Madness of March

Paterno

2012-01-22T08:07:00.000-08:00

I read this morning on Yahoo that Joe Paterno had passed.

Besides making me think about this great coach who, annually, took his team to prestigious games and won some remarkable games--(beating Miami when they were loaded in 1987 stands out)--I am thinking this morning about the connections between emotional and physical health.

We know from nothing about so much. Who would have predicted ten years ago that I could be typing on a machine without a wire and will be able to, whenever I so choose, broadcast my words to whoever anywhere on the Globe is interested in reading what I write. One hundred years ago who could have imagined phenomena we take for granted: air travel, television, superhighways, youtube.

Joe Paterno, aka JoePa to his supporters which numbered hundreds of thousands, was abruptly fired during the middle of this past football season. Tarnished not because of his own deeds, but because an associate has been accused of being a pedophile. According to detractors Paterno reported this only internally and should have done more to arrest the behavior of his associate.

It is difficult for me to imagine that one could work with another for ten years and not be aware of someone's predatory habits. Yet I have heard stories about couples who are astounded to discover something about their sleeping partners that is shocking and reprehensible. So maybe it is not beyond possibility that Paterno did not know of his associate's alleged behavior.

His awareness, however, may be peripheral to the point I make here. Within three months of being ignominiously removed from a post that he had held for forty years, Joe Paterno is dead. Reports indicate that he died of cancer. Earlier reports, though, suggested that the cancer that he had was minor and that he was being treated effectively for it. Of course, cancers can escalate unpredictably. I wonder, though, if what brought on Paterno's sudden demise was the emotional jolt he has endured over the last weeks. Once respected and exalted by all, he now--in some circles at least--has been criticized as being a tacit enabler.

What kinds of infections can emotional jolts exacerbate or create? My non medical opinion is that very significant physical trauma can be fueled by emotional distress. Emotional bruising does not just make an illness worse; it creates the physiological distress. We have all heard of psychogenic illnesses but these seem to suggest that emotional distress created a vulnerability which allowed carcinogens or some other infection to gain purchase. Makes sense, but in the same way that cell phones were inconceivable during the mid 20th century, I would not be surprised if in the mid 21st a blow like the one that Paterno endured would be acknowledged as not only what accelerated an illness but an insult that begat that illness.

I never met Joe Paterno, but whatever I have read suggests that he was a man who had earned the love that fans sent his way. To have some of that disappear, and to have in its place the sense that perhaps others were considering him in an antithetical light could have been the cause of his abrupt decline. He deserved better.

bereft

2012-01-08T19:26:00.000-08:00

How do we respond when people in our lives disappear?

I just finished a book called, The Leftovers. The premise, at face value, is preposterous. What would happen if people in our lives abruptly disappeared? How would we react? Who would we become?

Tom Perrotta, the author, has written a number of books that I have enjoyed reading. The best, Little Children, was made into a movie that was nearly as good as the book. But this one seemed to have an absurd premise.

I am not giving anything away with this, since what I am about to relay has already occurred at the beginning of the book. Throughout the world on October 14th, people just vanish. Not all people vanish (and not necessarily good people--so despite what some of the "leftovers" claim this is not a Rapture). A teenager is looking at a yearbook with a friend and when she looks up, the friend is gone. A mother goes into the kitchen to fetch a towel to clean up her child's dinner spill, and returns and her husband and children are gone. Throughout the world, people just vanish.

The plot is so other worldly that while I was reading I was often shrugging my shoulders in a "this is ridickalus" motion.

So, I was startled when about fifty pages before the end, I got the, duh, point. How do humans react when love and life vanishes and we are bereft. Do we buck up and forge ahead? Do we try to make sense out of what is inexplicable but find our sense making apparatus off kilter and therefore skid precariously away from a healthy path. Life and love are so central to our essence, so much more important than wealth and even food--so if life and love just disappears is it inevitable that our society, our families, and each of us individually behave as if we are malnourished?

I like the way the author writes and enjoy reading his books because they are fun and descriptive in a way that makes me marvel at his talent, in the same way I might marvel at an athlete's skill. But this book is not for entertainment purposes only. It is unsettling as a reflection of how we individually and how we as a society respond to loss of life and love.

triumph and disaster

2012-01-02T21:33:00.000-08:00

In the movie Back to the Future the main character is able to reverse an event in the past and change the future. He leaves the present and a home that is depressing, intercedes in the past, returns back to the past's future and finds a home that is bright and uplifting.

We can probably identify some pivotal events in our past and see how our successes had positive effects on our current lives. And the opposite is also true.

It would be great if we were strong enough to move on in the past's future--our present--unaffected by our past successes and unencumbered by our past failures. Difficult to do. At least it is difficult for me.

And tonight it will be difficult for a fellow named Williamson who plays football for Stanford University.

Rudyard Kipling's great poem If contains the lyric, "If you can dream and not make dreams your master; if you can think, but not make thoughts your aim. If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same."

Tonight at the end of a thrilling game, Williamson--a freshman kicker for Stanford, had an opportunity to win the game by kicking an easy field goal at the end of regulation. He hooked it wide left. At the beginning of overtime, he also missed a field goal. His counterpart made a field goal at the end of overtime to win the game for the opponent, Oklahoma State.

This is a recurring incident in college football. In earlier blogs I have written about a kicker for Boise State who also missed field goals which cost the team dearly.

Our present and future is benefited, I believe, if we can treat triumph and disaster as two imposters. And I hope that Williamson, a 19 or 18 year old, who at this moment must feel terrible, will be able to move on.

There is another line from the poem which goes like this. "If you can make a heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss--and lose--then start at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss." Tough to do, but something to keep in mind when you feel like Williamson does right now. I know for myself I try to hold onto that wisdom when there has been a loss of what seems like a heap of winnings. But it is not easy. And it will not be easy for Williamson.

last/next lap

2011-12-31T10:16:00.000-08:00

A moment ago I was stunned by an e-mail. Still reeling a bit. And the subject is not an inappropriate one for an end of the year message.

My university sends out notices when a faculty member has passed and so I received the message that Bruce Wallin died on Thursday.

The last time I saw Bruce we were sitting around a conference table. We both were on a committee related to sports and student athletes. Bruce had been a member the year before and I was new to the committee. He apologized repeatedly at the session because he would not be able to participate since he was having hip replacement surgery. This was in September of 2010.

Our paths did not cross that regularly. I first met Bruce at and around sporting events at the school. He was always friendly and welcoming something I appreciated. I got to know him better at a retreat on Martha's Vineyard about a dozen years ago. We were roommates and found ourselves chatting about this and that when not engaged in the retreat program, nearly like college freshmen.

He was an interesting man with a varied background. He was a college basketball player at Princeton where he played during the era when Bill Bradley starred there. He was a good friend of John McEnroe the tennis great. Bruce regaled me for quite some time on Martha's Vineyard with descriptions of his stint working for the Minnesota Twins. Bruce was the guy who drove in the relief pitchers back during the era when, to speed up the games, baseball required that a car drive the players from the bull pen to the pitching mound.

I saw him once around on campus from a distance after the surgery which had, I assumed, gone well. But apparently afterwards he had become ill with cancer. The notice from the school said he died after a short fight with the disease. Probably no more than 65, and he looked a lot younger. Plus he was full of life and energy--almost no pretension. Just a good guy.

We are about to finish the lap for 2011. Every day is precious, a gift. I hope I, and those I love, can remember this as we begin another trip around the track.

Sine or circle

2011-12-28T18:10:00.001-08:00

One of my favorite singers and song writers is the late Harry Chapin. I first heard of him when his "hit", Taxi, made it to popular radio stations in the early 1970s. I like Taxi, but it was sometime later in the 70s when I listened to some of his other songs and found him so engaging. I went to hear him play near Buffalo in 76 or 77 and he seemed so ingenuous and genuinely caring. Then, in October 1979 he came to sing at the small college I worked for at the time--SUNY Fredonia. At the end of that night he had the audience in a tizzy.

It is difficult for me to identify one song in particular that I like the most, because so many resonate with me. But if I had to pick one, and only one, I think I would have to go with Circle. The chorus goes like this.

All my life's a circle
Sunrise and sundown
The moon rolls thru the nighttime;
Till the daybreak comes around.

No straight lines make up my life;
And all my roads have bends;
There's no clear-cut beginnings;
And so far no dead-ends.

Typically, I don't think of a circle when I think of a metaphor for life. I think of a Sine curve. Sometimes you are up and sometimes you are down, and it is likely that, like the Sine curve, you will have regular ups and downs.

For those who have retained a bit of high school math, you know that the sine curve varies in terms of frequency--metaphorically how often we experience highs and lows, and the amplitude--metaphorically how high we get when we are happy and how low we get when we sink. I think it is inevitable that we will have highs and lows, the questions: Are we able to stick around long enough during the highs or are we always dipping down, seconds after we are aloft. And do we get too high or too low.

But whenever, I hear recordings of Circle, I wonder if the circle, not the Sine, is the right geometric figure as a life metaphor. A stanza in Circle goes like this.

I found you a thousand times;
I guess you've done the same;
But then we lose each other;
It's like a children's game;

As I find you here again;
A thought runs through my mind;
Our love is like a circle;
Let's go 'round one more time.

Maybe life is a sine curve, but the backbone of life--love--I think may be a circle. And if the backbone is a circle, perhaps the sense of the sine curve is just an illusion.

One of those Guys

2011-12-26T08:02:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 1969 my brother and I worked in the post office trowing (we were trained to trow not throw) parcels into bins. We were summertime vacation replacements. One of the fellows who started with us decided to continue working at the post office after the summer was up. A year later my brother went to visit him and his report was amusing. Don, the full time worker, reminisced with my brother about the employees we had met when we first started out. Then he said, "Guess what. Now I am one of those Guys."

The Raccoon Lodge will not win the football pool this year. We were the champions last year, but after my performance this past weekend, we have no shot to finish close to the top. My brother left it to me to pick the teams this past week. Very unwise choice on his part. While I sleuthed out the contests diligently, had a plan that seemed like it made sense, and won a number of the early games--including Indianapolis upset win over Houston and Buffalo startling Tebow and the Broncos--six of my other picks were incredible losers.

I have mentioned regularly in this blog how when one bets against the spread it is like flipping a coin. In football it is like flipping a coin while walking a tightrope. So many strange things can happen. I remember years ago meeting a self-impressed basketball better in Las Vegas who told me he does not do football. He said, "Football will drive you crazy with last minute stuff."

So, it can. Let's consider the fate of the Raccoon Lodge.

We won Indianapolis, we won the Giants, we won the Panthers, we won the Steelers and, hah, we won the Bills--up five and we had not even finished the one o'clock games. The rest of the story is this...

Baltimore was beating up on Cleveland and had plenty to beat the 13 point spread. Then they decide to relax. Final score 20-14. Tennessee is up by 20 points to Jacksonville. Another easy winner giving up only 7.5. Tennessee decides to take an afternoon siesta and the final is 23-17 which sinks the Raccoon Lodge,

Those are nothing though. How about San Francisco giving up 2.5 and winning 19-17. And there are the Bears getting 13 points to the Packers. The final 35-21. KC is giving up 1 and loses in overtime by 3. The Patriots are giving up 9.5 and go up 27-17 in the fourth quarter which would make me a winner, but they give up a meaningless touchdown at the end to the Dolphins who can barely swim. Final 27-24.

But my favorite of the day is Arizona and Cincinnati. This made it clear that the Raccoon Lodge is out of business. I have Arizona plus 4. Arizona is getting shellacked so I figure it is a loser. But, lo, there is hope. There is hope. Arizona down 23-0 scores 16 unanswered points in the fourth quarter. And they are driving to tie the score. If they tie, the game will likely go into overtime. In overtime games are typically decided by a field goal, so with four points in my pocket it does not matter if Arizona loses by 3 or wins by 3. The Raccoon Lodge would still win. On fourth down Arizona lofts a pass to a player that is so uncovered that my maternal grandmother could catch it, and she is no longer with us. However this absolutely all alone player falls down like a toddler stumbling after learning how to walk, and the ball bounces behind him. The Arizona quarterback puts his hands to his helmet in a gesture of incredulity. He should have seen my gesture in the sports bar.

The Raccoon Lodge is dead.

I am one of those guys.

John Brown and the religious right.

2011-12-25T11:21:00.000-08:00

I just finished Midnight Rising, a book about John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859. Today is Christmas and also, this year, the 6th day of Hannukkah which means that many are observing and celebrating this day. As I was finishing the book I thought about how Brown's act was related to spirituality.

I wrote in an earlier blog that I have been interested in Brown since I read a speech he delivered before he was hanged. I find out in this book that my memory is mistaken. He delivered the speech in the courtroom after he was found to be guilty.

John Brown was a zealot--his mission was to free the country from an abomination, slavery. The Harpers Ferry plan was beyond foolish. It was so short sighted that the author sugggests that perhaps Brown wanted to be caught and that the action more than the ostensible desired result of the raid is what Brown thought would further the cause. On face value the plan was ridiculous--truly worthy of ridicule.

But the raid did bring to a head the conflict between the states and the issue of slavery. Years later Frederick Douglass (I just read) said that the first battle of the Civil War was not at Fort Sumter but essentially at Harpers Ferry.

Since today is the 6th day of Hannukah and also Christmas, I got to thinking as I was finishing the book about the relationship between Brown's act and being religious. In his speech at his trial, Brown talks about the Bible and identifies the hypocrisy of those who kiss the Bible before testifying and then speak on the witness stand of the legitimacy of subjugating human beings.

Being religious does not mean crossing the ts and dotting the I's. Of course, there is no shortage of maniacs who in the name of some religious cause declare it fine to kill others--but in this case, Brown's cause was incontrovertibly right. And his activities toward to the cause expedited the end of an abomination.

Below is an excerpt from Brown's (unprepared) comments after having been declared guilty.

"I have, may it please the court, a few words to say."
"In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally left them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again, on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection."

"I have another objection; and that is, it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case), had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment."

"This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!"

"Let me say one word further."

"I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances. it has been more generous than I expected. But I feel no consciousness of guilt.

Consciousness of Guilt

2011-12-17T19:42:00.000-08:00

I am reading a book now called, Midnight Rising. It is about John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.

John Brown has been--for thirty plus years at least--an intriguing historical character to me. About ten years ago I was driving through Lake Placid and saw a sign indicating that his home was nearby. I hadn't known that he had lived there (according to the book he spent very little time in that home, leaving his wife to fend for herself while he pursued his mission). I pulled off the road and took a tour of the farm.

We all know the song John Brown's Body that we sang as kids, and most of us know about his role in the abolitionist movement. For me, though, what made John Brown a riveting character was the speech he gave just before he was hanged. I read it about thirty years ago when I was looking for important speeches for students to read. In the speech, Brown said at one point that he "felt no consciousness of guilt." It is this excerpt that I thought to be singularly powerful, meaningful (and apparently) memorable.

Of course we in 2011, know that Brown's goal was more than just admirable. Can there be anything that is more of a blight on American history than the fact that once slavery was a lawful institution. Why should Brown have felt any consciousness of guilt for trying to free individuals horrifically subjugated like subhumans.

But the excerpt stuck with me not only because of how right he was to feel no consciousness of guilt for fighting against slavery. The line has stayed with me because I thought that whenever one took any action, consciousness of guilt might not be a bad meter to use when considering whether the action should be done. Will there be consciousness of guilt? If so, then don't do it.

I have not finished the book--just half way into it--but I find it interesting to read about how quirky Brown was and how impossibly unsuccessful he was in almost any business enterprise he pursued. And certainly the raid on Harpers Ferry was a wild, myopic attempt to reach his goal. The raid we now know was a bloody failure--at least in the way it was designed to be successful.

I don't plan to be hanged, but I do hope that when I face some arbiter, I can say that I feel relatively little consciousness of guilt.

Raccoon Lodge

2011-12-17T19:35:00.000-08:00

Last year my brother and I won the annual (not for profit) football pool picking games against the spread. Those who have read the Madness of March know that I argue that essentially picking games against the spread is like picking heads or tails in a coin toss.

This year we are still in the hunt with three weeks remaining--we are about six wins behind the leader. There are 47 left to play including one that is being contested as I write. I have a good feeling about our picks for tomorrow and I add quickly that I know from nothing.

I looked at the pundits in the newspaper today, people in the business of picking games. The Raccoon Lodge (our team) is doing as well as the experts--for the simple reason that there can be no experts when picking against the spread.

All this self effacement aside, look out for the Raccoon Lodge down the stretch.

12-15/16-11; midnight

2011-12-15T21:24:00.000-08:00

After a big meal, when I was a boy, my father would lean back in his chair and say, "You know, if everyone had a meal like this every night, there would be no more wars."

This was one of several refrains we would hear from dad--and it is not insignificant that, now, forty plus years later I can still recall many of these comments and recognize the wisdom in the messages.

Tonight I arrived at my parents' home to celebrate my dad's birthday. As is always the case, I was greeted warmly by my folks. We shmoozed for a while, ate more than needed to be consumed, and now look forward to doing something special for my dad's day tomorrow.

If everyone had a loving home to come home to every day, there would be no wars.

Rational or Irrational

2011-12-11T09:52:00.000-08:00

Each December the New York Times publishes a list of the top ten books of the year. The list came out in today's paper and I had not only not read any of them, but had not heard of any. A couple caught my eye, but the one that has me thinking for the last few hours is called, Thinking Fast and Slow. Here is the blurb that describes the book:

We overestimate the importance of whatever it is we're thinking about. We misremember the past and misjudge what will make us happy....[the author] demonstrates that irrationality is in our bones, and we are not necessarily the worse for it.

There is something, of course, ironic about me thinking about this for the last two hours. But here are some of my musings--however irrational. Is it possible that what I am sure about represents a composite of misjudgements? If irrationality is in our "bones", and we are not necessarily the worse for it, does this means that rationality--valid logical thinking--has insidious effects?

I spend a good deal of time in my head. If I "misremember the past" and "misjudge what will make me happy" then it becomes very difficult to plan.

The Box Tops

2011-12-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

In September 1967, after the summer of love, the number one hit was a song taken from a movie called, To Sir With Love and the singer was a woman named Lulu. The song endured but shortly after it reached number 1, it was supplanted by a song by a group called the Box Tops. The song was called, The Letter, and it began with a lyric that reflected a frenzied reaction: "Give me a ticket for an airplane, aint got time for a fast train, lonely days are gone, I'm a goin' home, My baby she wrote me a letter."

The timing of the song release was likely fortuitous. Baby boomers in the millions were leaving home and going to college that September after the summer of love. The idea that a letter could be powerful enough to bring a sweetheart charging home was a comforting notion to those who had recently been separated. Of course it was likely in the realm of the real world that by the time the plane had landed, the "baby" who "wrote me a letter" might have had a second thought, making the flight's descent smooth sailing compared to the bumpy landing of the traveller.

One hears the Box Tops song now and again on Oldie stations, but I think it might have a muted impact in this next generation. By the time a sweetheart in 2011 is an hour away from a lover, there would be muliple texts, a call or two on a cell phone, and maybe a picture transmitted easily on a blackberry. "Here is me at the train station feeling blue."

Would someone be likely to bolt off the train if he received a text saying, "I miss you to bits" twenty five minutes after the last embrace? Maybe so, but I think there is a power to a posted letter that carries the weight of some time away. Would you rather get a birthday card that is handwritten, or a text wishing you a great day? Maybe soon the distinction between the two forms of communication will be blurred, but somehow I doubt that the lyric, "My baby, she wrote me an e-mail" would compel someone to hop on an airplane.

BCS without the C

2011-12-06T19:45:00.000-08:00

It is time for my annual rant against the Bowl Championship Series.

In all of sport, and this counts wrestling, there is nothing so silly and patently false as the BCS. This year, the wisdom of who knows who, has determined that the University of Alabama should play LSU for the championship. Previously this year LSU defeated Alabama in a game that was a cure for insomnia. The final, 9-6, was less exciting than watching your neighbor walk the dog.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that there are several teams with only one loss to someone other than LSU, and several teams that are exciting, can score touchdowns, and have deserved the opportunity to compete for a championship, the oligarchy that runs college football has decreed this ridickalus game.

Let's consider Oklahoma State. They lost one game. They lost the game on the day after they discovered that the coach of the women's basketball team had been killed in a plane crash. They lost, I believe, in overtime after mourning all day. Well, hell, they don't deserve to play.

How about Boise State. They lost one game because a kicker missed a field goal. That is the only game they lost. They are exciting have lost only one game in each of the last two years. They are playing in what might as well be called the Toilet Bowl.

College football postseason is nothing more than a series of exhibition contests. Since two teams have been decreed the best teams, what difference does it make when others play. Can there be anything that is more like a soccer "friendly" than the Independence Weedeater Bowl.

In Division IAA, II, and III there are tournaments taking place currently. It is much more exciting and genuine, as far as I am concerned, to see whether University of Wisconsin Whitewater will defeat Mount Union in Division 3, than to see how the hoo hah University of Wisconsin/Madison division 1 team will win in the silly Rose Bowl.

When I was a kid I would watch wrestling with Bruno Sammartino, Gorgeous George, Haystacks Calhoun, Jumbo, and assorted other "wrestlers". My father would tell me that it was all phony. He was right. But no more phony than whoever is called the national champion in college football this year.

this is going to hurt

2011-12-02T18:40:00.000-08:00

When I was nine or ten I got hit in the mouth by a baseball bat. It was an inadvertent strike. My friend Gregory and I were playing on a grassy area near our apartment building. As I recall we were near one of the several signs in the neighborhood that read, "No ballplaying of any kind." Scofflaws in training, I guess, though in the neighborhood it seemed that we were not alone. I recall that a number of years later I played football on a lawn and we, without really thinking much about it, used a similar forbidding sign as the touchdown goal marker.

I cannot remember now how exactly Gregory hit me in the mouth with the bat. It was certainly inadvertent. We might have been picking up the bats after our game and he accidentally swung a bat around or it could have been during a game when I was catching and caught the back of the bat as he finished his swing. It doesn't matter. I just knew I had been hit. I can't even remember now much bleeding if any. But I did not think it would go away.

My folks took me to the doctor who, and who knows if my memory is playing tricks on me now, always seemed to be there no matter when we showed up. I actually had two doctors like this. My pediatrician was a woman named Dr. Lipsett, and the family doctor was named Shapiro. I can vaguely remember Dr. Lipsett, but I can see Dr. Shapiro as if he was sitting on the nearby chair here where, currently, my cat Pumpkin now seems to be extraordinarily comfortable.

Dr. Shapiro was a heavy guy with a double chin who seemed jovial nearly every time I was there. We might have to wait a stretch to see him, but whenever we got to the doctors, eventually, he would see me.

So, Dr. Shapiro takes a look at my kisser and shakes his head a couple of times. Then he takes out something from his arsenal and tells me he is going to put it on the area where I'd been clocked. Then he tells me something that he rarely had told me previously, "This" he said "is going to hurt".

Well, I dont remember thinking much of this warning. I had been to doctors before and before a shot had been told that something was going to hurt. But often this warning came with a laugh as if to indicate that it was a right of passage and I would be fine. This time there was none of that. Nevertheless, I was not particularly concerned. He put the stuff on me.

It hurt like hell. I can remember it to this day. He was not bluffing. Whatever it was, when it connected with my bruised mouth I hit the roof. Eventually, of course both the pain and any vestiges of Gregory's bat left, but the pain was pretty good. I wrote in these blogs about a toothache I had recently that was off the charts painful. This was not in that category, but certainly it is memorable.

The thing is that throughout my life when something ominous was about to happen I have tended to downplay the pain that was upcoming. Emotional or physical. I figure something is going to hurt some and often am way off the mark in terms of the sum of the some. How bad can it be is a good attitude to take, but it is worth recognizing that sometimes the depths of pain can be beyond the capacity to conceptualize until we experience it.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-22T14:53:00.000-08:00

In 1967 I was a freshman at what we then called SUNY Albany. The fall was a magical time for me. I marvelled at, and revelled in, the college experience. I had made some new friends, found History, Spanish, Literature, Math, something called Sociology engaging enough, had, somehow, made the freshman basketball team, and began to appreciate the simple joy of a local tavern listening to yarns from fellow students as well as old timers who were, no doubt, twenty years younger than I am now.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving I decided to take a bus home and surpise my folks by arriving a day early. I got a ride to the bus station and took a Trailways to Port Authority arriving around 11. There I subwayed to Penn Station and took a late night train to Hicksville. From there I took a cab to our home.

I left my suitcase in the living room and tried silently to climb the stairs. I woke up my brother. He had been feeling under the weather and had just gotten to sleep. So, while happy to see me, he needed the sleep and now at about 2 in the morning I did too. Seconds later, I conked out in the twin bed that was "mine' in the bedroom we had shared as we grew up.

In the morning my father was readying himself to exit the house en route to work. There he saw my suitcase in the living room and bounced upstairs to see that I had come home in the middle of the night. He woke up my mother who was delighted to see me as well. She, excited, woke up again my poor brother, still not finished with his rest.

The thing is that all of them. My mother, father, and brother were excited about my return. We were together again. And it was this, far more than the turkey we ate the next day that was the most nourishing part of the holiday.

Love is the foundation. I am aware of my good fortune.

November 22, 2011

2011-11-21T21:30:00.001-08:00

I can rarely remember where I place my wallet and keys. Ask me what I did one year ago this month and I will have to check my logbook--and this assumes I remembered to record what I did one year ago in my logbook. I need to write my passwords down on a sheet otherwise I would never be able to check my messages or get into my e-mail.

But ask me, or anyone of my vintage where I was 48 years ago today, and nobody, but nobody, will have trouble telling you exactly where they were when we heard the news.

onslaughts--real and imagined

2011-11-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I was talking with my parents on the phone. My father writes to the family regularly with insightful comments about his philosophy on life. Earlier that day he had sent us a letter about how stress can be reduced by realizing that much of what causes stress are events that we anticipate, but do not typically occur. He referred to the Mark Twain quote that goes: I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. My brother had responded to this letter by sending several similar quotes.

If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you. ~Calvin Coolidge

Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist. ~Edgar Watson Howe

When we were speaking I mentioned the popular book that came out in the late nineties called, "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff* (*And it's all small stuff)

But it's NOT all small stuff. The author of the book, Richard Carlson, died at 45 when he suffered a blood clot in his lungs while on a plane. When the stuff is not small, but big, there is no balm.

