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Dancing in Summerland
I am leaving the tent camp at Maasai Mara with two men hitching a ride with us into Narok where we are again going to lunch at the Dreaming Garden Restaurant and where I will wait to switch to another van to go off with its passengers to Lake Nakuru, while Damian and Natalia (the Argentinians) will continue on to Nairobi. Another two men will ride with us to the point in the road where their cattle transport truck got stuck in the mud and where they have contracted to meet a local tractor owner who will try to pull them out. As we are waiting to leave camp I’m seated in the passenger seat of the van with the door still open. Maasai men in traditional garb with thick bracelets around their wrists and ankles are milling about the van, chatting with the drivers, checking out the vehicle, passing time, saying goodbye. I point to the watch on the wrist of one of the Maasai men shaking hands with me. The watch has a very unusual and attractive face, and I say casually and totally unconsciously to the man pointing to his wrist, “Nice watch.” I’ll learn not to do this one of these days, because in a flash he has his watch off and is attaching it to my wrist. So I take my watch off, one of probably comparable value, a Casio, or Timex, and hand it to him. He likes my watch. It has a much nicer Velcro band than his watchband that is plastic. Another Maasai man comes over to the van; he takes off his watch and places it on my other wrist. He takes my watch from the first man. He examines it. I give his watch to the second man. A third man comes over, not to be denied a part in the action of trade, and soon watches are being examined and moving from hand to hand. I end up with all three watches while they admire mine. I give back two of the watches and keep the one I first admired. The owner of that watch takes my watch. We each put our new watches on. The van driver arrives, says “Twende,” (we go). All of the Maasai men and I shake hands. I admire my new wristwatch – ascribe it with Maasai meanings, with the pleasures of time and travel, of possessions and value, of good faith and non-attachment. It acquires significances not associated with my one time watch now adorning the wrist of a Maasai man hundreds of miles away. I feel myself to be an inordinately happy trader.
As opposed to my new driver, the loud and sometimes impatient and annoyed Titus, who is definitely not happy with his current six passengers, two of whom are a young Japanese couple, a single man, a single woman, and the two somewhat dour (shy?) young women from Norway who the driver tells me never say yes to anything he asks or suggests and will probably not tip him well, if at all. I nickname them the “No Way” girls and commit myself to getting a yes out of them by offering cookies I’ve bought, or to buy them sodas. I even ask if I can help them out of the van, or carry something for them. By the end of the day I am batting zero in my effort to get them to yes.
Titus is just not my favorite guy. He is opinionated and believes things I don’t … that Obama hates Kenya, that Tanzanians are lazy, that I should help support his kids. He is critical and annoyed with other drivers on the road. The father of three young children, two of whom are in private school, he is also very obviously trying to see what he can get out of me. Nothing ventured nothing gained.
When we get to our overnight guesthouse on the far side of Nakuru, a bustling town one hundred miles northwest of Nairobi on the main (only?) Mombasa/Nairobi road that goes to the Somali and Ugandan borders and is filled with big trucks making their runs, Titus takes me aside and asks if I trust him.
“Sure,” I say hesitantly.
“Would you like to stay at a better guesthouse, the one I stay at?” he asks. “No extra cost. Nicer rooms. Better showers. We’ll have a drink and dinner together.”
“Sure,” I say … hesitantly.
So we drive to a part of town that I would say is definitely seedy. On the way we pass what I’m sure will forever be my favorite store name in all of Africa, the “Pentagon Butchery.”
