Moving

Tomorrow we’re scheduled to move out of our temporary quarters, which we’ve occupied since February, and move back to our renovated apartment. This will involve moving back into our apartment the furniture and other goods that we put into storage as well as the few pieces of our furniture, books, and clothes that we’ve been using here in our temporary quarters. We have only one day to organize the latter, since our children and grandchildren, who came from Los Angeles to visit us, returned home only yesterday. Once in the renovated apartment, we'll be confronted with numerous cartons to unpack, and we’ll have to learn how to use our new spaces.

It was, I think, Johnson, sensible and down to earth, who wrote that all change is hard, even from bad to better, and as usual he was right. The oncoming change has made me anxious. But when I try to identify the source of my anxiety, I come up with nothing, clutching only thin air. What’s to worry about? That the renovations won’t be completed in time, so that, for example, the filter for the dryer won’t have been installed? The renovations are currently at a stage that we could live in the apartment as is, and as for the dryer, we can run it without a filter for a day or two. That I might make a mistake in calculating what we owe the contractor? My wife and the architect will help me there and besides, how big a mistake could I possibly make? That the new mattress, blinds, or television or the telephone technician or the cable installation won’t arrive on time? So what? We can manage without them for a short time anyway. That our houseguests, who are expected a week after our move, will find our apartment a bit chaotic? They are old friends and won’t mind. If they wanted deluxe accommodations, they wouldn’t be staying with us. No, there is no reasonable cause for anxiety.

And then I ask myself how such a small matter as moving into a renovated apartment can bother me when many people would be pleased to have that problem. When I read in a column by Nicholas Kristof that the half-starved refugees fleeing from Somalia are routinely robbed and raped on their way to Kenya, I have to ask myself how in the world I can worry about such a trivial matter as moving, especially under such favorable conditions. The Somalis’ anxiety has a basis in a horrid reality. I know I’m fortunate in my problems.

My anxiety, I’ve concluded, is based on the knowledge that this move will, in all likelihood, be my last one. Any move after that will be, as my father used to say, feet first. Well, I won’t have to pack and unpack ever again. That part’s good. But it’s the finality implied by this move that’s making me anxious. It reminds me that the end of life, which once seemed so indefinitely far away, now seems to be around the corner. So if the time is short, that’s all the more reason to enjoy what there is to be enjoyed and to stop worrying about a move from one apartment to another.

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

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