True Ancestor

20

Oldest Daughter (left) and Middle Daughter, preparing to see the Art Institute's new Modern wing.

Middle Daughter turns 20 today.She is one of those rare individuals whose child-self shines through her adult self. As a child, she was dreamy, distracted, funny, very loving, resolutely happy. As an adult, she is still all those things. To have known her for 17 years is to have watched her grow lovely translucent layers -- a sweet onion of a human being.

Middle Daughter is perceptive -- so perceptive, it seems, that it's sometimes painful to her. She sees her own foibles and everyone else's, too: she can forgive others very easily, but not herself. As a child of divorce, she learned to mediate between worlds before she even understood that that's what she was doing. Never one to be forced into taking sides, she simply interpreted one "side" to the other, moving between parental realms with a diplomat's tact and a ballerina's grace.

Middle Daughter has a restlessness, a hint of reckless abandon about her. You sense that at any moment, she could throw everything over and be living in a DP camp in Zimbabwe, giving tetanus shots and reading stories to refugee children. Or traveling across India with someone she just met. And even as you interpreted this seismic life-shift to curious friends and judgmental relatives, she'd suddenly be back in college, double-majoring in economics and social work, earning all A's and still managing to follow Phish or Dave Matthews across the country.

Last night the extended family came to our house to fete Middle Daughter. It was a scene of hilarity and mayhem. On a beautiful, breezy summer night, Middle Daughter was surrounded with love (and repeatedly startled by the whoosh-BOOM of Gabe's potato cannon firing instant hash-browns into the office park behind our back yard), partially hidden behind a brown-glass forest of beer bottles, as the 20-something cousins (with only a little help from the elders) polished off all the Leinenkugel the state of Wisconsin had brewed in the past week.

Sadly, my aged and revered parents, who spent the weekend with us, were unable to stay for the party. My mother did a gainer with a half-twist off the back step of our patio, landing firmly on her rump -- the only place on her with enough padding to forestall serious damage. A little shook up but fortunately not seriously hurt, she and the Old Man returned to my sister's city abode yesterday afternoon. This morning, I asked the Old Lady whether she shouldn't go see a doctor. "Well, I'm a little sore," she said, "but what are they gonna do: put my ass in a sling?" Her sense of humor has suffered no fractures. Nor, thank God, has any other part of her.

Middle Daughter was kind of enough to duck out of the festivities last night and call my mom, see how she was, and tell her she was missed at the party.

In toasting her, I told Middle Daughter that she and Oldest Daughter were tied for "second most important woman in my life." What else cold I say? The One True Wife gifted me not just with Gabe, but with two remarkable girls -- as different as could be, as close as any siblings -- two people who taught me to parent, called me on my bullshit, forgave me my moods, are remarkable big sisters, and who know how to party.

Middle Daughter is bursting with potential, intelligence, love, wit, wisdom. Middle Daughter is mercurial, whimsical, philosophical. Middle Daughter is 20. Time -- and so much else -- is on her side.

Happy birthday, dear Middle Daughter -- and many more.

--T.A.

When Father's Day Actually Means Something

Oldest Daughter and Gabe. Photo: Youngest Daughter. Driver: One True Wife.

I put no store (if you'll pardon the pun) by Hallmark holidays. But yesterday was the kind of Father's Day that really did remind me what an honor it is to be a father and a stepfather.

We convened for an early cup of coffee with dear friend and faithful reader Starry and members of her husband's family, who were in from various far-flung locations to spend time with the husband's father. The One True Wife and I were eager to catch up with Starry but we were soon folded into this large and friendly group, featuring Milo, one of the cutest children I've ever seen. And to be named after the hero of The Phantom Tollbooth! What a cool role model.

A few lazy and generally unproductive hours followed. I was given wonderfully stylish shirts by Oldest Daughter, who knows I never buy myself anything stylish, and who wished me a "Happy Not-Father's Day." Then my aged and revered parents came to spend part of the afternoon and have an early dinner. Oldest Niece came by, as well -- a gorgeous and hysterically funny young woman who will be attending a new business school program this Fall at the University of Tel Aviv.

I'm very lucky to be born into a wonderful family, and wound by matrimony into another: the One True Wife's entire clan, which lives within a 20-square-mile radius and loves nothing better than spending time together. If I need refuge from this cozy clannishness, I have my own family of five siblings, and parents who are wonderfully physically and mentally sound at their age (they just celebrated their 67th wedding anniversary). Part of what makes being a father special is being able to still be a son. And to be a son in front of one's children. And having fatherhood both magnified by and diminished to proper perspective in the web of two large families.

At dinner, we regaled each other with myth and legend from those families; Gabe read from a hilarious family biography he had written as part of a school project. To be able to see ourselves through his eyes revealed a lot -- mostly, how observant and articulate he can be when he's not watching TV.

After a delicious dinner of fish tacos and fruit salad, I drove the parents to rendez-vous with my sister #3, while the rest of the family did the dishes (my customary chore, from which I received a blessed reprieve). Then the children and I adjourned to the local driving range -- even Middle Daughter, who finds swinging clubs at round objects to be a very strange activity. Much hilarity ensued.

Then we stopped at Dairy Queen, and ended the evening (along with the Wife) at the fabulous basement theater of my sister-in-law and her husband, where we sat in electric massage chairs, ate ice cream and watched Slumdog Millionaire.

The world is a vast and remarkable place. And so is the Family.

--T.A.

Getting Beat

Gabe is now faster than me. His hands and feet are bigger than mine. We are both a little stunned by this development.

He is better than me at everything physical that we both love to do: running, throwing, hitting, imitating people; his upper braces are off and his lower braces come off next week. He's a good writer, too. For a school project, he was bluntly funny about the poor quality of teachers: "If you put all my teachers in a group and threw a rock in their direction," he wrote, "you'd probably hit a bad teacher."

At a little over 5 feet 4 inches, and still shy of his 14th birthday, he's taller than I was on the eve of my 16th birthday. He seems totally at ease in the world, with enough humor and self-deprecation to survive the sudden handsomeness that adolescence has bestowed, and despite the approaching kingship of being an 8th-grader in a middle school. He's a good athlete, but not a stellar one. A fine student, but not a competitive one. His ease extends in all directions.

I could be wrong about this ease of his. But I doubt it. It's just possible that he's a straightforward, confident kid, living his life. May he stay straightforward and confident, long after I'm gone.

 

We are both a little sad that I can't compete with him anymore; our athletic arcs intersected only briefly. But there is nothing as exhilarating as that sadness. Gabe is a kid who makes me glad just to be around to watch him grow up.

--T.A.

The Younger

For nine months, my days were filled with, defined by, people who were half my age, or less. Suddenly, they're gone. I feel old again.

The funny thing is, it's not hard to be with them -- a) because I'm immature, so I fit right in, and b) because they remind me of my daughters (more mature, in many ways, than I -- certainly more mature than I was at their age).

But today's maturity is so -- I dunno -- immature. People who are in their late teens or early twenties have seen so much, done so much, sampled so much; but it's sampled from sanitized and digitized life-drives. Sometimes their lives seem to me like one big iPod, where if you don't like the song, the class, the interaction, the drug, the sex -- you just push a button and begin a new experience. They've played every sport, but never in pickup games on the street. They've been to every continent, but only on organized tours. They are aware of everything, but think that's the same as knowing everything.

The most indelible sense-memory I have is of sitting in the back of a fairly large lecture hall, with about 200 students arrayed in front of me, and the glowing forest of electronic devices, the snackety-snack sound of keyboards beneath the droning professors, the multiple screens on the PCs and Macs, upon which students took notes, checked e-mail, chatted, listened to music.  When I was growing up, the world was a ghetto. Now it's a playlist.

And yet, for all that curmudgeonly complaining . . . I love my fellow students. I am so in awe of their humor, their bursts of vulnerable humility, their hysterical senses of humor about their own neuroses, their desire, their insistence on seeing and doing and learning and being as much as possible. Theirs is a much more cynical world, but they are, somehow, much less cynical than my generation was. Having been reared in the shockwave of the (first) Kennedy assassination, under the mushroom shadow of the Cold War, and coming of age during Watergate and Vietnam, there was nothing for us to do but proclaim that everything was bullshit, even if you didn't believe it. My colleagues in the classroom, perhaps because of their fluency with accessing information, seem way less inclined to willful self-deception.They know everything's bullshit. They find it funny, challenging, stimulating.

On the other hand: the Internet turns everything into instant history. Relatively recent history -- Kruschev, Mickey Mantle, Elijah Muhammad, Flannery O'Connor -- may be buried forever beneath the new, lost to them in the landfill of contemporary noise.

This I'll say for them. They've been trained to learn, and their brains are learning machines at the peak of their function. They absorb information the way a thirsty plant sucks up rain. They're good, very good, at what they do.

I miss them.

--T.A.

Reflections on a Year in School, or: Confessions of a Symbolic Analyst

To realize how pervasive the model and the rhythms of the academy have become in our society, you really have to go back to school. At least, I did.

Now that I've finished a year in graduate school -- my first in almost a quarter century -- I can newly appreciate how the academic calendar, the culture of deadlines and tests, the schizophrenia of "work hard, play hard," the sacred self-absorption of the young, the free-floating molecular communities of people with similar interests -- all this comes to us from the university, and its ancient connections to the cathedral school, the village church, the symposium, the "Greek system."

Perhaps I'm finally returning to what I was trained to do, bred and brought up to do: read and think.

Here's Robert Reich in his book, The Work of Nations:

"Symbolic analysts solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols. They simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality. The manipulations are done with analytic tools, sharpened by experience. The tools may be mathematical algorithms, legal arguments, financial gimmicks, scientific principles, psychological insights about how to persuade or amuse, systems of induction or deduction, or any other set of techniques for doing conceptual puzzles."

I spent most of the year around people who had not been out in the world much -- although some had been out in it a lot more than I have -- and the rhythm of the academy was, to them, the rhythm of life. The fluent analysis of symbols was the yardstick by which they measured themselves. The deadlines set by professors and enforced by the academic calendar defined their seasons.

But so did a lot of other appurtenances that simply didn't exist when I was there age: PCs, iPods, cell phones, social networking. They stayed in virtual contact, building and maintaining friendships primarily by means of electronic digital technology rather than in person, enabling them to become more efficient but also making face-to-face contact kind of fraught, ambiguous -- uncomfortable.

The ability to tie together disparate ideas from different disciplines is the work of the computer, but now young brains are wired to harness that power and potential. Mine isn't, yet.

But the brain is sizzling with new neural connections and new ideas.

Which I'll have to share later.

--T.A.

When We Watched the Sun Come Up, for the First Time Ever

At the Birkat Hachamah celebration this morning, we stood at the edge of a pond, in a public park, in a suburb of Chicago. It was a little below freezing. Ducks and geese honked and paddled above their undulating reflections; the Sun bubbled up over a clear horizon in a wash of red.

I asked that people shut their eyes and feel the filament of Being that attached them to the Sun. I invited them to feel the sunlight through their eyes. And then we were quiet, contemplating the words of Psalm 19:

Day to day utters speech, and night to night speaks knowledge;
There need be no speech; nor words; their voice is heard without it.

And I thought, but did not say:

The sunlight beginning to glow through your eyelids is you, coming into being.

Light pouring through a film of flesh and blood: this is the essence of your very being.

Day by day, you speak, act, are in the world;
But the cycle that goes from darkness to darkness is the sum total of your life. 
You are reborn, through the miracle of the circulation of light and energy.
You come to be; you pass away.
Each day, and each life, is reborn in small moments like this one.
The Sun is the seal of this agreement,
The guarantor of your great good fortune to be alive right now.

--T.A.

Sunrise of Liberation

Wednesday, April 8 marks a pretty cool confluence of events on the Jewish calendar: the return of the Sun to its place in the heavens at the moment of its creation; and the fast of the firstborn on the eve of Passover.

The Sun comes to this point once every 28 years. For many years now, and many years hence, April 8 is the date when it occurs. This year, April 8 is also the day -- the evening -- that marks the beginning of Passover. According to one sage, the birkat haChama has fallen on the 14th of Nissan in the Jewish calendar only twice before: once, before the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt; once, before Esther redeemed the Jews at Purim. In fact, this confluence of events has occurred 11 times in Jewish history. There are other sites that speculate on the auspiciousness of this event.

I'lll be joining Rabbi Karyn Kedar and many others at sunrise on a local hilltop on April 8; I'll lead a brief meditation as the Sun emerges as it might have done in its first moments.

At times like this, Olam habah, the world to come, is also "the world that is coming:" like a train of infinite cars, it's always arriving, always moving past. Creation is still happening. Liberation is still happening. When you bless wine or bread, you're raising it. When you read of liberation, you're raising yourself.

And when you feel wonder at the Sun -- its magnificents as a tonic, mnemonic, a disc of creation and destruction -- you move Creation forward to this moment. You move light into every dark space. You move all moments to this one. You are free.

My Thoughts Awaken Me to See You

By Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra

My thoughts awaken me to see You; They show me in my heart's eye Your deeds; They teach me to tell Your wonders,      "When I behold Your heavens,      The work Your fingers made." Around its course the disk of heaven walks, A potter’s wheel enwhirling the world; It has no lips, and yet it tells Your glory To earth, unmoved within its orbit,      Suspended in the void,      By cords of Your love stayed. Thither the sun yearns, and there burns, And of its light some to the moon lends. While heaven’s sphere is spread out like a tent, With stars blooming on it, a garden,      Proclaiming how profound      The plans that You have laid.

 

Have a liberating Passover. Easter. Moment. Life.

--T.A.

So much to do, so little to say

I have suddenly forgotten why I blog. Suddenly and completely.

I can't think of much to say. Not much, anyway, that would make a damn bit of difference to me or anyone else. Or that wouldn't be dredged up and misinterpreted.

I'm at work, I'm in school, I'm at home, I'm the co-president of the board of an organization that serves the Jewish poor and is struggling, like so many other Jewish organizations, to raise money to meet rising need; the world is changing and this isn't a refuge for me anymore. For some reason, I feel like I have to be careful -- with my time, with my writing, with my energy.

The world will be changing -- is changing -- in ways that both defy and require description, documentation. If you weren't here, you wouldn't believe the stuff that's happened in the last 12 months. The next 12 will only be more of the same.

There are a very few blogs that will be very useful during that time.

I'll be around some. Just not as much as in days of yore.

--T.A.

City of Self-Importance

Henry Paulson ramping up production for the stimulus package: "Warp speed, Scottie!"

Gabe and I paid a weekend visit to Oldest Daughter in DC this weekend. O.D. graduates from college in less than 2 months, and the three of us had some memories to make.

We paid visits to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the International Spy Museum and the Newseum. We ate Chinese, Indian, and the Daughter's own inspired home cooking. We walked til our legs almost fell off, and we saw I Love You, Man, a very funny story about how to get married and make friends at the same time.

Traveling with Gabe, 13, is a little like traveling with a dog. Give him some exercise and plenty to eat, and he's very happy. At the end of the day, a little cuddling disguised as tussling, and he passes right out.

But seeing Oldest Daughter living off-campus with four friends, keeping house and nailing down post-graduation employment, it quickly becomes clear how fast these people grow up and move on. A rabbi friend of mine likes to say at bar and mat mitzvahs that, once they're 13, you only have a literal fistful of years left with them under your roof. At 14 or 15 they start high school, at 16 they get behind the wheel, at 18, with any luck, they leave for college.

Washington is an impressive and somehow ominous city. It radiates self-importance. It bathes in self-reference. In the same way that the street grid radiates out from the Capitol and the White House, the muscle of its bureaucracy and the grandeur of its collective ego seems to peer down at you from Art Deco/New Deal facades, from grand memorials, from hidden cameras.

Washington's denizens have a seriousness and a purposefulness about them that even makes Sunday feel like a workday. I left Gabe asleep in the hotel room this morning and went to a Starbucks down the street; there they all were, studying the New York Times and Washington Post like yeshiva students poring over a page of Gemara. Or else hunched toward their laptops. In a way, it wasn't all that different from the basement lounge of the U of Chicago Divinity School. Only the coffee wasn't as good.

Most of Oldest Daughter's roommates joined us for breakfast. It came up in casual conversation that three of them came from homes where the parents had divorced. I'd forgotten how common it is. They had all already met O.D.'s biological father, and it felt like there was some amiable scrutiny occurring. Maybe not. When you're a step-parent, you just assume that's what's going on. More likely it was Sunday morning, they were a little tired, hung over or both, and they were just happy to be fed.

More sobering was the fact that their job prospects are dim. A couple of them are interning for media or PR companies. These internships would ordinarily lead to a job, but the companies have made clear that that's not going to happen this year. These young women are emerging into the worst job market of my lifetime, let alone theirs.

Middle Daughter has a job waiting for her after graduation. In government consulting -- surely one of the only growth industries out there. When I told my old man what she would be making, he shook his head. "That's more than I made in any one year of my entire working life," he said. She is lucky, but she's made a lot of her own luck. Still, there's so little of the self-important about her. She seems strangely . . . mellow.

Gabe and I flew home this afternoon, leaving our hearts with Oldest Daughter -- and also our camera. Perhaps she'll bring it home with her at Passover.

--T.A.

Managing Expectations

Going back to school has begun a transformation in me. So far, it's enlarged my brain and withered my soul.

I worked full time in property management for more than a decade. I wasn't on the front lines, where I would've lasted less than a week. Instead, I was placed in management, which is where people go when they are related to other people in management.

I have unlimited admiration for property managers and leasing agents. This is a profession almost no one gets into on purpose. It requires organizational skills and people skills; math skills and language skills (especially the ability to parse documents in Bureaucratic Mandarin for hidden meaning); time management and stress management skills; and a sense of humor. Most of all, it is a constant exercise in the art of crisis management. Which is to say, it's a lot like life, but not like living.

Apartment buildings are big, imperfectly built computers: assemblages of different, distantly related kinds of engineering, thrown together quickly and inexpertly and then managed and maintained (usually) so as to maximize revenue for the owner, well ahead of the comfort and "private enjoyment" of the "consumer" (aka, the resident).

Universities are kind of like apartment buildings. They are assemblages of physical and intellectual assets designed not for the benefit of the "consumer" (in this case, the student) but for the purpose of self-perpetuation. Graduate students understand this very well, entering into a business arrangement with the intention of furthering their own careers while helping the graduate school build its reputation and its balance sheet.

Being in graduate school is about managing expectations and appearances, and about forging alliances and connections. It would appear to be about gathering knowledge, but that actually takes a back seat to the work of positioning oneself for whatever graduate school is supposed to put within reach. There is fine work to be done, don't get me wrong: elevated thinking and experimentation, and energetic exploration and analysis, the development of lasting friendships and the reading of great works. It's just that none of that's really the point.

As you can see, just lately, I have become profoundly, deeply exhausted by being in school. I'm not talking about tired here; I'm talking about old to the bone. I'm talking about being done with ambition and the desire to remake myself or be something I always thought I could be but clearly am not. I have never been good at exploiting situations or relationships, even in the best sense of the term. I've tended, instead, to let myself be exploited, figuring that it's an honor to be useful to some entity larger than myself, and that besides, then I don't have to figure out what I stand for.

At this age, I am what I am. I am not elastic enough or plastic enough to remake myself. I entered into the Faustian bargain of a relationship with a fine university, and a well-known department within it, thinking that we could mutually benefit from the arrangement. It wasn't just a mid-life crisis, it was a last-ditch attempt to remake myself in the image I'd always had of myself in my mind's eye (OK, maybe that is a mid-life crisis).

But those images are dangerous things to hold onto. Institutions are not built by dreamers, and they are not there for the benefit of dreamers. Rather, dreamers are the fuel consumed in the furnace room of the institution.

Can you tell it's finals week?

I have barely been present to myself or my family or the work I still must do for these last six months. I've dwelt in a fog of abstract cogitation and Hebrew grammar (to which French has just been added, like insult to injury). I take up a space that could be occupied by someone half my age, who could really do something with the language and the coursework and the books that I waste. I will be 50 this year, and I will remain a work in progress whose progress never quite seems to be in the right direction.

I just want to be able to take my son to Dunkin' Donuts on a Sunday morning and hold tightly to my atomizing family and forget all the dreams that have distracted me ever since I could remember.

And then I want to go bowling.

--T.A.