Category Archives: Family

That’s All You Get

The famous definition of insanity, attributed to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.   Many do an unwitting variation on this thought experiment over the course of their lives, never quite understanding why the outcome is so consistent every time.

We are often not really to blame, owing to the enormous variation in types we encounter in the world, and how hidden deeper similarities sometimes are.  The interpersonal variables may be so subtle that it’s hard to see that we are engaged in the same thing we always did.  As Moms Mabley pointed out: if you always do what you always did,  you’ll always get what you always got.    (Though the internet attributes the insight to industrialist/anti-Semite Henry Ford and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, I prefer to picture Moms Mabley saying it).  You may be doing what you always did, but the reaction of the new person may lead you to expect other than what you always got.  Then, when you get what you always got you will shake your head in disbelief at the familiar unwanted outcome.

The subtle nature of the world is responsible for much of this repeating of the same pattern over and over, with the same lamentable result.  Then there is also just plain madness, no small factor in human relations.   How could I have known, for example, that an old friend from High School actually saw me as his father and was furious that, like the smiling, passive-aggressive old man, I just kept making glib jokes and ignoring his need to be acknowledged as an educated man and excellent teacher.   I mean… how could I have known this?  How could I have suspected it?  Even if I had known, what the hell could I have been expected to do about it?

Yet to this fellow, the parallels couldn’t have been more unmistakable:  I had exactly the same  likable and despicable traits of his father, and the final proof, to him, was that, like his father, I withheld my appreciation of the things he needed validated the most.  There was no question to him that I was his father, and that I, so fucking typically, refused to see this must have infuriated him even more.  That I only found out at the end just proved how much like his willfully blind old man I was.

I’ve thought of this several times over the years, being put in a thankless psychic role I had no way to suspect I was cast in.  I only pieced it together after things had become intolerable enough that I had to disentangle the fellow’s clutching hands from my neck and, using my foot for leverage, force the door closed on this madness.   I had a letter from him afterwards informing me that, much as I might want to, I could not unilaterally end our friendship.  “Sorry, pal,” he wrote, “but it’s not in your power.”  I have the quote on my kitchen wall to this day.  It stands as a monument of some kind.  A monument to the barking madness of the world.   This man is a well-respected educator, a father, someone I haven’t been in touch with for decades.  In fact, ten years after his “sorry, pal, but it’s not in your power” letter I had an email from him, a single line:  “isn’t ten years a long time not to say hello?”

“Not in your case,” was but the first of a dozen rejoinders that sprung to mind at the time.  I had fun thinking up replies for a day or two, but left it realizing there was nothing to be gained by firing off some glib line that would only remind him of his infuriating dad.  The only thing that was still in my power was not pissing my pal off, though I knew that hearing nothing back from me would also piss him off.  What is a father to do?

I suppose what I am driving at here is that people can only give each other what they are capable of giving.  Sometimes the demand is unreasonable, even a little insane, as in the case of someone wanting you to do a better job of being their parent than their parent did. Sometimes the demand may be within reason, but the other person is only capable of giving very little.  It is foolish to expect more of them and inevitably leads to disappointment.  An agreement that they will not piss on your leg anymore while insisting it’s raining may be the best you can get out of them.  If this is the case, it behooves you to be satisfied to be at the end of the long, disgusting pissing/raining game and take solace in the dryness of your pant leg.  On the other hand, it also behooves you to realize that, most likely, this is pretty much all you are going to get from this particular person.

It is liberating, sometimes, and lets everybody mercifully off the hook, to realize that’s all you can get.

Irrational to end friendships?

As a child I was dismayed each time one of my father’s closest friends, bright, colorful people my sister and I enjoyed very much, was permanently banished from our lives.   “The fall from grace,” my mother would say, “is swift and absolute.”  People we were very fond of one day just disappeared, and it always aggrieved me.  My father always had his compelling reason why the last straw had been placed on the friendship, exactly how the despicable true face of the formerly beloved friend finally revealed itself.

I argued with him about the importance of forgiveness.  It was not lost on me that this forgiveness would also apply to me.  In my father’s view I had always fought him, even as an infant, when I stared from my crib with dark, accusing eyes even before I could speak.  He made a far less insane case for each of these people he once loved being unworthy of his affections, for the betrayal each had committed.  In only one case did I ever get to hear the other side of the story, and her case seemed at least as plausible and reasonable as my father’s did.  I have since come to write this woman off for much the same reason my father had decades earlier.

The point is, live long enough and you may see things from a previously incomprehensible perspective.   As a child it was unthinkable to me that a person could toss away a good friend and never look back.   As an adult I have done this many times, always in the spirit of not tolerating what I come to perceive as ill treatment or abuse.  It does not please me to say this.   I hold forgiveness high in my esteem, though it’s super-humanly hard to forgive someone who insists they did nothing wrong.  I would rather have all of the friends I once held dear.  In each case, though, I came to the impasse my father had come to during my childhood, the impasse I found impossible to understand then.    