The day after the phone call, I was reading the Sunday newspaper. I typically read the Sunday papers by first reading the Sports and second reading the book reviews. This indicates, very clearly, my priorities and hobbies. Joan Didion's book, Blue Nights, was reviewed. Blue Nights is a memoir about the death of her daughter. Previously she had written a memoir The Year of Magical Thinking about the death of her husband.

The review was beautifully written and included this line "The author as she presents herself here, aging and baffled, is defenseless against the pain of loss. [The book] is most provocative at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life's worst onslaughts nothing avails..."

I think this is so.

This week I wondered what it is like to be Joe Paterno. A man who was revered up until early this week and who now will forever, wrongly more than rightly, be linked to a scandal. Moreover, I wonder about those who were allegedly victimized by the accused perpetrator, Jerry Sandusky.

My father, as usual, is right about the therapeutic value of not worrying about things that are unlikely to happen. And Calvin Coolidge was right, nine out of ten troubles will not likely be troubling. But the tenth, even for the most resilient among us, is very difficult to overcome.

loss and resilience

2011-10-30T06:09:00.000-07:00

Can the players on the Texas Rangers ever forget game 6?

Twice they were within one pitch of getting a ring. Being world champions. The first time an outfielder made a play on a fly ball that looked like a little leaguer's attempt. I think I could catch that ball. I really do. But he ran back and took a stab that was nowhere near the ball. The result was a game tying triple. The second time was a little more digestible, a Cardinal player got a single to drive in the tying run. But still, twice, one pitch away.

I think coming so close to what you want and then having failed is a bruise on your heart that can't easily be removed. If you are successful at shaking it off and literally forgetting it, I believe you have created a callous that will make it difficult to feel good things later on. It is a reality. You lost. You could have been successful but you were not.

One could offset the failure by listing successes. One could also, legitimately, place the failure adjacent to more important successes. Missing a fly ball that cost your team the world series is big, but not as big as being a good person, parent, consistently responsible adult.

I think the source of resilience when confronted with failure is simply to acknowledge that tomorrow is another day and another chance to be successful. Not an easy posture to assume. When the Rangers lost game 6 the way they lost it, I figured they had no chance as in none to win game 7.

There was soap

2011-10-08T10:32:00.001-07:00

Today is a day of introspection for those in my tribe. I have wondered since I was an undergraduate, if not before, what is the best way to spend a day dedicated to introspection, identification of failure, repentance for transgressions, and forgiveness.

I was thinking about all of the above and I was reminded of a part in a book called Love in the Time of Cholera. The book is about a young man who falls in love with a young woman and spends a lifetime trying to reach her. At first he is thwarted because they are of different social classes and her parents forbid contact. She then marries a doctor and still, from afar, the young, then older suitor, attempts to reach the woman's heart.

The author takes us into the lives of both the suitor, and the woman married to the physician. In one scene the woman and her doctor husband have had an argument. It has surfaced because of something that on the surface appears to be minor. The husband makes a comment that there is no soap in the bathtub. The wife, the object of the other man's love, has had it with her doctor husband's regular identification of what she has failed to do. She insists that there was soap. He insists (and is correct) that there was no soap.

This husband's claim does it as far as the wife is concerned. She ceases to speak to her husband, compels him to sleep in another room, and goes about her activities in the house as if he is a piece of furniture despite his entreaties to stop the nonsense.

Finally after weeks of no communication and contact, the doctor stops his wife in a hallway and says simply, "There was soap." Nothing else. "There was soap."

Subsequently, she allows him into the bedroom and begins interacting normally.

I thought of this today. What does it mean when he said, "There was soap"?

It doesn't mean there was soap. There, in fact, had been no soap. It could mean, "Look I dont like the excommunication and I'll say anything to get back to normal." But it also could mean, "I love you, we both forget the soap now and then. Our hearts are entwined. Therefore, then and always, there was soap."

So, on a day dedicated to introspection it has crossed my mind that with the right intentions, "there was soap", might be something we not only say to those we love, but to ourselves when we in fact have succumbed to being human, and have transgressed.

Sacco and Vanzetti and Sports

2011-09-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

My knowledge of historical events is limited. In high school I was adept at learning what needed to be known to pass the State wide Regent's examination. In college I was adept at going to the library, but spent more time dwelling on peripheral matters than whatever it was I was supposed to be studying. For this reason while I had a general idea of who Sacco and Vanzetti were I really did not know more than the skeletal outline.

So recently I picked up a book about Sacco and Vanzetti and--until I forget what I just read--(and the over under is about 8 months)I will know a good deal about the details of their alleged crimes and their trials in both the literal and figurative sense.

Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists and, many feel, they were convicted of a crime and sentenced to death not because of any evidence linking them to the crime, but because they were anarchists. So the trial and the jury and the judge were determined to find them guilty and kill them in the electric chair while many throughout the world protested the unfairness of the trial. The most stunning example of the lack of due process was when an appeal was made for a retrial on the basis of the prejudices of the judge. And the judge assigned to the appeal to determine if the trial judge had been prejudiced was, incredibly, the trial judge.

And guess what? The appeal Judge Thayer, found that the trial Judge Thayer, was not prejudiced. Go figure.

I was on a plane on September 28th, the night that is being called the most exciting night of baseball ever. A night when three games with playoff implications were decided with walk off wins. The games were on tv on the JETBLUE plane. And to my left and right were fans cheering wildly for their teams. This was one bumpy flight and not because of the cheering. There was some weather and we were bouncing all over the air. Yet the zealots on either side of me paid no attention.

Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on 8/22/27; the rules that governed the verdict were flexible and flawed. The Red Sox lost 4-3 on Wednesday, and the verdict was based on the rules of the game.

What kept spectators riveted on a very bumpy plane ride was the certainty that nobody could get robbed because of caprice and hidden agendas. If the umpire thought the batter was a Communist a ball hit out of the park would still be a home run.

There are a lot of people with broken hearts in Boston and Atlanta. The Red Sox and Braves were eliminated on the last night of the season. But the fans will be back next year, because they know the games are relatively and essentially fair. Had Sacco and Vanzetti enjoyed similar protection the world would not have been rocked by injustice in the 1920s.

mezinka

2011-08-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

My friend Gary and I go way back. We met in high school, stayed in touch through the college years even though he went to school near home and I was three hours away. We annually meet up with another high school crony to attend the US OPEN, go to the school reunions, and generally keep abreast of each other's lives.

I remember meeting his then girlfriend in the early seventies and attending their wedding on November 17, 1973, the Saturday before Thanksgiving that year. I've been to both of his children's bar and bat mitzvahs, his daughter's wedding a few years ago, and then just last weekend to his son's wedding.

Gary and I have what I have always thought was a healthy dose of skepticism towards the status quo and convention for convention's sake. In the summer of 69 we worked together at a pool company unloading very heavy boxes that once assembled by the customer became outdoor pools for suburban back yards. In the course of that job and another working as waiter and busboy in the Catskills, we would regularly share a general laugh at what seemed to be done for show, ceremony, or without apparent reason.

There was a ceremony at his son's wedding last weekend, which on the surface was just the kind of thing that Gary or at least I would have ridiculed had we seen it while working one of the functions in the Catskills. It was called a Mezinka. The MC asked the parents of the groom to sit on some chairs in the middle of the room. And then asked each of the guests to circle around the parents and congratulate them on the marriage of their last child.

As I took my place in the circling guests I found myself not quite choked up, but feeling the power of this ceremony in a very physical way. Each of the guests, leaned into Gary and Cathy and congratulated them and I was very moved as I participated and watched Gary accept the well deserved congratulations.

Maybe getting older means realizing that there are reasons why conventions become conventions.

There is a power to having and raising a family and then seeing them move off on their own to continue the cycle. Gary, often the wiseguy, was engaged during the Mezinka and I could tell he was moved as he had a right to be. Afterwards, I told him that I thought it was a special moment and instead of pooh poohing it, he shook his head and agreed. He told me that his daughter was downstairs in the building taking care of her own young daughter who had walked down the aisle in the main ceremony. Gary's daughter was soon to be a parent again and I heard this week that she gave birth to a second child. The Mezinka congratulates him and Cathy and the cycle continues. Very powerful.

If we only have love, we can give the new world to our daughters and sons.

Pants on Fire

2011-08-07T07:54:00.000-07:00

There is a section in the Boston Globe which lists "what happened this day" I don't read it everyday, but today I did. The column also lists famous people birthdays. It is humbling to note that nearly everyone under 40 is someone I have never heard of.

But what caught my eye today, perhaps in the light of today's news about deaths in Afghanistan, was that today is the date that congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which allowed President Johnson to escalate the war in Vietnam.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was a reaction to what President Johnson referred to as the Tonkin Gulf incident--an event he described revealing the sinister behaviors of our enemies in North Vietnam, an event he suggested that compelled the United States to increase military activity in South East Asia.

Most, if not all, historians agree that the Tonkin Gulf Incident never occurred. That it was a contrivance by the President to persuade Americans and their representatives to give Johnson the authority to increase our involvement in the war.

Nobody with a pulse who visits the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington is unmoved. And so many of the names on that Memorial died because we escalated our activity based on a lie. Today is the anniversary of the vote that was taken based on that lie. How many of our soldiers and all the worlds' soldiers have died because they assumed that government was telling the truth.

Apples and Oranges

2011-08-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

I saw something in the paper today that at first startled me and then made me snort with laughter. I am not sure my employers will be able to similarly laugh it off.

Northeastern University, where I am employed, has advanced dramatically in the past ten years. At one point we were an open admissions institution with a reputation that did not rival our neighbors' in the Boston area. Last year, however, and in each of the last several years the university's qualitative growth has been remarkable. We were ranked 69th last year in US News and World Report. This year we will likely be ranked somewhere in the 50s. I have heard optimistic predictions that we may be ranked as high as the 30th best research university in the country. At the same time the numbers of students who have applied has soared. This year over 43000 students applied for 2800 slots. So, we are doing well.

I read in today's paper that another organization has ranked universities and this ranking has my employers justifiably irate. Instead of being in the top 100 we are not in the top 400. How can it be that USNews has ranked us so high, and the newcomer has ranked us so relatively low.

The reason is comical if one could maintain one's sense of the humor. It seems as if this other ranking agency has as a criterion the percentage of students who graduate in four years. This criterion has a hefty weight of 20 percent. And in this category we, Northeastern, appear to not measure up. Most of our students graduate in 5 years. Therefore, we would consequently fall in the rankings.

When I read about the criterion, as I write above, I was at first incredulous and then laughed. Northeastern is a five year--not a four year-- school. Nearly all of our students participate in what is called Co-op, Cooperative Education. That means they alternate periods of study with periods of employment in their field. Students do not pay tuition while they are "on co-op"; they get paid by an employer. So, an Accounting major studies Accounting and then works for 6 months in an Accounting firm. Then she or he returns to school, studies in a conventional classroom, and then during the next semester goes back to another Accounting firm. After five years the student has accrued the standard 128 credits and also has had three work experiences.

Since we are a five year school, graduating in five years is what we, the students, and the students' parents expect.

When my school discovered the ranking was based in large part on this alleged deficiency, we contacted the agency. Their response, "Well we have to use the same criteria, otherwise it is 'apples and oranges'."

Well, no. If you were to apply this same measure, then the apt criterion would be, do students graduate on time. If you were to claim that graduating in four years is the appropriate criterion, then Junior Colleges would head the list, because their students would seem to be remarkably quick graduating in 2 years. Six month certificate programs in, say, Cake Baking would do even better, graduating their students in 1/8 the time of say Harvard.

I am startled by how often people use shibboleths like "Apples and Oranges" to justify irrational or irresponsible behavior. My favorites are "Business is Business" and "I was just doing what I had to do." Under the umbrella of "Business is Business" you can steal and deceive. "Doing what I had to do" can justify behaving unethically with employers, friends, sweethearts, and family members.

I am more amused by the ranking than anything else. Nobody but a goof could think that the listing made sense, but I am troubled as I am reminded by how often platitudes are used to be unprofessional or inconsiderate or, in some cases allow for horrifically egregious behaviors. "Just doing my job" and "just following orders" worked well for genocide collaborators.

Now comparing perpetrators of genocide with college ranking irresponsibility would be apples and oranges. Hiding behind shibboleths, however, seems to work for all sorts of fruits.

Drugged

2011-07-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

I went to college during the late 60s and early 70s. Still, I was never much of a druggie. As opposed to President Clinton, I did inhale, but beyond that my recreational drugs were confined to coffee and beer. There were drugs all around me, but I never indulged. I solicit no points for my decisions. Essentially I did not want to take a chance and mess with my head.

I've maintained the same posture as an adult. I take almost no medicine except aspirin unless I am told that I really must take an antibiotic to ward off an infection. I've had back ailments in the past, but when I took pain medication it tended to rob me of my thinking apparatus as well as the pain, and I preferred the pain to feeling completely at sea. No medals for this decision to avoid drugs. I think individuals' bodies respond differently. I just think I, personally, am better off to just say no.

About two weeks ago I started to feel some pain in my head. About two months prior to that I had some dental work done and the dentist told me that I should make an appointment for a root canal. If I didn't, I was warned, eventually I would be in a good deal of discomfort.

I tend to pooh pooh such advice. I've heard it before from dentists and then when I visit another dentist and mention the warning, the new physician looks at my mouth and sees no problem. So, when I heard the dentist recommend I go for a root canal, I put the referral slip in my pocket, and intended to forget about it. As I was leaving the office the dental hygienist told me again to make sure I made an appointment and guaranteed me that I would regret it if I did not do so quickly.

But I didn't pay any attention. Until two weeks ago when I started to get headaches. I brought my aspirin with me on a trip to New York and found if I took a couple aspirin every four hours the pain would go away. So, I did, and I figured I would be fine.

But last weekend, I started to get the kind of headaches that I have only heard about. I've felt searing pain before with athletic injuries, but always sensed that the pain could be endured and eventually would go away. This was scary pain. This was hold onto the aspirin bottle like a wino holds onto Muscatel pain. At one point I thought maybe I had a tumor as the reach and duration of the episodes was debilitating.

I remembered what the dentist/hygienist had told me and hoped this was a function of my ignoring his and her advice. My dentist is on my route to work, so I stopped in Monday morning hoping maybe he could see me without an appointment. My dentist is really a special professional. He was about to consume his breakfast when I walked in. I told him what I was feeling and he suggested that I sit in the chair for a few minutes. He poked around, pulled up my ex rays, and explained that the pain was likely from the root canal that I needed. He phoned his associate right then and made an appointment for me, for Thursday. He also offered to write a script for some pain medication.

I adhered to my regular line about medication and told him I would prefer sticking with aspirin. He made a face like "suit yourself" but said if I changed my mind I should just give a call.

I got to work a little late, but felt relieved that I would soon be able to address the problem. And then an hour later, I felt pain in my head like I don't wish on anyone. Literally debilitating pain that had me holding my head in my hands. I called the dentist and left a message hoping he might write the prescription.

By the time I drove home I was feeling, almost comically, like my head was going to explode. I stopped at the drug store and my dentist had called in the prescription. I opened the vial feverishly and popped down the first pill.

Well, let me tell you, an hour later I was singing hymns to the CEO of CVS. There was no pain. I could drink hot, cold, walk around the house, read a book, watch tv. This stuff was great. What's more I was fully functioning. I was able to concentrate on work related issues. It was as if this pill knew just where the pain was and went right to it.

I "got" drugs, then. I almost got religion.

About six hours later I forgot I had problems with my teeth and head. Until I remembered again when about two hours after that I felt as if someone had slammed a brick onto the side of my head. I found the vial and popped another pill. Sea of tranquility in a half hour.

This drug stuff is great.

Last night I took one before I went to bed and slept like a marathon runner all night. But, my first steps this morning were a little wobbly. I took another pill before I went to work and thought I could hear the sounds of silence on my ride in.

I am supposed to take one pill every six to eight hours. About five hours into today's interval, I started feeling the pain again. I kept looking at the clock willing the time piece to go to six hours. Then I took another, and this time while the pain ebbed it has not gone away completely.

I am looking forward to tomorrow morning's appointment for this root canal like I might look forward to a reunion with a lost sweetheart. I cannot wait.

I think I was right about drugs in the first place. At least drugs that are taken to mask pain. They tend to be only good for the short run. If you use them for the long run, the natural problem will resurface--if you do have a natural issue, and then you will need more to suppress what is naturally surfacing.

Probably a metaphor in this related to sports and life. Perhaps the natural pains we experience from an absence of love and friendship, can be addressed by temporary coats of armor. But if the pain is so great and the source of the loss so natural, the armor/drugs will have only a temporary effect. But what do I know. The more times around the track, the more I tend to doubt what I at one time thought was irrefutable. So, maybe there is a metaphor in this, but right now I am more concerned with when the next brick will collide with my head.

A Complete Circuit

2011-07-23T04:42:00.001-07:00

When I was in elementary school--maybe in second grade-- each of us had to participate in the science fair. The idea was for us to come in with something we created related to science that would be put on display for visiting parents to view at an exhibit.

Science was not my thing. I had put off doing my exhibit until the last minute and finally fessed to my father saying I had no idea what to do for the science fair. So, he helped me. He found a piece of plywood someplace and an old insulated piece of wire. On the plywood he screwed in a tiny lightbulb that was encased in a small piece of hardware. He connected the wire to the lightbulb and ran the wire around the periphery of the plywood. He interrupted the wire about half way around from where the bulb was, and found an old manual switch. It was the kind of switch that you could pull down to get current. As I remember the top of the switch was not insulated so he yanked off the top of a nosedropper and put that on top of the switch. Somewhere on top of the plywood he hooked up a battery.

This he told me would illustrate a complete circuit.

I thought my father was a magician with this set up. What with the wire, lightbulb, even nosedropper and switch--this was impressive to me. However, I still did not get it. Then he demonstrated that when the nosedropper was up and not connecting with the base of the switch, the lighbulb would not go on. But if you depressed the nosedropper so that the metal on the top connected with the metal on the bottom, then the tiny lightbulb went on.

Now I was wide eyed. I must have asked a bunch of questions, but what I recall doing mostly was plunging the noseplugged top to the bottom and then releasing it to see that lightbulb go on and off. And then, periodically, picking my head up to look at dad as if to say, that's like a magic trick.

When we went to the fair there must have been 209 complete circuits that were brought in and there were exhibits that were like rides in Disney world, but it did not matter to me. I was still taken by the contraption dad had put together and kept plunging the nose dropper to see that light go on.

In early 2006 a woman who had been, to me, a little kid when I'd been a camper at a summer camp, endeavored heroically to organize a reunion of all those people who had attended the camp during a 20 year span. She was remarkably successful and in the summer of 2006 some 100 ex campers descended on a camp near the one where we attended and reunited for a weekend that was beyond rich. She not only brought together the people who could attend that reunion, she stimulated other connections that begat other connections. In December of 2006 she organized another reunion which I could not attend, but glommed onto the photos that were posted from the event. In the summer of 2007 she organized a mini reunion in New York which I could attend and seven of us sat in a midtown restaurant for hours reminiscing and connecting. In the summers of 2009 and 2010 there were other summer camp reunions near the camp where we had attended. Through this woman's indefatigable efforts she has brought lifelong friends, sweethearts, and even families back together.

The reconnections made are not artificial or superficial. They have established completed circuits that have enabled many of us--pardon the heavy metaphor--to light up and feel charged. Sure some connections might seem to fade as time goes on, but for those that were very real in the first place, we have embraced and been enriched because of the completed circuits.

I often wonder about energy. When we feel thrilled, relieved, joyous--it is almost a a palpable sensation. That is we can feel it. So, what happens when we don't have it. We know how we feel when we have a completed circuit, when we feel that rush of love, of having connected--what are the manifestations of not having a completed circuit. What happens to that potential emotional energy?

I am still not a science student, but I think that unharnessed emotional energy does go somewhere and it is in us. In the same way that a completed circuit is enriching and is genuinely salubrious, when that nosedropper goes up and the light goes off, I think something insidious begins.

Thank you Dad for helping me with my science project and explaining how a complete circuit works. Thank you Ona for the industrious and sophisticated wiring that allowed so many of us to complete circuits.

Keep that nose dropper down. Not only for the richness and illumination of a completed circuit, but to avoid the deleterious effects of a loss of power-- functioning in the dark, bumping into objects, substituting adjusting to darkness for genuine light.

world cup

2011-07-10T11:47:00.000-07:00

Since I was old enough to be aware of such things, I was surprised at how frenzied soccer fans were about their game. I knew of course how Americans would get riled about basketball, football, baseball, and hockey--but soccer seemed to be the kind of sport that could not engage enough people. And, of course, I was wrong--since soccer is the most popular sport in the world.

Today's match between the United States and Brazil might explain why that is. I noticed when reading the paper today that there was a world cup match at 11 a.m. eastern time. Sometime around 12:40 when I had some laundry to fold I put on the game while attending to the task.

Then I was hooked until the end of the second period, and the two overtimes, and the shoot out. The United States came back in the last seconds to tie the game, and then won in the shootout. The tying goal was truly a work of art. I found myself as excited about the end of that game as I have been for any sporting event in a month or two--and that includes the Bruins' championship.

So, for naysayers who consider soccer some inexplicable attraction, give it a chance. A game like today's would make a believer out of you.

emotional investment

2011-07-08T06:02:00.000-07:00

Typically, I divorce myself from legal concerns related to sports. I don't bother during the off season to see who is a free agent and who my teams "might get". I won't know who will be playing for the Red Sox until opening day and it may take a few weeks for me to distinguish a Scutaro from a Lowrie (two shortstops for the Red Sox). Line 'em up, start the games, then I will start to follow the sport.

However, with the NFL lockout I find that I am interested. I am not at all concerned with the nuances of the dispute and how much the players might get from this revenue stream or that. I am concerned to see that they settle it. I look through the newspaper daily to see if there might be an article suggesting a looming settlement. On the sports websites I frequent I will click on NFL to see if they are any closer to opening the doors. I will even switch to the NFL channel when I am surfing to hear if there is any news.

I have no financial investment in football. I don't sell tickets, popcorn, own a parking lot near the stadium, or play linebacker. I have an emotional investment. And I am not alone.

It is an interesting concept--emotional investment. We tend to consider investment planning in terms of dollars. Fidelity has a long running campaign about how customers seeking to invest for retirement should follow a plan that will lead them to comfort. This is important, no doubt. Financial security is only irrelevant when you have it.

But emotional investments are as important. So I want the NFL to start, because I like following sports. I have an emotional attachment to my teams such that I feel happier when they win. If we feel this way about our teams or avocations, doesn't it follow that we all have a good deal of emotional capital that can be wisely or unwisely invested. Emotion, I once wrote, runs the show. Only sometimes we do not respect its importance sufficently so we consciously or otherwise throw our precious emotional capital away like some frivolous gambler who places $100,000 on a horse that shouldn't even be in the race.

For all of us--not just those who find themselves happy when their teams win, or those who will want to pop a beverage when the NFL strike ends--all of us have to respect the value of our emotional capital and invest wisely.

don't postpone joy

2011-06-18T09:55:00.000-07:00

I had intended to drive to town today. In early December I saw Tom Moore in the hallway and as we were going past each other he said, "You get that letter?" He was following up on a conversation we had had when we were at a meeting a few weeks prior. "Got it." I said. "Great" I heard as he walked beyond me. A week or two later I heard that Tom, the dean of our business school at Northeastern, was stepping down. The word was that he was ill. This past Thursday we received an e-mail from the university president that Tom Moore had succumbed to cancer. Six months, nearly to the day when he had put on his coat, asked an associate to cancel his meetings for the next day, and walked out of the office.

So today I had intended to drive to town and attend a memorial service. I can't, at least right now. A driver heading east on the Mass Turnpike today will not be able to exit the road, at least for a few hours. The Boston Bruins are world champions of the NHL and they are having the mother of all parades in downtown Boston. I flipped on the television and you cannot believe what is doing on Boylston street, a major artery in the city.

Those of you who have read the Epilogue to the Madness of March, may remember that I am not much of a hockey fan, but the point in the book is that there is something to envy about those who are such fanatics about hockey or basketball or anything else. The joy that is apparent among those who managed to get into town in time before they closed the pike and surrounding streets, is worth admiring.

It was on Wednesday night when the Bruins defeated the Canucks in the 7th game. I watched the first two periods on an elliptical machine in a health club. At the end of two, the Bruins led 3-0. Between the second and third period I went to shower thinking that I would see the end of the game at a tavern not far from my home. Another gym goer bolted into the locker room while I was looking at my locker changing from my exercising duds. I heard him talking to himself and, you might think, the entire Bruins team. "Just play the third period the same way. Just play the third period the same way." By the time I turned around to chat he had vanished. Nobody ever got from gym to street clothes faster.

When I stopped at the local tavern there were 10 minutes left. I thought the place would explode with glee--and it did. When the Bruins scored an empty net goal to make it 4-0 one fellow took it upon himself to high five the entire community of drinkers. When the Bruins won it was pandemonium. The same high fiver was behind me and began massaging the back of my neck before moving on to similarly express his joy to others.

The parade will end shortly and there is a separate memorial service for Tom at the university which I will attend later today. But the juxtaposition of this kind man's sudden demise and the unrestrained rejoicing in Boston is something to consider. Today my brother turns 60. I once bought a bumper sticker that he liked and I gave it to him. The sticker read, "Don't Postpone Joy." We talked this morning and he told me he still has the sticker. Truer words never appeared on the rear of an automobile. "Don't Postpone Joy."

Rondo

2011-05-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

My least favorite player on the Celtics is Rajon Rondo. Next in line on this list is Shaquille O'Neill.

Shaq has been injured most of the season. He played last night in the Celtics victory against the Miami Heat. He looked like a man who is well acquainted with the buffet table. When he went to the foul line and missed both shots he looked like a man who had been yanked from the stands and told to try and shoot. Shaq gets paid a hefty sum. I believe that while he was injured he should have stayed in shape and could easily have practiced his foul shooting during this period.

Rando is another case. He is a very talented player and can sometimes win games because of his own prowess. Yet he often makes plays that suggest that either he is bored, stupid, or is using his head to explore his small intestines. During the last month of the season he played so poorly that the Celtics lost their home court advantage in the playoffs to their current opponent, the Heat.

Last night Rondo was not playing well and turning the ball over like a player not dedicated enough to winning. Then something happened. He became tangled up with an opponent and came down awkwardly on his arm. Replays made viewers wince as it appeared as if his forearm was twisted and about to break like a wishbone.

Rondo was helped off the court and it did not seem likely that he would return. But he did, and played essentially with one arm for the remainder of the game. And he played brilliantly.

So, how does that happen. A talented player plays like a fool while he is healthy, but then when hurt focuses and plays exceptionally.

There is no mystery to this although at first glance it seems odd. We all go through the same thing. Back when I played tennis competitively, I can recall winning two tournament matches when I had been losing and then suffered an injury. Forced to do everything right to compensate for when I could not chase down a ball, I made more shots than I otherwise would have.

This applies to our lives outside of sport as well. When healthy we take our health for granted and do not take advantage of the capabilities that we have. When injured we can become acutely aware of the value of our health and focus more intently on enjoying the time that we have.

marshmallows

2011-04-30T19:49:00.000-07:00

My father was a teacher and then a principal. My brother was a special needs teacher for over thirty years. I taught high school for one year and have been teaching college students for over thirty years. And yet, it was a fellow in a locker room who relayed an anecdote about teaching that I had never heard before and consider very interesting--even if I am not sure I completely agree with it. It may be that both my father and brother told me this story as did my own teachers in college, but I have no recollection of it--the marshmallow test.

So, we are in the locker room last weekend and shooting the breeze as is typically the case. He is asking me about work and we get to speaking about his playing days as a football player at Northeastern where I am currently employed. He tells me about one player who one just knew would be a leader on fields other than athletic playing fields. And this person did in fact become a leader.

I comment about how as a teacher you sometimes can sense that someone will become unusual and a leader. (By the way I will interject here that Michael Lake, a student in one of my classes several years ago, will--I guarantee it--be a senator or congressperson or perhaps president in fifteen years. He is now in his late 20s. If Las Vegas is taking odds on this--bet the farm).

When I tell my friend that teachers can sometime detect future greatness, he says--"well sure the old marshmallow test."

I smiled but confessed that I had never heard of it.

"You, a college professor, and you never heard of the marshmallow test?"

"This is one of many things that I do not know." I say. "But I am curious, what is it?"

He tells me that the marshmallow test is a good way to discover at a very early age who will make wise decisions and who will follow a path that is more difficult to travel.

He tells me that what you do is take children, isolate them, and put a marshmallow in front of each one of them. You tell the youngsters that they can eat their marshmallow now, or what they can do is not eat the marshmallow now, but wait thirty minutes at which time they can have two marshmallows.

My exercising friend said that the kid who eats the marshmallow right there is in for trouble. Whereas those who are wise enough to wait for the two marshmallows in thirty minutes reflect, patience, intelligence, analytical skills, and the likelihood of future successes.

I have been thinking of the marshmallow test all week. While I have found it intriguing, I am not sure the conclusions are necessarily correct. I am a two marshmallows in thirty minutes guy. No way do I snort that one marshmallow if I know that two are on the horizon if I wait. But I am not sure if that has served me well. Sure, two marshmallows are, all things being equal, better than one, but some people who are impetuous can benefit from this behavior. There can be tangible evidence of joy--and I have seen it--for those who grabbed that marshmallow.

sudden death in the NHL

2011-04-21T14:55:00.001-07:00

In the epilogue to the Madness of March I write about my trip to New York to see the 7th game of the penultimate round of the Stanley Cup playoffs in 1994. The Devils played the Rangers in the game. The Rangers prevailed in double overtime 2-1.

Of the four major sports, hockey is my least favorite. I attended because the person I refer to as Larry Poppel (I changed the name at his request) is a lifelong friend and a serious fan of the Rangers. I had previously attended hockey games with him and his season ticket holding cohorts and it has always been an experience to do so.

That game remains, 17 years later, as the most thrilling event I have ever witnessed live. Today 17 years later, I feel for everyone of Larry's friends because last night the Rangers lost a heartbreaker of a game in double overtime to the Washington Capitals.

Those who are not fans of sport cannot understand how deflating it can be to watch your team go down in a tight contest. Last night's game was in the playoffs and the Rangers had been up 3-0 before losing the game 4-3 on a flukey goal with only a couple of minutes left in the second overtime period.

Again, I am not a hockey fan but I was riveted to the tv screen for both overtimes and most of the second and third period. I muttered a cliche at a few intervals that I've often said aloud but, except for in sudden death hockey games, I've never meant literally. After watching the Capitals and Rangers skating up and down the ice and screaming slap shots that could end the game instantly, I found myself saying, "I don't know how much more of this I can take."

The folks I've met in Larry Poppel's section on the occasions I've been to Madison Square Garden have been unable to focus today. Nevertheless, not one of them would argue with the contention that there is nothing in sport more exciting than a sudden death game in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Objects in Your Mirror

2011-04-19T14:33:00.000-07:00

My friend Kenny, annually, travels to Boston for Patriots Day weekend. The weekend is a bit of a mystery to those who do not live in the Northeast. Monday is a holiday, Patriots Day, and most businesses and schools are closed. It is on this day when the Boston Marathon is run. Also, the Boston Red Sox play a baseball game which begins at 11 a.m. When I was a kid, the Red Sox played a double header on this day, but double headers have gone the way of Black and White television sets and now it is a single game. Spectators can leave the park, walk to the Prudential Center and see some struggling athletes try to leg out the last half mile of their 26.2 mile journey.

If you have never been to the Northeast to see the Boston Marathon you should put it on your bucket list. It is quite a scene with thousands of runners engaged and thousands of viewers cheering them on. One time attending the event and the party that is Boston on that day will make it clear why my buddy likes to travel here for the weekend. Even before the race day/baseball day itself, the city is charged with those who have arrived and are awaiting the race day. Restaurants and taverns are jammed with family members of runners, the streets are decked out with the bunting of a party, and in general all appears festive.

It would be good I think if we could imagine all of life like the three day ride which is Patriots Day weekend. Over breakfast Kenny and I were musing about this and that and I told him about a calendar I'd received last year as a gift. The calendar was a New Yorker cartoon a day rip off number, so that each day one could be greeted by a drawing and cartoonist's quip that might brighten your morning. I save the ones that are especially funny to me, and talked about a few with him. One that had a bit of dark humor featured a woman who is, apparently, conversing with the grim reaper. The cartoon/caption has the woman saying to the grim reaper, "Oh My, I've got to introduce you to my husband."

Kenny got a laugh out of that one and then told me about a birthday card he'd received last year from a friend. In it a driver is in a car and is looking out at the side view mirror. In the mirror the driver sees the reflection of the grim reaper. The birthday card message is simple: "Objects in the mirror are closer than you think."

This is a good notion to carry around in your head despite what could be seen as a gloomy reality. It is time to enjoy Patriots days, and all the rest of them. The object in the mirror is closer than we think.

P.S. The World's Record for a marathoner was set yesterday. The more amazing news is that "Dice Kay" pitched a one hitter over seven innings and the Red Sox won their third straight.

P.S. #2 Best tee shirt at the marathon yesterday was a takeoff on the omnipresent Green Celtic shirts that read, "Beat LA" a reference to the chant encouraging the Celtics to beat the LA Lakers. The knockoff shirt for the marathon yesterday looked the same--green with the same lettering color and font. However the message was slightly different.

"Beat Kenya" it read.

Sarah's Key--Book Review

2011-04-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

One of my tipsters for good books is the check-out woman at a local package store. She is a full time librarian who moonlights bagging sixpacks and wishing people a nice day. Once when checking out I noticed she had a hardcover underneath the counter, reading it when she caught a break from the traffic. So, I asked what she recommended and she rattled off a few names that I scribbled onto the paper bag. One was The Help. The Help was a great read, so when recently I spotted the librarian in the store I asked her for another suggestion. She suggested Sarah's Key. .

I don't think Sarah's Key is an especially well written book, but it is a powerful one. It is very predictable in some sections and often reads as a thin story intended as a vehicle to describe an historical event.

That written as a caveat, I still recommend it. As predictable as the book is, I still found myself moved by it.

When I first began teaching at my current university I heard a speech about the Armenian genocide. It was a very good speech and what bothered me most about listening to it, was that I had never heard of the Armenian Genocide before and was embarrassed that I had not. I had a similar experience reading Sarah's Key. It is not about the Armenian genocide, but about an event that is called Vel' d'Hiv, a horrific occurrence that took place in Paris on July 16 1942. Sarah's Key centers around this event and I had never heard of Vel' d'Hiv. Sixty plus laps around the track, a relatively well read individual, and I'd never heard anything about this. Can't remember a lesson in high school, graduate school, anyplace. July 16th is two days after Bastille Day. I sure have heard about this. How is it possible I did not know about what took place in another year on July 16th.

There are several parts of the book that can move a sensitive individual to tears. One occurs at the end and despite the fact that nobody wise enough to pick up the book will not be able to predict it, you will still water up when you read it. However, to me the section that will stay with me more takes place about two thirds of the way through the book.

An American journalist has discovered something that connects her life with the Vel' d'Hiv incident. She too had never heard of Vel' d'Hiv. The journalist doggedly investigates what transpired and is looking for a woman who is central to the story of Vel' d'Hiv.

The journalist finds a relative of the woman and requests information. "Why find her?" says the relative. "What for?"

The journalist responds "I wanted to say I am sorry."

"Sorry for what" says the relative. Why should she feel sorry, neither she nor her country had anything to do with Vel' d'Hiv.

The journalist looked straight into the eyes of the relative and said. "[I'm] sorry for not knowing. Sorry for being forty five years old and not knowing."

I was less than forty five when I heard about the Armenian genocide, and older than forty five when I read about Vel' d'Hiv. And in both cases I felt sorry for not knowing.

So, in sum, Sarah's Key is a good and fast read, and I don't think anyperson who reads it will be unaffected by it.

The light in the piazza

2011-04-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

This past weekend my mother turned 86. To celebrate, my brother and I joined my folks for the weekend. It had been a while since the four of us were together like this and it was a joyous few days.

On the birthday night itself we all went to see The Light in the Piazza, a musical that had played in Lincoln Centre several years ago. I'd actually seen it then and had been impressed by the staging as much as the story. I am one of those people who has to listen to a song a dozen times before I get it, so while I got the general gist of the musical at first viewing, it was only after seeing it again, that I was able to appreciate it in its nuances.

The story appears to be simple. A woman takes her daughter, Carla, to Florence. The two of them are there to explore the city. The mother reads a guidebook that explains the various sights. What occurs one day is that the wind blows the hat off of Carla's head and it, serendipitously, is caught by a young man, Fabrizio. And in that moment when Fabrizio sees Carla to return the hat, the two are smitten. Subsequently problems develop and we, in the audience, wait to see what will occur between them.

Pretty standard plot. Boy meets girl. Tension surfaces for this reason or that. Boy and girl may or may not unite. I'll not reveal the ending.

But what is central to the story transcends the plot. You can take a guide book and try to explore this or that, but what we are really seeking beyond any landmark is that light in the piazza that is our true love. Understanding the value of that light, and respecting its significance, can render a simpleton a wiseperson. And vice versa, not acknowledging the value of the light, can render an otherwise bright person to be a fool.

At breakfast on the morning of the day we went to the show, my dad made a little speech before he drank his orange juice. He talked about how grateful he was that he had met my mother when he was 16 years old. And what a delight it was to be able to share this birthday with her as he had shared the others and would, knock on wood, share more in the future.

In essence, in his little talk he had summarized the play that we would see that night. There is nothing more important than finding the light in the piazza.

a dream deferred

2011-04-08T04:24:00.000-07:00

There is a fine line between acknowledging a loss and failure, and feeling good about yourself because you fought hard to succeed even if you were unsuccessful.

The Butler Bulldogs lost to the UCONN Huskies last Monday night. None of the players on the Butler team are good enough to play professionally. What the players and the team did was miraculous. Just like the previous year, the Bulldogs won five consecutive games in a very competitive tournament to earn the rights to play for a championship. In 2010 they came within a last shot of being victorious. In 2011 they were determined to win the championship game.

Butler does not have a single player who would get meaningful playing time for Connecticut. Not one. Their two best players might not even make Connecticut's team. Yet they worked industriously and indefatigably on defense, had an offensive scheme that really was the stuff of genius, and had a chance, for a second year, to win the championship.

Not only did they lose, they looked on this championship night, as if they had no right to be playing. Nobody could make a shot. They had an awful, as in terribly awful, shooting night. I played some basketball in high school and college. Every single one of the players on Butler could beat me on my best day 15-0 in a game of one on one, 90 times out of 100. But on Monday night I have never seen a team, on any level, shoot so poorly. They could not drop a bar of soap in a bathtub.

So, not only did Butler lose, but they were embarrassed. And they had come so close.

The Butler players should feel good about themselves nevertheless because they had gotten so close.

But it must be difficult to hold onto feelings of self respect and at the same time acknowledge that you really messed up.

So, how do you handle this if you are a Butler Bulldog? You have got to be true to yourself and acknowledge that you did not score on the big stage. And at the same time you can not let this one event define you. Failure can haunt you, and an inability to reach a dream can be debilitating. I feel for the Bulldogs. As I have written in this blog before about similar competitive failures, the biggest challenge for athletes--and all others-- who have lost, is not to delude themselves that they have won--because in fact they did lose. But rather to understand that one loss does not define them however upsetting the defeat might be.

cost-benefit analysis

2011-03-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

A friend recommended that I read Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and I just finished it this morning. It is a good read in most, but not all, parts. In some sections it was written so well that I found myself making a spectacle of myself laughing out loud. Occasionally a few lines were so on target that I wanted to grab whoever was within the area and read a paragraph out loud.

One such part involves a conversation the Major, a 68 year old widower, is having with his son Roger. The Major is attempting to explain his interest in a widow.

"Unlike you, who must do a cost-benefit analysis of every human interaction, I have no idea what I hope to accomplish. I only know that I must try to see her. That's what love is about, Roger. It's when a woman drives all lucid thought from your head; when you are unable to contrive romantic stratagems, and the usual manipulations fail you; when all your carefully laid plans have no meaning and all you can do is stand mute in her presence. You hope she takes pity on you, and drops a few words of kindness in the vacuum of your mind."

The son responds while rolling his eyes. "Pigs'll fly before we see you at a loss for words."

Pigs will fly indeed because the Major courtesy of the author, Helen Simonson, is witty and eloquent throughout the novel.

But what about the Major's comments regarding cost-benefit analysis? Are we not wise, as his son suggests, to do a cost-benefit analysis even when it comes to family and romance?

Is there any accounting for what seems to be irrational emotion? Can someone explain why after each last second victory in the NCAA tournament players jump on top of their teammates in unrestrained glee? Why does this occur? In college sports, most players gain no pecuniary advantage for a victory. Maybe the stock of someone who could play professionally will go up, but for 90 percent of the players on the court, and every single one of the players on the bench, there is no benefit to outweigh the costs of acting like a crazy person, let alone the hours of travel and the loss of time in classes where one, ostensibly, will learn somethings that can add to out of school marketability.

I am fairly certain that many fans of Connecticut, Kentucky, Butler, and VCU spent work or school time today, poring over newspaper accounts of their teams' successes over the weekend. What is the benefit? For those who purchase tickets to the game and travel/lodging to watch the games, what are the benefits?

The Major and Roger are discussing love, not March Madness, but maybe it is the same thing. For some issues, if not for most, the wisest accounting is to let your heart record what passes for assets over debits. Can any reader write honestly, that the most significant moments in life were those in which there was a payday, as opposed to a time when a sweeheart "drives all lucid thought from your head; when you are unable to contrive romantic stratagems, and the usual manipulations fail you; when all your carefully laid plans have no meaning and all you can do is stand mute in your lover's presence."

Pigs'll fly when this ceases to be the case.

David and Goliath guaranteed

2011-03-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

I occasionally wonder what, besides inertia, is stopping the NCAA from creating a tournament akin to March Madness, for its football season.

Before this current March Madness tournament began a fellow asked me if I was "into" this year's games. I responded by shrugging and saying something like "Not so much."

Well, now I am hooked. Riveted and for good reason. Ten of the twelve games this past weekend have been thrilling. Virginia Commonwealth's last second victory on Friday night against Florida State (on one of the best bounce passes I have ever seen) and the VCU victory again yesterday beating the overwhelming (11 point) favorite Kansas was stuff of theater. Then throw in Butler's two wins against favored opponents and this was a weekend for the dogs.

And if the David versus Goliath victories were not sufficient entertainment, how many games between the heavyweights came down to the last shot. Kentucky now has won several contests with a fellow named Brandon Knight demonstrating that he has no fear. It is startling to note, as it relates to Kentucky, that Princeton, another David, came close to beating Kentucky in the very first round. Had it not been for Brandon Knight's driving shot in the last seconds, the Princeton Tigers would have knocked out a team from the powerhouse SEC, that now finds itself in the final four.

When you see a play, there is--for those in the know--a predictable ending. I read a column over the weekend which alluded to the theater of sports but included the point that sports is the ultimate theater since, even those who claim to be in the know--don't know.

The tournament draws a tremendous audience, is beyond belief lucrative to the conferences and teams involved, spurs business (how many ads have you seen this week with some sale that is a take-off of March Madness) and is just fun.

So, explain to me why those who manage NCAA division I football continue to declare who shall play for the national championship game, without having a tournament that allows the combatants a chance to compete for the honor. If VCU can be in the final four and defeat USC (Pac 10), Georgetown (Big East), Purdue (Big Ten), Florida State (ACC) and Kansas (Big 12), in consecutive games, then maybe Boise State should have had a crack at a national title by playing games on the field.

Monday Aril 4th will be the national championship game. It is guaranteed to be a David vs. Goliath contest as either Butler or VCU will play either Connecticut or Kentucky. It will be great theater and a fitting finish to this year's tournament.

divine retribution

2011-03-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

With 35 plus seconds on the clock in a tie game, Florida was waiting for a final shot. If they missed the shot, BYU would have an opportunity to get the rebound and take a shot to win.

Florida missed. BYU would have had a chance, but Florida was able to get an offensive rebound with 13 seconds remaining. BYU did not get a chance to score and eventually Florida won in overtime.

Good chance if BYU had Brandon Davies, their leading rebounder all season, they would have gotten the rebound. Tough break.

Davies, one of the few black players on BYU, was suspended from the team before the NCAA tournament. He was suspended because he admitted to having sexual relations with his girlfriend. For shame.

For shame on BYU.

I am delighted that BYU lost tonight. I feel bad for the team who played valiantly without their best rebounder. I feel bad for Jimmer Fredette an outstanding scorer on BYU who lost one of his best complementary players in Davies. Fredette had 32 points tonight. With Davies's help Fredette and BYU might have continued on to a national championship.

BYU deserves no praise for adhering to moral high ground. There is no virtue in what BYU did to Brandon Davies. He did not deserve a scarlet letter. The letter should go to those who believe they can divine what is divine.

notes from the weekend

2011-03-21T06:27:00.000-07:00

Various items that have coursed through my thinking apparatus after the whirlwind that is the first weekend of the tournament:

I was, apparently, incorrect about BYU losing to Wofford. I am, however, not incorrect regarding the hypocrisy of suspending the center for acknowledging to premarital intimate relations with his girlfriend. Does anyone think that other team members were interrogated subsequent to the center's revelations to ascertain if others had been similarly promiscuous. Do you think Jimmer was scrutinized?

The pontificators who are screaming for the Pitt coach's head because he had a player on the foul lane against Butler should view the last seconds of the Duke championship game against Butler last year. Up by two with Duke shooting a foul shot, Coach K--he of the 900 victories--has a player on the foul lane. The mistake on the play this weekend goes to the man in the striped shirt who called the foul.

The Michigan player who pulled up for what would have been the tying shot, instead of driving all the way to the hoop will replay that moment when he is in his 80s. He drives to the hoop, nobody gets in his way to risk a three point play. He would have stuffed it almost uncontested.

The call of five seconds against Texas seemed very fast.

I love Jim Boeheim, but Syracuse just did not seem to be awake against Marquette at the end.

VCU, now in the sweet 16, was defeated by Northeastern during the regular season by eleven points, 91-80. We, Northeastern, had a rebuilding year and finished 11-20. This is an example of how a team can get on a streak in the tournament and during the season not show up some nights. It also may reflect the powerhouse in training that is Northeastern.

Can anyone shoot better than Ohio State did last night? George Mason would have fared better if they were playing the Knicks.

I rarely think I have had enough, but last night I could not watch the last two games.

In a just for fun bracket pool that my brother and I are in, individually, my brother won a prize for finishing last, last year. He will not take last place this year. However there is a good chance that the honor will stay in the family. My wisdom notwithstanding, I have only Richmond, Kansas, Ohio State, Duke, Connecticut, and San Diego State remaining. 6 of the 16.

BYU

2011-03-17T05:41:00.000-07:00

Wofford will defeat BYU today in the first round of the tournament. They will win despite the fact that BYU has the best scorer in the nation. They will win because the school, BYU, made a puzzling decision several weeks ago that resulted in the elimination of another key player on the team.

The starting center for BYU was suspended for inappropriate conduct. One might think the administration at the school deserves credit for sticking to principle despite the likelihood that the center's absence will preclude the team's advancing far in the potentially lucrative tournament. Maybe I will be wrong and Wofford will lose today, but I don't think so and even if BYU wins they are not going to win many more games without their starting center.

So, isn't this good? Isn't it good that a school adheres to rules and places conduct above basketball prowess and the financial bonanza that can come from victories in the ncaa tournament?

No. This is not good.

The center was suspended because he admitted to having sexual relations with his girlfriend.

I could write about my feeling about such an unnatural proscription that flies in the face of normal and healthy desires. There does seem to me to be a whole lot of shaking going on, and advertisers sure seem to me to acknowledge the lure of physical intimacy when they peddle their products, and movie producers sure seem to me to hire actors and actresses who, in addition to their acting capabilities, are alluring and suggestive. However, I don't have a corner on the philosophic wisdom market, and I am not going to write that BYU administrators are unequivocally wrong in their belief system.

But I will write that their suspension of this student is wrong.

It is wrong primarily because if you are to suspend him for having intimate sexual relations and do not suspend the others you are declaring that the other players on the team do not have intimate sexual relations. This, I doubt.

This player is being suspended because he acknowledged what he is doing, not because he is doing what he acknowledged.

BYU goes down today.

Love Walked In--book review

2011-03-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

My parents are big readers. Always were.

In their home they have a coffee table in the den with a stack of books on it about nine deep. Underneath where they keep the few bottles of spirits in the house is a stash of about two dozen books. (Anyone who knows my folks also knows that the drawer that contains the books has been opened--by a factor of about 100--more regularly than the cabinets that contains the spirits).

In the spare bedroom my father had special bookcases made to house his book collection. And I noticed on a recent visit a few weeks back that inside the closet of this spare bedroom is a stack of books awaiting consumption.

I saw one in the closet pile entitled, Love Walked In. I asked to borrow it and neither of my parents were sure how they had acquired it, a likelihood when you buy or borrow books on a regular basis.

While the book has some flaws and is, in parts, a bit implausible, it is such a comforting read. The title will be misleading to anyone who assumes this is a classic love story. It is not, but nevertheless the title is apt. On the inside cover the publisher cites some favorable reviews. The Washington Post critic referred to the book as a "warmhearted fairy tale for grown-ups." This too is apt.

It is a debut novel (Marisa De Los Santos) and the author can turn a phrase. She cleverly alternates chapters from first person, to third person--an approach that would seem unlikely to work unless you read it.

Open the door and you let love in. Sometimes when you have the door open and are loving you're able to discover that you already have what you are looking for.

Very good. Worth a read.

Right or Wrong?

2011-03-13T05:31:00.000-07:00

Is there something inappropriate about watching basketball games when on the other side of the world an earthquake has caused devastation?

Yesterday, I watched several games many of which affected the entire seasons for the teams playing. The NCAA begins its tournament on Tuesday and makes decisions today about who will be invited. In at least three conference championship games I saw yesterday, the winner would, automatically, be invited to the tournament and the loser would very likely be disqualified. In addition, two other games that I watched went down to the very end with a player making a key shot at the buzzer to assure a team of advancing to the tournament.

I was working out last night on the elliptical machine watching Kent State play Akron--two rivals a mere 14 miles apart. The winner would go to the tournament and the loser go home. Adjacent to me was another exercise crony watching Arizona play Washington for the PAC 10 championship. That game, like the Kent State game, would go into overtime and be decided by a last shot in OT. At the same time we were watching the game we could see on another channel the devastating effects of the earthquake in Japan.

In the morning I had watched Stony Brook lead Boston University the entire game, until the last seconds when a bogus call on Stony Brook put the main stud for Boston University at the foul line. He hit both shots with 2.4 seconds left and a last second heave by Stony Brook just missed at the buzzer. The fans mobbed the players on the court.

On Saturday afternoon, Princeton and Harvard were playing on a neutral court to decide the winner of the Ivy League and who would be invited to the tournament. In the last two minutes the lead changed hands a number of times. Finally, Harvard went ahead with seconds to go only to have a Princeton player hit a shot as the buzzer sounded. Wild Tigers raced onto the court to smother the victorious players as the Harvard Crimson walked off stunned.

Earlier on Saturday, North Carolina was getting whupped by Clemson, only to tie the game at the buzzer and go on to win in overtime to the joy of the fans. On Saturday night Connecticut won its fifth game in five days to win the Big East--a feat that is truly remarkable given the level of competition and the fatigue that would have exhausted mortals. In post game interviews, satisfaction oozed from the remarks and the face of the winning coach and star player.

On Friday night, I witnessed something I have not seen previously in years of watching games. In its contest against Florida State, Virginia Tech scored a basket to go ahead with seconds remaining. State raced down the court and hit the game winner at the buzzer. The State players were mobbed and the Virginia Tech coach and its players were astonished--until the officials went to the scorer's table and looked at a replay of the shot. It sure seemed to me that the State shot got off before the buzzer, but when I and the officials saw the replay, the ball was still on the shooter's fingertips when the clock went from .1 to 0.0. The officials waved off the State shot, triggering wild jubilation on the seconds earlier depressed Virginia Tech side. At the same time the cheering Florida State team deflated like a ballon with a sudden leak.

Yet this morning, and during the day yesterday, I kept seeing images and reading about what is happening in Japan. And these seemed to render inconsequential the "do or die" jump or foul shots that were thrilling spectators throughout the country.

Is there something wrong with jumping for joy on a day when thousands have died tragically and an entire country is in danger?

I think you do what you can do. Concern and support is deserved for tragic circumstances and victims. And the thrill of victory should never be confused with the thrill of life and love. Yet, there is nothing wrong about celebrating life when we are fortunate enough to have it.

Bruins

2011-03-05T18:05:00.000-08:00

My plan this afternoon was to deplane at Logan and then take the subway to the commuter rail to get home.

Boston has a very efficient public transportation system from the airport. Unlike some cities where it can cost you an arm and a leg and some other appendages to get from the airport to your destination, there is a shuttle bus that takes one from your terminal to a subway line. From there, you can get almost anywhere in the region by combining the subway with the commuter rail.

Armed with my "Charlie card"...[for those of you not reared in, or in your, 60s, there was a song by the Kingston Trio called "Charlie of the MTA" (Mass Transit Authority). The song became popular and the MTA now requires one to buy a "Charlie card" to use the mass transit system.]

So armed with my Charlie card, I took the shuttle bus, arrived at the Blue Line and saw a sign that read that the subway was down. After one stop riders would be bussed. This was not what I wanted to read.

After one stop we, the riders, were herded like livestock into busses and taken downtown. My commuter train was at 530 and I thought I might miss it. As it turned out, I believe the bus driver took the wrong route which benefited me as I was deposited only steps from North Station where my train would be.

The Boston Garden-- now with some commercial name attached to it that keeps changing as businesses succumb to bad economic times--is above North Station. Just like in New York where Madison Square Garden sits above Penn Station, fans of the Bruins and the Celtics can take the train into North Station to watch a game and not have to shake much of a leg to get to their seats.

As I walked from where the bus stopped, I began to see armies of fans adorned in Bruins paraphernalia on the streets surrounding the train station. There must be a dozen restaurant/bars near the Garden catering to the Celtic and Bruin fans, and each seemed packed. I walked into North Station, still 90 minutes before the game and the station was mobbed.

When I first walked in I saw the real crazies, the ones who line up hoping to see a player come into the arena and get an autograph. Then, throughout the train station, all I saw were people adorned in their Bruin gear. By the ticket window there was a long and at one point serpentine line of aficionados hoping to get a ticket from those who could not make the contest.

All this brought a smile to my face which was not easy to do after being herded onto a bus. The people in North Station were excited like children on a birthday morning waiting for a regular season hockey game. There was an energy that you rarely see in other settings.

If you do not get sports, you should have been at North Station at 530 this evening, a full 90 minutes before game time and seen hundreds of adults busting with excited energy waiting to see a sporting event.

ochs documentary

2011-02-21T05:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I drove to Wellfleet Massachusetts--a town close to Provincetown on Cape Cod. I took the ride to watch a documentary on the life of Phil Ochs that was playing at a Wellfleet theater. Wellfleet is a good two hour ride from my home in Waltham, but the documentary--out since early January--is only playing in certain places and will not get closer to Boston until the middle of March.

I had read on the website that the theater was near the Wellfleet Post Office, a spot I know well as I have spent some time--as many Bostonians do--on the Cape during the summertimes. The Wellfleet Post Office is set off the side of what is called the mid cape highway. It is adjacent to a general store that makes one think of very small towns in America. I had not remembered a theater in the area, but I thought one must have been built recently.

I arrived at about 130 for the 2pm show, pulled into the small cluster of stores where the post office still is, and saw nothing that approached a theater. I went into the general store which still in 2011 looks like it could have been taken from a 1940s photo of any rural part of this country. Two people were sitting having coffee in the otherwise empty general store. I asked about the location of the theater. The proprietor--a young fellow who seemed half asleep or sour--repeated "The theater" somewhat disdainfully. He then asked me what was playing there. I told him that the theater was showing a documentary on the life of Phil Ochs.

"Who is he?" he wanted to know.

When I first started my now pushing 40 year stint as a college professor, nearly all my students knew who Phil Ochs was. I noticed over the first ten years of teaching that fewer and fewer did. Once in the early 80s I asked a large lecture class of about 100 and three students raised their hands. I found out subsequently that one of these three thought I had asked about someone else.

So in the early 80s, if this population was representative, about 2 percent of college students knew about Phil Ochs--a hero to many in the late 60s. Now, in 2011, I think half the faculty at my institution would not be able to place him.

At the theater--a modern building next to a new post office and a Dunkin Doughnuts-- which might explain the empty general store and the sour proprietor a half mile away-- there were about 60 people milling about ready to see the documentary. Nearly all were my vintage. During the showing they watched with appreciation the story of Ochs while listening to his songs.

When Nixon and Kissinger appeared on the screen, 60 something folks who looked like they might tell their children to "mind their manners" in a different context, hissed quite naturally, as if the hissing simply oozed from them at the site of a nemesis. At the end of the documentary there was applause, less for the documentary I believe, and more for Ochs himself and the era.

I milled around the lobby afterwards to hear the talk. One woman said she "was there then" meaning I think Greenwich Village when Ochs started his career. Others referred to him as "Phil" not it seemed to me because they were really friends, but because they had become so immersed in his music that he had become, in essence, an intimate from a distance.

Many clips from Ochs's songs were part of the documentary. The one that keeps surfacing in my consciousness today is from his song "Changes." If there had been background music in the post show theater lobby while the 60 year olds from the sixties clustered and reminisced the following lyrics from "Changes" would have been heard over the subdued conversations.

"Scenes of my young years were warm in my mind,Visions of shadows that shine.Til one day I returned and found they were the victims of the vines of changes...Passions will part to a strange melody. As fires will sometimes burn cold.Like petals in the wind, we're puppets to the silver strings of souls, of changes."

The Book of Ruth/review

2011-02-07T15:11:00.001-08:00

One problem or benefit I receive from reading books is that while in the book I tend to think and even talk like the main character or narrator. I don't know how atypical this is, but it happens on a regular basis as long as I become immersed in the book.

It is a benefit most of the time, but not most recently. I read a very good but extraordinarily depressing novel called The Book of Ruth. It is by the same woman, Jane Hamilton, who wrote A Map of the World which is an excellent novel that was made into a good movie as well. The Book of Ruth depicts life for a young woman named Ruth who marries a young man named Ruby and lives in poverty with her bitter mother named May. I wanted to finish the book at least in part to get myself out of this drafty house in Illinois with a misanthrope for a mother and a going nowhere spouse.

Hamilton has the characters spot on in so many scenes that a reader, or at least I, marvels at how clearly, and in the case of the three main characters, multidimensionally she draws the characters. I think those people who have lived lives in poverty with no way out, might find the book a little too close to home for comfort. This was not my upbringing so I just found the book to be so sad that I wanted to urge Ruth to somehow scram and take me out of there with her.

If you would prefer not to be depressed for the days it will take you to read this 328 page book, I will nutshell the essence of it by including an excerpt that appears on page 316. The narrator, Ruth, says that she has given up on talking with the reverend about her travails, "there is no use explaining that you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help. My trust, even down in that dark place I carry, is that some person will come running. And then finally the way through grief is grieving. There is nothing like lying down to bawl and choke, and then rolling over so the tears can drip out of your ears..."

A barrel of laughs this book was not.

I know those guys

2011-02-06T14:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon a high school buddy who went to Hofstra left a voice mail for me at home. He was watching Hofstra play Northeastern University, my employer, and wanted to know if I was watching the game. Judging by the message and an e-mail he sent when he did not get me in by phone, my pal was very excited about the Hofstra Northeastern game.

I wasn't home yesterday because--in what has become an annual expedition--several Albany college buddies met in the state capitol of New York and went to see the Albany Great Danes play an America East basketball game.

What prompted the Albany alums' rendezvous was less the basketball game and more the comraderie we have enjoyed when we reconnect. Still we made sure to get to the gym before the opening tipoff, and were relieved when the home team-- for the first time in our four years of having so rendezvoused--prevailed with a 62-59 victory.

It was a decent, but not packed crowd at the Albany arena last night. There was a good deal of howling for the home team. This despite the fact that last night in Albany was a terrible driving day. One of the worst I've ever experienced. The roads from Boston to Albany were fine, but it started to rain/sleet mid afternoon and then by the 7 pm gametime, it was like ice skating on the highways. Spectators after parking their cars slid, as opposed to walked, to the arena.

You don't need to go much beyond my experience of yesterday to see evidence of the lure of sport in our society. My high school pal, a very successful 60 year old accountant, is thrilled that his alma mater might defeat Northeastern in a Colonial Athletic Association contest. And maybe 3000 fans skate to a basketball game in Albany New York to watch a .500 college team play another .500 college team in the America East.

It was a gas seeing my old buddies in Albany. After the game we went to a restaurant and regaled one another with tales about our youth and I experienced, not for the first time, the therapeutic value of laughter. We were howling repeatedly making a scene of ourselves, but we tipped the waiter very well for his endurance while we joyfully reminded one another of our history.

But there was a sad aspect to the evening as well. Our pal Brian had secured the tickets for the game and we had terrific seats just to the left of the really terrific seats of the season ticket holders. I looked over to that bunch, and thought to myself--those guys look old. Then, slowly I began to recognize several of those seated there. The "old guys" were contemporaries, people who had gone to college with me and had stayed in the Albany area. I know those old guys that looked like old guys because I am one of them.

One of the bunch of us who meet annually is still in touch with some of the old guys in the season ticket section. And it was sad to hear him tell us, how this one is having some health issues, and how that one would have been here but had a stroke. One fellow who had been a star on the teams when I was a freshman is battling cancer, not for the first time.

Laughing as an adult--like a child might--is great therapy. Cheering enthusiastically for sports teams--as a child might--can purge the tensions within us. Remembering our mortality will allow us to enjoy the time we have and not squander our time away childishly.

Middle East Primer for Third Graders

2011-01-29T09:08:00.000-08:00

Directions: Read this story about Izzy and Ishy. At the end see if you can answer the questions and help Izzy and Ishy decide what they should do.

Part I. Izzy

A long time ago, a man named Izzy was evicted from his house for no good reason. Izzy struggled mightily, but was forced out nevertheless.

Izzy moved down the road into another house. His new neighbors, however, also gave him a hard time and also forced him out. Izzy packed up and moved into yet another home. There, he worked hard, minded his own business, and figured that if he kept quiet all would be well. Izzy was wrong. Every so often, for what appeared to be sport, Izzy's neighbors took to beating up on Izzy and his family.

Izzy kept moving on. He wandered from place to place, but always, after he’d lived in a house for some time, he would get pestered, abused, and eventually he’d have to leave.

Finally, a madman tried to systematically destroy all members of Izzy's family and almost was successful. Izzy survived but made a decision,

"Enough is enough. I'm going to get my old house back."

So, Izzy complained to the powers that be. They listened to his case, considered the recent efforts of the madman to destroy Izzy's clan, and decided to give Izzy his old house back providing that he shared the space with the people who had moved in during the interim.

Izzy said "fine", returned to his former home, but wasn't in the place for one day before his neighbors attacked him. Izzy had been moving around too long and been kicked around too often to give in easily. Izzy mustered all his strength and survived despite severe odds. The battlefield victory allowed him to stay in his old house.

Nevertheless, periodically to this day he still has to beat off his neighbors who still are furious that Izzy was allowed to move into their property without their consent. Izzy has managed to fight off the neighbors every time, but the battles are taking their toll.

Despite the frequent warfare, Izzy has done a very nice job of redecorating his old house. The place needed some repairs and Izzy was willing and able to do the repair work. He has made the house look very attractive.

Part II Ishy

After Izzy was first forced out of the original home--the house he eventually returned to--a man named Ishy moved his family into Izzy's old house. Ishy barely knew Izzy. He wasn't taking Izzy's house away. The house was available, so Ishy moved in.

Ishy had been living in the house for a long time when a man came to his door and told him that Izzy wanted his house back.

"Who's Izzy?" said Ishy.

"Izzy," Ishy was told, "used to live here a while back."

“So?”

"So, he's been kicked to hell and back, and now he wants his old place again."

"Yo. It's not my fault he's been kicked to hell and back."

"Well. He's moving back in anyway. Now look you can have the first two floors, Izzy is moving into the other floors…”

"Who are you to tell me to share my house with this Izzy guy, that I don't even know? This is my house, buddy. And Izzy or Dizzy, isn't moving in."

"That's where you're wrong Ishy. We took a vote and decided that Izzy gets two floors. He's had some tough times. People are always taking out their troubles on him and his people. Guy's gotta be safe."

"Let him move into your place, buddy. This is my place. Why does he have to move in here?"

"This is where he used to live. That's why he wants to move back in. Word is that if you go way back you two are brothers. Anyway, he wants to move back in. And he's entitled.

"He's entitled?!!!!! He's entitled?!!!!! What about me? I'm entitled too.”

"Look. You're just gonna have to share. Now get ready. He's moving in on Wednesday."

"Over my dead body…"

Part III Izzy and Ishy

Ishy proved to be correct, but his wasn't the only dead body. When Izzy moved in, Ishy got all his friends together and attacked Izzy. Somehow, as we've seen previously, Izzy survived.

Ishy became furious. Not only was he furious because Izzy had moved back in, but he felt terrible that he had lost the fight to Izzy.

Izzy was furious too. He finally had gotten his home back, and despite that apparent victory, every so often he had to fight this Ishy character who refused to live alongside Izzy in peace. Ishy will not even acknowledge that Izzy lives in the building.

Ishy, Izzy feels, is an ungrateful pain. Not only has Izzy cleaned the place up so that it now is very snazzy looking for everybody Ishy included but regardless Ishy continues to attack Izzy.

Izzy, Ishy feels, is a trespasser. Not only has Izzy come into Ishy's house, but Izzy's running the show, telling Ishy what he can and can't do, in what he, Ishy, feels is Ishy's own home.

Ishy decides, enough is enough. As long as Izzy stays here we're gonna play hardball.

Izzy decides, enough is enough. If Ishy is going to give me a hard time, I'm gonna play hardball.

Questions for Third Graders

Which of the following are appropriate things to do to solve the problem?

(1) Ishy should declare that he is determined to destroy Izzy and periodically behave like a barbarian claiming justification.

(2) Izzy should reduce Ishy to a second class citizen; make him feel like a conquered loser; and periodically behave like a barbarian claiming justification.

(3) Ishy should spend time listing the reasons why Izzy is a jerk and the instances when Izzy has behaved badly. Ishy should ridicule anyone who says anything good about Izzy.

(4) Izzy should spend time listing the reasons why Ishy is a jerk and the instances when Ishy has acted badly. Izzy should ridicule anyone who says anything good about Ishy.

(5) Izzy should have his tough Uncle Sam help him fight off Ishy.

(6) Ishy should have his strong oil rich buddies help him fight off Izzy.

(7) Izzy should recognize that Ishy has a beef and declare that openly. Izzy's Uncle Sam should do the same. That might be a start.

(8) Ishy should recognize that Izzy has a beef and declare that openly. Ishy's oil rich buddies should do the same. That might be a start.

(9) Ishy and Izzy should declare that the issue is complex and continue to destroy each other.

You have two minutes to answer the question.

Ko bia

2011-01-28T19:34:00.000-08:00

I don't think it was my first baseball game with my dad, but it was one of the early ones. I think so because I don't remember my brother with us. My brother, only twenty months younger probably didn't go when he was 3 or 4, so I am probably 5 maybe 6.

I was a Giants fan because my Dad was a Giants fan. New York Giants that is. Pre, the abomination of the Giants and Dodgers moving. Before they left New York, both the Giants and the Yankees games were televised on Channel 11, WPIX, in New York. The Yankees were sponsored by Ballantine Beer. I have a recollection that the Giants were sponsored by a beer called Knickerbocker.

I have a fair memory anyway, but the jingles for beer companies are very clear in my mind. This is because beer companies tended to be the primary sponsors for sports teams. Since I watched a good deal of sports, many ditties live on in my consciousness.

My beer is Rheingold the dry beer, ask for Rheingold whenever you buy beer, it's not bitter not sweet...won't you try extra dry Rheingold beer.

Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one.

But it is the Ballantine beer jingle that is etched into my consciousness.

"Baseball and Ballantine, what a combination, all across the nation, baseball and Ballantine. 'Hey get your cold beer!', hey get your Ballantine."

The singer who crooned, 'Hey get your cold beer' did not enunciate well. Cold beer was uttered as one three syllable word. The beer part was sung as if it had two syllables and there was no r at the end of the word.

So the shout sounded like,"Hey get your Kobia. Hey Get your Ballantine.'

Dad and six or five year old me are at this game. I have been told that I have a stubborn streak. This, my mother contends, is inherited from my father. And apparently as this anecdote suggests I had this trait as a lad. A woman once told me that she knew what she would put on my tombstone. "He wrote the book on everything."

Truth is I am quite flexible. But I digress.

We are at the game and Dad hails a beer vendor. He asks for a Knickerbocker beer. I pull on his sleeve when he has the drink and ask a very simple question.

"Why didn't you get a Ko Bia?"

"A what?" says Dad.

"A Ko bia"

"What is a Ko bia?"

I sing him the jingle. He looks at me with the same perplexed gaze I saw once when he came into the bedroom and I was watching the test pattern waiting for the first tv show of the day to come on.

Well we battle for a while he insisting that there is no beer called Ko bia, but they are saying cold beer. I of course will have nothing of it. Ko bia is a brand like Wheaties as far as I am concerned.

I like beer, but why is Ballantine and Baseball or beer and sports conflated. Is there any reason why when we go to a game, or watch one at home, we take out a cold one. It seems to me that there is nothing natural about this association. And like many things in life we assume that what is unnatural is natural simply because we have been dunned with information in support of an unnatural construction.

Ko bia all over our universe. And many who are willing to argue stubbornly that the construction makes sense.

guru

2011-01-22T08:24:00.000-08:00

Last night in the gym I saw a fellow perspirer sitting on a stretching mat. He was in one of those buddha like positions that I can only imagine. Back upright, legs folded and splayed with each knee making contact with the mat. Soles touching. I told him he looked like a prophet about to dispense wisdom.

"A man goes to the hot dog stand." he begins. "He asks for a hot dog. The vendor gets a bun places a hot dog in the bun and hands it over to the customer. The customer hands a twenty dollar bill to the vendor. The customer waits, the vendor does nothing. Finally, the customer says, 'What about change?'

"'Change' says the vendor, 'comes from within.'"

I got a laugh out of my buddy in guru position's joke. And I've thought about the punch line over the last several hours.

The fact is that the cliche on which the punch line is based is wrong and sends people who've internalized the alleged truth of it skidding.

Sure, in order to make a change in behavior one has to do some introspection. But the flaw in the cliche is that thinking that change can come from within diverts one from the reality that we are connected. And as best as I can reckon we are incomplete without these connections.

If we make the assumption that we can operate autonomously then we begin to skid away from the truth. And the truth is we are linked. The skidding makes it difficult to navigate and stay on course.

If we were not all inherently connected then how could one explain the phenomenon of loneliness. Loneliness is not an abstraction. It is real when we experience it. And we can experience it even if we are among others, pretend to be connected to them, but are, in fact, detached. So, if we are supposed to, and are able to, truly be autonomous then why do we feel lonely when we do.

We do, because, we are naturally connected to some others and therefore change can not come from within, unless we are cognizant of how incomplete we are without others.

Another buddy of mine who is a fanatic Jets fan wrote to me today telling me how nervous he is about tomorrow's game. He has no money on the game. Why should he or anyone care about a team. Sometimes we forge connections with teams just like we develop romantic, filial, and fraternal connections. What happens to your team, affects you.

Change, I do not believe, comes from within. Change requires shooting straight with yourself so that you know you can not change unless you embrace with whom and with what you naturally are linked. There is no you without me. There is no me without you.

blood libel?

2011-01-12T07:42:00.001-08:00

I have political views, but I do not use this platform, that is this blog, to articulate them.

However, as I came in from shoveling snow just now I saw something on Yahoo that just flabbergasted me.

I see that the 2008 Republican Vice Presidential candidate has used the term "blood libel" in a message.

Governor Palin has responded to intimations and accusations that what motivated the shooter in the Arizona killings were gun analogies. Governor Palin and others had employed such analogies when identifying sitting Democratic congresspersons who were targeted by Republicans as those who should be ousted in upcoming elections. One example of the shooting metaphor was a map of the United States on which rifle sight icons had been inserted at places where Democrats were coming up for reelection. Representative Giffords had been such a congressperson seeking reelection.

Governor Palin has objected to the accusations that she and others have spurred the maniacal behavior of the perpetrator of the shootings. She has said that such accusations are an example of "blood libel."

This is an astonishing statement. Any Jew who has a remote sense of history knows that "blood libel" has been used by antisemites for close to 900 years (867 to be precise) to disparage, accuse, prosecute, and kill Jews. Movie goers and/or readers may recall the Malamud book and subsequent movie, The Fixer, which deals with a blood libel case. Those familiar with WWII history know that Der Stuermer was a Nazi newspaper that employed the blood libel (and others) to justify the elimination of the Jews.

Okay so the target in the Arizona killings is a woman who when campaigning identified herself as a Jewish woman. The shooter had a copy of Mein Kampf among his possessions. And a presidential aspirant uses the term "blood libel" in her formal scripted messages.

It is either one thing or another. She is either (a) using this expression to subtly stir up her conservative base, "you know those liberal Jews in the media", or (b) she is a simpleton with a staff of simpletons who know nothing of history and are not curious enough or industrious enough to vet formal messages.

I will give her the benefit of the doubt. She is a simpleton. She has no clue of history and has no desire to discover much about it. She surrounds herself with people who, incredibly, have never heard the expression "blood libel." The members of her "thinktank" were plucked from the streets of Chelm. (This allusion will have no meaning to her).

My outrage at this usage is not so much that it is beyond insensitive to people who have been slaughtered in the name of it, but rather that there are people who are considering this simpleton to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world.

exhibitionists

2011-01-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

Today at noon there is a college football bowl game. Tomorrow, Sunday night, at 8 there is another college football bowl game.

The one today pits two very mediocre teams, Kentucky 6-6 and Pittsburgh 7-5 against each other. Pittsburgh's success is such that they fired the head coach that led them to this bowl. Tomorrow Boston College will play the University of Nevada. Nevada's claim to fame this year is that they beat Boise State when the kicker from Boise made two very unfortunate mistakes at the end of the game. I am not sure what Boston College's claim to football fame is this year. Boston College--which is actually not in Boston but in a neighboring suburb--had a 7-5 record but they, like Pitt, and Kentucky, and Nevada--do not deserve to be showcased.

These games are nothing more than exhibitions scheduled to satisfy a voracious audience. They are scheduled as they are for an interesting reason. Today the NFL playoffs will begin at 430. A game will be played at 430 and another at 8. Kentucky is playing with Pitt at noon in a silly exhibition today because so many fans are nervously and excitedly waiting to watch the NFL at 430. They have ants in their pants awaiting kickoff. They need a shot of football to allay their nerves before the 430 tilt.

Why is BC playing a silly exhibition game tomorrow at eight? Because two more NFL games are scheduled from 1-8 tomorrow. The networks are betting that fans will have the shakes on Sunday night and will need some football like a junkie requires a fix.

I will be interested in seeing if there are many fans in the stands for these college games. I have noticed, even in some of the bigger bowl games that the stands are empty. The bowl/exhibition season is for tv, voracious fans, and shekels. They have all the legitimacy of Boston College's name. The bowl tilts are really not a game. They are somewhere close to a game. Just like Boston College is somewhere close to Boston.

raccoon lodge redux

2011-01-03T20:36:00.000-08:00

For the past four years or so my brother and I participated in a football pool during the NFL season. Each week we predicted, against the spread, who would win the NFL games. We called ourselves the Raccoon Lodge in deference to the place where Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton frolicked when they wanted "good, clean, fun."

In one of our early years in the pool, our success was so pitiful that during the season we asked our mother, who knows as much about football as we know about say, knitting, to select the winners. And she did about as well as we did.

So for several seasons the Raccoon Lodge struggled. This year, however, we seemed to hit a hot streak. Going into the last game of the season we were up by five games on our closest competitor. On the final Sunday morning of the season, just yesterday January 2, we were on the phone for a long confab talking about who we should select to maintain our advantage and come away with first place. We pooled our wisdom and had a miserable week.

Nevertheless, because of our five game advantage we managed to prevail winning the league by three points. It was not easy. After the early games we figured out that we would have to lose every single contested game in the afternoon in order to lose our lead. Hah. I left the sports bar where I had been watching the games intensely and went home to enjoy a nice leisurely afternoon that would leave us as winners. How likely would it be that we would lose every single game in the afternoon?

As I sat in my easy chair at home, and as the games progressed, it became clear to me that we were in the process of losing every single game in the afternoon. I took the only steps that one could take. I did what any normal sports fan would do in this situation. I got into my car and went back to my lucky seat in my lucky sports bar. I could not risk sitting in an unlucky seat and tempting fate.

I wasn't in my lucky seat at the lucky sports bar for more than a moment when I saw that one of our teams had gone way ahead. Another game was going our way. Whew. It was a good thing I got to that seat before some other--perhaps a rival in the pool--had discovered the good luck charm which was the third--not the fourth-- seat from the right as you face the bar perpendicular to the main drag.

Today we were formally notified that the Raccoon Lodge won first prize in the contest. Hah. Check that out, Subway the second place challenger, or Speck who came in third. You were going up against the sons of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton. What kind of chance did you think you had?

Seriously, though, the experience has given me some pause. I wrote in the Madness of March that those who enjoy going to Las Vegas during March Madness are essentially just out on a lark, like someone who might go to Disneyland for a vacation. The sports enthusiasts who travel to Vegas in March are there for a vacation. And I have argued that there is nothing wrong with the excursion.

However, yesterday, I found myself rooting for teams that I typically do not root for because they were our teams in the pool. A "meaningless" touchdown for the Redskins in the Giants/Redskins game bringing the score to 17-14 Giants, was not meaningless to me. It was not meaningless because the Raccoon Lodge had the Redskins plus 4. I wanted to buy a round for the house when the Skins scored that "meaningless" touchdown. I never root for the Colts, but I was hoping that they would defeat Tennessee--by more than 10-- in order to secure the victory for Kramden//Norton.

The truth is that while I am glad the Raccoon Lodge won--like I might be happy when I win any contest--it was not as much fun watching the games yesterday.

the highwayman

2010-12-29T05:57:00.000-08:00

When I was seven or eight or so, and was running a high fever, my dad came into the bedroom where I was sprawled to keep me company for a spell. He had a book of poems with him and he read me, The Highwayman. I don't know if this was his choice, or he simply said to me, pick one, and I haphazardly selected it. I think it was the former, but can't recall for certain.

Afterwards, this became a tradition. Whenever I got sick, Dad, in what came to be thought of us as a therapeutic step toward recovery, would come into the bedroom where I had, no doubt, a cold washcloth over my head, and he would read the highwayman to me.

I once told a girlfriend about this ritual and she was startled. "Your father read you that poem when you were eight?"

I don't know if she was familiar with the poem or went to read it after I told her about it, but either way shortly after I told her about Dad's therapy, she was stunned that this would be a poem you'd read to your kid.

You might think she had a point. The poem is about a robber; an illicit lover; police depicted less than honorably; a jealous snitch; and two bloody murders.

But I was as startled by her reaction as she was by the fact that dad read me the poem when I was a young boy. The poem was beautiful as far as I was concerned, nothing out of whack about it.

In the poem, a highwayman--a robber--rides his horse to an inn. There, "Bess the landlord's black eyed daughter", was waiting for him,"plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair."

The highwayman would be plying his trade that night and so informs his lover.

"One kiss my bonny sweetheart, for I'm after a prize tonight, but I should be back with the yellow gold, before the morning light. Yet if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day, then look for me by moonlight, watch for me by moonlight, and I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."

A jealous hostler--the groom who takes care of the horses--secretly loves Bess. He surreptitiously listens in on the conversation between Bess and the highwayman. After the highwayman rides away, the hostler contacts the redcoats.

With this tip, the police come to the inn and set a trap for the highwayman. They say "no word to the landlord; they drank his ale instead." Then they go to Bess and tie her up "with many a sniggering jest" placing a rifle barrel "beneath her breast." They tell her to "'keep good watch' and they kissed her"

Bess knows her lover is doomed because the redcoats will wait for him at the inn and she, tied and gagged, will not be able to warn him. She remembers his last words to her:

"Look for me by moonlight, watch for me by moonlight, and I'll come to thee by moonlight though hell should bar the way."

Eventually, she hears her highwayman riding in. She had wrestled with the rope while she was waiting. While she could not get out of the binding, she could reach the trigger of the rifle that was pointed at her breast.

She hears the horse again.

"tlot tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot, tlot, in the echoing night. Nearer he came and nearer. Her face was like a light. Her eyes grew wide for a moment, she drew one last deep breath, Then her finger moved in the moonlight, her musket shattered the moonlight, shattered her breast in the moonlight, and warned him with her death."

The highwayman races away not knowing that the shot he heard was Bess's warning, but the next morning he discovers what's transpired.

"Not til the dawn did he hear it, and his face grew gray to hear, how Bess the landlord's daughter, the landlord's blackeyed daughter, had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

"Back he spurred like a madman shrieking a curse to the sky. With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high. Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon, wine red his velvet coat, when they shot him down on the highway, down like a dog on the highway, and he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat."

This is a poem you read your eight year old? A lover kills herself to warn her lover. And the saved lover is so crazed that he rides into his own bloody death.

You bet your 2011 it is.

In a few days we begin our next lap around the track. Can there be any message more meaningful for us to carry as we travel than to remember that the most powerful force in the world--and the most precious therapeutic balm for our sickness--is love.

Happy New Year.

Kyle Brotzman

2010-11-26T23:01:00.000-08:00

I am rarely up at 2 in the morning, but now it is 2:33 and I am wide awake.

The old Wide World of Sports program would begin each show with a narrative that included, "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." A cynic might wonder how agonizing can defeat be. It is just a game.

Tell that to a fellow named Kyle Brotzman. I am up because I wanted to see Boise State University play a game against the University of Nevada at Reno. Boise State has been heralded all season as the little engine that could. A team from the regularly dissed Western Athletic Conference (WAC) that had not lost a game in two years. Earlier this season it beat Virginia Tech in Virginia, and since then Boise State has mowed down every one of its opponents, attempting en route to dispell the idea that all they play in the WAC are patsies. All Boise State had to do was beat Nevada, a very good team itself having lost only one game this season, to have a shot at being part of the discussion regarding the best team in the land.

As has been typical, they went way ahead and led Nevada 24-7 at the half. But then Nevada playing at home with wild fans rooting them on, came back and tied the game with only a few minutes left in the fourth quarter. In true championship form, Boise State came right back to go ahead 31-24. Then in true championship form, Nevada tied it at 31-31. With nine seconds to go, Boise came out and threw a hail Mary, an expression used to refer to a prayer that might be answered. Someone up there was listening and a player for Boise made a beautiful catch with two seconds left on the 9 yard line.

Enter Kyle Brotzman, the regular kicker for Boise State and an excellent one. After a delay to check and see if the time was correct, Brotzman lined up for what would have been the last play of the game, a dead ahead 26 yard field goal. Incredibly he missed it. The ball went wide right and Brotzman berated himself as he walked to the sideline.

In overtime, Boise State moved the ball to the 9 yard line. In came Brotzman to kick another 26 yard field goal. This one he hooks to the left.

Out comes Nevada and they get in position to kick a thirty yard field goal which goes in. End of national championship season. End of winning streak. Beginning of conversation that believes Boise State is a fraud.

So what, you might say. Fans should get over it. What is this agony, people are sick, wars are going on. This is not agony.

Well, it shouldn't be, but Kyle Brotzman's life will never be the same again. The hell has just started. And it won't be external. His greatest challenge as an athlete will be to not let this event define him. I went to a site before I started writing and I see that Brotzman was a star athlete in high school. I wish I could talk to him and may yet send him a note. This does not define him. I know this, and you know this, but the challenge will be for him to know it. Otherwise this defeat will be a long agony.

A number of years ago, Sports Illustrated wrote an article about Scott Norwood, the kicker for the Buffalo Bills who will forever be known as the player who missed a 47 yard field goal at the end of a super bowl game. A successful kick would have made the Bills champions. In the article, the authors make this very correct point. What makes someone a hero is not a failure, we all fail, but the measure of success: is how we react when we fail and whether we are willing "to pick yourself up and try again."

I feel for Kyle Brotzman today. He will become the butt of jokes and people in Idaho, from where he hails, will never forget him. People will tell him obligatorily that it is "all right." Some will mean it. The challenge, however, will be for him to realize that what anyone says is irrelevant. We all mess up. The champions are those who can dust themselves off, and keep on moving.

Potemkin Love

2010-11-23T03:37:00.000-08:00

My parents met each other at a sweet sixteen party in the early forties. My dad asked my mom if she would like to take a walk. Sometime during that stroll he says they knew. Sixty plus years later they still know. It is remarkable, I think. When I was a kid it was not at all unusual for me to come into the living room and find my folks embraced in a big smooch. Every December 31st in a way that seemed just natural to me until I realized otherwise, as soon as the ball dropped my folks engaged in a long kiss that I figured was what you did when you grew up and it was midnight on New Years.

There are so many things we cannot understand and explain in the same way our ancestors could not explain so many things. Get in a time machine and go explain to citizens in 1800 about the internet or airplanes. It's not possible for them to understand the phenomena. If we go fast forward from 2010 and imagine 2300, maybe the people we would encounter then could explain to us, scientifically, the pull and nourishment from genuine love.

In the absence of that genuine love or the substitution of Potemkin love we stumble about, making as best sense as we can out of the world, but we need drugs of some sort because the natural drug is absent or falsified. I have been lucky as have been my parents, but I think that if we want to enjoy our upcoming thanksgiving we need to give thanks and respect the real, not Potemkin loves, of our lives and realize--in ways we might not be able to understand right now, the importance of familial, fraternal, and romantic love.

Bus Ride

2010-11-15T15:10:00.000-08:00

This really happened.

I am in San Francisco this Monday morning attending a conference of the National Communication Association. I am taking the opportunity of this meeting to visit with my cousins who live just a 20 minute bus ride from the conference hotel.

This morning my cousin walks me to the stop and I get on the Geary Limited which will take me to where most of the sessions are held. The bus is jammed and I can't get a seat so, in a manner I'm familiar with having been reared in Brooklyn and having lived in Boston for the past 30 years, I am hanging onto a metal railing leaning over a number of riders fortunate enough to get a seat.

The woman below me and to my right is on her cell phone. And she is animated. Initially I think she is venting about some issue related to work, then I think it is not about work but some investment. But I realize it is not either of these areas. I realize this because I hear her say touchdown, and then quarterback, and then penalties, and then Singletary.

This woman is ranting about the 49er game played on Sunday--a game which the 49ers won. She is referring to plays from the game and then she comments about "the catch" a phrase that football aficionados know refers to a catch made by Dwight Clark in 1982.

When she gets off the phone I ask her if she likes the 49ers. Her answer is concise.

Actually, I don't she says. But, she continues, she loves the Ohio State Buckeyes. Then this woman who tells me, without solicitation that she is in her 50s, is off to the races. I hear about Troy Smith the quarterback for the 49ers who is a Buckeye. I hear so much esoterica about the Buckeyes and the 49ers that I, a fairly knowledgeable sports fan, feel like I know nothing at all. She is crazy about Singletary, upset with the referees for not letting the boys play, happy to speak with me (really all I am doing is listening) because she rarely gets a chance to talk about football.

I ask her if she is from Ohio. She says yes, from Columbus. I mention Woody Hayes the revered coach of the Buckeyes. To that name she reacts as if I have said Yahweh. She then produces a bit of esoterica that only a zealot could produce. She tells me that she would have done the same thing Hayes did at the end of the Gator bowl.

I know what Hayes did, but what are the chances a stranger in 2010 will know what Hayes did in the late 70s that got him fired. Hayes, when a fellow named Bauman for Clemson intercepted a pass in the Gator Bowl that ended Ohio State's chances for a victory, hauled off and punched Bauman when he came to the sideline. To this date, I have never heard anyone say anything positive about this action. Today, I met the exception. With no solicitation my neighbor says, "I would have punched that Clemson guy myself."

I hope I am not painting her as an unsavory character. On the contrary, while I think punching a player is reprehensible, as I write in the Madness of March, I believe anyone who has such a passion for anything--stamps, coins, or football, is someone who has a nourishing hobby.

Corner of the Sky

2010-11-06T05:44:00.000-07:00

I blogged earlier about seeing, almost by pure luck, the musical Pippin in December of 1973. We had gone into New York for the day intending to see a play or plays and stumbled into Pippin with the original cast. Ben Vereen as Leading Man, John Rubinstein as Pippin, and Jill Clayburgh as Catherine.

The story is of Pippin, Charlemagne's son, and how he attempts to find himself. His introductory song includes the lyrics, "Rivers belong where they can ramble, Eagles belong where they can fly. I want to be where my spirit can run free. Gotta find my corner of the sky."

Eventually Pippin meets the woman who is to be his wife, Catherine. Too restless initially to stay with her, he leaves, only to come back at the end of the play despite some ambivalence. At the end he croons, "If you are never tied to anything, you'll never be free."

When he first leaves Catherine/Jill Clayburgh, she sings a song entitled, "I Guess I'll Miss the Man". I guess I'll Miss the Man, Explain it if you can. His face was far from fine, but still I'll miss his face, and wonder if he's missing mine."

Today I read in the paper, that Jill Clayburgh 66, has died of leukemia. Sounds a bit trite, I know, but I Guess I will Miss the Woman.

There was something ingenuous about Clayburgh when I saw her in the parts she played in the movies and that one time I saw her on stage. In an Unmarried Woman, and Starting Over and Pippin. My sense is that the time to find your corner of the sky is when you are underneath it, and from the very little I know about her, and in the characters she played, she seemed willing to find her corner by following her heart during the short time that she had.

red thong

2010-11-02T03:06:00.000-07:00

I heard this morning that Aubrey Huff, the first basemen for the now World Champion San Franciso (nee New York) Giants, wore a red thong each day during the last month of the season because it was good luck.

In the Madness of March I write about the superstitions of sports fans. Athletes are in the same category in this regard. Stories are legion about how players cling to notions that some supernatural connection works for them. Ron Bryant a pitcher for the Giants a few decades ago actually sat in the dugout with a five foot stuffed bear because he was certain this was a factor in his successes. His teammates agreeably put up with this while he was on a winning streak.

My guess is that all over San Francisco and wherever Giant fans reside an assortment of lucky charms were brought out last night in an attempt to rid the Giants of their 56 year drought. It must have been the charms/thongs that did the trick as the Giants finally won a world series.

The first game I ever went to was in the Polo Grounds. My dad took me to see the Giants play the Phillies in a double header. I can still see myself walking with dad to the subway and can imagine my open mouthed awe when I walked into the stadium and saw the field. When I was six or seven I had the baseball cards of the Giant players pasted to the wall above my bunkbed during the season. I don't remember the 54 World Series but I sure remember the loss to the Yankees in the 62 World Series.

Sometime in the 70s about fifteen years after the Giants moved to San Francisco my allegiance to the Mets and then in the 80s to the Red Sox once I moved here, trumped my fondness for the Giants. Still, I was happy last night to see the Giants revel when the last batter for the Texans struck out. I thought of the Giant fans I know, my cousin Marilyn, my friend Warren Greshes who is as fanatical as they come, and others who were glad that their individual brand of rabbit's feet came through for them fifty six years after the Giants swept the Indians in 1954.

Marilyn and Marty Redux

2010-10-28T05:07:00.000-07:00

I blogged before about my cousins, Marilyn and Marty, who have as strong a relationship as any of my first cousins. I wrote that their foundation would be put to the test in October because The Giants were likely to play the Phillies in the NLCS. Marilyn is a serious San Francisco Giant fan. Marty is just as committed to the Phillies.

The Phillies did indeed play the Giants in the NLCS. The Giants won the first game 4-3. After that contest I sent a quick note to my cousin. The subject line was "4-3" The message was similarly concise. "Still married?" I inquired.

The response came back quickly. "Check back in a few days."

This was all tongue in cheek, of course. Love trumps all if it is real--even team allegiance which can be surprisingly strong. I do know of New York Ranger hockey fans who, and I am not kidding, would consider it a deal breaker if they discovered that their blind date was a fan of the Islanders. They'd hear that and just know the relationship could not launch.

The Giants prevailed over the Phillies last week. I had occasion to write to Marilyn and Marty about some other matter this week and in the course of my note I asked how they had fared during the 6 game series. Marilyn told me that Marty had been a good sport and that he was even rooting for the Giants during the World Series. No real surprise there. Not sure there was a lot of smooching going on when Juan Uribe hit the clinching homer in the 6th game of the NLCS, but when the dust settled love trumped even strong team allegiance. This, as only a true fan knows, is the acid test of a relationship.

zigging and zagging

2010-10-16T06:08:00.000-07:00

Last night I finished my workout and was about to leave the locker room. Just before I stepped out I spotted my friend John and for about 90 seconds I stopped and shot the breeze. I went downstairs to the club lobby and there was Margarett and Mayank, two regular tennis playing cronies. For about thirty seconds we traded good natured barbs as is our wont. I went to the parking lot to drive off. Another member was driving off at about the same time and the route I would have taken was blocked off. So, I circled around and it took me about 15 seconds longer than otherwise to drive off the premises.

It was rainy and miserable. Plus at 630 pm the traffic was heavy on the road I take to get home. About half way through the drive I saw a vehicle, two cars ahead of me stop suddenly. The car right in front of me either did not see the stopping car or could not brake on the slick roads. I said, whoa, because I knew this would be close. It was not close, the car in front of me smashed into the stopped car. I was only seconds behind him--so close that my car's forward motion after the crash had me by passing both the rammed vehicles.

What is the difference between a pleasant drive home and a horrific accident that at the very least will ruin a weekend and at worst could be physically debilitating? Spotting John in the locker room? Seeing Mayank and Margarett in the lobby. Spinning around in the parking lot spending fifteen seconds more exiting?

How many times in our lives do we zig instead of zag and the zigging is either life saving or sends us on a route that gets us lost.

At the reunion last weekend I spotted a couple who looked nearly exactly like they did when they dated in 1969. They had these genuine smiles on their kissers. Most people were smiling at the reunion, but these folks looked like they smiled as a matter of course. I remembered them when they were "going out" in college. When did they decide to zig and stay together when they might have been tempted to zag.

Zigging and zagging is what we all do. Each step can matter. Sometimes it is a matter of luck, like last night, stopping to talk to my friend in the locker room. I don't stop, I am likely ramming into the car in front of me.

But sometimes it is not luck. We have a choice to zig or zag. Zig and we are beaming forty years later, zag who knows? I think about this couple at the reunion and I imagine just who they might have been, how well preserved they might have been, and how they might have smiled had they taken a different route.

sand and trees

2010-10-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

The brothers of old KB will be reuniting this weekend at our alma mater. Kappa Beta, blue and gold, was one of several local social fraternities at what is now called the University at Albany. Annually a group of about seven of us meet up to see a basketball game. This year, for the first time since 2002, an entire collection of erstwhile sophomoric cavorters are gathering. At last count 63 brothers will be in attendance, some foolish enough to bring their spouses to the event. (I don't understand this, having attended high school, camp, and college reunions in the past I am not sure there is a population that seems and feels more like a "what am I doing here" appendage than a spouse at a reunion).

I looked at the list of attendees and there are people coming that did not show for the 2002 shindig whom I have not seen in nearly forty years. Because of social networking sites like Facebook I have been in communication with some of these people and look forward to seeing them and sharing in-person tales of how we've fared.

The physical changes are always a little surprising. I think of Kurt and Eggs, for example, two cronies who I have not seen in decades, and all I think of is there 1971image. I don't know about those two, but I know that for others there will be more pounds, more gray, and less hair. But soon after the initial encounter, the old personalities merge with the new look.

Nearly everyone of us has a story. And I have found in former reunions that there is less posturing and more transparency during these affairs. It is as if the baloney that we might dispense in our daily lives is left at home and we can talk freely to people we knew before we began accruing our adult history, successes, and disappointments.

I, like many of those I will see this weekend, have developed a frightening loss of short term memory. I can and have poured myself a cup of coffee, gone to sit down with it, and seen a steaming cup already sitting where I typically park myself to sip. I have intended to check the cat litter and can't recall if I have already acted on these intentions seconds before. I look for my gym bag in the house, then give up and go to drive to work only to see the bag in my rear view mirror having, apparently, packed it in the backseat earlier.

But what has stayed with me is a very strong long term memory. I recall conversations I had with people from the 60s that are vivid and, I'll bet, are dead on accurate. I've startled relative strangers with recollections of things they have told me.

I also remember excerpts from stories I've read, even if I've read them decades earlier. And, subconsciously, these excerpts--sometimes lyrics of a song--rocket to my head and I start thinking of (or singing) them because of something that is occurring that makes the words apt. Even if I am not consciously thinking of the particular event at the moment, up pops--like an internet pop-up-- the novel or short story excerpt.

This week a line from the short story, The Open Boat, has kept surfacing. The story that most of us 60 somethings had to read in high school is about men in an open boat who need to be rescued. Often in the story one character or another says:

"If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?"

I read that story in Mrs. Brodkin's class in 1965 or 66 and it is still in my head.

All of we KB folks, all of all folks, have contemplated sand and trees when we have been adrift wondering if we will get out of a particular maelstrom. The 63 of us who reunite this week, no matter how successful we have been, know how painful it can be to contemplate sand and trees, to have experienced sand and trees, and be unable to access our dreams and the comforts of the harbor.

A wonderful thing about reunions is that they can remind us that we all have been there. I wonder how many times we will raise our mugs this weekend and sing the song that we, often beerily, crooned when we knew from nothing.

"Raise high your steins men, and drink a toast then, to the colors of blue and gold, and let your hearts sing, while foaming steins bring, golden memories of old, so be glad then, that you have drunk when hearts were gay and handclasps free, be glad that you have drunk as one of the men of old KB."

Marilyn and Marty

2010-10-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

Of my eleven first cousins, my cousin Marilyn and her husband Marty are among the strongest of tandems. They seem to get along effortlessly with natural love. This is not to imply that the rest of us are at screaming odds with our mates, but rather that they--like many of us--seem to enjoy spending loving time with each other.

This, soon, will be put to the test. My cousin Marilyn was reared north of San Francisco and since childhood has been a devoted fan of the San Francisco Giants. She listened to the Giants when the games were not televised and has a remarkable capacity for sports detail which I discovered when the two of us took a long drive to Lake Tahoe in the late 80s. Marty, her husband, was raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania and has every bit of the enthusiasm for his Phillies as Marilyn has for her Giants.

It seems apparent that the Giants and the Phillies are on a collision course to meet in the National League championship series. To my admittedly American League pay little attention to the National League lens, it sure seems as if the Giants and the Phillies are the premier teams. What will happen in October.

A few months back I spoke with Marilyn and Marty on the phone and they mentioned that they'd purchased the MLB television package so they can watch their respective teams' games all summer. My cousins are no casual fans. Maybe the first game of the seven game series there will be good wishes for their sweethearts' rooting interests. But what will happen with a game 7? Will all cheers be muted?

Love will trump all in the final analysis, but I don't see snuggling on the couch while watching the 7th game and I think a fly on the wall would hear, "Get your own beer" more than once.

I am glad their union is as strong as it is.

the trunk

2010-09-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

Some people collect stamps, others collect coins, some take walks looking for birds. I like to read. There are probably many philatelists and numismatists, and birdwatchers who also like to read, but the point is that we all have different hobbies. I have a buddy with whom I regularly have breakfast. He often asks me when I have time to read. I tell him that when you like to do something you tend to make time for it.

For me reading helps me think. Actually read a book in the late 70s which had that as a line in a conversation and it has stuck in my head. The book was called The Last Convertible, and when I read that sentence, I said--"that's me." Books give me ideas for me to consider, accept, or discard--as if they are fuel for my internal conversations. I would likely converse internally with or without books, but the discourse because I read is--I think--more informed.

There are authors whom I read because they have earned a reputation with me. Anything by Anne Tyler for example I typically snort. And some of her lesser known books--A Patchwork Planet for example--has hung around my head for a long time, as has A Ladder of Years and the Accidental Tourist. Not sure I always heed the wisdom of the authors, but the thoughts make appearances in my consciousness long after I've finished the book.

Richard Russo is another author whom I read. The Risk Pool and Bridge of Sighs are special. I was in the library a couple of weeks back returning some cds and saw a book of his on the shelf that I'd heard about but not read. It's called That Old Cape Magic. So, I took it out and finished it recently.

If you think you might want to read That Old Cape Magic, I'd stop here. I won't be giving the whole story away, but if you are like me, and don't want to know anything about a book before you read it, you won't want to read what I write below. (Even though what I will write is far less than some incomprehensibly insensitive reviewers who damn near give away the whole story in their reviews when an objective is not to do just that).

The Old Cape Magic is about a college professor who, when he was a kid, travelled with his college professor parents to Cape Cod for weeks in the summer. He returns there in the beginning of the book, now with his marriage to Joy on shaky ground, and is there in part to discard the ashes of his father, sitting in his trunk, who wished to be scattered on the Cape. During the course of the book the son winds up with both the ashes of his mother and father in his trunk. Yet, for various reasons he can't seem to get them out and scatter them. Several almost comical episodes preclude his attempts, and it seems as if only when he can get the ashes out of his trunk will he be able to engage his wife (Joy) again.

It's a little heavy on the symbolism, trying to find Joy and all. And it's not one of Russo's better books, but still it is hanging around my head. Fortunately, I am blessed with two healthy parents who provided and provide a remarkably sturdy ethical foundation for my life. But if we extend the metaphor some, how many of us are hauling around ashes in our trunks that we either don't want to address or just seem unable to--and it is that which precludes our ability to engage Joy.

Sometimes despite all efforts Joy is elusive. But sometimes it is only an illusion that Joy is elusive and that what prohibits engaging Joy is that we can't seem to get into the trunk, learn from the ashes therein, and free ourselves by scattering them.

cleaning and cleansing

2010-09-17T14:31:00.000-07:00

In about an hour I, as well as others from my tribe, begin a 25 hour period of introspection and concomitant self assessment.

This summer I read an article from a religion pundit who claimed that the notion that all religions were fundamentally the same was inaccurate. This claim piqued my interest since that was and is my assumption. That is, my assumption is that while people take different routes to what they consider to be the best way to live spiritually, the ultimate goal of being considerate, loving and self loving, friendly, and giving is the same in all tribes.

After reading the expert's article I still felt the same way. The only thing the author convinced me of was that he has become exasperated by those who do not accept his perspective. Some irony there.

So, while I am no expert on alternative religions I suspect that all religions have some time and prescription for repentance and self assessment. And the objective of this time of self analysis is a removal of the debris that somehow accrues and interferes with the functioning of our hearts. A cardiologist would argue that an unhealthy heart can undermine wellness. Similarly a heart infected by accrued litter impedes our capability to live and love as we should and could.

My favorite part of the day of atonement starts in about an hour here in the East. It is called the Kol Nidre prayer. I haven't missed a Kol Nidre in twenty years or more. I think as much as the message of the prayer, the fact that people all over the world are chanting the same prayer to start this period of introspection is a powerful starting point to my own day of evaluation.

Whatever route we take, I think it is important now and again that we stay on the course suggested by our pure hearts. Old story. My dad is watching me saw a piece of wood. He has used a ruler to draw a pencil line that I'm supposed to move my saw along. Somehow I move away from the line. Dad spots this as he pauses from his own sawing. He tells me to go back to where I veered off the line. I am maybe 7 and I tell him to look how far I am along, albeit away from the line. He tells me to go back to where I veered off regardless of how far along I might be.

It is I think the goal of this day of atonement to examine the forces that made us move off the line, and get back on track.

going for it

2010-09-11T17:30:00.001-07:00

In the epilogue to The Madness of March I write about how sport fans are occasionally disparaged by people who believe they should "get a life".

Today, there would not have been many better ways to spend this day of one's life than by enjoying sports. Since noon Eastern there has been football, basketball, tennis, and baseball to watch on television. In Boston, the weather was beautiful--a great day to run, take a canoe on the Charles, play touch football or kick a soccer ball around. I do have other hobbies, and I do have other "lives", but today was a day to frolic watching and playing sports.

I'm not sure there will ever be a tennis match as exciting as the semi finals today between Federer and Djokivic. And, beyond the fun of watching the game, the match was valuable as a lesson--as so many sporting events can be.

When I played club tennis competitively I used to tell my teammates that when the game was close at the end, it was not a matter of athletic skill. It was a matter of backbone. In the final set of a match it was no longer who had the better serve, it was who had the stomach to win.

Federer is one of my favorite tennis players. He doesn't squawk, he plays brilliantly, and is as gracious on those rare times when he loses as when he is victorious. But this afternoon he was beaten. And he was beaten because Djokivic in the final set, "went for it". Facing two match points on his serve, Djokivic wailed on a couple of shots that, had he not made them, would have made him a loser. But he went for them. He put it on the line, took a chance to be as good as he could be. And he won. In the final analysis, he beat Federer--a man with a sturdy backbone himself--because he had the courage to do what he needed to do--he went for it.

Sports are fun in and of themselves. Today Michigan beat Notre Dame in the last seconds. Last night West Virginia stunned Marshall by scoring two touchdowns in the fourth quarter to come back for a victory. Earlier today, James Madison University, a team that plays in the college football subdivision out of tiny Harrisonburg, Virginia, beat mighty Virginia Tech ranked thirteen in the country.

While sport can be exciting in and of itself, it often transcends itself and provides a lesson to spectators beyond the victories and losses. And today the message in Djokivic's victory--to any who had the courage to listen--was this: if you want to reach the high note--you have to go for it.

tattooed

2010-09-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

I open today's Boston Globe, back from an in and out trip to New York to watch athletes play a game far different than the tennis I play. What they were doing at the USOPEN and what I do when I play was as similar as my cat Pumpkin and a Tiger.

In the Globe I noticed a photo and caption about a convention being held at a hotel very near where I work. It is the Boston Tattoo convention. The photo has a woman wincing as she is being inflicted by a tattoo artist (one assumes, you can only see a gloved hand in the picture).

Tattoos are something I don't quite get. When I was a kid the only people who had tattoos did not travel in my circles. There would be some kid in high school who perpetually had a cigarette behind his ear, awaiting the time when his mandatory English class would let out so he could bolt and go the bathroom or some other illicit spot, to smoke up. That guy would come back from somewhere with a tattoo of boxing gloves one day and make sure to wear a short sleeved shirt. Then sometime when he was thirty he wished he did not have it any more and began to wear long sleeves in the summer.

This is not the case anymore. Now, it seems, that a very high percentage of people in their twenties and thirties have a tattoo. I approached a student last summer who, like most students during the hot months, wore shorts and a tee shirt to class. Because there was no ink on her, I confided my puzzlement about the appeal of tattoos. She was an excellent student and the kind of clean looking bright eyed smiley kid who was in the national honor society throughout her high school years. "Why do so many people have tattoos?" I asked. "They're cool." she replied. "I'm going to get my third around Christmas." Where her ink was, was a matter for conjecture.

I have a number of shirts that I really like. I wear them regularly. But sometimes I like to wear other shirts that typically are not in the rotation. So, I take off the shirts that I regularly wear, and put on the other ones. When you have a tattoo, though, you can not bring in the lefty. It's indelible.

I've been thinking about this regarding tattoos ever since they became prevalent. But another thought entered this a.m. when I saw the photo in the Globe. I had been musing about some ongoing matter when I opened the paper and maybe that is why this thought seeped into consciousness when I read that the Tattoo convention was in town.

What about the other tattoos? That is, what about the tattoos that are not visible. Sure, the guy with the boxing gloves--to me at least--is stuck with a "I put boxing gloves on my arm" message every time he wears a tee shirt. But what about the tattoos that we don't see from people who never went to an inkmaster. How indelible are these--and moreover are they even more difficult to get out. The girl who is dissed by her parents has a tattoo. The boy whose heart is broken as a teen has a tattoo. The girl who goes to the dance all duded up but noone asks her to dance has a tattoo, The kid who gets picked last every time sides are chosen up.

What happens to those tattoos.

I think we can get them out, but most of the time, like the high school kid with the boxing gloves tattooed on his arm, we--down the road--consciously or otherwise choose to cover them up.

out of the loop

2010-08-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

There are signs when one is aging. You walk a bit stiffly in the a.m. Find that you are not quite as resilient after a workout. Might wake up multiple times during the night. Maybe you're not quite as frisky as you used to be.

Tonight, I discovered yet another sign.

In the bottom of the 7th of a Red Sox game I decided to go to the Shopper's Cafe to watch the end of the game. The lure was not so much the Sox, because I could see them at home, but also the Yankee game, and a football game. At the Shopper's Cafe where there are a dozen sets in front of the bar alone, I figured I could watch all contests.

Not the case.

The Shopper's Cafe was mobbed. Someone left as I walked in and I grabbed the seat at the bar, but this was pure luck. It was four or five deep behind me. I was at a corner where patrons not fortunate enough to get a seat would approach the bar to order their beverages. If you want to make some money, I think you should invest in a tavern. I could not believe the booze flying out. Drinks I never heard of. One woman and her tribe ordered six lemon drops. There were only three in her tribe and let me tell you they banged those suckers down very quickly. Long Island Ice teas which, I have been told, can take you from Brooklyn to Riverhead in a hurry were very popular, as were various malt beverages.

But this is not what made me feel old, while I sipped, apparently a member of the WCTU when compared to my bibulous neighbors.

What made me feel old was that the Red Sox were on only two of the sets. And the Yankees nor any other baseball or football game appeared on any other. At ten oclock even the Red Sox disappeared until I squawked.

What was on all the sets was something called the Ultimate Fighting Championship. This was a pay per view event which the Shopper's Cafe had purchased for a song relative to the fortune they were bringing in from observers.

What is the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Well, I had to ask my neighbor, there with his woman. Unfortunately I could not understand a single thing he told me because the explanation was interspersed with phrases like "tap out" and other bits of jargon that you have to be a young un to understand. I love sports, but this spectacle seemed like two guys I knew in Brooklyn who went outside to settle a dispute and beat the crap out of each other. My neighbor told me some things were illegal, of course. What was illegal? I asked. Well, he told me, eye gouging was illegal.

Glad to hear it.

There was one set on the Red Sox game when the Rays blew my evening by hitting a walk off homer in the bottom of the 10th. It was, coincidentally, the same time the UFC fight was over. It seems as if it ended when the loser was, literally, about to choke to death.

Time for me to collect social security.

illuminating the wild scene

2010-08-26T06:44:00.000-07:00

I just finished a book about a tennis match that has been called the match of the century--meaning the 20th century. It was the rubber match of the 1937 penultimate round of the Davis Cup between the United States and Germany. Don Budge played against and eventually defeated Gottfried von Cramm. The book is called, A Terrible Spendor.

Unless you are a sports zealot and a tennis aficionado as well, I wouldn't recommend the book. There is a good deal of tennis detail and the author jumps around so much--without a pattern that at least I was able to discern.

However, the book is more than about the game. The backdrop of the event is the rise to power of Hitler's Germany. Gottfried von Cramm would not join the party and for various reasons was playing for what must have seemed to be his life.

The title of the book comes from a Thomas Carlyle quote: Fate envelopes and oveshadows the whole; and under its lowering influence, the fiercest efforts of humans will appear but like flashes that illuminate the wild scene with a brief and terrible splendor, and are lost forever in the darkness.

As it relates to the horrors of the Nazis, the quote is accurate. But I think for most eras the quote is not only inaccurate but dangerous. If we assume that we are dust in the wind, simply unable to overcome fate except for brief flashes of illumination which will eventually succumb to the darkness, then there is no hope for progress or self love or love at all. Why work toward anything if we assume that we are overwhelmed by fate.

I like Don Quixote and used to say to anyone who would be willing to listen, that the windmills never have a chance. And I believe this for the most part. Yes, there are times when fate does overwhelm us. And in totalitarian regimes people do not have the freedom to help themselves. But for those of us who live in bona fide democracies, the idea that all we can have are flashes that will illuminate for short durations is to take an easy road. We have our chances to keep the scene lit.

let's cross over

2010-08-21T05:39:00.000-07:00

If you have not seen Eat, Pray, and Love and you plan on seeing it, you may not want to read this blog now.

I read the book about a year ago, and saw the movie just yesterday. Typically I do not like movies when I've read the book. This was an exception. I don't know what the critics who disliked the movie saw that disappointed them. I found it to be particularly moving and I am not inclined to be moved emotionally unless there is a good reason to be.

I read a book a while back called, Crossing to Safety. Can't remember much about it, but the title has come back to me now that I have seen, Eat, Pray, and Love. What do we cross and when do we cross? Can safety on one side of the river be an illusion? Can the prospects of joy on the other side be similarly illusory. Once we cross might we then, when the road is not as smooth as we suspected it would be, desire to cross back?

My best guess is that once we are in tune with ourselves, we trust our tuned self to make the decision on the basis of what is in our heart.

Last night I went to the Shopper's Cafe after my constitutional stint perspiring at the health club. When I sat down the Red Sox were down 9-0. Before I asked for a beverage it was 11-0, when my Buffalo chicken sandwich arrived it was 14-0. The good news for the Sox is that they get to play again today.

We don't. This is our shot. Down 14-0 before you get your sandwich. It may be time to consider crossing over. If you don't, being down 14-0 will get to seem to be normal.

Of course, it's not always easy to cross over.

I used to play a lot of rummy 500. And my stategy then was always, always, always, to pick up from the cards that were discarded whenever I could make a meld. Yes, I ran the risk of being stuck with all the cards I had picked up. But it always seemed that in the long run, that was the best thing to do.

It's gonna be I believe

2010-08-18T02:06:00.000-07:00

I think I knew about Bobby Thomson before I knew the names of my uncles.

It is, as I try to recall the sequence now, one of my earliest if not my earliest recollection--hearing both my mother and father tell me about the 1951 pennant race.

Down thirteen games in the middle of August, the Giants clawed back to tie the Dodgers and force a three game playoff.

The teams split the first two games. In the third the Dodgers led the Giants by two runs in the bottom of the ninth inning. Bobby Thomson came up with men on second and third and then..

"Branca throws. There's a long fly ball. It's gonna be I believe. The Giants win the pennant. the Giants win the pennant. The Giants win the pennant. Bobby Thomson hits a line drive into the left field stands and they're going crazy, they're going crazy. Ahhhhhhh"

According to family lore, my father--a salesman at the time--had stopped in a restaurant to watch the end of the game. When Thomson hit the homerun he jumped up and down and coins flew out of his pocket. He retrieved one of the dimes and phoned my mother. When she picked up, my father--without much of a hello--simply repeated "Did you see that. Did you see that. Did you see that."

Fifty nine years later I still get goose bumps when I listen to recordings of the Thomson at-bat. And fifty nine years later a generation that witnessed the homer, and the generation who heard the narrative from their mothers and fathers were saddened yesterday when they heard the news that Bobby Thomson passed. Strangely, Clint Hartung, the runner on third when Thomson connected, passed within the last several weeks himself.

Two books, at least, have been written just about the homerun. One is called The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff. The other, The Giants Win the Pennant. The recording of Thomson's homerun has been played on sport shows dozens of times in the last 24 hours. It is, of course, an indication of the power of sport that an event 59 years ago can stay alive and still excite people six decades later.

Pumpie's in love

2010-08-08T06:58:00.000-07:00

My cat has been acting strangely recently. Coming in at all hours of the night and then sleeping it off for longer than usual, sprawled out like a spent lothario on the spare bed.

Today I think we have discovered why. While perched at my spot on the deck which might as well have a sign that reads "summer office" we hear a meowing unlike the typical sounds that are regularly audible at the 27 moments during the day when he feels the time is ripe for a snack.

We go into the yard and there is Pumpkin, gazing wistfully at a white cat with a black tail. She, the white cat, is looking back at him inscrutably. He is clearly smitten and she does not look like she minds the attention, but is not initiating. Now twenty minutes later, they are still doing this courting nonverbal dance.

What to do?

Is it time for me to have a man to cat talk with the Pump. He looks so forlorn. Should I tell him to forget her, that there are lots of cats in the sea. Should I tell him to be aggressive, "go ahead put your paws on her, she probably feels the same way about you." Should I suggest that he pull some flowers from somewhere (he won't find any in this yard, I specialize in weeds) and present them with a bow.

Not sure how to handle this situation. I wonder if the key is to just let them be and what happens is what happens. If she doesn't purr back, don't chase, there is nothing you can do. But then again, why is she in our yard? She came here. She's not a stray, there is a nametag on her neck. Maybe she is hanging around hoping for the Pumpkin to make a move.

I hate to have him moping around the house. Hope she comes across.

song of songs

2010-08-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

My father is an unusual man. He has written a number of books one mistitled Thoughts of an Ordinary Man. No ordinary man could have written this or conceived of the thoughts therein. No ordinary man would have realized the value of the book to his children.

He just sent me his newest effort. It is an analysis of The Song of Songs and, I think, an important one. His take is that the Song of Songs is a declaration of the value of physical love. It was decked out in disguise to get past the censors, but for those willing to explore it, it is nothing other than an exhortation to love. Moreover, he argues that bereft of intimacy we can never become fulfilled humans and the stigma our societies have placed on sex has had a deleterious effect on our individual and even collective growth.

An octogenarian's take on intimacy is worth noting, not only because it happens to be my dad's perspective, but because octogenarians are often associated with prudish or disinterested perspectives on intimacy. And besides he is right.

There is nothing more important than being held and loved by those you love. It is wasted time and life to deny such pleasures, and those courageous enough to embrace in this world have enriched not only their own humanity, but also the collective health of our world.

illegitimate child

2010-07-31T07:11:00.000-07:00

I put the radio on in the morning for background music while I read the paper. There is a station that plays classical music which I enjoy, not because I am anything of a classical music expert, but because it is soothing background for my contemplations. Periodically on the station an announcer interrupts the music flow to tell us listeners about the history of the piece. My feeling about these interruptions is that the shorter they are the better. Rarely, but sometimes, I am interested in the name of a piece if I had been paying enough attention to it to appreciate it expecially. More often, I would just assume that the music be continuous.

Yesterday morning, I am here as I am each morning on my perch on the deck drinking my morning drug, reading and letting my issues and the world's do their poorly choreographed dance in my head. The music is interrupted by an announcer who tells us who've tuned in about the next piece to be played. It is a lengthy interruption spiced up, he thinks, because he goes into a detailed bio of the early life of the composer. The composer I hear was an illegitimate child. His mother had travelled to south america to avoid the stigma attached to her child's origin.

My cerebral meanderings had been interrupted by the announcer's decision to go into the biographical narrative, but when I heard the composer described as an illegitimate child, I stopped for a longer spell than usual to consider the label.

Do you think there is a statute of limitations that prohibits hanging the arrogant bastards who first considered this notion and then hung a label on it. Illegitimate child. On what pedestal of wisdom sit the omniscient to so describe anyone.

I was born three years into my parents' marriage, but what makes me legitimate has nothing to do with the decree of the state of New York. I either earn or don't earn my legitimacy as I become an adult. Illegitimate child is an oxymoron. And those who attempt to subjugate others on the basis of a capricious grid of right and wrong have lost any claim to legitimacy.

I know the stigma attached to being "illegitimate" is not what it once was. Still, the phrase exists, we know what it means, and it should mean nothing.

scar tissue

2010-07-25T05:37:00.000-07:00

Last summer it did not get hot in Boston until the end of July. This year, it has been hot nearly every day since May. So I sit this Sunday morning on my deck, barefoot in jeans and no shirt, enjoying the few hours of the day before the humidity will drive me into an airconditioned space.

I've got the newspapers stacked up on the table beside me and my feet are propped up on a chair that's facing me. And I see it, and sort of smile.

What I see is the very first scar that I ever got. I probably don't notice it more than once every three years because it has faded some and is in a spot where the bone leading to my toe can obscure it. In 1955 while wading, reluctantly no doubt knowing me, in the kids area of the pool, I scraped the top of my foot on the coarse bottom of the pool. Had I been swimming with the big kids on the other side of the fence instead of forced to stew with the wusses my age, this never would have happened. It's not unlikely, though I'm not sure, that the scraping was the result of my trying to circumvent the authorities and wiggle around the fence.

I can't recall exactly what happened, but I think it started to burn and bleed and some lifeguard or other agent of the pool told me to get out. They applied something on it. Eventually the scrape closed, but I had myself a little scar in the middle of my foot. And it's still t/here.

I've got a bunch of other scars too. On my chin, under my lip, on my wrist, under my arm--a remarkable accomplishment which occurred when the seat in a makeshift wooden phonebooth gave way, and I seared my arm on an exposed nail as I skidded to the ground.

I think it is a good thing to notice scar tissue every once in a while. The question is to what extent do you dwell on it.

Last night Jon Lester was pitching a perfect game for the Red Sox going into the 6th inning. He recorded the first out in the sixth and then got the second batter to fly to center for what should have been an easy second out. The outfielder dropped the ball. My cat Pumpkin could have caught the ball in his mouth, but the outfielder dropped the ball. The next batter hit a homerun for the first hit of the game. The Mariners went on to win the game.

The center fielder probably feels miserable today. Big scar. His error cost a teammate a chance for a perfect game and led to a team loss. The question is, to what extent will he linger on the cost of the error and stare at the scar. Probably be a good thing to be more careful the next time he catches a ball, but will his confidence erode because of the episode, will he think he doesn't have what it takes, and will his game suffer.

Athletes have to have short memories. Otherwise they will always dwell on their scars. But I think the challenge to remember but not linger and brood about our scar tissue is a reality for all who want to enjoy time and life. Some scars are tougher to shed than others, but we all have had accidents and sometimes have been responsible for them. The toughest scars to shed, I believe, are not those that are visible but those that we construct when we dwell on the ones that are.

the path of least resistance

2010-07-20T16:04:00.000-07:00

The problem with taking the path of least resistance is that you're likely to get to a spot where you shouldn't be. And also it can be difficult getting out.

The story of the Miami Heat grabbing three superstars has been on the sports talk shows over the past week. The great (and make no mistake he is great) LeBron became a free agent and signed with the Heat. It comes out that he and two other free agents conspired to become free agents at the same time, and then sign with the same team creating, instantly, a powerhouse. There was nothing illegal about what they did, but there sure were many who spoke negatively about what they'd done.

The ploy does not really bother me, but I'm not sure it enhances my view of the three stars. I used to play pick up basketball at the health club where I am a member. I don't anymore, partly because they removed the courts and replaced them with every machine known to health clubs each with its own personal television. But I wouldnt be able to play anyway. No matter what I do these days I hurt something or the other. Played tennis last night and added, just today, to the treasury of a local chiropractor and my neighborhood Walgreens.

When I did play there was a tall lanky fellow who typically if not always acted a little bit like LeBron. The fellow was tall and could just hang around the hoop and swat the ball away from players 6 inches or so smaller. He was okay otherwise, but not really special. If I played him one on one (when I could walk) I would slaughter the guy as I could still shoot at one point and if he came up to guard me I could go around him like he was a piece of furniture. But in a four on four game he was the MVP. Whoever had him knew they were getting all the rebounds and many garbage baskets. The thing about this guy was that whenever we chose up sides he was not content with the configuration unless he could almost guarantee a victory.He'd look at the sides and then do a trade making sure there was no chance of a loss. I always preferred to play against him even if it meant losing a game and having to sit out the next contest. It was more of a challenge. What does it do for you to win when you've stacked the teams. What is the point of enjoying competition if there isn't any.

Professionals are different of course. they can earn more money if their teams win. However, these guys are loaded, winning a few extra thousand dollars for them is liking picking up pennies on the street for us. So, the reason why LeBron et al did what they did was to ensure they'd win. They created a path of least resistance.

So, if they win, so what. But if they lose, a big what.

Had a friend in college who sadly has passed. We both took Astronomy as did my brother. Astronomy required a lab. My brother says to our friend, "What do you think of this Lab?" She says, "I'm shooting for a D"

My brother and I still get a kick out of this. If you shoot for a D you will likely get it. Then you're stuck with a D when you could have, or at least might have, earned an A.

I think LeBron took the path of least resistance and it probably will be relatively easy to play this year. I am not sure he will enjoy the view when he gets to the end of the season.

It's f#*king raining out.

2010-07-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday night I was driving back to Boston from Stockbridge on the Massachusetts turnpike. I stopped at a rest area and walked toward the indoor food court. It was raining, not drizzling, but not a downpour. I did not feel the need to run.

Out from the food court emerged a young family. A man, probably about 26, and a woman about the same age. The woman was carrying an infant. As he walked away from the protective roof of the rest stop, I heard the following:

"It's f#*king raining out."

He didn't say it as if if he was particularly horrified. It sounded like he didn't really want it to be raining, and so it was not quite like a weather report, but it was not an utterance that you thought would be followed by a mad dash to the car. And in fact there was no mad dash. The threesome continued walking. The only other thing I heard was his wife's sober rejoinder.

"F#*k." she said. And then the couple with the infant continued to move through the parking lot.

Am I a prude? I don't think so. I have banged my thumb with a hammer now and again and spewed some words meant to be expurgated. And, just for example, I can clearly remember the Giant-Patriots Super Bowl game, when my Patriots went into the game with an unblemished record. And I can clearly remember the Giants drive when Eli Manning went back to pass and then, abetted, by at least one egregious hold, and likely three holds, threw a pass up for grabs which was caught by a bench warming receiver who secured the ball against his head. This play preceded the score that ended the Patriots perfect season. I think it is a fair bet that what I spewed at the conclusion of that play will not be in any sermons this weekend, regardless of your denomination.

But still. What's with the omnipresent modifier.

In the Madness of March I describe one fellow I overhear on a betting line. He is describing the meal he has consumed at a hotel's buffet. Chicken ala king, peach pie, salad bar...whatever the item, the fellow modified it consistently with the same adjective. Pick a noun, any noun.

I have just completed President Obama's Audacity of Hope. It's no page turner because the content matter while important is not always engaging--at least not to me--but the author's ability to select the correct word to match his thought is remarkable. Brilliant really. His vocabulary is extensive, but the words he chooses are not so chosen to impress, just to express. I marvelled at how often he seemed to pluck just the right words to describe a nuanced perspective.

Ages ago I was hired to teach a course in vocabulary. I took the job because I needed one. The result of having to learn the words I was to teach was that I was able to think more effectively and express myself more efficiently.

If all you have is one adjective, then you are sort of limited in how you can conceptualize.

E

2010-07-10T18:19:00.000-07:00

So, I get an e-mail from Eleanor in September that she and Larry will be in Boston for a conference in October and we should get together. We arrange to meet downtown at their hotel. We laugh our way through dinner recalling old stories and fond characters and reminiscences. Their son Greg will be married in December. This will be the last of their three kids to go down the aisle. I'd seen Greg once since he was a tot, but my most vivid image of him is when he was 2 and attempted to push a bowling ball down an alley. Larry had to do the funky chicken dance half way down the alley because the ball otherwise would never have made it down to the pins. I'm not positive, but I think we were tossed out of the establishment after that.

Every once in a while I marvel how an act of kindness, or what seems to be an insignificant gesture can have a dramatic effect on one's life. In 1976 I was living in a duplex that Larry and Eleanor owned. We students lived on one side, and Larry, Eleanor and Christopher--Greg's elder brother, lived on the other side. Greg was not yet born. Larry and E had bought the place while we were living on the one side and let us stay on as their tenants once they moved into the other side. We became good friends. We were contemporaries. Larry was a doc completing his residency. E was not only raising Christopher but getting a nursing degree and MBA, not to mention redecorating the place.

My roommates were law students and they took the bar exam in July 1976. They were ready to leave town and start careers or vacations. I still had about a month more work left to complete my degree and, significantly, had no job on the horizon once that was done.

So in August of 1976 Larry and E suggested I just come on and move in with them, rent free, until I finished up and could find work. They rented our student place out to some other doc, let me haul my belongings including my own phone (in case one of the schools to which I'd applied were to call) and I moved in next door.

I had applied to at least fifty schools by August 1976 and had a varied assortment of rejection letters to show for the effort. By the end of August I was essentially done with the dissertation but still did not have a place to work. I'd lined up some part time teaching, but that was all. Larry and Eleanor told me not to worry about it, and just stay with them until I could find work. They were unusually accommodating. There was no quid pro quo. They just were good people and friends.

In either late August or early September I went for a run around Delaware Park. When I came back perspiring through their house, Eleanor told me I'd had a call from SUNY Fredonia, a small college 50 miles southwest of Buffalo. I'd not applied to Fredonia so I was unsure of why I was being called.

And here is how serendipity works. Someone at Fredonia had quit at the last minute. The dean there was in a frenzy to find a quick replacement. He called the local university center, University of Buffalo, and coincidentally reached my adviser, who mentioned me as an option. My adviser gave the frantic dean my number and Eleanor picked up the phone and told me to call. This was at a time before answering machines.

I got an interview and got the job. I had five happy years there, earned tenure, and then went on to my present work at Northeastern.

We recalled this event over dinner and again they pooh poohed their kindness. Eleanor was a big sports fan and had read my book. She enjoyed it quite a bit--or at least said she did, and had bought a few copies for Greg who is now an unusually successful basketball coach and some other friends interested in sports.

Around March Madness this year I get an e-mail from Eleanor telling me that Greg's high school team won the state championship. Then I get another one telling me that she is at the final four of the NCAA. She sounds unusually happy.

In late April I receive another note from her, but this one is a forwarded note. The kind of letter you get on e-mail with a message that you are supposed to forward to ten friends. This was a terrifically upbeat message about how if you knew you had only a short time to live, what would you do, who would you call. It was the type of seize the day message that you want to pin to your bulletin board to make sure you don't squander time.

I jot a quick note back to her telling her how uplifting that note was and that I am grateful that she sent it out to me. I am in the library doing something I think is important when she posts a response that I retrieve from my laptop.

The response informs me that the seize the day message came to her coincidentally, but is particularly relevant for her. Right after Gregory's wedding she went for a ho hum check up and was told that she has gall bladder cancer.

I am, of course, startled by the news. I write a quick note back wishing her well and then bolt to my car where I keep an address book that I hope has Larry and Eleanor's number. I reach her about a half hour later.

She is upbeat. I ask her what she is doing. She says they are just finishing dinner. "Well, how are you?" I say.

She gives me the lowdown. When I ask, hopefully, about the prognosis she says she will be lucky to be talking with me in two years, and the doctor who diagnosed the problem had said it could be as quick as 6 months. Still E sounds like a trooper. She is taking chemotherapy and she is going to the shore with the whole family in June and then they are having their traditional July 4th celebration. I tell her, genuinely, that if anyone can make it, it is she.

I write to them when they are at the shore and I receive, again, an upbeat response. "Feeling a little beat, but the kids are here and we're having a blast. Weather is great..." etc.

I write on July 4th knowing that it is a big day of celebration for them. I am surprised when I don't receive a note and became concerned that the situation had deteriorated.

Today I am worrying about something relatively inconsequential--will the garbage men pick up this huge bookcase I have put out.

I go to check my voice mail and hear the beeping sound which indicates that I have a message. The message is from a stranger who says that she is a friend of Eleanor's and would I give this caller a return call.

I do.

And she tells me that on July 9th, yesterday, my friend Eleanor succumbed, six months after she was diagnosed.

I'm unlikely to have a better friend. This is the third contemporary of mine who has passed in the last several months.

Seize the day.

steady gaze

2010-07-07T12:05:00.000-07:00

In President Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope he writes, "I find comfort in the fact that the longer I am in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes...and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience."

I like the book. Sometimes it's work and often I wonder if I like it primarily because I tend to agree with him on what he is writing about. I am not finished with the book yet, but the line I refer to in the first paragraph is, to me, especially meaningful.

We are all answerable "mainly to the steady gaze of our own consciences." And the extent to which we can maintain that gaze and respond to our conscience, is a measure of our character. I think that I do this relatively well, but I have my moments when it is work, and heavy lifting at that. Yet it is a good guideline for me to employ.

Of course one's conscience has to be well calibrated and this, itself requires a tune up now and again. Pretty easy for the settings to be conveniently altered so that a gaze at one's conscience could justify all sorts of careless and inconsiderate behavior. I can actually feel myself flinch when I recall an episode when either the calibration was off and I was under the illusion that my behavior was consistent with appropriate behavior OR, more irregularly I am happy to say, I did something that was inconsistent with what I knew to be wrong when I did it.

No medals for me or anyone else for acting within the confines of one's conscience. Being conscious of one's conscience and acting accordingly is what one should do, like saying thank you when appreciation is called for, or taking courageous action when it is unpopular. Still it is tough work and I am aware of my transgressions. Judy Collins entitled a book, Trust Your Heart. When asked why she so entitled the book that way she said simply, "When I didn't trust mine I found myself in trouble." The heart and the conscience are attached meaningfully. Trusting the heart is a good method for keeping one's conscience tuned.

I hope our president keeps his gaze as steady as he suggests he should and trusts his heart to ensure that his gaze stays steady.

World Cup

2010-07-07T05:21:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the World Cup this past month. Like many american sports fans, soccer--or football to the rest of the world--had not captured my attention or satisfied my enthusiasm the way other sports have. Yet this world cup, and to some extent the last two cup competitions, have made me understand some more about the game.

Americans talk about soccer being low scoring and slow. Yet I wonder how many of these same fans would understand baseball had they not been reared in this country. Like soccer, baseball can be seen as slow and some leads in baseball, like leads in soccer can appear to be insurmountable. It's not quite the same because even a 5-0 lead in the fifth inning can be overcome, whereas a two goal lead in the first half in soccer can seem to make watching the rest of the game a waste of time. (Yet the American soccer team overcame just such a deficit in one of their matches. And yesterday in the semifinals, Uruguay nearly overcame a two goal deficit in the last two minutes of their game with the Netherlands).

Often I read books while I am watching sporting events. Between pitches in baseball, plays in football, and timeouts in basketball I read whatever book I am in at the time. I find it pretty easy and a good time to do the reading if I am otherwise occupied doing other things. I tried to do this yesterday while watching the Holland/Uruguay match. Could not do it.

And this I think is the appeal of soccer. The more you watch, the more you realize that every play is significant and could lead to a scoring opportunity. If you just watch it now and again it seems like many times the ball is just being booted around. But try taking your eye away from the screen during any time except for injury time outs and you could miss a scoring chance. Also, since the games are so low scoring, any scoring chance is a big deal. Unlike basketball when a final score will reflect many made shots, in soccer all play is like sudden death because any one goal can force the opponent to play catch-up even in the first minutes of a contest.

Still the game does not do for me what it does to the zealots in other countries who fanatically watch the games. But I can see the appeal. A buddy of mine has a son who is home for the summer looking for work. He couldn't get a job but finally managed to get the low man on the totem pole morning and early afternoon hours at a bar in Cambridge. Well, the kid is raking it in as the multi-cultural denizens of Cambridge are packing the place.

So, for American sports fans who tend to dismiss soccer as an unfathomable allure, imagine a south american asking you what you see in baseball. Imagine that fan shaking her or his head after your explanation and saying, almost condescendingly, "I just don't get it." Then try to watch the world cup game this afternoon or the championship contest this Sunday from the point of view of someone who wants to get it. I think you will.

P.S. I wrote the above this morning. It is now 430 pm and at 330 I was to meet a colleague at the Starbucks on campus. The Starbucks here is a large facility as Starbucks go. It doubles as part of the student union. It is separated from the food court section and rectangular in shape about the size of a NBA basketball court. Usually, even during the school year there are many vacant tables and chairs for students or whomever to sip their coffee and check their laptops. In the summer, the Starbucks is often close to empty. However, today when I arrived to meet my colleague, I could not get into the joint. It was jammed with students all facing a giant screen that was showing the world cup game. In the adjacent huge food court it was also packed with students and faculty rooting for the combatants. When Spain scored there was a roar akin to the roar that one hears in Sports Books in Las Vegas. I was once in the same space when a Red Sox pitcher, Derek Lowe, was about to, and indeed did, pitch a no hitter. It was a Saturday so maybe the comparison is not apt, but the place was nearly empty then.

independence and anomie

2010-07-04T16:59:00.000-07:00

On what must have been a Wednesday during my December 1973 holiday break I went into Manhattan to see some Broadway shows. We didn't have any tickets but figured we'd wait on the lines for half priced shows that met our student budgets. We really scored that day seeing That Championship Season in the matinee and then Pippin in the evening. We splurged nearly breaking our bank accounts even with the discounts paying something like 15 bucks a seat, but were in the orchestra down low for both shows.

I liked That Championship Season, but Pippin--which I'd known nothing about previously, touched and left a mark on my heart.

Usually it takes me a while to get the lyrics to a musical and one performance won't do it. An example is Evita. I saw that with my brother and minutes afterwords he was laughing recalling lines that I'd never heard or understood until I bought a recording and listened to it many times. But with Pippin, I got it right away. Maybe it was because I was 23 at the time and identified with a character who in his first appearance sang a song with a refrain that I thought was right on target.

"Rivers belong where they can ramble.
Eagles belong where they can fly.
I want to be where my spirit can run free.
Want to find my corner of the sky."

Several lyrics from the show surface now and again, but the one that has seeped into my consciousness regularly this weekend is the line not from the beginning of the show, but from the end when Pippin realizes:

"I'm not a river or a giant bird
that soars to the sea
and if I'm not tied to anything
I'll never be free."

I have often thought of myself as very independent. According to my folks I was that way even as a toddler. But the gap between independence and anomie is, at once, not large AND cavernous.

Anomie--that sense of being disconnected and isolated and, "not tied to anything" may seem desirable, but if I have learned five things in my 60 plus revolutions around the track, one of these five is that independence without genuine connectivity is an illusion. Being genuinely connected, heart to heart, is emancipating. Of course artificial connectivity can create an illusion of being emancipated--and then subsequently you find yourself tied up in knots. But truly being connected, I think, that is what makes one independent.

Firecrackers are likely to start bursting any minute now in downtown Boston. A lot of noise and a lot of revelry as the Boston Pops cranks out Stars and Stripes forever.

Those truly celebrating independence are holding on and allowing themselves to be held.

Father's Day 2010

2010-06-20T03:57:00.000-07:00

I am about 8 years old. It is a hot weekend day and I'm on my way to Sherrie's candy store to get an Italian Ice. Sherrie's is on the corner of Avenue W and Knapp right near P.S. 194. My biggest concern in the world is whether it will be Cherry or Lemon today.

Just as I approach Sherrie's a truck drives by along Avenue W. As it reaches Knapp a bundle of newspapers roll out from the truck.

I figure the men in the truck lost their newspapers. There is a wire bundling the papers together and I try to yank the stack up. I shout out at the truck, "You dropped your newspapers?" There is a fellow riding shotgun in the truck who looks out the window at me strangely. The truck drives on.

Now what? The poor men have lost their newspapers. The stack sits at my feet. What to do?

I have an idea. What I will do is become a paper boy. I knew some big kids in the projects were paperboys. There were six floors in our apartment building, and maybe fifteen buildings between Avenues W and V alone. I wouldn't even have to cross the street to sell the papers. This way, I would never have to ask mom for money for italian ices again.

I forget about the Italian Ices, lug the newspapers two blocks back to the monkey bars near Avenue V that often served as a gathering spot for my cronies. Ronald wants to know what I'm carrying. I tell him what I have and that now I am a paper boy. Lenny wants to know where I got the newspapers. I tell him.

Gregory snorts. "They did not fall off the truck. The drivers threw them off. They were delivering the papers to Sherrie's."

"Don't tell me. I was there. They fell off the truck." I say this, but I am feeling a bit uneasy.

"Uh uh." says Gregory. "They delivered them. You stole Sherrie's newspapers."

It hits me that I am in big trouble.

Gregory has an idea. Lenny and Ronald agree that it is a terrific plan. I'm not convinced.

The plan is to put the papers in the basket of Lenny's tricycle. We would then ride to the vacant lot across Bragg Street that sits right in the middle of Bragg between Avenue V and W. Then when we get there we'd dump the papers into the vacant lot and scram.

I don't know if I want to compound the heavy duty problem I have by going to the vacant lot. The vacant lot is a place all we 8 year olds have been told never to go to. It is an overgrown weedy depressed area surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire at the top. According to the collective parents' lore, it is a spot where juvenile delinquents hang out. Besides we would have to jay walk to get there, another prohibition.

"I don't know if I want to go to the vacant lot."

"C'mon. Don't be a fool. Nobody will ever know."

They don't need to twist my arm. We toss the newspapers into Lenny's tricycle and start a career of crime. We jaywalk along with Lenny as he crosses Bragg and get to the vacant lot.

The four of us together can't weigh much more than 200 pounds so it takes all of our collective strength to bench press the newspapers high enough so that we can toss them over the barbed wire fence. After a number of comical tries where the stack nearly knocks us over as we drop it, we get the papers over the barbed wired and see them disappear into the weeds of the vacant lot.

We race away as if we just robbed a bank, running helter skelter in different directions. We are not cool crooks. I walk the last fifty yards to our apartment building dreading a confrontation. I take the elevator up to 5D. It's a weekend day, probably a Saturday, so both Dad and Mom are home. Dad wants to know where I've been. It's taken a lot longer than it usually does to get an Italian Ice.

"Where's the Italian Ice?"

"I ate it."

I probably am not particularly convincing. A few minutes later after a mild interrogation I know I am cooked. I spill. Everything.

I stole the papers.
I went to the vacant lot.
My pals and I dumped the papers into the vacant lot.

My mother and father huddle up and I sense that there will be major punishment. But not so. My father leaves the huddle and says that when I took the papers I made "an honest mistake".

If this is all the heat I'm going to take I feel terrific. I nod my head like a madman and repeat what is, I figure, the key exonerating phrase. "Yes, I made an honest mistake." That, apparently, is the ticket.

Dad continues. "Taking the newspapers was an honest mistake. But throwing them in the vacant lot, that was wrong."

Ok fine. I'll cop that plea. Yes. throwing them in the vacant lot was very wrong. I shake my head soberly.

"Okay pal" says dad "let's go to the vacant lot and get the papers."

The man has to be kidding me. Imagine going to the vacant lot with my father? And people thinking my father hung out there, smoked cigarettes, and was a juvenile delinquent.

I plead my case.

"Dad we can't go to the vacant lot. We'll never find the papers. It's where juvenile delinquents go."

"Let's go Al", he says.

We get to the vacant lot and in a move that is truly athletic he climbs the fence, vaults over the barbed wire, and disappears into the weeds. Then he reappears with the bundle of papers. Again, he impresses me despite my fear as he easily tosses the papers back over the barbed wire. Then he vaults back.

"Alright" he says "Let's go and return the papers to Sherrie's".

No! This day has been horrible. Just to think I had been on my way for an Italian Ice just a couple of hours ago. I take a stand. "No. I am not going to Sherrie's. They will never miss the papers. Today is a holiday." Please God make it be some minor holiday. "Not going."

"Let's go pal." He has to drag me to the corner of Knapp and Avenue W. I walk into the candy store behind him. He finds the owner, a sourpuss as always, hands over the papers and explains what happened. He makes sure to say that I made an honest mistake. Then he tells me to apologize.

Eight year old me walks around my dad and tells Mr. Sherrie or whatever his name was, that I am sorry. The proprietor is not magnanimous. He mutters something about the neighborhood going south. Dad repeats it's an honest mistake.

We leave Sherrie's and I am furious.

"I can't believe you made me do that. He never ever would have known."

"Look Alan" said Dad. "Sometimes people make mistakes, honest mistakes like this one. But sometimes people leave the mistake alone hoping it will go away and it hurts them, or they try to do something to get rid of the mistake that is worse than the mistake itself. Your friends thought they were helping you. But you can't just do what is easy or what people tell you to do. You have to do what is right, regardless of what is easy."

What is the man talking about? After this horrible day I have to listen to a speech?

I repeat my position furiously "I can't believe you made me do that."

"Come on, Alan, don't you feel better that you returned the newspapers."

"No!" I scream with unequivocal certainty. I stomp ahead in irrational child rage.

"You will" he called after me.

Thank you, Dad. I love you.

Happy Father's Day

"

The Truth

2010-06-17T06:23:00.000-07:00

The nickname for Celtic star Paul Pierce is "the truth."

Today many people at work are far more concerned with "The Truth" than their own jobs. The Celtics play the Lakers tonight in a single game that will determine the NBA championship. The truth will be a key.

I am almost finished reading "A Bright Shining Lie"--a 790 page tome about the war in Vietnam. It is a troubling read. While I thought I had the gist of what had transpired, my understanding had been superficial. A Great Shining Lie does not present the opinion of War Protestors. Quite the contrary. It is presented from the perspective of military personnel who realized that fabrications were presented as truths. Nobody now--even those who allowed for the distortions--denies this. The boys--who in the name of patriotism went to be slaughtered--were lied to as were their parents and all of the citizens of the country. The book's title is excerpted from comments made by the main character--someone who had nothing but antipathy for war protestors. He was a dedicated military man who personified the courage of the boys and men we sent to this war and was frustrated by the counterproductive misrepresentations. "We had also, to all the visitors who came over there, been one of the bright shining lies."

The appeal of sport is that there are no bright shining lies. Tonight the NBA champion will be the team that scores more points than the opponent. Nobody will come out tomorrow and say that despite the score "our intelligence indicates" that another team has won and will continue to win. A player who commits a 6th personal foul will be disqualified and will not be able to appeal because of special circumstances. A ball shot within the arc will count for two points. A player will not be able to get three for the goal because he knows somebody important.

We were lied to in Vietnam. By Democrats and Republicans. Our contemporaries were sold a lie and were slaughtered. There was no reason. Even McNamara acknowledges this now. (The South Vietnamese were as dictatorial and corrupt as the North were alleged to be). There was no intelligent plan.

The championship game tonight has its allure, in large part, because we can count on the truth and truths that are foundational to it.

P.S. I am wearing my Celtic shirt. If The Truth scores more than 25 the Celtics will win. Watch out for Derek Fisher. Fisher, a Laker, is one of the more clutch players ever to play the game.

Seventh Game

2010-06-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

The Celtics did not come to play last night and the Lakers did. Now there will be a 7th game for the NBA championship.

When I was a kid the Celtics and Lakers had some terrific series and 7th games with Bill Russell pitted against Wilt Chamberlain. I recall one in particular when the opener for the game was a head shot of Chamberlain saying how he was determined to win, and then a head shot of Russell who gave a rambling--I got this game on my mind--talk saying the same thing as Chamberlain did, but more convincingly. Russell's Celtics won and I think it was because they, as a team, worked harder at it.

I wonder if we all should treat every day of our lives like a seventh game, not recklessly, but intensely. The players will be quoted, no doubt, in the next 24 hours as saying that they intend to "leave everything out there" during the 7th game.

And they will. If we all left everything out there each day of our lives, I think there likely would be more joy--assuming that our energy was expended in an intelligent pursuit.

Prediction. Lakers can not play better than they did last night defensively, but Kobe can score more. I hope I am wrong, but I think the Lakers win by at least 7. Of course, I thought Jimmy Carter would beat Ronald Reagan in 1980.

nourishment

2010-06-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

I understand that last night's game between the Celtics and Lakers was exciting. I did not see it, just read the score this morning.

I've been on the road for a while first driving through Albany and Buffalo on my way to Toronto for a conference. Driving alone except for the luggaged I've lugged--far too much for the week--in the car. Even for someone who enjoys independence and autonomy as I do, the road can deplete one's energy, at least mine.

On the way back through Buffalo I stopped at my friends Carol and Tom Rywick, who entertained me, fed me, and indulged my quirky desire to visit some nostalgiac spots around the city where I'd done my graduate work. They could not really understand why I not only had to visit the Buffalo and Erie County Public library but locate and parade around in certain spots that had sharp memories. I left Buffalo and stopped in Newark, New York, where I visited a friend from my freshmen year in college who looked, remarkably, preserved. Then off from Newark to Binghamton, New York where my dear friends Fran and Helen Battisti whom I've known since 1969 welcomed me as we discussed our past and futures.

Tom and Carol made lunch for me and took me to dinner. Fran and Helen broiled steaks on their grill and we ate on their magnificent deck overlooking their wooded yard.
But the nourishment from all--as corny as it may read--came from their love.

I sit now in the Honesdale Public Library posting this blog. In minutes I will drive about 20 minutes from here to a reunion with camp folks with whom I matured (or at least grew up) in my early years.

The vitamins there, I think, ought to be special as well.

I love sports, but last night as Fran and Helen and I discussed where we've been and where we are going, my interest in the Celtic and Laker series was minimal.

altruism

2010-06-07T21:00:00.000-07:00

The Community Action Corp (CAC) was a student organization at the University of Buffalo in the early 1970s. It had evolved because the university had been the center of student activism in 1970 which had created a clear rift between the school and the community. Most schools after the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings had become sites of student protests, but UB (as it was called for short) had been especially strident.

In an attempt to bridge the gap, several altruistic students created the CAC. I remember the student newspaper referring to the head of the CAC as someone who was too altruistic to be believed. He seemed genuine enough to me, but I only knew him superficially. I got involved in the CAC as a basketball coach for 10-12 year old kids in the community. Someone I knew from a camp where I'd been employed recruited me for the job and it was a delight.

Every Sunday morning from October until April, I coached my squad at either 8 a.m. or 930 depending on the schedule. In early October there was a "draft". Fliers had gone out to Buffalonians and to the elementary schools announcing that the CAC basketball league was about to begin. One Sunday morning in October, hundreds of kids came to the big university gym (big to them, the place was actually tiny by college gym standards) had a number tagged to their tee shirt and bounced basketballs in something akin to drills as we coaches decided who we would take. Then there was a draft where the coaches picked the players. Every kid got on a team. And every kid that showed up had to play every week in an intricate system of 8 time periods per game.

The kids loved it. The coaches loved it. The parents sat in the bleachers and thanked us, the "coaches" for giving up our Sunday morning for their kids. We had, the CAC, helped bring the community closer to the students. We weren't all, apparently, snooty privileged anti establishment miscreants.

Were those of us who participated in CAC altruists?

Altruism is a word that is often contrasted with selfishness. I often wondered though if the words were not different at all. Isn't an altruist someone who enjoys doing something for someone else, and if so, isn't the enjoyment the self derives from that activity the reason for the behavior, and consequently then isn't it just a more attractive form of selfishness.

I liked coaching those kids on Sunday mornings. My roommates and occasional Saturday night sleeping partners would often shake their heads when I bolted up at 7 on a Sunday morning to get to the gym. But I liked it.

By the way, my team, The Braves, won the championship in one of the three years I was coaching. We won in a sudden death overtime game--a peculiar rule implemented because the woman's volleyball team was about to come in and take over the gym. I'd brought a cigar to the game and ala Auerbach who used to light up a stogie when a game was won, I lit up after we won the game. I can still see two of the parents pointing at me and laughing.

One guy whose son was the star came up to me at the end of that championship run and thanked me for giving up the time for his kid. Fact is, I loved it.That's why we do things. For love.

Prediction

2010-06-05T05:16:00.000-07:00

Once my dad, brother and I were visiting my uncle who, himself, was visiting a friend of his. The five of us were in the man's living room trying to get the fellow's brand new television set to work. This was well before the days of cable. Yet this was a snazzy tv model. Problem was that no matter how we turned the rabbit ears this way or that, the picture kept coming in fuzzy. My uncle's friend then issued a remark that has become something of a family joke ever since.

"I have a prediction to make about this set" he said, "It's gonna be a helluva set."

I still snort when I am reminded of this. I have no idea if the set ever became "a helluva set" but I get a laugh when I think of this guy whose knowledge about televisions began and ended with the on-off switch.

My knowledge of basketball and ability to predict outcomes may be a little less rudimentary, but I am often incorrect when I try to predict the future. That said, "I am going to make a prediction about the Celtic--Laker series. It's gonna be a helluva series."

The Lakers will win on Sunday and in the course of going up 2-0 will get Rasheed Wallace to commit not one, but two technical fouls, and Kendrick Perkins will commit one. This will disqualify both for game three under the NBA rule. The Celtics will lose game three and go down 3-0. However, they will win the next three and tie the series 3-3. I'm not sure yet who will win game 7.

It's going to be a helluva series.

The Pump

2010-05-28T13:28:00.000-07:00

At about 11 pm on the Sunday night of Patriots Day weekend--a holiday only in Massachusetts that primarily, at this point in history, celebrates the Boston Marathon--our cat Pumpkin was acting peculiarly. Usually frisky, rambunctious, but pretty easy to hang with, the Pump was getting in and out of his litter box with a frequency that was abnormal. I went to pick him up and he gave out a yelp that I had not heard before. Since, of course, it was the Sunday of a three day weekend, we phoned the local vet hospital (Ka Ching) as opposed to our regular vet who has been terrific for us. The hospital told us, much to our dismay, that these symptoms could be a matter of life and death. Zoom, into the car and to the hospital.

Quite a scene in the emergency room to a vet hospital especially if you are a newcomer to pets as I am. Seven years ago had you told me that I would rush to a vet hospital with a sick cat, I would have laughed at the suggestion. Yet here I was at about 1 a.m. pacing in the waiting room like a worried parent. I was not alone. I was there with a family waiting for a dog named Ollie and a woman concerned about her Great Dane that had done the tango with some barbed wire.

Seems as if Pump had a urinary blockage that had we not acted on it would have resulted in no Pump. However, after a few days--and a big dent on my credit card-- the man was back to his usual tricks and was delightfully annoying--a juxtaposition that is not an oxymoron if you are a pet owner.

Of course today begins another three day weekend. And last night at just about the time the Lakers miraculously beat the Suns on what has to be called a lucky play at the buzzer after which the Sun Set for all intents and purposes, the Pump started doing the in again out again finnegan dance with the litter box. He was not particulary whiny, so we waited until the morning. We were able to see our regular terrific vet this a.m. who unblocked the poor guy.

But the Pump is staying the night on the disabled list at the hospital. Maybe we will bring him some very tiny helium balloons tomorrow.

Very grateful to Dr. Susan Rosenblatt who not only did the job, but showed me how it was done today. Fascinating, truly.

Root for Pumpkin, and the Celtics. My prediction is that they both will prevail and move on to the next match tomorrow.

meshugeneh

2010-05-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

The name of the fellow who sold pretzels by bike in my Brooklyn neighborhood was Meshugeneh. At least that is what I thought. I was 8 or 9 and we lived in a 6 floor apartment building in an area between Avenue V and Avenue X in Sheepshead Bay where there had to be close to thirty of these six story buildings.

As soon as it was warm enough to ride a bike, Meshugeneh would come along in his bicycle that had a large basket in the front. He'd ring a bell on the handlebars and stick, barrel, punch, and assorted other ball games would cease. The Italian, Jewish, Irish, Black, Hispanic, and Polish kids that made up this mini village went to Meshugeneh for pretzels.

"Where's Your Money Sonny? Where's Your Money?" That was the peddler's refrain. Most of the time we were penniless, so we'd go back to our buildings and say, "Ma, can I have a nickel for Meshugeneh." I remember once a mother of one of my buddies telling her son to go "get three pretzels from Meshugeneh. Two with mustard."

One day my Dad heard me asking for money for Meshugeneh. His comment was something along the lines of "Say What?"

"Can I have a nickel for Meshugeneh?" I said.
"Who are you calling Meshugeneh?" he asked.
"Meshugeneh." Who the hell else did he think I would be calling Meshugeneh? "Meshugeneh, the pretzel man--on the bike."

"You don't call people Meshugeneh." said Dad.

This, apparently, was another one of life's perplexing lessons. I don't know when exactly I found out that Meshugeneh meant "crazy person" but it was not right then.

Dad came downstairs from our 5th floor apartment to see who we were calling Meshugeneh. In a real example of "small world" my father knew the fellow. He had been in the army with the guy and at that time, the pretzel man was called simply "Brooklyn." They discuss army times a bit, and I can tell just from this bit of conversation with only my 9 year old head that the fellow is kind of daffy. He is all over the place with his comments interspersing a booming "Pretzels. Pretzels. Where's Your Money Sonny" every half a minute so as not to lose business while chatting with my father.

When they are through Dad asks me not to call him Meshugeneh. I don't get it. Even the grown-ups call this guy Meshugeneh. Eventually he waves a hand as if to say he can't fight all the battles. His pal Brooklyn does not seem terribly perturbed when someone hustling thirty feet away yells, "Hey Meshugeneh, Wait up" just about when the peddler's ready to take off to another cluster of buildings.

If I play back this vendor's mannerisms and conversation, he sure does seem daffy by what passes for normal. But every so often I come to the conclusion that everybody's meshugeneh. Everyone, just some people have nicer duds. The pretzel guy rambled and was sometimes incoherent and gee, he had to be close to 35 riding around in what amounted to be a tricyle selling pretzels with mustard. But, I wonder if I am not just as looney as he is, except I don't sell pretzels and have learned to behave myself sort of.

I finished Innocent today. A real page turner. Don't start it unless it's a weekend otherwise you might wind up using one of your personal days to finish it. The overriding question in the book Innocent is essentially this: Who is? I think a variation of that question could apply for Meshugeneh. Who isn't?

However, you would be meshugeneh if you think the Suns will beat the Lakers in the current series despite last night's game.

the worst/best day of my life so far

2010-05-24T06:19:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago on a Friday, I noticed all sorts of items packed up in boxes. There was a community garage sale of sorts sponsored by a local organization. We were, apparently, donating items for the sale. In one box I spotted a paperback that looked interesting that I'd not read. The title was The Worst Day of My Life So Far. A blurb from a review on the cover read, "Readers..will find themselves laughing out loud and moved to tears." I thought I could use a book with a bunch of laughs in it. Besides, what was to be the next book on my list was a 750 page tome about the war in Vietnam. It came highly recommended and it will probably be interesting, but the page numbers were daunting. So, about a week ago I started reading, The Worst Day of My Life So Far.

I finished it yesterday. Not a funny book. A very good book and I am glad I yanked it out of the garage sale intended box, but not a funny book at all. It is about a woman of my vintage and her relationship with her mother. A large part of the book is about how the main character goes home to care for her Alzheimer afflicted mother after her father dies. Excellently written, very powerful, very very few laughs.

Sometime last week, Wednesday I think it was, I came across a passage that resonated. The main character is thinking back on her childhood and the relationship she had with her parents. She writes,

"That's what I thought I had absorbed from my childhood around [my parents]. Love was the supreme emotion. The ultimate noun. I did not yet know that love is really a verb."

In my home I knew love was a verb. It is a noun also and I think one has to feel it as a noun before it can become a verb, but ultimately requited love--whether filial or romantic--requires the noun and the verb. Without the latter, the former is an insidious illusion. And the worst days of our lives will be those when we will ourselves to acknowledge this.

Good books, even depressing ones, make me want to read more. So because it was a good, if sad, read--I started another book last night. Again, I eschewed the 750 page book about the lie that was Vietnam. This time I picked up a thriller, Innocent, the sequel to the never-to-be-equalled- courtroom drama Presumed Innocent. (The best book ever of this genre and an example of why one should rarely see a movie instead of a book).

So I pick up Innocent in part to wash away the lingering depression over The Worst Day of My life so Far. And about fifty pages in, I read another line that stops me flat. [if you read Presumed Innocent and you are someone who does not like to know anything about sequels, then stop here, though I am not giving away much]. A significant character in the book is pondering a decision about love, "How, my heart shrieks, can I be doing this again?...the answer is always the same: Because what has lain between then and now--because that time is not fully deserving of being called living."

It is no accident that many books are about love. The best days of our lives are those, I think, when we respect the love we feel, and have the courage to love as a verb.

A non sequitor for sure, but I like Orlando tonight and think the series goes 6. The Lakers will win in 5. Celtics beat the Lakers in 5 or 6.

shed

2010-05-15T05:48:00.000-07:00

The fellow who owned the house before we moved in knew what he was doing in the backyard. Not because of any green genes I possess, the yard is filled with trees, and, in addition, the property borders on public park land. I am perched right now on a chair in the living room where I often sit in the morning drinking coffee. From this vantage point I can look out through glass sliding doors and see my predecessor's beautiful work.

Here is the problem. Adjacent to the gorgeous Japanese maple (that I did not know was a Japanese maple until a gardener oohed and ahed at it one day) my predecessor built a shed. A very practical thing a shed. In it we store the lawnmower, assorted baseball bats in the event I lose forty years and am summoned by the Red Sox to be a designated hitter, a symbolically deflated basketball, lumber--as if I would have a clue about what to do with lumber--, various garden tools that might as well be in a museum for all they are used by either of us, and boxes of items that if I unpacked them would provide hours of wondering regarding why I had kept this and that.

The shed is visible when the wind blows a certain way and when the sun shines a certain way. Otherwise the maple sort of obscures it. The shed is an eyesore, but right smack in my line of vision, so often when I gaze out into this otherwise inspiring back yard, I see the shed.

I wonder, now and then, if it's important to see the shed. Is it important to see the blemishes to remind yourself that all is not as it could be?I mean I could shift my position or where I place the chair so that I look the other way and pretend that the shed is not there. The thing is the shed is there and I would be kidding myself not to acknowledge it.

I did buy a new chair. There was a sale at Macys and I went downtown a week ago last Thursday to buy the new chair which, if as advertised, swivels so I can look elsewhere. When I got to Macys they said that they no longer have furniture at the downtown location, but I should go to a suburban mall Macys. So, last Saturday I drove to the mall--a place I like frequenting as much as I enjoy doing my taxes. When I got to that Macy's I was told that that particular suburban mall Macy's also discontinued selling furniture. There was another suburban mall that had it. But I had had it with malls and Macys at that point. So I stood in the middle of the mall and called the Macys' 800 number, amidst the little kids eating ice cream and their parents shouting for them to stop beating up on their siblings, and I ordered the chair that I had been seeking.

It is supposed to come on Wednesday. I'm pretty sure I will still see the shed, though, no matter how much I swivel. My idionsyncrasy perhaps, but I think it is a quirk that in the long run does me some good. You kid yourself to think there is no shed, and your heart and head and growth is misdirected and you start on the road not to be travelled.

Particle Board

2010-05-08T06:49:00.001-07:00

About a dozen years ago my friend Nancy and I decided to have lunch once a month. We work together at the University, have similar perspectives, and we figured this way we could solve the problems of the world each month, allowing them to accrue in the intervals so that we may address them at our following rendezvous.

As it turns out, our monthly lunches occur about three times a year. I have several such periodic appointments with colleagues. Don Margotta--the best person I know at Northeastern--and I last had our at-least-once-a-semester coffee during the first term of the Bush administration. At least it was W; not his dad.

After we remedy lingering university problems that require our attention and action, Nancy and I typically turn to movies and books, registering our critical opinion and making recommendations. Last month Nancy suggested I read, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, subtitled "What I learned while editing my life"

Typically, we have very similar interests. Something recommended is nine times out of ten a guarantee that the other will find it worth a viewing/reading. But I did not like this book. I read it, but found the author to be a bit of a belly-acher. He was kind of stuck in life, trying to get out of his rut, hobbled by this and that, and having trouble finding a route. I can commiserate with that, but there seemed to be too much time spent dwelling on wrong turns or bad luck.

At one point the author describes the loss of love. He is in a hotel room, and fears that the pain of the loss will surface. He writes "They don't have an emergency room for the kind of pain that is about to happen to me....then another thought came that said I would be living the rest of my life alone because I was unlovable."

I thought that was melodramatic. All but the blessed have been hurt at one time or another by the loss of love. Maybe it was just that this section came on the heels of similar descriptions of pain, but I had trouble empathizing with him.

Then about a week ago I was at the Shopper's Cafe--the place I typically visit to do my research about sports fanatics--and was watching the Celtics with a crowd of zealots. As is typical of me and maybe most of us, thoughts were coursing through my head, zigging and zagging without any discernible direction. Thinking of one thing, then zooming in another direction when another rocketing notion enters the highway. Yesterday I was thinking that if we humans--or at least speaking for myself, I--had a GPS system in my head that was intended to provide direction for the colliding thoughts that pell-mell enter my consciousness, the typically passive voice of the GPS computer would eventually wheeze in exasperation. "Look buster. I give up. I have no idea where you're going." (You could not find a computer in the world to do such navigation at 3 in the morning).

It was during one of these helter skelter cognitive rush hours in the Shopper's Cafe--amidst the groaning about the Celtics demise--when several thoughts collided. Multi-thought collision at the intersection of rejection and fear and failure.

In short time it went away. And it had nothing to do with Pierce finally hitting a couple of jump shots. The gridlock at that confluence of notions was cleared away and I was fine. But for that moment I returned to that author's depiction of pain and felt that irrational(if ephemeral) sense of loss and despair and I knew how fragile can be the particle board of our foundation. There is no emergency room for the kind of pain when those floorboards give way.

May 4, 1970

2010-05-04T03:29:00.000-07:00

Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming
We're Finally On Our Own
This Summer I Heard the Drumming
Four Dead in Ohio.

If you are over 58, you likely remember where you were when four students, Jeff Miller, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, and William Schroeder were killed by National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. Another student, Dean Kahler, was shot and has been paralyzed since unable to walk for life. Eight others were hit and wounded by the Guardsmen's bullets.

The book, The Killings at Kent State by I.F.Stone is subtitled, How Murder Went Unpunished. This, sadly, is a very accurate subtitle despite the fact that the Scranton Commission concluded that the shootings were "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."

It's a beautiful day in Boston--sunny, bright about 70 degrees. The boil water order was lifted last night so we can now drink the water after two and a half days. Even our sports teams have provided a reason for celebration. The Bruins, Red Sox, and Celtics all won last night. A great day awaits.

The seniors in our Communication Studies department at Northeastern have their graduation reception this afternoon.

Forty years ago on this day, the seniors in 1970 were diving for the ground as soldiers shot thirteen students, killing four and paralyzing one for life at Kent State University in Ohio.

mayim

2010-05-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

Last night I was sitting at Shopper's Cafe with a host of other Celtic fans watching the local team show their age. After leading comfortably in the first half, the trio of Pierce, Garnett, and Allen looked spent in the second as the younguns from Cleveland beat them to the spot. Some of Garnett's passes looked like exhausted lobs from someone who wanted to will his body to be 25 again, but took a look at the remarkable energy of LeBron James and considered retirement.

I found it amusing that in the back room the Saturday night band was deliberately blasting an oft repeated Boston song about the Charles River that runs through the city. The refrain: "For I love that dirty water, Boston you're my home" was particularly appropriate last night,

Not only were the Celtics leaning over their stomachs with fatigue, but earlier in the day we all were notified--by e-mail, signs on the Mass Turnpike, and something akin to Paul Revere advance representatives--not to drink the water. Somehow a pipe had burst only a mile or so from where I live rendering all water in Boston and a dozen nearby communities undrinkable lest we desire to spend significant portions of the next few days like some Celtics last night, bending over and holding our bellies.

The barflies adjacent to me got a charge out of the Dirty Water song sung by the band, but my hunch is that if this takes more than a couple of days to fix, there will be some sour looking hombres along the Charles in the very near future.

My father used to call square and folk dances as one of his several moonlighting jobs when he was a teacher and principal. (Those who squawk about outrageous teacher salaries might consider that at one time my dad called square dances, sold encyclopedias, taught Sunday School, ran after school recreation programs, recruited kids and was the head counselor for a summer camp, and lectured at NYU in order to supplement his "outrageous" salary). On Friday nights at the summer camp dad would employ his folk dancing skills to call and teach Israeli folk dances. One of the dances that was popular was called Mayim, a dance designed to complement pleas to whomever for water. I tend to think that the crew at the Shopper's Cafe are unfamiliar with the song Mayim though I did consider watching some eyeballs roll by going over and asking them if they did. Nevertheless, I was humming it at the bar as I watched the Cavaliers bury the Celtics.

iatragenic

2010-04-29T17:23:00.000-07:00

You can learn a good deal about someone when you play a game against them. This thought often comes into my mind when I play racquetball or tennis. Is your opponent inclined to call an outball in, will they make comments that are allegedly supportive but really are intended to diffuse your attention, will they call a "let" when they could, but a mensch knows that the alleged reason for the let is a technicality that should not be considered.

For a while in the late 90s I played tennis regularly with a fellow named Bob Whitaker. We had some great matches. He was as tenacious as I was and we both played fiercely but by the rules. Once after splitting the first two sets of a match, I said that the third one would be something. "It's going to be a war" he said. And it was, in the most positive sense of a competitive battle. Unfortunately, after a spell he got better and I could not compete with him. So then we played squash, a game that I had come to a little sooner than he, so I had the edge. Every one of our matches was a fun war. And every one was cleanly played. He would rather chew on a razor blade before calling an in ball, out, or taking an advantage that he had not earned. Since I like to think of myself as playing similarly, it was a gas to have these contests.

Because I know this about Bob, because I know he is thorough, prepared, and a person of conscience, I was shaken by a book he just wrote. The premise was not startling. I have thought that what he posited was indeed the case. But the thorough nature of his research and the comprehensive breadth of the book, have (further) reduced my respect for humankind.

The book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, argues that the psychotherapeutic profession and the drug industry have perpetrated a willful hoax on many Americans. In an attempt to justify a desire to claim that mental illness is akin to other biological illnesses, psychiatrists have declared that drugs can be used to address psychological disorders. In fact, what Bob unearths in his book is that drugs used to combat mental illness actually exacerbate, and in some cases, manufacture mental illnesses. Most disturbing is the documented claim that the perpetrators are aware of the deception, but the pecuniary rewards are such that--at the expense of the welfare of duped patients-the perps are willing to perpetuate the hoax.

I learned a new word reading the book. Repeatedly Bob refers to mental illnesses as being iatragenic--the illnesses are brought about by the alleged cure.

There is probably a metaphor here for other "illnesses" in life. How often does what we pursue--in a short sighted attempt to cure a problem or fill a void--create an "illness." I think it may happen more often than we are consciously aware. But metaphors aside, the argument that Whitaker makes about the drug biz is powerful and courageous.

And I believe him. I know how he plays sports.

Deis Rugby

2010-04-24T18:11:00.001-07:00

I did not get it going this evening to make it to the health club before my arrival time there would have precluded any meaningful exercise. So, instead, I drove to the Brandeis track which is a short distance away and decided to walk around it for an hour or so.

The track encircles a soccer field. There was something happening on the field when I arrived. A group of loud blue clad college students were warming up on one side, and a bunch of loud white clad students on the other. They were shouting to rev themselves up and tossing around something that looked like a football. When I got close enough I saw that the white clad players had the words Deis Rugby on their jerseys and the teams were doing pregame drills for a rugby match.

I know next to nothing about rugby so I was curious. The drills were strange to me and the chatter different from what I am used to. The teams continued to warm up during my first, second, and third trips around the track. This was a low budget operation. The players apparently got dressed right on the field as bags and sweatshirts were strewn all over. There was no bathroom. And I became aware of this because as I would circle the far end of the track I saw that the designated urinal was the right field foul pole of the adjacent women's softball field. It was tucked away from the crowd of say 55 who had come to watch the match.

Here's how the game seems to work. A team drop-kicks off. A player from the other squad gets the ball and is pummelled until he relinquishes the ball. Then another player picks it up and he too is mauled. When the ball is relinquished a johnny on the spot picks up the ball and heaves it backwords to fleet runners who attempt to get to a goal line by continuing to lateral the ball backwards until someone tries to go forward without being tackled by the opponent. Eventually, the stronger team is able to advance the ball over a goal line and when it does, they score what is called, I overheard, a "try".

It didn't take long for the blue team (which I found out was from nearby Wheaton College) to show that they knew what they were doing. The Brandeis team while vocal and energetic during warmups seemed completely overmatched. The Wheaton team had several fellows that nobody on Brandeis could tackle and, on a few occasions, nobody on Brandeis seemed to want to attempt to tackle.

Nevertheless after each "try" scored by Wheaton, Brandeis gathered itself together and rah rahed saying this time they were going to score.

I went around the track 10 1/2 times before I sat down to watch the remainder of the game. These guys had no protective padding and they were really getting whacked. A couple to my right were watching their kid play and I thought that if that was my kid I could not watch this.

At the end I lost count of how many times Wheaton scored. Brandeis scored once. When the horn sounded though, it did not seem as if Brandeis was dispirited. They shook hands with the winners and looked at least like they had earned their beer for this Saturday night.

55 fans tops, no pads, getting their innards pummelled, losing by at least 8 "trys". It appeared to be, and really was for them, fun.

shnorrer

2010-04-24T08:56:00.001-07:00

This morning while sitting by myself in the living room with my cat I heard myself shout "shut up" at the radio that sits on a table in the living room. I startled both the cat and myself at this outburst. I wondered if the accrued tensions of the week was not the source of this admonishment to the inanimate object nearby. Nevertheless, after the outburst I looked for the tiny remote control that allows me to change the stations on the radio. It was out of reach so I got up, shut off the radio and popped on a cd of Tony Bennett crooning oldies.

The impetus for my wrath were the words of a professional shnorrer. I tend to listen to three kinds of stations when using the music as background for reading or random contemplations. Either it is the local classical station, a college station that plays show tunes at certain times of the week, or an easy listening spot on the dial which plays the kind of tunes that cause my contemporaries to roll their eyes when they discover that I sort of like these songs for background.

It seems to me that in the past months, each of these stations has hired a bevy of shnorrers to interrupt the programming to try to make me feel guilty for not paying their salaries. I am told that if I like the kind of programs they have, I should send in some dough and get a calendar or some sort of magazine or, better yet, a judo type certificate suitable for framing that would let anyone who visits know that I am a bonafide member (read, "sucker") for station XYZ.

I find these shnorrers offensive partly because they interrupt the programs to which I have desired to attend without interruption. Also, I don't believe them. That is, I don't believe that without my check they will go belly up. I think their bellies are full and, I wonder, if I compared my professor's paycheck with programmers and directors there would be a glaring contrast and it would not be in my favor. I have some background knowledge with this. In Buffalo, I had a buddy who worked for a public television affiliate and she was adamant about the deceptive nature of the begging. For a stretch I served on a board that met periodically at the Boston public television offices. Nice digs, there. It did not seem as if anyone there had to take up a collection for much of anything.

I figure that if you make a deal with a public to do something, like teach, deliver mail, or broadcast show tunes, you should not make the deal if the only way for you to survive is to beg for sustenance. I make a deal with my administrators to teach for certain compensation. Can you imagine if after a course session I say that "If you liked the class you just took, then please donate to the teacher's fund."

I feel similarly when after I purchase a doughnut at a counter there appears a TIP fund for the person who has plucked the doughnut out of a case. I sort of figure that the cost of the doughnut includes the plucking. I sort of figure that my tax dollar is already supporting public radio. Play the music and stop with the shnorring.

Dichotomy

2010-04-14T15:23:00.000-07:00

Next Tuesday, April 20th, is my last day of classes before final exams that run until the end of the month. My teaching evaluations tend to be supportive, but if I were to announce on the 20th that I had decided to extend school for an extra week there would be an uproar approaching a riot. Few students, if any at all, would think this was a good bang for their buck--an extra week of classes for the same tuition dollar. There would be a petition and I would likely have to answer to someone at the university who is in a loftier position.

I had a Statistics professor in graduate school who commented that education was the one thing that people are willing to pay for, but don't care if they get. The quip was funny, and in many ways right on target. Some other time I might write about why his remark is on target in many, but not all, ways.

On Sunday night I watched a replay of the shootout between the Rangers and the Philadelphia Flyers. Their game was the last one of the regular season and as it turned out, the contest determined which team's season would continue.

The Rangers and Flyers were deadlocked prior to the game. The winner would make the playoffs. The loser would go home. End of season. The score at the end of regulation was 1-1. There was no score at the end of the 5 minute overtime. When this occurs during the regular season, the NHL determines the victor by conducting what is called a shootout.

A shootout in hockey means that each team selects three players and each of these players is allowed to skate toward the opponent's goaltender undefended in an attempt to score a goal. After each team has three attempts, the team that has scored the greater number of shootout goals is determined to be the winner. If the score is still tied after three players have attempted to score, then another player is selected from each team and the shootout continues until one team has scored more than the opponent.

The shootout, in my opinion, might be exciting, but it is idiotic. It is like deciding the winner in a baseball game that ends in a tie, by deciding how many of three selected players can hit a fungo out of the stadium.

But a shootout is the way ties are broken in the regular season in hockey. So that is the way the Rangers/Flyers game was decided and it determined whose season would continue and whose season would abruptly end.

The Flyers scored two out of their three times. The Rangers scored one out of their first two. When the third Ranger was unable to score a goal something predictable happened.

The Flyers erupted in joyful celebration. The Rangers sagged knowing the season was over. They would have to stop working. The Flyers could continue to work.

My students would riot if I extended their work. The Flyers exulted.

Something about sport and the joy of competition in this contrasting dichotomy.

Deborah Togut

2010-04-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

I remember exactly where I was on August 20, 2000. I was at Temple B'Nai Israel in Rockville Maryland. My 48 year old cousin Sammy, born April 8, 1952, was getting married. I have never seen anyone happier than Sammy was that day. Except maybe for Deborah, his bride.

Deborah was not only a prize in terms of beauty, intelligence, and class, but she was also the beloved cantor at the synagogue. No wonder Sammy was beaming. He had hit the jackpot. And Deborah: She too was elated. I have never attended a wedding where there was such joy. Yesterday I heard someone describe Deborah as being radiant on that day. Anyone who was there knew that radiant was the word.

And there were plenty of Zarembas there that day. I have this great photo of my clan standing on the bema. About forty of us gathered for a family photo right in front of the ark. I'm not sure if we were supposed to group up there, but knowing my clan any prohibition was not really taken seriously. I remember my cousin Neil trying to round up the clan. Finally we were in place surrounding the delighted bride and groom. We were kibbitzing and kidding back and forth. "Hey" shouts a cousin standing next to my father. "I don't want to be near Meyer Zaremba". Instantaneously my dad quips, "I second that." We all laugh. What a simchah. We are beaming in the photo, noone radiating more than Deborah and Sam.

I find out yesterday that Deborah spoke 7 languages; graduated from high school and Hebrew College in the same year; studied in Japan, and at the Jewish Theological Seminary; and influenced the decisions of three other women who became cantors. Yesterday her brother told us that Deborah came from a long line of women who would not take no for an answer. Apparently, her grandmother approached a rabbi and asked to learn Hebrew. The rabbi responded with four words that spurred her descendents to become the incredible achievers they turned out to be.

"Goils we don't teach" said the rabbi. This rocketed three generations of women to breakdown barriers, become physicians, lawyers, and in Deborah's case a cantor in a field dominated historically by men.

Sammy and Deborah have two beautiful young sons imbued with the love of this couple that began their journey together on August 20, 2000.

Today, I keep staring at the photo of our clan surrounding Deborah and Sammy. Because yesterday on that same bema, in front of that same ark where the Zarembas kvelled, joked, and beamed, in front of at least four hundred congregants whose lives had been touched, I heard 7 eulogies for Cantor Deborah Togut who perished from brain cancer on Friday April 9th, 2010.

Deborah made an indelibly strong positive mark on our universe. I know readers are unlikely to know my cousin Sammy, but I'll ask you, nevertheless, to wish him and his two sons comfort during this difficult time.

Butler

2010-04-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

There is probably something symbolic about the names of the combatants in Monday's championship game. The regal dukes against the lowly butlers.

Yet, this game proved itself to be egalitarian. Butler played Duke toe to toe and if only some magic could have been employed by a celestial force, the long shot from Hayward at the end, would have created a storybook finish.

Still it was fun to watch. I lost twice on Monday. Once when Duke won the game because I was rooting for Butler, and once when Butler came within 7 because I had offered my wisdom to any readers for Duke to cover that 7 point spread. For the tournament I finished 32-29-1, a rate of about 53%. I will keep my day job.

weltschmerz//tikkun olam

2010-04-05T12:53:00.000-07:00

I've been looking for a week and I can't find my watch. That is the bad news. The good news is that I have been unearthing great things that have been buried here and there as I have been searching for the watch.

Just yesterday I came across two items within minutes. The first made me smile. The second made me smile, but differently.

The first item is a photo my brother snapped on a trip we took through Wisconsin several years ago. We were driving from Madison to Green Bay and came to the town of Oshkosh which sits on the shores of Lake Winnebago. I like lakes so we pulled over and drove toward the water. We found ourselves on a suburban looking side street and could see the lake in the distance. We drove to water's edge and then saw a sign that made us stop and get the camera. Not more than 15 yards from the water, we saw a sign that read "Dead End."

Really. No kidding. Dead End.

What city planners thought that that sign was necessary? Maybe they figured that at night someone might not see the lake. Then how about a fence, or a lamp-post. No fence, no lamp post. Just a sign for anyone who, from 15 yards away, could miss the state's largest lake that covers, I just looked up, over 200 square miles.

So we got out and took a picture, and yesterday I smiled thinking about it.

I put the photo down, kept looking for the watch, and a moment later I came across a card sent to me by my teenage camp sweetheart. She had pasted a copy of the moon in the shape of a heart in the card. In the card she wrote that she was considering painting the heart with the words "tikkun olam" written underneath it and sending the painting to me.

The thought was sincere but I never received the painting--so perhaps there is something symbolic about picking up the dead end photo seconds before finding the card. Yet, reading the card made me smile.

Tikkun olam is a phrase that means repairing the world. If you subscribe to tikkun olam you assert that our world has been ruptured and it is our responsibility as those who inhabit the planet to repair that rupture. Weltschmerz means a state of depression or apathy that comes from comparing the ideal state of the world with its actual state. If you buy the idea of tikkun olam, there is a cure for weltschmerz and that is doing what is necessary to repair the rupture. My erstwhile camp sweetheart thought, apparently, that what fueled tikkun olam was the heart. I smiled when I reread the card.

In the second game on Saturday, Duke was ahead, yet its opponent West Virginia was valiantly attempting to come back from a deficit. In the middle of the second half a player named Da'Sean Butler, the spiritual leader of the team, drove hard to the basket. He collided with an opponent. Butler then began writhing on the floor in what appeared to be tremendous pain. He looked to be in agony as he flailed away on the floor.

What I saw next was something I have never seen in college sports. As Butler was jerking about, his coach--Bob Huggins--came out onto the court and kneeled over his player. He got as close to Butler as lovers do when they are about to embrace. What he said, we will never know, but he was speaking to his player attempting to console him. Doing what he could to comfort him, repair the rupture to whatever extent he could. The doctors were working on his leg, but Huggins was working on the players heart. It seemed natural and sincere.

There is balm in Gilead and that balm is the amalgam of concern, consideration, and a natural willingness to come out of your comfort zone, to love. Noone would have blamed Huggins for coaching his players instead of consoling Butler. Noone would have blamed him if all he did was stand up and shout platitudes. But instead he got in his player's face and whatever he said could be translated as, I love you.

What is the cure for paralyzing weltschmerz? Tikkun Olam. And love. And if you are willing to do that, work toward repairing the world, there are fewer dead ends and watches do not report time spent as much as time enjoyed.

By the way, Butler stays close tonight, until the end. Then Duke wins in double figures.