Probabilities

In last Thursday’s Science section of the Times, Peter B. Bach, a cancer researcher and physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, wrote about the probabilities of a cancer’s recurring. He and his wife, who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, asked his colleague, a world-renowned expert on breast cancer, what the probabilities of a recurrence would be. One chance in twenty? One chance in fifty? The expert, who knew the statistics as well as anyone, didn't give him a direct answer. He said the answer didn’t matter. The cancer would either recur or it wouldn’t.

When pressed to give an answer – after all, Dr. Bach, himself an expert, could readily find the statistics himself – his colleague said that he would provide the data if the couple would tell him what number would make them decide to act differently. To this they had no answer. No matter how low the probability, Dr. Bach wrote, the couple could not be confident that the cancer would not recur, and no matter how high the probability, the couple would continue living their lives.

Unlike Dr. Bach’s wife, I recently learned that my cancer has returned. This was a surprise, because after a two-month course of radiation ending in December of 2007 – with radiation five times per week and a longer course of hormone therapy - I had assumed that the dragon had been slain for good. Perhaps I had been lulled into complacency by my first experience with cancer, which had been excised in 1991 and had never returned. But if I had known that the dragon had only been wounded and would rise and fight again, would I have acted any differently? Would I have bought a red sports car? Traveled to Machu Picchu? Joined an ashram in Varanasi? No. I would have behaved much as I’ve been acting since the end of my radiation.

Dr. Bach wrote that Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist, convinced himself that he would beat the dismal odds presented by his deadly form of cancer. He told himself that he would be among the rare long-term survivors. And indeed he was. He lived for another 17 years after his diagnosis. Dr. Bach concluded that Gould chose to deceive himself, and I suppose that’s true. Yet during that time Gould lived an active life, continuing to be a productive researcher and science writer. My guess is that Gould would have continued his work even if he hadn’t such an optimistic view of his longevity. Still, his rose-colored assessment may have helped him forget the axe over his head.

As for me, I won’t ask my doctor to tell me the odds for my survival. I either will or I won’t survive this round. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to derive as much experience as possible from every day that’s left. In any case, the older we get, the more likely it becomes that some axe - whether from cancer, from some other disease, from an accident, or from simply wearing out - will fall on us. By now, after all, the string by which that axe is suspended is fraying. So hey, maybe buying a red sports car isn’t such a bad idea. First, though, I’ll have to convince the Department of Motor Vehicles to give me a driver’s license.

Memories

The way you wear your hat / The way you sip your tea / The memory of all that / No they can't take that away from me. George and Ira Gershwin's song has been going through my head for about a week now, ever since I concluded a blog post by stating that memories, it turns out, are the most durable of our possessions. I’ve been wondering if that assertion, as bald as its author, is really true.

First of all, they can take that away from me if I fall a victim to dementia, the chances of which are increasing year by year. But many memories have already fallen away. The year my wife and I spent in Addis Ababa, for example, constituted such a vivid experience that we were convinced we would never forget its details. Yet what I remember more than 40 years later is fragmentary. I recall, for example, a large bougainvillea, brilliantly red against a white wall, seen from the car as we made a hairpin turn on a hilly road. But where was that wall and when did I see it and where was I going? I remember barefoot women carrying jugs of water on their heads on the road outside our home, but I don’t remember the clothes they were wearing or the color or size of the jugs, or even the direction in which they were walking. Nor do I remember when or for how long the young goat – later slaughtered, roasted, and eaten in honor of an important holiday – was tethered in our compound. Was it black, brown, white? So much has blurred. So much has been forgotten.

About twenty years ago, when I was away from home, I bought one of Anthony Trollope’s novels. A great fan of his, I read it with my usual pleasure. When I returned home and put it on the shelf, I found another copy of the novel. Since I’m the only Trollope reader at home, it was clear that I had read the novel once before but that I had had no memory of it the second time around.

Memories fall away and the memories we retain may change. Several years ago, when a good friend, a retired supreme court justice from New South Wales, came to visit, I accompanied him to the New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn so that he might experience a case being heard. The courthouse was on the street where I had lived for several years immediately before my marriage. I had remembered the courthouse as standing across the street from my house and was flabbergasted to find it right next door.

Most of us have had similar experiences. My brother and I sometimes have such wildly divergent memories of youthful occurrences that we might as well have grown up in different households. But just as the courthouse didn’t move itself across the street, my brother and I didn’t live apart during the most formative period of our lives.

I recall a short story that consisted of a woman’s three narrations of the same event, an encounter between her and a man in the field behind her house. When she told the story as a young woman, she was raped. When she told it again as a middle-aged woman, she was seduced. In the final version, told as an old woman, she and the man had been lovers who met by assignation. What was the truth? And was each version equally true to the woman each time she told it?

