Category Archives: Gratitude

Minimalist

If I was a successful minimalist how different would my life be?   When Etgar Keret mentions the ‘inherent laziness that has plagued me for so many years’ it’s delightful to picture.  If I say it, of myself, it’s not that delightful.  Everything is a bit more delightful when you’re getting paid, and recognized for what you can do, but that’s only part of it.

Phone call from Albi, France interrupted my train of thought.  My dear, lost friend, taking care of his mostly paralyzed mother, apologizes that he was too depressed for the last six years to be in touch.    Which made me feel a bit better, I’d only been depressed and avoiding people for a year and a half.  

He reports that his hair is now white, he feels eighty and he has a chronic back ache from carrying his mother everywhere for the last seventeen years.

“Seventeen years!” I exclaim.  “What a punchline to an inspirational story!” (start at paragraph five)   

His manic-depressive mother had made tremendous progress during the first ten years of his care.  She had regained the use of her body to an extent that baffled doctors.   Doctors kept predicting she would die soon, that this procedure would be her last.  He wheels her to the funerals of one dead doctor after another, a cigarette propped jauntily in her mouth.

Then, during a split-second of distraction, she slipped from his arms, landed hard, needed an operation.  The anesthesia put the 87 year-old back to square one.  She’s now almost ninety-four, and although sometimes quite cantankerous, can’t talk.  He has to conduct both sides of their arguments, which is exhausting.  He loves her and has no regrets about his choice to care for her, but feels a certain wistfulness to realize he’s been her selfless and unpaid caretaker for the last seventeen years.

We had a few good laughs, between talking about the many reasons for being too depressed to pick up the phone.   Then it was time for him to make sure his mother wasn’t choking in the next room and for me to get back to thinking about the important work I need to be doing.

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Part 23

There has been research recently on the changes in brain chemistry, the physical structure of the brain itself, and even the DNA, of children who experience abuse, neglect, hunger, adverse childhood experiences that scar them for life.   There is a great, short video presentation by a brilliant pediatrician, Nadine Burke Harris, who clearly sets out the lifelong health consequences of terrible childhood experiences. Fifteen minutes well spent, the link is here.   

An old friend was telling me about a recent experiment where they abused baby rats until their brains’ plasticity was gone.  This is apparently one effect of child abuse, we can think of it as a hardening of certain areas of the brain that need to be flexible. Which makes the reaction of someone with this injured brain more extreme and painful than the reaction of someone with a pliable brain that can, literally, stretch and roll with the seemingly, to the un-abused person, minor punches.

This friend and I, both unfortunate subjects of an amoral behavioral experiment, identify with this kind of traumatized rat.  The senseless experiments we’ve undergone have left us sometimes struggling to behave as though we had normally elastic brains.   The main thing you need when hurt, particularly if you’re a survivor of adverse childhood experiences, is empathy, so you don’t feel crazy to be suffering what you are — and so you can learn to empathize and also continue to look for empathy, even if through a fog of pain.

My friend told me the experimenters, when they were done torturing these baby rats to sufficiently fuck up their brains, administered some drug and watched the effect on the little rats’ personalities.  The drug apparently restored their brain plasticity, or elasticity, or whatever it was.  The twitching rats became calm and cuddly.

We laughed that there might be hope for us yet.  There might be, there might not be.  But the laugh certainly didn’t hurt in any case.

Dueling Douche Bags in the New Jersey Night

Friedman and I once went to hit golfballs at a NJ driving range on a Saturday night some time in the 1980s.  Neither of us had ever done it and we both sucked badly at it. Standing side by side we snorted and giggled as we hit dribblers and sideways three hoppers.  Almost assuredly we were also somewhat intoxicated as we tried to drive golfballs for the first time.  

Making the obvious assumption of the homophobic day (and fair enough, given the optics), two self-respecting macho Jerseyites walking to their cars behind us loudly exchanged a sneering comment about the two girlish fags taking their homo hacks. Nowadays that witless comment seems hideous but quaint, but at the time, the words made my ears burn.

My next swing was like Mantle driving a golf ball, I hit it flush and sent a long drive to the back of the lot there (my only decent shot of the night).  

I could swear I heard the two homos behind me clam up simultaneously.  Very satisfied, I felt, as I hit the next sixty sissified dribblers, although Friedman and I, more self-conscious now, tried a bit harder to suppress our giggles.

Life As Metaphor

Thought I was on my way yesterday to meet a guy I haven’t seen in about thirty years.   A scamp texted that this likable fellow, who had been spotted recently, would be joining us for lunch.  As my life does not have the recognizable shape of most people’s I know, measured in a real-world career one can speak of, I thought of what I would say when he asked what I was up to.  I mused about this as I made the long trek by public transportation to a $40 snack with old friends.  

“I am living my life as metaphor,” I was planning to tell him.  He’d give me his patented puzzled look and I’d explain.

“For example, I founded a highly successful child-run public relations firm for the children of the doomed.”  

“Hell of a name for a P.R. firm,” he’d say.

“A metaphor,” I’d say.  

“From this you make a living, from the children of the damned?  Someone pays you for this?”

“Metaphorically,” I’d say.  “Of course, here in the literal world, everybody would know the first thing you need to have before even thinking about undertaking such a project is a funder — in addition to a name making no mention of the horrible fact that millions of American children, and billions worldwide, are in fact doomed, the children of the damned.  Some generous corporation or rich individual to pay people to do the work you have dreamed up for making the world a marginally more hopeful, playful place.”  

“From this you do not make a living,” he would say.  

“Again, metaphorically.  I’m alive, I’m making, I’m living.  Who’s to say my life dreaming in metaphors is any less rich than that of the billionaire who wakes early each day to go into combat for even more, and who once or twice a month sits on a board that decides whose big ideas will live and whose will die.  Which fledgling organization will wax rich and which will fall like the dry grass.”  

“Metaphorically speaking,” he would say.

“You were always a man who could grasp a metaphor,” I’d tell him.

“Metaphorically,” he’d say, with Talmudic precision.  “You got any more?”  

“One has a choice in life, I’ve discovered, between bitterness and happiness.  I choose to be happy, extremely and unremittingly fucking happy.  You got that, man?”  

“You are singing to the choir director, mein friend,” he would say, and I’d watch the famous Cheshire Cat smile spread across his gigantic, cherubic face like a metaphor for the Moshiach and the World to Come.

Four for Nothing

There was a middle aged black musician who came to the school where I worked in Morningside Depths years ago. He was there to teach the kids the fundamentals of music.  He spent most of the time teaching them to count and to read music.  I don’t recall much music being made by the group, but I do remember him bringing the group to attention for each exercise by smartly announcing “four for nothing”.  This meant four bars of some kind of intro before the actual piece would start.  You can hear examples of this all the time, I could sing you five of them now, these “four for nothing” bits.

Four for nothing.

1)

At seventeen I saw “Enter the Dragon”, the only Hollywood film starring the immortal Bruce Lee.  I saw it with a group of friends in a Jerusalem movie theatre.  It was intoxicating.  My friends and I left the cinema flooded with youthful strength and with the amazing possibilities contained in the human body and spirit.  We walked the streets imitating Bruce Lee, doing his graceful, stealthy walk from the scene where he spies on Han’s evil operations.  We did Lee’s catlike war cry, stopping to take heroic poses from various scenes in the movie.  I remember feeling like I could lift up or overturn cars.  We were all devastated to find out later that Bruce Lee had died, just before his greatest movie was released, just as he was about to become an international superstar.  He was already a superstar all over Asia, we learned.  I have seen Enter the Dragon perhaps six or seven times since, and I am never disappointed.

A few years later, at City College, I enrolled in a gymnastics class, hoping to learn to do the amazing handspring Bruce Lee had done, bounding into the air off his powerful arms and doing two or three flips in the air before landing with catlike nonchalance to bow to the judges.  There was a sign in the City College gym I remember.  It said: practice good hand stands every where.  This was excellent advice if you wanted to develop the strength and balance to do a handspring.  I was never able to do a good hand stand anywhere, the version I did required a wall nearby to brace my feet.  

I was too naive to realize that one does not enroll in a course that meets once or twice a week and expect to master something that people who do it have been doing every day since early childhood.  It is not enough to be young and fit to learn to do a backflip or handspring.  One thing needed for doing flips in the air is fearlessness.  Another is complete confidence.

I have the image of Simba Perkins, a Harlem nine year-old, balanced on a metal hand rail above a cement courtyard.  Simba was in my third grade class.  When he saw me getting to my car outside the school he called out my name and told me to watch.  Before I could get the words “Simba, don’t!” out of my mouth, the kid launched himself into the air, flipped upside down in the air high above the bar and landed lightly on the cement, smiling like Bruce Lee.  

You could have taken a photo of the fearless boy, with a very fast shutter, and caught him upside down, his back straight, his head pointing directly to the deadly cement six or eight feet below his head.  The still image would be of a boy about to spend his life in a wheelchair with a spinal injury, if he survived the shattering trauma to his skull.  Simba, of course, had done countless back flips.  He never had any fear or hesitation.

I had both and could not overcome the instinct to tuck my head when I went into any position where I might land on my spine.  This is exactly the opposite of what one needs to do to perform a handspring.  It was only by an act of mercy that the teacher passed me after I did my version of a floor routine, in the middle of a gym full of leaping, hand standing, back flipping gymnasts who were good enough sports not to laugh or otherwise show their pity for my game but sad attempts.

2) 

My uncle, a meticulous man, bought a blood pressure monitor.  It was a good one, top of the line, automatic, with a computer interface to keep track of your blood pressure and pulse readings.   He placed a post-it on the monitor where he wrote the date of the purchase.  All this soon became very ironic, and poignant, when, two or three days later, he had a massive stroke.  He spent the remaining time he had on this planet in a wheel chair.  Every time he had to urinate someone needed to hold a jar for him to pee in, the other hand guiding his penis.  The only time this wasn’t done was during his several trips to the hospital for intensive care, when, presumably, they inserted a catheter into the slowly dying man’s urinary tract.

I acquired the brand new blood pressure monitor, which he had no further use for, and took readings of my own borderline high blood pressure for a year or two.  Eventually a doctor friend convinced me to take the drug she and another friend of ours take to control elevated blood pressure.  She informed me that, after a certain age, when the blood pressure is elevated on a regular basis, diet and exercise will no longer have much effect.  I told her I wasn’t worried about having a stroke and she told me to worry about the permanent damage to my heart and liver the high blood pressure was already causing.  I got a prescription soon after and, although on half the dose she takes, my blood pressure has been in a healthy range ever since. 

“116 over 74,” said my former doctor, impressed.  

“White coat syndrome,” I told him.

 

3)

One summer afternoon about thirty years ago, in the early days of a romance with a pretty young woman ten years younger than me, we went shopping in Jackson Heights for every kind of ripe fruit we could find.  We borrowed my parents’ house in Queens where we made an enormous fruit salad in the kitchen, with mangos, melons, cherries, pineapple, oranges, strawberries, peaches, plums.  My parents were away for a few days, I don’t recall where, but there was no chance of their returning home.   It was a warm day, but not hot, and we stripped off our t-shirts and shorts as we made the fruit salad.  Then, as the sun began to set we took the huge bowl of fruit salad out into the backyard and sat naked in the grass to eat it.  

As we started to eat the fruit salad darkness fell.  Next door the flood light in my neighbor’s driveway cast enough light to see us clearly by, especially once it got dark.  Long stripes of shadow from the picket fence fell across the grass, halfway to where we were.  Beyond the shadows, just light.  I remember being slightly paranoid that my long-time neighbors, a young widow and her two beautiful daughters, could come outside or drive up at any moment, and there would be no way to hide, but the memory of that delicious fruit salad in the grass stirs me to this day.

4) 

Schoolyard, Bronx, 1972 or 1973.  I’d been playing guitar a year or two by then, and there was a genius at the school I went to, a school for science nerds.  Neither me nor this genius were science nerds, in fact, he had almost no interest in any of his classes, even the English and History classes that sometimes engaged me.  He was only interested in playing the guitar.  So disinterested was he in his scholastic studies that he had failed sophomore English.  I passed him once as his young English teacher was detaining him at the classroom door to implore him to give her some way to pass him,  a Junior, failing sophomore English for the second time.  He motioned for me to wait for him, so I heard her plea.

“Frank, you’re obviously very bright, and verbal, and you can write very well, but you have turned in absolutely no work this term and I cannot pass you.  I also don’t want to fail you….” she was clearly at a loss.  My friend shrugged and indicated that he and I were about to have an important conversation and that he needed to be excused.

 “What do you do all the time?” she finally asked him, “clearly you don’t spend any time doing my assignments.  What do you do?”

“I play guitar,” he said.  

“You must be good,” she said.  

“I am,” he said, with great understatement.  

She thought for a moment and came up with an idea only a young English teacher at that moment in history could have thought of.  “OK, bring in your guitar and play for the class and I’ll write it up and maybe I can pass you for that.”  He agreed quickly and we walked off to have lunch.  

Let’s say it was during lunch that same day, in the school yard.  I showed him my version of the intro to Stairway to Heaven, a delicate bit long passed into cliche, now banned in all music stores. He took the guitar, strummed the heroic variations on the D chord that presage the heavy electric guitar solo, and launched into Jimmy Page’s unforgettable solo.  He played it again when I asked, and I soon mastered that cool little intro and the opening of Page’s solo.  It was a great thrill.

A few days later I cut my fourth period class to be on hand during his guitar recital for the idealistic young English teacher.  To her credit, the teacher did not even ask who I was or what I was doing there.  I could have been the guy’s agent, for all she knew.  The desks were all pulled to the sides of the room and the chairs were arranged in a circle.  Frank sat in the middle, with a guy named Allen Saul on backing guitar.  I’d never seen Frank play with Allen, but Allen turned out to be a fine accompanist.   Frank began to play.  The English teacher looked on as though falling in love.  With tears in her eyes, and not looking away from Frank, she scrawled a note and sent a kid out into the hall with it.    

A few minutes later the chairman of the music department and both music teachers were standing by the door of the room, listening to Frank, clearly moved by his playing.  When he was done the chairman announced they’d had no idea they had a student of his caliber at the school and gave Frank basically the keys to the city.  “Come by when you get a chance and we’ll give you the key to a practice room.  Our resources are at your disposal, whatever we can do for you, whatever you need, we will be happy to do our best to provide it for you.”  

Then it was the English teacher’s turn, and words were clearly failing her as she attempted to tell Frank how moved she was by his playing, how, she too, would do anything Frank needed her to do.  Frank was clearly embarrassed by all this adulation and so, when a friend of his gave him, literally, a Bronx cheer, Frank leaped over the chairs and got his friend by the neck and they tumbled to the ground in a clatter of desks, playfully fake fighting.  

“Frank!!!” called the English teacher, like Dave Saville calling “Alvin!!!” when the cartoon chipmunk got out of control.  Perfect bit of real-life imitating art, Hollywood style.

A few days later, having absented myself from a trigonometry or physics class, I ran into Frank in the hall.  He asked if I had a minute.  I did.  He took me up a narrow stairway I’d never seen into a bank of rooms I’d never seen.  Using a key he opened a door and we went into a room just a little bigger than an upright piano.  

We sat on the piano bench and he played a line on the guitar.  It was a lightning fast bit of a solo from John McLaughlin’s wonderful acoustic album My Goal’s Beyond.   It was an extremely complicated bit of improvisation that Frank had easily copped from the record.  He played it on guitar, then took his right hand and played it perfectly on the piano.

My eyes popped wide open.  “How long have you been playing the piano?” I asked him.

He told me it had been a few days, and counted off the days since they’d given him the key to a practice room.  “About a week,” he said.

“How the hell can you do that?” I asked the sixteen year-old genius.  

“I have no idea,” he said, “and I can’t explain it, but, it’s exactly like playing the guitar, if that makes any sense.”

You Want to Laugh, do you?

I rarely find myself reading something and laughing out loud, LOL!  I don’t think I’ve ever ROTFLMFAO, but on rare occasions something in print tickles the old funny bone and makes me roar in my chair.   This bit did zee trick, LOL!

The author, always funny, was a good friend in high school who I lost touch with (or, ‘with whom I lost touch’, if you prefer the stick up the ass).  I stayed friends with her ex-husband and, through an on-line magazine he writes for that pays a few bucks for 1,000 word pieces, I discovered more than a dozen written testaments to Helene’s wicked wit yesterday.  There are a few tragic ones among them, although even those are leavened with her distinctive irony, but scroll down the list, every one is worth reading, and none more than 1,000 words or so.  

The list of Helene’s stuff  which she just reported bears the editorial mark, here and there, of that lovable “scamp” who improves good work with a deft, sometimes daft, touch (hey, Larry, where are you when the reader needs you?) is here.   Czech ’em, but only if you want a larf.

RIP Tawny

My sister loved her dog, a pit bull named Tawny.  My memory of Tawny is as an ageless lioness, limber, strong and perfectly formed.  Sekhnet recalls her as a giant lioness.   She was not small.  She had boundless nervous energy, if you threw her saliva soaked white sock for her once you’d be obliged to do it a hundred more times.  

The wet sock would be on your lap, at your feet, or next to you on the couch, Tawny, head cocked, staring longingly at you, at the sock, at you, making sure you saw her, knew the sock was there.  Whatever else might have been going on, she had one concern, her paw up on you now, to focus your attention to the matter:  throw, run after that sock and bring it back, drop it for throwing,  repeat.  

She was beautiful.  She was gentle, too.  She wouldn’t bite a hamburger, as the phrase goes.  She was not cuddly, had too much energy for that, and her coat was not smooth and silky for petting, she wanted to move, to bring back the sock, a ball, whatever.    

You could picture her on the savanna, with no fear of any creature, sitting under a tree gnawing a bone.  My sister said that is how she died today, at the ripe old pit bull age of more than 13, deaf, unable to use her hind legs any more.  Chewing on a bone, peaceful, as her loved ones sat around her and the vet administered the stuff to knock her out.  Very gentle and very sad.  My sister and her family are all crying tonight.  

To those who have never loved a dog or a cat or other animal, I have to say, I am a little bit sorry for you.   There is no love greater than that shared with a familiar, loyal animal whose life and warmth connect with yours.  We are lucky who have experienced that kind of love with another human.  

This love between humans and animals is not a new thing, either.  The bonds between human and animal go back to earliest prehistory.  The first friendly wolves who ran with humanoids, becoming the first dogs, defending the group, being rewarded with food and affection, a warm place to sleep by the fire.   The pack was as familiar to dogs as to humans.  Cats and other animals long ago joined into this most excellent arrangement.  

 

398

Freedom (and the Unthinkable)

Born free and in chains at the same time, it is written.  We are free to choose, within our choices, chained to things beyond our control.

“Good fortune, I have found, comes most often as the result of hard work.”  This was written by an industrious young man who’d inherited a thousand acres of fertile farm land and almost a hundred slaves.   History remembers him as one of our greatest geniuses.

Bad fortune, I suppose, to have been born one of this humanist philosopher’s slaves.  Hard work would not likely fix this egregious pre-birth planning mistake.  Your options are fewer than the boy landowner: you can complain, look for justice, or vengeange , you can seek to be the illuminating exception — but those don’t usually make for a felicitous pursuit of happiness.  

Once a prince left an opulent, pampered life in the palace, he renounced his wealth, the life of desire, searched for enlightenment, became the living embodiment of enlightenment.  Simpler, ironically, for the son of a king than for the son of a field laborer.

We are free and we are in chains.   Your government.  The policies and laws by which some live as philosopher kings while others lead lives of fear, violence and want.   Fairness and the world?  A grimly humorous idea.  Good social media skills in 2015?  Inspire a worldwide band of psychologically delicate people looking for a cause to rally to, convince them to create terror for that cause.  Stand back and wait for the internet to blow up.

 

 

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Snapshots

These tiny images of frozen moments, the way we remember life.  I am often reminded how great my memory is, which makes me feel like a fraud.  In my mind, I remember almost nothing.  Less than a millionth, I’d suspect, of what I have lived, remains in my memory.  There are odd bits, sometimes, that I remember in great detail.  They are like snapshots.

I have a few new ones now.  An old friend, wrapped in his prayer shawl, praying in the remote Jordanian desert at dawn.  The radiant face of a young beauty in the ancient tourist shrine Petra, posing irresistibly near a desert weed I was photographing.  The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a magical mountain.  The fisherman’s expressive face as he held court in his little open fronted restaurant, a hundred meters from the sea.  There are other photos in there, those baby ibexes, no bigger than small dogs, looking for food from smiling humans under the “Do Not Feed The Ibexes” sign.  A small fox leaping across the road near the national park called Appolonia over the beach at Herzliya.  The skinny dog in Petra who accompanied us for miles, seemingly just for the companionship as he went about his rounds, looking for good garbage to eat.  

Some cannot be unseen.  The little Jordanians firing rocks at our dog escort, cursing him, as he yowled piteously and took off.  Thankfully Sekhnet missed that one.  She cried when I told her about it.  I did not need to tell her of the one we all saw the next day, the large pale ass of the man, squatting directly in front of his car (instead of on the side where he would have been out of sight) poised to take a shit on the shoulder of the road up from the Arava desert to Mitzpeh Ramon.  I was praying as we passed that I would not see the turd dropping from the grotesque vertical smile.  My prayer in that case was answered.

There was that great moment with the woman we were visiting, her head thrown back in a great laugh, I don’t remember over what, though I recall laughing too.  That one was caught by the ever ready Sekhnet, whose phone is a better camera than most cameras. 

These snapshots remain, along with some beautiful views.  I think they will be in there for a long time now, along with some of the actual photos we snapped.

We complement each other

Sekhnet’s one-time friend, a likable quack she came to refer to as a ‘caboose’ because of the drag he exerted on the rest of the train, once did astrological charts for her.  He did not live by the stars, but had a lifelong interest in them and a fond belief that they held deep secrets for the mortals rushing about below.  He did two charts for her; one for her and one for me, her, then, new love.

Each chart was arranged in a circle, like a clock face, or a pie.   Sekhnet’s  pie was almost completely eaten on one side, solid pie on the other.  My chart was the mirror image, wherever she had pie, my tin was empty, where mine was empty, her’s was full.  

“These charts show two complementary souls,”  he reported happily, “look at how you complete each other!  This is the strongest bond you can have with another person.”  She was happy to believe this and I smiled to see her so happy.  Our bond is, indeed, very strong.

We are, in some fundamental way, like complementary angles, you dig, or properly aligned magnets, or any number of analogues from the world of science.   Adding our strengths and weaknesses together forms one very strong, complete composite person, though that person may be a slightly mad one.   I have noticed many things that seem to prove this complementary thesis.

Deadlines, for example, which famously trouble people, in part because of their sweaty similarity to death.  Sekhnet and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum on these.   Though we both complete absolute necessities by the deadline, our approaches are completely different.  

I give myself an arbitrary deadline, say 3:00, which, as I  glance at the clock now, I see is rapidly coming up.  OK, I have thirty minutes and then I must make those calls I’ve been putting off for two, or three, or six weeks.  At 2:55 I realize it will be impossible to make those calls by 3:00 and I will generously extend the deadline to a more comfortable 3:30.  I feel merciful having done this, and continue whatever else I was doing until… oh, crap, 3:29.  

Would 4:00 work better for you?  I ask myself.  Oh, yes, I answer, relieved, and then we both smile and: 4:00 it is!  In the end I put it on the list for tomorrow, with only the smallest pang of regret.   This is not the recipe for ambition, I understand, but it is how I tend to do it– unless there is some pressing external reason I must have the thing ready by a certain date and time.

Sekhnet is exactly the opposite.  She is tormented every day to know she will meet only a tiny fraction of the hundred deadlines she sets herself every day.  She may accomplish several big tasks in a given day, things that have been bothering her, but that is almost never a reason for self-congratulation or relief.  When I try to pat her on the back she is not having it.  She is quick to point out that she did not accomplish many more tasks, which must now be added to the long list for the following day.  When I try to comfort her she will not take comfort, not from someone who hasn’t made any of those two minute calls he wanted to make two months ago.

Reminds me of other stressful situations where I try to reassure her when she becomes anxious.  I’ve taken to adding a semi-humorous caveat to my reassurances, it sometimes works very slightly.  “Don’t worry,” I urge her, “… said Nearly Headless Nick….”  And I put my arm around her, my head lolling slightly to one side, where the neck has been hacked.

Oh, crap!  It’s 2:53.  I’m late!