Our Humanity

A typical Sunday morning, and I have burned the last piece of French toast, the one with that extra bit of yellow, not quite enough for another whole piece, but enough to make this one really good.

What do you do with a burnt piece of French toast? Do you just leave it there in the fry pan? Do you put it on the serving plate, charred side down, hoping no one will notice? Will anyone eat it? Can you throw it out?

You try the squish of egg, the one hanging off the crust, knowing it is burnt. And it tastes that way.  

Now what do you do? Logic dictates: Throw that piece out. But if you're a waste not, want not kind of person, like some of my green friends, then that's not so simple. You don’t just throw things away.

So you set the disgraced toast tenderly upon the platter with the others, perhaps burnt side up to show respect.

But there is another option, as there are in most things. A person could slide open the silverware drawer, select the sharpest knife, slice away the chaff and knuckle-ball it to the garbage. I choose this option, and predictably my brain rebels.

That wouldn’t have been thrown away in a concentration camp. And here you are, throwing it away.

You might suggest that this obsessing over toast is really about saving and recycling, brought on by my mother's impending move, having to move so many material things out of her house. In the eight months since my father’s death, she has lived alone. We, her children, are herding her into a new living facility, “independent living” it is called. My mother-in-law, still in her own apartment, calls what we are doing the warehousing of the elderly.

We think of it as hedging the odds, safety. And company.

Mother, too, fights the move for as long as she can, and summoning my father's ghost, digs in her heels. Ultimately, to get us off her back, she agrees. As the months of emptiness fill her hollow home, by time the house is sold, she is more than ready to go.

Nothing is easy, and the process demands some remodeling of my house, too, all for the best. I absorb some of her furniture as she down-sizes, and pack things away for garage sales, Ebay on a rainy day. At this point, both of our homes qualify as disaster zones. We need hard hats, seriously.

In the wreckage, my radio -- a two speaker mini-monolith -- is dissembled. It is hard to make breakfast with no one to talk to, so I wrestle with the wires until I hear Krista Tippet, NPR, crooning. She is interviewing a man who grew up fast in a concentration camp in French-Indochina, now Viet Nam.

Xavier Le Pichon* has become a famous geophysicist, the man who discovered plate tectonics, and that the frailties and flaws of the plates beneath the earth are essential elements in living geological systems. His writing is not just theory, but a world view. Frailties and flaws are essential to humanity, too. What makes us weak also holds the keys to our development, our psychological growth, our humanity.

I whisk cream into eggs, captivated.

“Our humanity is not an attribute that we have received once and forever with our conception,” Dr. Le Pichon explains, “rather it is a potentiality that we have to discover within us . . . progressively develop or destroy throughout confrontation with the different experiences of suffering that will meet us through our lives.”

As I set an embarrassingly charred griddle to the fire, Le Pichon waxes on about the plight of the elderly.

“The way to build a society is to integrate people in a way in which they interact,” he says. “Each of them can find out that each of them can have their place, that their life has a meaning; that they are needed by others. So often I found that older people have the impression that they are not useful, nobody needs them, and they opt to . . . go. They opt to go.”

He sighs. He is thinking that under severe mental and physical stress they can lose the motivation to go on living, do not see anything positive about frailty. It is depression he is talking about, the longing to die.

The conversation shifts to the economic down turn. Le Pichon isn’t impressed with the American struggle, the whining, perhaps, something we see as natural, even functional. He might agree that the verbal expression of our pain is good for us, but has another perspective.

“I was in a concentration camp and life was hard. All the babies were dying of hunger, but we were together. . . even under stress if you find a way to create a community that makes sense to your life, then it (your life) becomes extremely important.

My mother was a strong woman. When they would get the message from the Japanese governor of the camp, when he would let us know he planned to shoot most of the people the next day, my mother said, I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. But today you have to learn your lessons, so come. ”

Who could help but smile? She sounds like a Jewish mother. Maybe strong mothers are all like this. No excuses, not even genocide; what happens tomorrow is immaterial-- today a person should learn. My mother will like this story, my kids will, too.

We get together, me and Mom, as it happens, later in the day. I have picked her up for dinner; we’re ordering Chinese, something she loves. But I want to get to the recycling place before dark. We have collected four huge garbage bags of plastic, metal and paper, and the bags look terrible in my living room. My daughter-in-law, who has popped in to see what’s going on, is about to leave, but she volunteers to stay with Mom for awhile until I get back.

My mother glances over at me, commands her beloved granddaughter, “Go with her."

