Delores

 “I was born in a land that God forgot,” said Delores, one of our traveling companions.  She was referring to the South American country in which she was born.  Her mother had been forced to drop out of school after the sixth grade in order to help support the family after Delores’s grandfather died.  Delores, who grew up in a house with a dirt floor, read stories in the Spanish-language editions of the Reader’s Digest about American families who lived in big houses and owned two cars, stories which motivated her to come to the United States.

At her English teacher’s suggestion, she corresponded with an American pen pal, who eventually invited her to visit her.  But Delores needed 45,000 pesos, a fortune to her, in order to obtain a visa.  Determined to earn the money, she did so by learning to type and working as a typist.  She had to wait until she was 21 before traveling to America.  She would have needed her father’s consent to leave at a younger age and he would have refused to give it.  

She stayed a short while with her pen pal, who had offered to help her, and then landed a job, all the while going to night school, first to obtain a high school equivalency certificate and then to continue her study of English.  She went to college at night while working as a typist at the school system of a large California town.  Slowly she worked her way up the ladder and eventually became the office manager for six elementary schools, the second in command when any principal was away.  She married and, while working, raised two children.  She loved her work but retired early to care for her mother, whom she had brought from Colombia.  "I'm grateful for every day," she told us.  "America is my country now."

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

How Donna Got Her Dog

“Please, God, don’t ask me to become a Catholic nun.”  This was Donna, one of our traveling companions, who was telling us about losing her daughter’s dog.   Both her adult children were out of town on assignments and both had asked her to care for their dogs in the meantime, her son’s black Labrador mix and her daughter’s two Chihuahuas.  Her home was outside the town in which both her children lived when they weren’t working somewhere else. 

After a day or two, the big black dog appeared to be sick.  So Donna loaded him into her truck along with the two Chihuahuas in order to take him to the vet in town   She was just about to start the motor when she wondered if she had turned off the water to the washing machine, which had been giving her trouble.  She left the truck, went into her house, checked the water (she had turned it off), and returned to the truck.  She brought the big black dog to the vet, who gave her some medicine, and then returned with the dog to the truck. 

It was a hot day, so she had left the truck’s windows open so as not to suffocate the Chihuahuas.  But to her horror, when she returned to the truck, she saw that there was only one Chihuahua inside.  Someone must have opened the door and stolen the dog.  Deciding to stay at her son’s home in town, which was near the vet's clinic, she rose early every morning to look for the dog, figuring that who ever stole it would walk it early so as to avoid detection.  She asked everyone in the vicinity about the missing dog, but no one had seen it.  Every day, she checked the animal shelter in hopes that the dog had turned up there. 

She called her daughter to tell her the bad news.  “I’m 35,” her daughter told her, “and I have no children.  Those dogs are my children.”  Donna felt stabbed through the heart.  “Please, God, help me find the dog.  If I find her, I’ll do anything you ask of me.”  Donna wasn’t even sure that God exists, but there are no atheists in foxholes and she was in one now.

After four days of fruitless searching, she had to return home in order to attend the wedding of a good friend’s daughter.  When she turned her house key in the lock, she heard barking.  It was her daughter’s dog.  Four days before, when Donna had returned to the house to check the water, the dog must have followed her into the house and then remained there.  Fortunately, there was plenty of water in her bowl but the dog, of course, was ravenous.  Donna bought more food, the dog ate until it was full, and Donna relaxed.

It was then that she asked God not to require her to enter a convent.  But what did God want her to do?  She figured she would know.  And then she remembered a small dog at the animal shelter.  Unlike the other dogs who would run up to any visitor, wagging their tails, this dog hung back.  If no one claimed her, she would be put down.  Then Donna knew what she had to do.  And, having seen her pitying looks at the feral dogs that haunt the tourist sites, hoping for handouts, it was clear to us what that would be.  She went to the shelter and adopted the dog, which, it turned out, was sick.  After it had been treated, it became as loving and outgoing as one could want.  “And that,” Donna told us, “is how I got my dog.”  

Of Geese and Kings

The Egyptian Museum, officially the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, lies at the northern end of Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  During the chaotic few days after Mubarak’s resignation, it was looted, but according to our guide, the thieves took relatively unimportant pieces.  They must have been in a hurry, because despite its poor lighting and even poorer labeling, it is one of the great museums of the world, containing 136,000 Pharaonic exhibits.  As large as it is, however, it does not have sufficient space to exhibit the remaining  40,000 items now crated in its basement.

We were thankful for our knowledgeable guide, who helped us navigate the bewildering mass of exhibits and who pointed out to us some of the most important pieces.  These included a 4,500-year-old painting of three pairs of geese, their colors as fresh as if they had been recently painted.  Our guide told us that grinding stones, such as lapis lazuli, and then mixing the powder with egg white and honey produced the paint.  As I recall, four of the geese are eating or drinking something, two on the right and two on the left, with a third goose standing behind each of these pairs, waiting, perhaps, for its turn.  The scene, in its naturalness, simplicity, and symmetry, is exceptionally charming.

We saw, of course, the magnificent burial treasure of the boy king Tutankhamun, with its staggering use of gold, enamel, and precious stones.  Presumably the burial treasures of more important, longer-lived kings must have been even more stupendous.  The most celebrated of these pharaohs was Ramesses II, who reigned from 1279 to 1213 BCE, longer than any other pharaoh, who, in the 30^th year of his 66-year-long reign, was deified.  He built cities, temples and monuments to himself all over Egypt, including the four colossal seated statues of himself that we saw at the temple of Abu Simbel, and when he died at the age of about 90, he left a rich, prosperous, and powerful kingdom.  His burial treasures must have been prodigious.  

I looked at his body in the museum’s mummy room.  No golden burial mask hides his thin, hook-nosed face or his wispy gray hair.  And of course I thought of Shelley’s sonnet, “Ozymandias” (the Greek name for Ramesses II): “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”  This great warrior king, absolute ruler of a great empire, lies as dead as any dog in the road, subjected to the stares of strangers, who have paid an additional fee for the privilege, as though he were an exhibit in a freak show.  Yes, his monuments still stand and yes, he will be remembered as long as Egyptian history is read, but the kingdom that he worked so hard to extend and preserve fell 150 years later, and he remains as dead as his most degraded subject, as dead as the painter of the six geese. 

That simple painting has lasted as long as the awe-inspiring stone monuments Ramesses II built to aggrandize himself and it has probably given more pleasure as well.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Giza

“Avoid eye contact,” our guide advised us, “if you don’t want to buy anything.” He was referring to vendors on the Giza Plateau, site of two of the world's most famous ancient monuments, the Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Giza.  These were within walking distance of our hotel – indeed, we could see the Great Pyramid through our hotel window -  but we traveled there by bus. This made it easier for our guide to keep all twelve of us together and it was probably quicker too.  Besides, we would suffer less exposure to the city's smog-fouled air.

Giza, the third largest city in Egypt, sits on the west bank of the Nile, across from its larger and older twin, Cairo. I had imagined that the monuments we were going to see lie far into the desert, and I suppose that this was once the case, but in fact urban sprawl has surrounded them.  A Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet stands about 300 yards from the Great Sphinx.  When we stepped down from the bus, vendors  immediately assaulted us, offering to sell us postcards, glossy guides to the site, and various inexpensive souvenirs such as necklaces, scarabs, and miniature pyramids.

The vendors were extremely aggressive, waving their merchandise in your face, some going so far as to press against you, trying to put into your hand a “gift.”  I never looked at the so-called gifts, so I don’t know what they were, only that I didn’t want them.  Some vendors were so insistent that I had to turn around and walk in the other direction.  Finally, I realized that avoiding eye contact was insufficiently discouraging.  In addition, I shook my head, which in most cases warned them off.  Perhaps their aggressiveness was a sign of desperation.  Tourism had fallen off drastically and the crowds of tourists normally found at the site had disappeared.  On the other hand, a greater supply of tourists might have called forth more vendors.

The Great Pyramid, built by the fourth dynasty pharaoh Khufu or Cheops (2589-2566 BCE), was the tallest building in the world before the construction of the Eiffel Tower.  It’s composed of 2.3 million blocks, whose average weight is 2.5 tons.  Its size is astonishing, considering the primitive tools – bronze, not iron - that fashioned it.   Its age was brought home to me when my wife told me that the amount of time separating us from Herodotus, who visited the site, was about the same as the amount of time separating him from the pyramid’s construction.  It’s been a tourist site for thousands of years, and no doubt there were vendors and touts to pester Herodotus. 

