Category Archives: Gratitude

Doing Something Impossible

Why impossible?  I ask myself as 11:46 shows on the countdown timer.  Once the impossible thing is done it is shown to be clearly possible.  There are a million examples, like enormous, heavy hunks of metal flying through the air filled with people and luggage.  A video phone in your pocket.

Technology is what comes to mind first, but the impossible things I’m thinking about are massive changes inside individual hearts, inside our collective heart.   We are raised inculcated with certain truths, facts about us and the world that seem immutable.  I argued with my father for decades over whether people can fundamentally change themselves.  I believe we can, and don’t discount how difficult and sometimes painful it is.   My father always argued that we can change only the superficial parts, our outward reactions perhaps.   To him, the impossibility of healing deep wounds was a psychological fact.  At the very end, with his last breaths, he regretted that he’d fought me all those years instead of doing the hard work to have a more joyful, generous, loving life.

I set out to do something impossible, set up a network of children’s animation workshops.  To inspire children to show adults what children can do– to inspire change in the way things are done in schools, in our ass-backwards educational system.  I take my inspiration in this from people like Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Vandana Shiva, people I’d never even heard about six months ago.   I take courage from discovering new things that continue to help me as I go.

Is what I’m trying to do impossible?  I can’t concede that, though the odds against me are pretty impressive.  Is it impossible for one person to do alone?  Yes, that is clearly impossible.  So to gather a small group to help me push the project ahead I have to not only be inspired, I have to inspire them.  I cannot complain, I can’t hesitate, must be calm and confident at all times.  Hard!  As annoying as it may be when a kid screeches into a microphone with headphones on, thrilled to be hearing the echo in his voice, I have to show no annoyance, realize the bigger picture is about letting children feel these thrills.   Easier with children, to keep this philosophical stance.  It is the adults.  Man, the adults are the hard part.

Gratitude Check

Time to be grateful again.  Easy to forget that, when health is good, the legs are strong, the will is there, fear doesn’t have its sweaty hand on your chest at the end of a quivering, demonically strong arm.  

But I remember it now, remember to be glad, and grateful, and tick off the list in my head as I tap these keys.   Near the top of the list I am grateful at how often I remain mild these days, certainly compared to days past.  

Certainly compared to those days, for sure.

Making Repeat Requests

It is the way of the world, I know.  If there’s nothing in it for me, you know, WTF?

Still, some people push it.  At lunch two promises:  assistant will mail back book borrowed a year earlier, pass on your contact info to someone very helpful.  Three weeks, emails, a call, another email.  They are busy, and sorry.  So sorry!

Host of a nonprofit event has a release you signed, identical to the one you need for your upcoming event.  Ask for a copy you can tweak for your event and get this reply:   

You can generally find release templates througg Google. Then you or you lawyer can adapt them for relevancy. Hope that helps.

Sure it helps, but not as much as my vow to remain mild.

Sabbath

In ten minutes I will either have explained it or not.   The idea that a beast must work around the clock, with no rest and no time to restore itself, is a brutal notion from a hard-scrabble age.  Among enlightened people the importance of relaxation, a pleasurable holiday from the cares of the world, is understood.  

Don’t worry about me, I have one eye on the clock and almost seven and a half minutes to go.

On the sixth day God made Adam, looked at His creation, light and dark, order out of chaos, the living world, the oceans, all the creatures of the oceans, and the sky, and the sky itself, and all the land dwelling animals, reptiles, insects, mammals, the endless ingenious variation and variety.  God looked at His work and smiled and said “Good!” and took the seventh day off.

God rested.  Modeling the proper respect for yourself as a god, taking your rest after a job well-done.  You have worked hard and deserve the day of rest.   Use the day leisurely, to rest, repair yourself, dream, relax your worries.  So few of us actually take a day every week to do this, or even a few hours, except to see a movie, perhaps.

Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.  One of the Ten Commandments, up there with Honor thy father and thy mother, and Thou shall not kill.

In two minutes I’m going to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.  I’m going to tune up all the ukuleles and make a chorus of them.  They will play a vamp in the night.  This vamp will be very simple, and will thrum at the pulse of a relaxed heartbeat.   The vamp will have a two part riff that will go over it.  The boys sing the call, the girls sing the response.  Then they switch, then a few one and two note solos.  By then the strings will be well in tune, the beat calm and the notes to sing very clear and obvious.  

Time.

My Father’s Death

When I arrived in Florida, a few days after my father’s sudden hospitalization with undiagnosed end-stage liver cancer, a couple of days before he died, my father told me “you’re the only one who knows what’s going on.”   Although everyone around him knew he was dying, and the look on the Emergency Room doctor’s face had made that unmistakably clear to my sister, who urged me to get on the next plane, he was somehow trying to give me credit he’d often withheld.

“I want to talk to you, I’m gathering my thoughts,” he told me a while later, and I bought him a tiny digital recorder to speak into, if he was moved to speak when nobody was around.  He was beyond writing things down, and though he was an excellent writer, he rarely put pen to paper when he was able to.

We were fortunate to have that conversation, the thoughts he gathered were impressively organized, clearly expressed in that scratchy voice he had at the end.  I don’t know if anyone could have written, edited and delivered those thoughts better.  He always was an excellent speaker, and spoke virtually without notes.  Lucky for us both I have always been a night owl and when I drove over to the hospital at 1 a.m. he was awake and waiting to talk.  Turned out to be the last night of his life, he died before sundown the following day.

I am thinking about my father’s death because of something he said right at the end, it may have been the last thing he said.   We were sitting around his hospital bed, he’d become agitated, grabbed my sister’s hand, and mine, and when he let go I got the nurse and convinced him to take a mild sedative, an anti-anxiety pill, atavan, that a friend of mine is fond of.  I assured him it was fast-acting and would only take the edge off, since he was always very concerned with remaining in control and had never had so much as a beer, let alone a mind-altering pill.  Reassured, and feeling desperate perhaps, he agreed to take it and quickly composed himself.

“I’m feeling much better,” he announced a few minutes later, sounding like his old self.  “Why don’t you all go down and take a break and have a bite to eat downstairs, you’ve been sitting here a long time.  Elie can stay with me, it’s OK.”  My mother, sister, uncle and brother-in-law all got up and went down to the cafeteria.  It was dinner time and outside the sky was turning into a beautiful painting of a Florida sunset.  I recall the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital windows becoming more vivid as the light slowly began to fade.  

Two nurses were in the room and one of them said to me “it’s almost time.”  She pointed out that my father’s fingers were turning blue under the fingernails, something to do with the blood no longer delivering enough oxygen to the extremities, apparently a sign that Death is close by.  

“If you pray, now is the time to do it,” said the other nurse.  I told her we were not religious and she took it on herself to sing a Jewish tune she knew.  The African-American woman sang a chorus of Dayenu, a song from the Passover service that indicates we’d be thankful for any fraction of the many blessings God has laid on us. Thinking about it now, the snippet of song was as good a prayer as I could have thought of, though it seemed a bit surrealistic at the time.  She had a nice voice, and carried the tune well, but I remember thinking at the time that it was bizarre.

They helped me take down the railing at the side of the bed so I could sit closer to my father, then silently left the room.  My father looked at me helplessly and said “I don’t know how to do this…”   I assured him that nobody does, that it was OK.  I sat close as he breathed a bit faster for a minute or two, maybe five, perhaps fifteen, and then breathed his last.  His eyes were open, I closed them with two fingers of one hand, like playing a simple chord on the guitar or piano.  It was eerie how natural the movement was.  The nurses returned a moment later and I took the oxygen tube out of my father’s nostrils.  “He won’t be needing this,” I said softly, handing it to them.   I took his glasses and put them in my baritone ukulele case, where they are to this day.

I was amazed at how simple and graceful my father’s last moments were.  I’d been told a day earlier that death by kidney failure, the way terminal liver cancer actually kills you, is an accelerating sleepiness that ends in a usually peaceful death, but it was striking how peaceful that final struggle was.  A friend who read Jewish scripture for years quoted a line from the Talmud, I think, that stated it poetically and true to my father’s death: the moment of death is like lifting a hair off a glass of milk.

“I don’t know how to do this….” rang in my head just now, as I thought of the mountain I am trying to climb, an impossible one, really, for anybody but an exceptional being who is able to recruit exceptional helpers, and I thought to myself, with a sinking feeling “I don’t know how to do this.”   Same phrase.  It struck me.  Now, the same mercy I gave the old man, I extend to myself, if such a thing is possible– “nobody does, it’s OK.”

Either way, there will be the last breath and then darkness.  I’ll be happy to meet angels, and the souls of loved ones who have passed on, but I’m not expecting to.  The only thing to see between now and then is how exceptionally I can climb in whatever time remains for me to climb.

Our Infinitely Puckish World

Go on youTube and put in Vandana Shiva, you’ll find a number of videos of her speaking.  Every one of them is worth listening to.   I’ve been thinking Vandana Shiva is a genius, the way she cuts through infinite complexity with brilliant simplicity.   She has a doctorate, in physics, I think, and is one of the great speakers alive today.  She may be the most important voice out there, a voice that few have heard. a wonderful voice.  

There are a bunch of great speakers operating today.  You  can find many of them on TED talks, a great source for fascinating ideas to think about.  But unlike most of them, Vandana Shiva is not selling anything.  She lives past, present and future at once, her passion is sustainable life.   There is no subject more vital, literally, than sustainability.

Vandana Shiva will explain this to you, like you are sitting together after a delicious meal of fresh local vegetables seasoned with fragrant seeds.   You will not stop her conversation lightly, she draws you in with great compassionate logic and the light touch of humor.  Her humor is irony, that refreshing irony people need when they must use their bare hands to handle things made by monsters.  

Is she accurate when she says 270,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the last decade, as the crop seeds in India went from 80% owned by farmers to 95% of farmers now paying Monsanto for a license to grow crops?  I have no reason to doubt her.  

And I know quite well, I assure you, that few give a rat’s ass about an Indian farmer.  Isn’t it true that millions are slaughtered every year in senseless war?   That child soldiers are raped and forced to murder?  Isn’t it true that gorillas and chimpanzees plead for mercy when they are being slaughtered? And aren’t children torn apart every day by explosives sent by men who never set foot on their continent?  Who has tears for the Indian farmer who can’t bear the shame of bankruptcy after countless generations living well off the land?

Vandana Shiva spends only a moment on the suicides of the farmers.  She knows it is not the point.  The point, she says, is that if we do not take back control of our food supply from predatory corporations, those companies will profit from the death of the world, until the world is dead.  Then there will be no more human life and no need to fear man’s unsustainable ways, but that will not necessarily be a good day to wake up.

On the other hand, as they teach a lawyer to argue, Dr. Shiva herself admits that Indian seed companies only made two rupees per bag of seed under the old regime.  Now Monsanto charges thousands of rupees for a bag of the patented seed, a seed very similar to the original seed in most ways, but patented and licensed by one of the wealthiest mega-corporations on earth.   The Indian seed company now makes several hundred times more profit, since they are middlemen in the licensing deal between Monsanto and the Indian farmers.  So you do the math, two rupees or fifteen hundred rupees, your choice. 

In our infinitely puckish world, the logic of the earth’s greediest and most morally debased, backed by irrefutable economic fact — and the death of a human who is  not a wealthy, white American truly is an unfortunate externality, after all — carries the day every time.  Never mind that many more will starve, preventable disease (caused by a diet of poison) will continue to proliferate, , the earth itself will whither and die.  And until that time, the earth’s most greedy and unredeemed will continue to amass more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.

You might wonder, did I ever stop to examine why I hate your freedom so much?

It’s your problem, pal

“I’m sorry you’re upset about what you think happened to you.  I really am, but now, for the sake of all of us, and I’m asking you nicely, please shut the hell up, you don’t have to go on and on trying to make me understand what you’re upset about, like you always do.  I understand– you’re upset.  I told you I’m sorry you’re upset because you think I did something that I didn’t actually do.”

The look on your face might not convince the other person you accept the apology, so they might feel compelled to add:  “and don’t tell anyone we had this conversation, it is nobody else’s business what we talk about.”

“Look, I’m sorry I don’t have your money I promised to repay today, I know it puts you in a tight spot.  And I’m sorry I won’t be able to pay you back any time soon, because I owe a lot of other people money too, and I’ve owed it to them longer so I have to pay them first.  Once I finish paying the boss back we can start talking about when I’ll be able to start paying you.  Don’t mention this to the boss, or to anybody else.”

If you agree to stay silent, or if you go right in and complain to the boss, the outcome is likely to be similar.  There are people who will urinate on your leg and tell you it’s raining.  This is, sad to say, part of the Human Condition we sometimes hear about.

“Be mild,” you tell yourself, “anger helps no-one, but be direct”.

“Don’t be direct,” a nervous person will tell you.  “Look, I admit I lied, and I know you feel it put you in a bad spot, but there was a good reason, a reason I can’t tell you because you always judge me.  I am not a liar, by the way, though I know you think I am because of that one untruth, but it was an emergency and I had to say something fast.  Who knew it would be a lie?  I didn’t plan to lie, and it was the only time in my entire life I ever did, and I wish we could be done talking about this, I don’t know why you insist on talking about it.  I already told you: I admit I lied, now I’ll tell you I’m sorry it friggin’ bothers you so much, even though it’s none of your business and had nothing to do with you.  And now, for the love of God, get over it and stop frikking bringing it up.”

The problem will be yours to deal with as best you can, don’t expect help from the people who put you in the middle of it.  After all, you’re the one with the problem, not them.

“Look, I know you think it put you in a difficult position, but all you have to do is keep your mouth shut.  The lie doesn’t even involve you, and, really, it wasn’t even a lie.  I don’t even know why we’re still talking about it, why you’re so hellbent on discussing it.  You are so judgmental, you always have been, that’s why I can’t talk to you.  I don’t judge you, even though you do plenty of bad things and constantly judge everyone else.  You’re the only person in the world who would keep bringing something like this up.  You have some kind of agenda and no freakin’ shame.”

“So you had to go talk to the boss, I see.  You couldn’t work this out like a man, you had to go talk to the boss, like a little boy with a poopy diaper.  Nice.  Very freakin’ nice.  Imagine how much of a hurry I’ll be in now to pay you your stinkin’ money back.  People like you, all you care about is money, and crying about it.”

The rain continues to pound down your leg, soak into your sock, your shoe.  It doesn’t smell like water.  What they hell?

“You want people to share in the blame for your problem, but it’s your problem, you’re the one with the problem, deal with it.  Don’t tell anyone about this, or, so help me God, I will dig up your father’s skeleton and do shameful things to it.”

Now, wait a second, what kind of sick idea….

“No, you wait a second.  The sick idea comes from you, pal.   That’s right, if you could have kept your stinking mouth shut I’d never have had to come up with methods to make you keep your mouth shut.  You know, you’ve got a lot of problems, my friend.”

A host of problems, yes indeed.  Unreasonable expectations.  They started young.

“Quit staring at me from that crib with those big accusing eyes!” said the man in the bed.  I couldn’t answer, not because I didn’t have anything to say, but I was too young to speak.  I had no idea what my father was talking about, truly.

“Oh, sure,” my mother called out, “make it sound like it was his fault, like he was the one staring at you with that challenging, angry expression.  The pediatrician said you were having a temper tantrum at ten weeks old.  Ten weeks old!  You think we are making this up?”

“I think a good pediatrician might have tried to determine what was making a ten week old infant so upset, rather than concluding that the kid was just an irrationally angry baby.  Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

They never told me if the pediatrician was a human or a jackass.  He laughed like a jackass when he saw the baby rigid, red, fists clenched and screaming.  “Wow, I’ve never seen it so young, this infant is having a temper tantrum!” and his long ears went back and he honked out a good jackass laugh.

“Oh, sure,” the ghosts of my parents as young parents would have said, “You’re the only one who’s not a jackass.”

Though I wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way, they did make a reasonable point, at least between me and the pediatrician.

My only advice when people try to make something into your problem that is not your problem– shrug that mess off of yourself and go somewhere where people don’t urinate on your leg and insist you tell them it’s raining.  

Many times every day people urinate, and  it often rains, but when it’s on your leg, and it’s body temperature, and it stinks and is some shade of yellow or brown, it’s not really that hard to know the difference, though it can take many years to learn the most productive reaction.

Lucky Bum

Stop me if I’ve told you this one already.

Babe Ruth was always coy about whether he actually called that famous home run in the 1932 World Series.  The pitcher, he insisted, had quick pitched him– illegal but the ump called it a strike–strike two.  Charlie Root, the pitcher, smirked, the bench jockeys screamed and howled and Ruth stepped back into the batter’s box, steaming.  Ruth points his bat over the pitcher’s head (or directly at Charlie Root’s head, depending on your POV) into the hooting Chicago crowd in the bleachers and hits a tremendous home run right there on the next pitch.  
 
There’s a great shaky 30 second film of it on youTube and an 80 year debate on whether he was pointing his bat at the pitcher or at the spot where he hit the famous called home run.  It was the last of the long-time record number of World Series homers the great Ruth hit during a mythical career.  (Consider it took Hank Aaron almost 7 full seasons of at bats to eclipse Ruth’s career total, Bonds only had an extra 1,448 at bats.  Not to mention that no great hitter ever had the brilliant pitching career [94-46 2.28 ERA] 
Ruth did before turning to hitting full time.) 
 
A sportswriter friend of his, shortly before Ruth died, said “Babe, if you won’t clear up whether you called that shot, at least tell us what you were thinking as you rounded the bases.”
 
“I was thinkin’ ‘Babe, you lucky bum, you lucky bum!'”  And one imagines the hoarse laugh of the cancer-wizened Babe at the end.

Bitter Dogs, Very Bitter Dogs

Rodney Dangerfield, when he was a young comic, did a Borscht Belt-style routine about how hard he had it coming up in his early years in show biz.  He followed two terrible precision dancers, a horrible singer, and, while he did his act, the final act on the bill, a group of rabies infested performing dogs, heckled him mercilessly.  Very bitter dogs, bitter dogs, kicking around show biz for years.   In a mocking bitter tone:  “Lassie didn’t get where she is on her talent, you know… Rin Tin Tin… heh heh heh…”

Nothing funny about spoken comedy delivered without jazz trio timing.  Its deadpan, hairpin turns of voice and face that get the laugh, not humorous concepts on paper, which may or may not bring a smile.  I don’t mention those bitter dogs for yuks, they’re an illustration.  I had a good howl over a friend’s assessment of a certain deli-owner (“too bitter”) back when we were trying to sell beef bi-products to bodegas and delis in the Bronx.

My partner came back to the car carrying the case of beef sticks, smiling but also shaking his head to show me it was no sale.  “Nah, he immediately recognized the product, and said he’d sold hundreds of them, that it was a great product, he made good money with it.  But the old distributor never came back, left him high and dry, and he was too bitter to try the product again.  He was actually a very nice guy, and he was on the fence, but I couldn’t convince him, he was just too bitter.”

 And when he said “bitter” I laughed, and it’s still funny to me twenty-five years later, just not so gleefully.   At my mature age I know the taste a bitter person actually gets in the back of the throat.  Back then it was still just a hilarious abstraction to think of someone as bitter.  

I’m thinking of all the things I have to feel gratitude about, and I take stock of them periodically.  Today I’m thankful for my general calmness under fire and my patience, especially with young people.  And also for my general physical and creative robustness.

In a busy animation workshop my attention is sometimes called for by three kids at once, while at least one other is running wild.  I have to convey instantly to two that I’m sorry they’ll have to wait, attend quickly to the other and get back to them.  Often, by the time I do, the problem will already be worked out, another kid calling me from across the room to come help them with something else.  The workshop is running at about 80% efficiency now, which is amazing if you consider that it’s an after-school session, Thursday, at the end of a long week of school.

I get home from the session after a meditative subway ride, fire up the macBook and see what the young editor has put together during the session.  This is the first time I am seeing much of the animation.   The editing is about 90% done before I first see the material they’ve shot that day and there is very rarely any call to censor anything they’ve shot.  The bulk of the inputting of frames and editing and titling the animation is done by one of three fifth graders, which is amazing, if you think about it.  

Lately I’ve also been able to get an improvised soundtrack done by the kids each week, featuring their percussion and voices.  Nearer by two or three big steps to working out how to get really good soundtracks than I was only two or three weeks ago.  

Once the week’s sound and the picture are mixed and adjusted and I’ve sufficiently tweaked the final result, I will pump my fist, turn and give a high five to my shadowy, imaginary partner.  “We did it!” I’ll say, and laugh, to see how mischievously it is all going exactly according to my long-shot, hard to describe plan.  

“We vugging did it, man!” the imaginary partner will shout, proffering a fist for a heartfelt fist bump.  And I’ll give a good bash, and pump my fist again.

Creativity (the 12 minute version)

Doing things creatively is like being an acrobat, you have to leap with grace, lightly, without a shade of hesitation.   Doubt will stop you between trapezes, time will seem to stand still for a blink, as the audience, sickened and thrilled, waits for the splat.  (Almost two minutes to say that).  

Our time here, maybe it would be better measured in tiny spoons rather than with a ladle of unlimited size and scope such as the one we use without thinking of moments.   Rushing around can take up a lot of time, you got something important to get done give it to a busy person, blah, blah, blah.   Still, the hardest work is the work you have to do to have the grace to float between trapezes.

I don’t know what I’m talking about, except that I’m tired, and waiting for this tiredness to completely overwhelm me.  Into the bed then, under the soft, warm covers, a cold breeze rattling through the window, cozy in my almost weightless sleeping cap.

And in the dream I will not recall in the morning I am at the guitar and I play one note.  And that note, laid succulently against the beat, can be shimmered, until it is like an ocean, let’s say.  On that ocean light plays, and the salt evaporates off the brilliant water with that bracing smell, and there are fish, some leaping, others beautifully colored, just under the magical surface.  There is a universe in a raindrop, and billions of them in a bucket of sea water.  There is no bucket that can hold all of those universes.  Your mind can skip over them, use a machine to see under the sea, but everything about it is a mystery.  The next  beat, and the next, it is a human heart, the most primal sound available, we memorize it before we are even born, breathing through gills and then through a cord attached to our mother.  The whole arrangement is pretty amazing, though we forget most of the time.  

Creativity seems like a luxury, something rich people pay a premium for.  But free spontaneous creativity is what gives life its color and its flavor.  You cannot convince me otherwise, particularly when you laugh, surprised that something so crude and stupid arose so quickly and unexpectedly.  And see here, my left hand never left the neck of that dream guitar with its infinite sustain.  And what beautiful teeth you have, and how lovely to see them not biting but framing those odd sounds barking out, as your eyes crinkle and your head bops like a coconut on the waves of that ocean of endless possibilities.