The gate to the guesthouse/motel-like structure we will arrive at is opened by one of the armed twenty-four hour security men on duty. We are again the only guests I can see and we park inside a gravel courtyard, surrounded on all four sides by the motel, a barricade, a fort. My room is meager but fine. I do yoga, have a shower, play with the functions on my new watch, do not use the hair pick left so considerately hanging next to the room mirror. Titus comes to call me for dinner around seven. We pass through a small locked gate opened by another security guard on the other side of the courtyard, pass through an open air restaurant with a few customers, pass goat carcasses hanging in the open restaurant kitchen, pass some private dining rooms, and end up seated at a table with a pool hall on one side and a bar with a big dance floor on the other. Some men are playing pool, but no one else is dining and no one is in the darkened dancehall. Titus has preordered our dinner, a big single plate of stewed chicken in a light tomato sauce, steamed spinach, which I tell him is kale (which it is), and he insists is spinach, and roasted whole potatoes that are just fabulous dipped in the sauce. There are no utensils on the table. A waitress comes over with a plastic pitcher of quite hot water and a basin. She pours hot water over our hands, which we “wash.” The meal is shared and eaten with our fingers. Titus tells me he always sits at this table so he can see people coming from all sides.
“If something is biting you it’s inside your clothing,” he says.
Titus calls his wife in Nairobi. He puts me on the phone with her. She is delightful. He next puts me on the phone with his eleven year old daughter Elizabeth who wants to be a doctor and loves science and who I encourage with all my heart to live her dream. Then I take my leave, and retire for the evening by eight, falling asleep quickly.
I am up again at midnight, awakened by fabulous throbbing music coming from the dance floor on the other side of the gate. I so want to go and see what is happening, but this exploration seems beyond even my comfort zone and sense of prudence; that I would walk into a bar somewhere in Kenya where I’ll be the only white person and watch people dancing. I don’t think so. But I so want to go. I really do. I want to see Africa. Isn’t this what I came for? So I get dressed. Then I get undressed. Then I dress, struggling gaily with myself about the potential risks and potential rewards. I think I must have taken off and put on my pants three times. I’m laughing at myself having such a good time not knowing what the hell I’m going to do and enjoying my struggle. Of course in the end my pants are on and I cannot deny myself the experience of seeing what can be seen.
I leave almost all my money in the room, taking just a little cash, my passport, and one credit card, as I head out into the night, cross the courtyard, am admitted through the small locked gate that separates the motel from the rest of the complex by an armed guard, pass tables filled with people, and enter into a totally transformed environment, the music loud and pulsing, the dance floor, complete with strobe light, in what is a very well designed bar and tables surrounding the dance floor, a night club atmosphere, busy waitresses taking drink orders, and the dance floor filled with sixty or seventy people moving in delight.
I park myself in a corner of the room, but it is not long before a quite attractive woman in a lowcut blouse finds me and asks if I want to dance. I decline. She smiles. She comes near enough to rub her leg against mine. She has a genuinely lovely smile.
“Buy me a drink?” she asks.
“I left my money in my room,” I say.
“Well let me go to your room and get it with you,” she says. I say no.
A man comes over to introduce himself. I recognize him as a guide. He says he’s headed to Maasai Mara tomorrow. We have a pleasant conversation about where I stayed in Mara, who my guide was, what animals I saw. He tells me again that he is a guide, as if I didn’t get it.
“You are about to have a real taste of Africa, my friend,” he says smiling and nodding toward the woman, “Just watch your passport and your money, I don’t want to find you crying in the morning.”
The dancers are absolutely wonderful. Mostly men are dancing with men, or dancing by themselves, or dancing with whoever is next to them. There are also women dancing, some with women, some with men, some alone. The movements are subtle, feet often hardly leaving the floor, shoulders and hips so fabulously expressive in such a narrow range. Some men dance with women whose backs are turned to them, the man’s hands on the woman’s thighs, pulling her into him as she dances and moves. Some women caress their breasts as they dance. Older men are dancing alone. Big men are dancing lithely. The strobe light magnifies the movements. The dancers seem so happy, so lost in delight.
“Welcome to Summerland,” the same woman says to me, “I’m Kendin, would you like some company tonight?”
“Well yes and no,” I say.
“Tell me three reasons why no,” Kendin says smiling coyly.