When you look at the pyramid, you see a massive triangle, soaring up to its apex from its base.  Our guide told us that the pyramid’s four bases were almost identical in length.  This information required some mental rearrangements, since I had thought that the base of a pyramid was a triangle rather than a square.  This would, of course, be impossible, but the idea had been lodged in my brain ever since I saw a photo of a pyramid, which goes to show that my consistently low high school scores on tests of spatial relations were entirely justified.  I had to discard another long-held notion, namely, that slaves, subjected to the lash, built the pyramids.  Our guide told us that a workers’ village, recently excavated near the site of the Great Pyramid, included a bakery, a brewery, and a clinic.  A permanent corps of about 10,000 workers was supplemented by, if I recall correctly, by about another 70,000.

My wife, intrepid as usual, climbed several of the pyramid’s courses, and she might have continued climbing to the top, a dangerous enterprise, were it still permitted.  She had to satisfy herself by looking down at me from a lower height, while I stood as squarely as I could on terra firma.  In fact, even the terra didn’t seem so firma to me, so I declined the opportunity to join her on an upper level.  It was the first of many times during our tour that I felt old.  Indeed, I was the oldest person in our group. 

That night, we attended a Sound and Light Show directly in front of the Great Sphinx, with the Great Pyramid and two lesser pyramids behind it.  Our guide warned us to dress warmly, for the desert air, even in summer, can be cold at night.  I wore as many layers as I could, including silk long underwear, but I shivered throughout the 45-minute performance.  To allow workers to get to the polls, which closed at 7:00 pm, the show began a half hour late, so we sat in the cold even longer than necessary.  The show was unimaginably hokey and entirely too long.  I tried to sleep, but I was too cold.  As one of our fellow travelers commented, the show presented the history of Egypt and made us feel as if we had lived through all of it.  But hey, we sat shivering while the polls were still open, during the country's first fair and free election.   Even the Great Sphinx had seen nothing like that.


2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Horus

At nine in the morning, our group, twelve travelers plus our superb guide, left the barge that had carried us upriver from Luxor.  We were now going to visit the huge Temple of Horus, the falcon-headed god of the sky, war, and protection.  Until the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, visitors traveled from the riverbank to the temple by bus.  But in the five or six days following Mubarak’s resignation, when the police presence collapsed, the horse and buggy drivers stoned the tourist buses, hoping to gain the business for themselves.  The police have returned, but the travel agencies, taking no chances, have abandoned the buses in favor of the dilapidated buggies, although the latter are slower, less comfortable, and more expensive, and although the drivers’ whipping of their horses often upsets the tourists.

The stoning of tourist buses was not the only violence during the period before the Military Council took firm control.  Our guide told us that he joined a neighborhood watch, armed with a knife – his neighbors were armed with weapons ranging from clubs to revolvers -  in order to protect their homes from roving, looting gangs.  By the time we visited, the police were back on the streets and the demonstrations had died down – save for the street fighting near Tahrir Square during last two days of our stay, of which we were unaware.

The only demonstration we saw was at five in the afternoon, a few days before our visit to Edfu, after we left the new Library of Alexandria.  The library had closed for the day and its workers were now demonstrating for the removal of the library’s director.  He had been an appointment of the old regime – the library was a pet project of Mrs. Mubarak – and the workers wanted him to leave.  Hosni Mubarak was in a prison hospital and his sons were in jail, along with 60% of his cabinet.  Now the library’s workers wanted their director’s head.  The workers’ demonstrations continued after the end of each work day, of which this was the 32^nd or 33^rd, if I remember correctly.  Such demonstrations would have been inconceivable, of course, under the old regime.

During our ten-minute buggy rides to the Temple of Horus and back, we saw many men sitting around smoking, chatting, and drinking coffee, seemingly unemployed.  Perhaps more of them would have been working had tourism not dropped through the floor.  Our flight to Cairo was only about 40% full, with most of the passengers returning Egyptians.  The hotels were reporting only 30% occupancy.  The most recent violence is likely to poison tourism even further during the high season of Christmas week.  But it’s an ill wind, as they say, and our group had neither to stand in line to visit the antiquities nor to jostle others at the museums. 

Our guide advised us to identify ourselves as Canadians, if anyone asked, since America had temporized at the beginning of the revolution, not showing unqualified support for it until it was clear Mubarak was finished.  Animosity to America, at least among the politically aware, was strong.  In Cairo, we passed both the Saudi and Israeli embassies, both heavily guarded by police, the first because Saudi Arabia had never embraced the revolution – the rumor was that the kingdom had offered to pay half of the Egyptian debt if Egypt would allow Mubarak to take refuge there – the second for obvious reasons. 

After our visit to the Horus Temple and as we were descending from our horse-drawn carriage, a photographer showed us the photograph he had taken of us in the buggy.  The picture flattered neither my wife nor myself, and if the horse had been shown, it probably would not have flattered it either.  We were only mildly interested in owning the photo, but we asked him what it would cost.  I forget the price he mentioned, but it was laughably high.  We told him politely that we weren’t interested.  As we walked down the steps to our barge, he kept dropping his price until he offered to sell it to us for one Egyptian pound, or about sixteen cents. We accepted his offer, he removed the photo from its elaborate cardboard frame, and he grudgingly gave us the print.  Sixteen cents was better than nothing, which is what it would have been worth had we not taken it. 

Shortly before this transaction, a child, perhaps ten years old and dressed in rags, asked for alms, repeatedly gesturing with her thumb and first two fingers towards her mouth.  She would have been pleased by a gift of a pound, but I felt it was wrong to encourage the caretakers (her parents?) who had sent her to beg.  Even so, what were their options?  I should have given her something and I felt bad that I hadn’t.  Horus, god of war, sky, and protection, was nowhere to be seen.


2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Tahrir Square and Prospect Heights

Yesterday’s Times reported the Egyptian army’s escalation of its crackdown on street protestors. Military police clubbed unarmed civilians, ripped the clothing from women as they beat them, threw stones and blocks of concrete from rooftops on protestors below, and burned a small tent encampment on Tahrir Square, leaving ten dead and hundreds wounded. The prime minister on Saturday morning denied the use of military force and, in an ominous return to the days of military dictatorship, blamed third parties for the violence.

None of this was apparent to us either on Friday, when we flew from Abu Simbel, close to the Sudanese border, to Cairo, or on Saturday, when we boarded a plane for New York.  Indeed, our visit to Egypt was remarkably peaceful.  Tahrir Square boasted only a few demonstrators when we visited the nearby National Museum, with its spectacular (if poorly displayed) collection of antiquities. We saw, near the museum, the shell of the building that housed Mubarak’s political party, torched in the February demonstrations that had toppled him from power.  There were no demonstrations when we passed by.  The elections seemed to have sucked the wind from the protests.

It was an exciting time to be in Egypt, when the second round of the country’s first free and fair elections were being held.  In Aswan, we saw the stadium in which the province’s votes were being counted, and the cars of the representatives from the various political parties who had come to oversee the counting.  It was the first election, our guide told us, in which he’d ever voted.  In the past there was no point in doing so since the outcome was preordained.  This time, people waited in line for hours to vote, and even so, only about 50% of eligible voters turned out.  The elections under Mubarak and his predecessors claimed a 90% turn out, but in fact there were never ever any lines for those elections. 

In Cairo, we passed a long line of men and a separate, shorter line of women waiting to buy propane gas, used for cooking.  These people, too poor to afford the jacked up prices charged by companies that make home deliveries, waited for hours in line.  The Muslim Brotherhood, our guide told us, buys propane gas and delivers it to people’s homes, taking a very small profit, but either that service had not reached the people waiting in line or even the small additional profit made the service too costly for them.  In addition to its propane gas service, the Muslim Brotherhood operates low- cost medical clinics, and on Thursdays, the day before the Muslim day of rest, it delivers gratis food to the poorest families, so they too can enjoy a festive meal on Friday.  In the first and second round of voting, the Muslim Brotherhood’s party has won about 40% of the vote.

Our affable, supremely competent guide, is no fan of the Brotherhood and didn’t vote for its party, but he believes it will be moderate in the social changes it exacts.  He believes the party’s statement that it will not forbid the consumption of alcohol at home or in hotels, although it does plan to close liquor stores.  Islam in Egypt, he told us, is moderate.  But the second most popular party, the fundamentalist Islamic Al Nour, won 20% of the vote, and it remains to be seen whether the Brotherhood will form a coalition with Al Nour or with the liberal parties.  One of our lecturers, a professor of sociology at the American University of Cairo, is not as optimistic as our guide that the Islamicist parties will enact moderate policies and that they will not curtail the hard-won rights of women.

