The Gideon International and Sex Films

Recently I accepted what I thought was a pamphlet from a middle-aged, well dressed man on Willoughby Street. Whatever he was distributing, he was clearly doing so as a volunteer, rather than as paid employee, one of the army of the poor who hand out flyers advertising fast-food restaurants or retail outlets selling discounted designer clothing. He was giving away, it turns out, a small, green and white, hard cover book, entitled New Testament Psalms & Proverbs. I wondered if the omission of the comma was deliberate - the title should have read New Testament, Psalms & Proverbs - but I decided it was simple carelessness, after another man, distributing the book further down the street, called out to me, “Bible, sir?”

This bible was published and is being distributed by The Gideons International, “an association of Christian business and professional men, banded together in more than 185 countries for fellowship and service.” They’re the folks who place bibles in your hotel room, taking up space in your bedside table.

Will the distribution of these bibles change the attitudes or behavior of those who read them?Will they comfort, console, encourage, or convert? I’m reminded of a lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences that I attended years ago. It concerned a program to educate doctors in training about the varieties of sexual experience, so that later they wouldn't be shocked by what they found in their practices. We saw some of the short films that were shown to them: men with women, men with men, and women with women, some indoors, others outdoors, all the participants young, lusty, and beautiful, illustrating, among other things, some exotic uses of the body's orifices. At the conclusion of the lecture, one member of the audience asked the presenter about the effectiveness of the program. The lecturer said it was effective but it soon became clear that he had no hard evidence to support this view. In that high temple of the social sciences, of course, such a stance was heresy, and the members of the audience let him know it.

The Gideons International is probably much like that lecturer, believing in the effectiveness of its efforts without much evidence other than anecdotal. The society claims, based on hotel industry sources, that a quarter of hotel guests read the bible in their rooms, and the society’s website provides a handful of testimonies from men and women who were helped by reading a Gideon bible. But of the almost 79 million copies distributed from June 2010 to May 2011, how many people have been changed by reading them? To be fair, it would be hard to find out.

In a previous post, I wrote that missionaries are murderers of souls. Indeed, one meaning of Gideon is destroyer. I haven’t changed my mind, but in this case I don’t think there will be many murders on Willoughby Street. The print in the book these men were distributing is so small, few are likely to make a serious effort to read it. Chances are that readers are already Christians, at least nominally so, baptized at birth or as a child. I would be surprised if the efforts of these conscientious Gideons resulted in a single conversion of a non-Christian passing by. Still, they would probably consider helping lapsed Christians return to the fold as a worthy objective. Whether these bibles will do even that is an open question. It seems that the Gideons’ belief in the efficacy of their work is no less a matter of faith than their belief in the supernatural.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Mans Journal All rights reserved

Yellow Irises

My friend Nancy Halpern and her colleague Jane Magee are, among other things, the town gardeners of Natick, Massachusetts, responsible for the town’s public gardens. Last fall, they helped select and then plant a tree in memory of Betty Fancy, who had devoted herself to Natick Fair Housing, an organization that helped low-income families find housing in Natick. The tree they selected was a Kousa dogwood, whose large, white, showy blossoms brighten the spring. When it turned out that the tree would cost more than the memorial organizing committee had planned to spend, one of its members, Bob Hickman, offered to make up the difference.

Recently, he told Nancy that he and his wife were digging up some yellow irises in their garden and asked Nancy if the town would like them. Nancy was happy to accept the gift on behalf of the town. The Hickmans dug up the irises – about 250 plants – and put them into their garage, where, covered with dirt, they remained until it was time to plant them.

On the day before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Nancy felt ill at ease. She saw two possible activities for herself the next day, and neither one was attractive. She could sit in front of the television, watch memorials to the catastrophe, and feel depressed, or she could plant the irises, which would be a lot of work. Undecided about what to do, she began reading the edition of The New Yorker magazine devoted to 9/11.

In the second Talk of the Town piece, by Ian Frazier, she read about a beloved bus driver, Salvatore Siano, who, ten years ago en route for Manhattan, succeeded in turning his bus around before reaching the Lincoln Tunnel, which had been closed. He had seen smoke rising from lower Manhattan, and another driver had told him about the crash into the North Tower. He retraced his route, dropping off passengers along the way, returning tickets or making refunds.

Retired now, he recently talked to a "fan-passenger," telling him about another former passenger, a man who perished on 9/11. “He was such a pleasant human being. A man about my height, wore glasses. I had seen him just the week before.” This man's obituary mentioned that he worked in homeless shelters as a volunteer, often sleeping there to experience their conditions. His name was Howard L. Kestenbaum.