“Well one is that I have a woman at home I really really love,” I say. “Two is disease. And three is that I’m just not the kind of guy who goes off with women he meets in bars, women who go off with strangers.”
“You not fear on me,” she says, and I cannot hear if she is saying fear or fair. But it doesn’t really matter.
“Come, dance,” I say, and walk onto the dance floor where the music literally doesn’t ever pause or stop, the sound and the Afro pop beat awesome, the dancers in some state of delight, and before long so am I, other women coming near as we dance together, no one paying the slightest attention to me as best as I can tell, except for one slightly drunk man who comes over to bumps fists with me and shake my hand as Kendin leaves the dance floor, and I am alone … with about sixty other people, in a bar, in Africa, dancing in delight.
Later Kendin asks again if we can go to my room.
“We don’t have to do anything,” she says, “Just be friends. Have company. Be fear on me.”
She is thirty three, and beautiful, a beautician with a three year old son. And my answer is still no. The fact is no. Fear or fair is no. And when I say goodnight to Kendin I almost feel badly for her. Later, when the first rooster calls at four in the morning and wakes me in my room, the music is still playing.
Alan Berkman – NYT Obit
Physician, fugitive, federal prisoner, clinician to the homeless, advocate for AIDS patients. epidemiologist: That was the arc of Alan Berkman’s career.
Dr. Berkman, a Vietnam-era radical who spent eight years in prison for armed robbery and possession of explosives and who later founded Health GAP — a leader in the coalition that helped make AIDS medication available to millions in the world’s poorest countries — died in Manhattan on June 5. He was 63 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was cancer, with which he had struggled for nearly 20 years, said his wife, Dr. Barbara Zeller.
Eagle Scout; high school salutatorian; National Merit Scholar; honor student at Cornell, class of 1967; graduate of Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, class of ’71; medical director of the Highbridge Woodycrest Center in the Bronx, one of the first residences designed for AIDS patients; vice chairman of the epidemiology department at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health since 2007: Those, too, are parts of Dr. Berkman’s record, along with his years working in clinics in the South Bronx, Lower Manhattan and rural Alabama.
His life was laced with an activism that went to extremes, both in the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s and into the Reagan years.
On May 23, 1985, Dr. Berkman and a friend were arrested outside Doylestown, Pa. In their car, federal agents found a pistol, a shotgun and keys to a garage that contained 100 pounds of dynamite. That day ended Dr. Berkman’s two decades of participation in radical groups, among them the Students for a Democratic Society.
Four years earlier, on Oct. 20, 1981, an offshoot of the Weather Underground had attempted to rob a Brink’s armored truck in Nyack, N.Y. In the shootout, two police officers and a guard died.
A year later, a federal grand jury investigating the case subpoenaed Dr. Berkman, who, a witness said, had treated one of the robbery defendants for a gunshot wound. When he was indicted and charged with being an accessory after the fact, Dr. Berkman jumped bail; he spent several years on the run.
While a fugitive, he entered a suburban Connecticut supermarket with a friend; they brandished revolvers, tied up the manager and stole $21,480. Prosecutors later said the money was used to buy the explosives found in Doylestown and to support other radical groups. Dr. Berkman was sentenced to 10 years in prison; he served 8.
In 1994, when a reporter for The New York Times interviewed Dr. Berkman at El Rio, a clinic in the South Bronx where he was treating drug-addicted parolees, the doctor, too, was on parole.
“There is plenty to learn from all the mistakes we made,” he said at the time, referring to his radical colleagues. “Power is corrupting. And the use of violence is a form of power. People motivated to stop the suffering of others have to be careful not be caught up in the same dynamics.”
He changed his dynamics, not his motivation. In 1995, he became a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia, working with mentally ill homeless men who had AIDS.
In 1998 and ’99, Dr. Berkman did research in South Africa, where AIDS was rampant. Upon returning to New York, he gathered a group of fellow AIDS activists and founded Health Global Access Project, known as Health GAP, which became one of the leading groups in the campaign to provide antiretroviral drugs to poor people around the world.
