Category Archives: personal

Map of My Grandparents’ little town

Vishnevets

It may be too small to see here, and the half image is oddly distorted and cropped (click on it to see entire map), but on the key provided with this hand-drawn map of Vishnevets you can see, along with the post office, synagogue, cemetery and hekdesh (poor house) a large blot on the northern end, top left center of map, marked in Hebrew “brothers’ graves”, where the victims of the most recent slaughter in that town were buried together in a pit. The English words printed on the map there, “mass graves”, need no translation.  The mass grave was necessitated by “Nazi brutality and cruelty”, (enthusiastically carried out by local Ukrainians), in (August) 1943, according to the monument at Mt. Hebron cemetery in Queens, NY, erected by the Wishnevitz Brothers Benevolent Society and the Wishnevitz Ladies Auxiliary. 

Other information about the unlucky town is summarized in this on-line excerpt from the book of memory:

In 1500 the town was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible. In 1653 the Jews were killed by the Tartars. By 1765 there were 475 Jews in the Old City and 163 in the suburbs. In 1847 there were 3,000 in Wishnowitz.

I could not stop myself from reading the gut-wrenching survivor accounts, determined to get a clear picture of exactly how my grandparents’ families were murdered.  It chilled me to read their names mentioned in one survivor account:

March 16, 1943

On that date, which was a Tuesday, the order was given to set up a ghetto. The buildings to be included in the ghetto were marked. According to the order, the ghetto had to be constructed in three days. The Jews were assigned to build the ghetto with their own hands and with materials they had to supply.

To make sure the order would be carried out in full, two hostages were taken: Yakov Markhbeyn and the writer of these lines. Any diversion from the details of the order would jeopardize their lives.

The ghetto encircled a narrow part of the town and the length of one long street. It extended from Alter Layter’s house to Beni Mazur’s house and from the road leading to Lanovits to the entrance to the Old City.

The gruesome details of the massacre, which I learned for the first time a moment ago here:

At night we could talk, and we asked the two young men from Vyshgorodok to tell us what had happened. And the two young men from Vyshgorodok told me what they had seen with their own eyes-how Vishnevets Jewry had been destroyed-and here is their story.

All the people were brought to a ravine behind the Old City on the road leading to Zbarazh. The ravine served as a readymade grave, with a capacity that met the Nazis’ needs. The ravine had been prepared by Ukrainian farmers. They stood with their tools, clearing the surface of the ravine. They leveled it, removed small mounds, scraped the stones from the sides, and dug the walls. They covered the bottom with the stones and soil they had removed from the walls in order to create a kind of crushed-soil foundation for the victims.

Once the foundation had been prepared, the first group of Jews was led to their burial place.

Two policemen ordered them to take their clothes off and remain in their underwear. They undressed, piled up their clothes on the side, and were then ordered to lie down in a row in the ravine, face down.

When they were all lying face down, the policemen ran over them with their submachine guns in their hands, shooting bullets into the heads of the people who were lying down.

Afterward, they inspected. They walked from person to person and with a handgun killed those who didn’t die immediately, using the gun butt or a bullet shot into the center of the skull.

When they were done with one group, they brought the second, and so on.

The Ukrainians walked over the bodies inside the ravine with horrifying skill. They lifted the bodies that were not level and laid them straight. The Germans sat on the walls of the ravine and supervised the work. They gave the orders, and the Ukrainians executed them.

The farmers took over after the Ukrainian policemen were done inspecting and leveling the layer after the last round of shooting. They covered the layer of bodies with soil in order to place another layer on top. They used shovels to do this. They covered it with a thin layer of soil, and the area was ready for another row of bodies. The clothes piled up on the side were given as a gift to the farmers in exchange for their work. Immediately, they collected the victims’ clothes and loaded them onto their carts, and while the others were busy with their work of killing and taking care of the bodies, they set off to sell their booty.

That was what the two young men from Vyshgorodok told me, and it is the utmost truth, because while they told us their story, they were very detailed and corrected each other so as not to distort what their eyes had seen.

========

It was with another shuddering thought of ruthless fate that I recalled that Beni Mazur’s house was likely the same place where my grandfather Sam grew up, and narrowly escaped death by typhus during the epidemic after World War One.  If my grandfather had not escaped death from typhus (which killed at least one other family member and caused the deafness of one of his parents, and which he referred to as a “very bad item”)… you know the rest.

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.

Magical

“It’s hard to know what to say to you, how to start a conversation with someone in your perilous situation,” she said.

“That’s understandable,” he said, trying to distance himself from me. “What do people talk about? Not their terror, too scary. Not their inner feelings, way too uncomfortable. I have no idea what people actually talk about, I don’t talk much these days.”

A long moment of silence, and swallowing, seemed like it might never end.

“Death, there’s something else we don’t really like to talk about, except maybe for which really bad people deserve painful forms of it,” he said, after a while.

In her struggle to get him off depressing, dead-end subjects, she suggested that there was hope. An introduction had been made by email to a possibly congenial collaborator. “I heard she wrote that you were ‘magical’,” she said hopefully.

“Yes, she did, that was the word she used. Said I was ‘magical’ with groups and individuals,” he said brightly. It would only be a second or two, she knew, before he’d manage to turn even this glowing compliment to the dark side.

“Who was it who wrote ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’? If I had a smart phone I could tell you in a few taps, hang on, let’s pretend I do: Joan Didion. You remember that phrase? Magical thinking is a kind of irrational, superstitious belief that if you do things a certain way a bad outcome will be averted. Like Didion thought at one point that she couldn’t get rid of her dying husband’s shoes because if she did he wouldn’t have shoes when he came back from the hospice. By holding on to the shoes she believed she was magically preventing his death, somehow. Grief, derangement, insanity, all very terrible, desperate things, and part of the realm of the magical, you know.”

“What?” she said. “How do you get from a compliment about your ability to turn a group of strangers into a creative, collaborative team into Joan Didion’s meditation on the insane thinking caused by grief and impending loss?”

“It’s really a simple step,” he said, “nobody knows what to say about my program, which nobody, also, really grasps the potential and present reality of. I have seen it at work many times now, how organically my idea works over and over, and I have a few participants who can vouch for how well it works, but to the rest, and everyone I know, absent a compellingly creative and engaging commercial pitch, you have to take my word for it. My word, in a word, magical thinking. You know, if I meet a rich person who generously supports the idea, get the idea to a philanthropic foundation who can picture the vision I present and pay to help make it real in the world, if I can work in the shittiest schools in the city and produce work far better than anything I’ve had them do so far, if… you dig? My word for the odds of success here was ‘miracle’. That’s what it would take for one person to succeed at what I am trying to do alone. Another word is ‘magical.’ The guy is a miracle worker, magical.”

After a moment she said “do you realize how hard it is to have a conversation with somebody like you?”

“Absolutely, I do,” he said, and smiled, after a fashion. He thought suddenly of a man he once met at a friend’s parents’ party. The man was slim, and shy, and had a beaming smile on his face almost the entire night. Every time he looked over the man was grinning like the happiest man in the world. The woman the smiling man was standing next to for most of the evening, also happy looking, was his sister, it turned out. He learned later that they lived together and that the beaming man had died of complications of alcoholism.

“What should I have done at that party?” the ghost of the smiling man asks, “sobbed and wailed about how fucking unbearable my life was? I had one card to play, and I played it, went home and got shit-faced and then, soon after, I was dead. Finally.”

“Whoa,” she said, “that transition was kind of magical, but in a very dark way.”

“Believe in magic and you have to believe in dark magic too,” he said darkly.

“You’ve been painting the floor of this room we’re standing in and we’ve been backing up step by step and now the only door is far across that field of wet paint,” she said, pointing at the tiny door a long way off.

“You’re only now noticing this?” he asked.

“I’m trying to go along with you here,” she said. “You are not the easiest person in the world to talk to, you know?”

“I know, it’s true,” he said softly. What did they tell him at school about writing with adverbs and qualifiers? Fuck if he could recall.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “There are no rules in this world, and nothing is for certain. We stand on legs that will be swept from under us one day, under a light that will go dark and never come back on. We are controlled largely by our fears, and most people do what they feel is the safest thing to do. It is much easier to go to work and come home with money than to stay in a room with your thoughts and wavering beliefs as your existence becomes more and more marginal. On the other hand, you have a dream, even a noble one, and it is very hard work, and you’re not young and energetic any more, but you should either be grateful for your passion and your slow but forward progress or give in and find a way to make a living, however meaningless. If your Plan A is too hard, do Plan B. And I have no idea what Plan B would be in your case.”

“I like that!” he said. “And you said it was hard to talk to me!” He patted her arm, the paintbrush hanging down by his side in his other hand as the two stood in a tiny circle of dirty, unpainted floor. She smiled, and shook her head.

“Now, if you will excuse me,” he said, “I have to paint this last bit of floor.”

Better Way to Think About A Situation

A situation is what it is, good and bad and also, seen dispassionately, just what it is, with no inclination either way sometimes.  Wise people teach us that the way we look at things makes them appear good or bad. As we look, so shall we see.  When we look with fear, we see reasons to be afraid.  When we look with compassion, it is easier to play nice.

I have a meeting tomorrow that could result in some good things at a time when the signs, laid out like the entrails of animals read by soothsayers at the time of Caesar, would appear to foretell mostly doom. I can tell this, in part, because my friends are at a loss when I myself am at a loss to enthuse about this unusual plan I am pursuing, with modest practical skills, that seems so at odds with the times we live in.

I realize there is no reason to see this meeting in a few hours as a high stakes poker game, though there will be some negotiation.   If it is such a game, I could say, I am playing with house money.   But that is only a way to rationalize, make myself feel more comfortable at a time when I feel challenged.

Here is a more important thing and a much better frame to look at it through: the energetic assistant of a very successful economic and ecological entrepreneur, based again in the impoverished neighborhood where she grew up, visited wehearyou.net and was excited about what she saw.  A meeting was arranged.  Tomorrow is the meeting.

I can think about my program, and present it, like this: I have been programming and refining the simplified animation workshop for almost two years now, have worked with around 80 public school kids, in seven or eight workshops, for a total of maybe 140 hours on a once a week basis.   It is not a gigantic sample size, but it’s enough to know that every place we do it kids respond enthusiastically and creatively.   This is not surprising, it is designed to let them play and learn in a fun, interactive, collaborative setting.

The workshop is non-hierarchic, everybody there is a participant, treated with the same respect, including the adults who are on hand to facilitate.  The adults are not teachers, they’re time keepers, organizers, assistants, enthusiastic supporters of the animation the children make.   That learning takes place without teachers systematically presenting material is a radical but also very natural notion, play leads to discovery, wanting to do something leads to invention and mastery of the skills needed.  Young animals of all kinds play, it is how they master many things they need to know how to do.   Human kids are no different, if given the chance to, they love to play.  Give children musical instruments, they will begin to play a kind of music.

In the typical American school play, invention, improvisation, dreaming up ideas, is secondary, if it is encouraged anywhere but at recess — the main work is learning to master the materials tested on standardized exams.  Exams designed by large educational corporations in a way that ensures many young humans are destined to fail.

I have the animation made by a relatively small sample of kids done in a short once a week time format, so far, and you can find many inventive and enchanting moments in that highly original animation.   But what I’ve assembled until now is merely a glimpse at the potential of the program.   I am looking for a few places where my philosophy and methods can be worked week after week, over time, where kids can make real progress in animation, teach each other, work on more sustained stories, if they like, really master the technical aspects to the extent that they extend the boundaries of what kids can do.   I want people to be amazed, the more cynical among them shocked, at what children can create on their own, with their creativity as motivation and just a little guidance.

People are doing this work here and there.   A brilliant and charismatic educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, embedded a computer and track pad in an outside wall of slums in remote Indian villages and illiterate children organized themselves to learn a functional English vocabulary and were soon surfing the internet and playing games.   Mitra calls many of the things that happen when a group self-organizes to learn “emergent”.   Emergence is the appearance of things not previously thought to be part of the system.

Collaboration, invention, increased attention span, peer-teaching and group problem-solving, are not usually thought of as express goals of a school day or even of an art workshop.   Our society stresses individualism and competition and children don’t often get a chance to work together collaboratively over time.   Teamwork is needed in  team sports and encouraged in that context.   It is also necessary for animation.

Children in the animation workshop begin working in small groups very quickly.   We encourage it and like it when the teams shift players regularly.   Animation is made by a small community of interrelated teams working together.  It calls for the integration of many talents and skills, and requires a good deal of learning and peer-teaching to accomplish.

Deceptively simple, what I have tapped into.    Now what it needs is fertile ground to plant the seeds and demonstrate the things it can grow into.   Tomorrow I may find one such plot in this remote community in the South Bronx.    Someone is interested in listening, and I will be interested in listening too.

Thoughts on the uptown A

Gratefulness –
most valuable
where it seems
least possible.
 
The simple math-
addition of all the 
justifcations needed
to explain an otherwise
inexplicable life,
a life as malaise,
misdirection,
drinking invisible Kool-Aid
feeling wise and profound
while others bucked
seeming desperate–
when the ledger is tallied
I would be a fool 
to regret
a single wrong turn
 
clutching to myself
unimpeachable good character
even if
at the moment
gratefulness is not something
I can wrap myself in.

A little more love for Florence

I wrote to thank Florence’s children and grandchildren for a wonderful and inspiring celebration of a remarkable and brilliant old friend.  I’d been moved and distracted yesterday, when I spoke briefly at the memorial, during one of the breaks in the string ensemble’s performance of some of Florence’s favorite pieces, and wanted to make sure to add these thoughts:

Florence was an inspiration to many people, and to me in particular.  Her embrace of every aspect of creativity, and her nurturing of creativity in others, had a deep influence on me.  Her gentleness, her wide-ranging intellect, her humor, her love of life and her art work exerted a subtle but strong transformational force.  I attribute much of the best of who I am today to her generous, kind, whimsical influence, and her love.
 
Her beloved little brother told me, under a gentle interrogation, that she took some piano lessons for a while but never got that far on the instrument.  Still, this most musical painter’s love of music, and understanding of the underlying geometry of Bach’s music, was so profound that she could effortlessly put a counterpoint melody in exactly the right place against and among the beats and notes in a two part rock guitar jam.  It delights me as much now, remembering it, as it did when she sang that invention in real time late one night in the living room on Aberdeen Road, not long before her 90th birthday.
 
It could be said that her art deserved to be more widely known, and that she should have had some measure of fame and financial security from her brilliant, deep and masterfully executed paintings and other works.  Though she would have no doubt liked those things, I don’t think it bothered her very much as she went about her life and work.   She had more substantial things on her mind.   As Russ pointed out (and as she described in that wonderful piece about the creative benefits she derived from smoking), all of her many interests and loves seemed to focus themselves more and more into that hard to describe source of light and life energy that emanated from and flowed into the center of many of her paintings and her octamandalagons.  I watched happily as the mysterious force that Russ described shone out of the images in the slide show, as her favorite music was beautifully played and she was present, smiling, in that room.
 
I wrote this shortly after she died, and I meant to share it as well:
 
a few more words of gratitude about Florence
 
and two links to Florence’s work and words
 
two Florence links– wonderful stuff

On Learning About Other Damage Done by High Blood Pressure

I’d been worried about having a stroke each time I saw 152/100 as my blood pressure reading.  I don’t know what the stroke range is, but I know 104/70 is closer to the blood pressure I want than the, at best, borderline 137/89 I’ve been consistently getting.

“Stop fooling around,” a doctor friend who takes hydrochloride and Avapro to control her high blood pressure told me the other day.  “Your numbers, once they get elevated like that, will not come back down by themselves, your body has changed.  You’re doing damage to your heart and kidneys if you don’t get it treated.”

I call my doctor the next day to get the prescription phoned in.  We’ve been “monitoring” things for almost a year now since his eyes opened lemurlike, alarmed at my reading.   Hard to get a call back from him, missed the one I did get yesterday.  I’ll try the well-meaning liberal again on Monday.  Too bad he doesn’t use email like my urologist, but no sense stressing over how hard he is to reach.

Doing push-ups just now I felt the thickening of my heart muscle, squeezing, no doubt compromised by my high blood pressure. Must be why I’m so tired all the time too.  My kidney so far has been quiet, but, from what I understand, kidneys usually are.  

 

Dream

Remembering more dreams lately, a flurry of them in recent nights, as my imagination seemingly tries to recharge itself in the face of objectively dispiriting circumstances that call for heroic feats of imagining.  

At the end of last night’s I was, for the first time in years, back in that phantom second apartment of mine, the large space connected to my own cramped apartment where I stumble from time to time, wondering that I never use those rooms.   In the bathroom of the second apartment there was a dark blur of movement and a rustle behind the towel hanging on the rack.  It was a brown cat, at first afraid and then reassured by my quiet and calmness.  I kneeled and it came over, affectionate.  Petted the cat as I thought of the unused resources in my life and the sometimes terrible burden of our personal histories.

History can, and often does, repeat itself, but it is a mistake to feel that parallels between things happening now and things that happened in the past make the same outcome inevitable.  Dream and continue to breathe, sleep, eat well and exercise, only time will tell.

Cancer Journals

Alone, in the middle of the night, cancer victims I have known wrote long emails, sent to everyone they hoped might care.  I recall cc’s I got from two of them, one many years ago (she has survived, I saw her dancing at a wedding not long ago) and one, more recently, who was a wasted shell at my father’s funeral — held up on her son’s arm, who died not long afterwards.

 

The emails were excruciatingly detailed descriptions of cancer treatment, hopes, drug interactions, side effects, verbatim reports of talks with oncologists, nurses, spiritual advisers, descriptions of articles from medical journals.  One might call these email journals obsessively detailed.  The writers did not seem to pause for a breath, in their desire to tell the entire story, in every detail, how the drug trial, a long-shot, was nonetheless a hopeful thing, citing the literature, comparing side effects, describing how the previous chemo had made them feel, reciting many cancer terms of art with facile familiarity. They had been educated in a deadly grad school and they wrote long, scholarly emails.

 

These arrived in the night in one continuous paragraph, many screens long, or so my memory makes them appear.  I recall responding early on, and wishing them well and thereafter being at a loss, though they each thanked me profusely for writing a couple of sentences to them.  

 

One lived far away, the other I saw frequently as she grew thinner, lost her hair, grew it back, became drawn and skeletal, her beautiful smile more and more fleeting until it was just a memory.  Both wrote in the same way, writing to think out loud, writing to call out to other souls to answer them, writing not to feel so alone, awake and rattling the keys as they clung to their precariously teetering lives in otherwise silent houses.

 

I bring these up because I had an eerie feeling earlier today, thinking about some obsessively detailed emails I’d sent lately, in real time, about very specific aggravations I was going through.   The frustrations of buying mandated health insurance on the New York marketplace, by tomorrow’s deadline, for example, and having to pay $1,750 out of pocket, in addition to premium payments, before any insurance benefits kick in.  Or being dicked around by a corporation that helps nonprofits, and others, raise money on-line and does not make full payment more than a month after the campaign ends, its Customer Happiness bots cheerfully cranking out generic emails with update links that cannot be opened.  I realize the level of aggravated detail in my screeches of pain was probably similar to the emails from these two cancer patients.  Some suffer silently, others at great, sometimes unbearably detailed, length.  

 

I also had the troubling thought that diagnosed with cancer myself, I would probably find myself writing similar journals.  The odds are pretty strong both ways.  All four of my grandparents and both of my parents died of cancer, along with a young first cousin and a second cousin once removed, also quite young.  I’ve had a few small skin cancers already myself, and a few polyps snipped.  And I write by day and in the silence of night, sometimes in great detail.

 

I will now be as brief as I can as I explain to myself why I was so worked up by today.

 

On Monday a week ago I called my almost 93 year-old friend Florence, a great artist and a great soul.  She sounded befuddled on the phone, as she sometimes did.  I told her I’d call back.  When I spoke to her later she was completely clear and glad I’d be visiting her the following day.  I did.  The visit was wonderful and she looked great.  Three nights later she died.

 

I walked around the day after she died, last Sunday, feeling mostly grateful.  It was only when I told Sekhnet that Florence was gone that I found myself getting tearful.  Sekhnet is adept that way.

The following day my very promising young animation assistant was put into a terrifying position as the young man I am paying over-generously to arrive early and run the workshop showed up late and unprepared.  When I arrived the kids were one step from cannibalism, a bullied girl ran from the room.  This new group, and this promising and diligent assistant, may now be lost, the kids horses out of the barn and too late to lock the barn door. The young woman, seeing the carnage, may have been scared skittish.  I’d placed a lot of hopes on this new workshop and my new assistant.

 

Had dinner afterwards with Sekhnet, got choked up talking about a variety of things.  The next day and night I prepared a forced and muddled demo for the Wednesday workshop.  One girl correctly called the soundtrack creepy and I watched helplessly as my plans were cut to ribbons with little safety scissors.  I saw my dreams of this animation workshop flourishing and expanding littered across a classroom floor with the shredded materials that had been wasted.

 

Afterwards, after a long walk with Sekhnet, carrying heavy bags in the rain and expressing my hopelessness, she hit on an idea to help me.  Finding the 800 number for the company giving me the cold shoulder about the $450 they owed me from the fundraiser she urged me to call and straighten it out.   It was a sincere attempt to be helpful that resulted in me, on the fourth or fifth call, leaving a snarling message referring to the California attorney general’s office as Sekhnet called out the name of my nonprofit several times in the background as I tried to talk.  Wiping the foam off my lips I eventually accepted the tranquilizer she offered and found myself falling asleep twisted into a grotesque position memorialized by Sekhnet’s Blackberry.

 

A visit the following evening to an old woman dying slowly of Parkinsons, who seems to have lost the ability to communicate, didn’t feel like it brought anyone much joy.

 

Hours on hold trying to buy health insurance today, and so on.  I can add these things up and say “rough fucking week, man,” but I could not add them up in real time or distance myself in any single instance from the totality of them.  

Neither could I really get anyone to understand how unbearably painful any of it was to me, except for the sudden death of my oldest living friend.  Everyone can probably understand how much that one would hurt.