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