“He was one of the key figures in changing 20 years of U.S. trade policy on patents and medicine,” said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, one of the organizations that shared Dr. Berkman’s mission.
Health GAP, along with other advocacy groups, successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to change its opposition to compulsory licenses — orders by foreign governments requiring the owner of a drug patent to issue a license to a generic manufacturer, making the drug cheaper. Until that policy change, trade tariffs were often used against countries that issued compulsory licenses.
At the time, antiretroviral drugs cost about $15,000 a year for a patient. Now, with some American manufacturers sharply reducing their prices, and with generic marketers, particularly in India, offering them at very low prices, the drugs can cost as little as $150 a year.
In 1999, fewer than one million people, all in Western countries, had access to the H.I.V. medications they needed, said Jennifer Flynn, managing director of Health GAP. “Now,” she said, “there are close to four million, and more than half of them are in the poorest countries.”
Born in Brooklyn on Sept. 4, 1945, Alan Berkman was one of four sons of Samuel and Mona Osit Berkman. The family later moved to Middletown, N.Y., where his father owned a plumbing supply company. Besides Dr. Zeller, whom he married in 1975, Dr. Berkman is survived by his brothers, Jerry, Larry and Steven; his daughters, Sarah Zeller-Berkman and Harriet Clark; and a grandson.
Dr. Berkman learned he had a cancer of the lymph nodes while in prison and had recurring bouts with the disease.
In 1994, while treating parolees in the South Bronx, Dr. Berkman was asked how someone so committed to saving lives could have joined groups that were willing to plant bombs.
“I had seen pain in the communities I worked in,” he said, and “an increasing indifference” to that pain. “We became desperate and kept going further out on the limb.”
He added, “Between going to prison and having cancer two times and knowing that death sits on my shoulder, I try to make every day matter.”
Correction: June 17, 2009 – An obituary on Monday about Dr. Alan Berkman, a Vietnam-era radical who became an epidemiologist and AIDS activist, described incorrectly a group to which he belonged. Students for a Democratic Society was a radical group in the 1960s, not an underground group.
The Blacksmith
I tell my guide I’m interested in people, culture, and village life – not mosques, museums, or churches – and he gets it. An example of this is his decision to take me to see the only blacksmith still working in the area, not something I specifically asked for, although I did say I wanted to see real traditional village life.
The blacksmith’s shop is really just a shed with a forge, anvil, and bellows set up years ago outside the smith’s very modest house on a small hill off the road. When we get there the smith is working on a sixteen inch long by eight inch wide hoe blade. The owner of the blade is seated on a bench with his wife watching the smith and the supporting cast strengthen and extend the blade. The forge bellows are being operated by the smith’s wife standing on a four foot high platform located a foot or two behind the forge where she alternately raises and lowers two huge homemade “plungers” on long bamboo poles into two twelve inch wide tubes that the smith has crafted by cutting the tops and bottoms off one gallon metal buckets and then welding the buckets together to form eight foot long bellows pipes. The smith’s wife raises one plunger up in its tube as she lowers the other, then lowers the raised plunger as the raises the lowered one. Her stroke is long and steady, her arms lift up from her waist to above her head and back down again, first left then right, in a graceful rigorous dance, the cotton sleeves of her shirt fluttering, her head bobbing, the embers rising in flame as one plunger descends in the tube and air is pushed from the back of the forge across the coals. And as the other plunger is raised in its tube, air is sucked in from the front of the forge. The embers burn brightly. The tip of the blade turns red. The smith lifts the blade from the fire with a pair of thongs in his left hand to rest on the ancient anvil. He holds a two or three pound hammer in his other hand. When the blade is lifted from the fire the smith’s two teenaged sons rise from a nearby bench with their twelve pound long handled sledge hammers and the three of them rain alternating powerful blows onto to the hot blade, shaping it, flattening it, stretching the steel, sending out hundreds of sparks in fiery arcs, their rhythm fast, precise, powerful, tympanic, the blows seeming to fall as fast as the sparks fly, the men’s coordination a thing of beauty as the metal yields to their will, the eternal wife and mother resting, the embers cooling, until the smith returns the iron to the fire and the bellows worker breaths life again into the coals with her stokes.
I watch this dance mesmerized. The smith is a small man, at least sixty years old, his wife no younger. And they are working hard, really hard, and fast. And along with their sons they render a most ordinary task into a thing of poetic and choreographic beauty, seeing the mother’s arms raising and lowering, the fire enflamed, the rhythmic pinging of the hammers, the shower of sparks, the cats crawling around my feet.
Africa
I think of myself as being on a “spiritual” path, on a spiritual quest, that experiencing spirit wisdom and sacred wisdom, whatever they turn out to be, if noting more than a greater attuning of my sensory instruments to feel the vibration of the others’ sensory instruments, the other hearts beating, the other molecules spinning in ritual dance. But let us move on.
Journeys
Many travel books and travel videos are immensely well done, although no amount of reading about or videos of the pyramids at Giza or a village in India can compare to the overwhelmingly physical and sensual experience of being there.
My travel writings all seek to convey something intimate about the setting I am describing, to capture the “feel” of a unique place on the planet as experienced at a unique point in time by a unique narrator briefly passing through.
A reflection on the absence of agreed upon priorities and leadership on the Left
My focus is on organizing ourselves … the Rainbow Left … at this writing … specifically in the lands and with the blessings of the Massachusett and Wampanoag and many more Indigenous people who we owe a debt to and who lead us still.
Who speaks for and to the Rainbow Left nationally? Brother West? Rev Barber? The Abolish Prison and Prison Slavery movement? Bernie? Rise Up? The Squad? Bill Fletcher?
Who speaks to or for the Rainbow Left in MA? Jamie? Jo? Nika, Ayanna? Mahtowin Monroe? Big Mike, Jim McGovern?
We MUST be able to decide on our priorities, on where we can best direct our forces/resources at this critical moment.
There is no single organization on the left that doesn’t want more active volunteers. We all think about recruitment.
My focus is on organizing ourselves. Land back!
What I Left
In the middle of a mild winter on Cape Cod in Massachusetts on the land of the Wampanoag and the Nauset i escaped before the storm of ’22 that turned mild into wild.
I took leave of my home, dog, plants, coyotes, whales, oysters, sunrises, sunsets, birds, bays, and so much more to travel by air across an entire continent and land here – link to “what i found”
What I Found
I arrived in Temecula. It is beautiful. You can buy five acres of hillside here with 2 houses and 100s of highly productive avocado, orange, lemon, tangerine, grapefruit and more trees, hundreds!, for less than a bucket of sand on the beach in Orleans. You do not have to worry about sharks. You do worry about water availability and water’s price, especially water enough to quench a growing avocado’s liquid needs.
Mother’s end
1. My mother is actively dieing, with a purpose and acceleration not previous part of the picture. I hurt for her hurt, her fear, her aloneness, her paranoid hallucinations, the demon’s attack. She called to start my week on Monday morning asking to see me, urgently, asking for my help to find a way to let go, to release her attachment to life. She does not say this, but I know it. She does not know where she is or if she is alive or dead, she says. She wants “to see them again,” she tells me.
I say, “Your husband will be glad to see you.” He’s been gone over twenty years.
“You think so?” she asks with irony, “I’ve been thinking about that one and I’m not so sure.”
A vast trove of data and information is dieing with my mother.
She asks again, explicitly, if I can help her let go and I promise to do so, “But you have to wait until Saturday,” I say with a laugh to my petulant child, “I’m very busy, you know.”
“I don’t think I can wait,” she says.
“Well try, it’s important to me,” I tell her.
2. My sister calls. She tells me my mother is asking for me daily. It is so odd. And yet I know with certainty that I am assigned the task of helping her release her grip on the things she can no longer hold on to or carry, that I can facilitate her dieing. I must go to her. I know it. I don’t want to, but it is duty talking.
“I’ll be there Saturday, Ma, hold on.”
She hears my voice on the phone. She hears the other voices that frighten and confuse her, both at the same time.
“Who’s saying these words?” she asks.
“I am,” I say.
“No you’re not,” she insists. “Who is it that is saying these words?”
“Your eldest son, Bruce,” I say.
“No it isn’t,” says she.
Apparently she is right.
3. I talk to her about my good fortune, about her granddaughter’s wedding announcement, about my involvement in the peace campaign, about her grandson’s basketball fortunes, the upcoming state championship game, his college acceptances, his athletic scholarships. “Oh my god, oh my god,” she keeps repeating. It is as if she is on the edge of tears that she cannot bear, that she is being overwhelmed by good fortune and grace in death. “Oh my god,” she keeps saying, as if she were crying, as if what has been conveyed to her is too much good news at once.
“Oh my god oh my god,” she offers in worship, in gratitude.
4. On Friday night late I arrive at friends who live in the appropriately named town next to her hospital of Valhalla. I will see my mother on Saturday morning. I have her release on my mind. There is urgency, of course, but there is no urgency. I have thought about it. I have seen dark and enlightened thinking as well as the magical thinking in my speculations. I know what I will say. Whether it is projection, intuition, or knowledge-based I do not know, but it is clear to me what my words will be and that my words will have the power she wishes them to, that they will be a potent force and lead her to release from life unto death. Besides, I have to be back in town for my son’s state championship basketball game on Sunday.
And I do want my mother dead. It is what she has said she wants and I understand well why she would choose it. I also want her death for my own convenience and expedience. It is cold and disconnected and I do not know to what extent it is first my wish, made easier by my mother’s wishes, or if it is her wish first which finds fertile soil in her first born son. I just know I will talk to her and she will die. I think that truth is ridiculous. I also think it is real. Her physician has told me she will rally and recover, that the numbers are good, yet I feel her slipping away as the surreal and the real merge in me, surround me. Before I go to see her I take a long walk in an unfamiliar cemetery and pause by a grave marker that reads Hug.
5. I drive to the hospital feeling casual, relaxed, and in no hurry at all. I arrive around 11A.M. I ask at the nursing station what room my mother is in, and am directed to her. I enter the room and walk past the woman in the first bed, whom I do not recognize. Nor do I recognize the woman in the second bed. I walk back to the nurses’ station to explain there has been a mistake but am again directed to the woman in the first bed in the room I’ve just been in. It is, indeed, my mother, bandaged, stitched, her skin so old and thin it is everywhere black and blue.
I sit by the side of her bed and talk with her. I am not positive she knows exactly who is present but I think she does. She responds to me with understanding grunts and nods to my inquiries. “Do you want some water?” “Do you want to change your position?” She grasps one finger of my hand and squeezes it hard. She holds my hand and I help pull her up to a more comfortable position. The muscular strength and vitality in her arm is remarkable! No one that physically strong can be close to death barring some other cause. Her eyes are closed. I lay down in bed with her positioned to my left, pulling up the guard rail behind me so that I can relax and not fall out of the single hospital bed. I have not lain in bed with my mother in over sixty years. It is quite possible I never did, that I was never provided that comfort or warmth. I fall asleep next to her.
6. During my nap I dream of a house without windows on the north side that its owners have decided to put windows in, both to let in the light and to be able to see outside. There are big rectangular spaces carved out of the house where the windows will go. There are no frames yet built into the north wall, nor are the windows quite ready to be put in place. In the absence of windows the outside world of air and weather is also the air and weather inside the house.
When I wake up from my nap my mother is laying on her left side and I rise up slightly to whisper into her right ear. I kiss her check and her ear as I speak. I brush her hair out of her face with my fingers. I caress her face.
“You must let go of your beauty,” I tell her and she moans softly. I know that were she fully awake she would advise me of my foolishness, tell me she has long ago let go of her beauty, tell me my ideas are foolish, silly, that I don’t know what I am speaking about, but I think she is wrong. I speak softly to her, but definitely out loud. It is more identity than vanity she must let go of.
“You must let go of your beauty and of your strength,” I tell her.
“You must let go of your body altogether, your wonderful body that has been such a good friend to you.”
“You must let go of your sight, of your courage and determination, of your will to survive and your wish to be at your granddaughter’s wedding in this earthly form.”
“You must let go of your father and mother,” I tell her, though this too she would see as the most foolish of thoughts, her father dead over 86 years then.
“You must let go of your children, of worrying about your children, of worrying about them worrying about you.” I can feel her relax in my arms. Quite literally the tension in her body that I had not even realized was there passes out of her. She relaxes and grows lighter in my arms. Her breathing changes to an even slower pace. I am aware my sister- in-law Ona has joined us. I can’t remember when she came into the room.
7. “I don’t know what dieing breaths look like,” I tell Ona, “but these sure look like them to me.” I have never lain next to anyone when they died. My mother looks so peaceful between her slow deep breaths. And then there are none. It cannot be 15 minutes since I talked to her about letting go, and she is gone.
“She’s dead,” Ona says, and I nod acknowledging it is so. We do not call nurses. We sit with her. I hold her. I whisper in her ear, “This is the last gift we will give each other, thank you, mom.” I say “thank you” a lot. I laugh and cry a little. At some point a nurse comes in.
“She’s gone,” I say and the nurse feels for any pulse and nods that it is so.
A doctor with a stethoscope arrives and says it is so.
My sister arrives and it is so. It will be so forever. My mother is dead.
I call my brother to tell him it is so. He arrives in an hour. He waves an eagle feather over his mother’s remains and her lifting spirit. He brushes her with sage. He reads from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We all leave the hospital before her body is enshrouded and wrapped.
8. I drive back to Brookline. I call and talk from the heart with whoever is up on the west coast. I tell my daughter who cries more than anyone else, saying how she wishes she could have seen her grandma before she died. My giant son welcomes me home at 3 A.M. with a big hug. Everything is the same and everything is different. I tell him that just because his grandmother has died does not mean he is not allowed to enjoy things or laugh and play basketball, that there will be time to be sad. He says, “I know, Popi.” I suspect he really does.
9. I walk with best friend Steven on Sunday morning. I pick up my daughter up at the airport in the afternoon. My son starts at power forward for Brookline High in the state championship basketball game at the Fleet Center, home of the Celtics, that night. The town police escort the team bus to the game. I tell him to remember that the height of the basket and the dimensions of the court are the same as any other basketball court and he tells me that that was exactly what the coach told his players in “Hoosiers.” He has painted, “I play for you, Grandma,” on his basketball shoes.
Brookline plays very poorly and is being shut out when Sam makes the first BHS basket, bringing the score to 7 to 2. He makes both his first free throws. At the half Brookline is down 10. With seven minutes left in the game they are down 14. With 10 seconds left they are down by one point and have the ball out of bounds on the sideline under the opposing team’s basket, but the inbound pass is stolen and the game is ended. Sam is deeply dejected. He is also fine. We are all fine. He has played for the state championship. He has started every game. His grandmother loved him, not as I would have had her love him, but genuinely and for all the right reasons. The game is over. The season is ended.
10. We have a lovely memorial service in NY, something my mother would be pleased with. Is it only Monday? The service is simple and eloquent. My brother talks about how he liked seeing his mother age like an olden tree. My sister reads from a Gibran poem that speaks of sadness being the source of joy and joy the source of sadness. I speak of half empty and half full cups, of cups that runneth over.
In the morning before the service I walk unconsciously into the lobby of an old castle on the top of a hill overlooking one hundred and eighty degrees of the Hudson River. As I stroll over the palisades someone comes out to tell me that the grounds are only for private use. “My mother’s stay at this castle is over,” I mumble.
We all drive back to the private day school where my sister works, after the service, to a lovely, quaint, Adirondack like apartment where we watch old 8mm family movies and just hang out. Mom’s body is driven to a crematorium in New Jersey. We drive back to Brookline. It snows hard and takes us twice as long as usually and then it is over. What does love have to do with death? Maybe the terror. Maybe the ecstasy.
The U.S. Army – Day One, 1960
I leave from the Port Authority building in New York City by bus to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where I’ll begin my two months of Army basic training. I’m just shy of my twentieth birthday. The Port Authority is like Grand Central Station where I was sent unwillingly to camp at age four. This is different, a decision I have made. And although there is a claustrophobic feeling of doors closing and choices made which cannot be changed, there is also the sense of adventure and maturity that is concomitant with actions taken by men.
Almost everyone on the bus is an inductee from New York City. The Jersey countryside, a dune-like succession of sandy low hills and chicken farms, rolls by until we arrive at Fort Dix, which is surrounded by barbed wire. At the entrance to Fort Dix stands a tremendous statue of “The Infantryman,” the ultimate fighting machine I am about to become.
We are herded into a huge building, formed into lines, and begin our transformation and processing from civilians into army troops, first swearing loyalty and fealty to the United States and then being given shockingly short, dare I say bald, army haircuts. We put our civilian clothes into bags. We are marched into line after line where we are inspected, questioned, sorted, and given a series of injections in both arms with air-powered guns. We move down a lengthy counter where we declare our chest, waist, weight, height, and shoe sizes and are given shirts, pants, belts, underwear, shoes, and socks, more or less consistent with our size declarations.
At the end of the counter we flow onto another line and approach a sergeant seated at a table filling out forms with the information necessary to issue each man his dog tags. When I reach the table the sergeant finds my name and military identification number on a card and asks me my religion. I’m not sure why, but I am just not able to answer him. I don’t think it’s that I am afraid of anti-Semitism, or ashamed of being Jewish, quite the opposite, I am rather proud of being Jewish and eager to stand up to anti-Semites. It is much more that I don’t really believe in religion and I’m sort of stunned and offended because I don’t think my religious beliefs are anyone’s business, especially in this context, I mean this is the United States Army is it not, and we were all equals right, brothers in arms. I mean what does my religion matter? It seems almost unpatriotic to make such a separatist declaration.
“What’s your religion?” the sergeant asks me again in a Southern drawl as I continue to stand there, in spite of my wish to answer him, quite mute, embarrassed, and dumb.
“What’s wrong with you, son” the peeved sergeant asks, “what’s your religion?”
And I just stare at him, unable to answer, unable to form the words, unable to fully understand what is going on with me. Maybe I’ll say, “no preference, sir” but I can’t make up my mind and don’t really like that answer either. So I just continue standing there, struggling with myself about these matters of personal and philosophical significance, as the sergeant grows more and more exasperated, and rightly so, thinking I’m a moron or something, and rightly so again.
“I said, ‘what‘s your religion, boy?'” he says slowly, very slowly. And I just stare at him … frozen.
“Jesus H Christ,” he growls almost menacingly, “Who are your people, boy? “
People? The word “people” startles me. Who are “my People?” Shit, I know that answer. People? “Why the Hebrews, sir,” I say.
“Hebrew,” he repeats, and writes it down. “Next,” he says, and smiles.
I receive my dog tags two days later. They read just that, “Hebrew.” I still have them, of course. I don’t imagine there are many other Hebrews in the U.S. Army, but the Hebrews are definitely my “people.” And were there ever to come a time to identify my scarred and unrecognizable mortal remains left on some desolate field of battle I think I would be far more comfortable buried as an ethnic American, dare I say tribal, Hebrew (for all that would matter) than I would be hypocritically declared a “religious” Jew.