Memorials

“You  must have some good stories, my wife said to the taxi driver who was driving her home, after learning that he had driven a cab for a long time.  This is one of the stories he told her. 

Many years ago on Christmas Day, a Park Avenue doorman hailed his cab.  When the driver stopped, the doorman ushered into the taxi an old man and then handed the old man six packages and six envelopes.  “I want you to give one of these packages and one of these envelopes to each of the first five taxi drivers you see,” said the old man to the driver.  This the driver proceeded to do.  After the fifth package and the fifth envelope had been delivered, the old man said the remaining package and envelope were for the driver.  The driver opened the package where he found a bottle of champagne.  In the envelope was a hundred dollar bill.  “My father was a cabdriver,” said the old man, but I’ve been fortunate, so each Christmas I give these presents as a memorial to him.”

The story made me think of my own father and what if anything I’ve done to commemorate him.  He died almost 35 years ago, and, I must admit, not even once have I said kaddish for him, not during the year following his death, as is customary, and not on its anniversary, which is customary too.  My father had not done so for his father either, as far as I can recall, but in any case in the early years after my father died, I didn’t attend religious services and didn’t know how to say the prayer.  But even if I had observed the obligation to recite the kaddish in his memory, the prayer is for the living, not the dead.

But aren’t all memorials for the living?  The dead do not know what gestures have been made in their memory – the hospital wings, the plaques, the statues, the monuments, the contributions to charities in their names, and so forth.  These memorials help the living give thanks for the lives of their loved ones or, in some cases, assuage guilt for things said or done or not said or not done while the deceased was still alive. 

Not a day goes by that I don’t think of my father, if for no other reason that every time I look in the mirror I see him.  But I often recall things he’s said.  When, for example, a doctor I’m consulting for the first time tells me to come back in three months, I tell him that, according to my father, “come back in three months” are the most beautiful words in the English language.  I often recall his urging me to make a date with my brother’s sister-in-law, who he averred was a very nice girl.  “Leave me alone, Dad” I replied with not a little annoyance.  He knew me better than I knew myself, for two years later we were married, to his great pleasure and my lasting benefit.

I wish I could do something as flamboyant and as much fun as giving away bottles of champagne and hundred dollar bills on the anniversary of his death, but I know that such extravagance would displease him.  So my memorial to him are my memories.  “May their memory serve as a blessing” is often said of the dead.  I’m glad to say that his memory serves that function for me.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Bo

In this week’s portion, Parashat Bo, the plague narrative reaches its climax with the last three plagues, all of which, as Aviva Zornberg points out, are plagues of darkness (The Particulars of Rapture, p.165).  The plague of locusts blots out the sun, paralyzing the Egyptians, while the sun still shines on the Israelites; the plague of darkness is palpable, so thick that people who are sitting cannot stand and those who are standing cannot sit; and the plague of the first-born takes place at night, midst terror, horror, and the Egyptians’ wails of agony.  Pharaoh finally relents and not only allows the Israelites to go but pleads with them to do so at once.

The plagues are plagues of darkness, but the parasha itself is dark, for God continues to harden Pharaoh’s heart. God unleashes plague after plague upon the Egyptians – and last plague is particularly horrific - until Pharaoh finally lets the Israelites go.  God demonstrates his greatness not only in upsetting the natural order of things through the plagues he brings down upon the Egyptians, and not only in bewitching the Egyptians to part with their gold and silver, but also by controlling Pharaoh’s heart.  The thrust of the whole Book of Exodus is to demonstrate the power and glory of an omnipotent God and to provide a triumphant narrative of His greatness to be passed down through the generations.

Where, one asks, is the God of Genesis, who was willing to spare Sodom and Gemorrah if ten righteous men could be found there?  There were not ten righteous men in the small towns of Sodom and Gemorrah, but surely there were ten righteous men in the great empire of Egypt. Nonetheless, the God of Exodus kills the innocent along with the guilty, just as we did when bombing Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  Ruthess and implacable, He adds plague after plague, finally killing every first-born among the Egyptians.      

God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart has troubled commentators almost from the beginning.  Zornberg states the problem as follows: If it was impossible for Pharaoh to repent – obviously a theologically offensive notion – the plague story becomes a narrative of vengeful abuse, of a morally paralyzed victim bombarded by all the armaments of a powerful but immoral deity (The Particulars of Rapture, p. 142).

Several arguments attempt to explain away the problem.  One is that God punished Pharaoh for ordering the Israelite baby boys to be drowned in the Nile. But at the Burning Bush, God told Moses that all those who wanted Moses dead had died, so the pharaoh who ordered the drowning of the baby boys was no longer alive.  But even if that Pharaoh was still alive, why was it necessary to punish the Egyptian people along with their king?  Because, as some have argued, the Egyptians not only participated in oppressing the Israelites but also rejoiced in their suffering.   That argument, however, is unpersuasive.  All the Egyptians?  Even the infants who had the misfortune of being born first? 

Another argument is that by adding plagues, God was giving the Egyptians time to repent.  Indeed, Pharaoh's courtiers eventually urge him to let the Israelites go.  But since all the Egyptian first-born were killed, including those of the courtiers, we must reject that hypothesis.

Still another argument is that God simply allowed Pharaoh to follow his own inclination, so that God’s locking of Pharaoh’s heart is a metaphor for the outcome of Pharaoh’s repeated abuse of power.  Pharaoh himself, in other words, had become habituated to his status as absolute ruler of the world’s richest and most powerful empire, accustomed to being worshiped as a demi-god, so used to having his own way that he was incapable of change.  But this theory is inconsistent with the text, in which God repeatedly tells Moses that he will harden Pharaoh’s heart in order to demonstrate His power.  God says that he will show His power not only to Pharaoh and his courtiers, but also to Moses and the Israelites, so that the story will be handed down from father to son forever.  It seems that the foundation story of the Jewish people is built upon the suffering of another people, an  ancient precursor, some would say, to the establishment of the state of Israel. 

Zornberg cites R. Shmuel bar Nachman's narration of a dialogue between God and Moses when God was dictating the Torah.  When Moses was writing the Torah and was describing the creation work of each day, he reached this verse: “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” He said, Master of the Universe, why do you give heretics an opening of the mouth? [in other words, an opportunity to discredit the notion of there being only one God.] God answered. Write. And whoever wants

to read wrongly will read wrongly.  Shut up, in other words.

“Let us make man in our image” is sometimes offered as an example of God’s humility, His willingness to consult inferiors, the angels, in the creation of human beings.  But we can also read it as a statement of God’s multiplicity - that He is both the God of Genesis and the God of Exodus, among an incompassable number of manisfestations.  Is it possible then to justify God's hardening of Pharaoh's heart?  Each justification raises new questions.  There is no answer that satisfactorily closes debate.   In my opinion, God’s response to Moses, that whoever wants to read wrongly will read wrongly, is perhaps the best we can do.   The subversive narrative which views God as immoral in the matter of the plagues can never be completely silenced, never completely harmonized with the master triumphant narrative.  The plague narrative, like God, is ultimately inexplicable.

Which reminds me of a story by Shalom Auslander (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/369/poultry-slam-2008?act=5) which I’m taking the liberty to modify somewhat.  An orthodox Jew dies and meets God, who turns out to be a 30-foot tall chicken who speaks perfect English and sits in a golden cage.  The Jew prostrates himself, saying “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord...”  The Lord interrupts him.  “Hero as in hero sandwich?”  It appears that God has never heard of Shabbat or kashrut or the Torah.  "Oh," says the Jew, "if only I could go back and tell my people."  So God sends him back. The Jew goes home in time for Shabbat dinner.  He’s seated at the head of the table.  “God is…” he says, and looks at his children, all washed and in their best clothes, all looking at him expectantly.  “God is…” and he looks at the white tablecloth and the good china, crystal, and sterling set upon it.  “God is…” and he looks at the glow from the Sabbath candles and at little Hanna who has been practicing her favorite Shabbat song.  “God is,” he says finally, “unknowable.”

 .

2010-2012 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

The Moving Garden

A week or so ago, my wife and I visited the Brooklyn Museum.  Near the entrance was a forty-five –foot-long granite table with a curving channel running down the middle.  Appearing to grow out of the channel were 100 freshly cut roses.  Upon inspection, you could see that each rose sat in its own water-filled glass inside the channel.  Visitors were invited to take a flower when leaving the museum on condition that they make a detour to their next destination and give the flower to a stranger.  The next day, the flowers taken the day before are replaced, thus continuing the cycle.  Lee Mingwei, a Taiwanese-American artist based in New York, created this participatory installation, “The Moving Garden.”

Intrigued, my wife and I each took a flower.  A young couple, who evidently had not yet read the invitation to participate in the installation, looked scandalized at the sight of this respectable elderly couple who, in their view, had brazenly stolen two flowers.   Undeterred, we walked out of the museum, holding our roses aloft.  Instead of turning to the left on Eastern Parkway, we turned to the right and then left onto Washington Avenue. 

I determined to give my rose to the first woman I saw.  She proved to be a young African American who was walking quickly, seemingly engrossed in her own thoughts.  “Excuse me,” I said, interrupting her cogitations, “may I give this to you?” as I held out the rose towards her.  Her face broke into a delighted smile.  “Thank you,” she said, clearly pleased, as she took the rose.  Seeing her delight delighted me. 

Turning into Lincoln Place, my wife and I saw an adolescent, also an African American, who was propelling himself along the sidewalk on an aluminum scooter.  He won’t be able to take a rose, we thought, since he needs both hands for his scooter, but then he stopped at the entrance to a building.  Just before he reached the door, my wife said “this is a present from the Museum.”  He seemed more bewildered than pleased by my wife’s gift, but he accepted it with a thank you. 

As we continued on our way, I wondered what I could do to repeat my experience with that young woman, an interaction that made me feel so good.  I could add a rose every Friday morning, when I buy flowers in honor of the coming Shabbat, and then give away the rose.  But part of the pleasure of my interaction with the young woman was participating in a communal activity, and that component would be absent.  Still, it's worth thinking about how I could perform other "random acts of kindness" in the future, acts which are likely to give me much pleasure at little cost.

As a footnote to this adventure, let me add that the museum invites those who have taken and given away a flower to record their experiences using Twitter, Flickr, or Instagr.am.  Apparently the museum is unaware that there are antediluvian visitors like me who do not know how to use these devices.


2010-2012 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Mr. J.

They say that men, for the rest of their lives, dress the way they did in college.  That may or may not be true, but as for me,  I'm wearing the descendants of the gray flannels, blue blazers, and buttoned-down shirts that clothed me when I was an undergraduate.  So two years ago, at about this time of year, when I spotted one of the haberdasheries on Madison Avenue  that specialize in that style, I remembered I needed a sports jacket.  I walked in and was greeted by Mr. J.

Mr. J. was an old man beautifully dressed in a three-piece suit whose expert tailoring could not disguise the fact, that, like me, he had lost, to a bent back, several inches in height . When I told him that I would like a tweed sports jacket, he  ushered me to the rack of jackets containing my size. Alas, it was the end of the season, so the selection was limited, and none of the jackets I tried on appealed to me.

“Why don’t you consider a made-to-measure jacket?” Mr. J. inquired, leading me over to a large desk at the front of the store.  “Yeah, sure,” I said to myself, “but what the hell, it won’t hurt to look.”  How little I knew myself.  I sat down at the desk, and  examined one after another swatch of fabric, none of which excited me enough to make me willing to pay for a bespoke garment.  And then I saw it, a sumptuous, blue Harris tweed, and I fell in love.  “Well, why not?” I asked myself.  “You only live once."

Indefatigable and irrepressible, Mr. J. then suggested that I needed made-to-measure flannel trousers to accompany the jacket.  “What’s wrong with off the rack trousers?” I asked him feebly.  “They won’t be like these,” he answered. “They’ll be fully lined,” he continued, showing me one luxurious fabric after another.  “In for a penny, in for a pound,” I told myself and so I found myself being measured for both a jacket and trousers.   Not content with these sales, Mr. J. then sold me suspenders, three bow ties, three silk squares, and a summer hat with a blue and red band.  The cost did not equal the national debt.  It only felt that way.

I returned for a second fitting, at which the location of the button holes as well as other niceties were to be determined.  I stood on a raised platform as the fitter fussed with his measurements.  In the three mirrors that arced around the platform, I looked at my reflection with profound satisfaction.  “Now I want you to come back here even if you only need a handkerchief,” Mr. J. told me when I took final possession of the jacket and trousers.  “Not on your life,” I said to myself, “not if I want to maintain my bank balance.” 

In fact, the jacket’s shoulders were too wide.  They were not the natural shoulders I wanted.  They were the shoulders of a line backer. Why hadn’t I seen it at the second fitting?  I guess the material so dazzled me that I refused to acknowledge what would have been plain to an uninfatuated eye.  As a result, for the past two years I’ve hardly worn that jacket.  “Take it back and ask that it be altered,” advised my sensible wife more than once.  

Finally, the other day, when I was walking up Madison Avenue on my way to an appointment, I ventured into the shop.  Surely Mr. J., who was 80 when he waited on me two years ago, would be retired by now, but no, there he was, still beautifully dressed, if even more stooped than before.  I asked him if I might bring back the jacket to have the shoulders adjusted.  “Of course,” he said, “just come on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays, when my fitter’s here.”  So I will.  But I have a terrible feeling that when I do, I will again succumb to the blandishments of beautiful fabrics and a superb salesman.  Well, nobody's perfect.

2010-2012 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

School is not an Option

“Stop crying.  You have to go to school,” says a woman with a West Indian accent.  They’re standing behind me on a traffic island at the Grand Army Plaza.  “School is not an option,” she continues.  “You have to go to school.”  I’m too polite to turn around and look at them but I can imagine the scene, for I’ve enacted it myself:  my crying daughter telling me that she doesn’t want to go to school and my telling her that she has to. 

That was in 1972, the year we moved to Jerusalem for what we thought would be a two-year stay.  Our daughter was six and a half years old and in the second grade, the only non-Hebrew speaker in her class.  No wonder she didn’t want to go to school.  Engulfed in a foreign language, understanding almost nothing and thus bored when not bewildered, confronted not only with a strange language but also with a strange script, unable to connect with the other children in her class, and taught by a well-regarded veteran teacher who nonetheless treated her as if she were retarded, she must have been miserable.  That this has been the experience of young immigrants throughout the world could not have comforted her. 

With the benefit of hindsight, we now wonder if we should have enrolled her, along with her younger brother, in the first grade, where she could have learned to read Hebrew along with the other children, where her relative maturity might have given her an advantage, and where she would have escaped that terrible teacher,  who, as it turned out, stayed with her class through the fifth grade.  We didn’t place our daughter in the first grade with her brother because we thought it inadvisable to set up the inevitable comparisons that would be made between them. 

My father was visiting us at the time, and I suspect that the reason I was so insistent that our daughter go to school that day was that I didn’t want to displease him.  He would have had little patience with me if as a child I had asked to stay home from school.  But she was my child, not his.  Perhaps we should have let her stay home, although I don't remember if it would have been possible in light of our commitments that day.  Staying home for one day might have given her strength for all the days to come, indeed, had we only known it, for all the years to come.  We should at the least have taken time out to listen to her, whether or not it would have made her late for school or made us late for our appointments.

"School is not an option," said the woman behind me, reminding me of an event that has haunted me for the past 40 years.  If ever I descend into dementia, I hope that this memory at least will be erased.

Fetlocks and Tetrahedrons

The other day my brother-in-law told me that one of my blog posts contains a mistake, namely my assertion that it’s impossible to build a pyramid with a three-sided base.  “No,” he said, “it’s entirely possible.  It’s called a tetrahedron.”  Since a picture is worth a thousand words, including Wikipedia’s definition, “a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, three of which meet at each vertex,” I’ve included the picture  above.

I can join no less a personage than Samuel Johnson in citing the reason for my mistake.  When a woman asked him why he had defined pastern as “the knee of a horse,” a definition which describes the fetlock, when the pastern is in fact the long portion of the leg immediately below the fetlock, he replied, “ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” My ignorance of tetrahedrons was ignorance of the purest kind.

But how can I explain another mistake, one that my daughter pointed out?  I had given an incorrect name to the Israeli New Year’s song, "Hashana Habaa."  It would have been bad enough had I made the mistake only once.  But no, I had repeated it throughout the post.  When I learned of my mistake, I corrected the post, too late, though, for many other readers who had already seen it but were too polite to tell me of this egregious error.   I don’t understand how I made that mistake since I knew the name of the song perfectly well.

So, readers, I regret to say that I'm not perfect.  I hope this does not shock too many of you and that you will continue to read my posts, errors and all.

2010=2012 Anchises-an Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved  

A Life's Work

In my last post, I mentioned a grandmother who had successfully raised her children and now considered herself eligible for dentures, although her natural teeth were perfectly serviceable.  According to my dentist’s view of her, she considered her life’s work over.  I wrote about my father, who clung to his life’s work almost to the day he died.  And I said that my own life’s work would not be over as long as I was compos mentis. 

After posting that essay, I began to wonder what I meant by my rather glib use of the term "life’s work." If it’s one’s career, then mine ended twenty years ago, when I took early retirement.  But this is an era not only of frequent job changes but also changes in career.  Lawyers become teachers and teachers become lawyers.  Businessmen leave their executive offices to become cabinet makers.  Tycoons run for office or devote themselves to philanthrophy.  Mathematicians become biologists or philosophers.   Some people change careers when they're fired from a job and find that they need to switch fields in order to find employment.  Others change careers because they’ve become dissatisfied with their work and seek greater fulfillment from it. 

Still others are pushed into a new career by the force of circumstance.  Vaclav Havel was a distinguished playwright before he led the fight for Czech independence and subsequently oversaw the peaceful breakup of his country into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.  Was his life’s work in literature or politics?  Anthony Trollope was a high official in the British Post Office, who introduced the mail box to Britain and negotiated postal treaties with other countries.  He’s remembered of course for his novels and travel books but does that mean we should ignore his career in the post office? 

It seems to me that one’s career offers too narrow a focus in determining a person’s life’s work.  One’s career or careers should be included, of course, but there is more to a person’s life than his or her career.  In speaking of Trollope’s life’s work, for example, I’d include his devotion to fox hunting (most of his novels contain a fox-hunting scene, and he rode to hounds three times a week in season). 

Considering fox hunting as part of Trollope’s life’s work suggests that our life’s work represents our effort to live as fully as possible, maximizing experience, being alive to the wonders of nature and the beauties of art, and contributing to enriching personal relationships.  The money one has made, the papers and books one has written, the innovations one has made – one’s career accomplishments - all contribute to the extent of a life’s fullness but they don’t define it.  It’s worth again quoting the surgeon who said that everyone dies but not everyone lives.  The purpose of life is to live.  Our life’s work is to live it as fully as possible.


2010-2012 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Pulling out one's Teeth

“Old age is a state of mind,” says my immensely likeable, fresh-faced young dentist.    He’s speaking during a moment when one or another of his instruments is not occupying my mouth. He went on to tell me about a patient, in her sixties, who came to him with a request to pull out all her teeth and to replace them with dentures.  “I’ve raised my children and now I’m a grandmother,” she told him, “so now it’s time for dentures.”  In the course of three sessions with her, he tried to discourage her from taking out her teeth, which were perfectly serviceable.  I asked him if her motivation was cosmetic.  Were her natural teeth ugly?  He said not.  He thinks that she regards the removal of her teeth and their replacement with dentures as a rite of passage, in this case the passage into old age.  “She seemed to think,” he told me, “that her life’s work was over.” 

When my father was in his sixties, his dentist advised him to pull out all his teeth.  Sensibly, my father sought a second opinion.  He consulted Professor Minor of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.  Professor Minor told my father that the first dentist had been correct as far as textbook dentistry was concerned.  “But Mr. Anchises,” Professor Minor said, “we can always pull out your teeth.  In the meantime, let’s see what we can do to save them.”  My father lived another fifteen years and kept most if not all of his teeth.  He didn’t think his life’s work was over.  Indeed, he kept working long after he was able to drive himself to work (my cousin, who worked in the same office and by then was president of the company, kindly drove him) or to walk down the office hallway without holding onto the wall.  “I want to die with my boots on,” he often said, and he almost did, retiring less than a year before he died.

I don’t know if my father considered himself an old man or if he did, when he began to think so, but his behavior was consistent with my dentist’s idea that old age is a state of mind.  My father wasn’t going to let his teeth be pulled without a struggle nor was he going to allow physical disability keep him from his work. 

Still, when my dentist made his assertion about old age’s being a state of mind, I thought that he was right only in part.  I remembered the slowness with which I climb the subway stairs and how I marvel, when I watch young people rush past me, ascending the stairs like mountain goats, that I too once ran up the same stairs just as fast as they do. The difference in physical abilities between youth and old age is not a state of mind. 

But one’s state of mind does influence one’s response to such disabilities.  As for me, I want to keep vertical as long as I can and to cram as much experience as possible in the time that’s left.  I don’t consider my life’s work over, nor will I as long as I remain compos mentis. 

My dentist was unable to convince his patient to keep her teeth.  She will probably seek a more amenable dentist.  Let’s hope that dentist can not only persuade her that she doesn’t need dentures but that one’s life is not over when one becomes a grandparent.  In some ways, it’s a new beginning.

A New Year's Greeting

On New Year's Day, during my morning walk in Prospect Park, I wondered if I should wish the occupant of the Endale Arch a happy new year.  He’s the homeless man from the West Indies about whom I’ve written  before and who sleeps and spends much of his time in the arch, a pedestrian underpass in Prospect Park near the Grand Army Plaza entrance.  How could 2012 be a happy year for this man, I asked myself.  How could he be happy as long as he remains homeless?  Would he consider a new year’s greeting to be a mockery of his situation?

In spite of my misgivings, when I saw him standing inside the arch, I first said “Good morning,” and then “Happy New Year.”  His face became radiant.  “Thank you, sir,” he said, smiling broadly, and then, “ Thank you, sir.”  I had never seen him smile before.  The evident pleasure he took in my simple greeting touched me.

My guess is that most people pass this man without seeing him or if they do see him they avert their eyes.  Probably for most people he is a non-person.  If that’s so, then he must value a greeting that acknowledges him as an individual, a fellow human being.

The nights are getting colder now.  Will he join the 41,000 other New Yorkers who sleep in shelters?  Shelters are said to be dangerous and unpleasant, and if I were in his situation, I'd probably avoid them too.  But hypothermia is a real danger for those who sleep outdoors when the temperature is very low.  I worry about him and then berate myself for worrying, an activity of no use to him or to anyone else.

I wish I could help him, but it occurs to me that he might not want to be helped. He may prefer the solitary life he is living, resenting well-meaning efforts to change his way of life.  Or is this a rationalization to make me feel less bad for being able to do nothing more for him than to wish him a good morning every day and a happy new year once a year?

2010-2012 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Two Men

Whenever I pass the Meadowport Arch in Prospect Park, I remember its occupant of many years, a man who folded his blankets with military precision, placing them in a corner of the bench on which he slept.  Scrupulously neat in appearance, he usually placed a pile of paper back books on his bench. One day he disappeared and afterwards I regretted my never having said hello to him, in spite of the fact that he seemed encased in his own world and was unlikely to respond.  But last week I found another occupant of his bench inside the arch.  All I could see of him were his legs stretched out along the bench – he was wearing sweatpants - and his feet shod in sneakers.  An opened umbrella shielded his face from public view.

After I passed the Meadowport Arch, I walked on to the nearby Endale Arch, which has a new occupant.  A few weeks ago, I wrote about screwing up my courage to address him.  Now, as I walked towards his arch I wondered if he would be there, since he had been absent for the past few days.  But no, there he was, standing up inside the arch, his arms close to his body – he may have been cold -  his blankets on the ground nearby, and, on a rock outside the arch, an open paperback book.  On sunny days, he would sit there and read.  It was now overcast and raw.  I considered remarking to him that he would have a ring-side seat at the park’s firework display on New Year’s Eve, but I rejected that idea as cruel, in light of his situation.  Instead, I said “good morning,” to which he replied, as he had before, “good morning, sir.”

I tried to imagine myself in the place of these two men, isolated, poor, possibly deranged or addicted, but I found it hard to do so.  If I suddenly discovered myself in their place, it would be like living on another planet, in an alternate world.  How would I solve the problems of finding food, shelter, places to wash?  Where could I keep my few possessions, including my bulky blankets?  How could I keep boredom at bay?  How could I survive if I were cut off from the world of intimate relationships?

Whether these two men are very brave or are simply disconnected from reality, there’s no denying that their lives are hard.  It strikes me now that I rarely see an old man in their position.  If these two men cannot return to the ordinary world, they are not likely to survive into old age.

I wish I knew how to help them.  Saying hello can’t be worth very much.  So my wife and I contribute to organizations for the homeless, in the hope that they will help men like these.


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Memory

My brother-in-law, a distinguished theoretical physicist, does not confine himself to abstruse mathematical formulations.  He takes time from his theorizing to paint in watercolor, work as a cabinet maker (mainly for the benefit of his daughters), and to delve into whatever matters catch his attention.  One of these matters was the ancient painting of geese that my wife and I saw at the Egyptian Museum and that I had described in an earlier post.  He asked me if I had a copy of the painting, which forced me to confess that I had tried to find one without success.  He promptly found a copy and sent me the link to it (http://egyptsites.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/meidum-necropolis/).

I was astonished when I opened the link and looked again at the painting, because in an earlier post I had described the painting incorrectly, placing a pair of geese on each side, with a single goose standing behind each pair, as if waiting its turn.  As you can see, a single goose is at each side, with a pair behind it.  To that lapse can be added another: I had failed to notice that the pair on the left are geese, whereas the pair on the right are ganders.

If I had seen this painting several years or even months before writing about it in my blog, I would not have been surprised.  But I wrote about it not more than two weeks after seeing it.  If my memory of such a recent event cannot be trusted, what is the likelihood that my accounts of earlier events, especially those of childhood, can be trusted?  Is the fallibility of memory the reason that my brother and I remember some  childhood events in drastically differing ways, as if we had grown up in different families? 

The other day, my wife and I were discussing the soap operas we listened to as children when we stayed home from school because we were sick.  I mentioned “Our Gal Sunday,” and recited the question that opened every episode, “can a girl from a little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of one Britain’s handsomest and richest lords?”  And then I gave the lord’s name, Henry Brinthrup.  I was pretty proud of having remembered all that.  A check on Google, however,  proved my memory faulty.  This is the actual opening,  "Once again, we present Our Gal Sunday, the story of an orphan girl named Sunday from the little mining town of Silver Creek, Colorado, who in young womanhood married England's richest, most handsome lord, Lord Henry Brinthrope. The story that asks the question: Can this girl from the little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?"   So my memory for a serial that I must have heard 100 times during my childhood was correct in its outline but not in its detail.

Eyewitness testimony, which has falsely convicted many prisoners whose innocence was later proved by DNA analysis, is notoriously unreliable, but you would suppose that a leisured examination of a painting two weeks before and an epigraph heard one hundred times, even if heard 70 years ago, would yield correct memories.  That they do not is shocking.  Is this a function of my advanced age or has my memory always been so full of holes?  In any case, I find myself in good company.  When he was old, Mark Twain said that his memory used to be excellent: he could remember anything, whether it had happened or not, but now he could only remember the latter.


2010-2012 Anchises: an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

The New Year

Last Friday night, December 30^th, our young cantor’s sweet voice sang an old prayer to a secular tune. When, after perhaps ten seconds, I identified the song, a wave of sadness washed over me.  The tune, B’shana habaa (In the new year), is an Israeli song for the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana, and it was the first Israeli song that I attempted to learn during the intensive Hebrew course that my wife and I took at Beit Hanoar, on Herzog Street, in September and October of 1972, after our arrival in Jerusalem.

Our Hebrew course began before Rosh Hashana, so it was appropriate for Dalia, our gifted teacher, to teach us the lyrics to B’shana habaa, especially because it contains useful vocabulary as well as an irregular noun.  While the lyrics are appropriate for the religious new year in Israel, which takes place in September or October, they are utterly inappropriate for the secular new year in New York, as can be seen in the first line,  “In the new year, we’ll sit on our porch and count migrating birds.” Still, the tune that our cantor was singing reminded me of new beginnings.

But the beginnings I remembered were in the past.  When I first encountered that song, I was 40 years old, half my age now, my career largely ahead of me.  Our parents and grandparents were still alive, and our children were still very young.  I was starting work on an exciting research project in what for us was an exotic locale.  The future was endlessly long.  But when I heard that song last Shabbat, I felt the sadness of nostalgia for a time that can never come again, for the time when we were still young. 

In that week’s bible portion, Vayigash, the aged Jacob hears the astounding news that not only is his son Joseph still alive but that Joseph is now the viceroy of Egypt, the land to which his sons now take him.  Robert Alter (The Five Books of Moses, a translation with commentary: p. 265) comments: Jacob’s story, like David’s, is virtually unique in ancient literature in its searching representation of the radical transformations a person undergoes in the slow course of time.  The powerful young man who made his way across the Jordan to Mesopotamia with only his walking staff, who wrestled with stones and men and divine beings, is now an old man tottering on the brink of the grave, bearing the deep wounds of his long life.

I wouldn’t characterize myself as a powerful young man at the time I first heard B’shana habaa, although I was clearly more powerful than I am today, nor am I as feeble as Jacob was at the time his sons carried him down to Egypt.  Still, hearing B’shana habaa, shortly after reading Alter’s comment, brought home to me how advanced in age I’ve become, how careful I now find myself when walking over rough terrain, how slow I am in ascending the subway staircases, how little time there is left. 

But the other morning, as I was walking in Prospect Park and mulling over these sad thoughts of decline, I looked up at the sky, cloudless and radiantly blue, and I thought that the present is a good place to be.  And I remembered the advice a surgeon gave to the daughters of a man whose cancer he had excised: "Everyone dies," he said, "but not everyone lives.  I want you to live."  That's what I'm doing my best to accomplish during the time that is left. 

2010-2012 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Traveling Companions

During our two-week tour of Egypt, we visited some the world’s most stupendous and well-preserved antiquities, but I will probably remember little of them in detail.  Just a week or so after seeing the statue of Horus that I posted, I don’t remember if I saw it  at Luxor, Karnak, Edfu, Abu Simbel, or in the Egyptian Museum.  But I won’t forget watching the sunrise over the Sahara during our three-hour bus ride from Aswan to Abu Simbel, nor will I forget the other participants in our group.  They are at least as vivid to me as the antiquities we saw.

I’ve already mentioned Delores, who climbed from rural South American poverty to an important administrative position in a California school system, and Donna, who thought she had lost her daughter’s dog.  Donna had never worked outside the home, where she raised three children, all of them successful in their fields.  She exhibits a rare lightness of being, an attractive quality that endeared her to my wife and me. 

We liked all the participants though.  Paul, for example, was a retired psychiatric social worker who had worked for a large health care organization.  The only one of us to have suffered an intestinal upset on our journey, he confined himself to his room for a couple of days, but when he emerged he was as cheerful as ever.  He was traveling with Patricia, who retired as the head law librarian at a major university and had headed  her state’s Women’s League of Voters.  This was at least the sixth Road Scholar tour on which they’d traveled together, but their attachment, so far as I could tell from their interactions with one another and, more importantly, from their separate rooms, was platonic. 

Roberta, a motherly woman who spoke in a pleasingly deliberate fashion and who had trained and worked as a nurse, eventually retired as the chief executive of a health care organization’s west coast division.  I never did find out about the work experience of Lily, a small, energetic, and sunny woman, the grandmother of two, but she told us that she participates in about six Road Scholar tours a year.  Home, evidently, is where she keeps her souvenirs.

Max, a retired chemical engineer, seemed at first glance to be a straight up white-bread sort of guy, but I found later that after finishing college, he joined the Peace Corps, which sent him to Bangladesh, and that after his service there, he and a Peace Corps buddy motorcycled from Calcutta to the southern tip of India, from which they took a ferry to Sri Lanka, before crossing back to India.  They motorcycled up its west coast and then through Pakistan, the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan and Iran, ending their six month odyssey in Europe.  They slept out in the open and when it rained they got wet.  He recalls being chased by predatory dogs in Afghanistan, where the sandy terrain did not permit him and his friend to travel as fast as they would have liked.  But it was fast enough.  The dogs eventually quit, either because the young men had passed out of their territory or because of fatigue. You would think that I would have learned by now that you can’t judge a book by its cover. 

Max was traveling with Angela, his wife of eight years, a tall, attractive woman who, after living a very long time in one place, moved, due to an unspecified catastrophe, to another part of the country, where she reinvented herself, changed her career, and met Max.  He had been divorced a long time and, judging from the rapport that they exhibited with one another, his second marriage is a happy one.

Eugenia, a lively woman with a comic bent, retired as an office manager for an aerospace company.  After every trip abroad, she would have to submit to a debriefing, in order to maintain her security clearance.  She would be asked where she had gone, whom she had seen, and what she had done.  She could never, she said,  have gone to Cuba, her next destination, while she was working.

Rose, the only one of our group who was still employed and the youngest member as well, is a middle-aged lawyer whose arthritis makes it difficult for her to get about.  A wise-cracking woman with a mordant sense of humor, she managed with the aid of a cane to walk through all our sites until she fell at the Egyptian Museum.  After that, she used a wheel chair pushed by men that Road Scholar hired for her at each destination.  She was a good sport and didn’t complain, in spite of the pain she was suffering (which she admitted only when asked). She too had to miss a few of the sites.

How strange it is that memories of my traveling companions should be as least as powerful as those of the antiquities we had come to see, but such is the case.  By the end of the tour we had formed a cohesive, tightly knit group, and I was sorry to say goodbye to each and every member of it.


2010-2012 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved