, he said, but he didn't want to be a citizen. Finally the clerk gave him the papers he needed and sent him to the appropriate window to present them.

If the old man had fought in Palestine before the establishment of the state in 1948, he would have spent 12 years in Israel after the state's independence plus whatever time he had spent before independence serving in the Palmach. That's enough time to learn Hebrew. That he was speaking English to a Hebrew-speaking clerk conveyed an implied message: I'm not one of you. The medium was indeed the message. His use of English strongly suggests that he did not identify himself as an Israeli and that he wanted official confirmation of that change.

His attitude was hard for us to fathom, for while we identify ourselves as Americans, we also think of ourselves as Israelis and cannot imagine renouncing either identity. But few identities, it seems, are impervious to change. Even that most basic identity, gender, can be altered. Although the transsexual who has changed from male to female still possesses XY chromosomes, she can convincingly present herself to the world as a woman and can think of herself as one. About half of all American adults have changed their religious affiliation at least once, although for Jews, the ethnic component of their identity probably remains the same. A prominent example was the late Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was born a Jew and always considered himself one.

Prompted by overhearing the Palmach veteran ask to renounce his citizenship, I realized that although some of my identities are not likely to change - male, husband, father, brother, American, Israeli, and Jewish - others have dropped out and still others added. I no longer think of myself as a student or as a teacher or as a researcher. On the other hand, identities such as army veteran, husband, father, and Israeli were adopted one by one as time went by. Our identities change with our circumstances.

They say our cells regenerate every seven to ten years, yet we remain the same person. In view of our changing identities, however, do we really remain the same? I thank whatever gods may be that I'm not the person I was at 31, my age at which we married (my wife says I'm a decided improvement over that young man). The intervening decades have seen changes in my attitudes, perceptions, and experience, and I no longer look at the world in the way I did when I was young. It's hard to rid myself of the illusion that there's an inner, unchanging personal core, but when I consider the changes that have taken place over the years, I'm not so sure.

My Life as a Road Warrior

"Go right around the left," I told my brother, whom I was teaching to drive. This was about 60 years ago, when we were still living in our childhood home in Newton. "What?" he said. I then explained what had seemed perfectly obvious that he was to go around the traffic circle that we were approaching and then take the left-hand fork. He managed to become an excellent driver in spite of me.

My own driving skills were nothing to brag about, for I was much too cautious, frustrating the line of drivers behind me, which I suppose was almost as dangerous as if I had been driving too fast. Since mothers are responsible for everything, it's tempting to blame mine. Even slower than I was, she taught me how to drive. "Now stay in the left-hand lane," she would tell me, during our stately progress down Beacon Street at 20 mph, "and don't pay any attention to the honking behind you." She wanted me to make a left turn about three miles away and wasn't taking any chances that we'd be in the wrong lane when the time came. Honesty compels me to admit, however, that even with the best instruction in the world, I would have turned out to be a timid driver.

My mother-in-law, in contrast, was a speed demon, tail-gating recklessly from my slow-poke point of view. Her driving frightened me so much that I learned never to look ahead but to gaze out the right-hand window instead. But in close to 50 years of driving, she never had an accident, so it's clear that I was frightened, as so often is the case, for nothing.

My slow driving once so exasperated my father-in-law, whom I was driving, along with my pregnant wife and first child, from Montauk to Manhattan, that he ordered me to stop the car and change places with him. He would drive. I loved him and treasure his memory, but his irritation shocked me so profoundly that I've never forgotten it. But no doubt it was well deserved.

The few times my generally calm wife has lost her temper with me were in Los Angeles, when she was driving and I was navigator. "Which way should I go, left or right?" she asked. I pointed to the road on the left, although it was dark and there was no way she could have seen my hand. "You speak English, don't you?" she cried out angrily. "Left," I said.