That name electrified Nancy, for she knows his brother. The next day she would plant the 250 yellow irises in memory of Mr. Kestenbaum. It would be a second memorial in the Natick public gardens for a person concerned with the housing plight of the poor, although the only one who would know it was for him was Nancy. The task did not feel like drudgery, for it was infused by a purpose even higher than that of making a town garden more beautiful. We're all linked to one another, even if the links are not always apparent. When Nancy heard the bell toll, she knew it was for her.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved

A Summer Home

When I was 13 or 14, my mother, along with two of her sisters, bought a large, gray, shingled house in southern Maine, a few minutes walk from the sea. The house, which sat in a copse of firs and maples, included three or four bedrooms, plus a long studio that stretched across one side of the house. In that studio, seven bunks were set up, one for each cousin, in order, as I recall, of seniority. As the oldest cousin, I slept at the end nearest the door.

We children went to summer camps, so our time at the house was limited to a week or two after school ended and a week or two before it began again. But one October, my mother took me and my brother and sister out of school and drove us all to the house, where we spent the next two weeks. At the time I didn’t understand her motivation, but now I think it must have been a reaction to her diagnosis of metastasized breast cancer. She wanted to spend a few peaceful weeks alone with her children.

The foliage, of course, was gorgeous then, especially that of the maples in front of our house. We took long drives, usually north, to look at the splendid coloring. As she drove, Mother would amuse us by humming a tune and then asking us to identify it. She was a woman of many virtues but the ability to hold a tune, even in a basket, was not one of them. Any tune that she attempted to sing, even “Three Blind Mice,” meandered uncertainly through several keys. It was a game that never failed to make us laugh.

Would it have been better had I known at the time she would be dead in just a few years? Surely she knew.

After she died, my father sold his share in the house to his two sisters-in-law and finally one sister owned it outright. She left it to her three sons, one of whom bought the shares of his brothers. He kept the house as a country retreat, finally selling it this year when he planned to move his permanent home from the East Coast to the Midwest. I’m glad for him, for it was a late romance which prompted him, at the age of 75, to move, but I’m sorry to see the house pass out of the family.

He was kind enough to invite my wife and me to spend a weekend with him there a few years ago. The air was as crisp, the water as cold, the views as spectacular as I had remembered them, although the area had become considerably more manicured, transmogrified into a northern Hamptons. But then I’ve changed too. And if I’m not more manicured now than I was when I lived there for a few weeks each summer, at least I no longer have pimples.

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

Mychal's Prayer

The other day, when my wife came home from the hairdresser, she showed me a card. On one side was a color photograph of a Franciscan priest, dressed in a dark brown habit, a white rope around his waist, standing on a beach looking out to sea. The priest was Mychal Judge, the chaplain for the New York City Fire Department at the time of the 9/11 attack.

When he heard that the twin towers had been hit, he rushed to the scene and administered last rites to those lying on the street. He then entered the lobby of the North Tower, where he helped the injured and offered prayers. When the South Tower collapsed, debris flew through the North Tower lobby and killed him along with others. He was not the first to die that morning, but he was the first victim brought to the coroner and thus became the first certified victim of the attack, victim 0001.

“Even before his death, “ reports the Wikipedia article about him, “many considered Father Mychal Judge to be a living saint for his extraordinary works of charity and his deep spirituality.” The article quoted Father John McNeil, his former spiritual director, who said “We knew we were dealing with someone directly in line with God." The breakaway Orthodox Catholic Church of America has declared him a saint.

My wife found a pile of cards with Judge’s photograph next to her hairdresser’s cash register. On the back of the card she found a poem. Titled “Mychal’s Prayer,” it reads as follows: “Lord, take me where you want me to go. Let me meet who you want me to meet. Tell me what you want me to say and keep me out of your way.”

With no belief in a divinity that presides over the universe or pays the slightest attention to any of us, I was surprised by how much the prayer moved me. It packs a maximum punch with a minimum of means, employing only one-syllable words and a repeated grammatical structure. With this poetic prayer, the believer asks to be an instrument of the Divine will.

