Category Archives: Family

Somewhat Ironic Careers

We’ll leave my law license out of this one, I found a scrap of paper just now that had these words on it:

Human Relations Unit Sensitivity trainings led by my sensitive, brilliant father — always on guard against attack.

There were riots between ethnic groups in the NYC public high schools in the 1960s.  Jets and Sharks, they’d square off and rumble, with violent consequences.  A bloody nose or knife wound seems quaint by today’s standards, but my father’s mod squad would be called in and they’d find the leaders of these gangs and take them off to a weekend retreat.  Role playing, a chance to hear each other, guided trainings done by a multi-racial, multi-ethnic team of idealistic former teachers.

“We were pretty successful at stopping the violence at one high school after another with the kids we worked with.  The school would be peaceful for a year or two, until the kids we’d worked with graduated and their little brothers and sisters started killing each other,” my father told us, about the time he left that job for another equally stressful one.

Then, at dinner, the master of human relations and sensitivity training would go to work, reflexively doing what he could not help doing better than almost anyone else in the world. The insensitivity sessions the poor devil ran over dinner were legendary and unforgettable.

Talking to My Son After My Death

Eight, almost nine years in, I’ve learned a few things about this death business, and though I don’t think often of life, as such, in the way that living people do, I am slowly moving forward.   I have been able to hear certain conversations and have plenty of time to muse about them, all the time in the world, literally.   Yesterday you spoke of my attitude on my death bed and it struck me as poignant, the way you believe in certain things, and I’m going to address some of those beliefs now.

We had a life long debate about whether people could really change themselves.  Your upbringing was hard, I was there, I saw it from the beginning, before the beginning.  I played a big role in making that upbringing hard, of course, and am acutely aware of the obstacles I placed in front of you and your sister, how much heavier than necessary I made the rocks you push up the hill of your lives.  

We cannot know, in some cases, what it was exactly that made our parents monstrous in the way they were.  The stories from Europe were shady, muddy, obscured by smoke, and filth, and terror, they ended in the murder of everyone left there.  I never got any details of how bad my mother’s life, may she rest in peace, was in that benighted little hamlet she left twenty or so years before it was wiped out by the Nazis.  You found out, through diligent research, that she used to whip me in the face from the time I could stand, so something that was done to her filled her with violent rage.   I appreciate the times you’ve said it’s a testament to my character that I never whipped you and your sister in the face, that it would have been understandable.  I did equally terrible things, we both know.

As for our almost forty year debate on whether people can or cannot fundamentally change their natures, I have a few things to say.  Problem one was our adversarial relationship, which largely foreclosed meaningful dialogue, and that was my fault.  I projected many things on you when you were a baby and it set things in a very bad cast.  I thought, for instance, that the way you stared at me from your crib next to the bed was accusatory.  I can see now that this was an insane point of view.  It came from my own carefully repressed terrors.  The world is full of terrors, especially if your caregiver was a violent enemy.  I have to apologize again, though I know you will say it’s not necessary.  So we have the adversarial relationship standing in the way of a real discussion, turning it into a black and white fight to the death.   The next problem is one of framing, the definitional problem.  How do we define meaningful change?  

It was your position that changing your outward behavior and reactions is a significant change for the better.  I always countered that you may change how you act, but never how you feel deep down while you are acting.  This is a clever debating tactic, perhaps, particularly if deployed with the skill I had to deploy such arguments, but beside the point, I can see now.  It also effectively ends discussion of the nature of meaningful change.  Of course how you react is significant, and changing your reactions is hard work.  Of course you will have the same feelings deep down.  Or maybe not.

I heard you say yesterday that the most recent troubled old friend you had to take your leave of (remember how you used to condemn me for casting people over the side?  I guess you understand now that it is sometimes necessary to do this) left you with different feelings than past leave takings.  You said you have no anger toward this person, just sadness.   That’s real progress, I think, on an inner feeling level, and I found it credible, too.  I salute you for this.  

The insight that you may have been left with a sixty pound boulder to push up the hill, difficult but possible, and your former friend a hundred pound one, difficult and impossible for a person to roll, is probably correct.  On many levels you continue to make progress, and on some fundamental levels she has made very little and is still very angry, critical and a bit ruthless– to herself and everyone else.

But the reason I set bone to paper today (no pen here in the grave, sad to say)– and I am conflicted about it now, is to address your feeling that I had changed on my deathbed, and so gave the final proof that people can change.  Deathbed conversions are a cliche, of course, and they are a cliche because they happen so often.  We are faced with the finality of death only once, no matter how many times we may fear it in our lives, when it actually approaches there is no mistaking it.  When the end is near nobody can predict how they might react.   Some see it as a blessing, and I have mixed feelings about that, although, to speak plainly, death has been pretty good for me.  It’s true my consciousness is a bit hard to express now, and I can’t guarantee further communications, or even the end of this one, but in some ways it’s not bad.  No worries, for one thing.

But anyway, what you saw as proof that I was capable of changing can be chalked up to the Grim Reaper grinning at me next to the bed.   Your sister was probably right– if I’d have known about the liver cancer six months earlier, as opposed to six days before I died, I probably would have still waited until that last night to tell you the things I finally told you.  Who knows?  Your construction is more generous, that I would have come to those final realizations much earlier, have lived those last months differently.  Due to the collective genius of Florida doctors we will never know.   Your manner was indeed different in that hospital room, and I have to admit, your kindness to me, the way you kept trying to let me off the hook as I was apologizing to you for the first and last time, may be seen as proof that you were right about people being able to change for the better.

I don’t bring this last point up to undermine the progress you have undoubtedly made, at least I don’t think I’m doing that.  It may be that we actually can’t change after all, though.  Maybe I will always have to undermine you, in some way.  

You told me, in the last real conversation we had, your last attempt to open a dialogue two years before I checked out, that my milder reactions to you had greatly improved our relationship, even if the inner feelings were the same.  That I respected your wish not to be constantly bad-mouthed, often in the guise of giving fatherly advice, meant a lot to you, you told me.  You offered this as proof that even I, someone who did not believe in change, could make changes.  

At the time desperation forced me to be cruel.  I actually laughed, scoffing at your naivete, telling you that my superficial change in reaction merely masked unchanged inner feelings.  I drove the nail in by adding that if I ever honestly told you what I really felt about you it would do irreparable damage to our relationship.  You could see that as just my desperation talking, and that would be fair, but I also didn’t have the insight to know any better.   Which is a deeply embarrassing thing to have to admit now, almost nine years after my death.

But the point is, what if my behavior on my deathbed, the way I expressed regret, wished I’d been able to change, see the world in all its nuance and not just as a black and white fight to the death, what if all that was just a show put on to give you a fonder last impression of me?  A manipulation orchestrated by Death, who was approaching on roller skates?  You see, this possibility would mean that I was right, our changes are only acts, and deep down we are the same as we always were.  Some things that torment you mean nothing to most people, it’s the way these things were instilled in you as a young child.  

On the other hand, my stepping out of character to seek forgiveness that last night could be seen as proof that you were right, that by changing our reactions we can change the dynamics that have trapped us unhappily in our lives.  That my relief at seeing you mild, and not angry or condemning me, as you had a right to as I went towards the grave, freed me to act differently.

This is one of those conversations that could go on, I suppose, though, in the ordinary course of things, if two people are not adversaries, certain agreements can be reached and the conversation need not be an ongoing battle over decades.  I still think about my wish, that last night, that we could have had the kind of real conversation fifteen years earlier that we finally had the last night of my life.  Fucking tragic, I know.

There’s no place like home

I’ve got to be quick, because there is not enough air in here and I’m told it’s beautiful outside and I need to stretch the legs and breathe.  I am just thinking about the games we learn as kids and how much deliberate and focused attention and hard work it takes to unlearn the bad ones.

It’s a tiring story, but my father was a tormented soul.   Great, dark sense of humor, but essentially a well-defended fortress against all potential invaders.  Everyone was included in this category.   If I had a problem being raised by someone like this, it was not something he was obliged to concern himself with.   That was his position for our long, difficult relationship, his answer to every attempt on my part to have him lower the bridge so I could cross the moat: I was the one with the problem, not him.  A position he apologized for quite sincerely hours before he died.

He gave me the gift of belatedly acknowledging that my painful childhood was largely the fault of an adult incapable of being a better parent.   He acknowledged that I was right to be hurt and saluted, for the first time, my many attempts over the years to improve the relationship.

While he was alive and on his feet, however, he’d fight to the death any suggestion that on his deathbed he’d have the regrets that could be so easily seen by anyone who wasn’t him.

The enduring injuries of childhood

Some, I imagine, did not receive traumatizing injuries during their upbringing.  I would like to meet and talk to someone who didn’t some day.   Most people I know, in a candid moment, will describe self-hatred, shame, rage, humiliation, terror, depression and several other shades of pain they don’t deserve   My father, at 80, on his death bed, admitted for the first time how the brutality he’d endured as a child had doomed him to live in a black and white world, holding off rooms full of potential abusers wherever he went, instead of using his great gifts to bring more color into the world.

No tears for us, please.  Like the fact that we all die, that injuries we suffered as young children endure is no mystery, nor anything to get tearful about.  How do we face the fact of our eventual deaths?  Outside of not thinking about it, by living as well as we can.   How do we endure the enduring hurts of childhood, even as adults, even as tough people who would rather kick somebody’s ass than admit how much we hurt?  That is hard work and does not yield to a simple answer.

We pay careful attention, think unhurriedly, use our words to describe things as clearly as we can.  We model the way we want others to treat us.  We do not do to others what we hate done to ourselves.  We consciously work to do better, to replace an angry reflex with a kind gesture.   It’s not easy, or, even, it must be admitted, in some cases, even  possible.  People may be too damaged, too bitter, crazy, anxious, desperate, invested in the needs of their egos or their justifiable rage to even imagine another way to live their lives.  Imagining a better way to live is the first step, like imagining anything is the first step to anything different.

No time at the moment to do anything but the best I can.  And wish strength to you to do the same.

It Makes No Sense

Had lunch yesterday with an old friend from High School I haven’t seen in decades.  He was going to our fortieth HS reunion, I wasn’t, so he stopped in for lunch on his way to the reunion.  His life has gone in a logical line, the next in several generations of engineers, he’s been studying or working, mostly happily, in the field for several decades since graduating high school.   For the last twenty years or so he’s been at the same company, working on inventions that will do many things, including make smart bombs smarter and more precise in their targeting.  There is good money in those government contracts, the company he works for values his work, and many of his co-workers there feel like extended family to him.   He can narrate the events of his resume over appetizers, as he demonstrated nimbly over the vegetarian lamb satay.

When it’s my turn, I am at something of a loss.  Neither my life nor my description of it goes in a straight line, it jumps from my years as a bike messenger, too angry to consider any way to participate in a society that seems sick beyond redemption, to the 1981 meeting I had with a dean at CCNY who told me it was no problem to waive some requirements so I could get the remaining seven credits on my BA (magna cum laude, it should be noted).  He could not waive gym, he explained, so I took volleyball and led my team to the championship.  

The dean, a physics professor, if I remember correctly, a kind looking man with a resemblance to Kurt Vonnegut Jr., took care of the paperwork quickly and then gave a concerned look.  “That part’s easy,” he said, leaning forward and looking mildly concerned “but, I have to ask you, on a more personal level– what is someone as obviously intelligent and thoughtful as you are planning to do  with your life?”

My companion at lunch nodded, his eyes wide open.  A scientist and human being, approving of the humanity of his fellow scientist, going beyond his role and asking a good, compassionate and very logical question.  I proceeded to try to answer, weaving the story of my father’s life and death among the different periods of my life and times.  There was no line to follow, except for the evolution of my resolve to avoid argument and conflict, to be direct, and remain as mild as possible.  There was no pay-off to any of this, certainly nothing monetary, outside of  a life with somewhat less anger and violence.

Odd to say, while we walked after lunch and chatted, never once did the image of, not three generations of engineers, but three generations of angry, depressed people, seventy years ago virtually all of them murdered in ditches, burned, gassed, one of the lonely survivors whipping and sobbing over her first born, clinging in fear to a God who had clearly turned his back, come into my head.  

Just a single brief description of this enraged little redhead I know so little about, other than how she violently sowed the seeds for her baby’s tormented life, the baby who grew up to be my father.

I had a pleasant few hours with my HS friend and was left with the feeling I haven’t figured out how to make sense of much of it.   My HS friend looked at my current program through logical eyes and didn’t see why I wasn’t working as a middle school art teacher.  Better pay, benefits, same basic work.  

The finer distinctions I tried to draw about the uniqueness of my program, the integration of teamwork, children taking complete ownership of the collaborative process, peer-teaching, creative problem-solving, seemed pretty much lost on him, reminding me again how important it is to find a few people who grasp essential things about the program that cannot be quantified in a lab.  

Having said that, and not to suggest an inherent contradiction, I also need to quantify the claims I am making in a lab, in order to demonstrate to people who have money that this idea is worth funding.

That said, the only logical conclusion might well turn out to be that it makes no sense, this flickering idea of mine.  In time I will either discover this for myself, to what end I know not, or be pleasantly surprised to see a program I’ve long dreamed of alive and walking among the living, and inspiring them.

Grit

I heard a recent TED talk about grit being the key to success.   The speaker defined it as passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.  Talent is no substitute for dogged determination when undertaking something as ambitious as changing the world.  A person with grit is prepared to fail over and over again to get to the place they are trying to arrive at.

“Aren’t you afraid of burn-out?” asks a well-meaning friend, after I described the many facets of the work ahead of me.   I am not afraid of burn-out, I think, letting the wall in front of me go out of focus.

“Isn’t the fact that you haven’t been able to recruit anybody passionate about what you are doing depressing to you?  I mean, people should realize by now that your theory works.  You’ve shown the great potential of the program over and over, I mean, shouldn’t you have at least one trustworthy ally by now?  Isn’t this depressing to you?”  I am asked.   No more depressing than the fact that I am asking this myself, the well-meaning friend long gone from the phone.

In America we have the myth of the Rugged Individual.   This person has grit, true grit. This person is tough, with endless inner resources, prepared to do whatever it takes to succeed, undeterred about the necessity of doing huge things alone.  This person will kill you, if it comes to that.

“Would you kill for this idea of yours?” asks an abstract, distracted, watch checker.

“Only you, baby,” I think, out of the box.

The idea is to become like the psychopaths who prevail at any cost, only without forgetting that I am here to be part of a supportive community, not a rugged individual.  That I am here to model patience, and humor, and the optimism necessary for all learning.

“Well,” says the skeleton of the DU from his grave on top of the hill, “it’s no wonder you struggle with this.   I had no role models for showing love, and you had none for showing grit.  As I apologized for– I put great obstacles in front of you and your sister.  Instead of nurturing either of you I was busy competing with you, trying to crush you in a senseless war of survival I had no insight into.   I did apologize for that, didn’t I?”

You did, old man, and it was good of you.  Now, if you will excuse me, I have work to do.

Mood Music

It can be a challenge, keeping the mood steady, positive, relaxed, especially when there is no particular schedule to keep you on task and distracted.    My mother was probably depressed for most of her life, though she didn’t often succumb to it in any noticeable way.   She did housework, cooked a delicious dinner every night, raised my sister and me, went off to work every day when we were old enough to fend for ourselves.   This routine kept her busy and her mind off the kind of fearful musing that would occupy it when she had too much time alone in her final years.

“I’m afraid your nephew might be subject to depression,” she told me when the kid was about three.   “Sometimes he’s just so down, he won’t look you in the eyes, it seems like he’s sleep walking.  Then we take him to Lester’s and the waitress brings him a cookie when we sit down.   He eats the cookie and suddenly he’s like this” and she does a wild dance.   Eyes suddenly wide open and mischievous, manic grin on his face, moving like Carmen Miranda with a pair of castanets, swinging long arms from side to side, snapping his fingers, mugging.

I wish I had a movie of my mother doing this imitation.  She would often oblige and reprise a remark or imitation and she was not shy in front of the camera.  If only I’d had one when she told me about my nephew’s amusing mood swings.

The challenge for all earthlings, getting the mood music right.  Is it easier to dance with music that moves you?  Of course.  But how to keep the right music playing in your head– or how to learn to dance to music that might not move you as much as other music?

Here’s one to try– patience.   The hardest thing in the world, perhaps, and maybe the most necessary thing.   With patience ridiculously hard things can be accomplished.  Without it easy things are sometimes too hard to master.   The funny thing about patience, or maybe not, it must be absolute to do much good.   Being patient 99 times and enraged one time won’t butter the biscuit, as they say.  

But 99/100 is still a very good score, particularly when we’re talking about something as crucial as patience, so don’t lose patience with yourself.  It is like anything you would master, takes constant practice until you can do it every time.

It’s not like the world is teeming with masters.  But if you would be one, begin learning to master your moods first.

 Image

Genetic Predispostion to Laughs

My mother, maybe two weeks before she died, was in her bedroom when a hospice nurse, social worker and someone from a physical therapy place arrived to speak with her.  The previous hospice had declined to give her physical therapy, not because they were mystified that she wasn’t dead already, not because it was pointless to give her the illusion that she was fighting to get stronger when death was days away, but on the grounds that she was too demented to remember the instructions of the physical therapist.

I was incensed, switched from incompetent, vicious Vitas (this conclusion about dementia was but one of their criminal bits of negligence)  back to the other hospice, who’s name escapes me, and a day or two later these three arrived to assess my mother for physical therapy.  I was in the kitchen when these three women went into the bedroom where my mother was resting on the bed.  Within a minute I heard one of the women laughing, soon they were all cracking up.  There were several peals of laughter.  I have no idea what my mother was saying, but the effect was pretty dramatic.

“One thing for sure, your mother is not demented,” said the nurse coming out of the room with a big smile still on her face.  They started physical therapy the next day, and she did pretty well that first session, but session two had to be postponed so she could be admitted to Hospice By The Sea to die a few days later.

I think about this because, while I’m not up against an imminent death sentence as my mother was, I am living a stressful enough existence these days, no income, escalating health insurance, a program that works amazingly but that I haven’t managed to monetize, recruit the people I need to turn it into a sustainable business, blah blah.  There are days when I’m feeling quite desperate about things.  I spend long stretches alone wondering what I was thinking.

Nonetheless, wake me from a sound sleep on one of these days, like my wasted, napping mother, and I will find my footing in the conversation pretty quickly.  There will often be a chuckle or two, even though a moment before I may have been dreaming of my unfair and gratuitous execution.  

Laughter is like medicine, it is medicine, there is nothing as good for you as a good laugh.  At least that’s the way it feels to me, the dramatic reminder that in the midst of horror there is still a moment to lose yourself and your troubles in a roar that makes your heart leap and clears out everything else.

Cain’t Leave It Alone

Thought experiment.   Imagine:

Your father was brilliant and had a wicked sense of humor.  Your father was angry, and prone to panic attacks he could only calm by seizing control.   Your father was always alert, and on the defensive, because he perceived the world as a dangerous zero sum game, stark black and white, only one could win, everybody else: dead.

Your father had good reason to feel hopeless most of the time.    Mistreatment as an infant, we’ll leave it at that.   Brain research suggests that first-hand traumatic violence before the age of three can change certain souls into violent psychopaths.   It is all in the wiring of the brain, who is prone to become a serial killer or a Hitler, when he is violated mercilessly, or witnesses butchery, at a delicate age.  Let’s assume your father was not a psychopath, but that he shared several of the psychopath’s most salient traits.

Your father was brilliant, smart and cunning.  Although he felt helpless much of the time, he was adept at projecting an air of confidence and assurance.   He did this with his great intelligence, his antennae finely tuned to whatever emotions were stirring in the room.  He was expert at keeping people off balance, at controlling conversation.  

Most often he would take control of the conversation in the manner of Socrates, by directing the talk through a series of ever narrowing questions.  The answer to each would lead to the next link in the logical chain.  He was leading his adversary inexorably to a steep cliff, and would soon have him poised at the precipice, neutralized, at his mercy. 

Arthur Kinoy, famous lawyer and lifelong freedom fighter, once pointed out the brilliant legal reasoning in the Dred Scott decision.  The Dred Scott case was one of the judicial last straws before the so-called Civil War.   Kinoy was near the end, a brilliant version of Mr. Magoo, when I knew him.  “Read Dred Scott,” he told us, “you won’t regret it.  It’s a wonderful piece of legal legerdemain.  It’s extremely well-written and every link of the logical chain is perfectly connected to the one before it.  There’s not a single fuzzy moment of logic, actually; the conclusion is unassailable.  The only problem is the premise, the premise, as we all know now, is complete bullshit.”

Although Kinoy did not say ‘bullshit’, he found an equally forceful way to denounce the racist premise of Dred Scott.  As I told somebody the other day, I have a tin ear for quotations.  But that was Kinoy’s supremely important point, an unassailable legal argument, one that cannot be attacked from any legal angle, can be constructed on a pile of shit.

Let’s assume for purposes of this decision that (insert pile of shit here).  The structure that can be built on top of it can be a fortress all the armies in the world could not topple.  In Dred Scott the premise was the Negro’s natural inferiority to the White man.  This gave the White man a clear moral duty to protect the Negro.  From there it was a quick 90 page march to the incontrovertible conclusion that although Dred Scott, an escaped slave, was living in a free state he must be returned to his former master under the Fugitive Slave Act that was constitutional for most of the first century of our great republic.  Some people found this unappealable holding an outrage big enough to give their lives to overturn.

Anyway, I have a bike ride to take and no time to waste, you will forgive me if I plunge ahead to my point.

Imagine your father is like Antonin Scalia, brilliant, trenchant, sardonic;  a master at crafting an eloquent legal justification for his actions.   Your father asks your opinion of a current topic of debate.  Your father challenges you to justify your opinion.  As soon as you do, he seizes on one aspect of your answer and begins charging toward his inexorable conclusion.  Then you will be challenged to choose one of two answers to the question he’s been driving toward, a question only tangentially related to the original inquiry.  

In weighing your answer you will realize that both answers are traps.   If your father has had a particularly rough day, he will conduct this march to your capitulation in a very harsh manner.  

Afterwards, you will take the high road.  You will allow that as he’s framed the question, of course, he is completely correct, there is no possible argument.   You will point out that reasonable people could disagree about any of several key points foreclosed by his constant narrowing of the question.   Then you will tell him directly that you were perplexed to be asked for your opinion and then disrespected and browbeaten into answering an extremely narrow, re-framed question.  Email it off, go ahead, we’ll wait.  You’ll have the reply in seconds, no doubt.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.   I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later..

And you will sigh, not more of this fucking shit.  And you will fashion, but not send, your heavy hearted reply.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.  

Note:  He does not specify what is interesting or what parts of your take he will think about.

I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  

Elegant, the way the passive voice was used.  This is a technique law students are actually taught to employ.  “If your client is guilty, whenever you must make any kind of admission, use the passive voice.  Not ‘he killed Tom with a knife’ but ‘Tom was killed with a knife’.  Not contradicting a fact in evidence, something you can’t do in a legal argument, just not stating outright that your boy was the one actually holding the knife when Tom was killed with the knife.  You may not be denying it, but it’s as close as you can come to leaving the person who did it out of the equation.

You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later.

This is actually a mischievous, hipper way of saying “More never”.  It’s also a classy and gentle way to issue a challenge to the other party:  try to whine about it after I frankly admitted that you deserve a reply.  What do you want from me?  This is clearly your problem, not mine.  

The bit about  I hope to tackle when things ease up around here is another beautiful construction.   “I hope” is excellent, since it is an aspiration, the expression of a fond intention, something more noble than a promise but without the expectation built into giving your word.  “Tackle” is great, because it confesses that the work involved in giving the deserved reply would be strenuous, something of a challenge.  

But best of all is ‘when things ease up around here.’   An inspired echo of one of my father’s favorite lines, from his The Jokes That Killed Vaudeville collection.  “Let me borrow $20, I’ll pay you back as soon as my brother straightens up.”

And pocketing the twenty the vaudevillian gets ready to wink at the audience, “my brother the hunchback!”

Wink!