Because of the political unrest, our children tried several times to dissuade us from traveling to Egypt.  But one needn’t travel to Egypt to find violence.   On our way home from the airport, our taxi was forced to make a detour about 200 yards from our apartment house, because fire trucks and other emergency vehicles were blocking the street.  Yesterday’s Times reported the reason. A woman entered an elevator, where a man, dressed as an exterminator, doused her with a flammable material and set her ablaze.  The woman burned to death.  We worry about the wrong things.

Anchises at the High Dam

We awoke yesterday to find ourselves at Aswan.  After breakfast on board, we visited Philae, the High Dam, and the Unfinished Obelisk.   Philae, an island in the Nile, was the site of an ancient temple complex, which was dismantled and relocated to a nearby island to prevent its being flooded by the Aswan Dam, completed in 1970.   The Unfinished Obelisk is the largest of the known ancient Egyptian obelisks, one third larger than any other.  Carved directly out bedrock, it would have been about 137 feet tall and weigh almost 1,200 tons. 

After lunch, we spent the afternoon sailing on a felucca, sail boats that have plied the Nile since antiquity and are still built to the traditional design.  We loafed again, but after our hectic sightseeing in Cairo and Alexandria, we felt glad to do as little as possible, while still staying awake.

We enjoyed a farewell dinner on board.  Why was it a farewell dinner, when there'll be another dinner tomorrow?  Because some of our party are continuing on an extension tour of Lake Nasser.  But it was also a farewell to loafing.

Today we're to drive through the Great Western Desert to Abu Simbel, where we'll explore the Ramses II and Queen Nefertari Temples.  Like Philae, these were part of a massive relocation project to save them from the waters of the High Dam.

After lunch, we're to fly back to Cairo.

[written while still in New York, based on the offical itinerary.  I look forward to reporting some of my observations when we return.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

Anchises Floating up the Nile

Yesterday, after a presentation about ongoing discoveries and digs in Egypt, we explored the West Bank Valley of the Kings and various royal tombs.  How refreshing it was to visit a West Bank that is not in Palestine.

The afternoon was spent lounging on deck as we progressed up the Nile towards Edfu and watched the countryside and those who live and work there slide by.  We had nothing to do but do nothing, to steal Mark Twain’s description of a long ocean voyage.

Today we’re to visit the Horus Temple at Edfu, one of the largest in Egypt, and the Kom Ombo Temple, the latter built during the second century before the common era.  In the afternoon, we’re going to loaf again on board, as our royal barge takes us further up the Nile, this time to Aswan.

[written while still in New York, based on the official itinerary.  I look forward to reporting some of my observations when we return.]

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

Anchises in Luxor and Karnak

Last Saturday, we took the train to Cairo, boarding it in the morning and arriving in time for lunch.  We spent the afternoon at the Egyptian Museum, which included a visit to the mummy room, after an introduction by an Egyptologist. 

Yesterday, we visited various sites in historic Cairo, including the Ibn Toulum Mosque and the Khan el-Khalili Bazaar, the hanging church, St. Sergius church, and the Ben Ezra synagogue, representatives of four great religions: Judaism, Chrisianity, Islam, and Shopping.

Today, we’re to fly to Luxor, from which we will take a train to the Karnak and Luxor temples, the first of which is the largest temple complex ever built.  We will then board our floating hotel, the MS Royal Viking, for our cruise up the Nile.  That afternoon, we’ll hear a presentation about the Opet Festival, an ancient Egyptian annual celebration, in which the statues of the Theban gods – Amun, Khonsu, and Mut – were escorted from the temple of Amun in Karnak to the temple of Luxor, about two miles away.  We’ll also hear about the ongoing restoration work at Luxor.   

[written while still in New York, based on the official itinerary.  I look forward to reporting some of my observations when we return.]

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Anchises in Alexandria

Yesterday we drove along a desert road to the ancient Anba Bishoi Monastery, about 100 kms. northwest of Cairo.  It's a collection of five chapels, the principal one of which is named for St. Bishoi, who was born in 320 of the current era.  The monastery was sacked several times by marauding Berbers, and each time rebuilt. Although the defensive tower dates from the fifth century, most of what we saw dates from the fourteenth. 

From there we drove to Alexandria, where we visited the Eastern Harbor, the site of the Pharos lighthouse, one of the wonders of the ancient world, and the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Today we’re to explore Alexandria, visiting some of the great historic sites, including the second century catacombs of Kom-es Shouqafa, which were tunneled into the bedrock by a rich Alexandrine family who followed the ancient Egyptian religion, and the Roman theater.  We’re also scheduled to visit the Alexandria National Museum, located in a restored palace and one of the country’s premier institutions.  After lunch, we’ll continue exploring the city, ending our sightseeing at the Montazah Gardens, the site of two palaces built by the Mohamed Ali family, who ruled Egypt from the mid-19^th century until the revolution that brought Nasser to power in 1952.

Back at our hotel, we’ll hear a lecture about the Underwater City of Cleopatra.  By that time I'll be ready to collapse from stimulus overload.

[written while still in New York, based on the official itinerary.  I look forward to reporting some of my observations when we return.]

Anchises in Cairo

Aeneas reached Carthage, where he fell in love with Dido, before continuing to Italy and founding Rome.  His father Anchises, whom he rescued from the burning city of Troy and who accompanied Aeneas on the first part of his travels, died peacefully in Sicily, never having reached the north coast of Africa with his son.  I’m now filling that gap, since my wife and I are in Egypt on a two-week tour organized by Road Scholar (formerly Elder Hostel).  We left on Sunday night and plan to return to New York in middle of the month. 

We arrived in Cairo on Monday afternoon and, after being taken to our hotel by the Road Scholar representative, ate dinner with some of the twelve or so participants.   Yesterday, after breakfast, we drove out to see the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx, and the Solar Boat.  Today, we're to visit Dahshur, a necropolis of the Old Kingdom, and Memphis, as well as the Imhotep Museum in Saqqara, north of Dahshur, which displays archaeological finds from the site.  We'll be on our own this afternoon, but in the evening we're to hear a presentation by a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, who will speak about "Islam Today."

A confession: actually, I’m writing this from New York.  We haven’t yet embarked for Egypt.  But from time to time I’ll be posting our itinerary as it now appears in the schedule, as if we had actually taken part in it, although of course right now those activities are in the future.   No doubt the schedule will be changed here and there, so my posts may not be entirely accurate.  After we return, I hope to present some reflections on our experience.


2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Toledot

Each week, a member of our minyan offers a brief commentary on the Torah portion of the week.  My turn arrived two Saturdays ago. The portion was Toledot, an exceedingly rich text whose central drama is Jacob’s supplanting his older twin Esau as the bearer of Abraham's and Isaac’s legacy.  As I read through the portion, I was struck by how suffused it is with pairs, doubles, opposites, mirror images, and echoes, appropriate for a story not only about twins but also about duplicity.  

For example, Rebecca tells her son Jacob to bring her two kids, which she will cook into a stew for his father Isaac, now blind, in order to receive the blessing which Isaac has meant for Esau.  Why two kids?  Surely one would be enough for an old man or even for a family of four.  In a hot climate without refrigeration, an uneaten goat stew would soon spoil.  But the pair represents the doubleness that we see throughout the story. 

We need not look far to find other examples.  Rebecca gives Jacob stew and bread, another pair, to give to his father – an echo of the bread and stew that Jacob gave Esau in exchange for Esau’s birthright.  To fool Isaac into thinking that Jacob is Esau, Rebecca covers Jacob’s hands and the back of his neck in the hairy skin of the goats she’s killed – Jacob is smooth-skinned whereas Esau is hairy – and dresses him in Esau’s clothing.  So we have the pair formed by Esau's clothes and the goat skin, which in turn covers two parts of Jacob's body, his hands and the back of his neck.

Jacob brings the food to his father.  Isaac asks him which son he is.  Jacob says he’s Esau.  Isaac asks him to approach so that he can feel him and he asks “are you really my son Esau?”  Jacob does not answer but draws close.  Isaac feels him and says, “The voice is the voice of Jacob but the hands are the hands of Esau.”  And he asks again, “are you really my son Esau?” And once more Jacob says he’s Esau.  So here we have three pairs: the pairing of “the voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau,” Isaac’s two identical requests for confirmation – “are you really my son Esau” - and Jacob’s two lies about his identity. 