As for me, I interpret the prayer as a call to follow the dictates of what in Hebrew is called yetzer hatov, the impulse for good, and to resist yetzer hara, the impulse for evil. The prayer calls on me to follow a set of ideals that are embodied by the Jewish spiritual tradition of mussar, such as humility, compassion, honor, simplicity, and generosity. “Keep me out of your way” represents the need to resist my own laziness, timidity, and selfishness, traits that encourage me to ignore these ideals or rationalize them away. If these ideals are not universal, they ought to be. Just as you don't have to be Jewish to like Levy's rye bread, in the words of the old advertising campaign, you don't have to be Jewish to aspire to these ideals. Mychal Judge’s life represented them to the highest degree.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved

Handyman

The other day a handyman came to our temporary apartment to fix several problems that emerged just at the time we’re preparing to leave: the bathtub wasn’t draining properly, the lever that turns on the shower wasn’t engaging the mechanism, the kitchen faucet was dripping, the freezer’s temperature refused to stay low, the handle on the bathroom door was loose, and the wall next to the bathtub was wet and its paint flaking.

There are 250 flats in this residential tower and there’s only one handyman for all of them, so we were glad that our landlords were able to send him here on very short notice. He’s a tall, affable man of middle age, whose manner displays competence and confidence, and rightly so, for except for the wet wall, which must first dry, he dispatched all of the problems in no more than 15 minutes.

He showed me how to fix the loose door handle with the use of a hex key or Allen wrench, an implement not in my toolbox but will be from now on. The repair wasn’t hard to do, once you know how to do it. Nor did the other problems require an advanced degree. You learn by doing. Perhaps he began by watching his father make repairs. I’m sorry I didn’t ask him about it.

Nobody’s perfect, of course, not even me, so I suppose I shouldn’t feel so bad that I’m all thumbs when it comes to making a repair. I can change a light bulb. I can hammer picture hooks into a wall. I can even attach a new plug to an applicance's electrical cord. But beyond these elementary activities, I’m at a loss.

My mother used to say that a woman admires a man who can fix things. I wondered at the time if this was a veiled criticism of my father, who as far I can remember wasn't very handy – but then he was away at work most of the time and enjoyed few opportunities to display whatever talent he had in that direction. Nowadays, many more women learn to fix things themselves, so my mother’s generalization about women’s admiration for men who are handy may no longer be sound.

But I admire a person who can fix things. When I went to college more than 60 years ago, I had to pass a swimming test in order to graduate. I wish I had also been required to pass a test of making elementary repairs. Now, of course, it’s easier to call a handyman than to learn to make the repair myself, but each time I call one, I feel a bit diminished. Still, were I to start learning now, I’d probably cause even more damage that in the end would have to be repaired by somebody else. It’s hard to get it right.

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

Wet Wrinkles

The Times recently reported a study that examined 28 fingers wrinkled by water. Published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, the study found that the fingers exhibited the same pattern of wrinkling - unconnected channels that diverge from one another the further they are from the fingertips. “The wrinkles allow water to drain away, as fingertips are pressed to wet surfaces.” The wrinkles, like tire treads, improve traction.

So we need wonder no longer why our fingers look like prunes after we’ve spent the afternoon lazing on a float in our swimming pool, our hands dangling in the water. It’s good to know that water wrinkles helped our remote ancestors to survive. Just think, folks, we might not be here, to say nothing about our swimming pools, were it not for wet wrinkles.

So if water wrinkles gave an evolutionary advantage, what about the other wrinkles, wrinkles that won't go away without Botox or surgical intervention, wrinkles caused by the sagging of the flesh, the increased thinness and decreased elasticity of the skin? It would be pleasant to suppose that these too conferred an advantage on our remote ancestors. Could they, perhaps, have made our forebears appear less appetizing to a marauding tiger? Perhaps it sniffed with disdain at our wrinkled ancestor and stalked off in disgust, just as today we reject an overripe banana.

There’s more than one problem with that elegant hypothesis, not the least of which is that by the time the wrinkles have appeared, our ancestor might no longer have been capable of producing offspring. But this suggests another hypothesis. Wrinkles announce to the opposite sex that our years of fullest strength and vigor are behind us and that even if we can still produce children we are no longer capable of raising them. Thus we become less eligible as objects of desire, less of a threat to the perpetuation of the species. In case you were wondering, this hypothesis does not apply to Silvio Berlusconi.

What would the world be like if no one could tell our age, if we were all like Dorian Grey, without, of course, his sins? Who would give us seats in the subway? Who would pay attention to our pronouncements when the gravitas accompanying the appearance of old age is absent? No doubt our senior discounts would be taken away. The Republicans would have yet another excuse to abolish Medicare. Our peers would no longer be the aged but the adult population at large, who would pressure us to buy - and even worse, use - the latest electronic gadget. We’d have to listen to rappers, spend hours on social network media, and gyrate on the dance floor.

So if the wrinkles that accompany aging reflect no evolutionary advantage, at least they encourage others to let us live in peace, treating us with more respect than we otherwise deserve.

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

Dignity Therapy

Terminal illness often undermines a patient's sense of dignity and leads to depression, anxiety, a sense of hopelessness, and feelings of being a burden to others. One technique, however, “dignity therapy,” seems to alleviate some of these symptoms. A recent program on NPR brought it to my attention.

Dignity therapy is an intervention with the terminally ill who, in guided conversations with trained interviewers, speak of what’s most important to them. Patients are encouraged to tell their life stories and to talk about their feelings, their memories, and their hopes for their descendants. Transcriptions of their conversations are then edited and presented to the patients, who have an opportunity to correct or otherwise change them, and the patients can then bequeath the final versions to their loved ones.

The interviewers ask about the patient’s life as a whole. “Tell me a little about your life history, particularly the parts that you either remember most or think are the most important.” Responses are followed up by other questions such as “When did you feel most alive?” “Are there specific things that you would want your family to know about you and are there particular things you would want them to remember?” “What are your most important accomplishments, and what do you feel most proud of?” “What have you learned about life that you would want to pass on to others?”

The dignity therapy technique was first reported by Harvey Max Chochinov , a psychiatrist at the University of Manitoba, and his colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2005. The researchers, who employed the procedure with 100 terminally ill patients, half from Canada and half from Australia, found that after the therapy, a majority of patients reported a “heightened sense of dignity” and a “heightened sense of meaning,” and reported less suffering compared to the level present before the intervention.

One doesn’t need to be terminally ill in order to suffer a loss of dignity, as I’ve found in my own hospitalizations, in which I’ve often felt as though I were being processed along an assembly line of patients, an impression fortified by our being all dressed alike, in identical ill-fitting, unflattering hospital gowns. How much worse must these feelings be when, terminally ill, your strength is depleted and your dependency greater. It stands to reason that you will be bucked up when a professional shows an interest in you not as a collection of symptoms or as the host of a disease but as a person with a unique life story. And if you do not believe in an afterlife, the annihilation you face may seem not so terrible if you can leave something behind, a testament of what has been most important to you.

It struck me as I read about this technique, that one shouldn’t wait until one is terminally ill before preparing such a legacy. Not all of us will be terminally ill. We may drop dead from a heart attack or a burst aneurysm. We may be run over. We may be shot by a jealous lover. We may, in other words, die with no warning whatsoever.

I was reminded of this recently when, during a family dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Chelsea, my brother slumped in his seat, unresponsive. My quick-thinking daughter called 911, and he was taken to NYU Medical Center, where his vital signs returned to normal levels. He had suffered a “vasovagal episode” brought on by having to stand for four hours at the opening of an art show in which his wife had participated. But as I looked at him slumped in his restaurant chair, horrified at the thought that he might be dead, the brevity and uncertainty of life never seemed clearer.

So, people, if you want to leave a written legacy for your loved ones, don't wait until you’re terminally ill. But, I must admit, this is advice I won’t take myself. Since I’m not going to be hung in two weeks, to steal from one of Johnson's aphorisms, my mind is not sufficiently concentrated. Besides, I’m too busy having a good time.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved

Inequality

The other day, while waiting at Memorial Sloan-Kettering for my medical oncologist, my wife and I sat in a row of chairs, at the end of which sat a male patient and a woman, both persons of color. Their relationship wasn’t clear. Was she his daughter? His wife? A friend? English appeared to be her native language. His English was clearly not native, although it was fluent if a bit hesitant. My nose was in a book (actually a Kindle), so I didn’t pay much attention to them, but my wife later told me what she had observed.

They had arrived three hours late for an appointment with the man’s doctor, who had already left for the day. They were late because the man had been unable to obtain transportation in time to take him to the center. He had not yet applied for the right to use the MTA’s system for disabled persons, Access-a-Ride, and therefore had to rely for transporation on the municipal shelter in which he was living. He had no means of returning to the shelter. The staff summoned a social worker, who arranged return transportation for him and explained how to apply for Access-a-Ride.

My wife told me all this as we were riding home in a taxi. Ordinarily we would have returned home by public transportation, but I had injured my foot the day before and walking was still painful. Furthermore it was pouring with an Ethiopian ferocity. So we hailed a cab.

As we rode along the East River, I couldn’t help comparing our situation with that of the man who was living in a municipal shelter, who could not pay for a long taxi ride home. It would be pleasant to assume that our good fortune was the result of our own efforts and that his misfortune was his own fault. Of course, I don’t know why he landed in a shelter. Perhaps, as my wife suggested, medical expenses bankrupted him. He was too young for Medicare and his medical insurance, if he had any, may have dropped him after he became ill.

Whatever the reason for his poverty, it’s clear that our ability to take a taxi without our having to skimp on something else had nothing to do with whatever virtues we might possess. Had we not been born to economically comfortable families that valued education and could afford to send us to elite schools, it’s doubtful that we would as privileged as we are. Life is unfair, as all the world knows, and it will ever be so. But do the inequalities have to be so great? And do they have to widen? Considering our current political gridlock, the answer to those questions, at least in the short term, is yes.

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

Brain-Frying Exercises

During the past few months, my wife and I have been engaged in the most trivial of pursuits, as we've been making choices regarding the renovation of our apartment. Our contractor tells us that the work will be done in a few weeks and that we can move back before Rosh Hashanah, which falls at the end of the month. But we're still in the thick of decision-making. Recently, for example, we ordered window blinds and curtains. Last week, we bought a mattress and a bed, and this week saw us buying shower curtains and towel racks. Each of these purchases necessitated research, thought, and discussion, for the choices available are almost endless.

Barry Schwartz has written of the tyranny of choice, in his book of the same name. We were untroubled by that tyranny when we renovated our apartment in Jerusalem in 1975. The choices in finishes such as tiles and countertops were so few that we went away for the summer, while most of the work was being done, and let our architect and contractor make those decisions.

Nor were we bothered by the tyranny of choice when we furnished our home in Addis Ababa in 1968. The Ford Foundation, my employer, paid for the furniture, since subsequent employees and their families would use it, but we had to make the choices ourselves. This was easy because there was so little to choose from. There were, as I recall, only three types of upholstered chair at the town’s principal furniture store.

But the choices available today are stupefyingly numerous, even within a given price range, whether for floor tiles, wall tiles, kitchen and bathroom countertops, kitchen and bathroom cabinets, towel racks, bathroom and kitchen faucets, showerheads, bathroom vanities, door and cupboard handles, lighting fixtures, or window treatments. The head swims and the brain fries in dealing with it all.

I’m lucky in that I don’t need to look at everything before making up my mind. If it’s good enough, I’m satisfied. My wife’s doesn’t search for perfection either, but she’s more particular than I am and more fearful of making a mistake, so it usually takes her longer to decide. I tease her about this. This would be mean of me even if, as a result of her persistence, what she selects were not almost unfailingly excellent.

We look forward to moving back to our apartment and making it habitable. I worry, though, that after the brain-frying exercises in which we’ve been engaged - this tile or that tile, this color or that color - we won't ever be able to talk intelligently about anything ever again, even if we're able to find anything else to talk about.

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

Self as Illusion

Last Sunday, I walked from our temporary quarters on Bridge Street to the end of Joralemon Street, at the East River, about one mile away. Paved with cobblestones for the last few blocks, the street is lined with mid-19^th century townhouses, many with splendid front gardens. As I walked down the street towards the river, I thought back to the time that I lived only a ten minute walk away, on Monroe Place, more than 50 years ago and wondered at my lack of curiosity at the time. It never occurred to me to explore the historic and remarkably beautiful area in which I was then living.

Am I the same person now that I was then? What connects me to that foolish, self-absorbed young man whose riotous living should have gotten him into far more trouble than it did? If “cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women will drive a man crazy,” as the old song goes, I should have landed in a locked ward at Bellevue instead of managing to return each night to Monroe Place.

My cells have been replaced several times over since then. I’m no more like that young man today than I am like Herbert Hoover. What binds me to that youth are my memories, but memories change with age, just as dispositions do. When I compare my childhood memories to those held by my brother and sister about the same events, the discrepancies are often huge, as if we had each grown up in different households. Memory is treacherous.

Perhaps the self is like a bubble floating on the ocean, its contents continually changing as the water moves under it. If so, the continuity of the self is an illusion. I hope that’s true, for I don’t much care for the young man that once I was.

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

Very, Very Late

The other day, as I was leaving our building to take my morning walk, I held open the door for a woman who was behind me. “Thank you, sir,” she said, “I shouldn’t have said the police stopped me.” When I looked puzzled, she said that she was supposed to pick up her friend, who lives in the building, but that she was late and that to explain her tardiness, she had told her friend that she had been stopped by the police. She asked me the time. When I told her it was 10:30, she said that she was supposed to pick up her friend at 9:30. “I can’t even make up a decent excuse,” she said. “In fact, I haven’t any excuse at all.”

The woman was past her first youth, but she had beautiful blue eyes. “I’m very, very, very, very, very late,” she said. “I hope she will forgive me.” “Nobody’s perfect,” I said. “If she’s a good friend, she’ll forgive you.”

Why was that woman talking to me at all? She seemed slightly deranged. Was she flirting with me? If so, flirting with a guy a few months short of 80 would be proof of derangement. I would have been tempted to prolong the conversation – those eyes were beautiful – but it didn’t seem right somehow. “Good luck,” I said, as I turned to leave. She walked over to her parked car, the door on the driver’s side still open, and said, “Friends are so important.” She may have been slightly nuts, but she was right about that.

Hypotheses

On my morning walk the other day, I passed a woman standing near the entrance to a shop. She was talking passionately into her cellphone. “What do you care about” she asked. “You don’t care about me. You don’t care about [muffled]. What do you care about?” Totally engaged with the person to whom she was speaking, she seemed divorced from the world around her. I was intrigued, of course, by her question. To whom was she speaking? To whom or what did the muffled noun or pronoun refer?

I was tempted to stop in my tracks and eavesdrop, but that would have been rude. Besides, she might have awoken to her surroundings, noticed me listening, and moved away. As it was, she continued speaking in a loud voice, which carried for at least a block as I walked away. Alas, I could no longer make out what she was saying.

At night, when you walk past a window whose shades are not yet drawn, past a window that lets you look into a lighted room, don’t you wonder who lives there and what kind of life they lead? Through that window you can glimpse another life, just as you can glimpse a bit of the life of the people who are talking on their cellphones.

New York has eight million people and at any one time it seems that one-tenth of them are outside talking on their cellphones. If you walk the city streets, as most New Yorkers do, in any one month you can observe hundreds if not thousands of different lives through the momentary revelations that pedestrians offer in their cellphone talk. You may not learn much about them, just as you don’t learn much about the lives within the lighted room you pass, but you learn more about these people than you would have learned in the past, before cellphones became ubiquitous. And their talk provides fodder for your imagination, allowing you to construct a story around what you’ve heard.

That woman, for example, who asked so emphatically what her interlocutor cared about, was, I imagined, talking to her husband, and the muffled word I heard referred to their child. I imagined that the husband had moved out after it was discovered that he was carrying on an affair, that he had told his wife that the flame from their marriage had died out, that the thrill was gone, and that there was no use pretending any more. No wonder the woman was angry. Of course, for all I knew she was talking to her mother.

Speaking Out

The other day, when my wife boarded a bus at Grand Army Plaza, she saw an old man sitting near the driver. Chubby and cherubic, the old man seemed to be talking to himself. But his voice became louder and his face more and more mischievous. "They killed 3,000 people. Those Muslims wouldn't hurt a flea, not even a baby flea."

My wife looked around and saw, sitting near the old man, a strikingly beautiful young woman who was wearing an Islamic-style headscarf. Her face was calm as she looked straight ahead, her hands demurely in her lap. After a while she took her cellphone from her purse and photographed the old man. "How dignified she is," thought my wife.

When the bus reached the young woman's stop, she exited the bus, turned around, and shouted at her attacker, "I've got your picture on my cellphone, you fucking, racist bastard." The driver asked her to move aside, but she stood there, continuing to shout, the f-word in each breath. The driver threatened to call the police if she didn't move aside. "The police! You didn't hear what he was saying." But she did move, with a final shout, "Fascist pig!"

While the old man was abusing Muslims, my wife wondered if she ought to say something. But she concluded that the old man was deranged and that therefore there would be no point in speaking out. "The Muslims are taking the heat off the Jews," my wife thought, before remembering the saying attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984). "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one to speak out for me."

It's not that my wife is afraid of speaking out. In a taxicab in Jerusalem, she listened to her Jewish driver abusing the Arabs. "They don't all want to kill us," she said. "I put my life in their hands every time I enter one of their cabs." This silenced her driver. But she didn't speak out this time because the old man was not, in her view, compos mentis. Had I been in her position I doubt that I would have said anything either, not because I thought the old man mentally disturbed but because I shrink from making a scene. Still, if no one says anything, if no one protests, does that lend legitimacy to the old man's vituperation? No one came to the young woman's defense, surely a failure she will not soon forget.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved