True Ancestor

Memo to Sharon Stone: Just Shut Up.

Sharon Stone has just given a lecture on bad karma.

To which I reply: Oy.

When are we going to stop being juvenile about the unseen workings of the Universe?

Do we really think hundreds of thousands of Chinese needed to die because the Chinese government is mean to the Dalai Lama?

Or that thousands were swept away in the Tsunami because of Israel's disengagement from Gaza?

And how about those naughty Burmese? We're not sure what goes on there, but their government sure sucks! Guess that's why the powerful were spared, while the poor folks in the Irrawaddy Delta got washed away.

If there were a God that had such terrible aim and such flawed execution, don't you think that God would have tripped on His robe and stumbled into our midst by now?

Or if that God had such a deep investment in current affairs and a love for Tibetan Buddhism, don't you think that God would have stepped into the situation, oh, maybe 50 years ago?

Or is God's timing off because 50 years is, like, a millisecond to Her, and She was late because She forgot her keys and had to run back and get them?

Sharon, if karma works as you say, then your house should slide into the ocean in a week or two. But no, bad karma, so they say, is spread across many lifetimes and takes many lifetimes to clean up. It's a complex idea that can be distilled down to cause and effect -- between living beings, not between one government and the ground under its people's homes and schools. 

Show me how Beijing's repression of Tibet caused the movement of tectonic plates in Sichuan Province.

Go on. I'm waiting.

It'll probably be awhile, so in the meantime, could I just ask the MSM, pleez o pleez, to stop treating Hollywood celebs like major thinkers and powerful diplomats? Show us their lovely houses and their most excellent cosmetic surgeries. Show 'em on the red carpet and the runway.

But I beg you: no microphones.

--T.A.

Going Negative

I'm in one of those periods in which my skin is incredibly thin, my patience terribly short. I'm hurting people around me, and their expression of hurt only pisses me off more, as if I'm the one being wronged.

I can discern a couple of contributing factors. One is my anxiety about going back to school. Another is the interrogations to which I'm regularly subjected about this midlife adventure, and the incredulity and condescension with which it's often greeted. I suppose if I were able to hold onto a shred of equanimity I'd see that some people are jealous, some are threatened, and most are just plain ol' surprised that a guy with a family and a mortgage and a decent job would chuck it all. They have every right to be surprised, don't they? Heck, I'm still surprised.

Another factor: I'm sort of between worlds right now -- still focusing a lot of energy on work, even though it's now official that I'll be cutting my hours back. People have begun to take over some of my duties. School doesn't start until late Fall. I feel a little untethered. I'm not so good at that.

Also, I'm not meditating enough. When spiritual discipline goes, everything becomes personal. There's a direct correlation between how much you cast yourself at the mercy of the Great Mystery, and how personally you take things. Of course, some things are meant to be taken personally. Still, when you viscerally understand how interconnected It all is, we all are, even the barbs aimed at you don't hurt so much. You have a better understanding of the force that propels them, and better medicine with which to salve the wound.

But when I'm feeling like this, I feel claustrophobic. I can't get enough space. Every interaction is an interruption. Everything nettles. The closer someone is to me, the harder I push them away. The One True Wife has had just about enough, and I guess I don't blame her. The Daughters, in various stages of transition out of the house, want nothing but space anyway, and are blissfully unaware. Gabe, whose life is still centered in the house, takes it all in and says not a word. But at times like this, he has a nickname for me: Mean. It's not an accusation -- it's a moniker.

Buddhism helps you cultivate a peaceful acceptance of even the unsatisfactory. Judaism sets you at odds with it. Buddhism goes with the flow. Judaism struggles upstream. Buddhism meditates. Judaism thinks, prays (equal parts petition, praise and thanksgiving) and thinks some more. Buddhism grows silent. Judaism grows loud. Buddhism opens its arms. Judaism takes up its tools. Buddhism nods and smiles. Judaism shakes its head and cries.

With all this turning around in the overheated dryer of my cranium, I have several simultaneous responses to every world event, every snotty remark, every casual injustice. I can't sort them out or express them clearly. On the one hand, I think I'm suffering from a wider syndrome, a kind of ethical hypochondria (on which Charles Martin waxes eloquent), in which all actions are weighed for their ethical and moral content, and, if found wanting, merit Fixing. On the other hand, I am sick unto death of fuming invective, obnoxious, anonymous commentary and high-handed judgment from people who have no skin in the game.

With the aid of my Zen training, I hereby rededicate myself to making peace with the Unsatisfactory. And, with the anchor of my Jewish soul and all to which it answers, I resolve to make peace with the Unsatisfactory by slowly, persistently, challenging it.

Starting with my self.

--T.A.

Time to Grow Your Own

From a young age, I fantasized about living on a farm. I decided at about age 5 that, in the summer before I turned 17, I was going to work on a farm. It never happened, so I still dream about it, even though 17 is long gone.

I loved the sight of farms from a young age. I adored the orderly rows of crops, ridged like corduroy, zipping past the window of our VW bus as it made its pokey way along  the highway on long trips. I loved barns. The smell of hay. The idea of coming in exhausted at the end of the day and having a huge meal.

I was idealizing farm life, in a way, but I was a kid. I worked harder at understanding farm life than any other city kid I knew. I got up early every morning to watch the Farm Report on Channel 9, and hear the orotund orations of Orien Samuelson as he read and analyzed the latest commodity prices, and I loved the fact that farmers were watching right along with me.

When I was at summer camp, at around age 13, I told a counselor of my yearning to work on a farm.

"Well, my aunt and uncle will put you to work on their farm in Virginia anytime," Dave said. "But you'd better be ready to work your ass off about 12 hours a day, hurt over every inch of your body, and sit around in the evenings, drinking stuff you shouldn't be drinking and shooting cans and road signs with a shotgun."

I never worked for Dave's aunt and uncle, or any other farmers, for that matter.

I regret it more than ever after reading about the nascent movement of "energy survivalism." It features learning the skills to cultivate energy and food independence, or at least self-reliance, and removing oneself from the collapsing grid of modern excess. The pioneers of energy survivalism may tend to the wild-eyed prophetic types: some anticipate having to fend off hordes of starving disoriented urbanites -- folks who can't grow an herb or make their own latte but who might use their GPS systems to head to the country in search of food, or a least a B&B at which to weather the storm.

I find it pleasingly ironic that, at the possible onset of global upheaval, I'm heading to Divinity School -- and facing a 60-mile round-trip commute to school. A less practical choice could hardly be invented, especially by a person who's been the primary breadwinner in a family with three children, two of whom will be in college next year; especially in a time of rising oil and food prices.

I still can't believe I made this choice. I quake in bed at night and curse myself during the day.

And yet I can't shake the notion that on many levels -- including the practical -- it's a choice I won't regret.

Tomorrow, however, I'm digging a hole to begin a compost heap in the back yard. More vegetables are going in this year.

But face it: I was a city kid, now I'm a suburban dad. I couldn't build a cabin out of Lincoln Logs, much less the real thing. And I couldn't grow a weed without fertilizer.

But farming life, on a smaller scale, may be the wave of the very near future.

--T.A.

Calusa: 1998 - 2008

On this last trip to Florida, my father, aka "Director of Sunsets," did a more than creditable job working his magic at the end of each day.

On Monday, we were joined at sunset by my parents' longtime friend and neighbor, Judy, and her wondrous yellow Lab, Calusa (ka-LOO-sa), named after the Native American tribe that lived on the bay islands and fished the flats of Estero Bay and its tidal estuaries until the late 18th century (the raids of neighboring tribes and diseases introduced by the Spaniards conspired to wipe them out).

It was Calusa's last sunset. The faithful and gentle dog was riddled with arthritis, in too much pain to even sleep, and she was going to be put down the next morning.

Calusa (pictured above with Gabe, in 2002) was one of the great dogs I've ever known. Intelligent, playful, obedient, and heroically helpful to her master, Judy's late husband Ted, Calusa was the kind of dog about which stories and songs are written; the kind that you know has a soul, and whose soul recognizes yours;  the kind of animal for whom mourning is painful and prolonged (is there any other kind?).

On my April trip, Gabe and the One True Wife came with. Calusa was clearly in a lot of pain but still able to walk over to us and greet us smilingly, and loll onto her back for a good tummy-rub. On Monday evening, however, Calusa only reluctantly, at Judy's urging, hobbled off the motorized cart that Judy drove over and that her late husband had begun using after diabetes forced the amputation of his legs. The poor dog could barely walk, and was only able to get comfortable when lying down.

Ted and Judy got Calusa when she was only a few months old, after mourning their previous (also marvelous) dog, Ebony. A year or two later, when Ted was stricken with diabetes, they had no trouble training Calusa to be Ted's "service dog," and she accompanied him literally everywhere, helping and guiding him through life as his health declined.

Judy says that Calusa never recovered from Ted's death. A depression settled over Calusa; then her health began to decline.

In her youth, Calusa would retrieve all day long. I remember evenings of tiring my arm out, hurling a tennis ball toward the Gulf, or hitting it into the water with a tennis racket, Calusa retrieving it tirelessly, joyfully, until darkness fell (you can see the ever-present tennis ball beside her in the photo. You can expand the photo by clicking on it). Gabe played this game with Calusa, too, and they formed a sturdy friendship. Calusa greeted Gabe warmly in April, even though she had seen him only once in the past six years.

Calusa's favorite friend, however -- outside of Ted and Judy -- was my father. With permission from Judy, Dad came out to watch the sunset each evening, a cracker tucked in his shirt pocket, just in case Calusa and Judy came by. Calusa would look to Judy for permission, then come over to my father, staring eagerly at his pocket, and wait for him to proffer the cracker.

"Gently, Lucy," Judy would say, and Dad would extend the cracker, and Calusa, ever the retriever, would take it in her mouth as if she were lifting an egg out of a bird's nest.

On Monday, Judy called my folks to say she would be coming over to watch the sunset with Calusa that evening, and she told them that Calusa would likely have to be put down the next morning. Judy and Calusa were waiting for us when we came out of the house, about a half hour before sunset. With Judy's permission, my mom, my dad and I each gave Calusa a cracker. A day-long, wind-driven haze parted to reveal a glorious sunset, and we all watched, paying extra, gentle attention to Calusa, and to Judy, whose mourning had already begun.

As much pain as Calusa was in, she was still her alert, intelligent self. She eagerly watched dogs walking by on the beach; she gratefully accepted all petting and compliments; but she couldn't stop staring at my father's shirt pocket.

"I'm sorry, Calusa," my dad kept saying, "I gave you all the crackers I had."

Finally, the Sun had paid its parting tribute. By then, Judy was exhausted, and girding for a great goodbye.

We said goodnight to Judy, and to Calusa, trying too hard to be gentle in the face of the momentous. I told Judy that, while Judaism was both expansive and, compared to Christianity, somewhat vague on the subject of heaven, it is felt that people and animals both have souls, and that certainly our souls and the souls of the animals we have loved will meet again. Some Jews would not agree with this theological pronouncement -- it depends, as always, on which Jew you ask --  but my parents later said that Judy took some comfort from it.

Judy beckoned Calusa back up onto the motorized cart, and the two of them drove slowly away, as they had hundreds, perhaps thousands of evenings before.

After they had gone, my father discovered that Calusa kept staring at his shirt pocket with good reason: there was another half cracker hidden there.

"It's just as well," my dad said. "I wouldn't have wanted my farewell to be just half a cracker."

Here's to you, Calusa. We'll watch future sunsets, with crackers next to our hearts, in your honor.

--T.A.

The Old Folks' Home

Got on a 7AM flight this morning to make a business trip to Florida -- and, also, to look in on the aged and revered parents.

As the youngest of six children, I have no problem at all regressing into an infantile and dependent state -- even though my father and mother are 90 and 84, respectively, and could use more someone with a little more "initiative" (one of my dad's favorite admonitions when we were growing up was "Show some initiative!" We never knew what it meant, and didn't have the initiative to get the dictionary down off that high shelf).

The patterns in this house form a mnemonic choir that sings to me a lullaby of protection and sloth, borne out of the years of walks on the beach and afternoon naps in the bedroom facing the Gulf of Mexico. The colors and textures -- the salmon-pink tiles in the back bathroom, with its inexplicable three toilet-paper holders and its faux cut-glass doorknob -- are so familiar to me that I make conscious efforts, every time I'm here, to shock myself into pretending it's the first time I'll see them, or the last; and I try to open my eyes so that I can see any little hint of dilapidation in the house, or of descent in my parents.

The steps of their marital ballet, choreographed over six decades ago, are the same as they ever were: my father's anxious solicitousness in the kitchen; my mother's exasperation before guests arrive, and her expansiveness the moment they appear; the parents' tendency to carry on conversations across several minutes and between distant rooms, my father ensconced in his chair watching a ballgame, my mother engaged in a fierce post-prandial sterilization of their tiny galley kitchen; occasional calls from Dad, extending the obligatory offer from help that we all hope will not be accepted; these are the backdrop of their evenings, and of a childhood that I get to revisit, oddly enough, only on business trips.

Tomorrow I will, in the immortal words of Edward Albee, gird my blue-veined loins; I'll put on my "game face" and head down to Naples for a day of being a boss, casually inspecting the operations of a property that I rescued from condo conversion six years ago and preserved as low-income senior housing. I'll be harangued by at least a few residents about who did what to whom, and what about the property just isn't as good as it was once upon a time. I'll see the staff at the property gamely holding back the voracious elements, the bugs and the weeds and the mold and the heat washing in as the leading edge of summer's frontal assault. I'll review reports and talk to the manager; I'll walk the grounds and the hallways and talk to residents; I'll see and be seen.

I'll stop on the way back to my parents' place and pick up some fresh fish that Mom will cook for dinner. She will insist on cooking. I've never come close to chasing her out of the kitchen. Then my dad and I wage this mock-chivalrous battle over who will sacrifice themselves to the Chore of the Dishes. He will likely win out, although, when he sits down for a rest before tackling the pots and pans, I will jump in and play the hero.

Then we'll go out to the beach and watch the sun sink beyond Sanibel Island, into the brow-line of sky sweating out its daytime fever. Perhaps Dad and I will smoke a cigar; perhaps Mom will do her Vaudeville cough and wave her hand in front of her face, her comic benediction of the smoke that always finds her. And so, in this small way, I become a small player in their pageant again; a guest with a running part on the docu-drama of their dotage.

Next week's episode will include the quiet celebration of their 66th wedding anniversary, a mind-numbing achievement that would indicate, at least to me, that their solicitous dance, and their dancing of it, is a healing dance, a dance that honors love and hallows time and makes every habitual gesture a breath of new life.

Tomorrow night, I will wheel the garbage out to the roadside for Tuesday morning pickup. On Tuesday morning, I'll kiss the aged and revered parents goodbye, head to work, then to the airport. In a couple of weeks, the parents will migrate northward to Chicago for the summer. They'll engage in their tragi-comic nesting ritual for a couple of days, struggling to find reading glasses and set up their laptop and get their dressers organized; then they will slowly unwind, and all will be as it was, for as long as it can be.

They'll be home again, and so will I.

--T.A.

Into the blogosphere, like a pebble into the ocean, drops . . .

My 800th post.

--T.A.

Do you speak "Student"?

I'm counting that among the languages I'll have to learn when I return to school in the Fall.

The Academy, from which I've been absent about a quarter century, doesn't function the way the business world does. For one thing, the academy uses more syllables. Do business people regularly, or ever, use a word that has as many syllables as, say, epistemological?

For another thing, the overweening and overbearing bureaucracy of most academic institutions is stunning. I see where I'm going to have to get all up-to-date on my vaccines, as if I were Middle Daughter trekking off to the Steppes of Asia. I'll have to register for courses, and petition committees of the faculty to accept my proposed course of study, and get various approvals from various deans . . .

On the other hand -- how different is that, really, from the business world? You want to do something, you usually have to put your plan in writing and get several layers of approval. You have to talk a good game.

But in the business world, that talk is business-speak. In the Academy, you have to speak "student."

Oh -- I'll have to learn Hebrew, too. I mean really learn Hebrew. And pass a reading exam in another language (most likely German), before it's all said and done.

James Robinson, a professor in the History of Judaism at the Divinity School, has been very supportive of my mid-life adventure. I asked him which other professors I should meet before choosing courses for the Fall.

His advice: You don't need to meet them. You need to read them.

Ah, of course, I thought. Academic networking is an exchange of ideas, not contact information. The monograph is the business card of the Academy.

I just finished reading three works, recommended to me by Professor Robinson, on the "ecstatic Kabbalah" of Abraham Abulafia, a 13th-century Spanish Kabbalist who came to be convinced that he was the Messiah. After becoming convinced of this, he decided he had to meet Pope Nicholas III. Abulafia was persistent until an audience was arranged. Little did he know that Pope Nicholas had given instructions that Abulafia should be taken outside the gates of Rome and burned.

Abulafia was on his way to the audience when the Pope suddenly suffered a massive stroke and died.

Abulafia's radical idea was that you could achieve prophecy through the careful study and practice of meditation and chanting of various combinations of Hebrew letters. He thought that every Hebrew letter was a name of God, and therefore every combination of letters another Divine name with different mystical properties. He believed that, when one achieved the highest levels of prophecy, the student became, in a sense, one with the Divine. Having achieved that, Abulafia figured he must be a Messianic figure. He lived as an itinerant mystic, traveling and teaching throughout Europe until his death at the age of 50.

Why is this interesting to me? Because I think it's an early example of Judaism using meditative practice to discover Oneness.

Because Abulafia was a master of non-attachment.

Because he spent his life teaching that mystical experiences are accessible to anyone.

Because he was a nut.

Because there's power in the Hebrew language.

Because it's part of Jewish history.

And because he taught Jewish meditation seven centuries before it was cool.

--T.A.

Incremental Apocalypse

Middle Daughter arrived home on Sunday, after her five-month volunteering jaunt through India and Africa. A few weeks ago she was diagnosed with malaria. She immediately upped her anti-malarial medication, and yesterday, a battery of tests showed no sign of the disease. Either she eradicated the malaria with the increased dosage of medicine, or she never had the disease at all. We'll never know.

As I write this, she's under the knife in the chair of an oral surgeon, getting skin scraped from the roof of her mouth and grafted onto a small portion of her lower jaw where, for some reason, she's suffered an almost total loss of gum tissue. She'll be in a lot of pain and a drug-induced swoon for a couple of days; then, we hope, she'll begin to heal in earnest.

From the minute we picked her up at the airport, stories have been tumbling out of her: the fall she took into a ditch in Tanzania, leaving, on the back of her left thigh, the largest bruise I have ever seen; the terror of crossing a street in Delhi, and learning the trick of crossing next to a cow, whose sacred status means it musn't be harmed (and whose size almost guarantees that it won't); the site of a black rhino at the Ngorongo Crater (hey: there's one now!); learning to sleep on trains clutching all your belongings; the deep bonds formed with the kids in the schools in Delhi and in Moshi, Tanzania, where she worked (that's Moshi in the other photo).

And coming home, she was at first delighted, then somewhat stunned at the ho-hum opulence of American life. A bathroom -- all to herself?! A toilet that wasn't a hole you had to squat over?! Heat, and lights, and big, comfortable cars, and television? And sushi?!!

The other night, before Middle Daughter got home, the One True Wife and I went out to dinner with friends who have the largest and most opulent house of any family I know. The friends built this house about five years ago. They told me that their kids now run through the house turning off lights in empty rooms, and scolding their parents for their excesses. It's more than just the cheerily correct PR of the classroom. Kids intuitively understand what their parents cannot or will not grasp: we're on the point of no return. The next little burst of energy into your flat-screen TV, or the switch that illuminates that room full of recessed lights, might be the end of the beginning of the end.

The latest science is clearly suggesting -- and in unusually frank terminology -- that the tipping point in global warming is happening right now.

The will to survive exerts itself spectacularly against spectacular threats -- but when the threat is creeping and gradual, the will may arrive too late.

Our kids know this in their bones. Middle Daughter fears that India will become one giant traffic jam when the bargain basement Renault/Nissan/Bajaj joint venture car begins to pour onto the market at the rate of 400,000 per year. She thinks even cows will become roadkill. And then there's the huge increase in demand for oil that the new cars will instigate.

Gabe is appalled that my Honda Accord Hybrid only averages about 25 miles per gallon. You call this a hybrid? And when are they going to hurry up and produce the Chevy Volt?

Oldest Daughter, she of the Washington, DC, internships and political perspective, thinks the Prius will look like a dinosaur within 18 months, and we should all hold out for better, more environmentally responsible technology.

Two nights ago, at Middle Daughter's craving's behest, we bought sushi from Whole Foods and sat around our ancient analog TV set, watching awful television and enjoying being together again. I thought about where the fish had come from, and the Burmese who could really have used that rice, and the electric meter spinning like a top; I loved having my whole family together again, and stopped, for a moment, wondering when the other shoe would drop.

--T.A.

When you're up close at a baseball game,

you can see the distrust and loathing cross the players' mostly stoic faces as they come within earshot of the fans. You can see what the players and coaches do in the dugout when they think no one is watching: razzing opposing players and coaches, ogling women in the stands, imitating teammates' batting stances. And spitting -- lots of spitting.

You can see how the fans howl insults and pleas for attention in the same breath. "You suck! Throw me a ball!"

You can see how big and how specialized a professional athlete is. Every muscle, every piece of equipment, every tic, is, like every inch of the field, carefully considered, created and calibrated for the prevailing conditions.

You can see how the modern ballpark is built to distract us from the fact that we're not watching the game on TV. The frequent musical interludes, the cavorting mascots, the inane between-inning contests, the ADD-inducing scoreboard are all meant to function like commercials in real time, so that you're tempted to spend money on the products that cross your field of vision, and so that you don't have to concentrate on anything for an extended period.

However, with all that said: sitting in really good seats, with Gabe and two of his friends, and seeing a well-played ballgame, was a real MasterCard moment. The kids were so stunned by these seats they started waving hello to the ballplayers. "Hey, Mr. Young! Hello! Ozzie! Hey Ozzie: Hi!!!" The speed of the pitches, and the batted balls, made them yelp with terror and excitement.

And two majestic home runs by the hometown boys -- two rainbow arcs down the left-field line -- made them howl in glee, and high-five the guys behind them, who by this time were so drunk that the boys instantly became their new best friends.

Gabe got thrown a t-shirt by some nubile, dancing representative of Chevrolet. His buddy Jeremy, who'd never gotten a major-league ball in his life, got a ball tossed to him by one of the Minnesota Twins' coaches.

Last night, the game was replayed on a local cable channel. We watched it again, because, when the camera on the third-base line focused on a left-handed hitter, Gabe and his friends were clearly visible, two rows above the Twins' dugout. He loved watching himself on TV, having a great time with his friends, in the same picture frame as a major-league ballplayer (mercifully, I was just out of camera range most of the time). He got to watch a great ballgame twice in one day, he got a t-shirt from a cute girl, and he got to see himself on TV.

I hate to say it but:

Priceless.

--T.A.

Theological Thoughts for the Day

What would an effective signal [of God's existence] be like? . . . To cope with the fact that anything can be interpreted in various ways, the signal would have to show its meaning naturally and powerfully, without depending on the conventions or artificialities of any language . . . A perfect signal should be spectacularly present, impossible to miss. It should capture the attention and be available by various sense modalities; no one should have to take another's word for it. It should endure permanently or at least as long as people do, yet not constantly be before them, so they they will notice it freshly. The signal should be a powerful object, playing a central role in people's lives. To match God's being the source of creation or standing in some crucially important relation to it, all life on earth should depend (mediately) on the signal and center about it . If there were some object which was the energy source of all life on earth, one which dominated the sky with its brilliance, whose existence people could not doubt, which couldn't be poked at or treated condescendingly, an object about which people's existence revolved, which poured out a tremendous amount of energy, only a small fraction of which reach people, an object which people constantly walked under and whose enormous power they sensed . . .

Of course, I am being somewhat playful here. The Sun does exist, it is about as good a permanent announcement as one could imagine or devise, yet it has not served to prove God's existence, even though viewing it as a signal does provide a unified explanation of why all those properties listed happen to be conjoined on one object. Since we do not find it easy to imagine how God could provide anything that would be a permanently convincing proof of his existence, why should we expect to be able to do it ourselves?  -- Robert Nozick, The Examined Life

Our religious understanding of evolution means that the divine energy is ever reaching forward and upward, in whatever halting, multiple, and spiraling ways, toward more sophisticated and complex levels of development. From where we stand in the evolutionary process, and given our ignorance of extraterrestrial conscious life forms, it seems right to say that human consciousness is a significant and qualitative leap in this process.    -- Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology