Category Archives: Gratitude

A Key Distinction

 
The Devil, it is often correctly noted, is in the details.  We all have our particular weaknesses and very particular reasons we are weak exactly where and under what circumstances our weakness becomes excruciating.  I’ve been chafing for years, for reasons I’ve gone into many times, when someone simply leaves their end of a conversation to silence.  I’ve done conscious work on my reactions to this, which is about all one can do, but it’s a challenge for me even now, whenever it happens.  And we all know, it happens all the time, especially with email.  
 
I was gratified to see in the famous NY Times, in a review of books on how to deal with difficult people, that one respected author sets aside Silent and Non-responsive as one of seven supremely maddening types.   For whatever reason, that type has learned:  all I’ve got to do, motherfucker, is nothing.   Hmmmmm?  Is my humming bothering you?  Hmmmmmmmm?
 
If a friend expresses annoyance that I didn’t reply to his description of an outburst of rage he described in an email he sent, I will read the email again and reply.  Stepping neatly into the trap.  Because then, heh…. what?   I didn’t say anything.  You’re fucking crazy.  I did nothing and look how fucking mad you get!!!!  Oh my God, and you think I was enraged because I said I was enraged when I totaled my car… what a complete fucking asshole you are, Mr. Ahimsa-Boy!
 
A few distinctions occur to me and are in order.
 
In defense of people with bad tempers who don’t want to think too deeply about why they fly off the handle from time to time, or suffer, like an expatriate friend, from all sorts of painful anger-repression related physical ailments, or live joyless lives seeing no reason to do anything but continue trudging out of a sense of duty, if you don’t lose your job over your temper, is it really that big a problem?  True friends and loving family will often forgive you for an outburst of anger, bosses– not as much.
 
Also, the difference, I realize, between the rage that was directed at me (and my sister) by my abused father, at my friend by his enraged, quick to snarl and slap mother, and whatever bad treatment was meted out by other inept parents of adults we know, is that being raged at is a trauma that causes a different category of harm in the child than just being disrespected or treated thoughtlessly.   Being the object of a parent’s rage from your earliest memories?   Priceless.
 
Just ask my dad about that, though you’d need special powers to make out what his smiling skull would tell you up there in that little boneyard outside of Peekskill. If you had those special powers, the man could tell you a hell of a lot. 

Just watched a JFK documentary on PBS

And watched him deliver, in black and white movie footage, these words from Ireland, in the early summer of 1963, the last summer of his life:

George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life.  “Other people,” he said, “see things and say ‘why?’.   But I dream things that never were, and I say ‘why not?’”    
 
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.  We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask “why not?”
 
Dig it.

On second thought

My friend who asked me yesterday how I continue to write in the face of indifference emailed to clarify what he actually meant, a much worse question, to wit:

I meant, how do you maintain the focus and motivation to write, given the discouraging features of your life in general as you’ve described them to me over the last few months?

And my answer to this more pointed question remains basically the same as yesterday’s. 

The moment of grace, musical in a way, the tap of the keys clacking, a bit hypnotic, reminds me of the best of myself, no matter what discouragements lurk.  It is a relief to see my thoughts making themselves plain in black on this white screen.

His clarification does remind me of something though.  I had a dear old friend, very old, she died at almost 93 a year ago next week, who loved my project, the student-run animation workshop.  She had good reason to love it, she was the inspiration for it.  After the death of her youngest daughter on an icy road in Vermont she heeded the advice of good friends and opened the Elinor Beth Music and Art Workshop for local children.   I was one of the workers in this shop, though, as it was spring and we were kids, we spent more time in the backyard kicking a ball around among the budding trees and shrubs than we did at the easels painting.   

The inspirational thing about Florence was how much she loved to be on hand quietly encouraging us to be creative.  I’d ask her to show me things, she always told me she loved my way of doing them better than the ‘academic’ way she’d learned to do it.  She assured me there’d be time to learn whatever I wanted to about technique and the “correct” way to do things but that the most important thing now was to love what I was doing for its own sake.  And to keep doing it, in the way only a creative kid could.  I’d go back to the easel, slap another painting up there, hang it on clothes pins to dry, grab some cookies, suck down a little apple juice and dash back into the intoxicating back yard.