It is the moment when one sees a destructive pattern in the relationship, feels a lack of empathy that quickly becomes mutual.   The other person believes that you are the asshole, you just as fervently believe that they are the asshole.  That you may both be assholes no longer gives consolation to either party.   The air in the closed room begins to stink.  All that remains is a senseless fight in a stinking room or a move toward the door.  Outside the stinking room, walking away, there is little reason for nostalgia or even curiosity about whether the place still stinks.  It’s just time to move forward into the fresh air.

The Bitterest Use of Silence

In my experience, having been sensitized to it young, strategically deployed silence is one of the most effective and damaging expressions of rage out there.  It has the great virtues of ease and simplicity– plus the razor sharp double edged bonus of deniability.   Not all silence falls into this category, of course.  Much of it does not.  But those angry people who feel entitled to their rage can make excellent use of the simple device of saying nothing in return.  The real beauty part, it can be used again as a clever bludgeon if the party put to silence ever whines about it.  “Oh, Boo HOO!  Silence…. oh, dear….”

Here’s how it operates:  take an unbearable pain in your own life.  Maybe it was a mother who, from your earliest memories, regarded you with hatred and whipped you across the face.   Hard to recover from that one.  One will do one’s best not to repeat that in one’s own life, but the cards are stacked against you.  You will have to deal with some version of the following:

My son is brilliant, but he’s got a grievance against me, has been my accuser from the time he was born.   Now he wants my approval.  Let me do the math: not giving him the approval he wants versus being humiliated over and over by an insane and violent mother?   He has a lot to complain about, this pampered, angry boy.   I will say nothing, let him deal with a world as cruel as you like, but one ten times more merciful than the one I managed to survive.

One vice of heavy duty victims is comparing the pain of others to their own and always finding other people’s pain a pale and pathetic wannabe pain.  I was the victim of incest by a beloved family member, you want my sympathy because your boss called you a cunt?   Silence, I say, waiting with a slight smile for that delicious moment when you feebly accuse me of not caring just because I said nothing.

I never got a dime from my parents, nor even the respect of a thank you for the many services I did for both of them when they were dying.   You didn’t inherit enough from yours to make you independently wealthy?  Boo fucking hoo.  Get a job, loser, instead of dreaming you’re special enough to be the change you want to see in the world.

I am the most talented person I know, yet you don’t hear me whining about my lack of recognition.   I go to work, live in the world, do not whine about my creative efforts being unappreciated, myself being unlionized.  And, dude, I am much, much more talented than you.  So, yeah, sue me if I don’t have any comment on your wonderful hobby “art”.  Oh, boo hoo hoo.  Silence…. oh, my… pobrecito!

Etc.

It may seem a small thing to someone lost in a world of anger now, but I have seen my father’s regrets as he was dying.   It was a terrible thing to see a man with all the tools to have been a great friend, a loving father, bereft because he had been unable to separate himself from his pain enough to do either of those things.  Terrible for its own sake and in its timing, because all that was left for him was death, and he had become wise, and grasped the simplest and most beautiful of human truths, too late.  

He may have been putting on a play for me, trying to do me a final favor after decades of putting walls and heavy stones in my way, but I prefer to think his regrets were real.   He had defended himself against his pain as well as anyone could have, heroically, if tragically, since it came at the cost of true friendship and the warm, direct love of those closest to him.  He had deprived himself of the most important things in life, in order to cower behind a brittle sense of invulnerability.

I don’t judge the man.  It’s hard to imagine how anyone recovers from what he was subjected to in a childhood of unimaginable pain and humiliation.  I’m not comparing the pain of being whipped in the face daily with the pain of a father turning his face away at important moments.   I merely note that if you set out to hurt somebody who asks for your point of view, while maintaining that all important sense of superiority, silence is a beauty way to go.

Remain soft-spoken and forgiving

Of course, it’s natural to want to defend yourself when you are in the right. It’s particularly hard to resist making your case in our competitive society, where it is an applauded tic to lustily plead one’s cause in a no holds barred, zero-sum game of winner take all.   In fact, if you fail to make your case, you not only lose, you’re a loser.  If the game is zero-sum, as this one here is, losing is a big deal.  If you lose you do not survive, except as a grim cautionary tale.   Yet, consider:

…if you could remain quiet, even though reason was completely on your side, even though you had every right to be be angry and nobody with a heart could fault you for being mad as hell — if you could speak softly and not argue your case, imagine the different outcome, the good will and friendship that could possibly be preserved?    You’d still be seen as a loser, of course, but the quiet victory over the reflex to self-righteousness would be yours and no harm would be done by your justified venting.  Good might possibly result from your kind example, for it feels very good to be forgiven.  Remaining soft-spoken and forgiving means that you’ve gone past the need to prevail, be right, win, convince, justify or rationalize anything.  Remaining soft-spoken and forgiving is the work of a lifetime, it would appear. 

 

                                                                 ii

My mind leaps sideways, on this 76th Anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night when the proverbial gloves came off in Nazi Germany and Jews were finally starting to be killed outright, and the first 30,000 rounded up and sent to prison camps, in a night of national rioting against the Jews, to the outskirts of Vishnevetz, in the Ukraine, not far from Khmelnystkyi, on a particular August day in 1943.   Nazi motherfuckers, working with local Ukrainian red-neck motherfuckers, marched the Jews out of the hideous Vishnevetz ghetto in orderly fashion, to the banging of drums.  

