Wolf

In Friday's post, I wrote about the value of a friendship. Today I write about the death of one.

I first met him on the ferry from Cyprus to Piraeus, 18 years ago. A man about my age, perhaps a few years older, he was waiting for the dining room doors to open. Holding an English-language book, he evidently planned to read it while dining alone. I was at the beginning of a journey around the world by surface transportation, having boarded the ferry in Haifa the day before. Traveling by myself, I struck up a conversation with him. He told me he was leaving Cyprus, where he had lived for the past few years, and was on his way to Switzerland, planning to stop in Milan to visit his son and daughter in law. By the time the doors had opened, I had asked him if I might join him for dinner and he agreed.

Two days later, he invited me to accompany him on his drive from Piraeus to the west coast of Greece, where we would take a ferry to Italy, and then northwards to Milan, where I would board a train to Paris and he would continue on to Switzerland. (The ferry was carrying his car.) I had already purchased a non-refundable Eurailpass, but I was happy to throw it away. It would be entertaining, I thought, to travel with Wolf, as I shall call him.

Wolf had retired a few years before as chief of the European branch of a multinational company. His mother tongue was German, but he was also completely at home in French and English. In addition, he could get along quite well in Italian. A master raconteur, he entertained me throughtout our ten days together with stories about his childhood, his ex-wives (two), his children (six), his work - indeed his whole history. His steady stream of narratives, anecdotes, and jokes and his explanations of what we were seeing along the way, would have been sufficient to make me glad of his company, but he also introduced me to the glories of Italian cookery. He ordered some of the best meals I've ever eaten, making me wonder why I had spent so many vacations on an Aegean island, when I could have been eating in Italy.

His savoir faire, story-telling, and general good humor captivated me to the extent that when we were in Florence, I chose to sit with him in a cafe - Campari and soda at 11:00 in the morning - rather than to visit the Cathedral or the Uffizi. This was criminal, perhaps, for I had never before been to Italy and might never return, but Wolf provided, in himself, a cultural experience. I was sad when we finally parted in Milan, and I wondered if I'd ever see him again.

But we kept in touch via e-mail, and I did see him again, several times in fact, twice in Israel and again in the Sinai. Soon after our last meeting, he moved back to Cyprus, where he remarried, happily it seemed, and I was hoping to travel there with my wife to see him again and to meet his new wife. But then he began to write fevered essays lambasting not only Israel but also the United States for its support of Israel. He sent these screeds to everyone on his mailing list and he also forwarded articles written by others that expressed similar sentiments. Israel is by no means innocent of faults, but I wondered why he concentrated on that small country to the exclusion of all others. He had nothing to say about Kurdish desires for autonomy, for example, or Chinese oppression of Tibet, among the many targets he could have chosen for his wrathful indignation. I would respond with reasoned arguments, hoping to moderate his views, but my eloquence, such as it was, did not change his mind in the slightest. If anything, his essays become even more violent and extreme.

After he wrote me asking how I could bear to be a citizen of two such retrograde and oppressive regimes, I asked him what he wanted me to do - burn both my passports in a public square? That was our last exchange. He never responded to my exasperated question, and I never wrote to him again.

These days, when a friendship ends, the cause is death. In Wolf's case, it was the death of my view of him that ended our friendship. I wondered how I could have so misjudged him, so misplaced my admiration. My sadness at the transformation of this sophisticated cosmopolite into a ranting ideologue was almost as great as the grief I feel when a friend dies. A friendship creates its own world. When a friendship dies, a world dies with it.

Old Friends

We visited old friends last weekend. Our hostess has known my wife for close to 65 years. They were classmates not only in the small girls' school they attended in New York, from the fourth grade through high school graduation, but also at the same college and graduate school. They attended each other's weddings and kept in touch with one another, even after they both moved away from New York. After many years in Washington, our hosts retired to a New England village, where their home, set on a leafy promontory, overlooks the Atlantic and a small beach about 100 feet below. Every morning before breakfast, until late autumn, when the water and air become too cold, our hostess plunges into the sea and swims laps.

Our hosts' house is commodious, comfortable, and welcoming, reflecting their own generous spirit, a setting in which their relaxed and unforced hospitality made us feel immediately at home. They made us believe, during our four-day stay, that Benjamin Franklin's adage about fish and guests could never apply to us. Indeed they pressed us to stay longer, an invitation we would have loved to accept had we not appointments back in the city.

My wife and our hostess lived not far from one another when they were growing up, and they were often in each other's homes on weekends and after school. Our hostess not only remembers my wife's parents, she also remembers my wife's grandparents, who lived nearby and whose home was always open to my wife and her friends.

I've regretted not knowing my wife's grandfather, a busy obstetrician beloved of his patients, said to be a man of great charm and wit. Alas, when my wife was in the eleventh grade and he was in his early seventies, he was struck down by a disease that soon killed him. Today there are only a few people alive who remember him, but our hostess is one of them. This bond is among the many that bind her and my wife together.

Like siblings, old friends share many of our experiences and memories. Unlike siblings, who sometimes carry into adulthood the rivalries and resentments of childhood, our friends come with no such baggage. We choose each other freely and stay together by choice, and we give one another nourishing emotional shelter. We left our hosts wreathed in the nimbus of their friendship, which comforted us all the way home, as we rode away from their green woods and entered the canyons of New York.

Supergrandpa

Let's say you had a superpower. Maybe you could fly. Would you fight crime? Work for world peace? This is Ira Glass, in a 30-second promo for a recent broadcast of "This American Life." If I could fly, says one respondent, the first thing I'd do is fly into a bar, check out what's going on there, fly back home, attach my baby to me, fly to a doctor's appointment at 11:30, and then I think I'd fly to Atlantic City.

The program reported the results from a thoroughly unscientific survey conducted by John Hodgman, who asked respondents what superpower they would choose if they could choose only one, flight or invisibility. In general, the men chose flight, the women invisibility. None would use his or her superpower to fight crime or to work for world peace. Of those who chose invisibility, many said they would exploit it for personal gain. They would steal merchandise from luxury stores or walk onto planes and ride for free. Of those who chose flight, most said they would use it for speedy transportation, like the young-sounding man quoted above.

I was surprised. Shouldn't at least a few have said they would use their power for the public good, even if they didn't mean it? But it's not so simple. One man said that, after all, he was being given the power of flight but not superhuman strength or a bullet-proof body. If he fought criminals, he might get hurt. As for world peace, invisibility or flight might be helpful but neither would be sufficient. One also needs supersmarts, a quality not included in Hodgman's offer.

Still, the program made me ask myself what superpower I would choose. Like all Hodgman's respondents, I didn't hesitate, as if I had been considering the matter for a long time. Unlike most of the men in the sample, I chose invisibility. I'm not sure what this says about my masculinity, but at my age, who cares? Actually, I think I chose invisibility because when I was a child I listened every Sunday to "The Shadow," a serial about Lamont Cranston, who years ago in the Orient learned a strange and mysterious secret: the hypnotic power to cloud men's minds so they cannot see him. Even now, 70 years later, I can recite by heart the show's weekly introduction. I'll bet Hodgman's respondents were too young to have heard it. If they had, how could they resist invisibility? Never mind. What would I do with my strange and mysterious secret?

Well, I wouldn't go to Triplers and rip off a suit or even a few shirts. Nor would I fly for free to Bali. Those actions would be wrong! Besides, I'd be afraid of being caught. Nor would I enter a room to hear what people say about me when they think I'm not there. My feelings are too easily bruised for that. No, influenced by Lamont Cranston, I'd do my best to fight crime. Not as brave as Cranston, though, I'd avoid the violent criminals and concentrate on the white-collar sort - embezzlers, Ponzi-scheme artists, insider traders, and the like.

My evidence would consist of criminals' voice recordings as they conducted their nefarious operations. How would I hide my tape recorder, which, unlike me, would be visible? Easy, I'd wear it around my neck. I can cloud men's minds so that they cannot see anything on my body. But wait. How will I know who is hatching an evil scheme? I suppose I could stand invisibly on the trading floor of a major bank and keep my ears open, but maybe there wouldn't be any criminals at that bank. Most workers are honest, after all. So then I'd have to stand on the trading floor of another bank. Sounds pretty inefficient to me. No, I'd need a confederate in the Police Department's white collar crime unit, a smart detective who would enlist my help in cracking cases.

Okay, now I'm ready to make New York safer for the honest investor and for the hopelessly gullible. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Supergrandpa knows.

Our Town

Even though I read Thornton Wilder's Our Town sixty years ago, I remembered enough of the play to suspect that when I saw its revival at the Barrow Street Theater a week ago Sunday, I would cry during the third act. I was right. But remembering what was going to happen in the third act made me cry during the second as well. These weren't wrenching sobs, mind you, simply tears trickling down my cheeks. I'll bet it was the older members of the audience, like me, who were the most moved.

As all the world knows, or at least once knew, the play takes place in the fictional small town of Grover's Corners, near New Hampshire's Monadnock Mountain, in the early years of the twentieth century. In the first act, the Stage Manager introduces us to the town, pointing out its landmarks and some of its citizens. In the second act, we see the childhood friendship between George Gibbs and Emily Webb blossom into love and marriage. And in the third, we watch the ghost of Emily, who has died in childbirth, revisit her twelfth birthday, after having been warned by other spirits not to do so.

The Barrow Street Theater is very small, its maximum audience only 150 people. We sat along three sides of a tiny stage, and the actors walked and sat among us. This intimate exposure to the actors - the Stage Manager sat right next to me during much of the third act - created an extraordinary audience involvement in this drama of everyday lives.

For most of the play, the stage set is minimal, with only two tables and some chairs, and only a few props, such as school books, a baseball, and a baseball mitt. The actors wear ordinary modern clothes, for the most part informal duds, except during the wedding in the second act, and the actors pretend to handle solid objects such as plates, pots and pans, and ice cream sodas, although these are in fact invisible. But the scene in which Emily revisits her family on the morning of her twelfth birthday, is realistically staged, with authentic props and period costumes. We could even smell the bacon that Emily's mother was frying. This is a departure from Wilder's directions to use hardly any sets, but the innovation is highly effective. It was a bit like the shocking transition in the film version of the Wizard of Oz, from the Kansas of black and white to the Oz of color. Suddenly, ordinary life, the life that Emily longs to see again, becomes maximally vivid.

One of the play's messages is that ordinary life is precious, but that we don't usually appreciate it. When Emily's ghost returns to the graveyard, she asks the Stage Manager, Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute? He replies, No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some. The spirit of Simon Stimson, a church organist and the town drunk, who committed suicide, tells her, That's what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know - that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

I left the theater so dazed that when I entered the subway I took the wrong train. But wrapped up in the play as I was, I didn't care. A few hours later, my wife, who had been spending the last eight days in Germany, called from the taxi that was bringing her home from the airport. I started to cry all over again, I was so happy to hear her voice. It reminded me of the way I used to feel, after my father died, when I dreamed that he really wasn't dead after all. In those dreams I would feel intense joy at seeing him again. Of course I would have been happy to hear her voice again even if I hadn't seen the play a few hours before, but the play intensified my appreciation of just how precious she is to me.

I used to tell myself, when standing in a long line or performing some routine task, that if I were dead and an angel gave me the chance to experience life again for just ten minutes, with those minutes randomly assigned, I'd be thrilled even to find myself standing in line, folding the laundry, or washing the dishes. After seeing Our Town, I made up my mind to value, as much as I could, all aspects of everyday life, from tying my shoes in the morning to glimpsing the moon at night, from eating breakfast with my wife to saying kiddush on Friday night. Perhaps the Stage Manager is right - that this can be done some of the time, maybe, only by saints and poets. I'm neither, yet I will do the best I can.

Youth

In a recent post, I wrote that if a genie offered to grant me three wishes, I wouldn't ask him to make me look like a young man. Still, it's better to look like a young man than to be one. Just as one must pass through the stage of raising children in order to become a grandparent, one needs to struggle through one's youth in order to reach old age. To everything there is a season, but I'm glad the youthful season is over. In the words of the song by Lerner and Loewe, I'm glad I'm not young anymore.

No more confusion, no morning after surprise. I spent a long time confused and surprised, especially when I worked for Abraham and Straus, at that time Brooklyn's premier department store (since absorbed by Macy's). For three years my boss, a Harvard MBA, class of '29, terrorized me, and long after I left his employ, he inhabited my nightmares. I'll say this for him, though, he taught me the importance of a sense of urgency. (He only had to ask me once, "Do you know what it feels like to have a red hot poker up your ass?") During this interval I kept asking myself whether there might not be more to life than expediting the delivery of men's socks, cuff links, handkerchiefs, and underwear from the stockroom to the sales floor. To find an answer, I partied every weekend and on some weeknights too, only to discover that riotous living could yield no consistently compelling answers. I'm thankful that stage is over.

No self-delusion, that when you're telling those lies, she isn't wise. I'm glad I'm no longer moonstruck, consumed by longing, misconstruing polite smiles for encouragement. The tiny remark that tortures you - gone. No more gathering up my courage to ask for a date, no more anxiety about possible rejections - "sorry, I have to wash my hair" was a popular put down when I went to college - and on the other side of that jagged coin, no more hurting a girl's feelings, which was sometimes just as painful. I'm thankful that stage is over.

I'm glad I don't have to relive our wedding trip, when I struggled to make conversation at breakfast, lunch, cocktails, and dinner with that nice young woman I married but scarcely knew. I found it a huge effort to find anything to say, yet I had somehow to do it for 16 hours a day! (Only a few years ago that I discovered she had felt the same way.) Now, when our conversation is inexhaustible, I recall that first trip with both nostalgia and relief that it's over.

I'm glad I no longer have to lecture in Hebrew, preparing the lecture first in English, then in Hebrew, rehearsing endlessly. No longer do I need to look up words in a Hebrew-English dictionary, often with results mystifying to my students. When I looked up "dichotomy," for example, I found chitsui, which sounded reasonable since it's based on the root shared by the Hebrew word for "half." But when I used the term my students looked at me blankly. I resorted to English: "dichotomy." "Oh," they chorused, "dikotomia."

I'm glad I'm no longer the father of adolescents, although to be fair, mine inflicted far less grief than most, less than I feared they might, less perhaps than they should have, and no doubt less than I deserved. No more worry when they took the family car and then stayed out late. No more anxiety when they served in the army. No more falling in love with their girl friends and boy friends who, it turned out, were just trial runs. My kids' accomplishments after their adolescence continue to make me proud, so I needn't have worried about them as much as I did during a stage that I'm thankful is over.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not sorry I went through any of those stages, all necessary, all providing more pleasure than pain. Without them I wouldn't be the person I am today. If they didn't build my character, at least they helped me understand the feelings of others adrift in similar boats. All and all, I've had a good ride. It's just that I don't want to revisit any of the stations along the way. Been there, done there, and I'm glad I don't have to do any of it again. I've never been so comfortable before, Oh I'm so glad I'm not young anymore. It's time for something new.

One More Time

Civic Ventures is a think tank devoted to the baby boomers. Its principal focus is the promotion - by grants, awards, and programs - of what it calls "encore careers," which, in the words of its website, are "real jobs tackling real problems and making a real impact" (www.civicventures.org). The organization encourages Boomers, who are now approaching retirement, to engage in such careers, "providing personal fulfillment doing paid work and producing a windfall of human talents to solve society's greatest problems." If the organization succeeds, those advertisements addressed to the elderly will have to stop picturing us fishing, golfing, or playing bridge.

But there are those who want to do just that. A treasured friend of mine, who died a few years ago, retired after a long and distinguished career. He could have continued to work indefinitely. Instead, he and his wife moved a hundred miles away to a mountain community where they played golf every afternoon. I never understood their decision, since he had spent his entire professional life in intense intellectual activity, but he and his wife were happy with it.

Where is the think tank devoted to my generation, the "Silent Generation?" Time coined the term in a 1951 cover story that claimed we - those born between 1925 and 1945 - are conventional, hard working, unimaginative, and silent about the great political issues of the day, unlike the flaming youths of our parents' generation. Whether or not that assessment was true - look at Martin Luther King as a counter example - we were by and large a hardworking lot. Now that our grindstones have been worn down, worn out, or taken away, at least some of us find the lack of engagement painful.

Retirement is a second career, said my late friend the golfer. He believed that retirement should be thought out and planned with care, no matter what activities the retiree chooses to pursue. I took my friend's advice and planned mine as carefully as I could. Even so, I found the transition from paid employment to leisure a bumpy one, since I now had to find, without my usual institutional and occupational support, new purposes, activities that would be useful and well as engaging. I can solve that problem for stretches at a time, until I complete one project and start looking for another. I'm sure I'm not the only elder who searches for meaningful engagement. Does anybody want to join me in founding a think tank for the Silent Generation? We could call it The One More Time Foundation.

Is Your Skin Aging?

Earlier this week, I passed an upscale shop that displayed in its window a large sign, asking "Is your skin aging?" That ticked me off. "Of course, it is, you idiot!" I muttered to myself, "Everybody's skin is aging, and that cream or lotion or whatever it is you're selling is not going to stop it." That poster was selling a fantasy, the extended, indefinite appearance of youth.

Admittedly, young people, even those with ordinary looks, are attractive if only because their vitality is so appealing. But the young hold no monopoly on beauty. There are beautiful older people too. Clint Eastwood is an outstanding current example. His face has character, just as did the faces of Paul Newman and Katherine Hepburn, who looked terrific until they died. In contrast, the unmarked faces of the young are bland and uninteresting.

A friend of mine, a notable ballet dancer in her youth, now in her nineties, never tried to look younger. She hair turned to gray and then to white, untouched by artificial coloring. Yet she has always looked glamorous. Another friend, who died last year at the age of 97, looked good until the day he died. Of course, my friends were attractive to begin with, and since neither gained weight, their good facial bone structure continued to show to advantage. But even if your looks are nothing special and even if you've gained weight, what's wrong with looking your age?

If a genie appeared, released from the old brass lamp that I started to polish, and offered to grant me three wishes, I would not ask him to make me look younger. I'm not sure what I would ask him for, but it wouldn't be for that.

Just as I wouldn't want to speak a foreign language perfectly, without an accent, I wouldn't want to look like a young man. Imagine that I asked the genie to let me to speak French like an educated Parisian. When I spoke, the French would assume I had all sorts of knowledge that I didn't possess. I would appear dull to them, because I shared so little of the knowledge common to educated Frenchmen my age. Similarly, if I appeared to be, say, 30, young people would expect me to know how to operate all sorts of unfamiliar electronic devices; they'd expect me to maintain a Facebook page, to twitter, and to know the names of the latest rappers. I'd have to wear my tee shirts outside my nonexistent blue jeans and I'd have to throw away my ties. Besides, I could no longer smile at pretty girls without their thinking I'm hitting on them, cashiers would give me a hard time when I asked for a senior discount, my wife would be criticized for robbing the cradle, and no one would offer me a seat on the subway. No! I'm happy to look my age.

Years ago, I read a short story about a beautiful woman who spent a month in a Swiss clinic every summer, undergoing painful treatments to keep herself looking young. One day, she noticed that her hands were those of an old woman. Because she knew that plastic surgeons could not make her hands look young, she killed herself. What a pity! She should have allowed herself to grow old gracefully.

I know what I'd ask that genie: I'd ask him to make people contented to look their age. True, this would entail some negative consequences: plastic surgeons would have to buy smaller yachts, shareholders in cosmetic firms would see their dividends shrink, and the manufacturer of Botox would see its sales fall, but just think about much happier the rest of us would be.