I make a face. “Why? She likes being with you.”

“It might be dangerous over there. I don’t want you going alone.”

“It’s in the parking lot of a city golf course, Mom. It’s fine. Nothing’s going to happen. Maybe I’ll get hit by a golf cart.”

She thinks awhile. “Okay. But be careful.”

The crazy thing is that after I leave the recycling place, slowly crossing a very busy intersection, I hear the horrible scream of peeling rubber, a horribly loud, pre-horrible about-to-crash sound that I have never heard so near, so loudly before. It is so very, very close to me that I think. . I’m going to die. I can’t believe this.

The screech goes on for probably fifteen interminable seconds. I will still hear it in my head, days later. And then, nothing.

I have pulled over somehow to the right hand lane, and a car of kids, gangbanger-looking kids, smoking, laughing, shoots past me. My heart consumes my attention, beating to get out of here, maybe move to another country, and I’m dizzy, stop to collect myself; determine not to tell anyone. After all. Nothing happened.

Then why do I feel so bad?

The irony is that I have been trying to convince my mother to give up driving. She won’t need a car where she’s going. The community agency takes residents wherever they want to go, even the suburbs, the malls, Old Orchard. I’m a whole five minutes away. But she wants to take her car with her. It is a symbol, something else we want to take away.

“I can drive,” she says. “I can drive.”

“I know. But it’s such a hassle,” I say, not kidding. “And city traffic isn't suburban traffic. It is life-threatening, being on the road these days. There's a reason for those insurance premiums.”

“But I need my independence. I don't like the thought of relying upon you to drive me around."

And then she says it, "I don’t want to be a burden.” Which infuriates me.

“Burden!?” I blurt out. “You don’t want to be a burden? Let me tell you what’s a burden. Me worrying that something will happen to you, or to someone else, while you’re behind the wheel. Now that's a burden. Worrying that I’ll have to deal with your pain and suffering. Worrying about the financial stress of two or more lawsuits that I won’t have time for.

"And let’s not forget," I continue, voice rising, "people will whisper, behind closed doors, What was wrong with those people? Why didn’t they take away the keys? What were they waiting for?" The tirade ends.

She is silent.

This begs an evolutionary solution, a humane solution, one that determines our humanity. But it seems to me, to evolve, to be humane, we both have to stay alive.

therapydoc

Dr. Le Pichon

* You can get the download of the interview on American Public Media
On the website we learn that Xavier Le Pichon and his wife raised their children in communities of the disabled and mentally ill. He is professor emeritus at the Collège de France in Aix-en-Provence, resides at La Maison Thomas Philippe, a retreat for families struggling with mental illness.

A Different Thanksgiving Story

Lodz ghetto, circa 1939.

Hard to believe that anyone would be sitting around on Thanksgiving reading blogs, but here I am, writing one, so there are probably a few of you reading. Mostly recipes.

Last Saturday I was a little down. And sometimes, when things are going wrong for me, when life feels more than out of control, I like to read about the Holocaust.

Crazy coping strategy, I know, but it works every time. There are many collections of stories about the Holocaust, and I happened to have had one on hand, a survival story. Here's a mini-review, not on the level of one you might find at Jew Wishes, but it is what it is.

Sisters of the Storm, (from the Holocaust Diaries series), by Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz is the story of two young teens trapped in Lodz, Poland, a ghetto established by the Gestapo in 1939, a home to approximately 200,000 Jews, surrounded by barbed wire. According to DeathCamps.org

". . . inhabitants vegetated in wretched wooden houses comprising 31,271 apartments. Sanitary conditions were disastrous. Apart from the lack of food, only 725 apartments had running water. There was no sewerage, no coal or wood for heating the rooms, no warm clothes and shoes. As a consequence, 21% of the ghetto population died in various epidemics, of starvation or were frozen to death."

No turkey, baby.

Those who survived only survived to be deported to concentration camps, Auschwitz in particular, and the gas chambers. An estimated 6 million Jews were murdered in this war, another 6 million non-Jews fell to the Nazis, as well.

Here are a few hungry people on the way to Auschwitz in a rare photograph ostensibly to die.

Anna witnessed the torture and murder of family and friends, including her mother and brother. She survived the ghetto to be shipped like cattle, in a cattle car, hundreds to a car, little air to breathe, no room to move, certainly no bathroom facilities. From the crowding of Lodz to Auschwitz. You must know what happened there. I can't go into it now. It's a holiday.

It's hard to read these things, stories of survivors, but hard not to. On page 90 the author describes how her 22 year-old brother, before his death from tuberculosis, married knowing that the Germans intended to eradicate the Jews. Anna's brother contracted tuberculosis on the job, an occupational hazard, carrying human waste. He married with the intent to have a child, to stick it to the Nazis, to say, "You can't stop us. We shall survive, we will continue."

Ms. Eilenberg-Eibeshitzs writes (italics in parentheses are mine) :

My father came home one day with a very pale face. I tried to talk to him, but it took him a long time before he was able to speak to me. It seemed that he had seen Brocha (Anna's new sister-in-law)walking in the street, and she was obviously pregnant. I understood why my father was so firghtened; pregnant women were a favorite target for the Nazis. I offered up a silent tefillah (meaning prayer) that everything would be all right.

I grew more and more worried as the days passed by. . .I gradually came to understand that Brocha had been taken for deportation. (The Nazis killed mother and child as a matter of course. Babies filled in the gaps in mass burials before the Nazis came up with the Final Solution.)

Generally you hear a woman is pregnant and the response is joyous, gleeful. Happy.

Sisters of the Storm becomes more and more violent, more and more impossible to read, gut-wrenching. You wonder, you really do, when you read about such torturous conditions, starving people sleeping, if you can call it sleep, on dirty floors, punished with dirty (yellow) water for days at a time. Their simple crime? Genetics, race. You wonder how anyone can survive such conditions, always at the other end of the boot, slapped, beaten, waking to new corpses in the barracks. Grieving, fearful.

Do you become immune? I don't think so. Do you become skeptical? Suspicious of others? Jaded. Certainly. But many survivors kept their religion, stayed observant even within the camps, to the degree it was possible. Their faith somehow kept them going.

Survivor stories are told less often these days. The survivors of World War II are in their 70's, 80's and 90's. They are leaving us. We go to museums to hear them speak to us from videos, through headsets, or we read books to remember them. My cousin works for the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, travels all over the world to tell the story of the Holocaust, tells people that history can and will repeat itself. He recently spoke in Mumbai, a city on the watch for terrorism, bombs. It is the most heavily populated city in the world, the trains are mobbed at all hours of the day. We must not forget. Everyone is vulnerable to hatred.

Everyone takes something different from survivor stories. For me it's how amazingly little we need to survive (when it comes to food) and how precious survival, life, really is.

Lo aleinu, we say in Hebrew. Such things should not happen to us. We mean, really, that these things should not happen, and we're thankful, that we're not suffering, not like they did in the camps. We feel better somehow, telling ourselves, whispering some kind of talisman, a quick nod of thanksgiving. No one, none of us, should ever have to be hungry like that, should ever have to suffer like that. No one should. Lo aleinu. The downside of life can get pretty down.

My favorite journalist, Peggy Noonan, writes for the Wall Street Journal, and last Saturday she wrote a piece about being thankful. We're Still Here After a Rough Year--We're serving up a new gratitude this Thanksgiving. I liked it very much and am copying it below because we are thankful this week, as Americans. Last year was a difficult year. Our country, once a super power, is less super, we all agree. We don't trust, we are afraid of the future. But it's better now, today, than it was a year ago. We survived, she's suggesting.

And all I can think is,

Survival is surely relative.

Happy Thanksgiving.

therapydoc

*For those of you new here, shul is Yiddish for synagogue. I wrote this last Saturday night.

Here's Ms. Noonan's piece.

Last Thanksgiving, it looked as if a hard year was coming, and it was and it did. The holiday was shadowed by a sense of economic foreboding—Wall Street failing, companies falling and layoffs coming. It isn't over—no one thinks it's over. But the mood of this Thanksgiving looks to be different.

An unofficial poll of a dozen friends yields two themes: "We're still here," and, "I am so grateful." Almost all experienced business reverses, some of which were deep, and some had personal misfortunes of one kind or another: "I am thankful that my mother's death was fast and that she did not have to suffer," wrote a beloved friend. But something tells me that a number of Thanksgiving dinners will be marked this year by a new or refreshed sense of gratitude: We're still here. I am so grateful.

I felt it the other night, unexpectedly, in a way that reminded me of the anxieties of last year. I had been away from the city. I was in a cab going down Fifth Avenue. I hadn't been there in months. I looked up and suddenly saw, looming in the darkness to my right, the white-gray marble and huge windows of the Bergdorf Goodman building—tall, stately, mansard-roofed. Its windows were covered, but some lights were on, and there seemed to be people inside. They were preparing its Christmas windows. Something about the sight of it caught me—proud Bergdorf's, anchor of midtown commerce. It looked exactly as it looked 10 years ago, 20, only better. Because it's there. New York has been so damaged by the crash, and last year at this time small shops, the ones with the smallest margin for error, were closing. And now I see more that are opening, and Bergdorf's is preparing its Christmas windows. The sight of it came like an affirmation. We're still here. I am so grateful.

What are you most thankful for in 2009? I asked an old friend, a brilliant lawyer who lives in a New York suburb. "I saw my 6-year-old son run a mile, and catch a bunch of fish," he immediately replied. He saw his wife, a journalist, "dodge the firings" in her office. He still has a job, too. All of this sounds so common, so modest, and yet, he knows, it is everything. A child caught a fish, he ran, his father saw it. "Broadly," he added, "I am grateful to America for its freedom, for its yeastiness and, at times, its noise. Dee Snider belting out 'I Wanna Rock' is so America."

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My friend Robert wrote, "I am thankful that I lived to see a person of color sworn into the office of President." He takes heart that America has set a new face toward the world. "I am thankful and proud when I am in London and people ask me about my president and show great interest in him." And, "I am thankful that my friends survived the global financial disaster. I am thankful America survived it."

A real estate lawyer in Washington emailed, "Whether you agree with the policy decisions made by the new administration or not, let's be thankful that our economy did not fall apart since last Thanksgiving."

A Washington journalist: "I am thankful that this is still a normal country, with predictable common-sense reactions to excesses. The American people served as a counterweight to the excesses of the Bush years, and are now serving as a counterweight to the excesses of the Obama years."

A friend who emigrated from Nicaragua 21 years ago and lives now in New York knew right away what she was thankful for: her still-new country. "I'm mainly grateful that I could raise my son in freedom. I could vote for the first time in my life. I could express my opinions without being shot on the spot, jailed, or exiled like my grandfather. I could sleep through the night without fearing for my life. I could work and buy food without rationing."

My friend Stephanie is grateful that she got health insurance despite a pre-existing condition. Another friend, an academic, was grateful to have been raised in America that taught well the rules of survival—perseverance, discipline.

Jim, who owns a small business, told me that as 2009 began, with all its troubles, "the number of frowns" he saw on the street "was overwhelming." He decided to take action. "I now make a conscious effort to smile at people in the street, in a bus, while waiting in line. It's such a simple form of connection, and it only takes one smile returned to make a difference in my day, and I hope the same is true for the other person smiling back." He hopes to start "a smiling epidemic" in Chicago.

My friend Vin said, when I asked him what he was most grateful for in 2009, "I remember reading that survival rates for breast cancer have been improving. I remember thinking: Thank God."

I am grateful for a great deal, especially: I'm here. I'm drinking coffee as I write, and the sun is so bright, I had to close the blinds to keep the glare from the computer. When I open the blinds, I will see the world: people, kids, traffic, dogs. Too many friends have left during the past few years, and it reminds us of what death is always trying to remind us: It's good to be alive.
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And after that, after gratitude for friends and family, and for those who protect us, after that something small. I love TV, and the other day it occurred to me again that we are in the middle of a second golden age of television. I feel gratitude to the largely unheralded network executives and producers who gave it to us. The first golden age can be summed up with one name: "Playhouse 90." It was the 1950s and '60s, when TV was busy being born. The second can be summed up with the words "The Sopranos," "Mad Men," "The Wire," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "ER," "24," "The West Wing," "Law and Order," "30 Rock." These are classics. Some nonstars at a network made them possible. Good for them.

I leave it to others to dilate on why TV now is so good and movies so bad, since both come from the same town, Hollywood, in the same era. But there is a side benefit to televisions's excellence, and that is the number of people who follow a show so closely, and love it so much, that after it's aired they come together on long threads on Web sites and talk about what happened and what it means. People use their imaginations and unfocused creativity to add new layers of meaning and interpretation. "You know that was a reference to 'Chinatown.'" "Did anyone notice what it meant when Peggy told Mr. Sterling 'no' when he asked for the coffee? A whole revolution captured in one word!"

Those threads are golden. We rightly discuss the fact that media now is fractured, niched and broken up, that we no longer watch the same shows or have the same conversation. But what's happening now on the Internet after a good show is a conversation, a new one, and it's sprung up from the technology that helped do in the old one. How ironic and predictable, and another cause, however small, for gratitude.