True Ancestor

Gabe's first shave

He insisted that no one had been teasing him about his faint, elegant mustache. He insisted he didn't care how he looked, with it or without it.

And yet he insisted on shaving it.

So, one week and one day after his bar mitzvah, I gave my son a primer in shaving technique, and watched as he shaved the peach fuzz off his upper lip.

Already 13, he's one of the oldest kids in 7th grade, having missed by one week the Sept. 1 cutoff. It's probably just as well. Boys at that age want so desperately to seem, and be seen as, mature. Maybe that's why he wanted to shave.

At his age, I not only had that wispy mustache, I also had a unibrow (which, since the early days of my acting career, has become just another square inch included in my daily shave). One kid in high school had said that it looked as though my eyebrows went subcutaneous above my nose and then swam out my nostrils.

But at Gabe's age, I was not one of the oldest kids in 7th grade -- I was one of the youngest in 8th grade. Maybe I kept my mustache (and accompanying unibrow) because, as one of the shorter boys in the class, I had to have some kind of badge of maturity, and facial hair (no matter where on the face it grew) was the best I could do.

Kids at that age can be cruel. Maybe someone teased Gabe about the peach fuzz. Maybe there's a girl he likes who doesn't like it.

Or maybe, alas, he's just at that age where he's in a hurry to be grown up.

--T.A.

D School, Redeemed (for the moment)

As an introduction to graduate school -- a reintroduction, really, after almost exactly 25 years -- I commuted 36 miles each way, every day, for three weeks, for an intensive class in Biblical Hebrew.

Class met for either 3 or 4 1/2 hours per day, depending on the day of the week. Instruction was highly technical (but very well done), emphasizing grammar, morphology, syntax and only then building a basic vocabulary.

I failed the first three quizzes (quizzes were administered at least 3 times each week). The art of transliteration was lost on me. Fortunately, we then moved onto things having to do with the actual language.

My routine was to get up at about 5:30 every morning, and get on the road by 5:45, if I was driving. I'd get past downtown to the other side of the city and reach my destination around 7:00AM, leaving me about 2 hours to study, and drink coffee, before the beginning of the class.

On longer days, commuting by train and express bus worked better, and I was able to read and study -- and stare out the window -- and the bus would drop me within a half block of the Divinity School. This lasted right up until the day before Gabe's bar mitzvah. I took the final exam on Tuesday.

In the end, I managed an A- in the class. Not bad for my first letter grade since the 1980s.

Yesterday, we were "oriented": there were faculty panels, details on student health insurance (no, thanks) and registration (yes, please), and meetings with advisors. I'm now registering for classes, trying to balance intellectual thirst with the logistics of home, work and commute.

My advisor is one James T. Robinson, who has entire libraries inside his head, and who isn't above giving very straightforward advice:

• Don't go into academia if you have a need to be popular.
• Forget Biblical Hebrew for now: learn modern Hebrew. It and English are the languages of modern Jewish scholarship.

• I have to pass a reading exam in either French or German. I had French from 4th grade through high school, so Prof. Robinson said that's the exam I should take. "Time is of the essence," he said. "Don't start yet another language at this point. Especially German, which is going to be utterly strange to you."

• Start defining and refining your potential research area now, Professor Robinson said. Gosh, I thought I was just there to learn, but clearly, this is part of what the learning entails, and includes.

• The learning will not come primarily from the classes, the professor told me, but from the reading I do on my own. Go out and get syllabi from courses I'm interested in but not taking -- and read, read, read.

• Don't be in a hurry. This won't happen quickly.

This is the first stop on my reading list, and it is already undoing my fears about the irrelevancy of intellectual endeavor.

I am humbled. And utterly thrilled.

--T.A.

Are You Joining "The Great Schlep?"

Joel Stein is.

This piece as funny as hell. 

This ain't just Borscht-belt bullshit. Here, in Joel Stein's piece, you read about real people (I'm pretty sure), in a real state, with real passions and real pasts, who are going to play a real pivotal role in the upcoming election.

Weed it and reep.

--T.A.

Thoughts on a Life-Cycle Event

All the preparations behind us, the bar mitzvah weekend of our son sucked us into its vortex and today spat us out the other side.

Every life-cycle event is a birth canal exiting the womb of a certain moment in your life. You are pushed into it and contracted through it by forces that, having nurtured you into existence, have realized for you that your removal is the imminent phase of your creation. You are ready, scatologically speaking, to be eliminated.

So maybe birth isn't the right metaphor.

This past weekend, a few hundred people poured into our synagogue and watched and listened to this rite of passage called the bar/bat mitzvah. My son Gabe and his first cousin Sarah, two months older than him, went through it side by side, and had parties side by side today, under a humid but cloudless late-summer sky, on the grounds of a local day camp.

Nothing struck me so much as how, in the days prior to the event, time seemed to enter a kind of rip current, and the event had a life force and momentum of its own. Gabe was, as usual, self-possessed and laconic, executing his duties with the slight smirk of adolescence, brightening noticeably when gifts were proffered. My mom and dad gave him the World War II-vintage lighter my mom had given my dad back in the early days of their marriage ("To Jeeps, from Jean" was the inscription on the back. Who knew my mom called my Dad 'Jeeps'?!!), and my sister Janet gave him a bull statuette that turns out to be -- yep -- a lighter.These made profound impressions on Gabe, who's got a passion for lighters and other small, symmetrical, beautifully designed objects.

All that remain of the weekend are fragments -- impressions -- faces that kept coming at me and moments that flashed and receded. No conversation went uninterrupted and my face hurt from smiling by the end of it all. The event, loaded with meaning, was deprived of all meaning by the urgency of last-minute preparations, and then had meaning restored to it by all the love that surrounded us. Notable fragments: getting to lead the Shacharit portion of the Sabbath service, and the way everything faded away but the text I was chanting; watching Gabe read an ancient text with agility and concentration and some reverence; the look on his face when he was done: liberation.

Oh! Right: that's what it was about!

Then my family -- all five sibs, my parents, a passel of nieces, nephews and their significant others -- retreated to my house for an afternoon and evening of that rare opportunity to be all together, unpressured and unhurried.

 

A bunch of us, including me True Ann Sister (lower left), two nephews, a niece-in-law and my mom (to my left; that's me in the black tee), listening to my dad spin out some wisdom yesterday evening back at our house. The topic was almost certainly baseball -- although it could also have been the $700 billion fiscal crisis our country is wrestling with.

One pleasant surprise was seeing Danny Miller at the bar mitzvah, with his sister and his nephew Spencer. Danny and Annie got to meet at last. At Gabe's bar mitzvah. Pretty weird world. 

An especially weird world when your son goes through a kind of initiation right before you, and you feel this sad distance beginning to open in your life; this quiet space opening and moving between you and the child. The rite that was his is yours, too: look, it's saying: you're done with the delusion that you can mold his character. He's his own person now, officially as well as plainly. I'm officially a little more alone, and a little more free, and soaringly happy, with a drop of sadness at the heart of me for the distances that are opening.

I am too emptied of all energy and anxiety and energy, and my heart is too full, to say much of anything else. 

 

Brother-in-law, mom, sister #3, One True Wife, Sister #4, niece. Names withheld to protect the innocent.

Gabe, first day of school, August 2008

--T.A.

"We appreciate your contributions to our success."

One of my regular bureaucratic (and, frankly, few remaining) duties at work is the signing of birthday cards, and cards recognizing employment anniversaries, for the business I'm a part of. The title of this post is the message inside the card thanking and congratulating people on the anniversary of their employment with us.

Isn't that message kind of obnoxious? Like, "Thanks for letting us climb on your back and grab the brass ring"?

Or does the "our" include them? Y'know, a rising tide lifts all boats.

I dunno. I'm going to have to ask them to look for other cards.

--T.A.

The Long Commute

The trip from my house to the University is almost 30 miles. On longer days, I can take public transportation, as the train-to-bus schedule beats driving hands down.

Door-to-door, the trip is about 90 minutes. The weary etiquette of my stops are almost touching: people on the train platform begin to cluster in groups about 10 minutes before the train comes: they know where the doors line up, and that's where their clusters form.

For some reason the express bus merits a line not a cluster. First come, first served.

Yesterday, I had to rush off the train to make a tight connection to the express bus. I let four women into the aisle before me, and then kept moving, in front of a guy waiting to get into the aisle.

"Idiot," he muttered.

I turned around. He was a good 6 inches taller than me: iPod earphones, balding. Blue eyes. Suburban tough guy.

"Yeah, you heard me," he said. "You're an idiot."

"Happy Monday to you," I said, and kept walking. If his 9-year-old had spoken to someone that way, he'd have put the kid in time out. Of course, I violated etiquette, too: if you're in a hurry, you stand up well before the train comes to a stop, so you can avoid the long line of people waiting to disembark at the station. Otherwise, you let people into the aisle in  front of you. I guess.

Ah, well. Live and learn.

I study on the bus and the train, but I also look out the window. It's the one time of day -- and the first time in a long time -- that I let someone else convey me, and watch the world go by. In the winter, it'll be a decidedly less lyrical experience. For now, though, despite the occasional train bully, it's an oasis, a hollow carved into the rock of a very hectic time.

--T.A.

A transplanted Israeli's view of the U.S. election

I was at a bar mitzvah yesterday and at the lunch afterward I ran into a good friend of mine. "Rami" has lived in the U.S. for about 25 years. He's raised three daughters here (the oldest two were born in Israel), he's run a successful business, and he's become involved as a donor to Israeli and to U.S. Republican causes.

Inevitably, discussion turned to the election.

"I want to tell you something," Rami said. His English is better than yours or mine, but you have to get used to his accent, his rapid speech, his hoarse voice.

"Listen to me: All day, around the world, every minute of every day, do you know how much thought, how much planning, how much desire and determination goes into destroying America? To killing Americans?

"Don't give me that look. We are hated. We are hated because we're strong, and because we're weak. We're strong because we can wipe any country off the map. And we're weak because we're too timid to defend ourselves, to do what is necessary.We worry about 'Can she have an abortion, Can he carry a gun, Can I be gay and marry my boyfriend.' Meanwhile, they're aiming huge arsenals at our us.

"I'm not just talking about the Islamic extremists, although they're first in my mind. The Chinese, the Europeans -- they love that we've become a bunch of f___ups. They want to bring us down, too, only economically, not militarily. We're still at the head of the pack, but the Chinese, the Indians, the Europeans are gaining. Our failure is their success.

"And I want to tell you something else: the next president's job is going to be to defend us from a world that wants to slice and dice us twelve different ways. I think one candidate understands that, and one doesn't."

Rami recently held an event at his house for U,S, Rep. Mark Kirk, a Republican who's running in a tight race for reelection against Democrat Dan Seals. The event was for transplanted Israelis like Rami. The eighty or so who attended loved Kirk's centrist views, and his priorities. Military preparedness, environmental responsibility, energy independence, and strong support for Israel went over well. Rami said there were two dissenters to Kirk's pro-choice views; otherwise, everyone was enthusiastic.

Rami said that more and more Israelis are being deluded by false hopes for peace, and that he fears America as a whole is infected with the same virus.

"Peace, for most of our enemies, is just a siesta," Rami said.

--T.A.

A brush with Obamaphobia [UPDATED: LINKS TO RESEARCH INTO PALIN-OPHOBIA]

My brother and I received an e-mail from the father of an old friend of ours yesterday. In the e-mail, this dear man expressed consternation about Obama's remark about visiting "all 57 states," and his e-mail asserted -- citing this Wikipedia article as a source -- that the remark inadvertently revealed Obama's covert allegiance to the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference.

I might as well wonder if John McCain's repeated missteps on players in the Iraq War, or frequent reversals on a range of policy positions, reveal secret ties to the AARP.

With all due respect to the dear, dear man who sent this e-mail, and to the others who think like him, I want to say this:

We have had presidents with less experience (and there may even be an inverse correlation between experience and effectiveness). We have had presidents with little if any discernible religious background.

And we have one candidate in this race who wasn't born in the U.S. (Hint: it's not Obama.)

But we have never had a major-party nominee for president with dark skin and an exotic name. And that's what really scares most people who say they don't know enough about Obama, and who claim to fear he doesn't have enough experience. There is a post-9/11 conspiracy syndrome abroad in the land, and fears that Obama is a closet Muslim are just a prominent recent example of that imbalance.

All you have to do is go here, here or here if you want to analyze the Obamaphobia rumors. I'm sure there are other sites with no end of actual information, seasoned with whatever political slant reassures you.

Both candidates have plenty of flaws and weaknesses in plain sight -- why can't we resist inventing flaws and weaknesses for them?

Why would coded messages and covert allegiances be the hallmark of the dark-skinned one whose last name ends with a vowel?

If his skin and his name scare you, then don't vote for him. And leave the rest of us to make our decisions based on actual information.

--T.A.

UPDATE: And to keep your research fresh and unbiased, check out Charles Martin's exhaustive research on all the rumors out there about Sarah Palin.

Divinity School: Like regular school, only incomprehensible

That's my take, after three days of an Intensive Biblical Hebrew course, my first plunge back into academia after a quarter century out in the world (or some facsimile thereof).

I am surrounded by people half my age who grasp arcane concepts, theoretical patterns and intricate rules almost instantly. The teacher is teaching these people, who still know how to learn. I, meanwhile, am trying both to understand syllabification, transliteration and weird grammatical rules and trying to figure out why they matter.

Besides passing the course, that is.

The way you learn this stuff is by memorizing. You apply rules to every single diacritic and every shard of sentence, and you move on only when you are correct.

The first day, it was in the 90s here in Chicago, and the somber, Oxfordian stone of Swift Hall exuded a damp sweat. The leaded windows were thrown open -- only the administrative offices and some senior professors appear to have air conditioning -- and soon, we sweated like the stone that sealed us in.

Today, it's in the 60s, and the remnants of Hurricane Gustav have darkened the sky and soaked the parched earth. My long commute to the university has cut into my study time. But that's OK: I don't remember how to study, and find myself fidgeting and pacing after perhaps two minutes. That may be a contributing factor to my slow learning about the qames-hatuf vowel, the matres lectionis, the propretonic reduction, the dagesh forte.

I look forward to the sensation of knowing what I'm talking about, and understanding what I'm learning.

Last night, I lay in bed studying. Gabe came in and kissed me goodnight, and did a perfect pantomime of how I've tucked him in before school nights since his education began.

So, one thing I'm majoring in is humility.

--T.A.