Category Archives: personal

The Purpose Driven Life

As I start thinking about what I will say on a frigid Monday morning near a man-sized pit outside the benighted little town where my father and his brother, my recently deceased Uncle Paul, grew up, and where my father’s skeleton sleeps the long sleep in the frozen ground, I am distracted by a book I just looked at.  It is about the deep inner purpose, outside of the naked profit motive, that drives every successful business, according to the upbeat marketing creep who wrote the book, a consultant for McDonald’s and Proctor and Gamble, two exemplars of this purpose driven business culture.  I’m going to go downstairs and fetch it for a few quotes, but first, a few distracted words about my uncle, my aunt, my cousin and the fucking rabbi.

After my father’s death I found among his papers a cc of a letter he sent to the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill.   It was a remarkable piece of work and I have it somewhere.  In it was reflected my father’s great intelligence, his ability to tell a story and craft a very persuasive letter.   It was an appeal to be allowed to continue paying a discounted $350 annual out of state membership dues rate instead of the proposed rate of several thousand dollars.  

My father and my uncle, who had not lived in the town since graduating from Peekskill High in 1941 and ’43, respectively, continued to pay dues to the synagogue they had attended as children.  After all, my father pointed out in his letter, they felt loyalty to the place they helped their father mop and care for.  

He no doubt wanted to mention it was the place where they did menial jobs as children, assisting their father, who was paid a pauper’s wage as caretaker.  And that it was the place their religious mother donated money that probably should have been spent on clothes and food.  The family was poor.  Their father was so poorly paid as caretaker for the synagogue that the family received Relief, the shameful precursor to Welfare.  The boys helped him work there sometimes.  When they were young men they paid a few hundred dollars annually in dues for more than fifty years each.  My father’s letter was asking for an exception to the new rule that every member, whether in state or not, had to pay the full dues.

“I realize the impact on the congregation’s finances and ability to carry on its work if its many out of state members did not contribute the full dues.  I spoke to Lisa, who informs me that my brother and I are the only two such members.  In light of this, I respectfully submit that the harm to the congregation would be minimal and request that we be granted a waiver, and be allowed to continue paying the $350 annually.  It should also be noted that we have faithfully paid annual dues since the mid-1940s.”  

My father’s first cousin, Eli, long gone now, was less diplomatic, more inclined to turn purple and react with his fists.  A few years before my father’s letter he’d reacted to the news his dues were being raised by picking up the phone and barking.   “You can put a fucking dog in my hole,” he roared at the woman at the synagogue, “I’ve been paying dues for 60 years, out of respect, for a place I haven’t set foot in in decades.  I’m not paying one fucking dollar more, and you can tell the rabbi to go fuck himself too!”

Eli received a letter of apology and an assurance that the 85 year old’s dues would not be raised.   Two years later he died and was buried in the plot he’d probably paid tens of thousands of dollars to reserve for himself, next to his beloved wife Helen who left us early.

In my mother’s papers I found letters from my uncle, after my father’s death, assuring her that the Peekskill dues had been frozen at $350, in spite of new dunning letters.  My mother paid every bill she ever got on time, and must have called or emailed my uncle when she got the bill every year.  For her part, she always indicated a desire to be cremated, the stone was already over the double grave where her husband’s mortal remains were already eternally resting, she didn’t like religion, had no connection to the shul, or need for it, yet paid anyway, $1,750 for the last five years of her life.   In the end they forbade us to inter her ashes in the grave she’d paid and paid for.  She truly doesn’t care, I’m sure.

After my uncle’s stroke my cousin and I found correspondence in a file folder regarding the promise that the dues to the congregation would be kept at a preferential $350, in spite of the fact that members actually using the facilities paid many times that.  My uncle wrote a patient letter annually and was granted the exemption each time.  

When I called to tell the rabbi that my uncle had had a stroke, the rabbi sounded genuinely concerned.  He seemed like a compassionate guy in those couple of conversations.  He called my uncle once, which I found touching and which my uncle appreciated.

My uncle died early Thursday morning after a two week hospital stay that could not save him.  Later that day my cousin called the compassionate rabbi to arrange the funeral.  The rabbi asked my cousin if he’d mind if they made the hole a bit deeper and buried some old prayer books?  Jewish law apparently requires this odd practice, and my cousin said it would be fine.  They spoke about my uncle and his wishes for the funeral arrangements.  Then the rabbi mentioned that the congregation had a strict policy about burial arrangements and that members who were not up to date on their dues could not be buried.  There was the matter of the $350 unpaid on the most recent invoice.

“Please tell me you’re shitting me,” I said to my cousin.  He assured me that he wasn’t.  “Please tell me you barked ‘you can put a fucking dog in my father’s hole’!”  He hadn’t.  He, like me, seeks to avoid confrontation, and though he was disgusted, as most people would be, he did not make an issue or argue, he just made arrangements to pay the $350.

I am walking the difficult path of trying to remain mild and gentle in all circumstances.  You’d be surprised how many loved ones throw this kind of vow in your face, if you ever raise your voice, if you express exasperation, or anger, or, say, the desire to give this religious quack a quick short shove into the open grave.  Their mockery makes it no easier to become truly nonviolent, but ahimsa is difficult in any circumstance, living in a violent, angry often irrational world.

In my mind, as I think of the quick remarks I’ll say for my uncle  mainly to comfort my aunt at the grave, in that freezing cemetery where most of the rest of our family is already interred, I’m searching for the perfectly turned phrase to deliver, looking directly and mildly at the hypocrite rabbi as I do, to bring sudden color to his face and an abrupt, involuntary absence of breath, like he’d been punched in the solar plexus.

Tragedy and Comedy

Mel Brooks, of all people, gives the best definition of these terms.  It is concise and full of great insight, a frank and brutal snapshot of our lives here.  Tragedy is when I break my fingernail, comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.

I haven’t been sleeping well, it will no doubt sadden you to learn.  It isn’t that my sleep is fitful, or that I have insomnia, I just don’t get to bed at a reasonable hour and set my alarm, lately, five hours from when I finally get to bed.  To do otherwise risks switching night and day, sleeping all day and fussing at night until the dark rooms here are flooded with a sickening light and I retreat to my dark sleeping coffin.  I’d rather not go that far, though I am, without question a night person.

After several days of this short sleep I hit the wall yesterday.  By 11:00 pm I felt like I was moving underwater.  At midnight I took a dose of a new sleep product called Zzzquil, just to be sure I didn’t start getting energetic and alert at 1:00, as often happens no matter how tired I am all day.  By 1:00 I was in bed, groggy, drowsy, sleepy, sleeping.  Alarm set for 10:30 to have a nice catch up on sleep session before conducting the animation workshop with a new group this afternoon.

At 1:47 there was a sudden commotion near my head, my cellphone rattling and cackling.  It was my cousin Jon, my only living first cousin.  I knew at once that his father had just passed away.  My broken fingernail, being woken from a sound sleep at an hour I’d normally be awake, ironic and all that.  But there was nothing very comical about my poor uncle falling slowly into a manhole and dying, after two weeks unresponsive in the hospital.  Nor was my cousin laughing.

Ahimsa– the e-book

I write this to remind myself to create an e-book, illustrated by myself and children I’ve yet to meet, stressing the importance of Ahimsa, a practice of peace and gentleness I am trying to perfect without great knowledge or any religious framework.  This book will help me stay focused on Ahimsa– non-harm.

Do not cause suffering, if you have any say in the matter.  If you can’t help, don’t hurt.  If you hate something, don’t do it to anyone else.  Be calm, focused and peaceful when you oppose something.

Suffering is a contagious symptom that feeds on and devours itself along with hope and mercy.  The doctor who would treat it must remain calm, focused and peaceful, because it spreads easily and requires quiet skill to properly diagnose and treat.  

If I can’t help, I don’t hurt.  Practice that for two hours on Thursdays as you and your little colleagues draw, cut, photograph, edit, title, strategize, choreograph, clap, stomp and sing.

Don’t say “you suck,” although it takes almost no breath to say it.  Use your breath to laugh or sing, much better uses for it.  Only, don’t laugh or sing at someone else’s misery, no matter how funny or well-deserved that misery may seem to you at the time.  You would hate it if someone did it to you.

My Father’s Heartfelt Story

My father, a critical man who criticized himself most of all, lamented that my sister and I never sought his advice.  I wonder what he’d make of how deeply one story he told me shaped my life.

It was the story of the starving wolf and the well-fed dog who met on the road.   The dog, after expressing his concern, told the wolf he had plenty of food at home and they trotted off.   The wolf noticed fur rubbed away at the back of the dog’s neck and asked “do you have a skin disease?” 

“Oh, no,” laughed the dog, “that must be from my collar.”  The wolf slowed down, asked what the collar was.  The dog explained, then told him it was used for the leash, which he also explained.  The wolf stopped, thanked the dog, and trotted off in the opposite direction, as I did.

Fittingly Abstract

The dream dreamed that it was not a dream, unperformed task piled upon undone task til they are all-surrounding, heavy as a bag of wet quilts.  In the old days we wrote these on ribbons many miles long, in long hand, while trains rattled and tramp steamers tramped, people embarked, grim yet hopeful.  

Our mothers were alive back then, given the gifts of long lives, gifts they many times fretted over and complained about.   But when the lights went down, and the orchestra throbbed to life as the stage lights came on, their hearts always soared, giddily gulping air as the vault of the sky opened.

“I can’t hear a melody without someone singing it,” my mother, a lifelong lover of the Opera, confessed one day when I’d been unable to completely hide my dismay that she hadn’t recognized Stardust when I played it on the guitar.  I learned to conceal my dismay out of love, and trying to protect her in some small way.  But sometimes dismay can’t be hidden completely.

“Until I hear the singer start to sing, I really can’t tell what the song is from just an instrumental melody,” she explained.   

I was shocked to learn this (though relieved it was no reflection on my guitar playing), because she sang tunefully.  I’d learned the melody of Mairsy Doats from her renditions in the car, probably Swingin’ on a Star too.   She would join in to sing “I’m An Old Cowhand” til the end of her life, whenever I struck it up on the ukulele.  We sang it for her at her memorial at my father’s grave on that hot summer day in 2011.

My father, also a fair singer, also with poor control of his emotions sometimes, and a tendency to snap, would eventually snap at her from the drivers’ seat with a carping comment and she’d clam up.  My sister and I would continue our battles in the back seat and there’d be a heavy, brutal silence in the car, or the radio would blare news.

Funny, to think how well they both sang, that they always both claimed to have no musical ability.  My father was always self-mocking, self-excoriating, really, when it came to his voice, but had impeccable taste in music and an ear for truly great tunes.  He loved Sam Cooke and Bill Kenney and other soulful singers, and he’d deliver his four or five note riff of each selected killer melody with style, off the beat and perfectly in tune.  He loved the crooners, the hip ones.  I wasn’t surprised to find out after he died that he’d loved Bobby Darin’s singing too.

“I’ll never hear Joe sing again,” my mother cried one night over the phone, when the final chemo was done and it was only a matter of time now before a twenty-three year run of relative good luck with the cancer finally came to a bad end.  Joe came by after I told him that, and we looked through some songbooks.   Picked out any we thought my mother would particularly like, or that otherwise struck us as beautiful.

September Song, Stardust, Are You Lonesome Tonight?  We played through them and a dozen more, Joe reading from the computer monitor as I followed on guitar, reading chord charts penciled into small books.   Put some reverb on us, panned us slightly to get a nice stereo separation, it sounded pretty good.  Then I added a second guitar and, on a few, a little keyboard pad.  Joe was backed by a spare trio, or sometimes a guitar duo.

I brought the CD to Florida, played it over crappy little computer speakers for my mother who was sitting on the couch, off to the side.  She sat through it quietly, smiled a few times, but without great excitement, then smiled again when I asked what she thought.  She said “eh….” and apologized for the disappointment I was feeling, thanked me for the attempt, told me she really appreciated it and how sweet it was of us to try, and all that.  

It don’t remember if it occurred to me to tell her right then to listen to it through her iPod headphones, I’m sure I probably did have her listen to it at least once that way before I left Florida.  I left the tunes on her iPod when I went back to New York.  I spoke to her thirty or more times in the next month with no further mention of the songs.

“Oh, the most amazing thing happened to me before, this afternoon,” she began enthusing in that Bronx way of her’s, many weeks later, “I just heard the most beautiful music on my iPod, I don’t even know how it happened, how it got there.  I was lying on my bed, I put the iPod on and suddenly there was Joe singing!” and she began to kvell, as they say.  

Joe has a great voice and my mother always loved when he’d sing opera to her.   She probably hadn’t heard him singing popular music before and she went on about how beautiful his voice was.

“What did you think of his backing band?” I asked her, when she was done.  She was perfectly happy with them, who were they?

“Me,” I said, casually, told her I was so glad she enjoyed it, reminded her of her first reaction, told her about stereo and the fine sound quality of a properly mixed digital recording through headphones, and we went on to speak of everything else.

 One of the great memories of my musical life.

Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow

Years ago I had a single blind date with a sighted woman who worked in publishing.  I’m pretty sure it was she who gave me an advance copy of a book called “Do What You Love– the Money Will Follow”.  I remember it had a white cover.   I told someone about it recently and commented that I still have it on my shelf, unread more than 20 years later.  I don’t see it anywhere as I scan the shelves now, but it’s possibly fallen into a crevice and been covered with fur along with my missing pocket book of jazz standards and innumerable other items.

I read a few pages and put it aside in disgust back then, like many things.  Like a middle class life, for example.  How that happened is worth a word:  I found I wasn’t cut out to compete for the love of wealthy people in the art world.  Displaying drawings and paintings in libraries, as my father suggested I try, was not the same as being a fantastically paid meteor in the art world firmament– I retreated into a kind of autism for a few months as I came to realize neither of these options was viable.

To my surprise, I found that I really enjoyed working with third graders.  I was hired as a teacher in a series of horrible situations.  Being a NYC public school teacher in poor neighborhoods was a bit like being a death camp guard in World War Two who loved Jewish and Gypsy humor.   I was as helpless as the children against the meat grinder that was at work on them, that was paying my salary and health insurance and giving me ten paid weeks off every summer. 

I worked full-time at four or five different NYC public schools.  Choosing which was the worst would be hard, and I’ve already used “meat grinder” and “death camp” and those pretty much cover the gamut.  I assume at least one of the principals I worked for was motivated by something other than lust for the virtually unlimited exercise of arbitrary will.  Assuming that, I can explain at least some of their distaste for their popular young male teacher as animated by a concern for the children.  

That was not the case with the last one, the principal whose clumsily sexualized tango proved deadly for any belated daydream I might have had for a middle class life.  Minnie Frego was probably insane, but was I any better?   In response to a series of escalating, mad provocations, as the new, mad principal zeroed in on me as the leader of the school I worked at for almost three years, I finally snapped.

“You’re not paying attention,” she told me tartly, as I tried to ignore the sickening demonstration of meat grinding she was conducting with my class for my benefit.  She had just crossed out the work of a bored child who was working on workbook problem number five when she was still working her methodical way through number three with the rest of the class.  She’d firmly told that child to fold his hands over his book and follow instructions.  I was trying to do the same at my desk, but it was burning me.  I was glancing at my required lesson plans when she called across the room to me.

“I’m doing this for your benefit,” she told me, as the eyes of every eight and nine year old Harlemite in the room turned to me.   It was like looking into the eyes of twenty-five smart young animals in the slaughterhouse chute.   I could not let them down, did not stop to think.  By way of response my arm swept everything off my desk on to the floor.  Then I folded my hands on my empty desk.

The rest, as they say, is history.

My Mother Reads

Driving back to New York from the outskirts of DC, where my once difficult aunt and still problematic uncle live in a well-kept, depressing home for unwanted old people, my dead mother is reading a story by Grace Paley.   The sun is fading behind the car like a world disappearing into the past as my mother reads the story like she’s one of the little girls, later women, arguing on that Bronx stoop.

“But Edie!” my mother pleads as Ruth, the perfect Bronx six year-old.   I used to buy my mother journals, try to get her to write, but she always complained that she couldn’t.  To hear her read a story, you’d never believe she couldn’t write one, she reads the stories exactly the way she would have told them.  Plus, toward the end she often spoke happily about how much she loved to lie.  She was pretty creative with some of those lies, too, and sneaky fast.

Eventually tears came to my eyes, driving as the daylight died, my dead mother’s voice coming through the car speaker, reading with such feeling, such understanding.   I used to urge her to write, she’d get defensive, then mad, but it wasn’t like I was writing.   I mean, I was writing, but I wasn’t out wrestling with other writers, proving my prose could kick their prose’s ass.  I wasn’t promoting myself, fighting the brutal fight to get recognized and paid, though my mother would once in a while read some pages I’d give her and smile and sometimes say “this is wonderful”.

“So your dead mother was a fan of your writing, how nice that must be for you,” says the guy standing on my head to get where I thought I was going.

The emotions I felt listening to my mother read, I’ll spare you.   How did I get the cassette?  It was found, by chance, in a box of tapes by my first cousin, my only cousin, really, as he was preparing to put the torch to his childhood home.  His older sister died young and I’ve tried to be more or less the brother he never had, he’s been the brother I grew up lacking.  We come from a very small family, most of the rest murdered en masse or dead of cancer.  Our two mutual grandparents, cancer.  His sister, cancer.  My mother and father and both of my mother’s parents, cancer.

“That’s impressive,” says the writer, eating my sandwich, drinking my single malt Scotch, dainty feet up on my hand tooled Corinthian leather divan.  He has all my stuff neatly arrayed in his condo.

But it’s not the cancer I’m thinking about, though on the same trip we visited a brilliant, patient, gentle man with a wise, slightly reptilian smile always at the ready, with stage four lung cancer, it turns out.  Explains a lot about how he looks.  He looked bad right after the radiation, but, even with his hair grown back, he looks bad now.  But he’s cheerful, taking every moment as a gift and planning on hanging around.  The new chemo is holding the tumors at bay, and he’s thankful for that, even with all the terrible side effects.

As I drove north, musing, I was unaware that a large library had fallen out of my pants pocket, onto the ground somewhere, probably at a Maryland gas station, with a tiny plink I didn’t notice.   My mother would not believe it, all the things that were on three tiny drives on a loop of black cord that together were no larger than a finger.  Maybe 2,000 pages, probably 1,000 tunes I’d recorded over the last few years, 200 short animations, maybe 500 drawings.   I have no idea what was on those flash drives, how to reconstruct them, back them up again.

Sekhnet was all solicitude, too much, really.  Her cousin reassured me that I could recreate the flash drives from my computer, probably.

It was almost like the gift of the found tape, recorded in 1986 when my mother was Sekhnet’s age, was cancelled out by the lost back up copies of my life’s work.   Why I was carrying my life’s work around in my pants pocket is a bitter little puzzle, at the moment.  As for the tape my mother recorded and sent to my aunt, another mystery.  

My mother once offered me $2,000, then quickly $3,000, to reschedule my court appearances and come to Florida for the week my aunt and uncle would be there visiting her, not long after my father died.

“You can’t leave me alone with them,” she pleaded, “I’ll jump out of my skin, just the thought of it.  If you love me, you’ll take the money and come down here when they come.  Please, Elie, there’ll be bloodshed.   Six days!   I’ll pay you!”  There was nothing phony about her desperation.  

The funny thing is, twenty years earlier she’d sent the tape of her reading Grace Paley stories (probably from the book of them I’d given her) to her only sister-in-law, the same woman she probably would have paid 5 Gs to be protected from.   By the way, I earned every penny of that $2,000.

“Your parents both look good,” I told my cousin at breakfast that last morning.   

“Way to kick me in the nuts!” he said, alarmed, echoing my mother’s tone as she bribed me to protect her from them.  “Why don’t you just take this fork and stab me in my right testicle?” he said, offering me the fork.

My uncle is 86, and except for the fact that he’s in a wheelchair after a stroke a year and a half ago, he looks like he could live another ten or fifteen years.  My aunt, a few years younger, also looks good.  Whatever serious health worries she’s had seem well in the past.  She’s steady on her feet, eats with a good appetite, the mild dementia agrees with her.

“I’d trade both of them for your parents, in a heartbeat,” my cousin said.  I nodded and chewed my breakfast, and thought of that ledger on which all our deeds are tallied.

Intentions

bulletin 

Intentional kicks may actually hurt more than accidental ones, least hurtful being accidental, followed by a quick, sincere apology, a new study suggests.   A thought experiment, actually.

There are thoughts that hurt, like words, and thoughts that can heal, like proper words at the needed time.   Thoughts can freeze right action in its tracks, lead directly to tissue death, heart failure, horror.  

Thoughts can also open a window high on the wall, gracefully fly up through that window to wherever you want to go.   Words discourage and disable, words encourage and enable.   Deeds, same, same.   Silence, same.  What you think the world is– it is.

For example: there are, it is said, a thousand reasons for the thing to fail, but only one needed for it to flourish.  

Smiling faces may smile for different reasons, but a real smile strikes a certain beautiful harmonic note.

There are people who look good, have winning personalities, charm and talent, who assure you, through proxies, of their affection.   You want to believe them, whether they mean any of it or not, because they are such appealing people.  And it is shame on you if you let a mistaken belief in friendship shake you up.  

 Take off the fairy glasses, man, yer old to be so naive.

Some kindness is done with great intention.   Some is done with no thought attached to it at all.  This unintended kindness may be the greatest kindness of all.  The same holds true for unkindness.

The Return of the Bad Karma Kid

Like bad breath that lingers in a closed room forever, bad karma, the lack of faith in other people’s goodness, stinking in a cloud around him.  

“I had to fire him,” he said defensively, talking to someone he considered a moralist,  or at least a person of high morals,  “his replacement was so much better than he was, it was a no-brainer.”

“I took him to court and I beat him.  I win every time I have to take someone to court– an unblemished winning percentage.”

“I made more money last year than you made in your entire life, and I’m making 40% more this year,” he put his cigar out in the kid’s hand.

The kid, I knew, didn’t need my help.   He made no sound when the cigar tip hit his hand, only a quick downward movement and the burning cigar was on the ground.  A half second later Mr. Bad Karma had a terrible expression on his face, and the next second he was on the ground, wincing.

“Violence is not the only answer,” I said to the kid, while at the same time, I couldn’t help but admire how quickly he’d resolved the karmic quandary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL0YBXwXNIg

The Unkindest Cut

I’d be hard-pressed in this world of pain, this world of pleasure and pain, to call one cut the unkindest.  I recall a teacher describing his worst terror, the moment he might have to take his clothes off to make a point about teaching, or character, or life.  Not a far leap from that to being forced to strip and then machine-gunned into a ditch, that’s a terrible one, unkind and also a deep cut.  A sister whose rage will never be soothed in this lifetime, or a brother who will never forgive the rage, in spite of his sacred vow.  Nation who will always lift up sword against nation.

There’s the image of being on the outside of a space craft, alone in black silence, the smug robot inside, reading out your remaining oxygen levels in that robot singsong.  Friends bailing with both hands, all their servants also there, bailing hard, all the possessions in the world under that water and no time to sing harmony or even think about music.  There are massages that will never be had, laughs never laughed, debts that can never be repaid and gifts squandered ungratefully, mercilessly.   Cancer.    There are terrors more real than the hand that is on you trying to calm you down.

There are many unkind cuts, and they all hurt.  There are cuts so unkind we can only describe them by crying.   Or bending an Eb note up to E, over and over against the vamp, another way to weep, as in this example:

Image

see you in the boneyard