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The Snippets of Death

While I was having a heart event, I thought that I was being whisked down a long, dark tunnel. I could do nothing to prevent my movement. Finally, I saw a blue light at the end of the darkness. It started to pulse, and I felt myself being pulled even quicker through the tunnel towards the pulsation. But as I started to glide into that abyss, I heard a voice shout, “No!  No!  That’s New Jersey.” I returned to the living.

Ancient cultures always seemed to have many more memorials to death than to birth. Discuss.

“You can live through anything except death.” Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.

“The soul will fly home of its accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.” Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.

“An autopsy later revealed that she had died of plaid.” Ian Frazier, Cranial Fracking.

“To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjectures.” Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels.

“The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.” Voltaire.

“Make sure to send a lazy man for the Angel of Death.” Yiddish Proverb.

“All I desire for my own burial is not be buried alive.” Earl of Chesterfield.

“Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.” Steve Wright.

“How many of those dead animals you see on the highway are suicides?” Dennis Miller.

“My uncle Pat reads the paid obituaries in the paper every day. He can’t understand how people always die in alphabetical order.” Hal Roach.

When I die, I want to go like my grandfather . . . in his sleep. Not screaming like the passengers in his car. Old joke.

“It’s a sad fact that 50 percent of marriages in this country end in divorce. But, hey, the other half end in death. You could be one of the lucky ones!” Richard Jeni.

Hear about the Newfie who was killed while ice fishing? Got run over by the Zamboni!

“You can’t take it with you. You never see a U-Haul following a hearse.” Ellen Glasgow.

When Bob Hope was dying at the age of 100, his wife asked if he wanted to be buried or cremated. He thought for a while and said, “Surprise me.” (Thanks to SN.)

“If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.” Yiddish proverb.

I am not proud that in scanning the obituaries I feel some satisfaction when I find that a vegan has died of cancer.

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Lenape Land on 42nd Street

I saw This Space Between Us last week, a funny, touching, and thought-provoking play written by Peter Gil-Sheridan and performed by a strong ensemble of six. The play was presented by the Keen Company, one of the many theater organizations in New York City.

As I have written about before, I read and save Playbills. Search Results for “playbill” – AJ’s Dad (ajsdad.blog) This one had a multi-page insert that briefly told me about the Keen Company and more extensively about the foundations and individuals who have given money to it, how I could donate to the Company, and how the audience could promote the play. All this was ordinary stuff, the usual kind of information in a Playbill.

What was different, however, was a paragraph headed Land Acknowledgement, which told me that I was “in New York City, which is the traditional land of the Lenape people. Keen Company recognizes the long history of the territory we occupy, and its significance for the indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live and work here. We pay our respects and gratitude to the Elders, both past and present, for their stewardship of this region.”

I did not completely understand this. What did stewardship of this region entail? Was this stewardship ongoing? Was it a reference to a particular plot of ground that encompassed 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues where the theater is? Or did it refer to the time when the Lenape lived as a people on lands in the Northeast?

So what was the point to this wokeness? Lenape were forced from their lands in the Northeast almost two centuries ago and even earlier for Manhattan. Driven further and further west, they are now largely in five different tribes located in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Does this paragraph in a Playbill insert for an off-Broadway production make the Lenape living far from New York City feel better?

I also wondered if the paragraph fit with what is supposed to be the mission of the theater company and the theme of the play that I saw. The Playbill stated that “Keen Company is an award-winning Off-Broadway theatre creating story-driven work that champions identification and connection. In intimate productions of plays and musicals, the company tells stories about the decisive moments that change us.” Did that paragraph about the Lenape champion identification and connection and was it about a decisive moment that changes us? If so, I did not see it. I did not feel any more decisively connected with the Lenape after reading Land Acknowledgement than I had been before.

And This Space Between Us made me question the paragraph further. In the play, Ted, a vegan, corrects the political incorrectness of others and is fond of saying, “You can’t just talk the talk, you must walk the walk.” Jamie, Ted’s partner, announces that he wants to walk the walk and is leaving his high paid legal job to work for an NGO that tries to better lives in Eritrea. At the core of this amusing and touching play is walking the walk and how mere talk accomplishes little. I could not see how the smug Lenape paragraph truly advanced anything. It seemed simply to talk the talk.

The Keen Company could have tried to get its audience to take a step or two. It at least could have told us that there is a Lenape Center in New York and urged us to visit and support it. We might have been told that the Brooklyn Public Library has been holding programs featuring some Lenape people whose ancestors were forced to Oklahoma and Wisconsin. And the paragraph might have said that there is an exhibition about the Lenape curated by Lenape at a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Instead, we got only that the Keen Company paid their respects and gratitude to non-defined Elders, and I thought, as I do about many politically correct statements, that it is not expected or even meant to accomplish anything other than to make the speakers or writers feel better about themselves.