The Jews of Vishnevetz and the surrounding areas had been rounded up into the ghetto only a few months earlier. The Jews had been required to finish this work of creating the ghetto boundaries and kissing their chains in three days or else my grandmother’s brother, (or possibly her uncle or father– there’s no one left to ask)  who was one of the two Jewish hostages being held by the Gestapo, would be executed.  My grandfather’s father’s house had been designated as the Eastern edge of the fenced ghetto, and so it became.  The work was done on time and my grandmother’s loved one presumably released, or maybe shot by the Germans just for laughs.   Many Jews had already died in Vishnevetz under Nazi occupation, several summarily shot, others starved to death or dead of disease, or, one suspects, suicide.  Most of the survivors, always hungry, and, if sick, soon dead, lived the half-lives of the living dead, expecting their murder at any moment.

To the edge of the ravine, then, the Ukrainians have been preparing it for you all day.  All rocks and roots removed, the dirt combed nicely back from the hillside.  A soft bed of dirt, freshly turned, with that fresh earth smell. Perfect.  OK, clothes in neat piles, please.  You can leave your underwear on, it’s OK.  First group of Jews, please.  Yes, right this way.  OK, face to the left, that’s right, excellent, now slide down a few feet, there are a few more people here on the side who could fit in.  Yes, that’s good, well-done.  OK, lie down, it will all be over in a second.  A line of Ukrainians steps forward and shoots each Jew once in the head.  They then scramble over the bodies, straightening limbs and covering the freshly killed bodies with a fresh layer of dirt.  The drumming continues, to cover the sounds of the shots, the screaming, the wailing.  It’s like a parade for the Ukrainian onlookers, already starting to gather up the clothes to sell.

OK, next group!  Thank you all for waiting, next group, this way please, come on, step up, please!  The Jews in their underwear stumble forward into the ravine, walking sideways in the narrow row to be lined up behind the barely buried layer of dead in front of them.  Thank you all for waiting. OK, here we go, lie down, please.  Make yourselves comfortable, and goodbye.  The Ukrainians step forward, pap-pap-PAP! and then they are nimbly dancing over the dead bodies, straightening limbs, neatening the stacks.  Their wives, meanwhile, have finished tying into huge bundles the first of the murdered Jews’ best clothes, which the Jews had been urged to wear for their relocation.  Relocation from life to death, OK, we lied just to get you to wear your good clothes and all remaining jewelry.  We’re fucking Nazis, what do you want?   Next group, please.

 

       iii

This is, obviously, not what I started out to write when I chose the title remain soft-spoken and forgiving.   The forgotten slaughter at Vishnevetz is nothing to remain soft-spoken and forgiving about– it is about the worst example I could find, although I did not find it so much as it found me, clearly.  It is only an example of something that burns the soul, presses hard against any vow to remain soft-spoken, forgiving, decent, human and kind.   It cries out loud for a different response.

When someone comes to kill you, if it is within your power, do not let them kill you. Nazis, although they take care to arrange things to make resistance as difficult as possible, must be resisted (not that the persecuted Jews of the Ukraine were in any position to resist).  Of course, this leads to the famous problem of specific cases, murderous laws like “Stand Your Ground” and things like that.  The clear right to avoid your own murder is an extreme case of having reason on your side, soft-speaking and gentility aside.

On the other hand, an in extremis situation like the grotesque events in that Vishnevetz ravine that August 1943 day is often used by philosophers to illustrate and test their points.   If a Vishevetz Jew could remain soft-spoken and forgiving… a far better universal moral principle than an unslakable thirst for vengeance.  The sickening slaughter does provide a good snapshot of how difficult it is not to rage sometimes, with reason screaming on your side.

I will try this post again with a better example, a smaller scale, more personal example having nothing to do with the mass murder of my family and many other families.  Right now, I’m still unaccountably lingering by the edge of that long-forgotten ravine full of the bones of my ancestors.

Maybe the DU was right after all

The old man was wrong, but maybe he was also right.  

He believed, after couple of decades working optimistically toward progressive social change, that hope for change was for suckers.  Our deepest fears, prejudices and hatreds, he concluded bitterly (as he’d suspected all along), were beyond reason, will and the most ardent desire for change.  

We fought this back and forth for years and I won’t recount the tedious exchanges I’ve already set out on this blahg and elsewhere.   He was wrong, clearly, things do change, as do people and their reactions and ideas.  He was right, though, that on a fundamental emotional level most people are set, blessed or doomed, by their genetics and programming.  

“That’s a depressive line of thinking, son,” a kinder, wiser father might say.  

“Maybe so, pops, but I’m looking at your own life, my life.  I’m granting you a measure of correctness against the position I argued for so many years, that people can, and do, change for the better, if they work hard enough at it,” I would reply.  

“Would, should, could,” said the kinder, wiser father wistfully.  “When you’re dead you’ll hear how poignant all those words really are.”  

It won’t take that long.  I recall the state the old man used to get into when he misplaced the change from his pocket.  He’d be beside himself, cursing, unable to get over his anger at himself, over the 43 cents he couldn’t find.   He’d received the change at the dry cleaners a few hours earlier, taken it out of his pocket when he changed his pants, goddamn it, and if I didn’t put it on the dresser where I always put it, what the fuck did I do with it?!  Goddamn it!!  He’d be inconsolable as he stomped around the house in a rage at himself, looking on all the end tables, the kitchen table, the bathroom sink, in the basement, upstairs again.

 “Losing 43 cents was the same to him as his favorite dog, or one of us, being hit by a car,” my sister pointed out correctly.   The loss of control of any kind was a lightning rod that electrified him right back into the center of his worst fears.  

“Easy for you to say,” he said.  

I suddenly think of the wallet I lost on the circle around the retirement village my parents lived in for their final years.  The wallet had dropped out of my cargo shorts pocket on to the road as I spoke to Sekhnet on the cell phone carrying the bicycle upstairs at 2 a.m.   I didn’t notice it was missing until the next morning when I went to get dressed and take a drive to visit friends.  No license.  No wallet.  Several days of desperate hope, checking with the security office over and over, until piecing together that the angry redneck security guard I’d disrespected a week or two earlier, and who’d been on duty that night, had found the wallet, had a good laugh seeing my photo in it, harvested several hundred dollars from it and tossed the rest in a garbage can somewhere.  Three or four years ago.  Randomly, the image comes up and punches me hard in the face, the stupidity of carrying my wallet in those baggy pants for a late night aerobic session, of not checking for the wallet when I came in, etc.  

“Depressive thinking, son,” the compassionate skeleton of my difficult father said softly.  I need to get screened for depression, though I haven’t much hope that anyone can help with it, certainly not a drug, beyond the placebo I already take.  I’ve made an e-inquiry with my health insurance provider and a robot wrote back telling me how to find a doctor with a specialty in mental health care on their website, no referral or paperwork required.

It’s a depressing thought, finding a doctor to screen me for depression, even though the Affordable Health Care Act apparently covers me for it.  The doctor is most likely to prescribe a drug shown to be better, on a certain blind test, than the placebo that was 84% as effective as the patent drug overall.  You can read a wonderful scholarly article that lays out the whole psycho-pharmaceutical industrial complex here. 

“Do you sleep more than usual?” the doctor will ask.  

“No,” I will say, and I have the data to back it up on my fitbit profile on the computer.  The average of  seven hours is steady going back two years.

“Are you exercising less?”  

“No,” the five to six miles I walk a day is pretty steady across the time I’ve worn the tiny pedometer.

“Have you had a change in your eating habits and weight?” the doctor will ask.

“No,” I will say.    

“Do you ever think of suicide?” the doctor will ask.  

“Not as an option for me, no,” I will say.  

“Why is that?” the doctor will ask.  “If my life was like the one you describe yours as I would honestly have to at least consider it as an option.  Why do you think you close your mind to even considering that?”

The doctor I go to might not necessarily be quite that moronic going through the checklist of diagnostic symptoms, but these would be among the questions asked to screen me for depression.   The thought of reading the list of two hundred names of unknown doctors to pick the one I might consult with, hoping for a doctor of great insight, is like buying a lottery ticket.  

“Better not to help yourself at all?” asks the skeleton who raised not a bony finger to help himself, before he fell into that predictable long-term state.  

All of the time honored, proven ways of beating back depression, vigorous exercise, cleaning your place, making and keeping to daily to do lists, require an energy and optimistic sense the depressed person is often hard pressed to muster.

Sunday afternoon, chilly, the short days of winter creeping up.   Outside Sekhnet’s plants shiver under the flapping plastic covers she’s tucked around them.  The clocks have been turned back.  The only sound is the ratlike tapping on these metallic keys, clack, clack, clack-clack.  The clicking is a comforting sound a person could almost dance to.  There is a certain music in it, I have to say.  I say it.   Having said it, what now?

 

After FUNeral musings

The rabbi conducting yesterday’s funeral had actually met the recently deceased several times over the years, my friend’s father who passed away Sunday at 89 from a late diagnosed cancer.  The deceased had been a strong, vigorous man with a handshake like a vise, I was amazed to learn he’d been close to ninety.  His nephew ended his funeral remarks by calling him a mighty oak and there is nothing lacking in that description of him.

It occurred to me, listening to the moving stories of his youngest daughter and two of his grandsons, that stories told at funerals by people who love you present your best qualities while the rest, to reverse paraphrase the Bard, is oft interred with your bones, as Aaron’s were in the Jewish policeman’s funeral plot in some Queens cemetery.

I am muddling this, because in a hurry to pack up and get back to my cracked and depressing hovel which I have once again vowed to tidy and have patched up.  There is too much to tidy and too much work to patch and paint and re-tile all the things that need to be fixed once the clutter is removed.  A powerful metaphor for my life of action-stalling deliberation that went through my mind after the grandsons spoke lovingly of how their energetic grandfather never wasted a moment of his life.  After retiring from a long and vigorous work life as a police lieutenant and later insurance inspector, he was either strengthening his already strong body or keeping his mind sharp with a new book.  Or walking with or playing with his grandchildren.

The rabbi spoke of the dead man’s uprightness and nobility.  It would not occur to this man of integrity that there could ever be a good reason to depart from what is true, and right, and decent.   His name, Aaron, said the rabbi, was the name of the Jew who had created the priestly class and a fitting name, for the deceased was a true aristocrat.  I thought then of the analogous speech at my own funeral, the final rites of a man who has spent too much time brooding and too little time  pitting himself directly against life.

“He embraced his arbitrarily given name, The Prophet Elijah, with humility and an absurd sense of purpose.  He accepted without apparent complaint the difficult, essential, unpaid task of returning the hearts of children to their parents and the hearts of parents to their children.   Only this reconciliation could prepare humanity for the coming of the Messiah.  Undeterred by the impossibility of the assignment, knowing that the Messiah is not of this world, as subject to wishful imagining as any concept ever dreamed up by people facing the worst and an idea more objectively dubious than all other such human imaginings, even if more laudable than most, he persisted.   Our Elijah was not dissuaded by any of these things, even though he received no reassurance from God, as his biblical namesake had, and thus had no expectation of being taken alive up to heaven as a very, very old man because God loved him so much.”   A pause to look around at the assembled in their suits and nice dresses, letting the immensity of this sink in.  

It is a depressive move to think of your own funeral at, or immediately after, a funeral for somebody else, I think.  I wonder idly now how many others were measuring their own lives against the life of this mighty oak in his flag draped coffin to the rabbi’s right.

Many who give these funeral orations have never met the deceased.  This man did, and gave a few personal reminiscences that were meaningful and moving.  I thought the bit about the name was a little forced, perhaps, especially when he added that the last name, written in Hebrew, formed the root of the word sustainer, nourisher, giver of life, and that he was, indeed, an aristocratic nurturer who sustained us all by his example.   It set my thoughts back to my father’s story about the funeral of our neighbor, Sonny Friedman.

“The rabbi said that he was called ‘Sunny’ because of his cheerful disposition, that he lit up the room when he walked in,” my father told me in his sardonic manner after Sonny’s funeral.   I wish I was artist enough to convey my father’s wry, disgusted expression as he recounted that clinked attempt at a warm, personal touch.  Sonny was a nice neighbor, but withdrawn, a bit dour, perhaps, and I don’t remember that his understated, slightly forced smile lit up any rooms.

Our view of a person, from life to death, is clearly dictated by our perspective, and you know how dictators are.  My sense of this man I’d met a few times was much different from the portraits those who knew him well, and loved him best, painted.  These paintings were striking, majestic, highlighting what was best in him, colored with bold, poetic strokes.  

My sister had seen our father paint such masterpieces at funerals, I had too.  He could make the person live again for a moment among the gathered as he led them through laughs and tears.  “The D.U. could do that for someone he hated,” my sister contends to this day.  “It was just a gift,” she says.

In the audience, in a suit that bound me here and there, to remind me it was not my regular, comfortable clothes, I compared my own life, with its generous swathes of wasted time, to the deceased’s energetic striving, even in the weeks before his painful death, his unflagging strength and discipline, the full exploitation of his engine’s potential, run full-throttle, every day.  

In my seat on the wooden bench, squirming in my suit, I felt the opposite of that.  A trailblazer with tired eyes and quivering rubber legs, resting up apprehensively for the big day as winter prepared to bluster in.

 

 

Lovey Cries for all of Us

Another one of the things I used to write.  Lovey, a ten pound poodle, had a short, tragic life, fighting with my mother, often bullying my mother.  My nephew, a boy of few words, said as we were leaving the apartment “that dog’s a tyrant.”  

It was not, strictly speaking, the dog’s fault.  My mother in the last years of her slow death from cancer was in no condition to give a puppy the care and patient guidance it needed and they both suffered for it.  Lovey died at five, a month before my mother, and it was a tragic blow, like losing an affectionate, troubled teenager.

 

Lovey cries for all of us

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 4:31:57 AM

My father told me the last night of his life that he’d never seen love or affection exchanged in his home. He said “I have no idea how it’s even done.” I did not have my hand on his as he spoke to me that night, with all the tenderness he could muster. He was not the cuddly or even affectionate kind.

When he was feeling maudlin, after a particularly stupid and bloody battle with his children over the dinner of steak he provided every evening, he would look at me with hurt in his eyes and say “you should read ‘I Never Sang for My Father”. He’d tell me to read this play with all the bitterness he could manage and I’d snort.

I had the play on the bottom shelf in my room in my parents’ house, it rested halfway on the floor, covered in dust. I never so much as cracked the cover of the old paperback.  I have no idea what the play is about, except for the sense my father, someone who never sang for his father, gave me of it.

I saw my father cry twice in life.  Once was during a seder, when he was talking about God pouring out His wrath against every tyrant who persecuted His People, from the Egyptians to the Assyrians to the Inquisition to Chmelnitski to the Nazis.  His tears were bitter as the Dead Sea, pouring out of his surprisingly light hazel colored eyes, and I’m sure my sister recalls that moment as clearly as I do.

The other time was during a visit in Israel.  I’d gone there for a year after High School and my parents came to visit the new kibbutz where I was living and working.  It was a historic occasion, the kibbutz was about to celebrate its first Passover, and so my parents and my sister came to visit.

My father swept the dining hall and helped lay the table cloths and set the hundreds of places for the seder, my mother worked in the kitchen, my sister probably did too.  I was out in the field picking the crops.  I spent most of the long seder in a friend’s room, listening to Jimi’s beautiful Axis: Bold As Love for the first time, then the second, then the third.

I got a day off for my parents’ visit.  We drove in a rented car to a stretch of the beautiful Aravah desert, an oasis.  It may have been Ein Gedi, I can’t think of where else it could have been.  It could have been the walk down to the Dead Sea, now that I think of it, judging from a picture I have from that day.  It is a picture of us standing on the rocky shore of some dark water at low tide.  My father, with big, black sideburns, my sister, thin with a big new bust in a yellow tank top, and me, skinny as a whippet, with a scraggly beard and veins roping down my arms.

My mother and my sister were walking ahead on the dusty trail.  My father motioned for me to hang back by the car a minute, then we began walking slowly.  The color of the land was like wheat, but there was no wheat.  It was dry, parched, biblical terrain that did not look kindly on strangers.

My father was trying to talk to me but I was seventeen, lean, tanned, and impossible to engage.  I’d hardened my heart to him, as he’d required me to do, and appealing to me was like appealing to a thug, a stone-faced adversary who gives no quarter.  I had the demeanor of someone who’d rather smash your face than listen to your side of the story.

Taking this in, what he knew in that moment was largely his own handiwork, he suddenly began to cry.  It lasted only a moment, long enough for him to beg me not to become like him, to let my mother hug and kiss me, to be humane to my mother.

“I’d have to hold his head, but your father would let me kiss him,” my mother told me after my father died.

I was on the plane tonight, the cranky old woman next to me had gotten on standby.  She was in the middle seat, spilling over to my seat, she’d firmly taken the entire armrest and part of the area where my shoulder and arm should rightfully have been.  I didn’t muscle her.  I’d already let another old woman ahead of me on the walkway to the plane.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told me with a lovely smile and an accent from the old country that told me she’d seen much more terrible lines than this one.  She truly didn’t care if I went first or she did, but she took my small gift, to make me feel better.  She was very gracious about it.

I’m sitting on the plane and it occurs to me that my mother finally said the words “I’m dying.”  Words easy enough to say when you are depressed, or angry, or manipulating somebody.  But to say it when you are dying takes a lot of work, and when she said it the other day, angrily and to manipulate me, she meant it and understood it.  Said the awful thing aloud for the first time.

A few hours later I was sitting at the computer keyboard and she rested her face on the back of my forearm as I typed.  Gently, it didn’t disturb my typing. And with infinite tenderness.

Sitting next to the fat old lady who crowded me on the plane it came to me.  Her relentless touch and the heat of her meaty arm reminded me.  I hadn’t hugged my mother much, perhaps two or three times while I was there.  I’d probably hugged my nephew as much, or my niece, and these were hugs like hipsters give each other in greeting.  Stylized, barely touching, they take a few seconds to execute and are done for the look and the gesture rather than for the feel.

I leaned into the car and kissed her goodbye on her cheek as she kissed me on mine, the way I kiss Ida whenever I see her.  Her dog cried like a human being, beside herself to see me leaving.  My mother for her part did not cry, neither did I.

The dog sat up on her lap, staring at me, stretching toward me, inconsolable, crying, imploring me not to leave.  The dog wept without shame or restraint, like a creature acutely conscious of love, affection and companionship and crying because it was losing someone it loved.

I Used to Write Things like this

Looking for an account of a long unhappy friendship I’d written at some point, germane at the moment due to the passing of that former good friend’s mother, I’ve been picking through the haystack of unsorted needles with little hope of finding that story.  Going through the files for the now extinct blahg I once maintained, I stumbled on this one, poetic in its way, written four years ago when I was in the first stage of optimism about this new plan I had for my life.

Lost Souls

Sunday, September 19, 2010, 12:30:58 AM

Sat around a long table last night eating delicious food with a dozen people I love, each one full of great qualities, each one, in some part of themselves, a lost soul.   We bang around in this world lost a good deal of the time and there is no shame in it.  I am just thinking about it now, the dark night before Ralph’s unveiling, in the aftermath of the Days of Awe.

My sister took my mother to see “Up in the Air” a black comedy that touched a raw a nerve in this downed economy.  My mother, even though a George Clooney fan, didn’t enjoy it very much.  “Everybody in that movie was so damaged,” my mother told my sister as they left the cinema.  Abby was impressed by the insightful comment; indeed, every character in that movie is damaged in their hearts, in their minds, in their souls.  They dream the dreams of damaged people.

It was my mother’s follow-up comments that rendered my sister speechless on the drive home.  

“Do you think the filmmaker was trying to say that everyone is damaged?”  my mother asked.  Abby wondered if this was an ah-ha moment, the possible opening of an important discussion.  She ventured the opinion that everyone probably is damaged to some extent.

