Category Archives: musing

Please Tell Me You’re Kidding Me

“So you, a man without a megaphone, with no idea of how to get a megaphone, have as your goal giving a megaphone to poor, feral kids who have no voice in the world?” she said, not as a question.

“An uncharitable way to say it, but yes,” he said.

“Are you starting with the ‘he’ again?” she asked, her smile catlike.

“I leave that to you to figure out,” he said.   These conversations with the internalized victimizer were tedious, but sometimes unavoidable.  The thing was to be patient with the cruel voice in his head, he reasoned.

“Yes,” she said, “be patient with the voice of reality, the voice of the world, the voice of sanity and reason, the voice you’ve made it your life’s work to be deaf to.”

“Of course,” he thought.   It was true he was taking a beating.  No rest in his slumbers, eyes tired as soon as he opened them, the world a slippery uphill slope from the time he put his foot on the floor by his bed.  He could not escape the several ironies, heavy as anvils, clumsy as tortured metaphors.  

“You are so talented!” his friends’ children often told him in childish amazement.  

“You should monetize your art,” many a shrewd friend of a friend had told him years ago.  “Get used to rejection and just keep sending your stuff out, it’s as good, or better, than much of the stuff that’s selling.  You can make a fortune, with persistence and a little luck.”    

It was never a dream, making a fortune, or being loved by rich people.   The dream, somehow, had been making a difference, somehow.  The dream always involved brooding over people, particularly young ones, who were irretrievably fucked by the bad timing and placement of their birth.  

“Bingo!” she said, “now look in the mirror.  Happy Birthday!”

“I take my spirit and I smash the mirrors,” he said, singing Jimi’s triumphant couplet.  The song died in the cluttered room.   There was much to do, but where to start?   He’d heard a spot on the radio about New York City Business Solutions, a great resource for small businesses at any stage of development.  Prematurely thankful for this piece of  luck, he went on-line and got the number.

“The number has been changed,” the recording said and he jotted down the new number.  This new number turned out not to be the number for the office he was looking for, but one in Harlem where he was invited to leave a message.  He left a cheerful message but had no answer on the third business day.

He called 311, which gave him yet another number, which connected him to someone in the wrong office, a bright young man named Adam who promised to set things straight, and by the end of the day, spoke to the supervisor of the proper office who cheerfully promised him an appointment that week, which would be set up by Carlos, cc’d on the follow up email.  

“Thanks so much,” he wrote back three business days ago.  Perhaps they construed it as sarcasm?  

“Are you not used to the fact that virtually nobody ever gets back to you on matters of any importance at all?” she asked, yawning ostentatiously.  

“I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan office,” he said.  

“Sure you are….” she said, letting her voice trail off annoyingly.  “Oh, by the way, that excellent application you wrote to the New York State Small Business Mentor Program, did you ever hear back on that?  It was really a wonderful description of your program and your needs, very well-written and positive sounding.  You put on a good act, anyway.”

“There were some business mentors in Utica, Buffalo, Ulster County, Onondoga County, Syracuse and other places who were sent off as automatically generated possible mentors…” he said.    

“Did you ever hear back from their help desk after you checked ‘please help me with this application’?  Did you ever get a return call on your voice mail seeking assistance?”

“I said, I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan Office,” he said with great determination.   What he was thinking was ‘somebody tell me you’re fucking kidding me with this fucking shit.’

 

 

 

Graveside Service

Today is the 59th birthday of an old friend who died last January 2.  A few days later I joined an amazingly large group of people who went out to the necropolis, snow-covered that day but generally looking like a golf course with a few trees, to help bury a very likable man.

Tomorrow, if the determined widow’s July 21 email requesting a favor and mentioning the date is still accurate, is the unveiling– the Jewish custom of returning to the grave about a year after the funeral and pulling a veil off the engraving that memorializes the departed’s life.  In this case, because of this particular burial ground, it will not be a tombstone unveiled, there are no raised markers there.  A plaque at the head or foot of Steve’s grave will be revealed, and his oldest friend, a rabbi and wonderful speaker, one of the best, will read the inscription and say a few words.  As our friend speaks the large crowd will nod, and sigh, and smile, and cry, and laugh, and they will go somewhere to eat and catch up and then, in their comfortable cars afterwards, life will continue on.

I didn’t agonize long before deciding I won’t be making the trip to the unveiling, outside Boston.  There are a variety of reasons, I suppose.  For one thing, nobody reached out to invite me, outside of the demanding widow’s slightly unreasonable July email requesting that I write, within the next few days, not about any specific memories from the time her husband and I actually spent a lot of time together, but about our conversations in the months before he died, after not seeing each other for decades.  At a loss, and unable to pull something together in the sudden and arbitrary four day window I was given, I didn’t write back and haven’t heard a peep since.

I think of their wedding, and how my friend stood next to his bride and sobbed as the rabbi performed the wedding ceremony, and I remember mumbling to a friend “it is the right of every man to choose the noose into which he slips his head.”  As far as I can tell Steve’s thirty year marriage to this demanding woman was a very happy one.  Though both were amputees from their respective cancers, they continued to have sex right up to the end.  I think that detail I’m probably not supposed to mention speaks remarkably of their love and devotion to each other. 

None of our small circle of old friends has contacted me about the unveiling, on the theory, I suppose, that I could just as easily contact them.  Fair enough.

An objective case could me made that it is difficult for people to reach out to me these days, as most people are reticent in the face of tragedy.   Steve and I once talked briefly about how many people were unable to call him during his decline, or, if they did call, talked of everything but his cancer, although he remained consistently upbeat and much more cheerful than anyone could have expected through the long crucifixion that was his cancer death.  I suspect something similar operates with me, though I feel like I’m as personable as I ever was.  Lurking, behind my deft evasions about how I’m doing, is the unmistakable and terrible tragedy of someone doomed to not truly live in the same world as everyone else, despite having all the tools to flourish in that world.  Like a dying man, the things I am wrestling with are not the carefree playful ones a hard-working, productive person likes to be surrounded with on a day off.

So, happy birthday, Melz.  You were a good man and I salute your success, your many talents, your loving wife and your two beautiful, talented daughters.  In other circumstances, I’d pay a call tomorrow.  But you, as well as anyone and better than most, know the deal, old friend.

Standing on the edge of the ditch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can see her point.”

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

“Who are you asking?”

“Good point,” I say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Welcome to our virtual world

Some kind of spambots, which are now ubiquitous, diverse and ingeniously specialized, land on my website from time to time and leave me comments, designed to get me to click on links they send me.   Posing as appreciative comments about my writing, the kind of comment most people are tickled to receive, they’re sent to generate hits on the sites they are promoting.   Many of the rare “likes” I get for these posts lead me back to enterprising web entrepreneurs who describe how wonderful it is to write from Bali, Copenhagen, Goa, Prague, Florence as they make excellent money working when and where they want, writing for the internet.  

All you need to do is create a blahg, a squeeze page, I think they call it, with affiliate links, backlinks, sidewinder links, they write using a jargon alien to me, but apparently very simple to master.  They will teach you everything you need to know.  Master this surprisingly simple craft and you can sit on a beach, or hotel room or in a cafe, anywhere in the world, and spend a few hours a day writing and watching substantial amounts of money flow into your electronic bank account.  A few changes of underwear, your laptop and international chargers and power cords and you’re on your way.  You will also find yourself losing weight, flab turning to muscle, meeting cool people, having tons more sex, laughing more, eating better, sleeping better, waking refreshed to have breathtaking adventures every day. 

Funny or not, I get almost no direct comments on this blahg but several every week on the blahg for the upstart nonprofit I am trying to start up.  The spambots for some reason home in on that mission driven nonprofit site rather than this gratuitous one.  Many of their comments are in laughably machine-translated non-English advertising some very weird and specific products involving commercial concrete removal, aluminum, real-estate, diet pills.  But I’ve had variations on this one a few times now, usually in response to posts of pictures or videos that have virtually no written content on them:

Comment:

I read a lot of interesting content here.

(Actual interesting content on this one was:  

If he doesn’t start long jumping right away, click on him.   

This neat leap was animated on 3-10-14  by a ten year-old at the Ella Baker School in NYC, using the amazing reference photos of Eadweard Muybridge taken in the 1880s.)

Probably you  spend a lot of time writing, i know how to save you a lot of time, there is an online tool that creates high quality, google friendly posts in minutes, just search in google  – k2seotips unlimited content

Think of the hours I could save!   I could use those hours to learn about and master affiliate marketing and try my program, untroubled by any funding concerns, two or three weeks at a time, in Africa, Asia, Iceland, spend the hours every day learning languages, mastering new musical instruments, collaborating with local musicians on every continent, working on my six pack abs.  While high quality google friendly content is generated for me to maximize my audience and lead to my almost instant success in anything I try.  What an increasingly wonderful world it is!

Perhaps my favorite recent comment is one I saw on the site of a business woman who occasionally has a spambot send me a message letting me know that she thought my thoughtful post was awesome and that I should check out what she’s up to.   Clue number one on her site is her description of how the free site had been taken down once because she had violated the terms of use by promoting her businesses on the site, and that she had figured out a beautiful workaround she was generously sharing for others who wish to use the free platform for free, and powerful, advertising.

A commenter on that post referred to her, perhaps not entirely unfairly, as a “cunt”.  The next commenter took that first one to task for saying something so harsh about someone who was trying to do something good.   The first commenter wrote back, not without a certain hard humor.  Other commenters joined, but after a while it was only the first guy, the one who’d called the scheming businesswoman a “cunt”, who was answering everybody.  

Since high quality google friendly content (the post you’re reading now, actually) was being generated for me by robots of my own, I had the leisure to read the entire string of comments, and eventually came to a wonderful exchange that made the entire exercise worth more than I can say.  I share it here:

A man who identified himself as a pastor wrote to the woman who’d thought his post was awesome and had invited him to visit her site.  The pastor thanked her humbly and profusely for her appreciation of his writing.  It was a wonderful thing, he said, to have one’s poetry and philosophy appreciated and she was clearly a bright and discerning woman and also, in his humble opinion, the creator and keeper of a very interesting and rewarding site that he would be visiting again soon.  And a fine writer herself, if he might say so.

The next comment was from the clever trollish commenter who was the only one answering anything directed to the site.  It is perhaps the best comment on this whole blogging business I’ve seen:

Look, “Pastor”. I’m the only one reading these comments and responding. There is no blogger here anymore. She set up an automated system that goes around and clicks LIKE on people’s wordpress posts. And, let me guess – that is how you found this blog. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but no actual people read or like your posts.

 

 

 

Uncanny Echoes of Babel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   
 

And so it goes

When I was in High School my father clipped out a very short piece by Kurt Vonnegut published in the New York Times.  It was about how to write, and it was excellent.  He began with the advice to always give the thing you are working on a title.   This is the first step in framing what you want to say, and I have found it helpful.   I don’t recall much else from his excellent advice, but that was help enough.

(Spent the last half hour searching the web in vain for that piece.  If I ever turn it up, I’ll post it here.)

I have been reading a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. called “And So It Goes”.  Engaging tome.   I am reading about how diligently Vonnegut worked at his craft, how tirelessly he pursued a paid writing career.  In passing I learn that he apparently played the piano well enough to execute Chopin’s Funeral March as the new owners walked up to the decrepit house he was selling.  This is the second mention of him at the piano as an adult, with no explanation of how he knew how to play.   During a time he should have been finishing a novel he’d long ago gotten an advance for, and when he was still completely unknown, he took a few days to build an 18 foot sculpture at a Boston International Airport restaurant.  Huh?  He took time to add many creative touches to his home in West Barnstable.   We have no inkling where these skills came from but we learn that he was handy, he could build things, he had many creative interests.  But mostly, he wrote.

I am reading about his struggles, including his bouts of depression, and trying not to think too hard about my own struggles.  I tell myself there are lessons to be learned from Vonnegut’s life, things I can use.

“One thing you could use is his discipline and drive,”  a voice announces, “the ability to soldier through terrible moods, fear, rejection, and keep producing something you can SELL,” a voice announces.  “He wrote every day from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., no matter what.  When he worked full time, he woke up early to write and wrote at night.  Another thing you should keep in mind:  you are no Kurt Vonnegut.” 

True enough.   Vonnegut was, from the beginning, a writer with his eye on making a living.  He wrote what he could sell, changed his ideas, often grudgingly, to sell short stories to glossy magazines at a time when selling three or four stories could provide a decent year’s income.   It was decades before he was able to write what he really wanted to write. Decades before he got any respect as a writer, something that troubled him immensely during those long years.  He was, from the beginning, a working writer, struggling to put food on his family, as a former president once observed was a challenge many Americans step up to.

Write with an eye for what the market will pay you for.

Write to one person — the one who loves what you have to say.  Come to the point, don’t waste a second of her time being clever.   Write what will touch her heart, make her laugh, and then, cause the tears to flow.

And so it goes.

 

Vacation

I am on vacation, I finally decided the other day, and I am glad to be at rest.  Unpaid vacation, true, but my work is also largely unpaid, so that’s no big deal.  And though I had an offer today from a spamming stranger to visit a site where I can have ‘content’ generated for this blahg automatically, I will continue to do it the old-fashioned way, tapping letter by letter until the words come out on their spindly legs to go through their opinionated paces.   We don’t often stop to think of the miracle of this — 26 symbols, spelling out words that convey enough, properly arranged, to give us information, insight, make us laugh, cry, get mad.   “Mad”, there’s a good bit of meaning in three letters.  

I try to avoid getting mad, though, of course, it can be a challenge sometimes.  I think of that famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald, snapped just as hulking, tortoise backed Jack Ruby lunges forward and pumps a few bullets into Oswald’s guts.  Oswald, face and body language, is the picture of physical agony, as the larger of the two cops escorting him is up on his toes, face a mask of shock, completely taken aback.   I mention Oswald’s face in the context of explaining why it is so important that I take a vacation right now.  Even writing this out may be considered counter-vactionary, and make me eligible for a trip to the gulag of self-flagellation, but I’ve started, and it won’t take long to finish.

I am embarked on a ridiculously difficult mission.  It turns out that creating an innovative educational workshop that functions pretty much as designed, and delights and engages the participants everywhere it operates, was the easy part.  The hard part is learning to be a salesman, manager, marketing expert, CEO, successful social entrepreneur.   The first year was a heady upwards climb, I was constantly thrilled seeing how well the flying machine operated.  During that year I was a cheerful and enthusiastic salesman whenever I had the chance, which admittedly, was not often.  I found myself at the end of that first year amazed that it had only been a year, it seemed like the fullest, most satisfying year of my life had played out slowly and tastily.  One workshop had become three, kindergarten kids proved themselves capable of participating creatively, it was working and everything would work out.  Woken from  a sound sleep I could have chirped cheerfully about the prospects, as I did to the millionaire media mogul who could have been so helpful at the promised second meeting that was never arranged.

The second year was a downward spiral of hard luck and trouble, although the workshop worked as well as ever and I even refined it a good deal.  We went from three sites to zero, got ripped off for ten weeks of work, and found ourselves increasingly frustrated and discouraged.  Eventually my resting face took on the look of Oswald’s in that famous photograph whenever I contemplated my chances, which was often.  It was just as I finally became Oswald, another famous loner, that a couple of old friends leaped into action, arranging interviews, in the dead of summer, with people at two possible sites for the workshop.

The first interview was a very long shot, on a hot and humid day that turned into a monsoon, talking to an entrepreneurial genius who, although doing great things for the poor community where she grew up (and now owns several houses in) is widely disliked there for her brash, brusque, superior style and for, because of her great success and her drive since her ambitious girlhood, being something of an overbearing know-it-all.   She tried to convince me to remake my workshop as something that could be done in a street fair, in an outdoor booth, complete with professionally made banners and a rented tent, to enhance her grand opening (for which she’d received a $100,000 grant)– and to do it for free.  I considered it a successful meeting, though I wound up understanding why this pretty, fit, supremely focused social entrepreneur is widely disliked in her neighborhood.  It was a success because at the end of the ten rounds of nodding and listening to her I was standing and my face wasn’t a bloody mess.   I didn’t look in a mirror, but surely my expression was similar to Oswald’s as  I made my way from the meeting, though I remember feeling relief.

The second interview, a month later, was at a much more promising place, a nonprofit that brings Healing Arts into the lives of people who need it, the aged, the mentally disabled, children.  Most of their funding, it turns out, is for old people in nursing homes and the mentally ill, but they have a school component and currently operate in a number of schools. I was introduced to one of the directors of this 43 year-old nonprofit by an old friend, a member of the board of my nonprofit startup.  She described me in the email as “totally mission driven” and “magical” and she predicted to both of us that our meeting and instant connection would be “magical” too.  My old friend and board member instructed me to call her for details, and I did, but she wasn’t interested in the answer to her question about how things are going.  She cut me off and told me I’d love her friend and that it was a great opportunity.  I remember thinking, after she rang off, that it was too bad she hadn’t thought of this magical connection in the two and a half years we’ve been talking about the difficulty of finding such opportunities.  Timing is, as they sometimes say, everything. 

I understand the need to be alert, positive, interactive, to listen well, to say less rather than more, at a pitch meeting.  I understand that without confidence, optimism and great belief in the value of the product or service you are selling, it is impossible to close the deal.  This must also be reflected in your poised body language and intelligently listening facial expression– a cheerful interest, but not laid on so thick as to look fake.  I was alert, listened well, was interactive, had the sense the discussion had gone fine, though nothing concrete is so far in the works, it is on me to close some kind of deal, if there is to be one.  The door was definitely left open, I’m fairly sure.

Woken from a fitful sleep, urged to a hurry up meeting, on an August afternoon at the program’s desperate low tide, with a woman my friend has known, it turns out, for 11 years or more, just as I am kicked in the balls and wearing the Oswald face much of the time, well, it is not hard to understand why I may have resembled that last photo of Lee Harvey Oswald alive more than I liked as I tried to sell my stalled program to this bright, brusque woman.  I read nothing into the abrupt ending of the meeting, she simply stood up, or the turning away, with perfect comic timing, just as I extended my hand to shake her’s.

Once I send off the pitch I promised her, which is virtually ready to go, it’s vacation time for Bonzo.  And not a moment too soon.

From A Heck of A Book of Fate, Brownie

It’s a book about the invisible hand of fate, extending its fickle finger here, tickling a cooing baby there. 

In 1921, or possibly 1923, Yetta Marchbein, Yetta “Marrowbone” (her father was a butcher), about 20 years old and full of ambition and idealism (the Bolsheviks billeted in her home during the Revolution had been gentlemen and also inspired her), crossed the Atlantic Ocean from some European port, having made her way there, alone, far under the deck, terrified for life by the rats who walked the partitions there between the bunks.  She, alone, of her large family in a muddy little shtetl in the Ukraine called Vishnevitz, would be alive twenty years later.   The rest disappeared without a trace into the nightmare that was Hitler’s fondest dream. In the U.S. she’d take the Americanized name of her cousins, Miller, and two years later, long before the slaughter of her family and town, marry her strong, frightened fiance Sam Mazur, also from Vishnevitz, who followed her to the U.S. on a ship that embarked from Bremen during the presidency of Warren G. Harding.  The Mazur family, Sam’s six brothers and sisters, father, mother, extended family, was murdered along with the Marchbeins and the rest of the Jewish town of Vishnevitz.  There is a monument in the cemetery in Queens, behind the gates of the Vishnevitz Benevolent Society, where Sam and Yetta are buried, commemorating the slaughter there.

Sam and Yetta Mazur were my mother’s parents.  They had one child, a girl they named Helen, who, as soon as she was able, changed her name to Evelyn.  Evelyn grew up on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx, a once thriving street with one end at the stylish Grand Concourse.  Eastburn Avenue, at some point in my mother’s childhood, was cut in half, literally, and its neighborhood destroyed by Robert Moses and his Cross Bronx Expressway.  In that apartment house, where the Mazurs lived on the first floor, a family named Stamper also lived.  Yetta and Dinch Stamper (who called each other “Mazur” and “Stamper”) became lifelong friends.  There is a great photo of the Mazurs and the Stampers, probably from before they had children, relaxing on the grass somewhere, in front of dense trees, dressed in the style for going out on Sunday in the early 1920s.

Dinch Stamper had been born Dinch (Diana) Gleiberman in a town in Belarus called Truvovich, a Jewish hamlet about 300 km. north of Vishnevets.  The Jews of Truvovich met the same terrible fate as their landsmen in Vishnevets, wiped away with barely a trace, Truvovich now erased from the map.  Dinch had come over by ship years earlier with a cousin named Chava Gleiberman, youngest sister of my father’s Uncle Aren.   Aren had arrived here a decade earlier from Canada after fleeing involuntary service in the Czar’s army and the Russo-Japanese War.  Chava, a good-looking, deeply religious red-headed Jewish girl, had her hopes for a happy marriage dashed when Aren’s wife broke up a romance with a Jewish postman in Peekskill who’d fallen for Chava.  When Chava’s indentured servitude to Aren and his wife ended a marriage was arranged hastily with a man named Harry Widem, a man my father described on his deathbed as “an illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by this world.”  What my father probably didn’t know about were the routine beatings, with club-like boards, that young Harry had received daily from his step-mother in the mud-floored farmhouse in Connecticut where he was raised.   What I didn’t learn until recently was that Harry spoke English with no accent, unlike Yetta and Sam whose Yiddish accents and inflections spiced my childhood.  I never met Harry and Chava, both died before I was born.  I am named after my father’s father Harry (Eliyahu in Hebrew) and my sister after Chava.  What is now well-known is how much Chava despised her husband, and that she whipped her oldest son, Israel, without mercy, from the time he could stand.

The hand of fate, gentle reader, spared these two couples, Sam and Yetta and Chava and Harry, my grandparents, while the rest of both of their large families (several of Harry’s siblings and half-siblings in the US survived to produce families, as did Chava’s brother Aren, who has dozens of descendants here and in Israel) disappeared into the night and fog the world remembers hazily as World War Two.  The good war America fought against unequivocal Evil.  

My parents met, of course, in that apartment building on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx where my father, and his younger brother Paul, would visit their cousin Dinch and her family.   During these visits my future father spied my future mother, the beautiful, dark-haired, popular and completely haughty, Evelyn Mazur.   She had an active social life, many boyfriends, and considered the shy, skinny guy from Peekskill a laughable hayseed, and besides, he was clearly poor as a church mouse.  In time she would agree to go out with him (to get the insistent Yetta off her back) and would watch, amazed, as he transformed himself from hick to urbane, witty, increasingly sophisticated boyfriend, fiance and later husband.  They would build a middle class life together, she’d come to think of him as the most secure and brilliant man she’d ever known and he would (when not making her cry) give her all the credit for transforming his life into one worth living and striving to improve.

If Yetta, Chava and Sam had not left Europe before the slaughter of everyone they knew (Chava lost her brothers Yuddle and Volbear and her sister Chaski as well as the rest of her family in Truvovich), had not Harry (who came to the US as an infant) survived the passage and a childhood of blows to the head with whatever wooden truncheons came to hand, Evelyn and Israel would not have been born.  If they had not come to be, and meet, and procreate, neither would I have.   If the bleeding my mother endured one frightening day late in her time pregnant with me had been worse, if this, then that. 

The hand of fate, gentle reader, including its fickle, tickling finger.   More details to follow, perhaps, if fate and the spirits will it.

 

At the Picnic

“So what are you saying?” he asked me, understandably at a loss.

“When I say certain gears aren’t working in my head, I’m not trying to say I’m seriously impaired.  I mean, I can have a conversation, can take care of a lot of things, I have talents, feel responsible to people I love and even people I don’t know, I’m strong, I can be counted on in a pinch and all that, but I am impaired, clearly,”  I could see this was not making things clearer for him.   I felt bad, he is a likable man.

“I’m like 90%,” I said.  “I can do most everything I need to do, but I’m not 100% effective, if you know what I’m saying.”

“So, you’re like 10% off?” he said.

“Yeah, something like that.  I mean, not to say it’s not a problem for me, it’s clearly a problem.  But also, yeah, I’d say about 10%, maybe, things I can’t get myself to do.”

“Can’t get yourself to do or can’t do?” he asked, making a distinction that left it my turn to be confused.

“No, to be clear,” I said, “sometimes ten percent, which seems like a small percentage, takes on a disproportionate importance, like when the top 10% in a society own 90% of everything, things like that.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, looking around with a sudden determination to refill his waning red plastic cup of wine.

What We Should Say Instead

A book I read recently about making a good pitch, saying it right the first time, pointed out that the hardest question a person usually gets during an interview is the one inevitable open-ended question seemingly too simple to prepare for:  tell me about yourself.

The author suggests we prepare well for this question, practice a short, rich answer tailored to advancing the subject at hand.  If it’s a job interview the answer should convince the interviewer that everything in your life has led up to this perfect-for-me job.   If promoting a book, it is the short, crisp background story that will make the reader know why you wrote it and make them want to rush out and get the book.

Yesterday a woman at a nonprofit I hope to work with asked the famous, and obvious, open-ended question: how did you come to this?  Tell me about yourself.

What I said, without a script:

I’ve always drawn and I play music.  I was a teacher years ago.  I practiced law for a while, until, when my mother got gravely ill, I decided I should do something I really love, which is when I began developing this program.  It took me about a year to work out how to do animation in a way that kids could do everything, I invented the animation stand and perfected the program.   We’ve been working with public school kids for about a year and a half.

This answer led to the question of what kind of law I practiced, how contentious the NYC Housing Court is and the woman’s “at least you represented tenants.”  Followed by my self-deprecating remark that landlords’ lawyers wear better suits than tenants’ lawyers and some other off topic banter that advanced nothing, other than the idea that I may be a dilettante, and/or someone having a midlife crisis, and that, naturally, as a lawyer, I had incorporated as a nonprofit.

Clear lesson learned:  work on the short, punchy script for next time that advances why someone should care about what I so deeply care about.   It needs to include how much I enjoy creative play, visual, musical and otherwise; how long it’s bothered me that public school kids don’t get much chance to show their creativity and competence in this age of metrics and teaching to the test.  That creativity is not a luxury, it’s a huge part of learning and a vital part of life.  That being listened to is a rare gift easily given, and sorely needed by children in particular.  Work in how much I love to draw, and play guitar, and collaborate, and how every time I work with children in the animation workshop, the buzzing intersection of so many creative avenues, I feel energized and delighted by their creativity. 

And, note to myself, don’t ever again mention to strangers that instead of a smartphone with GPS I have my dead mother’s once state of the art Motorola Razr.  Why would anyone but a nattering madman mention such a detail?  Note how much better in every way this answer is:  “Do you have a smartphone?”  Answer: “No.”