Body Parts

The Wound Is Deep and Wide, the Healing Is Thin

I've had difficulty grappling with 9/11 memories. The day was a horror for me and my family. As I have written on this blog, my daughter and son, living in New York City, were both at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Both walked out to Brooklyn before the towers collapsed and were safe, but both were scared and scarred. My daughter, working in the banking and finance industry, left New York and travelled around the world for three years. My son, attending college in New York, stayed in the city, but began his journey into Orthodox Judaism, discovering his Jewish heritage, as an assertion of light against the forces of darkness. My daughter eventually returned to New York and the finance industry, and recently married and lives in Manhattan. My son married and moved, following his wife's career, to Seattle; but both of them yearn to return to New York.

My personal reaction to 9/11 involved my deepest fears of losing my children. I thank God I did not, but that long day dug a deep hole of empathy for the victims of the attack, who suffered prolonged and painful deaths, and the families and friends who lost them. The empathy is like a black hole at the center of my galaxy, silently and invisibly sucking life into its vortex when experiences venture too close to its rim. I steer my spaceship as far away from it as possible.

I deal with the wound by sequestering it. I'm like a child, when it's out of sight, it's out of mind. No ritualization to objectify it, no therapy to cope with it, no immersion in it to deprive it of energy, no display of the bloody shirt to strike a political posture, I have rather let it exist untreated and so deepen my experience of humanity, even at the distance it is kept. It provides a cosmic scale by which to measure the attitudes and experiences of other persons, such as public figures whom I observe, a metric for the universe of emotion in which we all exist.

I discovered one can, I can, live with a big wound and get on with life, without being crippled or disabled. A great wound, as long as you don't fall into it, can be a foundation for strengthening other structures of experience, for coping with everyday tragedies, for healing of lesser wounds, for enlivening ordinary happinesses, for receiving the blessing of each day, for perceiving the openness of the future, for nourishing gratitude.

As a lawyer, whom I engaged years ago to help me deal with a gang of thugs who viciously attacked me, would sign off each memo and letter to me: Onward! Onward, it is, as in onward, Christian soldier, warrior of faith. Onward.

One Degree of Separation From the Bombings in Mumbai

In the November 26, 2008, Muslim attacks on Mumbai's city center, the Chabad Nariman Community Center was deliberately targeted. Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka Holtzberg, six months pregnant, were viciously killed in a torture murder so horrible that it cannot be described. The Rabbi was a close childhood friend our our Rabbi. The personal connection brought emotional intensity to the services held after the attack. The July 13, 2011, Mumbai attacks occurred 4 blocks from the ancestral home of my son's wife's father's family, where 3 of her paternal aunts still live and which my son's wife visited in her childhood on family visits to their home. Visiting my son's family recently on the occasion of the birth of their first child (and our first grandchild), we talked with his wife's mother at length about the family home and its proximity to the bombings. Such emotional closeness to distant tragedy and its accompanying grief is taken into consideration by the plotters of terrorism. Terrorism affects many people who are emotionally close to the event, even though geographically distant. That is why it is a weapon of choice in warfare.

Life Is A Roller Coaster

I thought, after New Year's, that I would be returning to blogging shortly. Alas. In December, the roller coaster cranked higher and higher on the elevated track with holiday pleasures, rewards, and good news. In January, the ride was definitely down hill and nearly off the tracks. But I think we've reached the bottom of the ride and the little train is slowing down at the gate for us to get off. In December, both my children and their chosen ones came home for Christmas. My daughter announced her engagement and her fiancee flew out, after several days of delay due to the fierce post-Christmas day snow storm in the East, to meet the family. My son, with his wife, was here for the holiday for the first time in years. And my wife's niece and her new husband and baby were here twice. I cooked three dinner parties in a week. Each memorable. Each joyous. The season ended in early January when my son called with the wonderful news that he and his wife were expecting their first child, our first grandchild. Then January descended.  My daughter's grandmother--the mother of my first wife--died at ninety-nine years of age. My daughter flew back from New York for the sad occasion, which was, despite her grandmother's age, unexpected; her grandmother was weak but not suffering from a major disease or illness. Early in the morning, according to the attendant in her assisted living home, she complained of difficulty in breathing, then simply expired. Several days later, I had to take my wife's mother, eighty-four years of age--my daughter's surviving grandmother--to the nearby emergency room. She was in ER for two and a half days, then in the hospital for two and a half days. She could not be left alone at any time, as she was delusional and repeatedly attempted to tear off the monitor lines and the tubes attached to her trying to leave. My wife's brothers came to help us attend to her at night. Within a few days we all were exhausted. On her fourth day in the hospital, I came down with stomach and intestinal flu. I was in bed for two days, more or less on my own, and I was exhausted for the following four days. After my wife's mother returned to her assisted living home, our labors lessened, but vigilance was required. My wife had to spend the first night back with her mother, because her mother was so weak as to fall down repeatedly. We hired a night nurse to stay with her until her strength returned. Affairs have finally calmed down. And my thoughts return to my past times, including blogging. I read days of unread blog posts this evening and enjoyed the observations of my conservative community on the parade of political follies. But in truth, it was a relief, nearly liberating, not to pay any attention to the news and to politics and to President Obama for over a month. All of America does not spring out of the nation's capital and all that is worth saying does not spring out of the Presidential mouth. Indeed, most does not. It is good to be reminded of that. That is the perspective that will probably stay with me for a few weeks, as I return to the keyboard make my observations about America's headlong rush to the future.

Surface

My mother-in-law has just returned home from a five-day stay in the hospital. I have just recovered from the GI flu, which, alas, she probably gave me when I put her in the Emergency Room early in the week. Tending her, we've hardly had the chance to look up. In late morning today, I sat in my pajamas and bath robe on the back porch, watching a flock of several dozen mallards in the golf course water hazard (too small to be seen clearly in this distance photo), as golfers practiced in the background before walking the links.

 

My Merry Christmas Video To Family, Friends, and, Yes, You

Ten minutes long. Made in 2009.

 

Perfect SAT Scores

A personal anecdote about perfect SAT scores. This is not bragging; it's not my accomplishment, but that of my daughter. This is about standing back and being amazed at the fireworks. My daughter took the SATs, twenty years ago, scoring 800 in math and mid-700s in critical reading. She was dissatified with the critical reading score, so took both tests a second time. On the second testing, she scored, again, 800 in math, and high-700s in critical reading. How's that for consistency?

Angel Aware

My wife and I were crippled with grief for months after 9-11, as our son and daughter had been at the World Trade Center that fateful morning, escaping by only minutes Islamic terrorism's terrible anger in the collapsing towers. Our grief expressed itself through a mood of gratitude, but our gratefulness had no objective personification. Later in the year, we were in Las Vegas and browsing an antique shop. We came upon several reproductions of Victorian angels done as bookends. Instantly, we knew we wanted them  in our home. They could provide a location, much as would a shrine, for our continuing emotional turmoil and our gratitude.  Prior to this time, as a secular, humanist atheist, an emotionally barren ideology that accompanied my allegiance to Left liberalism, I had scorn for persons whose households contained religious icons, shrines, framed inspirational poems and prayers, and illustrations. Superstition! After 9-11, that political ideology dropped away from me as a repugnant thing, much as the survivors of the bombings might brush ashes off their shoulders. So I discovered myself susceptible to a range of emotions I had not previously experienced. And I discovered the reason for those material manifestations of belief, worship, hope, and gratitude. Now, whenever I see garden sprites, angels, cherubs, elves, even plastic deer, stone frogs, and stone rabbits, I feel a connection to the persons whose emotional longings embodied themselves in their yards in the approaches to their homes. The icons are not objects, but doors inviting us to walk through them to another world. As in this photograph of the under-utilized side entrance to a home on my 4.2 miles jogging route, the neglected, little angel seems to be saying, that is not the door, I am the door.

Abraham Lincoln at Parliament Square

A Spring poem and memories.

Why Do Dogs Run into the Street and Get Killed by Cars?

I read frequently in the newspaper sad stories about dogs who are killed in the street by motor vehicles. In one story, a police dog, a German Shephard, saw his master on the other side of the street and ran across it toward him. Wham. Dead. Many dogs are killed in the streets, because they escape from their yards and wander into the street, perhaps following the scents of their human family. Males dogs are frequently killed in street accidents, because they are following the scent of female dogs in heat and are unaware of their surrounding. We have had five dogs, all of whom I walked. I have pulled all of them by the leash, in many occasions, out of the street away from on-rushing cars or trucks. Clearly dogs don't have street smarts. But what are street smarts? I think, to answer like Piaget, the dogs, like babies, don't know physics.

Of course, ignorance of physics is not really the reason the dogs are killed. It is an explanation of how they are killed, some calculation of mass, momentum, impact, compression of tissue, difficulty of breath, heart smashed. I wonder whether there might not be more to dogs' deaths in the street. What about their motivations? Are we certain that all street deaths are accidental? Are we certain dogs don't have motives? 

Perhaps the dogs are committing suicide. It would be difficult for a dog to kill itself, except by starving itself or exposing itself to attack by, say, as in our neighborhood, coyotes. I have seen what coyotes do to cats they capture and devour. It's not pretty and the cats' demise could not be pleasant. A dog would presumably be aware that death by coyote would involve prolonged suffering--basically being eaten alive--and it would seek to avoid such a death. Other than those instruments, what would a dog have available to end its life? Why do we assume that dogs could not formulate such a plan? Or, at least, have such an impulse? Why do we assume they do not occasionally suffer from despair and want "to end it all"?

One of our dogs died of cancer. After her death (the dog was a female), I reflected upon its last few weeks with us, its eating pattern and how it behaved in the home, at the stable where it accompanied my wife, on walks with me. I now think our beloved pet had a foreboding, for a month, of its end. We were unaware of its condition, I remember with guilt. It must have felt physically uncomfortable or some pain in its stomach (it died of stomach cancer) for weeks. In its last day, when it could no longer keep water in its stomach and could hardly crawl, I lay down on the floor with it for an hour or so, before my wife took it to the vet where it was put down. I held my dog, who relaxed into my arms. Who am I to say it did not foresee its end. She knew something was up. Other dogs might similarly sense their end and seek to shorten their terminal suffering by a quick death in front of a speeding car. Perhaps, trapped alone in their back yard, left unloved by their family, neglected in their health, they fill with despair. I can feel a dog's angst. Seeing, in the distant street, freedom from its isolation and loneliness, a canine existentialist, it digs a hole under a fence, rushes to the asphalt, and dies quickly, stunned by a speeding car's bumper, crushed by a destiny of its choosing.

What's the Best Food I Ever Ate?

That's the Food Network question, premise of an upcoming show in which chefs and others reveal their favorite eating experience.

A bean and pickle sandwich. That's my answer. I was, I think, thirteen years old. I was hunting deer on a Sunday morning in freezing, late fall weather at Lucknow, my grandparents' estate. My father and one of his old buddies, a WW2 vet friend, were running the ridge. I stood on a carriage/logging road at the base, waiting for deer to be flushed down the hillside. I was not wearing warm clothing--a cotton hooded sweatshirt over layers of sweaters and shirts. I was freezing. I hadn't had breakfast. We were hunting at dawn. My dad didn't make any breakfast or lunch for us. When we stopped at his friend's house to pick his friend up, his wife made a sandwich from Saturday night Boston baked beans. The sandwich consisted of store-bought sliced white bread, surrounding a thick layer of beans and a less-thick layer of sliced pickles. I stored the sandwich against my body. By mid-morning, the sandwich was the only thing warm near me. My dad and his friend failed to flush any deer. No shots were fired that morning. When they walked down the hill in late morning, preparing to leave, we first ate the food we carried. Oh, my God, that bean and pickle sandwich tasted good. A huge Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas Dinner, Easter feast, July Fourth picnic all wrapped up in one small, unpretentious sandwich. I salivate as I remember it. I felt like it saved my life. A legendary, personal moment.