“I’m not damaged,” my mother said forcefully, a few months before cancer took her ravaged body and struggling soul from this life, and my sister was at a loss for anything to say to that.

Ralph’s tombstone will have a cheesecloth gauze removed from it tomorrow, after some prayers are chanted and a few words said about him.  Ralph was the father of my good friend Rob, who was my best friend in the world, and we spent many an evening over at his house, my family and I.  Ralph was quick with a droll remark, glass of booze in his hand, suave as Dean Martin but at the same time as downtrodden and dominated as the Jewish husband in any Jewish husband joke.  

The last time I saw him he looked wonderful, he was pushing 90 and could have passed for 75, dapper as always, smiling, his thick hair brushed back and shining.  He had no idea who I was, but could see by his wife’s friendliness toward me that I must be an old friend.  We went into a quiet room and sat and talked, his wife and I, then he turned to me with that old Ralph mischief in his eyes, and melancholy too, and crooned “the party’s over, it’s time to call it a day.”  A year or so later he was being eulogized, another mystery who had walked among us.

As all the ones we walk among must of necessity be.  There are reasons for every action, ridiculous as it may seem, given so many of the actions reasoned to.  If too unreasonable to be called reasons, there are at least rationales for every belief, behavior, hope and grudge.  We don’t act without them and we can’t do anything incredibly cruel or stupid without believing we have good reasons, or at least strong rationales, for doing what we do.  Sometimes we feel lost, wondering who is actually pulling these strings, this spider web I am hanging in life by, like a dangling participle?

Music that could and should be made, but silence.  Love that should be expressed freely, and shared, and used to give strength, used in a hundred bizarre undermining ways that advance nothing but puzzlement and hurt.  Beauty, sorrow, beautiful sorrow, sorrowful beauty, permutations of every moving thing often moving off in directions that sustain nobody.

It is no wonder that so many souls are lost, lost on the way to Death we do our best not to think of as coming for us, though it most certainly is.  We are a busy society, a competitive, commercial one, time is money and money runs faster than time, so we must be faster still.  And this chasing is hard work, leaving us tired, distracted, it is not always easy to concentrate.  

The research says we can only really focus on one thing at a time.  We generally have several things clamoring for our attention and feel obliged to multitask, which makes us less attentive to the things we attend to.  We have to take risks to advance, they are scary and so we are often tense when we jump.  A tense jump means trouble.

No connections, you want connections?  I could give you connections, but it would cost you.  I would require something of you to make these connections for you.  I am weary, and will be sleeping presently, to be up in seven hours to stand with Ralph’s widow, and his children, and a few friends still alive.  I will now be taking off my slippers, putting up my pipe, neatly hanging my velvety robe, laying myself between thick, creamy covers.  I’ll be snoring.  

I am tired, my dear, of speaking to the black, purring night.  The night is many things I love, but it is not big on conversation, which I do also love. And lost souls or no, I see the light of engagement on everyone’s face when they are correctly asked an intelligent question, or given feedback that leads them toward the light, or laughter, or a good, long cry.  I wonder about the short-circuit, why most people are too lost in worse things to be present more than momentarily when the moon is blue and a certain music reminds them– damn, I used to love music.

Standing on the edge of the ditch

In a sense, my father, who once cried about the murders of our family but always denied its relevance to our lives, was right.   I never stood, nor did anyone I ever knew, on the edge of a ditch waiting for a murderer’s bullet.  Not when I was an eight year-old with a terrifying imagination and first learned of it did I actually stand on the edge of a ditch with the rest of the family waiting for the order to lie down and be shot.   Much less fifty years later when I am that much closer to my own natural end, after standing beside the open graves of loved ones many times now.  

To be truthful, these things happened thirteen years before I was even born.  I’ve never been machine gunned, or shot with even a small caliber gun, never been tied up with ropes or even been hungry for more than a few hours.  For crying out loud, I’ve never even been whipped in the face or beaten bloody.  My father took the manly stance that his dramatic young son was just sniveling, looking for pity in the echoes of the murder of our family back in some far away Ukrainian hellhole more than twenty years earlier.   Some of us never get over anything, it would seem.    

If I’d been a Black kid it would have been the fucking slave ships I’d have been whining about, the millions crowded below decks in airless holds, chained, driven insane, thrown to sharks if they grew too indignant.   Then I’d have been worked up about the hundreds of years when I could have been sold, whipped, sodomized like any flesh robot you could own.  It wouldn’t have soothed me to hear that life here for the former slaves was better after the Civil War, or that not millions, only thousands, of former slaves were ever beaten, raped or killed for being indignant.  And probably less than ten thousand, total, who were ever burned to death or hung from trees while crowds laughed and whooped and had picnics, sold body parts and photos as souvenirs.

My father would have said “for Christ’s sake, son, they put those Klansmen on trial in Mississippi for what they done to those boys down in Meriden.  The country is changing, for the better, it has changed a lot in your lifetime.”  It would have been peevish to tell him only one of the murderers of those Civil Rights workers would ever see the inside of a jail cell.  Or that sixty years after the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation, schools would be as segregated as at the height of Jim Crow.  Hindsight, you know what they say about it.

“Is this really what you are thinking about at 4:36 a.m.?” asks a concerned voice.

“No, not at all.  I was thinking about this hours ago, but couldn’t shut off that great documentary about how they did the animated life of Graham Chapman I’d seen earlier…”

“Drawing again, I heard the scratching of your pens….”

“Yes, Sekhnet wandered in like a zombie, saw the animation on TV, looked at the drawings on the couch and said ‘Oh, God, he’s generating more papers…'”

“You can see her point.”

“Yes, I can certainly see her point.  These twenty thousand fucking drawings are a plague.  I do myself no favor drawing them.  But listen, do you mind if I get back to what I was thinking about?”

“Who are you asking?”

“Good point,” I say.

It was an accident of birth, and dumb good timing, to be born in a place and era when I was not forced to lie face down on top of dead bodies and wait for a bullet to end my life, as all of my grandparents’ families were.   Pure luck not to be living in a 2014 slum without sewers or any kind of toilets, where babies die by the truckloads from ragingly contagious excrement borne diseases that basic sanitation prevents.  Good fortune not be born in a place where children are dragged from their homes and forced to kill, or are ‘collateral damage’ statistics in drone attacks, or fated to live in neighborhoods where human predators attack, or if the criminals don’t get you the cops will.  A blessed accident of birth to be born wearing this face instead of one that invites real kicks and blows.   The kicks and blows I receive are gentle indeed compared to real ones.

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” [1]  The pains we are given to deal with are painful enough for each of us, unbearable sometimes, though they’re not as painful as many more terrible things countless people are enduring at this very moment.  It doesn’t give us perspective, sadly, not to be standing on the edge of a ditch waiting for the order to fall in and be executed.  In a sense we are all standing on the edge of a ditch in a world where ditches for mass graves are dug all the time.

“Take this shovel, dig a hole deep as you want to be buried and stop crying and farting about it,” is about the worst thing any of us can hear.  In that childhood nightmare where Nazis in storm trooper uniforms were slicing through the screen of the back porch of our house to get at us I remember thinking “a lot of good those screens did” a second before I woke up with my heart pounding in terror.

That no idea, no matter how good or well-presented, can be sold in the marketplace of ideas without properly calculated marketing?  A female mosquito landing on your shoulder for a drink.  That unscripted candor has no place in a salesman’s pitch?  Please.  That’s as self-evident as the fact that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that may vary, according to circumstance, history and financial situation.    The world is just the world, although it is not always easy to keep perspective when the world is chanting something loudly and continuously enough to drown out all other thought.  

They were apparently banging drums and making a racket on the hill by the ravine to the north of Vishnevets those days in August 1943, to mask the cries and other sounds of the massacre.  The noise of the drums and lusty screaming, as you can imagine, was a fearful sound to the remaining ragged, starving citizens of Vishnevets, waiting their turn at the lip of the ravine.  

The world of competitive commerce and war constantly and insistently beats the drums, to drown out the silence that might lead to forgetting about the drumbeat of commerce and war and allowing people to recall matters of a deeper nature, to gain a more humane perspective.  

It’s possible, I suppose, that these two lusty drummings are only comparable in the mind of a madman.   Then again, many things in our world are the work of madmen.

 

 

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Uncanny Echoes of Babel

The following are from survivor accounts in the Vishnevets Yiskor book. They sound uncannily like the characters and narrators in Isaac Babel’s wonderful, terrible tales (in the incomparable Walter Morrison translation). Many of the worst, and the best, of these finely compressed little stories are set in benighted, bloody little towns like Vishnevets.   

My grandmother fondly recalled the Red Army men who were billeted at her family’s home in Vishnevets.  I think she said they were Cossacks, who were generally White and not Red, and rarely friends of the Jews. Babel’s Cossacks fought for the Revolution, and eventually came to tolerate the Jewish Babel, though occasionally raping or killing Jews here and there.

This doomed pregnant woman’s plea is right out of Babel, who may well have been in Vishnevets with the Red Cavalry at some point during the Revolution.  
 
“Vasye,” she said. “Look, Vasinke, look at my condition. I’ve never harmed you. Have mercy on me and my baby, have mercy, Vasinke.”  
 
(Vasye did not have mercy)
 
And this grimly poetic narration, right out of Babel, by a nameless survivor: 
 
One day I stood by the window looking through a crack and saw a young man around the age of 17 returning from work. He left the group, approached the fence, and threw a package over into the ghetto.

A Ukrainian saw it and grabbed the youth – the boy. And the boy didn’t realize that he had seen him. I knew the Ukrainian; he was a reptile but not one of the worst. I called him.

He came to me, and I said to him, “Vaske, what are your intentions?”

And he said to me, “He’s done something that deserves punishment by death.”

I asked him to give him a fine. Punish him with money and let him go, strongly warn him, and in this way, he would satisfy his “conscience” as keeper of the law. But he held on his own and explained to me in a beautiful way:

 “You have to understand, he doesn’t have any money. If I punish him with a fine, he’ll have difficulty paying it. Why should I enforce something that will make his life more difficult and cause him trouble with the Germans? It’s better for me to kill him. It’ll be a lot better for him.”