Isaac asks Jacob to kiss him and as Jacob complies, Isaac smells Esau’s clothes, commenting that Esau’s scent is “that of a field blessed by the Eternal.” So Isaac employs two senses to confirm his understanding that Jacob is Esau, touch and smell, but he ignores two others.  He ignores the evidence of his hearing – “the voice of Jacob”  – as well as the evidence provided by taste.  Surely goat stew does not taste like stew made from game, which is what he asked Esau to give him and which is what he was expecting.  So we have two pairs here, those senses that support the deception and those senses that contradict it.  Isaac then blesses Jacob, and the blessing itself, a poem, is structured as a collection of couplets.

The question arises as to whether Jacob really deceived Isaac.  Perhaps Isaac deceived himself, willing himself to believe Jacob’s grotesque disguise.  But if it was Isaac who was the deceiver, it may not have been himself that he deceived but his family.  In other words, he may have been conscious of Jacob’s ruse and pretended to be fooled by it.  In either of these cases, he acted as he did because in his heart he believed that Jacob was the appropriate bearer of his and Abraham’s legacy.  That Isaac chooses not to believe the evidence of two senses, hearing and taste, that he refuses to rescind his blessing after Esau presents him with clear evidence of Jacob’s duplicity, and that indeed he later blesses Jacob a second time all support the notion that Jacob did not deceive his father.   Thus the story provides two plausible interpretations, one in which Jacob deceives Isaac and the other in which Isaac either deceives himself or deceives the rest of his family

The story does not criticize Jacob for his immoral behavior, but its pairs, doubles, opposites, and echoes provide a subterranean comment on the duplicity and ambiguity at its heart.

In this post, I’ve given only a few of the pairings that I presented in my d’var Torah.  The more I looked for them the more I found, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are even more to be discovered.  But in preparing my commentary, I found more than these pairs; I also learned the pleasure of close textual analysis, of which this was my first attempt.  This old dog is learning new tricks.

A Walk in Prospect Park

In addition to the fading glory of the foliage, the oceans of fallen leaves underfoot, the joggers, and the runners, this is what I saw and heard last Sunday morning during my daily walk in Prospect Park.

I saw a father blowing bubbles towards his child, perhaps 20 months old, who toddled towards him trying to catch a bubble, while his mother watched.  I saw a beautifully combed and brushed brown and white Springer spaniel. I heard a father saying to his child, “See all those runners?  Where do you think they’re going?” I didn’t catch what the child said but the father laughed.  The question was a good one, for the runners weren’t going anywhere. I saw ten ducks swimming in the dog-paddle pond, across which a barrier had been thrown to keep dogs from venturing onto the ice that often forms in winter. I saw four guys throwing a football to one another and four guys line skating in close formation.  I saw several phalanxes of racing cyclists.  I saw a dog playing fetch with his master on the Long Meadow.  This was after nine, when dogs are not supposed to run free. 

A woman smiled at me (was she thinking, “isn’t he cute?”).  She was standing next to a man. A tall, well-turned out couple in their forties, watching the dog playing fetch, they looked the essence of “U.”   I smiled back and said “good morning,” which they repeated to me.

I saw the homeless man I wrote about in Monday’s post.  He was sitting on a rock outside the Endale Arch.  He was talking to a woman with a dog, so I heard him speak for the first time.  He has a West Indian accent.  (The next day I saw him hunched up against the wall, all but his head buried in blankets.  He looked at me.  I called out “good morning” and he replied “good morning, sir.)

I saw a special bench on the path that runs parallel, more or less, to the East Drive.  What makes it special is that for a long time several photographs of a twenty-something young man had been affixed to it along with the dates of his birth and death and a note to the effect that he had died of cancer.  A bouquet of flowers, replenished from time to time, was placed next to the photograph.  But the bench had neither photographs, nor note, nor flowers.  And I thought of the tragedy of the young man’s early death.

And of course I thought how lucky I’ve been to have lived so long (yesterday I turned 80).  For many old people the notion of “golden years” is bitterly ironic, if they are beleaguered by straitened incomes or poor health or the loss of a beloved spouse.  My old age, though, has been truly golden so far, if enjoyment of life is the chief criterion.  Let’s see what happens next, now that I’ve joined the ranks of the octogenarians.  Whatever comes next, though, I won’t have any grounds for complaint.  I've had a good run.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

Names

“Who is Paul named after?” my sister asked me the other day.   Paul is our brother.    Mother once told me, I answered, that she named Paul after a character in “One Man’s Family,” a radio serial popular in the thirties, because she loved the character’s voice.   I never knew when to believe her, for she liked to give fanciful answers to questions about her past.  In response to my queries as to where she and Dad married, for example, she never gave me the same answer twice, and I began to wonder if they had eloped or perhaps had never married at all, especially since their wedding photographs, if there were any, had never been produced.

Since Mother had a cousin named Paul and since it’s the custom among Ashkenazim to name a child after a dead relative, it’s likely that our brother was named after the same relative as that cousin.  “But what about his middle name?” my sister persisted, referring to Reuben, our brother’s second name.  He was probably named after our grandmother, Rebecca, I told her, who had died a year or so before he was born.  Ashkenazim typically give their children two names, at least one of which is a Hebrew name or its secular variant.  My sister’s middle name, for example, is Deborah which in Hebrew is D’vora (bee).

When called to the Torah, to serve as a witness, so to speak, while the Torah portion is read aloud to the congregation, one gives one’s Hebrew name.  Having grown up in a largely secular family, whose only religious observance was attendance at High Holiday Services and the prohibition of pork at home, I had never been called to the Torah, even when I became of age at 13.   Indeed, I didn’t know if I had a Hebrew name. 

The issue arose in the mid-seventies when my mentor and colleague, Joshua Fishman, and I were in Honolulu, teaching at the Linguistic Institute of America’s summer institute, held that year at the University of Hawaii.  We lived in the same hotel and I walked with him each Shabbat to services at an orthodox congregation.  “You know,” he said, “as guests, we may be called to the Torah.  What’s your Hebrew name?”

I told him I didn’t know, but since my first name begins with an R (in case you were wondering, people, Anchises is not my real name), I offered Rahamim as a possibility.  It’s not only a beautiful name but it has a beautiful meaning, compassion.  Joshua laughed.  “That’s no name for a boy from Vilna,” he said. (I, of course, wasn’t born in Vilna, but all four of my grandparents were.)  Rahamim is a name given to Sephardim, not Ashkenazim, Joshua reminded me.  So I chose the Hebrew name Aryeh (lion) based on my middle name, Leon.  When called to the Torah, I’m Aryeh ben Moshe ve-Leah , although I’m only guessing that these were the Hebrew names of my parents, Maurice and Lena.

For whom was each member of my family named?  What Hebrew names were they given if any?  What were the characteristics, the occupations, the history of our namesakes?  Why hadn't I asked while there was still time to do so?  Now there’s no one left to tell me.


2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal  All Rights Reserved

Compassion

Prospect Park is one of New York’s glories.  Unlike Central Park, it offers you the illusion of being in open countryside, where you forget you’re in the middle of a great  city.  The illusion is broken in some places, though.  When walking towards the Grand Army Plaza, for example, along a path parallel to the West Drive, Richard Meier’s One Prospect Park, a new condominium on the corner of Plaza Street and Eastern Parkway, rears its glass façade well above the trees, providing an unwelcome reminder that you’re in a city.  You avert your eyes from the building, but soon you come to the Endale Arch, a pedestrian underpass near the main entrance to the park.  There you can see a peculiarly urban phenomenon, a homeless man.

When it’s not raining, he sits on a rock at the entrance to the arch, reading a book.  In inclement weather, he lies inside the arch – a structure perhaps 30 feet long – on the ground along one wall.  Resting on several blankets, with a small bag containing his possessions, he’s a dark-complexioned African American of middle age, wearing a hooded parka.   

The other day when I passed him, I did not avert my eyes from him, as I did from One Prospect Park.  Unmoving, unblinking, he stared at me in return.  As I strode past him, I remembered another homeless man who occupied the nearby Meadowport Arch, whom I passed daily for several years.  Also an African American of middle age, the Meadowport homeless man appeared more put together – his clothes well pressed, his beard neatly trimmed - than does his Endale counterpart, who looks as if he has just  tumbled out of a spinning dryer. 

I wrote about the Meadowport man in July of last year, in a post called “Too Late.”  It was too late because after passing by that man for several years, he disappeared.  The bench he occupied inside the arch was empty of his neatly folded blankets and his pile of paperback books.  Where had he gone?  What had become of him?  And I regretted never having greeted him, never having said hello, although I admitted that had he continued living in the arch, I probably would never have done so.

I can no longer greet the Meadowport man, but I can do so with his counterpart in the Endale Arch.  But should I? Would it be at all appropriate?  Would he interpret it as condescension?  Would he even notice?  I believe he would, because unlike the Meadowport man, who seemed enclosed within a private glass cylinder, the Endale man seems alive to the world around him, at least as evidenced by his staring at me.  He must be lonely, but perhaps he wants to be let alone. 

This week our Mussar group is considering the trait of compassion.  That I feel sorry for the Endale man goes without saying, but compassion must be expressed if it is not to be empty.  What expression can I give to my compassion for him?  Giving him money seems out of the question.  He doesn’t ask for it and he might be insulted by the offer.  If his apparent isolation is painful to him, perhaps a greeting would be welcome.  On the other hand, perhaps he would interpret it as an offense to his dignity.  I will probably continue to do nothing at all, just as I did with the Meadowport man, and when and if I no longer see him, I will again regret my inaction.  But no man is an island, entire of itself.  When I pass the Endale man, I hear the bell tolling for me.  If only I knew how to respond.


2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Rain Pants

A few years ago,  in search of a rain suit, I considered two, one with slits in the rain pants' pockets that could provide access to the pockets in one's regular pants, and one suit without the slits.  I chose the latter because it cost twenty dollars less.  But ever after, I criticized myself for being so cheap. The rain jacket's pockets were hard to open and close, so I kept my wallet and keys in the pockets of my regular pants.  In order to reach them, I’d have to pull open the waist of the rain pants and reach into the pocket of my regular pants.  Wouldn’t it be grand to reach my wallet and keys through a slit in my rain pants!   I looked forward to the arrival of the clothes that I had sent from Jerusalem, including rain pants with slits, which had been slumbering in a Bronx warehouse for the past three years.

The clothes arrived along with the rain suit.  I gave away my old rain suit and began wearing the one from Jerusalem.  It was raining heavily on Tuesday, so I wore it when my wife and I went out shopping.  Our first stop was at the corner grocery, a small convenience store that carries the peanut butter that my brother likes.  I paid for it with a credit card, which I put back in my wallet after the transaction and then placed the wallet in my pocket.  On to the next destination!

After a few steps outside, I realized that I did not feel my wallet against my thigh.  It was raining too hard to search for my wallet on the spot, so we retreated to the store, where I emptied my pockets and turned my backpack inside out, without finding my wallet.  I asked the proprietor’s son, who had sold us the peanut butter, if he had seen my wallet.  “Yes,” he said, “I saw you put it into your pants pocket.” 

Oh boy, the wallet was somehow gone, evaporated.  “Never mind the cash inside,” I moaned to myself, as I thought of the trouble I’d have of canceling credit cards and my Metro card and returning to the time-gobbling Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain a new identification card.  My mood was made even worse because it was the poisonous hour before dinner, that time of day when life tends to seem bleak.  Just then, one of the store’s workers pointed to a bulge at my ankle.  And there was my wallet.  Earlier, when I had put the wallet through the slit in my rain pants, the wallet fell not into the pocket of my regular pants but outside those pants. Fortunately the rain pants on that leg had been snapped shut at the ankle, keeping out the rain but also preventing my wallet from falling onto the floor.  .

Greatly relieved, my wife and I left the store and proceeded to complete our other errands.  When we returned home, I couldn’t find my house keys.  After a thorough search of my backpack and pockets, I concluded that the keys had also fallen through my rain pants, but since the rain pants had not been snapped shut on the leg that held the keys, they fell onto the ground. 

I’ve learned a valuable lesson.  Never put your wallet or keys through the slits in your rain pants.  Instead, put them in the pocket of your rain jacket (my Jerusalem rain jacket has easily accessible pockets).  Had I been wearing my old rain suit, I would not have lost my keys nor would I have almost lost my wallet.  You have to be careful what you wish for.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Desire

My friend Steve Altman, in a recent blog post, wrote about the effect of Univision on his father, who was in his mid-eighties and gradually losing his interest in life.  Unable to feed or dress himself, no longer able to read, he spent much of his time half asleep, seated in front of the television set in his assisted living facility’s common room. 

Univision, the most popular Spanish-language network in the country, employs on its programs scantily dressed, gorgeous young women, who move beautifully and are a pleasure to the eye.  When his son, surfing the channels in the search of a program to interest his father, came upon Univision, his father brightened up.  Thereafter on his visits, Steve would turn to that channel, which would cause his father to “sit up in his chair.  He’d lift his chin.  A glimmer would come back into his eyes, he’d smile just a little bit, and sometimes—you had to see this to believe it—he’d start to sing…. Virtually nothing that that had interested him throughout his life interested him anymore.  But over his last year or so on earth, one thing still did.  And it was, truth to tell, the last thing to go.”   A few days after he no longer responded to those beautiful girls, the old man died. Generalizing from his father’s experience, Steve suggests that a man’s interest in sex is hard-wired and irrepressible.  He titled his post “The Last Thing to Go”  [http://www.317am.net/2011/11/the-last-thing-to-go.html#more-11531]. 

It may be the last thing to go but not if you’re undergoing hormone treatment for the suppression of testosterone, the male hormone that acts like a fertilizer for prostate cancer cells.  Testosterone suppression effectively castrates you, not with a knife but with chemicals.  Take it from me.  I’ve undergone it twice, once in 2007, for about five months, after which I thought I’d never have to repeat it,  and again this year, when became clear that it will be a permanent part of my therapy until it no longer works and other measures will have to be tried. Now I know why eunuchs guarded harems.  

The effect of the hormone treatment has been dramatic.  I can walk without pain and the PSA index, which measures the amount of prostate cells in the blood, an index that had been doubling each month, has dropped to almost zero.  If chemical castration is the price for a longer pain-free life, it’s a price I’m willing to pay.  Still, I’ve had to sell myself a bill of goods, as my father used to say, to convince myself that masculinity has many components besides sexual desire, which is, after all, found in women as well as in men, that my masculinity remains unimpaired, and that I’m the same person now that I was before the treatment. 

For me, desire is not the last thing to go.  It’s already gone. But the life force, of which  sexual desire is a product, remains strong in me.  I embrace each day with gratitude for being alive, determined to wring as much experience from it as I can.  And that includes watching the girls on Univision.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

Veterans Day

Our Shabbat services a few weeks ago recognized Veterans Day, because this year it fell on Friday.  The Star Spangled Banner, God Bless America, America the Beautiful, and My Country ‘tis of Thee replaced some of the traditional melodies, and during a break in the service, our rabbi asked all the veterans who were present to join him at the front of the room. 

There were eight or nine of us.  How ancient, how broken down we appeared.  But then our rabbi asked each of us to give his dates of service and I was astonished to find that I was older than all but two.  So this is what I look like to others, I thought to myself glumly.   I don’t flatter myself that I look younger than I am, but I don’t want to look any older.  As it is, boys and girls as well as men and women volunteer to give me their seats in the subway.

The two oldest veterans served in the Second World War.  One of them, now in his nineties, told me that he participated in five invasions, four in Europe, including Sicily and Normandy, and one in the South Pacific.  In comparison to his service, mine seems laughably unheroic.  I served from 1954 to 1956, in the aftermath of the Korean War, when there was still a draft.  It would pleasant to tell you that I trained as a commando, but nobody would believe me.  No, I trained as a teletype operator, in a course which taught me how to touch type, a skill for which I’ve long been grateful.    Because my score at the end of the course was the highest in the class, I was given a choice of assignments. Alas, all of them were in America, so I chose Fort Totten, a base that dates from the Civil War, in Bayside, Queens.

It turned out to be a plum assignment because, as teletype operators reporting the status of missile batteries along the Atlantic Coast, we had to work shifts – morning, evening, and night – which excused us from kitchen and guard duty.  The night shift had so little traffic that we slept on cots by the teletype machines, and rarely were we disturbed.  We had ample opportunity to go into Manhattan, where as uniformed soldiers we could watch  Broadway plays virtually free, albeit as standees.  Those two years were a time for reflection, for reading, for figuring out what I wanted to do with my life (what I figured out proved to be wrong) and it brought me into contact with men from all walks of life.  It provided a valuable education.

But by no means did those two years represent a high point in my life.  For the oldest veteran in our congregation, in contrast, his service in the armed forces was just that.  This was also true of the other veteran of the Second World War that I’ve known.  He was a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, among the lucky 15% of his cohort from Australia who survived.  Later he went on to a distinguished career as a Supreme Court justice in New South Wales.  When I first met him, on a freighter traveling from Suva to Hong Kong, he pulled out a photo of himself in uniform, standing with two other pilots, in front of a Spitfire.  It was clear that his military service represented for him a supremely important period in his life, a period in which he felt most alive.  I’ve heard the same story from Londoners who survived the Blitz.  The combination of constant danger, camaraderie, and the sense of total enagement in a great cause probably explains the phenomenon.