In spite of my slowness and the need to stop every 50 minutes or so to snooze at the side of the road, I've driven across the United States by myself twice, without incident. I must admit, though, that I once drove back and forth across the Mississippi several times before figuring out that the place I was looking for did not require me to cross at all. But in recent years, I've had fewer and fewer occasions to drive. We lived in downtown Jerusalem, within walking distance of most of the places I needed to go, and I preferred walking to driving. My skills, such as they were, became rusty and I began to lose my nerve. In one of my last forays on the road, I drove too close to a bus on my right, clipping my side-view mirror, which flew into the car, landing not too far from me. This so frightened me that I decided not to renew my license when it expired. So after more than 60 years as a driver, I finally hung up my keys. My wife, however, is a splendid driver and likes to drive. It's she who now rents our cars and it's she who drives them, while I do my best not to tell her to drive right around the left and not to point out in the dark which road she should take next.

It Ain't Necessarily So

During Monday's Mussar class, we discussed gratitude, the trait on which we had been working for the previous two weeks. The Mussar masters suggest the virtue of being alive to the possibility of good as an outcome of misfortune. Our text, Alan Morinis's Everyday Holiness, provides several examples of misfortune leading to good outcomes, one of which stems from his own experience. The failure of his high-flying business plunged him into a depression, which ultimately led him to a rabbi who was an adept at Mussar. As a consequence of the rabbi's teaching, Morinis became a prominent popularizer of Mussar in the United States, a move which has led to a flourishing and productive career.

He gives a far less convincing example. A Holocaust survivor emigrated to Uruguay, where he became a rich manufacturer. His factory produced what he had learned to make in a Nazi concentration camp: soap. To many of us, this example seemed obscene, testifying to the possibility of human resilience rather than to the possibility of finding good as an outcome of evil. Our instructor, calling this example "over the top," asked us if anyone could give another example from his or her own experience.

Only one participant offered an example. She had worked for an organization that, after many years, transferred her to another branch, which required commuting two hours in each direction. The disagreeable commute made her reevaluate her work, which had remained much the same but which she now realized was neither fulfilling nor enjoyable nor, in her view, socially useful. After reviewing with her husband their financial situation, she decided to take early retirement, which would permit her to pursue volunteer work and her own interests. Although she and her husband would have to give up some luxuries, she would be happier, and as a consequence, so would he. Had she been able to continue at her former location, where the commute was easy and her colleagues agreeable, she would probably have remained there for many more years, never seeing how little satisfaction her work was giving her.

Although I didn't volunteer a personal example, I too have found good as an outcome of misfortune. Structural problems in my bronchial system cause me to suffer from chronic bronchitis. Because of it, I've missed numerous performances for which we had secured tickets well in advance, to say nothing of canceled dinner parties and other missed social engagements. I've had bronchitis all over the world, including China, South Africa, India, Ethiopia, and California. Because I've been so often away from home when sick, I've had to consult unfamiliar doctors, each of whom gave me, in our initial meeting, a thorough physical examination. One of them prescribed a procedure that discovered a large malignant tumor in my colon. We were able to remove it before it spread. Another doctor, in the course of his examination, found an aneurysm, which could then be repaired. Both of these conditions were potentially fatal and might never have come to light had I not been sick away from home so often.

Yes, misfortunes can lead to good outcomes, but that's not inevitable. To regard the Holocaust as bringing any good whatsoever seems dangerously close to adopting a Panglossian view that all's for the best in this best of all possible worlds. It ain't necessarily so.

Kinship

Last Friday we had the pleasure of hosting for dinner a couple that my wife and grandson had met in Germany a few months ago. The four had attended a meeting of cousins, descendants of an ancestor whose existence has been documented in Germany during the seventeenth century. The cousin who came to dinner and my wife are related only remotely. You have to go back eight generations to find their most recent common ancestors, a son and daughter-in-law of that seventeenth-century forebear.

Our dinner guests are accomplished, interesting, and engaging, and I liked them immediately. I felt pleased to welcome them as members of our extended family. But how strange, I thought, to consider them kin, since the amount of genetic material my wife shares with the cousin who came to dinner is so small that the chances are good that any two people randomly drawn from the Ashkenazi Jewish population would be as closely related as they are. Perhaps I wouldn't be so willing to regard our guests as members of our extended family were they not such an attractive couple, but the notion of shared kinship gives their luster an added shine.

Why is the idea of shared ancestry so powerful? It holds together families, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, and those nations whose populations are homogeneous in origin. American educational systems try, with questionable success, to convey a sense of shared ancestry, or at least they did in my day, when I learned about my ancestors sitting down with Native Americans for the first thanksgiving, although Puritan ancestry was as mythical for most of my classmates as it was for me.

I identify myself as Jewish, even though I'm not religiously observant and attend synagogue services only when compelled by a social obligation, as when a 13-year old boy, the son or grandson of friends or relatives, is called to the Torah. Despite my secular orientation, I feel part of a lineage that began in the distant past and extends, with my children and grandchildren, into the future. Some regard that lineage as mythical too, although genetic testing has found that more than 90% of today's Cohanim, members of the Jewish priestly caste, both Sephardim and Ashkenazim, share six markers in their Y chromosome, which of course is inherited from their fathers, going all the way back to their founding ancestor, presumably the Biblical Aaron, who lived more than 100 generations ago. This demonstrates that the ancestors of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews once lived in Biblical Palestine. I'm not a Cohen, but if a shared descent can be demonstrated for these Jews, it's entirely possible with me. But even if my remote ancestors never spoke Hebrew in Palestine, never went up to Jerusalem bringing temple sacrifices, it doesn't matter. I feel part of an ancient tradition and a kinship with all Jews everywhere.

Still, I wish it weren't so. I'd prefer to regard all humans as related to me, as of course, if you go back far enough, they are. Any man's death diminishes me, wrote Donne, who perhaps expressed the notion best, because I am involved in mankind: and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

In a world of infinite desire and finite resources, a world in which scarcity leads to conflict, group solidarity provides a defense against the aggression of others. Group solidarity makes us exquisitely sensitive to accent because it's such a good indicator of group membership, marking a speaker either as a member of our group or not. Whether or not suspicion of the outsider is inborn, it probably takes a saint to overcome it. This sinner can only try his best to do so, even if he's not likely to succeed. Even though I'm prepared to regard my wife's remote cousin as part of my extended family, I'm still not able to regard all humans as my kin. Still, it's worth a try. I can start by being more civil in arguments with those who hold different political views from mine during this overheated, poisonous political campaign. They are no less patriotic than I am and no less worthy of respect, even if they're not related to me or my wife within the past eight generations.

Offshoots

When I told a friend about the ancient elm tree in Prospect Park that a recent tornado had damaged, she sent me the following story. The so-called "Mother's Day Blizzard," of May 1977, destroyed or injured many trees in Greater Boston, because the trees had leafed out, and the snow was wet and heavy. Among the casualties was a maple tree in my friend's back yard. She decided not to cut down the vertical half of the tree that remained standing, since it was posing no danger, but to let it alone. "Within a year," she wrote, "a little sucker at its base was ten feet high, and as it continued to grow, it wrapped itself around its mother, like a living crutch. The mother put out a limb on her broken side, and together they looked as if they were doing a stately tree-dance. Now mother is old and increasingly arthritic, but her daughter's embrace is poignant and lovely."

I'd like to think that this story serves as a metaphor for our own passage through life. Each of us creates offshoots - children and grandchildren, of course, but these are not the only ones. Our behavior influences our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues, our students, indeed all those with whom we interact, even if the encounters are brief, perhaps never to be repeated.

"If I look angry and scowl," said the young man who was displaying a T-shirt on the corner of a busy street, about whom I wrote in a recent post, "no one will approach me. But if I smile and look pleasant, passersby might stop and talk to me." Has a stranger ever told you that he or she liked your hat or your jacket or some other item of your apparel? Didn't it brighten your day? And hasn't an interaction with a sour, uncooperative functionary sent a cloud across your sun? I remember watching two children frolicking on an Aegean beach. As we were leaving the scene, my wife whispered to their children's mother, without waiting for a response, "your children are lovely." I'll bet their mother remembers the tribute, but even if she doesn't, it will have made an impression on her, if added to others. Our influences on others may be profound or trivial, long-lasting or momentary, but even tiny influences can create a cumulative effect, like that of the proverbial bird that sharpens its beak on a mountaintop once every thousand years, until the mountain is worn away.

Many were the students who repeated to me something I had said years before, a remark that made an impression on them. "Do you remember when you said such and such?" they would say, and half the time I'd have no memory of ever having said it. I stopped attending religious services immediately after a member of our congregation, during a discussion of the week's portion, asserted that we should omit anything from our prayers that we don't believe. He was referring to the phrase chayot hakodesh or holy creatures, whose meaning is unclear, but his remark made me realize that I didn't believe any of the prayers I was saying. When the King of Norway invited our friend to a reception at the royal palace, His Majesty could not have known that the sequence of events that flowed from his invitation, about which I wrote in a recent post, would result in a happy marriage that lasted for close to sixty years. Small actions can have large effects.

Because "no man is an island, entire of itself," each of us influences the others with whom we come in contact. We many not know the outcome of our actions, but that they exist is as certain as the offshoot from my friend's maple tree.

The King of Norway

Our friend, a distinguished concert pianist, tells the story of how he met his wife. It was shortly after the end of the Second World War, when he was about 25 and at the beginning of his concert career. He had been invited to perform at a concert, under the patronage of the King of Norway, for the benefit of Norwegian victims of the Nazis. The king planned to attend the concert. But one week before the concert was to take place, the king's older brother, the King of Denmark, died, casting the Norwegian court into mourning. The concert would take place, but the king could not attend it. However, in order to make up for his not attending the concert, he invited our friend to a private reception at the palace the next day.

Our friend, who had booked his return passage on a Norwegian vessel due to leave Oslo straight after the concert, canceled his reservation. He didn't want to miss the palace reception nor the opportunity of meeting the king. Not yet experienced in dealing with royalty, however, he consulted the American embassy for advice. "Do not shake the king's hand," he was told, "and remain standing in his presence." When our friend was ushered into the room where the king, a very tall man, was standing, the king greeted him enthusiastically by name, extended his hand for a handshake, and pushed him into an upholstered chair, which made our friend laugh. "Why are you laughing?" asked the king, so our friend told him about the advice he had received, which made the king laugh in return.

Our friend wanted to return to New York as soon as possible. so he arranged passage on a Swedish vessel leaving Gothenberg the next day. The embassy kindly flew him, in a very small plane, to Gothenberg, where he embarked on his journey home. On that ship, he met the woman, still a girl really, who became his bride a few years later. Had the King of Denmark not died a week before the concert and had the King of Norway not have been gracious enough to invite our friend to the palace, a productive, happy partnership that lasted for 59 years and produced two children and three grandchildren would never have taken place. Our friend is now in his ninetieth year and he met the king about 65 years ago, yet he still tells that story from time to time, and I never tire of hearing it.

Stop Bitching

Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution, printed in white letters on a black T-shirt, grabbed my attention last Thursday afternoon, as I reached the corner of Seventh Avenue and Garfield Place in Park Slope. As I came closer, I read, in smaller letters under the slogan, www.zendik.org.

A tall young man was standing on the corner, holding up the T-shirt. I remembered the sidewalk vendor that a friend of mine and I had talked to this summer, a riveting encounter which came about only because my friend had initiated the interaction. "You need air conditioning out here," he had called out, on that excessively hot, humid day. Emboldened by that memory, I spoke to the young man on the corner, asking him how I could start a revolution. "That's a good question," he replied, which suggested that he had no ready answer, but he then proceeded to tell me what revolution he had in mind.

His revolution would be two-fold. First, it would change our relationship with our physical environment, so that we protect and conserve it, rather than despoil and degrade it. Second, it would change our social relationships, so that they become based on honesty and cooperation rather than on dissimulation and competition. The young man belongs to a community which works to promote these goals through outreach and through the example it sets.

His community consists of thirty or so artists and their seven children (he is the father of one of them), who live communally on a farm in West Virginia, where they grow organic vegetables and raise their own livestock and poultry. They are, as a consequence, "almost self-sufficient" with respect to their food, but they have no surplus for sale on the open market. The community's organic farming sets an example of protecting the environment. Humanity's intelligence and essential oneness with nature, the young man told me, both enables and requires us to be creative in husbanding the earth's resources, a notion that his community calls "creavolution." That term, he showed me, was tattooed in large letters on his left arm.

As for the more difficult task of changing the basis of human interaction, his community uses no money among themselves, and they reveal to one another their emotional and sexual concerns. This leads to some "hairy" conversations, the young man told me. It sounded like group therapy, but I held my honesty in check and didn't say so. Perhaps it is in fact therapeutic.

He towered over me, making me painfully conscious that, after gradually losing three inches on my journey from youth to old age, I'd shrunk to below-average height. He was blonde, with regular features and a thoroughly wholesome appearance, despite his long hair, tied back in a pony tail, and his thin beard, longer at the sides than in the middle, which created the effect of a pair of inverted diabolical horns.

I asked him if his community is associated with an organized religion. It's not, he told me. "My mother is a devout Catholic, and I love her to pieces, but on her wall is a plaque that reads, 'stay where you're planted.' As I was growing up this was for me a message of despair. Would I never leave this place, this way of life?" He seems genuinely glad to have left that place, that life, and to have become a member of his farming community. When I asked him when it was founded, he told me that "a Beat poet" established it 41 years ago. This surprised me because most Utopian communities are short-lived.

His youthful idealism was touching but also sad. His goal of protecting the environment is as admirable as it is urgent, but it is unlikely to be realized until we become dangerously closer to world-wide catastrophe. As for transforming the basis of human interaction from competition to cooperation, the goal of applying it on a large scale seemed to me to be hopeless. Perhaps it can be attained in small-scale, ideologically committed societies, like his commune, in which everyone is in face-to-face interaction, or in cases where it is necessary for physical survival, as among the Bushmen in the Kalahari desert. Exceptions are temporary, called forth by extraordinary events. Dorothy Day, the Catholic social activist, remembered the San Francisco earthquake, when people rushed out of their homes to help strangers in distress. Why, she asked, can't we live like that all the time?

Still, most revolutions begin with a small group of people, and it's a truism that to transform the world you must first transform yourself. The young man and his community were doing more than their share to repair the world. I would have liked to continue our conversation, but I was afraid that the raw fish I was carrying home in my shopping cart would spoil if I didn't put it into our refrigerator soon, so I thanked him, wished him the best of luck, and continued on my way.

Regret

Our downstairs neighbor died last week. A victim of lymphoma, he left behind his wife and 19-year-old son. He was a trim man of medium height, who showed to the world an open, pleasant face and a ready smile. About the only comforting thing to be said about his death is that he died at home without pain. He was, I think, in his early fifties.

He worked in the field of art, but whether he was a dealer, appraiser, curator, artist, or administrator, we've yet to find out. You can see by this uncertainty that we knew him only slightly, the way one knows most neighbors. When you encounter them in your building, you smile and greet them but rarely exchange more than pleasantries.

Once we did do more than that, though. We asked him and his wife for permission to view their remodeled kitchen, hoping to gather ideas for our own renovation. They showed it to us most graciously, explaining some of the finer points of design that we might have overlooked. Otherwise, we saw them only occasionally - in the lobby or elevator, at the annual meetings of our shareholders' association, and once at a party, given by another neighbor, at which they were present.

When I last saw him, as we passed one another in the lobby, he seemed uncharacteristically solemn. I chalked it up to his not working - at the party at which we were both present, I had heard him say that he was "unemployed," and I assumed he had lost his job. But now I understand that his lymphoma, and perhaps the regime of treatments for it, had forced him to stop working.

About two weeks ago, his wife rang our doorbell, asking me if she had lent us a walker - one of those four-legged wheeled contraptions that help people, insecure on their feet, propel themselves along. Last year, after my wife's hip replacement operation, we had borrowed some medical equipment from another neighbor, which included some of the devices he had borrowed from her, but a walker was not among the borrowed items. My wife, however, had obtained one from the hospital, so I gave that one to our downstairs neighbor. Because she was using a cane, I assumed the walker was for her. I should have known better, however, because as she was leaving she told me that at the moment a physiotherapist was with her husband.

Two days later, when I met her in the elevator, I asked her how her husband was. She told me that he was in home hospice care but that he was comfortable. Only then did I understand that the walker was for him and that he was desperately ill. A few days later a neighbor called to tell us that he had died. My wife and I went down right away to give his widow a honey cake that my wife had baked and frozen. On our way we met their son - a strapping young man who had spent the spring semester in China. His mother was sleeping, he said, exhausted after being up all night, administering hourly painkillers to his father. His mother's friend was at home, though, and she could receive us.

Her friend, who had come down from Buffalo, told us that earlier in the day they had gone to a crematorium, where our neighbor's body had been reduced to ashes. They would bury them in a ceremony to which they would invite only a few people, but later they would hold a memorial service. When they had arranged a time and place for the larger gathering, they would surely let us know. They would eat the honey cake for breakfast.

I was surprised by how sad I felt when I heard of our neighbor's death. He was relatively young, in the prime of life really. It would have been so much fairer if the Angel of Death had taken me instead. But of course, fairness has nothing to do with it. Naturally I felt bad for his widow and son, but I particularly identified with the latter, who is the same age I was when I lost my young mother, and I remember the severe grief that followed. But there was also a selfish cause for regretting our neighbor's death. He and his wife were such an attractive couple that I had long wanted to know them better. Perhaps, we thought, we could invite them over for drinks. Like so many things, however, we put it off, and now, of course, it's too late.

Gratitude

Grandpa, whose principal concerns were his good name and the health of his business, was both shrewd and wise. When he was an old man and I was a boy, he would often ask me why he couldn't compare himself to people who were poorer rather than to those who were richer.

Of course, I never tried to answer his question, and I don't think I could answer it now. Whatever the reason, his ambition led him, throughout his life, to a series of expansions and acquisitions, each of which made him anxious. I remember passing his desk calendar when he was negotiating the largest acquisition he had made up to that point. He had written on that day's date, "This too shall pass."

I thought of him last Monday night, during the second meeting of my Mussar class. Mussar is a Jewish tradition of spiritual refinement, whose earliest text was written about one thousand years ago. The practitioner focuses week by week on a different trait, such as humility, silence, or generosity, and during the week tries to act in such a way as to find balance in that trait. When, for example, the trait of humility is in balance, we take up no more than the space that is appropriate for us but no less than that either. The practice includes reading relevant texts, daily recitation of a mantra concerning the trait, self-examination through keeping a daily journal, group discussion, and discussion with a partner.

The other night we were asked to consider, before our next class meeting, the trait of gratitude, and the suggested mantra is "be awake to the good and give thanks." The Mussar tradition asks us to be grateful for what's positive in our lives and to recognize the possibility that the painful things we suffer might eventually lead to good. We take for granted many good things, such as electric light, indoor plumbing, and central heating, and to tell the truth, before encountering Mussar, I had never thought to be grateful for them. They would, however, have delighted Grandpa when he was a boy, since he grew up in a hovel without any of them. I once asked him where he went to the bathroom when he was very young. "In our backyard," he said, "which of course was someone else's front yard."

I thought about Grandpa because of his frequent question: why did he compare himself to those richer rather than to those poorer, a comparison that led, of course, to dissatisfaction. In a world of infinite desire and finite resources, concentration on what we don't possess or on what we haven't accomplished leads to perpetual dissatisfaction, since there will always be more goods than we can acquire and more work to be accomplished. But was it not my grandfather's dissatisfaction that impelled him to continually strive?

I wonder if he was thankful for what he had been able to achieve. His rhetorical question suggests that he was not. His ambition, never to be slaked, could not have been without cost to him, his wife, or his children. What then does it mean to be balanced with respect to gratitude? Surely there can be too little, but can there be too much? Can we awaken to the good in our lives and give thanks for it, yet continue to strive?

Miss Marsh

The year begins in autumn, as far as I'm concerned, with the opening of school, a feeling that has persisted long after I ceased being either a student or a teacher. I could never see the point of beginning the year in January, when you're in the midst of your normal activities and the world is frozen. March or April would be a more reasonable time, at least in the northern hemisphere, since that's when the earth begins to bloom, but by then the school year is more than half over. I guess my year is only ten months long, from September to June.

My formal education began in the first grade, without benefit of first having attended nursery school or kindergarten. At the age of five, I was too young perhaps to notice the season, but I did notice the heavy rain that mesmerized me as I looked at it through my classroom's three long windows. What I remember most vividly from that first year is my teacher, Miss Marsh. She was stern, unsmiling, and tall, although of course when I was five years old most grownups seemed tall to me.

The first lesson she taught me was the importance of listening to instructions. At the end of one school day, when I failed to get up from my desk and retrieve my coat, as all the other pupils were doing, she slapped me. I truly hadn't heard her, dreamy boy that I was, wrapped in my own world. It probably wasn't a hard slap, more like a tap, but it shocked me as much as if she had punched me in the nose. If I had gone to kindergarten first, I would have learned to listen to what the teacher was saying. Miss Marsh never again had to slap me, but even now I wonder what heights I might have ascended had I only gone to kindergarten.

At the end of the first term, Miss Marsh gave each of us a report card. I didn't know what it was other than something important to give to my mother. As I left the school grounds, some big girls asked me to show it to them. When I did so, they gasped. So did my mother when she read it. As a result, she kept me out of school for two weeks and taught me to read, a procedure she subsequently followed with my brother and sister when they began their schooling. After I returned to Miss Marsh, she moved me into the highest reading group, a vindication of my mother's efforts and my first and perhaps greatest academic triumph.

The building in which Miss Marsh reigned no longer stands. A few years ago, we met a teacher from that school. She told us that she took her class to the demolition site as an exercise in archeological discovery. Among the treasures that the children uncovered was linoleum, whose purpose she had to explain.

Dear Miss Marsh, I suppose you've gone the way of the linoleum, but I wish I could see you one more time. I'd thank you for having taught me the importance of listening to instructions and for having been honest in your assignment of grades, and I'd have a chance to see if you really were so stern, unsmiling, and tall.

Sports

In a recent post, Laura Belgray wrote about her recent attendance at a Giants' game (http://talkingshrimp.com/2010/09/28/most-valuable-popcorn-eater/). Not understanding much about sports in general or football in particular, she amused herself by looking at other spectators, especially the large man seated in front of her. He ate popcorn during the singing of the National Anthem and continued to stuff himself with a succession of finger foods, including peanuts and Cheetos, littering the space by his feet with empty cartons and wrappers, until the end of the game, when he headed for the exit. She was fascinated by his utter lack of self-consciousness, since she kept wondering what others would think of her in the unlikely event she made a similar spectacle of herself.

Like Laura Belgray, indeed like most people, I care what people think of me, perhaps overly so, and I also mentally criticize strangers I see in public spaces, until I remind myself that I can't know what stresses they face and that I myself, appearances to the contrary, am scarcely perfect. And like Laura Belgray I understand little about sports and care about it less, except that I'm happy when the Red Sox win and the Yankees lose, a vestige of my youth growing up near Boston. But it wouldn't occur to me to watch a Red Sox game on television or listen to one on the radio, let alone buy a ticket for a game.

There, I've said it in public. If there are other guys who are as bored as I am by watching the exquisitely slow pace of a succession of grown men hitting a little ball with a stick or by watching large men give each other concussions, as someone once defined that sport, they keep it to themselves. If you're a man, you're supposed to like that stuff. But one of the advantages of old age is that you feel freer to do and say what you want. So I'll say it again: I'm uninterested in sports.

Maybe it's a defensive reaction to my own ineptness as a ballplayer when I was in school. Always the last to be chosen for a baseball team, I'd be relegated to left field, where I'd pray that the ball wouldn't come to me. Even if the ball popped into my hand, I'd be unable to throw it all the way back. But my ineptitude may have been the result rather than the cause of my lack of interest. When my father took me out to the back yard on Sundays, I went with him reluctantly. In the forlorn hope of arousing my interest, he would take me to games at Fenway Park and Braves Field, where I'd be quickly bored. I'd ask him questions that revealed my ignorance of the game, questions that embarrassed him because those in nearby seats could hear me.

Why are adults, particularly men, so engaged by children's games? I suppose there are many reasons, among them an appreciation for the beauty, grace, and economy of movement that many players display. Perhaps some spectators derive vicarious pleasure from observing superb athletes at work, imagining themselves in their place. Maybe rituals that are repeated from year to year, which men watched with their fathers and now watch with their sons, provide a sense of timelessness. And still others may enjoy the camaraderie of fellow enthusiasts, although that begs the question of why there are enthusiasts in the first place.

My lack of interest is not a highbrow/lowbrow matter. John Updike wrote a lyrical essay about Ted Williams's last game; Marianne Moore compared baseball to writing; and Roger Angell continues to contribute elegant baseball essays to The New Yorker. No, whatever combination of genes is responsible, they must be recessive in me. But, as the character played by Joe E. Brown says, at the end of Some Like It Hot, "nobody's perfect."

A Brief Ceremony

"Are you Jewish?" The speaker was a yeshiva student, who approached me last week as I was about to cross the street, on my way home from my morning walk. Barely old enough to shave, this fresh-faced kid was dressed in the black suit, white shirt, and black hat of his sect, the Lubavich Hasidim. He stood smiling at me tentatively. Next to him was another, similarly attired young student. It was the first day of Sukkot, a seven-day harvest festival when, according to Leviticus 23:40, we are commanded to take an etrog, a date palm frond, myrtle, and willow and to be joyous in the presence of your God for seven days.

When I told the boy that indeed I was Jewish, he asked me if I had yet fulfilled the commandment. "No," I said. He then handed me a tightly closed palm frond flanked by branches of willow and myrtle and asked me to recite, after him, the appropriate prayer in Hebrew, which I did. Then his friend handed me an etrog, a fragrant citrus that looks like a large lemon, and, after I recited another prayer in Hebrew, instructed me to hold it with the palm, myrtle, and willow and move them about in the fashion that he mimed for me. Again, I complied, and then wished them a happy holiday.

Pairs of these boys patrol our neighborhood at every High Holiday season. Earlier, at Rosh Hashana, when our son was here on a rare visit, they approached us in the park and asked us if we had heard the shofar, a primitive musical instrument made of a ram's horn, that is blown as part of the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services. After we recited the appropriate blessing in Hebrew, we listened to a young man struggle to coax the appropriate blasts from his horn.

I used to resent these proselytizing attempts to bring me back to traditional observance, especially when carried out by representatives of such a religiously far-right group, and I would either pass them by in stone-faced silence or, after telling them that I'm Jewish, I'd inform them that I was unwilling to perform whatever obligation they were promoting.

Whether or not it's a function of aging - these days I'm more patient about most things - I now accept these boys' offers with good grace. It pleases them when I do so, because from their point of view they're performing a good deed. As for me, I figure that I'm increasing the sum of happiness in the world, without harming anyone (unless it's harmful to encourage them, as some might claim) and with hardly any effort on my part beyond suspending disbelief during my cooperation in a brief ceremony.