So if memories are unreliable and if, one by one, they decided to retire, as Billy Collins puts it, to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones, are our memories really our most durable possession as I had so rashly claimed? In defense of my statement, durable doesn’t mean immutable nor does it mean imperishable. Just as a house is no less solid for having changed over time or for being subject to destruction, at least some of our memories are equally substantial, as real to us as the fingers on our hands. I treasure, for example, my memory of my friend the supreme court justice, the Honorable Ronald Cross, especially now that he is no longer alive. My memories of him are real to me – the way he bowed before the New York State judges before taking his seat in the courthouse here, the anecdotes he related, the jokes he told, the little tuft of hair on his left cheekbone, the photograph of him standing straight and tall between two shorter RAF colleagues in front of one of the Spitfires they flew during the Battle of Britain - colleagues who did not survive the war. These memories as tangible to me as the computer on which I’m typing. They've outlasted him and would remain if the courthouse or the freighter on which we first met were demolished tomorrow. No, they can’t take that away from me. At least, not yet.

B-Girl

“Did I ever tell you about my job as a B-girl?” This was our good friend Ruth (I’ve changed her name) last Sunday, as we were schmoozing after a leisurely brunch. Of course we wanted her to tell us the story and she did.

She was 22 at the time, an American working in Israel as one of that country’s top models. She liked the clothes that sometimes came with the job and of course the money, but she found the work stultifying. At dinner with a friend, the second engineer of a vessel bound for Southampton and temporarily docked in Israel, she asked if there were empty staterooms on his ship. When told there was space only in first class, she impulsively bought a ticket and embarked for England the next day.

But she was now penniless, having used all her funds to buy that ticket. Once in London, she knocked on the door of a rooming house and told the proprietor that she needed a room but had no money. Would he trust her? Awed perhaps by her good clothes if not by her good looks, he checked with his wife and together they agreed to take a chance with her. Ruth’s friend gave her some shillings to feed her room’s heater, she pawned some of her good clothes, and she started looking for work.

Her friend had given her a letter of introduction to the head of production at the BBC. The executive was impressed by her looks (at 74 she's still beautiful, so at 22 she must have been a knockout), and by her American accent, which was in demand at the time. “You’re just what we need,” he told her. He’d hire her if she had a work permit. But at that time these were difficult if not impossible for a foreigner to obtain without marrying a British subject. The executive told her he could provide any number of homosexuals who would be happy to marry her as a means for obtaining an American green card. Horrified, she rejected the suggestion. She would marry only for love. In the meantime, she could always work as a waitress.

But just as the BBC would not employ her without a work permit, neither would any of the many restaurants she approached. Her friend, the second engineer, then suggested she apply to an after-hours private club. The first one she entered needed no waitresses but it did need hostesses. Would she be willing to work as a hostess? She thought that she would be asked to show patrons to their table and give them menus. But no, the job required her to sit at the bar and encourage male patrons to buy her drinks - drinks that only appeared to be alcoholic. The club would pay her two shillings for each drink ordered for her and would guarantee her a minimum of 12 pounds a week. This, she knew, from having examined the help-wanted columns, was the salary offered to executive secretaries. Still, she was doubtful about accepting a job that seemed to her disreputable. When she asked her friend for advice, he told her that many female university students accept such work and that no one will expect her to go home with a customer, this last point confirmed by the club.

The first night on the job, a good-looking man came in, sat next to her, and started to speak in what Ruth described as “word salad,” making no sense whatever. After he left, a group of men entered. When one of them sat next to her and asked her if she went to that club often, she said no, this was her first time. She would sit there every day from six in the evening until the early morning, she explained, and went on to say that she would earn two shillings for every drink he ordered for her – not real drinks, she added – and she hoped he would buy her lots of drinks because she needed the money. At this, his mouth opened wide, but he told his friends what she had said and all of them bought her drinks. She was a great success.

Soon, she had a regular clientele. One would come at seven, another at eight, a third at nine, and so forth, with each one complaining about his wife. At first she would offer what she thought to be sensible advice, but she soon understood that they hadn’t come for advice but for a sympathetic listener. After a few weeks, the man who had spoken to her incoherently returned, this time with a young woman on his arm. Ruth made herself scarce around him, but she noticed that this time he was making better if not complete sense.

By now the work had become depressing to Ruth, who had to listen night after night to a series of sad stories. She decided to quit. But before she did, the word salad man returned again, this time alone, and this time he was perfectly comprehensible. He told her that she had been the first person who listened to him after he left the asylum. He knew he hadn’t been making any sense at the time and was grateful to her for listening to him respectfully anyway.

That was not the end of Ruth’s story at the club, but it was the end of her career as a hostess there. The club’s management, by this time probably figuring out that she was not only gorgeous but also smart, offered her the job of straightening out their accounts, a job she accepted. This seemed to her both more respectable and less depressing, but it never yielded the trove of interesting stories that she had accumulated during her work at the club bar.

