The Stream of Life

More than 50 years ago, when I was an assistant buyer at the late lamented Abraham & Straus department store in downtown Brooklyn, I lived not far away, in Brooklyn Heights. It was a summer day when I decided not to take the subway to work but to walk. In truth, the store wasn't very far from my apartment, no more than forty minutes by foot.My boss, a formidable man who inhabited my nightmares for years after I left the store, somehow learned that I had walked to work. He asked me why I hadn’t taken the subway, a trip of about ten minutes. I told him that it was so much more pleasant walking than descending into the depths of the earth, waiting on a hot platform, and then traveling in a crowded subway car. He was displeased. “Stay in the stream of life,” he said.

During my three terrorized years as his assistant, he taught me several valuable lessons, of which that was one, although its application to walking is, in my opinion, mistaken. The general principle is sound, however, and I thought of it recently when visiting old friends at their summer home in western Connecticut. Theirs is in a planned community whose houses are nestled among woods on a rustic preserve of 325 acres.

Our hostess drove us to the community’s office, so that we could send a fax in connection with the renovation of our apartment. At the office our hostess introduced us to another resident, an energetic woman of a certain age. I don’t remember how it was that we told her the fax we were sending was to solve a particularly frustrating problem in our renovation, but she responded, “You should build a house!” She built one in Florida, where she now lives most of the year, migrating to her home in western Connecticut only for the summer.

She had summered for years in our friends' community, but had spent the rest of the year in New York, before moving to Florida. “I never thought I would say this,” she told us, “but there are 40 reasons not to live in the northeast.” And then with the fervor of a religious convert she told us how good her life was in Florida. There are lots of things to do at the clubhouse, which seems to be the center of her life there; she can drive there from her home in just a few minutes; and she can wear practically nothing at all in the winter, while we in New York are bundled up like Eskimos.

To each his own, of course, but the idea of retiring to Florida appeals not at all to my wife and me. We want to be part of the life around us. At our age it would be hard to sink roots into the community at large if we moved away from New York. Our lives are here, where we began our married life, where our children, my wife, her parents, and grandparents were born, where the institutions with which we are long familiar are found, where our daughter and her family and many of our friends live. For the same reason that we hope never to move into “protected living” or worse yet into a nursing home, we would hate to live in Florida, isolated from the life around us. Even our neighbors in Brooklyn, mainly young families with children, give us a sense of being in the midst of life, as we interact with them and watch their children develop. How arid, in comparison, would be a life centered around a clubhouse, frequented almost exclusively by other retirees.

True, New York winters are hard, especially for the elderly, but there’s a sense of accomplishment and pride in withstanding the worst that the snow, sleet, and cold can bring. And for our perseverance, the glories of spring, summer, and autumn reward us. This progression of seasons, a progression that reminds us of the cycle of life, is sadly lacking in Florida.

"Stay in the stream of life,” said my boss, and he was right.

© 2010-2011 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All rights reserved.

Room Eight

Last Friday, when it reached 104 degrees in Central Park, I entered the cool reception hall of the Kimmel Urology Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. The Center is new, the furnishings modern and expensive, and if you weren’t paying attention, you might think that you’d walked by mistake into the lobby of a boutique luxury hotel.

My mission that day was to receive an injection of Lupron, a drug that suppresses the production of testosterone, a hormone that promotes the proliferation of prostate cells. When I announced my presence to the young man at the desk, he told me to go to Room Eight, which caused a bit of confusion inasmuch as I had no idea of the room’s location. “Is this your first time?” he asked. When assured that it was, he led me through a door marked “chemotherapy” and brought me to a cubicle with a large, comfortable leather chair, some smaller chairs next to it, and a television set that was tuned to a show hosted by Whoopi Goldberg.

A pretty blonde nurse named Anna entered and asked me, in a vaguely Slavic accent, if I had experienced various symptoms (breathless? fatigued? blood in the urine?), most of which I was happy to say were not present. She explained the possible side effects of the hormone therapy, the least unpleasant of which are hot flashes, enumerated those symptoms that should merit a call to my doctor, drew the cubicle's curtain shut, told me to drop my trousers, asked me if I had a preferred buttock (no), then punctured the side closest to where she was standing. I understand that within a few weeks the injection should allow me to walk without pain. I hope soon to be able to hang up my cane and stride once again along Prospect Park paths.

Confused as to the location of the exit after leaving Room Eight, I wandered about for a minute or so before sighting my nurse and asking her for directions. That minute gave me enough time to glimpse at least a half dozen patients sitting in large leather chairs like the one I had vacated, each in his or her own cubicle just like mine, each attached to an IV that presumably was delivering a chemotherapy drug. I hope they were an unrepresentative sample, for they looked pretty ill, each sunk in a private reverie, despite the presence, in most cases, of another person, probably a family member, occupying one of the smaller chairs in the cubicle.

No doubt the injections are given in the chemotherapy section for convenience. After all, nurses are required for both treatments. But I couldn't help wonder if perhaps there was another reason. Perhaps it was to warn us that the feeling of regained health, which the injections provide, will be temporary, and that in the end, after the inevitable failure of the hormone treatment to halt the proliferation of cancer cells, we too will be attached from time to time to an IV line.

That there’s another stage of defense down the road is encouraging, since it suggests the possibility of greater longevity, but the appearance of those haggard patients was a downer. All the more reason, I thought, to seize the moment while I’m still vertical and reasonably ambulatory. This would take the immediate form of a raspberry sorbet should I pass an ice cream establishment on my way home. Alas one was not to be found, but on the way, I bought six yellow carnations, a treat less fattening and likely to last a lot longer.

2o10-2011 Anchises-an Old Mans Journal. All rights reserved.

Onwards and Upwards

In Friday’s blog post I wrote that I’d like to visit the Egyptian and Mexican pyramids and sail down the Nile. But then I awoke before dawn with second thoughts. I wondered if I'm nuts. I’d be 80 years old when embarking on these excursions. Both in Mexico and Egypt, I’d be far from metropolitan centers much of the time. What if my illness became acute? Doesn’t my present stage of development preclude more globe-trotting? Isn’t that part of my life over? Shouldn’t it be over? You know how it is at four in the morning.

But later that day, fully awake, I read about an 81-year-old widow who spends ten months a year traveling to exotic locations. She travels light, with only one pair of shoes, the barest minimum of clothing, and miniature cars to give to children en route. She’s not letting her age stand in her way of living the way she wants.

Neither is Diana Nyad. Last Tuesday, the Times reported on her mission to swim from Cuba to Key West. A long-distance swimmer, she’s swum from Bimini in the Bahamas to Jupiter, Florida, a distance of 102 miles. But a year before that, in 1978, she was forced to abandon her attempt to swim the 103-mile route from Cuba to Key West after swimming 50 miles, when tumultuous seas pushed her far off course. Now, at the age of 61, she’s trying again. She’s trained for a year and a half, enlisted a support team of 22 people, and has raised most of the half million dollars required for the venture. She hopes her exploit will help people say “‘I want to live life like that at this age.’ I want the candle to burn bright.”

I too want the candle to burn bright. I couldn’t engage in long-distance swimming at any age, but there are more candles to burn than one. At 60 I traveled around the world by surface transportation, by means of ferries, railroads, freighters, and automobiles, never once boarding an airplane. This was pretty tame compared to swimming in the ocean for 103 miles without a shark cage, but for me it was what Ms. Nyad, the marathon swimmer, calls “energizing.” During that journey I felt fully alive, completely immersed in the moment, a feeling I'd like to capture again.

The examples of these two women, one 81 the other 61, made me laugh at my fears about setting forth again at 80 on what after all would not be a very hazardous or adventurous journey. So the other day, after discussing the matter with my wife, we signed up for a two-week educational tour of Egypt, a Road Scholar (formerly Elder Hostel) program. This will include, of course, visits to the pyramids and a cruise down the Nile, covering two of the items on my wish list. We’re scheduled to fly to Cairo a few days after my 80^th birthday. Onwards and upwards.

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

Wish List

On the front page of the Weekend Arts section of last Friday’s Times appeared an article with the headline “A Single Pleasure Ere Summer Fades.” So often, the author writes, we let the summer slip away without managing to do anything for our own pleasure – reading that book we meant to read, for example, or seeing that film we wanted to see.

That opening paragraph made me feel rather pleased with myself because I had done at least two of the things I had meant to do for my own pleasure this summer. I had visited the Cone Sisters' exhibit at the Jewish Museum, which presents a judicious sampling from their fabulous art collections, on loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art, and I had seen Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, a delightful jeu d’esprit and a love letter to Paris. But since it’s unbecoming to be pleased with oneself, I soon turned my thoughts to the more serious issue of not letting the rest of my life slip by without doing a few more thing for my own pleasure.

If I were a serious person, I would find pleasure in writing another book, volunteering at a local hospital, or otherwise contributing to the general welfare, miniscule as my contribution might be. I used to be a serious person, but I figure that at my stage of development I’m entitled to seek pleasure where pleasure is to be found.

Would I find pleasure in learning Spanish, so that I could eavesdrop on conversations in the subway? Indeed, I would be pleased to know Spanish but not so pleased to work at acquiring it. What about renewing my knowledge of French, which was kicked in the head when I learned Hebrew? Then I could read Remembrance of Things Past in the original. It’s clear I’m a deeply unserious person to propose something so unlikely. I’m reminded of Johnson’s remark about whether some object was worth seeing. Yes, it was worth seeing, he said, but not worth going to see. Self-improvement is not going to get very far with me, I’m afraid.

So here’s a more realistic list of things I’d like to do for my own pleasure in the time that’s left to me. I’d like to see the pyramids, not only those in Egypt but also those in Mexico and Central America. And while I’m at it, I’d like to take one of those four-day cruises down the Nile, stopping along the way to view antiquities. This is, admittedly, a self-indulgent list and if I never manage to check off any of them, I won’t feel terribly deprived. After all, I’ve already walked on the Great Wall of China, viewed the Taj Mahal by moonlight, and watched, from the deck of a slow boat to China, the sunrise over the Pacific.

Exotic travel is all very well and good, but what I most want is domestic. I’d like to bring both my children’s families together for a visit. Our son and his family live in Los Angeles, whereas our daughter and her family live in Brooklyn. The logistical issues in bringing them together are formidable. But when these issues are resolved, our children's and grandchildren's reunion gives me the most pleasure of all. When they are together, I can kvell in the presence of my descendants and once again act as pater familias. That I have combined Yiddish and Latin in one sentence testifies to the strength of my emotion.

So that’s what I hope won’t slip away in the years (I hope) ahead of me. In the meantime, I’ll see more films, visit museums more often, lean something new, and meet my friends for lunch.

(c) 2010-2011 Anchises-an old mans journal All rights reserved.

Transformation

My medical oncologist was a little boy the first time we met him, when he visited us in Jerusalem with his parents, good friends of ours, and his older brother. I couldn’t know, of course, that roughly forty years later I would be hanging on this child’s every word. My wife and I met him again last Friday at the Sidney Kimmel Center for Prostate and Urologic Cancers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, where he is engaged in research concerning prostate cancer metastases to the bone and to the lymph nodes.

Now a distinguished medical researcher, the former little boy is a man of medium height, trim physique, and a neat beard, who displays both intensity of focus and warmth of personality. He explained the nature of my disease and the treatments available, impressing us by his knowledge, his ability to convey clearly what we needed to know, and his compassion. During his physical examination, he revealed what’s been called a “healing touch,” hard to define but easy to recognize. I'm in the best possible hands.

He transformed my understanding of my disease. Instead of looking at my metastasis as a fatal disease whose progress can be slowed, he views it as a chronic disease, like hypertension and COPD, that can be managed. Since a man my age has a pretty limited life expectancy in any case, the two views may amount to the same thing, but his way of looking at my disease is, of course, much more attractive. So I will have to give up the romantic view of myself as suffering from an incurable, fatal disease and return to the ranks of ordinary mortals. It’s a move I’m happy to make.

(c) 2010-2011 Anchises - an old man's journal All rights reserved.

Identities

In a class led by Rabbi Andrew Bachman, of Congregation Beth Elohim, we studied a letter from Moses ben Maimon (1125-1204) to Rabbi Obadia, a convert to Judaism. Rabbi Obadia had asked if his status as a convert excluded him from those prayers and blessings that alluded to the Jews’ common ancestry. Was he permitted to say, for example, “God of our fathers,” or “You who have brought us out of the land of Egypt?”

Moses ben Maimon, medieval philosopher and physician, also known as Maimonides, was one of the greatest rabbinical scholars in Jewish history. Thus his answer to Rabbi Obadia carries great weight. Ben Maimon responded that Rabbi Obadia could say all the prayers and blessings without changing them in the least. This is because Abraham converted many people, bringing them “under the wings of the divine presence.” Just as he converted his contemporaries, so all future converts are considered the disciples and thus the children of Abraham, who was the ancestor of Obadia no less than of Maimonides himself.

Obadia’s question concerned a topic that had been much on my mind. I'd been thinking about my own identity in part because I had recently reviewed a volume of essays about language and ethnic identity and in part because in the evening of my life, having known five generations of my family, I increasingly see myself as a link between the future and the past.

Jews’ common ancestry may be a myth, but if so it is a most powerful one. I consider myself a Jew by virtue of birth, whether or not my ancestors ever lived in Palestine. For all I know, they could have converted to Judaism in, say, the 18th century. But it doesn’t matter. Even though there’s no historical evidence for the existence of the Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, even though Genesis and Exodus may be literary creations rather than historical accounts, I descend, in an admittedly mystical fashion, from Abraham, just as did Maimonides and Obadia. Judaism is, in other words, not only a religion. It is also an ethnicity, a collective defined by belief in a common ancestry.

Of my many identities, some are no longer active. My identity as a student is unlikely to be revived and my identity as a soldier cannot. My identities as university professor and academic researcher have long been in mothballs, unlikely to be taken out for an airing. My identity as an Israeli, now that I’m back in the United States, has become almost vestigial, although I retain a lively interest in the news from Israel. Whereas my Israeli identity has weakened here, my American identity never lessened during our 36 years in Israel.

It turns out that my identities as an American and as a Jew, both acquired at birth, are the ones that have lasted the longest. Of the two, my Jewish identity is the stronger. In part this is the consequence of encountering Antisemitism in school, but that ‘s not the most important reason. My Jewish identity seems primordial, imbibed with my mother’s milk, whereas my American identity does not. I could have been born anywhere, but as the child of my parents, I’d be a Jew, whether or not I ever observed any of the religion’s rituals or commandments.

Even so, my Jewish ancestry began at the earliest during the second millennium before the Common Era, whereas the bulk of my ancestors, like everyone else’s, lived for innumerable generations before that. If we go back far enough, to the divergence of homo sapiens from other hominids about two and half million years ago, everyone on earth is probably related to everyone else. Thus, it’s curious that such a slight sliver of time, the generations since Abraham, should have had such a powerful impact. And it's remarkable that even if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, along with the Books of Genesis and Exodus, should be fictional, it doesn't matter at all.

(c) 2010-2011 Anchises-an old man's journal All rights reserved.

Saying Goodbye

Unlike my unfortunate mother, who died at the age of 47, before any of her children had left home, my father had the pleasure of seeing each of us marry, establish homes, and begin to raise children. With the important exception of the last six months of his life, when he lived in my brother’s guest cottage, my siblings and I lived far from him during most of our married lives. Whereas he lived in a suburb of Boston, my brother and his family lived near Kingston, my sister and her family lived near Utica, and I and my family lived all over the place – New York, Addis Ababa, Palo Alto, San Diego, and finally Jerusalem. My father would visit each of his children and we would visit him, but these visits were generally brief, since my father, who worked almost until the end of his life, didn't like to take long vacations. Most of the time, we communicated by phone and by letter, mainly his letters. For years he wrote to us once a week, often enclosing a check for a birthday, an anniversary, or for no reason at all.

Each time I saw my father after an absence, I was struck by how much older he looked, so different from the mental image I carried of him. While it was hard to see his gradual decline, it was much harder to say goodbye to him at the conclusion of each visit. One time, when he was visiting us in Jerusalem, he worried that he might miss his return flight to Boston if he didn’t spend the night in Tel Aviv. So on his last evening in Israel, I drove him to a hotel there, where, in the lobby, I hugged him goodbye. As I did so, I wondered, as I always did during those last years, if I would ever see him again. He entered an elevator, its door closed, and I turned to leave. As I did so, a hotel clerk, who had witnessed our farewell, said “It’s hard to say goodbye to a father.”

It’s hard to say goodbye to a father, but, as I’ve since learned, it’s hard to say goodbye to a child. We have the privilege of living close to our daughter and her family, who in fact live in the other wing of our apartment house in Brooklyn, but our son and his family live in Los Angeles. We see our Los Angeles family only a few times a year – generally twice a year and with luck three times, never for longer than a week or two per visit. This summer, as she’s done for the past ten years, our daughter-in-law took her children to visit her parents in Rehovot, Israel, where they will spend six weeks. Our son will join them for the last few weeks of their stay. After they had left for Israel but before he joined them, he flew out from Los Angeles to spend a long weekend with us.

It was a lazy four days that he spent with us, a time of snoozing and shmoozing during the intervals in which he was not negotiating various business deals via the medium of his Blackberry and laptop computer. His visit gave us great pleasure even as his departure, as we knew it would, gave us some pain. As I hugged him goodbye and watched him enter the town car that would take him to the airport, I wondered if I would see him again. I used to wonder if my father would still be alive when it was time for the next visit. Now I wonder if I will. Only now do I realize that my father probably had the same thought when he said goodbye to me that evening in Tel Aviv.