Florence and I remained lifelong friends.  At one point, two or three years ago, telling her about the great potential and probable impossibility of actually accomplishing what I’d devoted my life to– getting the animation workshop up and running–  she told me she didn’t know how I could sleep at night.  She said it was a great idea, but how I could face the discouraging obstacles I was facing was beyond her powers, seemed superhuman.  “I love what you’re doing and it’s a fantastic idea.  I just don’t know how you can sleep at night,” she said with characteristic love and concern.  

I laughed, brushing her worry aside with bravado.  “I don’t know either, but I sleep fine.  Don’t worry about me,” I told her.

Not long after that I began to have trouble sleeping.

So if this blahg goes suddenly silent, you’ll understand what happened.

Making it Right (and the difficulty of anger)

The world is not right, though it will insist it is, bashing you in the face as many times as necessary to prove it.  History does not proceed by justice, the law does not concern itself with trifles, like the American lynching that was winked at for a century after the Civil War.  You get a flawless receipt from every ATM you will ever visit, along with the exact amount of money you ask for, plus applicable fees, yet the same company that makes the ATMs will insist it’s impossible to guarantee the same accuracy in counting electronic votes in US federal elections.  There are a billion examples, literally, more than that if you go inside families, friendships, workplaces.

In a world as insistently corrupt as our own, how does an individual make it right?   We have the serenity prayer, which at times may guide us to accept the difference between truly maddening things we must fight and things that will only madden us.   I have nothing much to offer here, except to consider for a moment the role anger plays in these proceedings.

A friend’s recent reaction to anger caught my attention.  This cheerful, agreeable woman got angry, years ago, over something she took as a slight.  Her unusual show of temper was mentioned recently (note how slyly the passive voice is used) and she became very apologetic about it, almost worked up that we recalled it.   The words angry and mad are used interchangeably, and both are emotionally fraught words.  A stigma is attached to both, and for understandable reasons.  Angry, mad people often do terrible things.  Seeing people out of control, or feeling out of control ourself, strikes terror.

You read the book Everyone Poops?  A delightful Japanese book pointing out the obvious and showing various creatures pooping.  Here’s an illustrated post about it, keeping it classy, as the author says.  We all poop, very important.   It is clear what must be done regarding poop and we do it as often as necessary.   A very good thing it is, too.   We all get angry, and even funnier, we all have a right to be angry much of the time when we feel it.  It’s what to do with the anger that is the perplexing puzzle.    

It often gets turned inward, which goes badly almost every time.  We blame ourself for something as natural as pooping and wind up using it against ourselves– very bad, as bad as not pooping.  It gets barked at the wrong people, also bad, for at least two reasons.  The source of the anger remains untouched and a person who did not deserve blame got barked at.  Very fucked up.  It’s threatening to express anger to someone who can retaliate, so those who can’t or won’t fight back are often targets instead.  Speak truth to power?  Want to get fucked up, go right ahead.  Unless of course, that truth flatters power; power doesn’t mind that.

My old friend was determined, when he became the father of a brilliant and provocative child, to learn not to react to his child’s provocations with anger.  This sounds easy, but try it for twenty years or so, every waking moment, tired and distracted, in sickness and in health.   His mother had not done well in this department, not well at all.  Not many angry people do well in this department.  My friend did the hard work, I am always proud of the job he did in not repeating what was done to him.

We get mad when somebody hurts us in a strikingly unfair way, or in a way they know will hurt us.  This happens.  What we do after that makes all the difference.  I think of that wonderful line I saw at Buddha Bodai restaurant, under the glass on the table:  remain soft spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.  Wonderful advice.   Hard advice, but consider– if you care about the person who made you angry, what better way is there to respond?  If you have reason to be mad at yourself, what better way to speak than softly and with a tender willingness to forgive?

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.

A Gentle Story

I try to walk at least five miles a day and I have a device clipped to my shirt that encourages me to do so, recording every step and hundredth of a mile (20 steps).   Some days lately walking this distance is about all I manage to accomplish, but, I’ll take my accomplishments where I can and as my father always said of such things “it’s better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.”

Walking in the Bronx last night, looking for a new route around the part of my usual path that takes me under ear shattering elevated trains, I walked down a street I’d never been on.  This empty street, a block or two long, is named Adrian Avenue.  As I reached the end of it I heard cries for help coming out of a window over my shoulder.  

Two women were piteously calling from a window in an alley, their necks thrust out into the night.  “Please help us, we’re locked in!” the younger of them cried as I turned to face them.  

I took out my cell phone.  “Who can I call for you?” was my first idea.

“No,” said the desperate woman, “come into the lobby and let us out!”

It was after 10 pm, the unfamiliar street was empty and quiet.  Two helpless women lure unknown man into lobby where accomplices wait to rob and beat him, I thought, tabloid style.  “How will I get into the lobby?” I asked the women.

“We’ll buzz you in,” the younger one said.

“And how will I be able to get you out if the door is locked?” I asked.

“We’ll throw the key out,” said the woman.

“What apartment are you in?” I said.  She gave me a number on the first floor.  They buzzed me into the small apartment building.  I saw their door and noticed there was no door knob on it.  I heard them inside.  There was no sign of anyone waiting with a blackjack.

Within a moment or two the key slid out under the door.  I turned the key and the door opened.  Both women were so happy to be rescued from their predicament they were practically giggling.  The older woman, in a dressing gown, beamed a grateful smile.  The younger one also beamed gratefully, pumping my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and thanking me profusely.  I smiled too, told them they were welcome, and went back to walking.

Less than 200 steps later I was at the end of Adrian Avenue, and looking left, realized the street did not go through in the direction I needed to go.  There would never be another reason to walk down Adrian Avenue, I realized, which made the odd coincidence of being there to do a good deed a little bit cooler.

Funny

We learn that Napoleon was funny, quick-witted and, one presumes, deadpan.   A biographer of his recounts Napoleon’s drollness when a maniac ran up to Napoleon and Josephine outside the opera and declared to Napoleon that he was in love with Josephine.  “Odd choice of a confidant, sir,” Napoleon said to the maniac. 

“There are over FIFTY Napoleonic jokes recounted in my book,” said the biographer indignantly to the man he was debating, a man who held that Napoleon was a humorless, tyrannical, bungling, petty dickhead who, given the chance to truly spread the values of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, made things much darker rather than lighter, particularly to the humorless, autocratic, militaristic east.

“Over 50 jokes scattered over the 900 pages of your book,” shot back the man who would stop at nothing to debunk the notion that Napoleon was a cool guy, a great man, and funny.  “Pretty slow going, eh?”  Turns out he’s got a Napoleon biography in the works too, was flogging it a bit by the end of the debate– hinting coyly, in hopes of boosting sales, that he actually thought Napoleon was a cool guy and, possibly, even droll.

I have no idea if he was a cool guy, or droll, or if one should expect more jokes in a 900 page biography of a famous conqueror and ruler.  It’s not like it’s the biography of Jerry Seinfeld, after all.  Still, it got me thinking cheerlessly about humor, about the mysterious force that makes people say and do things that make people laugh.

If you ask me, or even if you don’t, I will admit to being a bit mystified that I am not more depressed at the moment.  If we get on to the subject, and I don’t dodge it for once but describe plainly the present circumstances I find myself in, you will find yourself flinching.  I’ve seen people literally start biting themselves in the back, like dogs attacking fleas, when I am done recounting the probably impossible challenges I’m up against at the moment.   People begin clutching at the most ridiculous ideas to try to help me.  Perhaps I could do the animation workshop with severely retarded adults who are also blind and deaf?  There’d probably be a grant for that somewhere, no?

“Hmmm,” I’ll say, pretending to consider the merits of the idea, “You know, I never thought of that.   Of course, they’d have a bit of trouble making a soundtrack, wouldn’t they, if they’re deaf?   And I suppose they’d need some help with the visual part, being blind.  But I’ll have to mull it over.  Thanks!”  And my thank you will ring a bit emptily in the uncomfortable silence before we can shift the conversation to more pleasant topics.

Still, before taking my leave of these friends, at more of a loss than I am to understand why I am not yet totally paralyzed by depression, I will usually have remarked, riffed, opined, and/or dead-panned in some semi-humorous way.  People need to laugh and the dark humor of dark humorists will suffice in a pinch, especially in a pinch.  

An old friend, literally almost 98 years old, passed away recently.  Sekhnet cried and I patted her then said “but let’s be honest about it, she’s a fucking quitter.  She said she was going for 100, but she just didn’t have the guts.”  Tears still falling she laughed, the sick twist, because there’s nothing like a little laugh to ease pain.

There are over FORTY other, equally hilarious, jokes in the 3,000 page memoir I am working on now.  You’ll want to be alert for them when you read the book.  Of course, bear in mind they don’t come across as well in print as they do when deadpanned spontaneously in the circumstances that spawned them.

“You should do stand-up!” a friend declares, wiping his eyes after my farcical account of my long and terminal unemployment, my foolish ideals and abject lack of practicality.  A good idea, stand-up, perhaps, if I’d started 40 years ago, had an incredibly thick hide and was as determined pursuing it as I am now, intermittently, pursuing this other long shot.  I could also have been a hell of a professor of something, if I’d started a few decades back.  Coulda, woulda, shoulda, you know the drill.

On the other hand, I know a self-made millionaire, one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met, who lives in a mansion of one hundred rooms, a beautiful place he had built for himself and the wife who savagely attacks him daily. And, like in the old Yiddish curse, the devil chases him from room to room. Helps me keep things in perspective, thank my luck that I live alone in only three cluttered rooms where the devil has a much less fun course to chase me through and often tires of the tedious game.

LOL!

Remembering A Remarkable Soul

The first two lines of a greatly appreciated personal email today, from a man whose mother died a few nights ago:

My Mom and your buddy passed away peacefully in her sleep Wednesday am. She got this, her final wish,  a royal death.

She would have been 98 in a matter of weeks, and it was only recently that I heard her voice tiredness for the first time.  

I knew her for more than 40 years, making her around my age now when I met her, a small coincidence that just occurred to me.   If I could live the rest of my years as well as she did those 40 that remained to her, I would be very blessed.  

The only memory of her that is not pure sunshine is recalling how demanding a mother she sometimes seemed to be.  All mothers cause some vexation to their children, as, sadly, we all do to our mothers.  Though I could see what could be vexing about her as a parent, I was privileged to never experience it personally.  As her oldest son noted, over the years we became buddies.

“I want to be Sophie when I grow up,” Sekhnet said often.  If talking to Sophie she’d say “I want to be you when I grown up!” and Sophie would laugh the easy, distinctive laugh she practiced often.  What Sekhnet meant was Sophie’s joy for life, her sense of adventure, her ready embrace of the good side of whatever else the thing might be.   Her robustness and optimism, the way she drew people to her by these qualities.

She became friendly with my parents in 1999 when they met for the first time.  My parents came up from Florida for my law school graduation in the spring.  The graduation was in Newark, New Jersey.  Sophie emailed my parents, inviting them to stay with her and her husband in their nearby home.  The email was typical of Sophie — charming, well-written, mischievous.

She laid out the many advantages of staying in her home and stressed what a pleasure it was for her and her husband to be able to offer this hospitality, and how small an effort.  “If you say no, we’ll say you’re being stubborn,” she ended, closing the deal.  The two couples became friends at once.

Her husband died, and, not long afterwards, my father was hospitalized suddenly with only days to live.  Sophie was then close to ninety and had stopped driving on the dangerous Florida speedways, but she wanted to say goodbye.  She took local streets, a trip that took several times as long as going by the turnpike, and a journey much longer than any she’d driven in years.  I will always remember her face as she sat by my father’s bed a few hours before he died.  It was like the sun.  She beamed a smile on him as he feebly gestured and made such small talk as he could.  She showered him with love and a huge smile in a room where everyone else was frowning and fretting. It was about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.   She stayed a short time, hugged and kissed us all, and made her way back the way she’d come, while there was plenty of sunlight to navigate by.

A few years later she and my mother booked an apartment in a residential building in the West Village that was rented out as a cut-rate B & B.  Sophie and my mother were going to share a place for a week and then my mother would move to a studio apartment for the second week of her last visit to New York.   I brought them to the apartment and when they opened the door my mother looked around and let out a gasp. “Oh, my God,” she said to Sophie, looking around at walls that needed painting, almost no furniture, a mattress on the floor in the living room “what a dump!”.  My mother turned her expressive face to Sophie– the expression was of someone about to throw up.  This cracked Sophie up.

“Oh, Evelyn!” she laughed “it’s an adventure!”  She immediately offered my mother the better of the bedrooms and they had a very nice little adventure together in that perfectly adequate semi-shabby apartment on West 15th Street.

Walking with them during that visit illustrated another contrast between my mother, a glass half-empty gal, and Sophie, for whom the glass was always, at the very least, half-full.  My mother walked with a cane at that point and would walk quickly until she had to stop, breathless and feeling she was about to die.  “I can’t breathe!” she’d say with some degree of panic, “I can’t breathe, I have a sharp pain…” she’d point to her heart and double over slightly as she struggled to catch her breath.   I’d talk soothingly to her as she caught her breath and then she’d be fine, dash off on her next sprint. Sekhnet and I switched walking partners after she and Sophie caught up to us.

Sophie walked slowly and deliberately at 92.  She would take your arm and cause you to walk at her pace.  She would converse, and observe, and laugh, never running short of breath, walking at a slower than average NYC pace. She made the whole process of being old and wanting to see and do everything seem effortless.

One trouble with living long and having old friends is that eventually they all die.  Sophie kept up with the children and grandchildren of old friends and continued to make new friends everywhere she went.  She was an inspiration, my life was enriched by knowing her, watching her remarkable example.  I hope very much that Sekhnet gets her wish and grows up to be her.

 

 

Self-love and avoiding human toxicity

In a poisoned world a baby must learn what to avoid in order to survive.  Avoiding what will kill you is as important as acquiring what nourishes you.  The adults around can help or hinder that learning, or, more commonly, do both.

“You’re seven years old, for Christ’s sake, it’s time to stop acting like a chid. Start acting like a man.  I can’t stand that whining.  Man up, for fuck’s sake.”   There’s a clue for a bright young kid that something in this relationship should be avoided, or at least discounted.  A more subtle clue, perhaps, than several grunting lashes across the child’s face, but a strong clue anyway.  

“You’ll be whining to some shrink about how your parents ruined your life,” he predicted through the door, locking the latch on the outside of the punishment closet.  “‘It was all my parents’ fault‘,” he said raising his voice an octave into a sniveling whine.  “You keep wailing and see if you get out of there today” said dad. 

Humans are not primarily rational actors.  We like to think we are, but the things that drive us are largely irrational.   Fear drives us, rational or not, it is a powerful mover of people and nations.  Fear’s first cousin, Anger, drives us to do irrational things with an urgent sense of righteousness.  Other emotions not amenable to any sort of logical review are frequently at play in human affairs.

Driving to a friend’s funeral on a busy interstate in Connecticut in January, hours ahead of schedule, the driver plunged across a white lane to enter the HOV lane.  The passenger behind the driver noticed we were accelerating past 80 to enter the HOV lane.  The white lane turned out to be white because it was a thin layer of snow over a five mile long sheet of ice.   Invisible under the ice was the herringboned “do not cross” lane between the traffic, doing close to 80 on a dry highway, and the cars in the HOV lane moving slightly faster than that.  When we hit the ice the car skidded, swung, did a 360.  It is a miracle that the driver was able to pull out of the skid, do another donut among three lanes of speeding traffic, and get us safely to the far shoulder.  

A second equally gigantic miracle: that none of the drivers catapulting along were looking at their smartphones, GPS maps, video screens or other glowing devices instead of directly at the road ahead of them during those perilous seconds.  Our survival was miraculous, and I wrote about it at the time, and when we got to Boston I praised the driver over and over for saving our lives, when, of course, (though it didn’t dawn on me til later), her unthinking idiot move had put us in mortal danger to begin with.  She knew it, though, and winced every time I recounted the story, thanked her for saving us.  She asked me not to talk about it any more.  

Turned out her father, invariably described as a dangerous maniac, had taught her sister and her, every icy weekend during their teen years, how to master an out of control car skidding wildly on ice.  This exercise was done in frozen parking lots in New Jersey until both of the young drivers mastered it.  Hearing this, the only explanation for our survival, I said “Hail Murray!”  I owe my life to Murray and will always be grateful.

The other day, offered a ride home by the husband of this same driver, our mutual friend jocularly asked who was driving.   The driver who’d performed the miracle on ice flashed angry, betrayed eyes at me and hissed that I had apparently told everybody the story.  I smiled, pointed to heaven and said “Hail Murray!  God bless Murray!”  I later thought of how difficult it would have been, for anyone, when asked about the funeral, to omit the dramatic story of how we had nearly died on the way there, but for the divine intervention of the dangerous Murray who’d prepared his daughter to perform the miracle that saved us.

It put me in mind of my brother-in-law, to whom I’d innocently loaned my life savings after he lost a well-paying  job for a fraud that wasn’t his fault, the first of several identical cases over the next thirty years.  This was before I learned that this highly intelligent, funny man was also insane.  After spending all the money I’d loaned him he announced that he couldn’t pay me back for a long time, he owed many people money and he had to pay them back first.  My father was among his creditors, my money had gone, in part, to repaying part of my father’s loan to this con man.  

“Don’t tell your father,” he told me sternly, and then, when I expressed disbelief that he would have the gall to demand this, he made the case that I was a whiner who couldn’t keep a confidence.   Which put me in mind of the sexually depraved priest, righteously instructing the boy that God would be very angry at the boy if he told anybody what the priest, a man of God, had caused the boy to do.  

The world is strewn with booby traps, thin ice over a toxic lake waiting to dissolve your bones.  It is the work of many years to learn to navigate these dangers, unless we have an excellent teacher, like Murray was to his daughters in the realm of driving on ice.  Murray, clearly, did other things to make things much more difficult for his daughters.  But in that respect, teaching them to come out of a skid on an icy road, “hail Murray!” I say, and thank God for his excellent, life-saving instruction.

Murray, of course, also instilled that reflex to anger, which flashed in his daughter’s eyes at the betrayal of someone who would cavalierly reveal such embarrassingly personal details to everyone.  “You can’t keep a secret!” the eyes screamed, as righteous as a priest betrayed by a seductive young parishioner.  

My commitment to mildness dictates that I do not blast back, tell this overworked, striving person on multiple treadmills that she’s ridiculous to express anger at something anyone would have done, chide her for her many promises unkept, important emails unread, her half dozen soft and harder betrayals.  

“You should have told her,” insisted Sekhnet, thinking about a specific, inexcusable promise unkept, even after I pointed out that she was literally in the hallway outside the apartment when this five second exchange took place.  Avoiding toxic exchanges is as important as learning which frozen lakes not to venture out on to.   Learning, learning all the time, the best we can do in this world of a million designer poisons.  It is far better than giving in to righteous rage and setting traps for those who have done us wrong.