Category Archives: Family

3,000 words — second shot (3,825 words)

I was born into an endless fight, a kind of blood feud, initiated by me, the story goes, as soon as I got home from the hospital.  “You really were an enraged baby,” both of my parents always assured me.  It was true, they insisted, a pediatrician confirmed it for them when I was ten weeks old.   A lifetime later, as my father was dying, he told me with regret almost as painful to hear as it must have been for him to speak, that he had been in the wrong.   “It was my fault,” he said in the choked, faltering voice of a man who would be dead within a few hours. “I felt you reaching out to me many times over the years, I always fought you but you were essentially right all along,” he said, “and I was a horse’s ass who resisted all insight into how fucked up I was.”  A good start, I thought, and good to hear.  

“I wish we could have had this kind of talk fifteen years ago,” he said in that strained dead man’s voice, on what turned out to be the last night of his life.  I remember thinking what a modest wish that was.  I was almost 49 at the time.  34 years of senseless war, then fifteen of peace?  I realized later I would have signed on for that too, even fifteen days.   The next evening I was closing his dead eyes as the south Florida sun set behind the palm trees outside the hospital window.  So much for the conversations we never got to have.

I began writing about my father’s life and times in earnest two and a half years ago.  I imagined I could cover a lot in three or four hundred pages.  So far I’ve written almost 1,200.  Early on the skeleton of my father piped up to give me grief about a description of the childhood he never talked about.   I thought the device of the opinionated skeleton stagey and ridiculous and figured I’d cut it in the next rewrite.  The skeleton persisted, wound up waiting for me every day, eager to get to work.   Over time, the skeleton provided a lot of assistance writing the story of the man he once was, what he stood for, how he felt about the history that was unfolding around us.  The daily talks with the skeleton of my father were a great help.  

It’s daunting to try to cover the panorama of a perplexing lifetime of almost eighty-one years, even with an imaginary partner urging you on.   Add to this that my protagonist was an average man, a nobody.   I can’t see his life outside of the context of our larger family tragedy, a context he always denied.  A life, in death, as anonymous now as any of his aunts and uncles in that hamlet in the marshes, across the Pina River from Pinsk, forced to die terrible, unknown deaths, every trace of them, and the doomed little hellhole they called home, wiped away forever.  This book is an attempt to reclaim his life.

My father’s life, though full of the highest potential, and animated by a keen sense of humor and idealism, was essentially a tragedy.   I will give the gist of it to you, along with the seeds of wisdom he was able to impart, in a condensed form now.   

Irv Widaen, was commonly known among us by my sister’s name for him, “The Dreaded Unit” (or the D.U.), a name he embraced.  He read two or three newspapers every day, starting with the New York Times.  He was a lifelong student of history.  The bending of the moral arc of history concerned him greatly and he could speak intelligently on many philosophical subjects without the need for notes.  He was a great humanist who was also, when he couldn’t help himself, capable of great brutality toward his children.  

When my sister was upset at something I’d said or done when we were kids, he’d remind her impatiently “I’ve told you a thousand times, if you play with a fucking cobra you’re going to get bit.”  This image of a deadly scaly brother was made extra potent by my sister’s phobia about snakes.  He didn’t like the expression on my nine year-old face at such moments, not at all.   “A fucking rattlesnake,” he’d say, closing his case, “look at his face, twisted and contorted in hate.”   I’d hiss, rattle my tail, and hastily leave the kitchen.

Few people, outside of my sister, mother and I, ever saw this dreaded side of him.  He came across as something of a hipster, an ironic idealist with a dark, wicked sense of humor.   He loved Lenny Bruce, and later Richard Pryor.  He loved soul music, particularly Sam Cooke.   For a few years, in the middle of his long career, he wound up speaking like the angry black cats on the street.  “As they say in the street,” he would say, then hit us with the latest street vernacular. “Dassum shit!” he would snap when confronted with something that struck him as bullshit.  He appreciated the nuances of the word motherfucker.

Professionally, he hung out with the violent leaders of rival ethnic high school gangs, bullshitted frankly with them and won them over to his way of thinking.   In those days he wore mutton-chop sideburns and grew his dark hair down to his collar.   As part of a Mod Squad style team (Black guy, Jew, blond WASP folk singer, Italian guy, Puerto Rican woman) my father led the rap sessions, I’m sure, with quick, barbed humor and irreverent, pointed honesty.  

His deep identification with these discontented underdogs must have come across, along with his sincere hatred of brutal, random hierarchy and its inhuman unfairness.   He invited these young enemies to laugh, identify, curse, imagine, talk about injustice and find common ground. They all left as friends, or at least with mutual respect, at the end of these weekends, time after time.   There was a certain amount of charisma and a lot of deft, real-time improvisation involved in this alchemy.

He’d been born and raised in “grinding poverty”, a phrase he always spoke through gritted teeth, face constricted like Clint Eastwood’s.   “Grinding poverty” stood in for his unspeakably brutal childhood circumstances in Peekskill, New York during the Great Depression.  To be sure, as was confirmed by a cousin his age whose family was very poor, my father had grown up in unspeakably painful poverty, making the cousin’s desperate childhood circumstances look somewhat comfortable by comparison.    

Young Irv had the good fortune after high school to be drafted into the Army Air Corps as America entered World War Two.  In the army he ate well every day for the first time in his life. He never looks happier than in those black and white army photos, after he’d put some meat and muscle on those bones.  He went on to live through a unique time in American history when hard work and determination, and a little help from the G.I. Bill, which put him through college and graduate school, could actually lift a person from humiliating intergenerational poverty to a comfortable middle class American life.  

Not to say he ever felt comfortable, not for a minute.   He paid a high price, working two jobs, to give his family an infinitely better life in a nice little house on a tree-lined street in Queens.  Naturally, his children, not knowing any different, never expressed the slightest appreciation for the many things they took for granted, the lawn, the great, small public school, the backyard with the cherry tree that gave big, black cherries. 

Irv had all the appearances of a cool guy, but the nonchalant pose concealed a dark, corrosive edge that was always at the ready.   He had a deep reservoir of rage that was kept under tight control most of the time. His anger poured out almost every evening over dinner, in violent torrents over his two children, my younger sister and me.   Even as we expected it every evening, as our overwhelmed mother recited all her complaints about us for her tired husband to address before he drove out to his night job, the ferocity of his anger still surprised us, somehow.   His rage was not understandable to his young children, it always struck us as cruel and insane, though, naturally, we blamed ourselves for it.

Like anyone who rages and snarls, the D.U. justified his brutality as necessary to do what needed to be done, in our case to educate the two viciously ungrateful little pricks he was raising.   He never hit us with physical blows but pounded us regularly with ferocious words intended to cow us and destroy unified resistance. The terrible mystery was how he could be such a tyrant while also imbuing us with important life lessons about decency, humility and kindness to animals.  There is no doubt that my sister and I try our best to live by the moral truths we learned from the D.U.

The brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was a regular feature of our childhood.   Screaming fights, insane threats, vicious personal attacks were as common to us as the steak, salad and Rice-a-roni we found on our plates virtually every night.   Eating steak was a palpable sign of prosperity for a man who’d been hungry during his entire childhood.  Ironically, and somewhat characteristically, my animal loving father joined PETA later in life and cut most of the meat out of his diet.  

I was an adult, well into in my mid-thirties, before I had the beginning of any insight into this confounding split in my father’s psyche.  On the one hand he was a funny, smart, sympathetic, hip guy who was very easy to talk to, when he wanted to be.  On the other hand, he was a supremely defensive man who more often used his great intelligence to keep others constantly off balance, a man who seemingly could not help trying to dominate and verbally abusing his children.  

My father had all the attributes to be a sensitive, lovable, very funny friend, yet he somehow chose to be an implacable adversary to his children most of the time.  That he may have shared this troubling split-personality feature with many men of his generation made little difference to my sister and me.  We couldn’t help but take it personally.

I’m realizing only now, as I write these words, since I am not a father, what most fathers would probably have realized about my father a long time ago:  what a tormented father my father must have been all those years.  

I spent many years, before and since his death in 2005, trying to assemble a picture of my father as a whole person whose life made some kind of holistic sense.  I could never do it.  That’s the reason I eventually started writing this, an attempt to put together the challenging puzzle of my father.  I work at the puzzle in a darkened room, most of the pieces missing, moving things around on a slanted, slippery table.  His profound unhappiness, right alongside his great capacity for laughter, was something I never had any insight into, not even a clue.   Puzzling over it as a kid is probably at the roots of my lifelong compulsion to research and write, to try to make sense of things that perplex me.  

Partly in search of insights into my perplexing father, I used to visit my father’s beloved first cousin Eli in his retirement cottage in Mt. Kisco, New York.  I’d drive up there every other weekend for a while, about an hour north of my apartment, and sit with the supremely opinionated Eli in his tidy living room, shooting the shit.   Then we’d go out for a meal somewhere.  We’d often wind up talking until well after midnight and by the time I left I had to be alert driving the twisting, black Sawmill River Parkway, steering with both hands on the wheel.    

Eli was an old man, well into his eighties, alienated from his own three kids, in a forty year blood feud to the death with his half-sister, on an every other year basis with his half-brother; he didn’t get many visitors.   I was a fledgling writer and he was a great storyteller and it was usually a pleasure sitting around bullshitting with him about the past.  His stories about the family, the few survivors of a group ruthlessly culled by a rabid movement to rid the world of their type, were fascinating.

It added to our bond that I was also the firstborn son of Eli’s favorite cousin, Irv.   Irv was the firstborn son of Eli’s favorite aunt, Chava, who was the youngest sibling of Eli’s firstborn father Aren.  Irv’s Uncle Aren had deserted from the Czar’s army, hopped a westbound train as the other draftees were shipped east to fight the Japanese.  Aren’s run to America, and bringing his youngest sister here a decade later, a generation before their hamlet was wiped off the face of the earth along with everyone they’d ever known, is the only reason any of us were ever born.  Eli was Uncle Aren’s firstborn son, born in New York City, 1908.  

Eli was seventeen years older than my father, he had watched my father for his entire life.  The tough, American born Eli was the closest thing to a father figure my father had growing up, though his own father, a silent man from Poland “completely overwhelmed by this world” (Irv, on his deathbed), was around until my father was in his mid-twenties.

Eli was a colorful character, no other way to put it.   A short, powerfully built, frog-bellied man of infinite charm, with a sandpaper voice, equally comfortable charming a pretty waitress with his smile or punching someone in the face with either hard hand.   I have often said of Eli that if he loved you he was the funniest, most generous, warmest and most entertaining person you could ever spend a few hours with.  If he didn’t like you, he was Hitler.  He had his own demons, surely, but was devoted to my father, my mother, my sister and me — there was never the slightest doubt of that.  

Eli had a fierce temper, “the Gleiberman temper” as he called it, and would turn, in one second, from an infinitely charming raconteur into a purple faced, savage panther, white foam on his sputtering lips.  Even at eighty-five he was formidable when he was angry, and Irv seemed to be occasionally scared of Eli until the end.  My mother was the only person I knew of who was allowed to constantly fight with Eli.  It was great sport between them, to rage at each other wildly and end up laughing, hugging and kissing when it was time to take their leave of each other.  

Once, describing a car trip back from Florida with Eli, my father told me happily “your mother and Eli fought all the way from Boynton Beach to the end of the New Jersey Turnpike.”  I pictured my mother, turned around in the front passenger seat, slashing at Eli with a broad sword as Eli swung his at her from the back seat.  Tireless combatants locked in mortal combat, swords clanging, for more than a thousand miles, then getting out of the car, hugging and kissing with genuine, unquestionable love, laughing and saying they’ll see each other soon.

I had something of this kind of relationship with Eli, every visit he’d turn purple with rage at least once, but we always parted as friends.

It was in this spirit of friendship, and seeing me so frequently perplexed by my father’s unfathomable anger and sudden alarming rigidity, his grim determination to win an argument at any cost, that Eli finally told me something, a truly terrible thing, that immediately changed the way I thought and felt about my father.   The more I thought about the brutal scenes in the kitchen, the more it explained.

I pictured the kitchen grinding poverty would have provided a little family in Peekskill, New York in the 1920s.   It was like a scene out of a gothic horror movie, a shaft of light coming into the dim, barren room from a high, narrow window, dust motes dancing listlessly, menacingly.  

The skeleton of my father sat up abruptly in his grave at the top of the hill in the small First Hebrew Congregation cemetery just north of Peekskill.  

“Oh yeah, listen to fucking Eli, Eli the wise oracle, the great historian… yeah, a fountain of reliability, that raging fucking maniac.  Ask his kids what kind of loving father Eli was, why none of them talk to him.  Nothing in his life was ever his fault, that’s why he’s so angry all the time, he’s always the innocent victim, from the day he was born.   Did he tell you how many times he was about to become a millionaire before he was screwed by some asshole, how his whole life was one long fucking, how his violent temper got him into big trouble time after time?  Yeah, go ahead, listen to Eli.  He’ll tell you the real story, sure, he’s ultra-reliable… Jesus Christ, Elie, when you build a story on a foundation of bullshit, what do you expect of the finished structure?   You’re going to give credence to fucking Eli?”

I never planned on my father’s skeleton being my partner in trying to tell the story of his life and times, but he made a pretty good case since popping up during an early writing session.   As I said, he was a very smart guy and, in spite of a lifelong twitch to defend himself at all costs, could always see the other side of whatever he was arguing against.  

“I love it when you talk to the reader like I’m not sitting right here,” said the skeleton, turning his head in a crackling circle to loosen his crepitating neck.  

That’s very helpful, dad.

“Don’t mention it,” said the skeleton, with a nonchalant little flip of his boney hand.

This skeleton is a different entity from the man who was my father during his lifetime. That man regarded me as a deadly adversary starting a few days after my birth.  He fought me at every turn, until the last night of his life, when he took the blame for our long, senseless war.  One of our long-running disputes was about whether people can fundamentally change themselves.  He insisted it was impossible.  In his case, he believed it 100% of himself, which blinded him to the possibility that anyone else could change anything about their life.  Then he had a dramatic change as he was dying.

“Hmmpf,” said the skeleton.

What were the first words you said to me when I came into your hospital room that last night of your life?

“I asked if you brought that little digital recorder,” he said.  

Right, and right after that?

“I said ‘You know those stories Eli told you about my childhood?   He hit the nail right on the head, though I’m sure he spared you the worst of it.   My life was pretty much over by the time I was two years old…'”

The skeleton’s consciousness starts at that moment, just before that last conversation of my father’s life, when he finally came to the understanding that had always eluded him.

“If you say so,” said the skeleton.

High over the well-situated grave (there is a huge tree over his hilltop grave providing blessed shade) two Westchester turkey vultures made lazy circles in the air.   The skeleton looked up and nodded absently.

To those who loved my father, and there were many of us, including some very bright people who frequently roared at his tossed off lines, waiting with expectant smiles for his next bit of irreverence, it will cause great distress to read about his monstrous side.  

“After all, Elie, who among us has not employed relentless brutality to irreparably damage the children we raise?   Come on, Elie, be fair about that.”

I’m picturing the dinner table when Arlene and Russ Savakus were over.  Arlene with her keen appreciation, her super-sharp mind, Russ, her more low-key hipster husband, a moderately famous bass player, both of them howling.  Their explosions of laughter were a kind of music I can still hear.  My father was at his best with an audience like Arlene and Russ.

“We’re always at our best with people we love, who love us back,” said the skeleton.

Yes.  Love is all we’ve got here, really.  If you don’t have love in your life, nothing else really matters, except a ruthless lust for power I suppose. 

