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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)

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Snippets

Cake bakers bake cakes. Bread bakers bake bread. Cookie bakers bake cookies. Bagel bakers bake bagels (after boiling them first, I hope.) Pretzel bakers bake pretzels, with a twist, of course. A recent email from a right wing “religious” organization, referred to “Christian bakers Aaron and Melissa Klein.” Oh, dear! Do Christian bakers bake….?­­

Born-again Christians. Isn’t it better to get it right the first time?

Ascribed to Billy Sunday in Jess Walter, The Cold Millions: “Goin’ to church don’t make you a Christian any more than goin’ to a garage makes you an automobile.”

Do the Christians who are non-celiac but gluten-free pray sincerely, “Give us this day our daily bread”?

Increasingly actors listing credits in Playbills include preferred pronouns. For example, the actor playing Max in the production I just saw included (he/him/his) and the one playing Sandra had (she/her). And pronouns often appear on the signature lines of emails these days. I wrote about how a new pronoun for the NBP has not come easily to me. Search Results for “pronoun” – AJ’s Dad (ajsdad.blog). But my preferred personal pronouns have remained constant: I, me, and especially mine.

I have not done much traveling since Covid infiltrated, but it is funny what I retain from earlier trips. For example, I went to Morocco shortly before the pandemic. I could not name all the different foods I tried. I cannot remember all the restaurants and hotels. I could not even tell you all the cities I visited. But I do remember that Morocco had many wonderful, varied streetlights.

Like others, I have admired the broad boulevards of Paris that help make the city beautiful. However, A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh says that these streets were not designed for their esthetics but to aid the police so that the thoroughfares could not be blockaded as they had been earlier in the Nineteenth Century.

Call me prejudiced. I was surprised at how fit–and attractive–the mixed-doubles Olympic curlers were.

“It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half rude.” Norman Douglas.

Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.

Are you a Zen master if, when you order a hot dog, you say, “Make me one with everything”?

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The Ukrainian Jokester (concluded)

The man with the accent who, to my regret, had just told an offensive joke on the subway to me, loudly announced at the joke’s conclusion that he had to take care of some personal business. He fished out of a fanny pack-sized satchel a dented plastic cup. He moved to the end of the car. I feared that he was going to urinate there, but, instead, he opened the subway door and stepped into the space between the cars as we lurched to our next stop. A considerate man, apparently, to do this out of sight and to use a cup.

My hope that he would take another seat and find a new conversant was dashed as he sat in the place he had vacated. I could not take my eyes off that plastic cup, which looked surprisingly dry, as he placed it back into the satchel while I wondered what that cup was nestling against.

Based on zero evidence that his comedic efforts were a success (no passenger had laughed or, strictly maintaining the no-eye-contact rule, had even looked in his direction), he launched into several more stories. Each time the punchline was, “It was the Jew!” After one of these inevitable endings, he said, “I must be Jewish. My grandfather was Jewish, but he converted to Catholicism.” Perhaps there was a story worth hearing there, but I was not about to try finding out.

We came into a stop that allowed a transfer from our local train to an express, and I got up to exit as did other passengers. “You’re leaving,” he said, and I nodded pointing at the subway sign. He looked a bit hurt, and for a brief, irrational moment I felt sorry that I was sneaking out on him. Even so, I hurried out the train door and scurried to get on the subway car directly in front of the one I had left.

 Now that I was separated from him, I did exit at my planned 110th Street station, but I was immediately pleased that as I stepped from the car I was behind a pillar on the platform, for I could easily hear “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” coming from my “friend” who, too, was on the platform. (He did not advance the song beyond this refrain, but his voice was pretty good.) I had a view of the exit turnstiles, but I did not see him go through them immediately. He had to be lingering on the platform, and if I headed for the street, he would see me. I waited. I still did not see him. I can’t tell you how foolish I felt hiding behind a narrow subway pillar that required me to suck in my gut to remain unseen. Finally, thanking all the Christian, Arab, and Jewish gods, I saw him go through the turnstile. I could not see the stairway to the street, so I waited some more. I inched forward, but with his back to me, he was still at the bottom of the steps that I had planned to take. I tried to calculate the likelihood of being spotted going up a different set of stairs that would have made a slightly longer trip to my destination. I eschewed the risk and waited further behind my protective pillar. I finally took baby steps forward again, and blessed day, I did not see him. I left the platform and ascended to the street, fearing he would be at the top, but although I did a 360, I did not spot him.

I hurried—a rather loose term for the way I now walk—up to Columbia University stopping for a few quick errands along the way. I was going to meet for the first time a student whom I was going to advise for his senior thesis. I had read his proposal. It was for the definitive biography of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall. My goal was to aid the student in narrowing his topic so he could complete it in the next year and not need five more years to graduate as his proposal would require. I knew that I was about to dash some dreams, but sometimes you have to break some eggs to make the omelet for the greater good. (Ok, I agree that this is a mixed metaphor and not a good one, but I can’t come up with anything better right now. I am listening if you have a suggestion.)

 

The meeting site provided a complication. Although I have taught a course at Columbia, and I am currently advising another senior on his thesis, I am not a regular member of the Columbia faculty and do not have a Columbia ID. In this land of Covid, Columbia now limits access to its buildings, and I can’t get in them. The student and I had worked out a solution. We would meet on the steps of Hamilton Hall (yes, that Hamilton of musical fame—a graduate of a precursor of Columbia) and then move into a wedding-sized tent set up on a lawn in front of the building, one of the many “temporary” erections now marring the Columbia campus. Enough heat is provided by portable heaters to make it reasonably comfortable inside.

 he student calls out my name as I approach Hamilton. We shake hands and head into the tent, which contains a dozen or more eight-person tables and find a place to talk. Doing my job, I ask some incredibly insightful questions that will advance the student’s thought processes exponentially. He is answering, and I am listening when I spot him. My pisser, Polish-Ukrainian, Jew-joking subway rider is walking on the far side of the tent. My eyes are glued to him hoping he does not spot me. He sits down at a table where there is one other man. Does he know this guy? Does he have some connection to Columbia? I am not about to ask him, but I realize that I have not been listening to the student’s painstakingly thoughtful comments. I stop the student’s discourse and say, somewhat embarrassed, that I was not listening. I briefly explain to him why, and then immediately wonder if I should have told him about the anti-Semitic jokes since the student has a Jewish sounding name. However, he seems to think that my awkward situation is funny. My subway companion is sitting with his back to me and is unlikely to see me, so I get back to my business of advising a Columbia senior thesis. After a forty-minute discussion, I leave the tent with hopes that I have left my subway regaler behind.

I have garnered no great wisdom from this encounter, and it will not change my subway behavior. Someday again I will be asked about a book I am reading, and I will still give a brief reply, and the odds are overwhelming I will quickly return to my reading. All I can take away from my subway trip is the reminder that not every experience in New York is pleasant, but even those that are not may add interest to life.

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The Ukrainian Jokester

          New Yorkers have rules for subway riding. Some are for efficiency—let passengers exit before boarding. Other rules are for privacy and safety. Thus, don’t make more than fleeting eye contact with other passengers and then only  as an “excuse me” after bumping into someone. Similarly, no engagement with ranters on the train, whether they are preaching what they think is a gospel truth or telling us about the presence of alien beings or the dangers of fluoridated water. When performers seek to collect money, don’t ask them about their lives, where they got their dance or musical training, or how much money they make—they are in a hurry to get to the next car. Riders, of course, can give money to the beggars, but should seek no other engagement with them. (I am beginning to worry about inflation. In the past panhandlers would seek any loose change passengers might have, but yesterday one asked for dollar bills, suggesting quarters were not enough.)

          Only certain conversations between passengers are proper. It is all right to ask travel directions. Is this the 4 train, for example, or does this train stop at Spring Street? Someone will almost always give the correct information. However, all personal questions and comments are to be eschewed between passengers not known to each other. You don’t ask where another passenger is going or what they do or where they live. You don’t comment on someone else’s clothes even if their dress looks as if it is meant to elicit remarks.

          All those rules, of course, do get broken occasionally even by nice (i.e., non-crazy New Yorkers), such as the time I was asked whether I could calculate the circumference of a heptagon by a seatmate who was on her way to buy antique wood for a frame. I have broken the rules myself a few times. Once I asked a young man holding a basketball about his ability and learned he played professionally in Israel. Another time I played rock, paper, scissors with a high school student as we hung onto a subway pole.

          Perhaps the most frequent question I have asked or been asked on the subway has been, “Is that a good book?” referring, of course, to the material someone is reading. I have not been or seen anyone offended by this query, which is often asked as an effort at self-aggrandizement. It is akin in some circles to a wag of the middle figure in front of a closed left eye—a signal of membership in a group. This not a secret society, but the book question announces that I, too, am in that select group that reads books. The answers are usually mundane: Yeah, it’s good. I am not far enough into it to know yet. It was highly recommended to me, but so far it’s only so-so.

After the answer the inquirer usually responds with something such as: I read [name of different book] by that author and have wondered about the one you are reading. People have recommended that book, but so far I haven’t gotten to it. I am looking for a new author. This brief interchange is almost always the entire conversation, and we readers quickly go back to our books.

          It was not surprising, then, as I headed uptown at noon the other day, that the man seated across the car from me asked, “Is that a good book?” He was about sixty with a shock of thick hair on a big head. He was dressed simply—not in business or fashionable attire, but he did not look like a homeless person. His left hand held a sheaf of papers bound together but it did not have a cover as if it had been a pamphlet. From my vantage point six or eight feet away, I could not tell what the material was, but it did not appear to be in English. He had an accent, but he was perfectly understandable. There was no indication from his speech that he was under the influence of drink or drugs.

          I answered his book question simply, “I am enjoying it.” Then came my first warning for he asked, “What is it about?” Normally we book questioners have spotted the cover and know something about the book or the author and that has prompted our original question. But perhaps he was captured by the catchy title of the book. I replied, “It is about a baseball catcher who was a spy during World War II.” I glanced down at my book hoping to end this conversation. He probed, “For who?” I said, “America” and turned a page even though I had not read it as my signal to be left alone.

          Silence for the briefest of moments, and then, “Books are wonderful. They can take you to other worlds.” Now I definitely wanted out of this conversation. No subway book lover would say this to another book lover. I remained silent. He: “I read a lot when I was in prison.” This confirmed that I should find a way to get out of this conversation, not because the guy had been in jail, but because this was not a subway-book-lover discussion. On the other hand, my long-ago career as a public defender makes me a sucker about talking to those who are usually shunned, those who have been imprisoned. He continued that he read history book after history book while locked up. I couldn’t resist; I acted foolishly for a sensible subway rider and asked how long he had been in jail. “Twenty-two days,” the bigheaded man said with a smile. I had trouble not laughing, but I was convinced that this was not the time for jocularity or asking whether he was a speed reader.

Instead, to avoid saying something more about jail, I asked where he was from originally. He told me Ukraine but also mentioned Poland. He said his last name, which I did not get, but it sounded as if it was Polish. I gathered he was Ukrainian of Polish descent. He launched into a short geopolitical discussion and said that Ukraine was really part of Russia and Ukraine needed Russia for protection. He said that the countries were close culturally, with similar ethnicities, music, literature. “The countries share an alphabet.” I have listened to many crazies on the subways and streets of New York as well as at work, but, I thought, this guy, if crazy, is not typical; pointing out a common heritage from a shared alphabet had an intelligence not encountered with most ranters.

Silence for a few moments, and I hoped that the conversation was over, but then he said, “I am getting off at 110th Street.” I tried to hold my face and body steady to not betray that that was my planned exit, although I immediately started thinking about getting off at another stop instead. I was not sure why he announced his destination, but then he said that he had time to tell a joke. I had concluded that he was not totally crazy, but I was not so confident of my psychological skills that I wanted to risk making him angry by telling him to shut up. But I quickly regretted not taking that chance when the joke started loud enough for most people on the car to hear, “A Christian, an Arab, and a Jew were in the desert.” The punchline was, “It was the Jew!” indicating the inherent rapaciousness of Jewish people. This was not a joke that I would have wanted to hear anywhere, much less in New York, much less in a subway car. And to make things worse, it was not funny.

Concluded on Feb.9

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First Sentences

“In a first-class stateroom on a cruise ship bound for New York from Alexandria, Egypt, a frail, middle-aged writer and educator named Sayyid Qutb experienced a crisis of faith.” Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

“Miss Minerva Winterslip was a Bostonian in good standing, and long past the romantic stage.” Earl Derr Biggers, The House Without a Key.

“Moscow. Autumn. Cold.” Teffi, Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea.

“Gwenda was eight years old, but she was not afraid of the dark.” Ken Follett, World Without End.

“At the start of the twentieth century, language in America—it had not yet become the ‘American language’—still showed the influence of its largely prescriptive Victorian past.” William and Mary Morris, Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage.

“The decision to bomb the office of the radical Jew lawyer was reached with relative ease.” John Grisham, The Chamber.

“In the late spring of 1875, the ancient seaport town of St. Augustine, Florida, witnessed the beginnings of an educational campaign that would have an impact on every Indian nation in the United States.” Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation.

“I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.” John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps

“The game, like the country in which it was invented, was a rough, bastardized thing that jumped out of the mud.”Sally Jenkins, The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation.

“In a dream at daybreak, on 18 April 1948, Calogero Schiro saw Stalin.” Leonardo Sciascia, The Death of Stalin.

“Faced with working-class life in towns such as Winchester, I see only one solution: beer.” Joe Baegeant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War.

“—Something a little strange, that’s what you notice, that she’s not a woman like all the others.” Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman.

“Vic Smith, a hunter, lifted his head above a rise on the plains floor, peering down at seven hundred buffalo in the valley of the Redwater River.” Michael Punke, Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West.

“I’m a priest, for Christ’s sake—how can this be happening to me?” John Banville, Snow.