This Space Between Us, however, is worth seeing.

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Compare and Contrast Assignment

          Today’s post is different. It is a request or an assignment for thoughts, facts, and opinions that would help me with my thinking. Here is the assignment: Compare and contrast the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine with the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. Send me what you come up with, and perhaps I can turn the results into a meaningful essay.

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Partisan Hacks, Comprised of

Before the ink was dry on her nomination to the Supreme Court, right-wing news articles and fundraising emails attacked Ketanji Brown Jackson. One said that she had “taken radical, liberal positions throughout her career” without giving even a hint as to what those positions were. A different writer labeled her “a politician in robes.”

The writings did not contain a glimpse of irony or even the slightest acknowledgement that only recently conservative Supreme Court Justices have themselves been criticized as partisans. This criticism came as a result of issuing opinions with scanty or no reasoning that followed their own political predilections and that of their patrons; allowing unconstitutional laws to be enforced; and bending judicial norms to hear cases that have political overtones.

The conservative justices had to know that their actions would look political and produce vehement criticisms, but you might expect them to simply ignore the critics. When I was a baseball umpire, I expected disagreement with some of my calls. I knew that I should not umpire if I could not handle criticism. If you take a judgeship, you should not be surprised by criticism. And if anyone should feel secure from critics, it would be an insular band of people who have both power and life tenure.

However, the comments about the Court made some justices feel like paper flowers in the rain.* Ignoring the fact that defensiveness often gives greater credence to the critics, several justices made replies. The most quotable “defense” came from Amy Coney Barrett who announced that the Supreme Court “is not comprised of partisan hacks.” Of course, it would have been even more newsworthy if Barrett had said that the Court was filled with partisan hacks, but, nevertheless, the whine indicated how touchy some members of the Supreme Court are.

Now, if you are looking for self-conscious irony, don’t go to the conservatives on the Supreme Court. Whether or not she is a partisan, she is sitting on the Court because of naked partisan power, and she made her statement in a place that honors a person no one would ever sanely label as nonpartisan, Mitch McConnell. And yes, if she has an ounce of gratitude, she should be indebted to him for his partisanship.

If Barrett, for unfathomable reasons, thought her ex cathedra-like statement would end discussion of the topic, she was undercut by her colleague Justice Samuel Alito. A month or so after Barrett announced the absence of judicial partisanship, Alito made a speech to the Federalist Society, a group not widely known for its even-handed policies. Many sources concluded that this speech was so highly partisan that it should have raised ethical concerns for a judge. However, Supreme Court justices are not bound by the ethical standards set for other judges—disturbing yet true.  So, on the one hand, we have Barrett’s assertion, not supported by any evidence or reasoning, about the lack of partisanship on the Court, and then we have the stark evidence of a partisan speech by a Justice. Chicolini’s classic comeback in Duck Soup comes to mind: “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

But maybe, I thought, I was being unfair to Barrett. Perhaps her statement was more limited than I had first believed. Reports say that she is smart and a meticulous judge. She, no doubt, tries to use words precisely. She asserted that the Court “is not comprised of partisan hacks.” I went to H.W. Fowler’s classic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. In it he discusses the difference between include and comprise: “[T]he distinction seems to be that comprise is appropriate when what is in question is the content of the whole, and include when it is the admission or presence of an item. With include, there is no presumption that all or even most of the components are mentioned; with comprise, the whole of them are understood to be in the list.” With her use of comprise, then, Barrett was only telling me that not all the Supreme Court Justices were partisan hacks. However, she might be signaling–with lawyerly precision–that it includes some. Or perhaps she is conveying that some justices are partisan but not hacks or hacks but not partisan? Alito comes to mind again. Many commentators, citing several examples, say that Alito is a partisan. They almost never label him a hack; instead, they almost always refer to how smart he is.

Of course, I may be giving Barrett too much credit for using words precisely. After all, she did use the phrase comprised of, a definite grammatical no-no. The prickly Fowler believes that the English language might be better off with the banishment of comprise: “This lamentably common use of comprise as a synonym of compose or constitute is a wanton and indefensible weakening of our vocabulary.” Perhaps when it comes to words, Barrett is not a conservative standard bearer. Even if that might be laudable, comprised of is not to be praised, at least according to Benjamin Dreyer who writes about comprise in the immodestly titled Dreyer’s English: “I confess: I can barely remember which is the right way to use this word.” He says that he looks it up each time he is tempted to use it. Dreyer tells us that it is correct to say, “The English alphabet comprises twenty-six letters.” And this, too, is right: “Twenty-six letters compose the English alphabet.” But it is wrong to write, “The English alphabet is comprised of twenty-six letters.” Dreyer writes, “As soon as you’re about to attach ‘of’ to the word ‘comprise,’ raise your hands to the sky and edit yourself.”

Of course, you might tell me to lighten up. Don’t parse her words so closely. C’mon; you get the gist of her meaning. Don’t take her so literally. It’s not a big deal if she was imprecise. But, my friends, she is a Supreme Court justice, and when she writes an opinion, no matter how loose its reasoning, no matter how imprecise it may be, it will have important consequences. Barrett may be making decisions that control us for the next thirty or forty years. And precision should matter for a Justice. As Fred R. Shapiro writes in The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations, “Law is the intersection of language and power.”

I wonder if Barrett will continue to suggest how nonpartisan the Court is if Ketanji Brown Jackson ascends the Court. Conservatives of all stripes are accusing her (Jackson) of being partisan. What kind of hypocrisy is this? Well, we can rest in the assurance from Barrett that she, at least in her own opinion, is not a political hack. Or can we?

*“Only paper flowers are afraid of the rain.” Konstantin Dankevich.

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First Sentences

“When he was old and allowed himself a reverie, he remembered the soil and the way it felt as it caressed his feet.” Jonathan Alter, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.

“They were firing from the bell-tower with machine-gun bursts or careful rifle shots, according to our movements.” Leonardo Sciascia, Antimony.

“On January 16, 1934, a Nazi customs official arrived at the door of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cell Physiology with a stack of papers.” Sam Apple, Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection.

“This was the day that Daniel vaulted the wall.” Louis de Bernières, The Dust That Falls from Dreams.

“The hillside on which the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho were about to make such a grisly fool of Lieutenant Colonel William J. Fetterman was dun-colored and bare, with no cover save for broken rocks that looked as if they had been thrown down by a short-tempered God.” Sally Jenkins, The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation.

“Gramercy Park is the most wistful and the gentlest of the New York squares, and the Players Club is one of the handsomest buildings in it.” David Stacton, The Judges of the Secret Court: A Novel about John Wilkes Booth.

“’Remember the year 1763,’ the celebrated stage actor David Garrick told James Boswell.” Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. (History group.)

“Bill Rankin sat motionless before his typewriter, grimly seeking a lead for the interview he was about to write.” Earl Derr Biggers, Behind That Curtain.

“More than a decade later, racial antagonism still burned in Jones County, a south Mississippi setting with a complex history.” Curtis Wilkie, When Evil Lived in Laurel: The “White Knights” and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer.

“For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.” Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn.

“Law is the intersection of language and power.” Fred R. Shapiro, The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations.

“I am lucky: I know what people say about me.” Lauren Belfer, City of Light.

“Why should we begin with biblical, Greek, and Roman wives?” Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife.

“The two suspects sat on mismatched furniture in the white and almost featureless lounge, waiting for something to happen.” Alex Pavesi, The Eighth Detective.

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Round and Round (or Is it Oval and Oval?)

          I have not kept my usual posting schedule this week because of Covid, not because I caught it but because a friend did. He got it just after the woman he lived with died suddenly. Bob teaches at Columbia University and had already cancelled a class because of the death. He knew that he could not teach this week because of Covid but did not want to cancel another class, and he asked me if I would teach it. I, of course, assented. I had familiarity with the First Amendment material that had been assigned, but I having never taught it before and wanting to do an acceptable job for Bob and the students, I spent a lot of hours preparing for the class, hours that I otherwise would have spent on posts for this blog. Thus, the posting schedule got disrupted.

          However, this week I also got in a conversation with two friends, one of whom had attended roller derby. I told them that I had written about that topic a few years ago, and they expressed an interest in what I wrote, so I am re-posting that essay.

          We all should know more about roller derby.

Round and Round, or Is It Oval and Oval?

          Jerry Seltzer died. I did not know of him before his death, but his obituary brought back memories; he was instrumental in the roller derby I watched many times on television and once in person.

          Roller derby was invented by Jerry’s father, Leo Seltzer, in 1935 in Chicago. Originally it was an endurance activity, akin to walkathons and dance marathons, but this proved too boring, and Leo, with advice from the writer Damon Runyon, created rules for a competitive, contact sport. Two teams of five roller skaters at a time circled a banked track. Skaters at the back of the pack had to get to the front and then lap the remaining skaters earning a point for every lapped skater on the opposing team. The other skaters elbowed and body-checked their opponents to help their teammates pass and score.

          Early television, short on programming, featured roller derby several times a week. This led to an overexposure and a declining interest, and the sport seemed all but dead when Jerry took over from his father. He taped the contests, and through innovative use of television syndication, built up interest in roller derby again. He used a shorter track, 100 feet, with more banking that allowed for better viewing. The new track could be put up and taken down quickly, and this allowed roller derby to make one-night stops in towns where the television ratings showed that it was popular.

          Jerry Seltzer’s efforts resurrected roller derby. Half a decade after he took it over from his father, he had it back in Madison Square Garden where it had last appeared more than a dozen years earlier. Its popularity surged with crowds of upwards of 19,000 and even more when he held it in baseball stadiums.

          Roller derby occupied the ground between spectacle and sport. It was fast with body-checking that sent skaters on their asses and over guard rails. Fights were common as were arguments with referees. Roller derby was more integrated than many other sports. There were all colors, but the unusual aspect of roller derby was that teams consisted of both men and women. Each team had ten skaters. Five men would race and elbow five men from the other team, and then five women would take the track against five women, and those women were just as physical as the men. I don’t know if they were paid equally, but the women were an equal part of the team, something that was not true in other sports. As a result, unlike many sporting events where few women attended, roller derby attracted both male and female spectators who cheered and booed the skaters of both sexes.

          For me, the biggest star was a woman, Joanie Weston. She was instantly identifiable. She always wore a scarf and had strawberry blonde hair. Weston was five feet ten and weighed 165 pounds, and every ounce of her radiated athleticism. Her skating was fast, and her powerful elbows and hips sent opponents flying. She was as well-known as any woman athlete of her era, but the figure skating or tennis crowd who knew Peggy Fleming or Billie Jean King seldom crossed paths with the blue-collar folk who watched roller derby.

          Other than watching her prowess on the track, I did not think much about the rest of her life until I read her 1997 obituary after she died at 62 from Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare brain disorder. I learned she excelled in every sport she tried. As a college softball player, she batted .730 one season and hit eight home runs in a single game, but there were few sports then in which women could make a living. She ended up in roller derby, but I was pleased to learn that she loved it and made a good living.

          Years ago, I did not have to watch much roller derby on TV to doubt whether it was a real sport. There were good guys and bad guys with raucous interviews and taunts. No one ever seemed to get more than momentarily hurt in the frequent fights. And the contest was invariably decided in the last jam, as the scrum of skaters was called. The roots of roller derby may have been in endurance walking and dancing, but it had settled into a pro wrestling mold.

          But it was still fun to watch. The great writer Frank Deford was right when he wrote that not watching it “just because you knew the Bombers would prevail on the last jam was like not going to watch Dame Margot Fonteyn dance Aurora because you knew how ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ would turn out.” (The pro wrestler Ric Flair would bristle when someone would say that pro wrestling was fake. “It’s not fake,” he said. “It’s choreographed.” At least from my understanding of pro wrestling, Flair, who never seemed humble, was being modest in this instance. The opening segment of a wrestling match is scripted, but then the wrestlers have to improvise, and since Flair had many matches of a half hour and longer, this improv took great skill and stamina until the final moments of the bout came, which were choreographed.)

          The obituary of Jerry Seltzer who popularized roller derby made me recall the days I watched roller derby and the time in winter of 1968 I went to a match. I was in law school in Chicago, and a friend and I decided to go to the roller derby at the Chicago Coliseum. This was fitting since it was at the Coliseum where roller derby began in 1935 (the year Joan Weston was born). Roller derby always had a derelict air to me, and it was fitting that we took a bus on a dreary, cold night through almost barren streets. I spied a pawnshop or payday lender. Foot high, golden letters on its front window proclaimed, “WE TRUST YOU!” The words were mostly obscured by a rusting, pulldown gate. Things had apparently changed since the sign had been painted.

          I only learned later about the Coliseum’s distinguished history. It had hosted five Republican National Conventions in the first part of the twentieth century. Six months after my roller derby attendance it also hosted a different kind of political gathering–an anti-Vietnam War rally in the days shortly before the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That memorable gathering was held at a different Chicago venue, the International Amphitheatre located, not unfittingly, adjacent to the Union Stock Yards.

I attended that 1968 anti-Vietnam War Coliseum rally. In those counterculture days, nothing seemed to have been planned for the event—anarchic might best describe it. I remember little of what occurred except that Allen Ginsberg sat cross-legged on the stage endlessly intoning “OM.” I quickly got bored and left. I went to the car I had purchased since my previous Coliseum visit and started to drive to my apartment. A police car followed me, and I was pulled over after a few blocks. Two smirking cops came over, and I rolled down a window. I had been driving carefully, and I knew that this was not a traffic stop. In this land of liberty, they had been staking out the gathering that was exercising free speech and assembly and started asking me about what was occurring at the rally. I gave some monosyllabic replies. As I wondered where this was heading, they asked what I did, and I answered that I was a law student. They shot nervous glances at each other and soon departed. I was as happy as I ever was for being in law school.

But my first visit, in 1968, to the Chicago Coliseum was not about war and peace, the future of the country, divisions in the land, or police spying on citizens; it was only about the battle that was roller derby. My friend and I had seats in the first row of the balcony. We could see all of the track and the spectators on the far side but not those directly underneath us. The crowd nearly filled the seats, folding chairs on the track level. Many in attendance knew all the names of the skaters and jeered many of them, forcefully shouting out shortcomings about their skills, courage, and looks. This was a different Chicago from my rather circumspect law school neighborhood. It was fun.

I cannot tell you the names of the teams or the skaters, but it was exciting watching them zoom around the oval with bodies and taunts flying. Fights broke out time and again, and the crowd was into it even though to this skeptical eye the fisticuffs looked staged. Late into the match a “bad guy” was on top of a “good guy” flailing away right underneath us. And then something unexpected happened. The skaters who were all over the track started rapidly converging towards the fight, but they were not looking at the combatants. They were fixed on the audience where a man came into our sight holding a folding chair with two hands above his head. He started to bring it down on the back of the villain, but, as I had seen many times on TV, the hero threw his opponent off him to reverse the fight. In that split second, the chair came down on the face and chest of the unprotected good guy with blood gushing from his nose and mouth. This no longer looked fake; the blood was real. The skaters, enemies a moment earlier, circled together like a wagon train shooting nervous glances into the audience to see if they needed protection from any other crazies. None appeared, and the chair swinger was manhandled off by security.

The action was delayed for only a few minutes as the injured skater with what appeared to be a broken nose was helped to the locker room and the blood was cleaned up. I don’t know who won, but I do remember that it was on the final jam.

A few years later, the Coliseum closed, and a few years after that, the sport, or whatever it was, died. However, shortly after this century began, roller derby was again revived. I have read that there are hundreds of leagues throughout the world. I have seen the present version advertised and have seen it on some obscure TV channel once or twice. It now seems to be solely a woman’s sport with the hint of pro wrestling and camp remaining, most obviously in the colorful, pun-filled names of the athletes, but perhaps it is truly a legitimate sport now. There is no reason why it couldn’t be. It has athleticism and strategy. But I have not gone to a match. Perhaps, I thought, it is time for another visit to roller derby. I investigated and found that there is a league in New York City, the Gotham Girls, with teams representing the various boroughs. The league, which was on a winter hiatus, was scheduled to begin again in April. I made plans to go to the opening event, and then the pandemic hit. The new season’s opening day was cancelled, but I hope that roller derby has another resurrection. I would like to see the updated version.

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Which South?

(Guest Post by the Spouse)

Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King is a must-read–a disturbing but gripping non-fiction account of a series of horrific racial injustices (among many) that took place in central Florida in the 1940’s and 50’s. It also catalogs the work that Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP did in trying to remedy them. The book resonates deeply with me because I once lived in Gainesville, Florida, some 70 miles north of the incidents in the book. Furthermore, my aunt and uncle and three cousins lived within 2-5 miles of the occurrences. Until reading this book, I was completely unaware of these dreadful events. I was a child at the time they occurred, but never heard of them as I grew older. The book makes me ashamed of my southern roots.

But there is another South counterpoised to that one. This is a South that I like to remember–a South that is epitomized by my maternal grandmother. We called her “Mom.” Mom lived in a postage-stamp-sized town in Alabama called Ashland. Small though it was, it was the county seat of Clay County, complete with an antique courthouse centered in what was euphemistically called “downtown.”

My most vivid childhood memories of Mom are linked to warm summer days in Ashland when my sister and I would most often come to visit. My grandfather was a livestock trader and managed always to have a horse in between trades when we arrived. My sister became quite a horsewoman as a result. I, on the other hand, was too small and besides, I was afraid of those big beasts. So while my sister went riding, I had those lazy summer mornings alone. I often spent them doing nothing in Mom’s front yard. In her front yard was the first time I investigated the mysteries of green moss. Out in front was also a set of mysterious concrete steps that lead down to the curb and stopped. I often puzzled over the existence of those steps leading nowhere. But I used to sit on them and watch the Ashland of seventy years ago go by. Somebody on horseback or in a mule-drawn wagon might come along – quite a spectacle for a little girl coming from a northern city. Often when people would come to visit Mom, they would drive their cars – or more usually their trucks – right up onto the front yard. Sometimes it seemed their vehicles would go right up onto her wrap-around front porch.

You could crawl under Mom’s front porch and under her house, too, if you dared. One day somebody drove up in one of those pick-up trucks, crawled under the porch and killed a snake. Much of the exotic trivia of my youth comes from Ashland.

Mom was a staunch Baptist, and the First Baptist Church of Ashland was right across the street from her house. Because of Mom’s love and concern for her church, it isn’t surprising that many of my Ashland memories are of that church. Sometimes on those long summer days I would go across the street to the old church building and play the piano. I was about ten or eleven then and not a very good piano player, but the church was naturally cool on hot summer days, and I would play “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” and sing along.

And on Sundays, we’d go to church wearing white elastic mesh gloves, black patent-leather shoes, and crinolines that we had brought along for the occasion. I had a little straw hat with daisies around the brim that I thought was quite fetching. And I would sing the hymns and, before air conditioning, examine carefully the peaceful scenes on the hand-held fans.

Late on those summer afternoons we would come home to Mom’s from a day at the swimming pool or an afternoon at the twenty-five-cent movie (air conditioned!), and Mom would be there feeding the chickens or bustling around the kitchen making fried chicken, biscuits, lemon meringue pie. Mom’s lemon meringue pie! She kept on making it until she was in her 80’s because she knew we loved it so. And then we’d have the chicken and the biscuits and sip pink lemonade through silver straws that my father had brought from Mexico.

I remember the warm – no, hot – summer nights. Mom’s magic porch held a magic bench swing. We would sit out there on that swing and do nothing. Tell ghost stories maybe. Play jacks by the light of the door. When my sister got older, boys would come by.

Mom was like those warm summer nights: tranquil, accepting, at peace. Mom had a rare capacity for acceptance. She never railed against the fates, even when she lost a brother to typhus, a son to war (see ajsdad.blog, November 11, 2020), and then a husband to cancer. She accepted what life in God’s wisdom had offered her. I know that she didn’t always approve of what we did or how we ran our lives. But she never criticized. She accepted us and loved us for what we gave and what we were. She never rejected us for what we didn’t give or what we weren’t.

Mom knew and was disturbed by the treatment of Blacks in her town. She knew that their schools were inferior, that Blacks were not welcomed into her church, that they had segregated seating upstairs in the movie theater, that their swimming pool was a clay-contaminated water hole in a culvert, that they lived under oppressive Jim Crow “laws.” She was horrified by Alabama’s Governor George Wallace and his segregationist vitriol. To offset some of these injustices, she went out of her way to treat black people whom she encountered in Ashland with dignity and respect. In 1950’s Ashland, that was more than others did.

I sort of lost touch with Mom as I busied through college and graduate school. After my grandfather died, she was always part of my life, always part of my Christmas, always part of my school vacations, but I was too busy to notice. And then I finally grew up and married and was fortunate enough to marry a man who realized, and helped me realize again, the treasure that our family had living with us, sitting quietly in her room reading. It was Mom in her 80’s who knew when Henry Aaron was trying to beat Babe Ruth’s home-run record. Mom who read Oliver Twist before we went to see the movie. Mom who read things that would dismay or rattle a less accepting human being. Mom who read all of the richness and brutality of life, took it in, and accepted it for its window to the world.

After she died, I was going through her papers and found a quotation she had cut out of the newspaper. I see why she cut it out. It’s the way she lived her life: “I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. The longer I live the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and the wonder of the world.”

Mom gave to my life a living model of peace in a hectic and brutish world. She believed in and lived in “the peace of God that passeth all understanding.” Her legacy to me was her quiet goodness and the fundamental decency of her life. I cherish her memory for being a calm and loving presence in my life, and continue to wish for her all the peace and tranquility of those warm summer nights.

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Snippets

The CDC National Center for Health Statistics has just released state-by-state data on life expectancies at birth. Hawaii leads the country at 80.9 years. Mississippi is last at 74.4 years. Eight states have life expectancies at birth of over eighty years. None of those states is red. Fox News and other conservative outlets spend much time telling us how awful it is to live in these blue states, California and New York especially. On the other hand, eight states have life expectancies below seventy-six years. All of them voted for Trump. Fox and other right-wing media often report increased urban homicide numbers telling us the cities have Democratic mayors. (I have never heard them say that the homicide rates started accelerating under President Trump or that Republicans control the states that consistently have the highest homicide rates.) Let me know if you hear Fox reporting that life expectancy is higher in Democratic states than elsewhere.

While crossing the street at a busy intersection, I heard a young man say to a young woman, “Would you rather have your best friend murdered, or . . . .” And it faded away.

I just learned that an Olympic gold medal is really silver. The prize must be at least 92.5 percent silver and is then plated with a bit of gold. The news story said that the gold and silver are worth $758. The article did not say how much a medal was worth on Ebay.

“Many priceless things can be bought.” Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach.

Many people poked fun at Marjorie Taylor Greene for “gazpacho police” and assumed that she did know that she meant “gestapo police.”  “Gazpacho police,” however, at least has the virtue of not being redundant. Now, whether Greene knows the meaning of “redundant” is another question.

 Old joke: “She seems lost in thought.” “I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s a total stranger there.”

The emails beseech me for a donation so that the organization can vigorously defend Navy SEALS who have not been granted a religious exemption from a vaccination requirement. And I wonder about the religious belief system that says a person may kill but may not get vaccinated. I also wonder if the organization would defend someone who wants to be a SEAL but has religious scruples against killing.

 He asked, “Are you religious.” “No,” I replied. “I’m rational.”

I used to have a torso, but apparently now I have a core.

The spouse looked at my wispy, uncut-for-quite-a-while hair haphazardly brushed back and said that I was beginning to look like Benjamin Franklin. I wanted this to be a compliment noting that my high forehead denotes intelligence and that I, too, am a lusty old fellow still sharp as a tack. But I don’t think that’s what she meant.

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Ron and Bob: Lessons in Hate and Prejudice (concluded)

          Although my Jewish friend Bob, Ron’s cousin, progressed in the same grades as I did, I don’t have as many memories of him from our grade and high school days as I do Ron. Instead, I primarily remember him from a college summer when I worked with him and some other college kids for the town’s Parks Department. We mostly cut grass with one of the fulltime guys supervising. The four or six of us assembled in the morning at the tool shed, got our assignment, and headed for a truck. We got in the back along with our Toro reel mowers (we all knew by now that a reel mower cut grass better than a rotary one) and headed to a spot where the gang mowers could not cut, such as the central median on some streets or steep hillsides. At twelve we stopped for lunch, which we had all brought. At the end of the day, we went back to the tool shed and some of us walked together going home. All this gave plenty of opportunity for us to talk, and we all got along. I had known all but one of them from high school. The previously unknown one had gone to the high school on the other end of town. He was a music major and taught me a lot. By the end of the summer, I sort of knew what a fugue was.

          We played harmless jokes on each other such as disconnecting the Toro’s spark plug by pulling a wire off and seeing how many starting pulls a colleague would attempt before recognizing the problem. High humor it was not but it was good for a laugh. We also became protective of each other. If someone was sick and did not come to work, that person would not get paid. Therefore, if someone who was not feeling well struggled in, the rest of us would pick up the slack to cover for him.

          It was common for us to use the restrooms in the parks where we cut the grass around and in between trees. All of us were in one of the restrooms using the urinals, when the supervisor for the day told a joke about a rabbi who could not hit a urinal because of a bad circumcision. Bob was there, and silence fell upon us college kids. After we got outside, somebody took the supervisor aside and told him that Bob was Jewish. Our boss looked deeply embarrassed and said that he had no idea. He did not tell any more Jewish jokes with us.

          The “newspaper” spewing hate about Ron’s father and President Kennedy was written by people who readily acknowledged their hatred of Jewish people and those who promote them. I had already decided that any attempt to “correct” those hateful ideas was unlikely to have any affect. Our boss at the Parks Department, however, in all likelihood, would have denied being prejudiced, and his joke was not filled with hatred, just misguided humor. AND…our comments to him had changed his behavior. We had made him uncomfortable, and that discomfort perhaps made him think about prejudice. At the very least, it prevented future overt expressions of antisemitic prejudice.

          I recognized that discomfort from my own behavior when my speech was chastised. My friends and I knew not to use the N word, but in fact we used it quite a lot. We boys in playing leaped on each other so that four or five might be lying atop one another. We called this a (N word) pile. I have no idea why. When we did eenie, meenie, miny, mo, we followed it with “Catch a (N word) by the toe.” Once again, I don’t know why. We used these expressions until my aunt reproved us for using these expressions. Only then did I realize what we were saying. They were just nonsense words. Right? To us, they were just harmless sounds without any meaning, but were they, in fact, harmless? Did those casual uses of racial slurs affect us? Did they tend to make us see the world through prejudiced eyes? They certainly would have been hurtful to any Black person within earshot. Only when Aunt Beulah reprimanded us for the use of the word in our childish activities, did I truly recognize what we had been saying. I was embarrassed and uncomfortable both because I was less self-aware than I had assumed and because I was using a racist expression. I did not say eenie, meenie, mo in the same way ever again. My discomfort led to a change in behavior and maybe even to a better understanding of a deep-seated prejudice implicit in our supposedly playful doggerel. In contradiction to the snowflake trend by many today, I learned that it was good thing to be made uncomfortable if it opened my eyes to my own behavior.

          I would like to think that I am more aware of the consequences on others of what I do and say than I was back in my youth, but on occasion someone suggests what I have said or done reveals a prejudice. My immediate reaction is either wonder—there’s nothing wrong with what I said—or discomfort at my unthinking mistake. But almost always I reflect on the situation to see if I should alter my behavior, and that is a good thing.

          I have also learned that the discomfort in such situations is not confined to the speaker. Bystanders, too, often feel uncomfortable, perhaps because they use such expressions or because they know they should have spoken up or because they thought they would sound like a prig by reacting. The bystander’s instinct is to blame not the casual prejudice but the one who points it out. One day Gary, a nice guy, used the expression, “Jew me down.” Another friend, Jim, said that he would prefer it if Gary would not use that phrase. Other people who were part of the conversation were made uncomfortable at least as much by Jim’s comment as they were by Gary’s, but I think Jim was right to say what he did.

          It is right to call out the casual prejudice, but it is not always easy. I was happy that we talked to the Parks Department guy about his joke. Bob R. was our friend, and the supervisor told no further jokes about Jews. Instead, he shifted into Rastus jokes. No one said a word to him about them. We knew no Blacks. We spoke up when a friend was affected by casual prejudice Good. But at the time our sense of justice did not extend to the exposure of prejudice that did not so immediately affect us.

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Ron and Bob: Lessons in Hate and Prejudice

Ron R. and Bob R. were cousins. The shared a last name. They were the same age as me, so we were all in the same grades growing up. They were Jewish, and they gave me some early experiences of virulent hatred and casual prejudices.

          New Yorkers are often surprised that I grew up with Jewish friends [What? They think that Jews don’t live other places besides New York?], but in my grade school classes of twenty-five or thirty, two or three were Jewish. In grade school, the Jewish kids outnumbered the Catholics. My town had Catholic grade schools, and few young Catholics went to the public elementary school that I attended. However, the town did not have a Catholic high school and about half of the students in high school, and my closest friend, were what my Baptist Sunday School teachers called “the papist religion.”

Our friendships, though, did not break down by religious or class distinctions, and I knew of no one who seemed in the least antisemitic. We noticed that the Jewish kids were absent some school days and would hear that it was a holiday for them. We Christians had some understanding of Passover (it was, after all, associated with Easter), but Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, or even Hanukkah were outside our ken. I did not know much about the Jewish faith, but I also knew little about Catholicism. The Jewish kids were just friends and classmates and not nearly as exotic as the few who were Greek Orthodox. (My first kiss, sitting on a hill that overlooked the high school in one direction and a Catholic cemetery in the other, was with who Sir Walter Scott would have called the beautiful Jewess, Miriam. I can remember my heart beating with that kiss, but I don’t remember what happened to Miriam and me.)

          Ron was more gregarious than his cousin Bob and a bit of a class clown. Although he did not play it well, he loved baseball and between classes would come running down the hall and launch a hook slide into a second base that only he could see. Almost always he was safe. (You now know how long ago this was; major leaguers don’t hook slide anymore although in those days it was a standard part of a baseball education.) Sometime after we passed puberty, he would regale us boys with dirty jokes he said that he had heard on records, but I don’t remember any explanation of where he listened to these dirty records. I did not always understand the punchlines, but I nervously laughed any way. (I even remember some of them. E.g., I was walking through a field with couples entwined everywhere. In the dark, I accidentally stepped on some guy’s back. A woman thanked me.)

          I knew that Ron’s father was a lawyer, and a highly regarded one. Somebody said that he was a labor lawyer. I did not fully understand what that meant. I could only imagine Clarence Darrow-like courtroom advocates, and even today, I can’t imagine how many clients in our small town needed a labor lawyer. I also knew that Ron’s father was important in the Democratic party, and so I was not surprised to learn, when Ron and I were in high school, that his father had been nominated by President Kennedy to be a federal judge. Ron knew that I was an anti-conservative, and while we did not talk much politics (none of the kids in my circles, at least, talked about politics or even mentioned for whom their parents voted), we did talk a bit about his father’s appointment. One day he came to school with a four-page “newspaper,” which he showed me. I knew there was such a thing as hatred of Jewish people, but I probably thought that it had largely disappeared after the WWII atrocities became common knowledge. But no, this paper had ugly articles about Ron’s father and his nomination to the bench. It was filled with kike and Hebe and crude drawings that were supposed to represent Ron’s father. It carried on with dire predictions of what would happen to Kennedy because he had made the nomination.

          This publication was shocking. I knew there was hate in this country. How could you not if you had seen the televised images of those girls entering a Little Rock school? But that was far away; it was in the South, and I thought that the South was almost another country fixated on race. I don’t know where Ron’s newspaper was written or published. I doubted that it came from my town, but it was writing about the father of a friend in my town. Its hate had invaded where I lived. Hate, I realized, did not just affect distant places, and I wondered who, and how many, in my town harbored such virulent views. I didn’t want to believe there were any, but I could no longer be so sure.

          However, since this hate was so overt and repulsive, I could not imagine that it would cause anyone who was not already an antisemitic bigot to become one. But I also knew there was danger in such hatred because it encouraged the hate-filled to band together in ways making hateful actions more likely. Such views were repulsive to me, but I also realized that their views were unlikely to change if others confronted them. I could not imagine that they would feel even vaguely uncomfortable if they were shunned or mocked. Perhaps their feelings of inferiority would only be fueled by the rejection of “nice” people. Maybe, I thought, it was best simply to avoid these hatemongers.

          But I began to doubt if the same was true for casual prejudices when I encountered them.

(Concluded February 16)