True Ancestor

Sunday Afternoon: A Meditation

The two couples that come over with their young children for brunch have left. The dishwasher is running.

Chicago's watery afternoon light begins to weaken.

The Bears are winning a final, meaningless regular-season game. The town's other teams are mired in mediocrity. Baseball is nowhere in sight.

A host of tasks cries silently to me from my desk.

Outside my study, remnants of December's 17 inches of snow sweats off the asphalt shingles of the mansard roof.

The router on my desk blinks and winks.

I sit and look out the window at the sclerotic tree branches, the deserted office park, the fat and frantic squirrels high-wiring across the backyard fence.

Five cardboard cartons of old papers stare at me from beneath the study windows.

Oldest Daughter sings to herself as she primps for another evening out.

My Mexico tan itches and peels and flakes; I feel like Gabe's gekko, when it turns pale and frosted-looking and sheds its bumpy skin. But that happens in the Spring, an eternity from now.

In the meantime: I pray for a speedy end to the Iowa caucuses. I begin to have a funny sense, which I haven't had before, that John Edwards could wind up facing John McCain for the presidency.

May clarity come to you, and to me, and to us all. Speedily.

And may we put that clarity to good and lasting use.

Happy New Year.

--T.A.

End-of-Vacation Syndrome

• The children, regardless of age, are restless, cranky or melancholy, depending on their innate disposition. It's certainly within the realm of possibility for any one child to display all these emotions at once.
• Watches, cell phones and shoes begin to reappear on the edge of one's consciousness, then on one's body.
• One's surroundings begin to leak familiarity, until they seem alien. You suddenly feel excluded from all that welcomed you.
• Weather patterns in other parts of the world are matters of some urgency.
• There is a last rush to spend money, eat food, soak up the sun's rays, frantically have fun.
• You become sentimental about home: you are happy at the prospect of your own refrigerator, your own car, your own bed.
• Your mind struggles again to accommodate details, logistics, plans, obstacles: Life.
• You are crusted with salt and sand. Something like a margarata with feet. You try to hold onto this sensation as you once again don long pants.
• It is hopeless.

Welcome home.

--T.A.

I'll Be Seeing You

No posts for a week.

No perspective on current events, no schmaltz on family life; no musings on religion, or lack thereof; no celebration or cerebration.

Just this wish for you:

Peace. Peace in your home and peace in your heart. Peace at work and peace at play.

Peace -- and patience. The blessings that come with peace, and the ability to bear up under inevitable pressure that comes with patience.

This, and more, may you have, and may you bring into the world: tonight, next week, next year, and every year thereafter, as long as you live.

--T.A.

Death of a Neighborhood Grocery Store

Another venerable institution -- a neighborhood grocery store, a socialist experiment, an icon of my childhood -- has bitten the dust.

The Hyde Park Co-op was a cooperative grocery store started in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood as a Depression-era, working-man's alternative to company stores. It was started, in all likelihood, by U. of Chicago idealists who wanted to create a collective -- oh, and by the way, get good food at decent prices. In time, it became the neighborhood grocery store -- a place whose smells, whose characters, whose chilly charm I can still recall, and whose opaque white fluorescent lights, ensconced in a drop ceiling, made me dream of heaven.

I remember trudging alongside my mother (in those years when she wore horrible Danish clogs and sounded like a Clydesdale thundering along the cobblestones) through the aisles of that store, sweating in my corduroy winter jacket with my mittens clipped onto the ends of the sleeves. I remember the neighborhood kids who bagged groceries there, and the vast aisles of produce and the smell of wet cardboard and citrus. I remember discovering the allure of infinite food, and the colorful aisles of cereal boxes; the siren song of Captain Crunch and the grrreat, cheerful masculinity of Tony the Tiger's Frosted Flakes.

I see the Co-op, still, from a small child's perspective. When I revisit my memories of the place, they're from perhaps three feet off the ground: the shelves are enormous, the workers' green aprons look like sails on a schooner, and the cornucopia is a miracle, each aisle disappearing in a parallax of impossible plenty.

Which is, of course, no reason to keep the store around. To read the comments under the Chicago Tribune article about the Co-op's demise is to understand how far the Co-op has fallen in recent years. It was never exactly a food boutique, but commenters (many of them former U. of Chicago students forced, for lack of choice, to shop at the Co-op) feel the Co-op is getting its just desserts (pardon the expression).

Perhaps Hyde Park is, too. Now the University will rent the space to a Jewel or a Dominick's. The neighborhood that loves to be different will be a little more like every other neighborhood. And the neighborhood residents who subsist on low or fixed incomes -- well, ironically, they'll actually probably be better off.

--T.A.

"I Am Legend." My response: "No, you're not."

A few evenings ago, while off on vacation with Gabe, we went to see Will Smith in I Am Legend. We both were looking forward to seeing the film: Gabe for its special effects, me for the larger messages, and the reminder of seeing Charlton Heston in The Omega Man many years ago.

The film has some redeeming features. Like the special effects. The special effects are stunning. The zombies are horrifying because they are the epitome of humanity gone wrong; the deserted and desiccated streets of New York are haunting. It's so well done that you can't imagine (a) how they did it, or (b) how it could have been done any better.

And Will Smith can act. He loves his dog so much that your heart just breaks -- and you hate him -- when he repeatedly puts the dog in harm's way (of course, there's danger everywhere, and he can't help it).

But the movie has only two gears: slow, and shriekingly fast. It has only one real relationship: Will Smith and Samantha, his German Shepherd. It has sonorous pronouncements set to Bob Marley music, and violence in the name of some greater good that is never even vaguely defined as anything other than survival.

And the story is weak. It's worse than weak, actually: it's sanctimonious and vapid at the same time. Without giving the plot-line away for those who don't know it, I'll just summarize its message here:

We are a special society: a society of caring and healthy people who will guard each others' mutual best interests -- until, that is, we discover that we have zombies in our midst. Then, while looking for a cure, we have to put our family's interests above all others. While reaching out to the zombies, we also have to kill as many of the zombies as we can. We have to be willing to give our lives to kill zombies, so that we can retreat to our magical compound and restore our society to its rightful place as the loving but well-armed nation of diverse, fair minded, heat-packing, warm-hearted, cold-blooded killers.

What disturbs me is that the above paragraph could also serve as a passable summary of the Old Testament.

But I give the Torah four stars, whereas I give I Am Legend a mere one and a half.

--T.A.

Surpassed by a son

I'm not a skier, I'm a flatlander. Always have been, always will be.

Except there was that period of a few short, eventful years when I lived in Denver. Everybody skied. Even the One True Wife and her little daughters skied. Those who disdained skiing still cross-country skied. (skiied?)

But Gabe has always loved the outdoors, and always loved challenging himself physically. He is not a risk-taker, but he is someone who wants to do extremely well those things that he chooses to do.

This weekend we're reprising our Presidents' Day trip to Park City, Utah, with a friend of mine and his son who, though 5 years Gabe's senior, still treats him like a contemporary (something Gabe's become accustomed to with teenagers).

This other dad and his son are excellent skiiers, so they go in one direction when we ski, and Gabe and I go another, toward the easier runs. I ski, Gabe snowboards. This year, I can't keep up with him. Partly it's because he's just a better athlete than me. Partly it's because my body aches more than his, after awhile.

And partly because I love to be behind him, watching him navigate the world without me in his sight. I love to watch him go from heel to toe, or from left foot in front to right foot in front. I love to watch him fall and see how he turns it into a turn, bouncing right back up on his board.

I like to watch him watching out for other people, and being alarmed and a little irritated when people don't watch out for him.

I like when we're sitting on the lift together, and all of a sudden, he hits me. Or nudges me and says, "Mean." Meaning that's my main quality. A joke, I'm sure. I'll nudge him back and he'll say "See? Mean. Meanmeanmean."

And I like how he stops and looks for me, from far down the slope, and when he sees me laboring toward him, sits down to wait for me.

That won't last much longer. But it's had its day. And a great day it's been.

--T.A.

"The Arctic is screaming."

That's what a senior scientist says after reviewing a record melt of Greenland's ice sheet this past summer -- a melt that exceeded the previous record by 19 billion tons.

Scientists don't yet know whether this is a momentary blip in an overall upward trend, or the climate having rushed horribly past a tipping point. What they do know is that the Northwest Passage is navigable by boat for the first time on record. And that "the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press."

How serious are any of the Presidential candidates about this issue?

How serious are we as a nation? The answer appears to be "Not so much:" I came across this story on AOL's home page, which scrolls through several stories of topical interest. The story after this one was:

Celebrity Headlines 2007.

At least the Arctic ice melt story came first. That would never have happened in a pre-Al Gore world.

--T.A.

I must be a Transcendentalist

Reading about Phillip Gura's book, American Transcendentalism: A History, I'm struck again by how much kinship and gratitude I feel toward the mutton-chopped masters of this American religious/philosophical movement.

And by how much we are all inheritors of their uniquely American take on religion.

Gura notes that Emerson, Thoreau and many lesser-known colleagues felt that religion, as expressed, communicated and practiced in their day, was not touching the heart; that one was guided toward religious experience primarily through the hear and not the head; and that the rigors of social conformity was inhibiting people away from "the supremacy of individual consciousness."

My unspoken, unexamined belief in the wisdom of my consciousness was probably what guided me toward Buddhism. I was frustrated with normative Judaism for exactly the reasons that guided this mostly Unitarian bunch toward "self-culture," an idea very similar to the nearly contemporaneous German idea of Bildung. People at my synagogue were seated, week after week, in the same seats, in the same rows, obedient prisoners in the dock of dogma, mumbling prayers, murmuring hymns, engaging in choreography oriented toward grander purpose but reduced to rote, with all the grandeur of a social club. I saw and felt nothing but alienation. My consciousness, and my conscience, led me elsewhere.

And then it led me back, and my experience of these same people, and these same services, was entirely transformed.

But that's a whole other story.

Without knowing it, I think most American-born Buddhists are Transcendentalists. As are most searching Jews, most feminists (harking back to one of the movement's principals, Margaret Fuller), many atheists, and all ardent fans of baseball.

This review calls Transcendentalism a "many-headed Hydra" but defines it as "the belief that divine primacy rested in the natural consciousness of the individual." This belief led the movement's grandees toward causes that would liberate the individual from drink: Theodore Parker become a leader of the abolitionist cause, and railed against other, more literal forms of slavery -- he was one of the "Secret Six," who knew of and supported John Brown's plans to raid Harper's Ferry. He also wrote an article called "How Ought the Bible to be Read," which urged readers "to read with reason," "with a consciousness of its antiquity," "with an awareness of the varying authors," and "with a feeling and sympathy for the nature of the work." Still revolutionary, even today.

(I only know this because I found everything you could ever want to know about Transcendentalism right here.)

The energies of the Transcendentalist movement -- if it can be called that -- dissipated by the 1850s, and in post-Civil War America, the appetite for serious philosophical introspection was trampled by the desire to just have a good time. But the ripples of this stone, thrown into the pond of our collective consciousness almost two centuries ago, are still lapping at the shore.

Are you in touch with your Inner Transcendentalist?

--T.A.

We can't win for losing

Ever have the feeling that no matter what our government does, it's the wrong thing?

That's the feeling that's haunting me now, thanks to the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capability and ambitions.

First of all, releasing a National Intelligence Estimate for public consumption has always struck me as one of those laudably American, democratic acts that can also be perceived as knuckle-headed. Why would you release national intelligence? Doesn't it cease to be intelligence the moment you release it (if not before)?

And doesn't releasing intelligence tip your hand and erode your credibility? If the NIE said the Iranians were evil incarnate, and were busily loading their first nuclear warhead onto a missile aimed at Israel, we'd all accuse the Bush Administration of orchestrating or slanting the report to suit their own nefarious objectives. The report would immediately lose all credibility, and the downward slope towards an expanded war in the Middle East would suddenly grow steeper.

Instead, the report says the Iranians suspended work toward development of nuclear weapons capability in 2003, and this, too, is heralded as a triumph for Democracy and diplomatic containment, not to mention proof of an autonomous, straightforward intelligence community.

But this is knuckle-headed, too.

You can tell it's knuckle-headed by Iran's reaction: they've claimed a major victory, and understandably so. If they truly have curtailed or ceased development of nuclear weapons capability, they're still busily ramping up a nuclear infrastructure that can produce enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. They could have enough of the stuff after a year of continous operation of the 3,000 gas centrifuges they're busy installing at Natanz. Besides, why would a country with so many energy resources at its disposal need nuclear energy for purely civilian purposes?

What's more, China and Russia are backing away from further sanctions. The effort to pressure the Iranian regime not just to suspend nuclear development but to soften its sabre-rattling has lost all steam.

Ahmadinejad knows that if Iran does build a bomb, he'll be able to eviscerate Israel just by knitting his brow in the direction of Tel Aviv. Now he knows, too, that all Iran has to do is idle the centrifuges for awhile, and everyone else will back away.

He also suspects, rightly, that anything Iran does will now be judged charitably, because, gosh, we've misunderstood them all along. This is dangerous. We have a poor track record not just of detecting Iran's actions but of understanding its intentions.

Lately, every move they make comes up smelling like roses.

And every move we make smells like -- fertilizer.

To me, this moment is the ultimate indictment of the Bush Administration's execution of foreign policy. It suggests some or all of the following: a predisposition toward military engagement without justification; an intelligence community with diminished capacity, in near-rebellion, or both; a startling lack of credibility among Middle Eastern and global powers; an inability to read trends and anticipate developments in a way that could increase credibility and shore up intelligence-gathering capability; and a State Department trying to burnish its legacy while Rome is burning.

The result of the NIE, coupled with the bungled war in Iraq, is that we've increased Iran's credibility at the expense of our own, and in so doing given them a shield to do whatever the hell they want, not just with their nuclear program, but in the region generally.

No matter how accurate the report, no matter what happens in the intervening year, the next Administration's problems -- and yours, and mine -- just got bigger.

--T.A.

Spiritual Renewal: Just Add Light

We're entering a profound period in our year. The darkest time of the year, the time when festivals of lights appear in various spiritual traditions, a time of purported miracles, a time dedicated to renewal.

Last night, in a "teleclass," the author and Mussar teacher Alan Morinis asserted that Chanukah does not celebrate the military victory (of a small band of insurgents over one of the mightiest armies in the world) as the miracle. Rather, it was the sustenance that a small amount of consecrated oil provided to a single wick that was miraculous. We honor and reenact that miracle, Alan said, when we kindle Chanukah lights, seeking to rededicate ourselves to growth and understanding: the discovery of spiritual sustenance and renewal in the smallest of flames is its own modest form of miracle.

And even though most evidence suggests that Jesus was not born at this time of year, his birthday is celebrated now because  -- well, because it was more seemly, I guess, to celebrate the son of God than the Sun God. The idea of Messianic redemption dispels all sorts of darkness.

Chanukah is a holiday that centers on the home. That's where we create and share the most light, ideally. That's where our light is born and bred, kindled and shed.

An entire season of festivity has grown up around Christmas. It, too, makes the family the center of a community which in turn is the center of a still wider community.

So it gets me thinking more about the trend toward independent, synagogue-less worship. Christians have been worshipping and learning in homes for centuries. The "house church" more of an institution in Christianity than a mere trend (h/t: me True Ann-Sister).

And yet, the "house synagogue" can be said to have started with the destruction of the Second Temple. That's when the rabbis codified a system of teaching and a form of worship that could be taken anywhere, performed anywhere. They were forced to understand that giving sanctity a central site also made it vulnerable. You had to be able to find the Divine in a room, or on the run. They pared it down to its essential. Bring a few people together, have the right texts in hand, and then, just add light.

Happy Chanukah.

--T.A.