True Ancestor

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.

Major Dickason and Me

My sister Martha, one of my favorite people in the world, always brightens my day, but she improved my mornings, on the occasion of my most recent birthday, by getting me a six-month susbcription to Peet's Coffee -- a different roast every two weeks, delivered to my doorstep.

The most recent caffeinated confection is Major Dickason's Blend, which, according to some coffeeholics, has attained near-cult status and which, according to Peet's web site, is their most popular blend.

Midwestern mornings in February are routinely brutal affairs. This has been an especially gray, snowy and cold winter, so, in my snow-madness, I have taken to greeting Major Dickason by name each morning, in a poor Scottish brogue recalled from my acting days:

"Stand at attention, Major Dickason!," I'll say, stumbling toward the coffee-maker. Or: "Top o' the mornin', Major! Got yer work cut out for ye today!"

Turns out that Key Dickason was a retired Army officer and a regular at Peet's flagship store at the corner of Walnut and Vine streets in Berkeley. At Peet's you can create your own blend; Major Dickason (who was actually a lieutenant) was one of the first, and most successful, to do so, working with founder Alfred Peet to perfect Major Dickason's blend in 1969.

When you search for Dickasons online you run into some pretty creative people, like this bunch, which features both yarmulkes and cowboy hats, and whose artists create some very stirring works, many of them Jewish-themed. They have a bunch of their own web sites, and are somehow connected to this very cool-looking synagogue in Tucson.

Are they related to Key Dickason . . . ? Well, there's a link to Major Dickason's blend on their "Dickason links" page.

For some reason, I like knowing that there's a connection between my coffee and people who create beautiful works of Jewish art, are committed to spiritually awake and searching synagogues, and who also wear cowboy hats.

Shabbat Shalom.

--T.A.

Living in "The Truman Show"

Last weekend featured yet another trip -- this time, a trip to the Florida Panhandle for a board meeting and a weekend of eating and drinking too much.

Aside from that, the most interesting part of the trip was staying in Watercolor, a new "Traditional Neighborhood Development" adjacent to Seaside, one of the original New Urbanism developments by the pioneering architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

Seaside, you may remember, was where The Truman Show was shot, because it's an idyllic but forced meditation on Simpler Times, when automobiles did not run our lives and rule our collective consciousness, and that made it perfect for the movie's message about both reality TV and reality itself. Watercolor, developed more recently (and still under development) on adjacent land, takes Seaside's egalitarian and pedestrian scale and explodes it into multi-million dollar residences, each with its own distinctive style (although held to strict design and buildind codes), each with large screened-in or wrap-around porches; each capacious (from 2,500 to about 5,000 square feet), and none selling for under $700,000.

To run the meticulously meandering gravel jogging paths on a cool January morning, through these deserted neighborhoods of self-conscious Southern manses, is to have fallen into a combination of The Truman Show and To Kill a Mockingbird. You can't be sure if it's Jim Carrey who will stroll by with his Irish Setter, or Boo Radley will be watching you from a darkened porch.

More likely it'll be Carrey, with a no-foam latte from the nearby Starbucks, who'll stop you, talk your ear off about yesterday's stroll on the beach with his adorable children and next week's project to increase the value of his home, and vanish into the mist.

Good to be home.

--T.A.

Jerusalem doesn't make sense

Cross-posted on Jews By Choice

I've sometimes thought that Judaism cannot make sense to you if you've never been to Jerusalem. And it follows that neither can Islam, or even Christianity -- in its elemental, formative, rebellious beginnings -- really make sense if you've never been to the one city in the world that has loosed more radical thinking, and more love, and more violence upon the world than any other.

I revisited that thought after I read this stunning, rambling piece by Richard Rodriguez in the January '08 issue of Harper's (a piece sent to me, of course, by that great literary omnivore, me True Ann-Sister). The sun-blasted warrens of that great and bewildering city have been fought over, partitioned, bombed, bulldozed, consecrated, desecrated and celebrated so completely, and so repeatedly, that it's hard to understand what lies under the detritus of all that dogma and delirium. Everywhere you look, every stone you step on, has been in the presence of an occurrence or a person of such significance, a force of such magnitude, that it's beyond our dull comprehension.

And yet those same stones and walls are rumbled over by buses, trod upon by tourists and commuters; lives go on there with the same precarious monotony and the same fevered bliss and bottled fury that Jerusalem has fostered for millennia.

I've been to Jerusalem four times in my life. In each visit after the first (1979), it is so unchanged upon first inspection from the previous visit, and appears so completely transformed after just a day, that it seems like a chameleon or a mirage. You can't believe what you're seeing; you can't believe that what you didn't see hours earlier now seems to proclaim itself to you. The scales literally fall from your eyes.

Jerusalem is a place of polar opposites, a place that radiates polarization into the world. But it is also a place that constantly transmits signals of radical hope, of messianic madness, and of the merest sliver of the possibility that you really can live in a place where one mundane existence touches another, more unseen, more miraculous one.

Jerusalem is bipolar: it is love and hate, madness and wisdom. Whenever I go, some part of me can't wait to get the hell out of there. That very same part of me -- that loves the Divine, that yearns for the Transcendent, but that also just wants some peace and quiet -- then cannot wait to return.

Jerusalem -- its pecularity, not its politics -- is why peace will always be possible in the Middle East, and why it will never be fully realized. It's why there will always be proselytizers, dogmatists and fanatical dreamers, and why there will be people who want no more dogma or dreaming. Jerusalem is a proof-text for unity and for chaos at the same time, in the same instant, and within the same atom.

And it's why, once you've been to Jerusalem, and been through a blast-furnace of a day, and the afternoon light starts to glow and that afternoon breeze redeems you from desert madness, you cannot see anything the same way, ever again.

Including your faith, or lack thereof.

--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.

Buddhist Boomers and the future of cross-pollinating religion

Last Friday's online edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an article -- can you believe it?! -- on "Buddhist Boomers" and the future of American Buddhism.

The author, Clark Strand, identified a critical weakness in the contemporary practice of Buddhism in the U.S. -- a weakness, as is so often the case with religion in the West, that has been disguised as strength. And that is that "from the beginning, Buddhism has been seen in its American incarnation not as an alternative religion, but as an alternative to religion."

He's right. In fact, my Zen teacher impressed upon me (and I know many JuBus to believe) that Zen can be practiced with any religion -- that it is not a religion per se but, as Strand puts it, "an elaborate thought experiment being conducted by society at large."

Many interesting questions arise here, and Strand addresses some of them: Is it better to have a religion than an "empirically based spiritual practice"? (Yes.) Why should we care if Buddhist Boomers don't give their kids a Buddhist religious education? ("This has the advantage of giving Buddhist children great freedom of religious expression with the disadvantage of not giving them any actual religion to express. The result is a generation of children with a Buddhist parent or two but no Buddhist culture to grow up in.")

Strand points out that Sam Harris' (largely ignorant) portrayal of Buddhism as a religion unburdened by superstition, dogma or dark history makes it less than a religion -- devoid of both religion's strengths and its weaknesses. There is no culture that can grow in its sterilized soil; then again, there are no weeds in which charlatans and murderers can lurk.

The larger issue is the one of how we Boomers approach religion: if a faith tradition is flawed, we must spare our children its entirety. If it is not completely, empirically true, it can't be trusted at all. And if it comes with a culture whose history is tainted with any violence, any failure, any brain-washing masquerading as folk-tale wisdom -- well, better to throw it all out. Our children should know our truth, our perspective; that way, they can make up their own minds.

Sometimes I agree. Usually, however, this approach seems to me like saying, "I don't want to mess up my kid's mind with all that crazy aerodynamics and aerospace engineering. When she's old enough, she'll figure it out and build her own plane."

Strand, a former Zen monk, sounds like my kind of monk. He tells Buddhists seeking to integrate family life with Buddhist tradition to look for instructive examples at, say, a local synagogue. He has a book coming out from Doubleday called How to Believe in God (Whether You Believe in Religion or Not). He lives in Woodstock, NY, and teaches a class called Koans of the Bible.

Now there's a teacher worth learning from.

(h/t: my co-author on Letters to a Buddhist Jew, Rabbi Akiva Tatz)

--T.A.

If it's more popular than porn, it's worth taking note of.

That would be Facebook.

As a member of "Generation Aleph" (I think I made that up), I'm one of those who has rediscovered their Jewish spiritual DNA. But I'm also a creaky, cranky, middle-aged fart who feels like an idiot, or a hanger-on, or some South Park perv, for even going on a social networking site like Facebook.

But Facebook knew about me before I even knew about it, so I figured I had to go on there, create a profile, see what further friendships awaited me. The introductions Facebook was waiting to make were kind of eerie: people I'd met once, relatives I hadn't seen in 20 years, people who'd read my book, kindred spirits, all hovering in the ether.

Whippersnappers are so busy connecting and networking via Facebook that they are spending less time fantasizing about more old-fashioned connections: visits to pornography Web sites have dropped by a third, according to TIME, and that's in large part because, for "Generation Y" (under 25) college students and individuals, porn ranks 4th in popularity of Web categories, whereas for the over-25 set, porn comes in 2nd (clearly, we in Generation Aleph need more refreshers than do the young). Since the young rely on the Web even more than Boomers do, porn is actually in decline.

If you're reading this, odds are you're either a member of "Generation Y" or "Generation Aleph." There's also a good chance you've spent more time on Facebook than surfing porn web sites.

Keep it up.

The good work, that is.

--T.A.

Housing Wonks vs. Religion Geeks

Most of the past two days were spent in the company of some of the country's most impressive housing policy professionals, who were convened in Washington, DC, by the MacArthur Foundation as part of its initiative to preserve affordable housing.

MacArthur just tripled its investment in work to advocate for more effective affordable housing policy and data dissemination. The foundation's support for leading nonprofit developers and policy organizations is now at $150 million. So the folks at MacArthur's confabs are fascinating. It's a crowd on whose coattails I like to ride from time to time: I need their help understanding the labyrinthine ways of local, state and federal housing law and policy, and the arcana of affordable housing finance. I find these people voluble, friendly, principled, intelligent and genially competitive. They are a little on the frumpy side, but, hey, they work, for the most part, in the nonprofit or public sector. They buy off the sales rack. And they're proud of it.

And as I consider whether to go back to school and immerse myself in a study of the interaction of Judaism and Buddhism in the West, and to surround myself with religion wonks instead of housing policy propeller-heads, I find myself wondering:

Will I be doing myself or anyone else any good?

Are these disparate groups actually composed of the same kinds of people?

Will I have fun researching JuBus instead of stitching together affordable housing acquisition/rehabs?

Will my life have more meaning?

Will I wear better shoes?

--T.A.

"There goes the neighborhood."

The gentrification of San Francisco's Castro district is at once an anomaly and the same old real estate song being played one more time: a neighborhood's character changes with the generations, and developers recognize the chance to capitalize on the transition. People bemoan the change without realizing they've been part of it all along.

Neighborhoods tend to maintain distinct identities for about a generation. When that generation moves on -- gets old, moves away, dies off or (as in the case of old warehouse districts) becomes obsolete -- the neighborhood is vulnerable to the forces of change. The change can either enhance or erode the value of the buildings in that neighborhood.

That's how historic districts like Lower Downtown Denver are born: an architecturally or economically distinct area enters a period of benign neglect. The buildings decay but largely avoid urban renewal or redevelopment. Soon, the leading wave of change -- in the form of artists, usually -- inhabits the neighborhood, because the spaces are large, cheap and aesthetically pleasing. The artists' creativity transforms the neighborhood from a DMZ into a destination. That increases the value of the buildings to the point where their redevelopment into lofts and galleries and trendy shops is virtually inevitable.

The Castro is an anomaly because gay communities have traditionally helped foster rather than fallen victim to gentrification. Now, though, a generation of gay residents is moving on and spreading out. Because of wider societal acceptance, gay neighborhoods are becoming more rare. That means that other demographics will move in, most likely singles and young families.

While I'm pretty laissez-faire about upscale neighborhoods changing character, I don't feel that way about diverse or lower-income neighborhoods. Those are the ones that need saving today, because they're the ones that add racial and socioeconomic diversity to community fabric. They're the ones that ease traffic congestion because residents don't (or shouldn't) need to drive 40 miles to get to a job or a day-care center.

We'll see more and more affordable development in the suburbs as jobs continue to move out of urban centers. Some communities will try to legislate their way out of having to accept a lower-income demographic, fearing that it will cause property values to drop. In fact, the exact opposite is more often true.

So I guess I'm saying that a neighborhood's history shouldn't get in the way of progress -- but progress, to me, is socioeconomic diversity. If incentives have to be used to create that diversity, then let's use them. Because when purely market-driven forces govern the real estate market, it's the people with fewest options that suffer the most, and most often.

And I'm also saying that people shouldn't waste their money and their breath trying to keep the Castro gay. It's a chapter that's ending. That's what chapters do.

And the ones who say "There goes the neighborhood" will be missing the point.

--T.A.

An Office Is a Little World

An office is a world -- its own world. Or maybe a community. Or an ecosystem. But whatever it is, an office is unique in the kind of human relationships it creates.

I remember when I was an actor -- kept in close and sweaty quarters with compulsive liars and exhibitionists, swamped by the smell of spirit gum and witch hazel -- I remember thinking, "Wouldn't it be nice, just to go to an office? To have an actual workspace I could call my own? And to work alongside people that weren't trying to make me look or feel like crap all the time?"

Silly me.

I've now been working in the same job for over a decade. There are five others who've been here that entire time. Contemporaries. We've slouched into middle age together, the six of us. It seems to me we've hardly changed at all, but our relationships have changed enormously. There's a kind of empathic communication, an extrasensory, no-nonsense Morse code that delivers little packets of information without fluff or obfuscation.

The relationships couldn't exist outside of work -- not as they are. And in fact, when I run into these people outside the office, I'm almost embarrassed, as if I've been caught leading a double life. As if they know something about me they shouldn't.

When I leave this place -- if I leave this place -- I will be a little sad about this one strange fact of working life: these are people who understand me, who help me and whom I enjoy helping, and who, when the day is over, leave me alone. We have a history, and we have space between us that is full but doesn't collapse or catch fire.

What a blessing.

--T.A.