After listening enthralled by her account - in the interest of brevity I've left out some details, such as those concerning the intensely dislikeable woman who owned the club - I said to Ruth, "I'm tempted to steal your story for my blog." To which Ruth, generous as always, said "Go ahead, take it. It's yours."

Supermoon

Last Saturday night, as we left our synagogue’s Purim celebrations, our good friend Alison Brunell pointed out the full moon. She advised us to take a good look because it would not be so close to the earth for another nineteen years or so. The moon in fact did look larger and brighter than the average full moon. A search on Google informed me that this was a “perigee moon” or “supermoon,” 31,000 kilometers closer to the earth than at its furthest point.

I gazed at the moon with mixed emotions. Of course I enjoyed its beauty and brilliance, but I also felt sad that the next time the moon’s elliptical orbit brought it this close to earth, I would most likely be under it. Even if I were perfectly healthy, it would be foolish to expect to live long enough to see a perigee moon again.

Earlier, after the conclusion of the Purim service, our rabbi, Andrew Bachman, pointed out the oldest active member of our congregation, Irwin E. Meyer, a 92-year-old veteran of the Normandy campaign. Rabbi Bachman compared the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews to the (probably apocryphal) attempt by the ancient Persians to kill all the Jews within their kingdom, a plot initiated by the wicked Haman and foiled by the Jewish Queen Esther and her uncle Mordecai. The story is read aloud – chanted, really - each year at Purim, when Jews celebrate this storied deliverance by merry-making, the exchange of gifts, donations to charity, and blotting out the name of Haman with noisemakers each time it is recited in the course of the ritual narrative. Rabbi Bachman, who spoke with horror of the 75,000 Persians killed by the Jews according to that story, thanked the nonagenarian in our midst for his part in the invasion of Normandy and concluded with the traditional Jewish blessing for an older person, “may you live to 120!” At this, the old man jumped up, raising his arms above his head and crossing them several times, in vigorous nonverbal dissent from that wish.

After the service, we saw him walking home with a firm step. He’s likely to reach an even more advanced age in reasonable possession of his faculties. But it’s understandable that he doesn’t aspire to Guinness Book of Records old age, at which no one is likely to be able to do much more than breathe. I too wouldn’t want to outlive my capacity to enjoy life. As long as pleasure continues to outweigh the pain of lost abilities, I want to continue living. In the unlikely event that I’d still be alive when the next perigree moon arrives, I’d probably be no more than a dessicated remnant, almost lifeless in a wheelchair, like so many extremely old people I’ve seen in institutions.

I’ve had many chances to view perigree moons before this one, but if I ever saw them, I didn’t know what I was looking at and therefore couldn't fully appreciate them. I had never heard of them until last Saturday night. But I’m happy to have seen and appreciated at least one. That I almost certainly won’t see another made that one sighting memorable. It’s not often that we know when we’re experiencing something for the last time.

A House and its Memories

In the Home section of Thursday’s Times, the lead article concerned a remarkable African-American family and their stately home in Croton-on-Hudson, which they bought in 1966. Standing on a hill overlooking the Hudson, the thirty-plus room mansion solved the problem of housing a widowed mother, five of her eight adult children, and a young grandson. The siblings, none of whom had married except for their divorced sister (the mother of the boy), all educated and, according to the Times, all strong-minded and opinionated, pooled their resources to buy the place, with its nearly twenty acres and swimming pool. Fortunately, all were enthusiastic gardeners, and one of the brothers was mechanically gifted and able to help keep the building in good shape. All the adults adored the child, and all helped to bring him up.

The child, now 47, is James Moorhead, an architect with offices in Seattle and New York. Three years ago he moved back into the house with his wife, Pattie McCluskey, a marketing director, and their four-year-old daughter, Oona, to care for his mother and two surviving aunts. A second daughter was born to the couple two years later. The house is so large that the girls get about with the aid of scooters. The Times pictured them on scooters in the enormous formal dining room.

The last sibling died in January, confronting Mr. Moorhead and Ms. McCluskey with the problem of what to do with the house. “Even if money weren’t an issue,” Mr. Moorhead said (the tax bill is $45,000 a year), “a house like this has to be your life, and I’m not sure that’s what we want.” So should the couple improve the house, which is structurally sound, or sell it? If they sell it, what should they do with the family documents and the hundreds of composition books in which his grandmother kept a daily journal? “Can you keep the memories,” asks the Times, “if you get rid of the house?”

I thought the question strange, for in my opinion the memories persist even if you’ve lost all your family’s documents and furnishings and even if the property has long passed out of your hands. My parents bought their only house in 1939. It was my permanent address from the age of nine, when I entered fourth grade, until I went to work for Abraham & Straus in 1958, a freshly-minted MBA, when I was twenty-eight. That's only nineteen years in all, and during many of those years I was away either at college or in the army or in graduate school. My father, widowed in 1951, continued to live in the house long after his children had left it, moving away only in the last year of his life. The house was sold after he died in 1977.

Whenever I asked him why he continued to live in that house – not as grand as the mansion in Croton-on-Hudson but a large house nonetheless – he would answer that he was keeping it for his children. At the time, I didn't understand his answer. After all, he could put us up at the Ritz-Carlton when we came for a visit for less than what it cost him to maintain the house. It was only later that I understood my emotional attachment to the house and the wrench I felt when it was sold.

When he moved away to live in the guesthouse on my brother and sister-in-law’s farm, he took some of his furniture, papers, books, and memorabilia with him. The moving truck suffered a fire, however, and much of what he sent was lost. A few items from the house, though, remain. When we were visiting my brother and his wife recently, I noticed a pewter tray that I remembered from my childhood and the sight of it made me glad. A cream-colored, bear-shaped cookie container and an egg-boiling gadget that my sister salvaged from our old home make me similarly happy whenever I see them. But I don’t need those relics to remind me of that house or my life in it.

That house still inhabits my dreams and I suppose it will continue to do so as long as I dream. In those dreams set in my old home, I’m never a child, nor do my parents or siblings ever appear in it. Instead, I’m carrying on with my life as usual, but my life is there in that old house, not in any of my other homes, not even our home in Jerusalem which we occupied for 32 years, more than twice as long as I lived in my childhood home. But that childhood home is in some ways profoundly home.

Of course, if Mr. Moorhead and his wife decide to sell their house, they’ll have a much greater problem than most children have when disposing of their deceased parents’ belongings. They'll have to consider the belongings and papers of many more adults. Still, it’s hard for me to believe that if the house is sold, the memories will go with it. Mr. Moorhouse is unlikely ever to forget that house or the experience of growing up in it. Memories, it turns out, are the most durable of our possessions.

The Good Don't Die Young

Just about everyone hopes to live a long and healthy life, so the Longevity Study: surprising discoveries for health and long life from the landmark eight-decade study, by Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, published about two weeks ago by the Hudson Street Press of the Penguin Group, is likely to have a healthy sale and a long shelf life.

The “landmark” research to which the title refers is a long-term study of intellectually gifted children begun by Lewis Terman in 1921. Terman, an educational psychologist at Stanford University, best known as the author of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test and the father of the term IQ, hoped to dispel the notion that intellectually gifted children are maladjusted misfits and that the popular saying “early ripe, early rot” was wrong. He enrolled in his study more than 1,500 bright children, mainly from white, urban, educated, middle-class families, principally from California, who were about 10 years old in 1921, and indeed he found that as a group they were healthier and better adjusted socially than other children.

Not content with his initial findings, Terman followed his sample until he died in 1956, periodically gathering data from them. The data are presented in the five-volume Genetic Studies of Genius. The fifth volume (1959), a 35-year follow-up, completed after Terman’s death, found that the participants in the study were in generally good health and exhibited normal personalities. Most of them had succeeded academically and socially at school and were generally successful in their careers, and their divorce rate was lower than of the general population. However, nine years later, a study by one of Terman’s associates compared the 100 most successful and 100 least successful men in the sample, with success defined in terms of the intellectual gifts required by their occupations, and found no difference in the average IQ of the two subgroups.

Friedman and Leslie undertook the laborious job of finding the death certificates of those in the sample – by now most have died – and they then determined what characteristics were related to longevity. It was of interest to discover that women in the study who reported a higher frequency of orgasm during intercourse tended to live longer than their less sexually fulfilled sisters. Alas, there was no similar effect for men, but this can probably be explained by the fact that most men who engage in sexual intercourse reach orgasm. When there’s little variability, there's little correlation to be found.

The good, it turns out, do not die young. The variable most strongly related to longevity was conscientiousness, marked by being “thrifty, persistent, detail-oriented, and responsible.” Oh dear, the dull plodders among us will outlive the really interesting people. If we survive to extreme old age, will those of our contemporaries who are still compos mentis be worth talking to? Let us cultivate some amusing younger friends.

Friedman and Leslie’s findings have to be taken with a liberal dose of salt for several reasons. First, in any study, some correlations will be large simply by chance. Second, the children sampled were scarcely typical Americans, although they might well correspond to the readers of this blog. Third, Terman intervened in the lives of his respondents, writing them letters of recommendation, for example, or helping some get into Stanford University, which probably biased his results.

Still, the two findings I’ve noted here are plausible. Healthier women are probably more able to achieve orgasm in the first place, and happy marriages, to which sexual compatibility contributes, promotes better health. The conscientious are probably more likely to pay attention to their health, going for regular physical check-ups and following their doctors’ orders, than the less conscientious. So, toiling tortoises among you, take heart. It’s more likely that you will outlive the carefree hares.

Custodian

A few days ago, my wife gave me a yellow gold ring to replace the white gold wedding band that I had worn for almost 48 years but lost in January. The ring she gave me belonged to Jacob Bloom, her great grandfather. It’s a strange feeling to be wearing another man’s ring. I don’t suppose he would object to my wearing it, since he has no use for it now, although he might wish that one of his descendants was wearing it instead of the husband of one of them. Still, perhaps he would be glad to know that just about every time I look at it I think of him.

But I have to imagine what he was like, for we know little about him. He was born in Louisville, in 1856 or 1857, the son of Nathan Bloom, who had immigrated from Bavaria in the early 1840s, and Rosina Kling, who was born in Lorraine. We know much more about the father than the son, for Nathan Bloom became the head of one of the greatest wholesale dry goods houses in the South, operating in all the southern states as well as in Ohio and Indiana. A philanthropist who contributed greatly to Louisville causes, he's memorialized there by a street named after him. One of his sons graduated from Yale and became a distinguished physician.

But his son Jacob seems not to have led as notable a career. He was known as Colonel Bloom, but as far as we know, he never served in the military. We assume that he was a Kentucky colonel, an honor awarded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky for outstanding service to the state or the nation. Whatever his service was, it's unknown to my wife. I suspect the title was a reward for a generous campaign contribution, but this is an ungenerous thought and I hope untrue.

He and his bride, Sallie Thurnauer, who was born in 1858 in Cincinnati, lived neither in Louisville nor Cincinnati but in New York, where he devoted himself to his investments. This was a time when the stock market was largely unregulated and more speculative than it is today, and his financial reverses forced his wife, who also came from a rich German Jewish family, to go to work. She eventually became the much-admired principal of The Hebrew Technical School for Girls, one of the charities established by the well-established New York German Jewish community for the benefit of the poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had come after them. Still, the Blooms had come down in the world. Whereas her parents could afford to send her to Vassar, she and her husband could not manage such a college for their own child, my wife's grandmother, who went to what is now New York's Hunter College.

His ring, a simple, wide gold band, looks wonderful even on my small hand. His hand must have been larger than mine, though, because it slips off the ring finger of my left hand. I asked a jeweler to insert something to secure it, but she said the only way to make it fit was to "size" it, i.e. reduce its size. I'm not willing to alter the ring. Somehow I feel it's not mine but the possession of my (and Jacob Bloom's) descendants. So I wear it on the larger ring finger of my right hand, where it is reasonably secure. I’m determined to preserve this ring if only as a keepsake for a man I never met. It’s sobering to reflect that after a few generations my descendants will know as little about me as my wife knows about her great grandfather.

I hope that my great grandchildren will inherit this ring, just as my wife did. They will view the legend inscribed inside, S. T. to J. N. B July 11^th 1881, and wonder who they were. They won’t ever know that another ancestor wore it for a while, and that he served as a custodian for what would pass down to them.

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Last Monday we saw a pre-opening performance of the musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Based on the 1994 Australian film of the same name, which was written and directed by Stephen Elliott, the story relates the adventures of two young drag queens and a former drag queen, now a transsexual woman, who travel from Sydney to Alice Springs, in the heart of the Australian Outback, in a bus that they’ve named Priscilla. In the film, the three principals lip-sync pop classics, but in the musical they actually sing the songs, also pop classics, only some of which, however, were in the original version.

In the musical, co-written by Stephen Elliott and Allan Scott, the story provides a thin excuse for numerous extravagant song and dance numbers played in High Camp style, with costumes more outrageous (and much funnier) than even those of the most over the top Ziegfeld Follies production. But whereas the Follies provided a showcase for feminine sex appeal, the musical displays the sculpted bodies of young beefcake.

The film was memorable for its sympathetic portrayal of LGBTs as well as for the remarkable performance of Terrance Stamp, who played Bernadette, the middle-aged transsexual. He brought a depth to her character that made her the heart of the film. That he could do so was a tribute not only to his ability as an actor but also to the script. It gave him the chance to shine. In the musical, the script does not give the three principals such an opportunity. They produce one-liners and provide excuses for elaborate song and dance routines, but their characters are much thinner and less believable than in the film. It doesn’t matter, though, because the song and dance numbers are such great fun. The musical is an amusing spectacle from start to finish. That is enough of an achievement. If you expect believable characters as well, you’ll be disappointed.

The film was criticized for its portrayal of a mail-order Filipina bride, who, it was charged, embodied the worst national stereotype. As in the film, her musical counterpart shoots ping-pong balls from her vagina, but the musical’s character is so extravagant and the situation in which she finds herself so ridiculous that it’s doubtful that anyone could take her seriously enough to be offended.

That’s probably also true of one of the principals, the obnoxious young drag queen, whose flamboyant flouncing is not likely to reinforce anti-gay sentiment because it's hard to believe he represents a real person. But perhaps it's of no consequence whether the character is believable or not. When a majority of Americans can view same-sex marriage as acceptable, as is the case today, the civil rights of LGBTs in America, while far from assured, are more secure than they once were. The civil rights of LGBTs constitute perhaps the last of the great civil rights causes in America. Progress towards that goal has been surprisingly rapid during the past ten or twenty years, but there is still much prejudice to be overcome. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert won’t help in that regard, but why expect it to do more than entertain us? It does that brilliantly.

Ibo Magnificence

Our hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey was the site of a large wedding last Saturday night. Most of the guests were members of the Ibo community of Greater New York. The community, which originated in southeastern Nigeria, has been here for some time, perhaps refugees from the Biafran War (1967-1970). We would have known nothing about the wedding were it not for the spectacular costumes that the older guests wore.

As we waited in the lobby for the arrival of friends with whom we were going out to dinner, we saw the guests drift into the hotel, in twos and fours. Those who came early waited in the lobby for the doors of the ballroom to open, some sitting down, others standing, all in conversation. They looked so magnificent that we dropped all pretense of politeness and simply stared at them.

The women wore colorful blouses with puffed sleeves and long skirts, each in a different pattern but whose colors were coordinated and whose trims were often the same. Their colors were also coordinated with their hats, which were the most spectacular component of their costume. These were constructed from what appeared to be a single bolt of richly ornamented brocade. It formed two or three solid-color bands around the temple that served as a foundation for an irregular eruption of colorful fabric above, protruding several inches on either side of the head and as much as a nine inches above it. The lobby seemed to be the landing place for great tropical birds that had flown north instead of south, their navigational system turned off course by 180 degrees.

Most of these ladies were blessed with what Alexander McCall Smith’s Motswana heroine Mma Precious Ramotswe would call a “traditional African build,” and their costumes flattered their amplitude far more than would the contemporary costumes that their daughters, the first generation born in America, wore. The younger generation was indistinguishable in its dress from that of other American young women in attendance at a wedding, with plenty of exposed flesh. They will probably never learn the intricate art of preparing the elaborate headdresses worn by their mothers and grandmothers. It will be a shame when that art disappears from America.

The men’s costumes were also colorful if not so magnificent as that of their female partners. They wore long tunics over trousers, both of different color-coordinated patterns. Many wore little pillbox hats as well. Again, these costumes were the province of the older generation. The young men looked like young men everywhere.

When we returned from dinner, we saw many of the guests sitting in the lobby – perhaps seeking refuge from the pounding music of the ballroom. My intrepid wife approached one pair of ladies and asked them where they were from. That’s when we found out that they were Ibo and that their community had been in America for some time. They explained that they prepared their own hats and implied that it was a vanishing skill. They also said that only the family of the members of the wedding were entitled to wear green, the color of these ladies’ headdresses. My wife asked how to say congratulations in Ibo, and when told, she congratulated them on their appearance. What a pity it will probably disappear along with them.

I have traveled extensively in Asia, Europe, and Africa, but I’ve never seen such magnificent costumes in the prosaic setting of a hotel lobby. How good it is to know that at my stage of development, having already seen so much, I can still find something new to delight me.

Micah Gartenberg

For the last twenty years or so, I’ve rarely attended synagogue services and then only to mark a rite of passage. Last Shabbat was one such occasion, when Micah Gartenberg became a bar mitzvah, literally, a son of the commandment. Micah, thirteen years old, read from the weekly Torah and haftarah portions and led much of the synagogue service as well. He has taken upon himself an adult Jew’s responsibilities and obligations.

In his unusually clear talk to the congregation, Micah acknowledged that he needn’t have assumed this role. A curious, active, and handsome lad, he thought a long time, he said, before deciding not only that he wanted to please his parents but also that he wanted to be a part of the Jewish community. He wanted, in other words, to join the stream of those who had gone before him and those who will come after. Once he had committed himself, he studied the Shabbat prayers and that week’s biblical portions with a full heart. His accent in Hebrew was excellent and his reading was fluent. His parents and grandparents had every right to be proud of him. Rabbi Bennett Miller described him in terms of the Hebrew word chen or grace, an apt description because Micah demonstrates an unforced concern and liking for others and an unconscious warmth and charm that draws people to him.

His parents and grandparents were not the only ones who were moved by this occasion. The community, members of the Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple in New Brunswick, New Jersey, were also touched. They had seen him grow from infancy through boyhood before becoming bar mitzvah, one of them. Micah’s performance moved me as well. When he said he wanted to be a part of the Jewish community, I realized that I had been wrong to separate myself from it.

I had long stopped attending synagogue services since I couldn’t say the prayers without feeling hypocritical. I was unable to praise a deity whose benevolence was at best questionable and in whom, at any rate, I didn’t believe. But as Micah read the prayers, I realized that one needn’t give a literal interpretation to the Divinity in order for the prayers to be meaningful. The origin of the Big Bang is a mystery, but saying that God caused it is simply naming a mystery, not explaining it. Still, the power unleashed by that primal explosion is itself worthy of awe and reverence, for the molecules that formed the stars and set the planets in their course formed us as well. My wife, of course, has been telling me that for years, but somehow I was unable to accept her point of view until last Shabbat, when Micah Gartenberg led the prayers and read from the weekly portions.

As I watched the members of the congregation embrace him and his parents, warmly congratulating them, it was clear that such support is a result of his family's full participation in the community. In Jerusalem, our many friends, mainly English-speaking immigrants like us, provided that support for me. That support is missing now, but it was only when I saw the warmth of Anshe Emeth’s response to Micah’s call to the Torah did I realize how much I missed it.

As the realization finally penetrated that I could give a metaphorical meaning to the prayers, I found myself, for the first time in twenty years, joining a congregation in the responsive reading. As I did so, I resolved to become a more active member of our congregation in Brooklyn, Beth Elohim. Finding metaphor where perhaps none was intended seems a small price to pay for the fellowship and support that regular synagogue attendance can provide- even to an atheist.

On Receiving a Kindle

Recently my brother and his wife gave my wife and me two Kindles, a white one for her and a black one for me. No, it was neither my wife's birthday nor mine, nor was it our anniversary, all of which are months away. There was absolutely no reason to give us these presents except as an expression of love. “Why wait to enjoy something?” my brother asked me, when I called to thank them for their gift. “Now’s the time!” He and his wife were pleased with their recently acquired Kindles and they assumed that we would feel the same way.

In fact the gifts couldn’t have arrived at a better time. The several cartons of books that were clearly marked as destined for our temporary quarters were mistakenly shipped into storage by the otherwise estimable moving company that transported our belonging. It was a complicated move involving six different destinations, so it's remarkable that they made only one mistake. Still, here we are without any of the books my wife had ordered for the various book clubs to which we belong. No problem! Now we can download them onto our Kindles. And as my brother pointed out, if we register both of them on the same account, each of us can download the other’s books without additional charge.

We were grateful to our beneficent siblings. Alas, they didn’t know what technological phobias lurk in their brother’s soul. It was not always that way. I spent my first graduate school summer calculating correlation coefficients for Professor Robert L. Thorndike. I used a huge Burroughs calculating machine in which you entered the paired values for A and B. The machine then gave you the components from which you could calculate the coefficient. You had to calculate each coefficient twice to make sure you hadn’t made an error in entering the values. As I recall, it took about a half hour to compute a coefficient with a sample of only 30 cases. Today, this looks as antiquated as washing clothes on a washboard, but at the time, it was considered the latest thing. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen a washboard.)

I was thrilled, a few years later, when the university made available to the graduate students an electronic computer. You entered the data on punched cards, one or more per case, submitted the stack of cards to the computer center, and picked up the results the next day. This was a big improvement, a great saving of time, and made it possible to process large batches of data. With the aid of punched cards, I analyzed the data for my doctoral dissertation. Punched cards! Again, this is ancient history but at the time the technology seemed miraculous, and I was proud to be using this innovation.

In the 1980s, my friend and colleague Dov Spolsky and I were the first in Jerusalem to purchase IBM personal computers. These were laughably weak compared to today’s personal computers but at the time they seemed as marvelous as punched cards did a generation before. In the terms employed by researchers of the spread of innovation, Dov and I were early adopters. As personal computers became ever more powerful and cheaper, I bought successively more sophisticated ones until finally I stopped. I found myself resisting innovations. I was late to adopt a router, for example, a device that permits my wife and me to access the internet at the same time, although the usefulness of a router was clear to me long before we adopted one.

I’ve gone from being an early adopter to a late adopter and am now on the road to becoming a non-adopter. So I look at my new Kindle with mixed emotions. I’m convinced I will like its convenience, but first I have to learn how to use it. I know this won’t be hard. After all, Amazon couldn’t have sold millions of the device if it were difficult to operate. I will eventually overcome my inertia, register the device, download the next book for my book club, and be enchanted with the result. But in the meantime, I have to struggle with the impulse to avoid yet another innovation, yet another complication to my life.

Yes, it’s old age that’s operating here, but it's not what you're thinking. I’m not so lost to senescence that I can’t learn something new (who is that snickering in the back row?). No, it’s not the inability to operate innovations that’s at work here. Rather it’s a desire to simplify my life. This desire is, I think, a concomitant of old age, although I may have reached this impulse earlier than most of my age mates. I’m no longer in the business of accumulation and acquisition. Instead I want to rid myself of inessential material goods and unnecessary complications. My new Kindle will be a convenience, but there’s no denying that it adds one more possession and one more complication to my life at a time when I’m doing my best to simplify it. Still, if you think I'll give it away or leave it unused on a shelf, you're wrong. I will use it with pleasure and gratitude. Tomorrow.

Schedules

Whenever I felt I wasn't accomplishing enough in a day, during my years of employment and several years after that, I would make a schedule. It would run from six in the morning until six in the evening, broken up into fifteen minute intervals. Exercise, wash, breakfast, walk, read such and such, write such and such, etc. all through the day, with even nap times specified. The exercise of making the schedule was exhilarating. Just think of what I would accomplish! How efficient and productive I would be! After that, it was all downhill: generally it was a miracle if I kept the schedule for more than two days.

Life and my own procrastination had a way of intervening. Because we lived in Jerusalem's center of town, those of our friends who had come downtown would sometimes drop in unexpectedly. I was usually delighted to see them. Naturally we had to have a cup of coffee together, and not ordinary coffee either, but the kind that requires extra time to brew. And just as I was about to sit down at my desk, my children would call. I’d be thrilled to hear from them and of course I couldn’t confine my conversation to them but would want to talk to their children too. After ending the call, I’d notice the newspaper was still in the front hall instead of the sitting room, where it belonged.. I’d stand up while reading it, pretending that I wasn’t reading it at all but simply taking it to its proper place. And when the mail arrived I couldn’t wait for the evening to learn if I’d won second prize in a beauty contest but had to look at it right away, and if any personal letters had arrived – quaint survivals from another age – I had to read them immediately. Finally, my rear end would meet the chair at my desk and I would start to work. But then my spouse would enter my sanctum with an urgent query or request. When she left my office I’d notice a smudge on the window and I couldn’t wait for the housekeeper to wipe it off – she wouldn’t come for a day or two – so I’d search for a rag. When I’d removed the smudge I’d realize that my pencils must be sharpened, and after I’d sharpened my pencils, the washing machine would complete its final cycle and demand that I empty it immediately. After I’d done all that I needed to fortify myself. I'd go to the refrigerator and take out an apple. But of course I couldn’t eat it at my desk – I might spill a drop of juice on my computer – so I’d take it onto the balcony and eat it in the sun until I’d notice a few plants in urgent need of water. And so the morning would pass and I’d have written a single paragraph.

How my life has changed since my days of making schedules. First of all, we no longer live in Jerusalem’s center of town but in Brooklyn. Here, no matter where you live, your friends generally don’t drop in unannounced. We no longer have a balcony on which I can tend my beloved plants instead of working on whatever it is that demands my attention. But most important, I no longer make schedules at all. I have less to do and less pressure to do the little that I’m doing. For the tasks that will take a long time but that are not urgent, say winnowing my files, I allot fifteen or twenty minutes a day. (It’s amazing what one can accomplish in that time, if you do it every day.) For other matters, like the annual collection of material for the preparations of our tax returns, I simply keep working on the task until it’s done.

Yes, I no longer write schedules. They were, after all, exercises in futility, attempts to control the uncontrollable. Yet I miss them. Their preparation made me feel virtuous and offered a bewitching prospect of efficiency and productivity. And, perhaps, more to the point, they gave me guilty pleasure in flouting them.

Old Old Age

The Times published two disquieting articles recently. The first was Jane Brody’s Personal Health column, published last Thursday. She wrote about the dual problem of caring for patients with multiple chronic diseases – conditions that require continuing care - and preventing those diseases in the first place. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, two-thirds of Americans over 65 have at least two chronic diseases as do three-fourths of those over 80.

The prevalence of multiple chronic diseases among the elderly is well known. What was disquieting was the statement by Dr. Mary E. Tinetti, a geriatrician at Yale, whom Brody quotes, that “patients with multiple conditions should always be asked what their goals are: to live as long as possible, to be as functional as possible or to be as free from symptoms as possible? There’s always a trade-off. You can’t have it all.” When the patient suffers from multiple conditions, Dr. Tinetti continued, a treatment that’s effective for one condition might make another condition worse. The patient’s primary care doctor must coordinate the treatments prescribed by various specialists in order to create a program that will best meet the patient’s goal.

Of course I want to live as long as possible but at the same time I want to be as functional and as symptom free as possible. I want it all, in other words, but now I’m told I can’t have it all. I have to choose. Before I had time to consider what choice I would make, I read a review, in Sunday’s Times, of Susan Jacoby’s Never Say Die: the myth and marketing of the new old age. According to the review, it is a jeremiad against the public’s ignorance about the vicissitudes of “old old age” - those 85 and older. “We might not like to think,” writes the reviewer, Ted C. Fishman, “that poverty, social isolation, crippling pain, dementia and loss of autonomy are likely to come calling the longer we live, but it’s a fact.” We are deluded, therefore, if we believe that we're likely to remain physically vigorous and socially active in extreme old age. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. My spouse’s second cousin lamented, at the age of 100, that she had to choose between swimming and walking when she lunched with friends, since she could no longer do all three on the same day. We would have to be extraordinarily fortunate to be as functional as she was during the whole of a very long life.

“At 85 or 90,” writes Jacoby, “whatever satisfactions still lie ahead – only a fool or someone who has led an extraordinarily unhappy life can imagine that the best years are still to come.” With this in mind, the goal of living as long as possible no longer seems so attractive to me. Of the other two goals, being as symptom free as possible and as functional as possible, I’d choose the latter. “Old age is not for sissies,” said my spouse’s centenarian cousin more than once.