The Second World War was the last “just war,” the last war in which the whole population mobilized to fight, whether in the armed services or on the home front.  The public willingly made sacrifices in pursuit of this great common purpose.  America is so polarized now, its representatives in Congress so deadlocked, that a common purpose seems far away.  Do we need a great war to foster a sense of common purpose?  One would think that the dangers posed by global warming, our crumbling infrastructure, our second-rate educational system, and the government deficit would provide such a purpose, but thus far it has not emerged and no leader has yet  been able to generate one.  To be told to go shopping, as President Obama’s predecessor advised us, won’t cut it.

2010-2011 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

A Rembrandt Etching

The other day we finished unpacking the 99 cartons we had sent from Jerusalem in 2008 and which resided in a Bronx warehouse until a few weeks ago.  It was only on the last day of unpacking that we came across an artwork that we feared might be missing, a Rembrandt etching.  It’s not terribly valuable - appraised a few years ago at $750 -  since it’s a second strike and we have neither a date for its printing nor any information about its provenance. 

My wife inherited it on the death of her father, while we were living in Jerusalem.  She picked it up on a trip to America, during which time we bought two large framed prints by the printmaker Virginia Myers.  We took all three pieces of art back to Jerusalem, in addition to my wife’s great-grandmother’s sterling silver service.  When we went through Israeli customs, we stopped to declare the art and the silver. 

“What do you have here?” asked the customs officer.  “My great-grandmother’s silver,” answered my wife.  “I don’t want to know about it,” he said, whether from the goodness of his heart or because antique silver was not dutiable, we don’t know.  “And we have some pictures, too,” said my wife, which was perfectly obvious from the package’s size and wrapping.  “I suppose you have a Rembrandt there,” said the customs officer, to which I replied “yeah, sure!”  And then he waved us through.

I’ve always felt slightly guilty about that “yeah, sure!”  This was, of course, in effect a lie. But telling him that indeed we did have a Rembrandt would have caused us a lengthy delay, as he tried to determine its value, which in any event was about what we had paid for Virginia Myers's prints, on which he had charged no duty.  So I said “yeah, sure.”   Well, nobody’s perfect.

Rembrandt looks out at us full-faced, unsmiling, the upper part of his head shadowed by a floppy brimmed hat.  “Take me as I am,” his uncompromising stare seems to be saying.  In his left hand he holds a thin tool of some sort.  His wife, sitting or standing behind him (we see their upper bodies only), looks towards him, showing us three-fourths of her unsmiling face.  She wears a lace cap towards the back of her head, so that we see her hair. They’d been married for about two years, when he made this etching in 1636, and it’s likely that neither of them dreamt that she would be dead in another six.

Nor could they have imagined that the country in which his biblical art was set would again become a Jewish state and that two Jews would bring a print of this etching to Jerusalem, where a kind customs officer would accept two positives as a negative.  


2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Sibling Rivalry

One afternoon, about 70 years ago, when I was ten and my brother six, my mother asked us to sing a song for our aunt, whom our mother had invited for tea.  At least I thought she had asked us  both to sing, but I was wrong.  “Not you,” she said to me, when I began to sing along with my brother, “just your brother.”  This hurt my feelings even more than when our junior high school music teacher, directing my class's chorus several years later, told  me to mouth the words of the songs but not to sing them.

My brother’s sweet soprano is now, 70 year later, a mellow baritone, but his voice continues to be beautiful.  This past weekend, when he and his wife were visiting us, they accompanied us to Shabbat services on Friday evening and Saturday morning. Most of these services are sung by the congregation, and as we sang together, my brother’s voice seemed  to sail above all the others, distinct and lovely.  After each service, several members of our congregation came up to him and complimented him on his voice.  And I thought to myself, “not you, just your brother.”

Seventy years have passed since my mother asked my brother but not me to sing, and though I love my brother, I’m still envious of his voice and - it pains me to admit it - slightly resentful of the attention it receives.  Sibling rivalry never  dies. 

. 

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Two Walks

On a brisk autumn morning the other day, as I walked in Prospect Park, the orange and yellow foliage glowed. Mist rose from the Long Meadow, where dogs, permitted off leash until nine, ran alone, frolicked with one another, or fetched the balls that their owners had thrown out for them. Younger runners and bikers passed me as I walked as fast as I could on the West Drive. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and the air was just cold enough to provide a pleasant briskness. What a marvelous day, I thought to myself, and then felt a deep gratitude that I was again able to walk without pain.

And then I remembered the cartoon by the late, great William Steig that I clipped out of The New Yorker Magazine years ago and placed in a plexiglass frame. It shows a man floating in a sun-dappled sea, his head on an inflatable pillow, his hands clasped on his stomach. He smiles blissfully. Beneath him swims a dreadful sea monster. The caption: “Complete Peace.”

And that reminded me of a spring day during my sophomore year at college. I was a staffer on the college paper and well on my way, so I hoped, to becoming a Big Man on Campus. I was enjoying myself so much at college that I said to myself that “this is too good to last,” although I had no idea about what could derail me. I didn’t know that my mother was dying, that in another month she would be dead, that I would transfer to a college near home, drop out of campus life, and live at home, where I could help my grieving, shell-shocked father raise my younger brother and sister.

These two walks, one on the quadrangle of a college campus, the other on the West Drive of Prospect Park, are separated by more than 60 years. In both cases, I felt the intimations of darker times to come. The difference is that when I was 19, I had little experience of catastrophe, and I took for granted the good things life had given me. Now I know what catastrophe means, and I’m grateful for every day.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Friends

Last week, two friends wrote me of the death of close friends. One wrote that when he heard the news of his friend’s death, he felt that "part of his reality was fading away." The other wrote that she and her husband were “beyond sad…We have lost enough people to know that a day comes when you are used to their not being there and can think of them without crying, but we aren't there yet.”

I know what they mean, because I've lost close friends too. At my age, it’s almost inevitable that this should be so. My friends’ recent bereavements made me reflect on the nature of friendship and why it should be so important in our lives. When I consider my good friends, all of them offer understanding, sympathy, and empathy - emotional support, in other words - and all of them are a pleasure to be with (or to correspond with, since some of my friendships are primarily epistolary). I feel I can be myself with them, without pretense, without fear of criticism. These are qualities one finds in one’s spouse, if one is lucky enough to be in a good marriage. So why do we look for friends as well?

For one thing, each friendship extends our experience, since each person is an entire world, a unique world, a world into which we enter by virtue of our friendship. Also, it’s hard to get enough of the support and validation one receives from friends. We are, after all, social creatures, and our views of ourselves are created in part by our interactions with others. We find it deeply satisfying when people we respect and like show respect and liking for us.

At my age, there’s little time to create, in a new friendship, “the continuous, organic, thickening of relationship,” in Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg’s felicitous phrase, that's characteristic of friendship as well as of love. Its creation requires years if not decades. Still, it’s important for the old to seek new friends, younger friends. We cannot replace old friends who one by one will drop away, but if we live long enough and make no new friends, we’ll finish our lives with no friends at all.

So my wife and I reach out to our neighbors, to members of our congregation, and to those we meet through old friends, and we've begun to establish new friendships. In our old age, we're engaged again in spinning webs of friendship. May we live long enough for them to become as thick as possible, given the time that is left.

A Painting

My brother and I married sisters, so my wife’s sister and my brother’s wife are the same person, a double sister-in-law from my point of view. The winner of numerous awards, she’s a distinguished artist, working in oil, pastel, acrylic, and mixed media, whose joy in color is evident in most of her work.

Over the years she’s given us two of her large paintings. Both contain images of water surrounded by trees, a lake in Vermont, where she attended camp as a girl, and a wintry pond on their farm in upstate New York. The first one hung in our Brooklyn dining room for the past ten years. At the moment it’s resting against a wall, waiting for our decision as to where to place it. The second hung in my Jerusalem study for more than 30 years. A few weeks ago, it arrived with 98 other cartons, where they had been residing in a Bronx warehouse.

Unlike the first painting, whose location is still undetermined, I knew immediately where I wanted to place the second. Just as it had graced my study in Jerusalem, I wanted it for my study in Brooklyn. The reason was more than sentimental. The painting is an exercise in shades of black, gray, and white. Only when you look closely, do you also see an occasional dash of green. Philistine that I am, I knew that the painting would complement the room’s color scheme, with its black sofa, white desk, and green lampshades. I would place it above the black sofa.