“As your friend Napoleon, who reputedly regarded men as base coin, wrote in his diary  ‘As for me, I know very well I have no real friends, and you don’t suppose I care– as long as I remain what I am I will always have ‘friends’ enough.’  As you’ve noted before, Elie, who is the ‘you’ he is addressing this thought about not needing intimates to?”

Arlene and Russ.   I remember lying in my bed, as a kid, long after dinner, with the smoke from Arlene’s endless cigarettes wafting up to my room, along with their cackles and excited remarks.   It is hard to imagine, seeing you at your best, that you could have also…

“Well, there’s your mystery of life right there, Elie, and nothing very sweet about it, I’m afraid.”    

The potential in all of us, to be at our best, instead of pressed under the pressures we’re constantly forced to fight being crushed by.  Mind boggling, how hard it is to always put that best side forward.    

“Well, some people are better at it than others.  I think you’re probably right that a willingness not to be eternally aggrieved is important.  Some people, some of our most successful people, are all show, a thin candy shell over an inner life of squirming, festering horror and rage.”

Overhead the two turkey vultures continued to circle.

“I like to feel, although, admittedly, I verbally whipped you and your sister in the face every night over dinner, that I never humiliated either of you, that I always, somehow, let you know how much I loved you both.”  

Aye, that you did, pater, though it took me almost sixty years to see it all clearly.

“The tragedy of life, Elie,” said the skeleton.   One of the vultures suddenly veered toward earth, the other one turned to follow.  

Also the triumph of life, dad.  We couldn’t have this kind of conversation when you were alive, but now we are.  

“I’ll take it,” said the skeleton, looking off toward the rapidly descending scavengers.

Mehchaya

It was recently uncomfortably hot and humid in New York City (and much of the northeast, I understand) for about ten straight days.   The air was thick, heated to a sickening degree, and walking through it for more than a short stretch was like walking through warm vaseline.   It left a filthy slime on the skin that was most unpleasant.   The air went down hard to those trying to breathe it.   I would go out for a listless limp every evening slightly shaking my head.  Walking through it was like being slowly and deliberately punched in the face over and over by a giant, sullen, slimy fist.

We Americans have reason to be skeptical about any correlation between a century of escalating pollution due to refining and burning of fossil fuels and  the warming of the atmosphere, and the oceans, and the catastrophic climate emergencies: floods, droughts, catastrophic hundred year storms and raging wild fires,  popping up with horrific frequency on every continent.  American skepticism has been bought and paid for by the refiners of the dirtiest, most polluting form of crude oil, primarily Koch Industries, who invested three times more in “climate change denial” than even Exxon.  They certainly have nothing to gain by mounting this vigorous campaign against scientific consensus, easily observable catastrophic events and common sense.   I have to tip my hat to fucking Charles Koch, what an enormous and stunning cunt the man is.

Anyway, I was walking down Broadway one evening, at around my breaking point.  I’d been philosophical during the first week of the heat wave, summer in New York City has always been famous for airless humidity, certainly by day.  It began getting to me big time by day eight or nine.   I dragged myself down Broadway and looked toward a favorite bench, which was thankfully empty.  I sat down on the metal bench to check the score of the Yankee game on my phone.  I was damp from the short walk, my Hawaiian shirt stuck to my back.

From the south, without any warning, a cool breeze suddenly blew, and it kept coming.  I sat there like an old Jew in a sweaty shirt, two hundred years ago, my eyes closed and a big smile on my face.  “Oy,” I said to myself, or possibly out loud, “a MEHCHAYA!”   This Yiddish word indicates a pleasure that comes in the form of a great relief.  A cold drink to a parched throat– a mehchaya.  This beautiful, magnificent, life and hope restoring breeze, a mehchaya.  A fucking mechaya.

The breeze was actually wicking the dampness from my shirt.  It was indescribably beautiful.  It got me thinking, after the breeze finally died down and I made my way back up Broadway toward my apartment, that a mehchaya like that inevitably reminds one of other mechayas.

I recalled my father, at the dinner table one night when we were somehow not fighting, describing a woman he’d met recently, I have no recollection of who she was.   My father described her as a mehchaya.   A person as a mehchaya!   He had met her, possibly with some hesitation, and she had turned out to be a mehchaya.  Like a cool breeze on a hot, airless night.  A mechaya.

Searching for Ancestors

It is late at night, has been a long day, an emotionally challenging day, but I wanted to get back to my cousin in Israel, so I dropped him an email just now.   He has been searching for the traces of our family and recently found some real clues.   The hamlet our people came from, on a fork in a marsh south of the Pina River a short ferry ride from Pinsk, has been erased from history, wiped off the map–  the people who lived there and the name of the hamlet that all those who lived there called it by.  

Truvovich was the name, wiped from every map in existence, as far as my cousin, and I, and a friend who lives in Poland and is a pretty fair researcher himself (and who searched in Polish), have been able to ascertain.  Between us we turned up one map, with a Jewish star and the letter T at the place we suspect may have been that site where one of my grandmothers, and one of my cousin’s grandfathers, were born.  The link I sent my cousin to that map no longer exists, though we have my screen shot of the pertinent section of the map.  

Pinsk Street Map - circa 1925.png

This takes us into the realm of What the Fuck?   We know the Nazis were fucked up, that the einsatzgruppen, the special killing units that followed the Wermacht, the army, as the secret police state was imposed in one occupied territory after another, were merciless (until they started going mad, becoming alcoholics, became unable, most of them, to continue murdering unarmed civilians and their children, usually by shooting them into ditches).  

The Final Solution, with its mechanized extermination camps, was put in place partly because the number of Jews and others believed by those insane Nazi fucks to be genetic poison was too great to be wiped out by shooting alone, and partly because the killers they sent to massacre these folks just couldn’t keep doing it, psychologically.  Those rare sadists among them who loved to kill became another kind of problem.  Easier to just put them in charge of a crew in one of the death camps, where their perversion would be a virtue.

But I am getting ahead of the story.   At one time all of my family members were alive and supremely insecure in the impoverished little shit hole in the marsh where they lived.  Of two of them, Harry Aaron (who I always knew as Uncle Aren) and my grandmother, Chava, I know what can be known.  Aren fled the Russo-Japanese war, made a life for himself in America, had three children, all of whom I knew.   My cousin in Israel is the son of Aren’s daughter.  I remember Aren too, he lived until I was eleven.   Chava, Aren’s youngest sister, begat my father and my uncle and died in Peekskill a few years before I was born.  There was a cousin, Dintsche, who had two kids in America, both still around,

Beyond that, the fate of the rest of our family is a statistic.  The einsatzgruppen rounded up all the Jews of Pinsk, and the outlying areas, and wiped them out in two major aktions, a few months apart, in 1942.  The details are here.

It is late, and airless, the humidity is like a continual punch in the face.  Outside the sky is black.  I haven’t the strength at the moment to follow all the thoughts that led me to begin to write this.   Except to note the mystery, as we are alive here in this wink of an eye, and the need to know.   The desire, like a serious thirst, to find something out, to learn even a single detail.  It is too maddening to know nothing.  

Recently my cousin learned that one of his great-uncles, a man I’d heard of as Volbear, a man he names Wolf Bear on his family tree, is listed in Yad Vashem as killed in 1942.   This was big news, to see the testimony, our ancestor’s name in writing.  The testimony consisted of a few names: Wolf Bear’s (born 1888), his wife Tzirel’s (age unknown), their two children, Leah Reizel, 14, and Yisrael, 10, and the year they died in the slaughterhouse that was Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1942.  This is far more detail than we have about the fate, and lives, of Aren and Chava’s other brother Yudle or their sister Chaska.

The other day my cousin sent me this photo, taken in 1938, found among his mother’s papers (she lived to 104!).  The niece and nephew of our common ancestor, named for the matriarch and patriarch as far back as our family tree goes (four generations).  Those ancient ancestors would be my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, Leah and Azriel [1].  The nephew and niece in this photo are Azriel and Leah.  Look at them:

Azriel & Leah (Nephew & Niece) - 1938.jpg

1938, before Hitler’s war, the war the madman insisted the Jews made him start. Their photo, taken that year, came with a note, in Yiddish, which my cousin had translated into Hebrew.   My cousin wrote: they state that life is difficult and they are looking for help.  

 

[1]

Leah and Azriel Gleiberman.png

Why So Pissed, El?

I have a great memory, made of a moment that sucked in real time but which has become precious to me over the years.   During one of our normal family fights at the dinner table I became furious.  I must have been eight or nine, maybe younger. 

My mother, who sat next to me, responded by grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me.  She shook me like a terrier shakes a rat, or a floppy rag doll version of a rat.  In my memory I am limp, and being wagged in the rhythm of her words, almost syllable for syllable.  Picture it: “what (shake) did (shake) any (shake) body (shake) ever (shake) do (shake) to (shake) you (shake) to make you so (shake) fucking  (shake) angry?! (shake)” 

I thought of my reply many years too late.  It was one of those moments some clever grenouille dubbed l’esprit de l’escalier, the bon mot you think of after the fact, on the stairs, the perfect witty rejoinder realized moments too late to deliver.    My missed line was an obvious one: I don’t know, mom, maybe being angrily shaken when I’m clearly pissed off and asked angrily why I’m so fucking angry? 

I don’t offer this story as any kind of indictment of my mother, not at all.  She never gave me reason to doubt her love.   Those fights at the kitchen table were no holds barred, we were all in pure survival mode in the fog of war as we fired our rounds, lobbed grenades, ducked wherever we could.   She and my father were as helpless as we kids were.  I don’t hold it against either of them, at this point, it was just a tableau vivant (although not silent, but screaming) of the Human Condition.

I love the image of the mother angrily shaking her young kid and demanding to know why he’s so fucking angry.

I’m not writing this as part of my Mother’s Day or birthday card to my departed mother.   Though I’d like to note here that an orthodox Jewish friend of her’s, Benjie, hearing that she was in a coma on her 82nd birthday, told me that it is considered a sign of a righteous life to die on your birthday.   

My mother was miles away at the time, in a nice room at Hospice by the Sea, but she seemed to have heard this remark.  She’d always fought with Benjie about what she considered the idiocy of a life ruled by religious ritualism.   She hung on overnight and died a day after her birthday, that way winning one last argument with the religious friend she loved to fight  with.

Why am I angry lately?  On one level it’s the same reason my mother and father were so often angry.  An imposed sense of powerlessness, frustration they had their faces rubbed in over and over.  In reality I am no more powerless than anybody else, I just get more occasion to soak in it than most people I know, living on a small fixed income, as I do.  And, of course, I have much more time to feel my feelings daily, being self-unemployed until I can start selling little slices of myself the way professionals all do.  Few people can have any real understanding of the possible value of what you are putting together unless you sell it; once you are paid for it, all the work makes perfect sense.

We all live in the same viciously materialistic society, currently governed by a grasping, entitled madman who personifies its values to an alarming degree and is stinking up the common space with uncommon speed and effectiveness.  The poor, the weak and the marginalized are vilified in our great democracy as greedy parasites, while the truly insatiable and powerful are celebrated.  Yeah, yeah, I know, go write a letter to your Congressweasel… write an op ed, write your damned blahg, in fact, monetize it, win or go home, take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. 

I had the same chance for a comfortable, successful middle class life as any of my hardworking friends, I know.  It is unseemly of me to complain, really, having so flagrantly failed to cash in my winning ticket years ago.  I could be running on a very fancy treadmill in really, really expensive running shoes.  Instead of moralistically daydreaming about making any difference about anything, or even having a  voice in the conversation.

So what is it specifically that is so maddening?  We accommodate ourselves to the world we must live in.  It is a place where only a microscopic fraction of humans have any say about what is done in our names.  We learn as much as we can about the proper way to act and try to take as much solace as possible from doing what we believe is the right thing, from our sense of integrity.  Having integrity of any kind is just one challenge of being a member of a dodgy species like our earth ruling, hubris-filled, existentially terrified homo sapiens.   Homo sapiens, the self-named “wise man”, has figured it all out, everything except how to behave decently toward his fellow primate.  Oh, and how not to destroy life on the planet while exploiting its bounty and striving to own and control everything.

Money, motherfucker, the only thing you lack, to give substance and reality to your fleeting, meaningless life, is a dump truck full of filthy lucre.  Until you get paid, you ain’t shit.  If you forget that for a minute, how about a long wait for a subway at night, a tight squeeze into the train with a thousand other powerless chumps too stupid to take a $45 cab ride home, remember now what you are?   Next go visit a doctor here, wait a few hours for surly service, try to see a specialist — here, let us remind you again, bitch — you want to feel like you have integrity of some kind, with that laughably shit insurance?   Hah! Yaw hilarious!  Unless and until you get paid for what you can do better than someone else, friend, you ain’t a fart in the wind, let alone shit.  Let that be a fucking lesson to you, ass-bite.  Have a wonderful day!

(to be continued)

Happy Birthday, Mom

Yesterday I was at a party, a memorial and celebration of the life of the mother of an old friend who died recently at 95. [1]  My friend’s mother was, in fact, almost 96 when she died.  In a glamorously lit photo from more than 70 years ago, she appears as a dreamy beauty from the silver screen.   Her smooth face is illuminated as Rita Hayworth’s was in those gorgeous black and whites taken during the war with Hitler and Tojo.  [2]   When I met his mother, my friend and I figured out, she was 47.   Seems like the blink of an eye.

My own mother, who died in 2010, would be ninety today.  Happy birthday, mom.   There is a book to write about you, someday, if the God it’s hard not to curse just a little allows me the time and focus to write it.   Not that you had much use for that particular fable, the whole God thing, the all-wise, always merciful creator who lets the creatures He made in His image take the fall for every evil thing that is constantly happening in His miraculous world of Free Will. 

There was a blue, leather bound notebook I remember seeing as a kid.  Your poems were in it.  Your gravestone, don’t forget, is inscribed, in Hebrew, “heart of a poet”.   You had such a heart, a heart that would not allow a simple story to be told without a couple of embellishments that would make the story shine a bit more.   I came not here to quibble about truthfulness, not on your birthday.  Not to say you weren’t also essentially a candid and truthful person.   You just always had that artist’s desire to make the thing a little more perfect, in this crooked, cockeyed world.

Funny though, as funny as this conceit of talking to someone dead for eight years tomorrow, I was sitting at your kitchen table in Florida, close to the end of your long battle with cancer.   That twenty-three year ordeal that knocked the shit out of you, and eventually took your last breath.   You were on the phone, talking to your buddy Sophie, also my friend, and she asked you if I had arrived in Florida, as planned.

“No,” you said emphatically, as I watched in amazement, “he got stuck at the airport, in that terrible blizzard they had in New York last night.  He was there for hours, before they finally cancelled his flight.  I don’t know when he’ll get here…”   I said nothing, of course, but as soon as you hung up the phone I asked you what the fuck?! 

“I love to lie!” you said happily.  “I don’t know what it is, but I love to lie.”

A few days later, when we were visiting Sophie, the subject of my being stranded at LaGuardia never came up.  Why would it?   Sophie lived to be 98 by living in the present.  She was happy we were there, happy we were going to your favorite restaurant for lunch, eager to hear all the latest news.

I know, I know, of all the stories, that’s the one I tell on your birthday.  Some fucking son!   Hey, what can I tell you, mom, that’s the way God made me.

Kurt Vonnegut replaced Isaac Asimov as the president of some organization of free-thinking atheists.  In his first address to the group he told them Asimov was looking down from heaven, smiling on them all.   This caused the assembled intellectuals to roar in mirth.  If it had been now, one might have texted ROTFLMAO!    Funny line, Kurt.     

What has that to do with you, mom?   You know very well.  You always loved a good story, especially one with a punchline.   I don’t really have one for this birthday card, as I am feeling almost constantly angry these days, but I’m, you dig, trying to keep it light here for you.   For YOU, mom.  That’s kind of funny right there.   Even as we both know you’re smiling down from heaven right now, thinking of the perfect rejoinder.

 

[1] I am well-aware, Sekhnet (and mom), that the structure of this sentence is as ridiculous as the one I love from the old Mad Magazine “I was the prisoner of a sadistic hunchback with bad breath named Harold.”   I point out that the ambiguity about who died in that first, dick-fingered sentence, my friend or his mother, was resolved a nano-second later in the sentence that follows.   For what it’s worth, to a caviler with bad breath named Sekhnet…

OK, as I suggested above, I’m too pissed off and impatient at the moment to fix it.  (No, you don’t have bad breath, Sekh, and I’m pretty sure if you did it wouldn’t have the same name that you do).  Peace!

[2] see note above.  Rita never posed with Hitler and Tojo.  No way.

Mistake in my father’s eulogy

I wrote the eulogy of my father following the guidelines of the man who was conducting the funeral:  give the facts of his life, sprinkled with a bit of his personality.

My father read the New York Times obituaries every day.   Shortly after my father died my uncle handed me a long obituary he’d written and told me to contact the NY Times and have it published.   With my hands full, writing the eulogy, trying to coordinate the funeral 1,200 miles away, I smiled as I took the pages and gave my uncle the famous, ever so gentle silent  “fuck you” he’d no doubt received many times before.  My father never had an obituary in the NY Times, as far as I know.

I suppose I am making up for that now, or trying to, in setting down everything I know about the old man, part wonderful friend of underdogs everywhere, part monster.  

I recently read over the eulogy as delivered at the funeral.  The guy conducting it got a couple of details from my aunt and uncle that he added.   He added in some prayers, which he chanted beautifully.  But most of it were the words I’d written about my father.  The facts of his life sprinkled here and there with hints of his personality.

I saw one asshole mistake in there, a mistake I can easily forgive myself for, under the circumstances, but an assholish mistake nonetheless.   I refer to my father’s lifelong friend Benjie as “a colleague he met at Camp TY”, in the context of the two of them, along with my mother, opening the restaurant Tain Lee Chow, which they operated for a number of years.   I don’t even mention his good friend’s name.  What the fuck?  This is the guy I mystified right after my father was buried by a comment he had no hope of understanding as anything but the kind of weird “fuck you” I’d recently given my uncle about his absurdly grandiose obituary.  The details of that bizarre dis are here.

Benjie had done nothing, outside of being the son my father never had.   Benjie, for his part, found the father he’d never had.   It was a blessing for both of them.   I was an ungracious jerk to reduce Benjie to a faceless business partner.  How easy would it have been to add “my father’s lifelong close friend Benjie”?  Outside of that mistake, I think the rest of the eulogy was pretty good.  I have cut and pasted it below, since it apparently is nowhere else on this blahg.

 

EULOGY 

Israel I. “Irv” Widaen was born June 1, 1924 to Harry and Eva Widem in NYC.   The Widem family lived on Henry Street in Lower Manhattan for the first few years of his life. 

They moved to Peekskill when “Azraelkeh” was a young boy where he grew up poor with his younger brother Paul.  Began kindergarten in Peekskill speaking only Yiddish, played sports, mastered English, graduated from Peekskill High in 1941.   At least one member of Irv’s class went on to serve as Mayor of Peekskill.

Irv was a member, as was Paul, of Boy Scout Troop 33 of the First Hebrew Congregation and they marched together in Peekskill parades under a banner representing the First Hebrew Congregation.  

He was Bar Mitzvahed (and attended post-Bar Mitzvah classes) in the downtown First Hebrew Congregation on lower Main Street, where services are still conducted to this day, even though the “new” synagogue is on upper Main Street, where a plaque on the front of the new synagogue memorializes Harry and Eva Widem.  

 Growing up he idolized the Jewish slugger Detroit Tiger first baseman Hank Greenberg. His identification with Hank Greenberg was so strong that his schoolmates called him Hank and referred to him as Hank in print in the High School yearbook. He remained a lifelong Detroit Tiger fan.

Drafted into the Air Force in 1943 where, in spite of having almost no mechanical aptitude, he was sent to mechanic’s school and attained the rank of sergeant. He served after the war in Germany where his crew had a mutt they named “Schicklegruber”.

It was during WWII that his name became “Widaen” while the rest of his family remained “Widem”.  A spelling mistake on his birth certificate, relied on by the draft board, resulted in the new name.

 Irv graduated from Syracuse University on the GI bill with a BA from the Maxwell School of Diplomacy and Public Policy, and went on to a doctoral program in American History at Columbia. While at Columbia met Evelyn Mazur who lived downstairs from his cousin Dinch Stamper and her family on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx.

 According to him it was love at first sight.

 Evelyn was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met and her love changed his life.

 After initial resistance Evelyn was won over and has always maintained that Irv was the most brilliant, funny, caring and wonderful man she ever knew.

 The couple moved to Queens after living for a while in Manhattan.  Eliot was born in 1956, followed by Abby in 1958.

 Irv taught Junior High School, then High School – at Martin Van Buren in Queens. At Van Buren he was the G.O. advisor and won the esteem of many a high school student.  

 In the early days of school integration in Queens Irv went from school to school to speak to hostile white parent groups about the need to bring black and white students and their families together.

 He was more than once pelted with the proverbial rotten vegetables and traveled with a police escort. His addresses to school principals were greeted with similar enthusiasm.

 He was selected to be part of a “Mod Squad” unit at the NYC Board of Education that intervened in riot plagued schools once integration began.  

 Along with a folk singing blond female WASP, an ethnic Italian, a Hispanic and a couple of Blacks, this mutton chopped secular Jew rounded out the Human Relations Unit.

 As Coordinator of Pupil Programs he designed and implemented sensitivity workshops that used role playing, and team building workshops conducted with humor and insight to teach the leaders of student factions to stop fighting each other.

 His team won over these hardened inner-city teenagers and peace reigned in the schools, until the students graduated and their little brothers began killing each other a few years later. He became a master of street talk, jive and playing the dozens in those years.

 He moonlighted as the Director of the Nassau/Suffolk region of a Zionist youth group called Young Judaea. He later went on to become director of their national camp, Tel Yehuda in Barryville, New York.   He directed the camp for more than a decade and became national director of Young Judaea.  

 He influenced many teenagers during his years as director, and kicked more than one of his son’s friends out of camp as well.

He also kicked his son out of camp once.

With a partner he met at Tel Yehuda he opened the first Glatt Kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens. He ran “Tain Lee Chow” for several years with his partner and a Chinese chef, named, coincidentally, Mr. Chow.

 He had a lifelong commitment to Social Justice, Animal Rights and the environment. He loved animals and he and Evelyn always kept a dog as a pet.   He did not care for cats.

 He was to the end of his life disgusted by the reactionary trend of American politics.

An avid reader of the New York Times — and a daily reader of the obituaries — once he retired and finally bought the computer his wife lobbied for, he added about five daily papers to his reading list and spent two hours a night on the internet. He subscribed to Sports Illustrated and followed college and professional football, basketball and the Detroit Tigers.

 He had suffered anemia and weakness for the last two years.   He always maintained that medical care in Florida was the worst in the world and that old people were treated as fungible cash cows. His final experience bore this out.

 In spite of seeing as many as seven specialists a month for years, he died from a cancer that went undiagnosed until he got to the emergency room.

 On Saturday, April 23, as Evelyn prepared the fish and matzoh ball soup for their quiet seder meal, my father woke up from a nap yellow with jaundice and unable to lift his head off the pillow or move his legs.   He was rushed to the emergency room.  

He was diagnosed immediately by the doctor who palpated his swollen abdomen, as swollen with cancer-related acites.

 He died the following Friday late afternoon from a badly damaged liver that led to the shut down of his kidneys a day or two after he was hospitalized.

 Once certain that medical intervention was futile he chose hospice care and died within a few days. His condition was inoperable, his decision to have hospice care was informed and intelligent.

 He had no self-pity about the sudden news of his impending death and remained sharp, never losing his lucidity, even in his final minutes.

He died peacefully.

A personal note from his sister-in-law Barbara:

 “Irv was the best man at his younger brother Paul, and Barbara’s wedding 55 years ago.

 He was a man who could be depended upon with grace and compassion when a family member was in need.

 Barbara has everlasting gratitude for the manner in which he came to her assistance when both of her parents died suddenly.

 He and Evelyn were always gracious hosts when visiting them, whether at Tel Yehuda camp, their restaurant, Tane Lee Chow, in Queens) or sightseeing throughout south Florida.

 Their energy was awesome.”

 He is mourned by … [short list of names deleted] … and will be missed by many whose lives he touched.

 

Who gets to tell the story?

The cliché that history is written by the victors, as a rule, is hard to dispute.  We have to be a little careful about oversimplifying the categories of winner and loser, though.   Take the history of the American Civil War.   A generation or two after it ended the daughters and granddaughters of the great families of the South, the wealthiest families, the “best” families, in the popular parlance, became very concerned with how history would remember their glorious families.    An influential school of historians arose, largely supported by these well-born gals, who told the story the way they preferred it: a glorious history of high principle and protection of an inferior race who became predictably savage when liberated from the protection of their former masters.    

It may also be said that this history, written in the late 19th – early 20th century when most of the Confederate monuments were being erected to the heroes of the violent rebellion against federal tyranny, gave a moral fig leaf to a new generation of American racial terrorists.   The history is only now being written of the long, bloody decades of lynching and intimidation that went along with this sanitized, glorified version of the antebellum south and the Civil War.   It became cool, and often politically smart, for glory-seeking white racists to become “knights” in the Ku Klux Klan, membership soared nationwide after World War One.  Nothing like a good old-fashioned beating, mutilation and death by torture to remind everybody of their places.  The lessons of this brutality, even as it was most often kept a local secret, were not lost on anyone.

Who gets to tell the story?  In American politics mass media pundits (even drug addled ones), with no background in anything but self-promotion, are more influential than our most well-read, well-spoken, deepest thinking scholars.  Put the scholar on one side, a defiant blowhard on the other side, and America gets to watch another egghead get put in his fucking place.   It is a kind of thought crime here, basing your thoughts on too many fucking facts.  Fuck you and the fucking facts you rode in on, asshole!  You think you’re better than me just because you’re smart, and devoted to knowledge, and actively seeking facts and something you claim is truth?  I got your truth right here…

 Who gets to tell the story, even in your family?  Put any spin on it you like, dismiss the version that makes you feel bad.   No need to ever feel bad, just write anything bad out of history.  See how simple it is?     Most people I know, like my highly intelligent, idealistic father, eventually give up after enough time banging their head against the imperatives of our frequently merciless world.

I wrote the book about my father.  Not yet a book, it is a collection of stories and conversations, evoking the times, conflicts and the complicated spirit of a gifted man who did not fully enjoy his gifts, who died full of regrets.  More regretful than angry, even at himself.  How’s that for a deathbed surprise, dad?   The lifetime of rage and denial yields to the reality that death is hours away, your thoughts became more and more focused on how you missed out on the most beautiful parts of the ride your gifts might have otherwise provided you.

 “Oh, give it up, Elie!” says the skeleton of my father.   “Better to go through the hundreds of pages you’ve already written, picking likely lottery winning passages, pasting them together into a scroll.   Your lifetime of rage and denial will end in your own terrible regrets, when death is closing in on you, that you never managed to sell your book, be interviewed by Terry Gross.  I hear your man Leonard Lopate got canned for some likely sexual impropriety or other, so you missed that boat.   Keep paddling, Elie, is all I’m saying.”  

Righty-oh, dad.   I remind myself, while I’m wondering about who gets to write the stories we all come to believe, that there are many ways to see a given thing, a given person.   Not to say that every point of view is equally valid, equally interesting, equally revealing.  Can we separate a devoted Nazi’s beliefs from his watercolors?  I mean, the guy may have been a supremely gifted watercolorist, a regular Winslow Homer, but he was a major fucking Nazi.  A Nazi, dude, those beautiful watercolors were painted by an officer in the SS.    Nazi watercolors, dude.   Ain’t dassum shit?

The best artist I ever knew, a few nights before she died, expressed this very clearly.  She had no truck with Nazis who were otherwise very artistic people.

Lunch with cousins (& the grasshopper and the ant)

My ninety year old cousin Gene introduced me, at his birthday party yesterday, as his only living relative.    His wife, sister and daughter were also there, along with a brother-in-law and a son-in-law,  but his point was taken.   His father, one of eighteen siblings (nine of whom lived, for a while, at least) was the only one who made it out of the caldron that was Hitler and Himmler’s Europe in the 1940s.  His father had survived by sheer luck.   An uncle in the U.S. had sent his future father a ticket for a steamship.  This was around the time of the First World War.  That uncle died shortly after the thirteen year-old arrived in America.  That was it for that side of the family.   No trace was ever found of anybody else, and Gene searched on at least two trips to Europe.

My grandmother and Gene’s mother were first cousins.   They had come over together right before the First World War on a steamship called Korfus die Grosse.  I never met that grandmother, my father’s mother, who died young before I was born, but I remember Gene’s mother very well.   Dintch was a bright woman with mischievous eyes and prominent cheeks that were often raised in a wry smile.   She also lived to be ninety or more, if I recall.   The rest of our family disappeared into that marsh south of the Pina River, across from Pinsk in what was then Poland and is now Belarus.   There is no trace of any of them, or even the muddy hamlet they all lived in, as far as any of us have been able to find out.

Gene explained our exact degree of cousinly relation yesterday.   Since my father and Gene were the sons of first cousins, they are, apparently, second cousins.   This makes Gene and me second cousins once removed.   I believe the same relationship exists with my cousin Azi in Israel.  His mother and my father were first cousins, so their children, Azi and Azrael (Israel), both named for their common ancestor, my father’s grandfather and Azi’s great-grandfather, were second cousins.   Or something– I’m pretty sure my analysis is faulty, now that I reread it.  I have never been good at this cousin business, probably because I have so few of them it never seemed to matter.

Chatting in the restaurant with Gene’s sister, I couldn’t help mentioning the 1,200 page manuscript I’ve drawn up grappling with my father’s life.  Gene’s sister has only fond memories of the witty, well-spoken Irv, and of my mother, another colorful character, an opinionated, earthy woman who loved a good story and a good laugh.   Gene’s much younger sister expressed interest in reading it, as Sekhent put the sales varnish on it, that it’s a story of history, and memory, and forgiveness and blah blah blah (actually, all she mentioned was history, but she strongly suggested the ms. is way more than a cv of an unknown man going on 13 years dead).

As is her way, Sekhnet pointed out to the group at the table that it is much easier for me to keep cranking out new pages than it is for me to figure out how to package and sell the book I’ve already largely written.  That’s the hard work, she pointed out, making the obvious a little easier for all to see.  Hard work, she made plain, is something  I constantly shrink from.    Like the grasshopper I am, think of that parable of the grasshopper who loves to play guitar, and mocks his constantly worried, constantly working ant neighbor (until winter comes and the grasshopper begs in vain for some food), I continue tapping here, instead of reading the whole thing and plucking out a succulent 15-20 page slice to send out to literary agents and get to the next step.

Since I have promised to send Sheila the whole megilla, I figured I’d seize the opportunity to select a strong 15-20 pages and send her those first [I sent her a random 53 page sampling– ed].   It will be much easier for her to deal with an appetizing slice than more than a thousand pages of sometimes rambling prose.  

In my experience, people have a very hard time reading even a five page story, unless it’s published somewhere, in which case they are all pleased to send a good word.  I need to cut out a strong section to get to the next stage.  How I will do this, I have no idea.  I do know I need a cup of strong coffee before I get started.  That is the very least I need.  You hear me, Sekhnet, goddamn it?

It’s Really About Who Gets to Write History

My father, who had a lifelong fascination with history and politics, taught me early about the importance of putting dates on things I wanted to remember.   As a boy I showed him a drawing I was proud of and he asked me if I’d written the date on it.   It struck me as an odd thing to ask, to do, it had certainly never occurred to me.  Then he asked an illuminating question.  

“Well, it may not matter to you tomorrow, or next week, when you did this particular drawing.  But what about if  you find this drawing five years from now, or twenty years from now?  Wouldn’t you like to know when you drew it?”   It turned out I would.  

He also taught me to make sure I put a date on any newspaper articles I clipped out. This brought home to me the fascinating idea that time passed, things happened, took their historical place in a long sequence of events, later creations were created based, in part, on earlier ones, more dead people died, others took life, many things happen every day.  All these things had a specific time when they happened.  Like right now, the way I can type April 11, 2018, the day it is now and the day it will never be again.

History is the procession of selected events seen through the lens of what happened before and after the event.   It is this connecting of the things, giving context, explaining the origins of and the events that flowed from the thing, that is the heartbeat of history.   We humans are geniuses of rationalizing, we invent perfectly plausible reasons to support a case we can make, if pressed.  So the history of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency can be told as an idealistic, progressive one, or a particularly racist one during which the Ku Klux Klan rose again and Americans were whipped up by a skillful propaganda campaign and marched off to die in a senseless European war.  

Of course, Wilson’s presidency was also both of those things and more.  Historians tend, like the rest of us, to take sides.   You can be in the school that defends the violence in the former Confederacy as a natural, human reaction to the savagery of former slaves, or you can be in the school that documents and excoriates the violent  racism that halted government services for former slaves in a very short time and ushered in a century of racist terrorism.  It’s hard to be in both camps. History is a moral exercise for those who write and defend their version of the story.  

The building blocks are the events, the facts, things that actually happened, though they may be in dispute or, often, covered up completely.  If we are missing an important thing that happened, a promise that was violated, an unprovoked series of attacks that called for pay back, it’s impossible to understand why two countries go to war, two people begin punching each other, how a problem finally gets worked out.  Assembling the pertinent facts is an important part of figuring out this convoluted, iridescent, free-style human conga line we call history.   

Fact:  We know that on (or around) July 4, 1776 the British colonists in North America served notice of their demand for political independence from the King of England.  The Declaration of Independence speaks of the burning need to dissolve long time political bands and bonds of kinship, language and affection and blah blah blah.   Self-evident truths we hold so, re freedom and equality, as opposed to King George III, [1] who was a merciless fucking tyrant (fact or not fact).  

Fact:  I was momentarily uncertain about what number George the English King our forefathers rebelled against was.  I remembered George III and then wavered.  I suddenly thought it possible he was George IV.   Some part of me just wanted to type IV, I realize now, because it is Roman numerals and it’s cool the way you subtract the lower number from the higher by putting it in front.  

We can all have this verifiable hard info instantly in 2018.   It took me literally five seconds to fact check the correct name of King George III, the bloke our Founding Fathers rebelled against.    We are in an electronic age where everyone who takes a few seconds to do so can instantly be as factually accurate as the greatest minds of the past.  This is now done in seconds.   It behooves every writer of nonfiction to do it frequently.

 For one thing, nothing hurts your credibility as a narrator as instantly as a factual error.   If you say you’ll never forget where you were when you heard Malcolm X was murdered on February 21, 1973, anyone who knows Malcolm was killed in 1965 will instantly know you are full of shit, at the very least about the date.   Those eight years between the event and when you say it happened were full of rich, charged, explosive days.  A billion significant things happened in those eight years of turmoil and hope.   America was one way going into the 1960s, what can be considered the old, conservative way that the MAGA hats dreamily dream of, and another way entirely coming out of the 1960s.   To many it felt like a revolution.  It certainly was a dramatic swing of the pendulum, from 1965 to 1968, to 1969 and into the early seventies.  It has swung hard the other way ever since, IMHO.

The other reason to be accurate is because you can.  Because it is good, in a discussion of any problem you are trying to solve, to have all of the available information on the table.  That’s one reason the increasing lack of transparency in our corporatized society, in our government, drives me mad.    There was a massive U.S. government surveillance program in operation for years.  The conversations and private emails of millions of us were recorded and stored in a searchable database.   Criminals and terrorists were already wary of this kind of shit and generally took measures not to communicate by unsecured means.  The rest of us were not wary, and had no reason to be, as our private communications were being intercepted and stored by the billions.  

Our presidents gave inspirational speeches about our freedoms and our high aspirations as a great democracy, even as secret prisons existed where people were secretly tortured in our names, even as drones killed countless people in several countries, quietly, discreetly.   Even as we were all being illegally spied on by our own government in a massive data mining operation directed against everybody.

A citizen named Edward Snowden made this information public, at the risk of his own life and/or freedom.   Obama said he would prosecute Snowden under the Espionage Act of 1917, amid bitter arguments over whether Snowden was a traitor or a patriot.  The Espionage Act Wilson signed into law criminalized what, to my understanding, would have otherwise been protected speech if it arguably “aided and abetted our enemies” in a war declared mostly for American ambitions on the world stage (and the recovery of billions loaned by our banks to England, France and other “good guys” in that war).  

The Espionage Act carries the death penalty (though I don’t recall anyone being convicted and executed, though a few popular outspoken opponents of the World War spent years locked up behind it).   Under his own legal rationale and precedent, if Obama could have directed a missile at Snowden he would have been within his new presidential rights to have Snowden reduced to a pile of steaming chopped meat.  Other American citizens met that fate even though they were not charged with anything, let alone a crime that carried the death sentence.

Facts are all we have to defend us against incoherence.  They are not magical tools, but they’re the only ones we have to make sense of what is otherwise incomprehensible.   When you read a well-researched, well-told history you get the feeling you understand more than when you read something you cannot help thinking is a bit stilted, written by a partisan.   Was the Klan really the modern-day equivalent of the knights who protected Christendom from infidels as Woodrow Wilson seemed to believe?   (Well, maybe so, if you think about some of the excesses of the Crusades).  I don’t have a ready example at the moment, but hopefully you can take my point.   

When you are given a story with a piece that just doesn’t make sense, you are probably being given a story with a crucial fact or two left out.   This happens quite regularly.   I will tell a story of outrageous, unaccountable customer service in my local post office; the postal supervisor will tell a story of an unappeasable customer with an angry attitude who would not give him a break, or listen to reason, and in the end told him to go fuck himself.   Both stories are true, and even accurate, but both stories leave out crucial pieces that are harmful to the storyteller’s version of events.  

If I hadn’t been frustrated with the lack of acceptable service, or even an explanation for that bad service, things might have gone differently.  Since I grew increasingly frustrated, every time the supervisor called me “sir” it was like he was jabbing me with a sharp blade.   I countered with a tart legal argument about my contract with the Post Office.  That must have enraged the supervisor, who had no answer except ‘machine error.’   Since he’d been repeatedly stabbing me with the indisputable truth and a dozen “sirs” and I was not backing away, the supervisor had to turn up the icy politeness.   An asshole dance needs to be danced by at least one complete asshole, but it usually involves two.

Which reminds me of what sent me to write this in the first place.   Who gets to tell the definitive story?  Clearly, in world events, we must piece together history as best we can, according to our knowledge and our prejudices.  What about in our personal life?  Surely that is a sphere where we can exercise some control that is impossible when understanding and assessing, say, the strange and fabulous career of Donald Trump. [2]

Much in human life is inexplicable, we don’t always proceed by logic or common sense (see, e.g., footnote 2  below).   Some things are explainable and make sense, if we have all the facts.  That affable, funny, affectionate father of yours that your mother spent years enraged at?  Did you know how he regularly put you are your siblings at risk, gambling all of his money on stupid bets that never paid off, resorting to illegal means to get the funds to place these all or nothing bets?   Ah, without that hidden fact, how can you ever understand your mother’s anger?  It was righteous anger, she was mad for a good and concrete reason– every time she was lied to and had to bail the liar out of a legal jam by working overtime to pay his debts.   That he never expressed remorse or gratitude?  The rancid cherry on top of the shit pie.  But we all smile and pretend we understand, even the things we will never know.

The facts matter, they really do.   They are all we have by way of understanding any sequence of events.   As for those who write the final history, they are free to highlight or omit any fact that advances their story.  The feeling of being written out of history?   There is nothing like it.

 

 

[1] I originally called this man King George IV, then had merely to click the first words of the sentence “King George” before “during revolutionary war” popped up and I instantly confirmed that it was indeed as my hunch had it, George III, the guy mad with Porphiria who had his physicians running through the palace halls carrying covered pots containing his stools.  

[2]  I have been wondering lately about the current president’s ill-fated actions in Atlantic City some years ago.  He opened a casino that was very successful.  He had boxes of hundred dollar bills sent to him whenever he asked.  Then, for whatever reason, he opened a second casino, a competitor to his first.  The second one did well too, there seemed to be plenty of business for both.   He then decided to build the world’s largest, most luxurious casino, his Taj Mahal, and borrowed $675,000,000 to build it, at 14% interest.  The Taj opened and it was only a matter of time before all three were bankrupt.  

One can only wonder: what the fuck?   I am at a loss to imagine the rationale, outside of hubris and boundless greed, for opening three businesses to compete against each other, particularly when the first two are making excellent money. There are facts we would need to know to understand this colossal WTF, facts it is unlikely any of us will ever learn.  The story itself tells us a lot, even without the missing WTF?

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth

I learned, at an otherwise soporific session on legal writing many years ago, that in the old days lawyers had their writs, complaints, answers, surreplies, etc. written by scriveners.  These professional scribes had elegant handwriting and were, one won’t be shocked to learn, paid by the word.  

So much of the seeming double-talk in the law, the endless legalistic quibbling, caviling, carping, signifying, distinguishing, synonym stringing, de-empahsizing, re-emphasizing, privilege-preserving, seemingly redundant, overstated, reiterative language in traditional legalese was the work of these craftsmen.   “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?” is more than twice as many words than “do you swear to tell the truth?”.   Cah-ching, scrivener!

But that’s not the only reason for the development of legalese, of course.  Make something complicated, convoluted, meandering, equivocating, jargonized, specific, obfuscating enough et, voila, half of your problem is solved.  

If half the country hates slavery, do not ever use the word in the founding document that preserves the right for those who love having slaves.  No “slave”, “African” “chattel”, “servant” or any other straight forward reference in the Constitution to the slaves, from Africa, who were regarded by the law as chattels, unpaid servants for life.  

Instead, in three or four discrete, discreet clauses, we read of “other such persons as the states shall see fit to admit” and nonchalant, misdirecting yet precise, legally-binding phrases like that.   You can feel better that the word ‘slave’, or even some of the horrible things these forced laborers were called, is nowhere near our sacred founding text.   Even as, of course, the legality of slavery, and its enforcement under federal law, received irrefutable, iron-clad federal protection in that same discreet document.  

We are, and have always been, a nation of laws and freedom under those laws, notwithstanding the 3/5 of such persons– and it goes without saying we use the term ‘persons’ in its broadest sense — who come into play for apportionment in Congress for grossly underrepresented slave-states (majority slave state, in the case of South Carolina).  The devil, yop, yop, in the damned details.

OK, this has been my typical ‘why I hate our freedom’ rant and you are well within your rights to treat it as such and click over to something more uplifting.  The point I am driving at today is not our national tic for concealing truths that might make millions of our citizens angry enough to rebel, it’s personal.

I recently took down some fiction I’d written and posted here, realizing that if certain parties read this work they would see themselves and feel violated, angry, perhaps even vengeful.   When a person guards a humiliating secret, which each of us has every right to do, any reference to that secret is easily seen as a betrayal.  

I once wrote a line that infuriated a very wealthy man living, closeted, as a salt-of-the-earth working stiff, by writing “it’s not as if he needed the money.”   This was construed as a betrayal of a secret he had kept from me, something I could only have learned from his ex-wife, which was how I’d inadvertently heard it.   She described a $75,000 settlement of their divorce, which I called generous when she told me about it about 30 years back.  She laughed, and agreed it was generous, although, possibly not quite as generous in the context of her ex-husband’s fortune of more than $20,000,000.   The whole thing was humiliating to him, the poisonous reference to him “not needing the money,” and my mention of these facts here, where any member of the public can theoretically see them, was an unforgivable, final betrayal, even if he was never mentioned by name.  I get that.

I am not in the habit of violating confidences.  If somebody tells me something in confidence, I will never break that trust.  I can think of many examples.   All we have is our word and our good name.  Which reminds me of something my old friend the judge told me once, on the Triboro Bridge.

I’d just purchased an iPad, which I was integrating into my student run children’s animation workshop.   We were driving along and I was using the iPad’s video camera for the first time, filming the trip.   We were chatting when suddenly the judge turned to me and asked me if there was sound on that video I was recording.  I told him, now that he mentioned it, that there was.  Our talk was being recorded, although that was not my intention when I started filming.  He told me to shut the video off and erase it, that he didn’t feel comfortable with our conversation, which he hadn’t known was being recorded, being preserved in perpetuity.  He got quite exercised about it, actually.  I assured him I had no intention of playing it for anybody and then he made a good point.

“At the moment you make a promise like that, it is inconceivable to you that you would ever betray my confidence.  That’s why contracts are drawn up when the parties are friends, with protections built in for after their falling out.   Provisions against non-disclosure are not made for when everybody is on the same page and getting along great.   They are for the day when the parties are no longer friends, for the day they are adversaries, in fact, looking for evidence to use against each other.”

I assured him that once I had extracted the video footage, isolated from the sound, I’d delete the original, with our conversation on it.   As it happened, not that long after that ride, we were on shaky ground as friends and soon after that completely estranged.  

Here’s the morally sticky part.  A loved one tells you they were threatened with particularly violent death by a husband with a long history of road rage, speeding tickets and petty crimes, including embezzlement, credit card fraud, shoplifting and who knows what else.  You are not told this in confidence, your loved one is shaken and upset when the details pour out.  You hear the same story from another party involved in the drama, which involved multiple murder threats.   Later you are told you may never speak of this.   There’s your moral quagmire for you.

The children of that couple?   Do you have any obligation to them?  

Clearly, I am wrestling with this constantly.  I think part of the reason it is a bone crosswise in my throat  is the frustrating world we live in now, our general powerlessness in this corporate age.   We live in a world run by the corporate imperative: admit no wrongdoing, cite the plain language of the contract, construct hoops for someone with a complaint to jump through, restrict options available to the aggrieved, condition any settlement on nondisclosure.   In politics it is the same: never admit fault, stick to your theory of why you were justified, state your talking points, pivot, constantly, away from any responsibility on your part, repeat talking points.

When a personal connection resorts to this intolerable bullshit more than once or twice, it may be time to dissolve the apolitical bands which have connected you.  It seems self-evident; you cannot depend on a person who routinely lies.   Depending on someone who will say whatever they feel is necessary under the circumstances is like depending on a person like Donald Trump to take the moral high road.  

“That high-road you moral fucks talk about is for you high-minded assholes to walk on, it’s a road for fucking losers.  I walk on the winner’s road, it is very smooth, and padded to be gentle on the joints, and downhill all the way.  All other things being equal (LOL!!!)  I’ll take my regular road against your moral tight-rope every minute of every day, asshole.”

If you have a problem with any of that, take a fucking chill pill and dummy up.  Word to the wise.