First, I had to move the sofa away from the wall. In the space between the sofa and the wall, I placed a ladder, on which I climbed, holding the painting. After numerous failed attempts, I managed to hang it on the hook that I had hammered into the wall. I straightened out the painting, pushed the sofa back against the wall, and stepped back to admire the effect.

To my dismay, I noticed a two-inch gash in the canvas. I wish I could accuse the packers of having ripped it, but I’m pretty sure that it was my fault, caused when climbing the ladder with the painting. The painting and metal ladder must have collided, with this fatal result.

Fortunately the gash resembles some of the strokes of color on the canvas, so that it’s not immediately noticeable. I asked my wife to look at the painting and tell me if she could see anything wrong with it. She could not. But I know it’s there, and my pleasure in the painting, while great, is diminished by the knowledge of my guilty clumsiness. I would feel bad about damaging any painting, but I feel especially bad about damaging this one, not only because of its beauty, but also because of the artist who made it.

Just as the imperfection of a loaf of challah – a bit of dough is taken from the loaf and thrown against the oven wall – reminds us of the destruction of the Temple, the little gash in our painting reminds me of the ultimate dissolution, the eventual destruction of all things under the sun. But I enjoy eating challah, even though a piece has been taken from the loaf, and I will enjoy looking at the painting, even though I know that, like me, it will not last forever.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Love Goddesses

A recent post by Steve Altman, in the blog he co-writes with George Clack, considered the glamorous female movie stars of decades ago, particularly Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, and Ava Gardner (http://www.317am.net/2011/10/kaze-a-love-goddess-or-a-grande-cappuccino.html). Artie Shaw, the clarinetist and big band leader, was married to two of them and is said to have had an affair with the third. Altman reports that when Shaw was very old, he was asked what it was like to wake up next to a love goddess. He replied that when he woke up what he wanted was a cup of coffee, and was she going to get up and bring one to him? No. After all, she was a love goddess.

My wife was indignant when I relayed this story to her. “Why should any woman get up and make him a cup of coffee?” she asked. True. But Shaw’s response is amusing on more than one level, suggesting among other things that after awhile the importance of sex diminishes in the day-to-day life of a couple. It’s important, yes, but then so is a cup of coffee in the morning.

When I awoke the other day, snuggled against my wife, I felt thankful that I had been long married to her. And I felt sorry for Artie Shaw. How little he knew of love! Married eight times, he could never have experienced “the continuous organic thickening of relationship” that occurs in a good marriage. The phrase comes from Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s discussion of “the peculiar nature of love” (Genesis: the beginning of desire, p. 92).

Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner were accomplished actresses, but they were also goddesses. They were not, however, true goddesses of love. They were goddesses of sex, the objects of masturbatory fantasies. Love had nothing to do with it. Unlike Artie Shaw, I wake up next to a real goddess of love. This is an enormous gift, for which no words can express my gratitude.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Halloween

Our building's large apartments have attracted many young families with children, and consequently the building has become known as "child friendly." Last week on Halloween, the children were in almost full attendance as they raced up and down corridors and up and down stairs going from apartment to apartment asking for treats. Householders willing to participate in this ritual – amost all – posted on their door a drawing of a jack-o-lantern that had been distributed a few days before. A reception in the lobby offering cider and sweets preceded the children's dispersion to ask for treats

All the trick or treaters sported costumes and carried bags to receive the candy offered them. One pair of girls, dressed as conjoined twins, wore a single sweater pulled over their heads, with only the right arm of one girl and the left arm of the other appearing. A two-year old dressed as a bunny. Another two-year old, wearing green hair and a red face, represented, perhaps, a leprechaun. Several boys sported swords and many girls wore makeup, with a few dressed as princesses. One princess, acting perhaps from noblesse oblige, held out a box from Unesco, requesting a contribution.

Parents – a father or a mother – accompanied the youngest children. Two of the mothers wore costumes. One painted cat whiskers on her face and wore a long tail. The other wore the flowing gown of a Green goddess, but it turned out that the pipe cleaners emanating from her head were not a crown, as I had thought, but snakes. She was Medusa. Children who were trick or treating without their parents went with other children, in twos, threes, and in one case four. The children were excited, and the adults who opened their doors to them were both pleased to participate in this annual ritual, which reinforces the solidarity most of us feel with our neighbors, and amused by the children’s intensity.

When our doorbell rang, I would open it, holding out a large black bowl filled with assorted sweets, including lollypops and miniature candy bars. The girls tended to pick just one or two pieces whereas the boys tended to grab a handful. After one boy had done so and I had not yet raised my bowl, he asked “do you want me to take more?” I told him to take as much as he wanted, so he grabbed another handful. I don’t know whether he was being polite or simply greedy.

Our building contains but 54 apartments, accessed by two elevators, one on each side of the building. Because the elevators are slow, one has a chance to talk to other residents during our stately descent or ascent, so we know most of the people who live on our side. It’s a pleasure to live among these young families and to watch their children grow. I would hate to live only among other old fogies.

Still, there are disadvantages to living in a building with so many young children. They sometimes play in the building’s courtyard, and their screams echo up to our apartment on the sixth floor, but the kids generally don’t stay there very long and hardly at all in the winter. The children sometimes congregate outside the building’s entrance, generally in the late afternoon, playing catch, climbing up the poles that support the long awning, and generally running around. Some residents find the resulting noise disturbing, especially those who live on the lower floors, but again, the noise doesn’t last very long, or so it seems to me whose apartment does not face the street and who enjoys seeing the kids play. Occasionally one finds unattended kids turning cartwheels or racing through the lobby, although such behavior is strictly forbidden. So far none of these athletic kids has knocked me over.

The apartment we leased, while our own was being renovated, is in a former office tower with 250 apartments. Living there was like living in a hotel as far as getting to know the other residents. So it’s a relief to be back in our building, where we know our neighbors and our neighbors know us, where the neighbors tend to be young and personable, and where there are plenty of children to ring our doorbell on Halloween.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Life Report

In last Friday’s Times, an op-ed piece by David Brooks asked readers over 70 to “write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way.” He gave two reasons for this request. First, there are “few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture.” Second, young people can benefit from their elders' experience, helping them to understand “how a life develops, how careers and families evolve, what are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood.” Around Thanksgiving, Brooks will write a few columns based on his readers’ responses and will post some of the self-reports he receives on line. I’m dubious that many young people will alter their behavior after reading Brooks’s columns or the essays on which they are based. Nonetheless, I present some of the lessons I’ve learned during the past 80 years. An invitation to talk about oneself, is, after all, irresistible. What follows is what I sent to Brooks.

Chance has played an enormous role in my life, from the choice of a spouse to the choice of a career. Had my brother not married my wife’s sister, I would not have become a member of my wife’s family circle, which gave me both the opportunity and the courage to ask her to marry me. If my doctoral dissertation adviser had not recommended me for a job with one of the fathers of the sociology of language, I would not have entered that field, of which I hadn’t even heard at the time. He hired me for a project the second half of which was to be carried out in Nigeria. If the Biafran war hadn't scuttled that plan, I wouldn’t have been able to take a position in Addis Ababa with the Ford Foundation’s Language Survey of Ethiopia, which gave me one of the most memorable years of my life. If my job interview in Dublin, for a two-year research appointment, had been a success, I wouldn’t have been able to accept a two-year appointment in Jerusalem, which led to a satisfying university career there and a thirty-six year stay, with all its implications for learning a new language and culture, both secular and religious. If one lesson is the importance of chance, another is the notion that what seems like a bad outcome, can in the long run lead to a good result.

My career as an academic gave me great pleasure – I was often amazed that I was being paid for it – until somehow I lost interest in it. It no longer engaged me. So I took early retirement when I turned 60 and embarked on new ventures. I went around the world solely by surface transportation and later my wife and I followed Mark Twain’s 1895/6 year-long world lecture tour, 100 years later, and I published a book about that adventure. Those projects made the decade of my sixties deeply engaging, but in my seventies I never found a comparable project. I worked for several years on a history of the Great Fire of 1835, which destroyed most of Manhattan's business district, but I never was able to summon much enthusiasm for that project and I finally dropped it. I regret having started it in the first place. I should have kept searching for a topic that captured my imagination more forcibly. I've learned that engagement in one's work is a great blessing.

Freud has written that work and love are the pillars of our lives. I’ve been fortunate in both respects. I was reasonably successful as an academic, enjoying my work for 25 years. I regret the death of my long-standing engagement with it, but I’m grateful that it lasted as long as it did. As far as love is concerned, I’ve been married now for 48 years to a woman whom I’ve always considered too good for me. She has made me happy. I’ve also been fortunate in my children, of whom I am proud but for whose virtues and accomplishments I take little credit. I’m sorry I was not more attentive as a father when they were growing up, more attuned to their needs. I’m not sure I would have acted differently, though, had I the benefit of foresight, because I wanted badly to succeed in my career, which demanded so much of my time and energy. I take comfort in the thought that while I could have been a better parent, I was probably good enough.

If chance has played an important role in my life, so has luck. I've been lucky in my doctors, who have caught potentially fatal diseases early enough to be neutralized. I was lucky in my parents, who could afford to give me a first-class education and, in the case of my father, who provided a role model for the world of work. Had I been born in less favored circumstances, it is doubtful that I would have been as successful as I managed to be. Life is unfair - many good people suffer and many are the wicked who prosper. But beyond this intrinsic unfairness, our society is deeply unequal. I fully recognize that I was born on third base, so I should have tried to do more than I've done to help repair the world.

No one can live as long as I have without making mistakes or without acting in ways which make them ashamed. I know I've hurt others in my journey through life and I'm sorry that I haven't always been able or willing to ask them for forgiveness. I console myself with two thoughts: nobody's perfect and there's no point on dwelling on what can't be changed.

Life is unfair and there is much ugliness in the world. But life is nonetheless glorious, to be enjoyed and lived to the fullest extent possible. This I try to do in the time that is left to me. Onward and upward!

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

A Dream

Last night I dreamt of my father. We were expecting him for dinner, but he was late. Just as we decided not to wait for him any longer, I saw him laboriously climbing the stairs to our apartment. “Dad,” I called out to him, “use the elevator!” I guided him down the stairs to the floor below and entered the elevator with him. Inside was an upholstered bench in the Directoire style, a pleasing addition until I noticed that the upholstery was worn and in parts torn.

My father died 34 years ago at the age of 77. I’m now three years older than he was at the time of his death, but of course in dreams as well as in conscious thought he's always older than I. In the first years after his death, when I dreamt of him, it was always with a sense of enormous relief and joy: he wasn’t dead after all! But for at least the past twenty years, there’s been no heightened emotion when he appears in my dreams, for there he has never died; he still exists in all the ordinariness of everyday life.

I don’t belong to a culture that believes that the dream of a dead parent provides a message from the other world. If I did, I might have written “my father came to me in a dream.” He didn’t come to me. I dreamt of him. He had no message. Indeed, he said nothing at all. He was, of course, like the elevator bench, a projection of my perception of myself – old and wearing out. What did the Directoire style represent? It was popular during the French post-revolutionary period of the 1790’s. It suggests, perhaps, the revolution implied by a son becoming older than his father.

After I die, after my siblings die, who will dream of our father? It’s unlikely that our children will dream of him. Instead, they will dream of us.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Flying by Flapping My Arms

The other morning, my wife, who generally looks at the obituary section before she turns to the rest of the Times, read to me from the eight paid notices for Fred Stein, who died at the age of 84. A retired partner in Neuberger Berman, an asset management firm, he began his career by handwriting price quotes on the stock exchange chalk board. He became rich, but what struck my wife and me were the comments of his friends on the occasion of his 80^th birthday. “If anyone who knows Fred were in trouble and could make just one call for help, he would call Fred.” Another said, “the day was always better if one got to spend a part of it with Fred.”

My 80^th birthday is scheduled to arrive in only a few weeks, so it will be too late to earn encomia like those. Fortunately, no party is planned, so no one will have to dissemble. It’s probably already too late to earn such praise for my tombstone. Never mind, long ago I had determined what would be written on my tombstone, were I to have one:

He Lectured in Hebrew

What’s so remarkable about that? It’s remarkable because I had a vocabulary of only a few thousand words. I lectured in what might be called basic Hebrew, but my students, whose English was far better than my Hebrew, preferred fractured Hebrew to beautiful English.

I was forty when we arrived in Jerusalem, expecting to remain for only two years. Still, I needed enough Hebrew for transactions with the grocer, the dry cleaner, the florist, and so forth, so I enrolled in an intensive Hebrew language course. After six weeks, I dropped out so that I could concentrate on my work. After a few months, though, it became clear that my Hebrew was inadequate for even the modest demands placed upon it, so I enrolled in a part-time course. After two years, we decided to prolong our stay, by which time I had been appointed a lecturer at the university, which required that lecturers use Hebrew after they had been in the country for three years. So the summer before I was to begin lecturing in Hebrew I took an intensive summer course.

Even so, I was unprepared to lecture in Hebrew. So for the first semester of lecturing in Hebrew, I would write, for each lecture, an outline in English (I couldn’t read Hebrew fast enough to write it in Hebrew) and then I would rehearse the lecture with a teacher, who corrected me as I went along. Over the appropriate places on the English outline I would write in ink the needed Hebrew term or phrase.

It’s not clear who was more tortured by my first lectures in Hebrew, the students or the lecturer. Sweat would roll down my cheeks as I went along. I felt as if I were trying to fly by flapping my arms, working very hard but not getting off the ground. Every now and then suppressed laughter would ripple around the hall, but I never stopped the lecture to find out what solecism I had committed – it would have taken too much time.

I could prepare my lectures in Hebrew but I couldn’t prepare the students’ questions or comments, which were often – and in the beginning almost always – incomprehensible. I would ask for a paraphrase, and when I didn’t understand that, I would ask for a slow, easy Hebrew paraphrase, and when that didn’t clear up the mystery, an exasperated student would call out an English translation.

One thing I learned by lecturing in Hebrew. What seemed to me to be a reasonable notion when expressed in elevated English, sometimes proved to be nonsense when reduced to simple, uncomplicated language. This was a valuable lesson, one that I wish more social scientists would learn.

Lecturing in Hebrew was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, and it’s a shame that all that effort produced such meager results. Still, I managed to do it, and it seems to me that “He Lectured in Hebrew” wouldn’t be such a bad epitaph, although I must admit I was not entirely serious when I proposed it. “Beloved father, grandfather, uncle, and friend,” the beginning of the first obituary notice for Fred Stein, would be even better, if “husband” and “brother” were added to that list.

2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Epigenetics

My wife is a sociable woman. Usually among the last persons to leave any gathering, she likes to talk to as many people as she can. So when she told me last Friday that we’d be going home directly after the services that evening, I was pleased. The job of unpacking the 99 cartons that had arrived from Jerusalem earlier in the week (a job still largely unfinished) had left us both tired. We needed to maximize our rest.

At last Shabbat evening’s service, as I reported in my Monday's post, our rabbi introduced a new convert to the congregation. “Oh, I must congratulate Karen,” said my wife, as we left the chapel. So after the blessing over wine and bread, my wife talked in turn to Karen and to each of her three children. And as usual, we were among the last to leave the building.

But one should see the possibility of a good outcome from any event that on its face seems unfavorable. There was indeed a good outcome of our leaving later than I had hoped, for I had a chance to talk to Karen's 85-year-old father, who had come with his wife and another daughter all the way from the state of Washington to attend his daughter’s presentation to the congregation.

White haired, blue-eyed, and rosy cheeked, he is the apotheosis of a beautiful old man. He walks with a cane but he is more active than I am. Twenty years ago, he retired from a senior administrative position in one of the national research institutes and then started a new career as a university lecturer. Among the courses he teaches is a graduate course in epigenetics. This is a relatively new field, so perhaps I can be excused for not having heard of it before. But I pushed the right button when I asked him about it, for he is passionately engaged in this field, and he was glad to give me a brief tutorial.

Our DNA is wrapped around a protein called histone, both of which are covered with tags. These tags constitute a second layer of structure, the epigenome, that shuts down some genes and activates others throughout the individual’s life. Whereas our DNA is fixed, our epigenome is flexible, reacting to outside influences, such as diet and stress. Epigenetics, then, is the study of the reactions that switch parts of the genome on and off and the factors that influence these reactions.

Karen’s father seemed most excited about epigenetic inheritance. The embryo’s epigenome is not built entirely from scratch because a small minority of epigenetic tags are passed down from generation to generation. This is an unexpected finding, because until recently it had been thought that the DNA that passes from parent to child is the sole agent of inheritance. So if, for example, starvation causes changes in a person’s epigenome, some of these changes, which regulate the expression of given genes, may be passed on to succeeding generations. The parent’s experiences can influence the expression of genes in the child.

I learned this while each of us was, so to speak, standing on one leg. I would have learned more from him had our conversation not been interrupted by his grandchildren, who were eager to get the old man home. It was good to learn something new. It was even better, indeed inspiring, to see an 85-year-old man so enthusiastic about his work.

2010-2011 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved