This morning my train was stopped in a station because of a sick passenger at 42nd Street. Everyone was quiet and polite when hearing the announcement. No groans about the inconvenience. People were patient and calm.
Then a local train pulled in the station and everyone started pushing each other and shoving themselves into the overcrowded train. The train conductor started to yell to people to back away from the train.
Different situation, but exactly the same people.
People in NY can live a delusional life even as its financial institutions are crumbling. I heard someone say to another: “These days, saving a couple hundred thousand dollars really makes a difference.” Meaning that saving that much two years ago wasn’t so important? Whaaaaaaat?
I keep thinking that I would love life so much more as a silent film.
May I eat the crumbs at your table?
My sister is guest blogging with me. She is helping edit this entry. So, it will be nicer and better written than usual.
On Sunday, my partner, son and I were on our way back from the Bronx Zoo on the No. 2 train. Somewhere in the Bronx, a woman had a petite mal seizure (form of epilepsy it seemed) on the train, but no one knew that until she came around. Everyone was joking about her being a drunk or a drug addict. Someone helped her back on the seat. Then, everyone continued talking about her as if she wasn’t there. I got up and walked down the subway car to see if someone was hurt and and asked her if she was ok. She said she has seizures and felt ok. She seemed dazed and I kept my eye on her and asked her a few more times about how she was feeling. We got off the train at the same stop in Manhattan and I made sure she knew where she was and that she had her wallet with money to get where she needed to go (back up to the Bronx). I was startled and sad that no one else came to her aid and people thought it was funny. I didn’t even help that much, but I hope I made her feel a little safer.
Over 40 years ago, Kitty Genovese was stabbed countless times while her neighbors looked on. Psychologists say that this communal inaction is known as diffusion of responsibility. No one will act unless someone else does, and therefore no one acts.
So, only one person needs to act and everything can change. Yes, we can.
Too many bugs in nature. But I braved the wilds of Rockland County for my son.
I went to camp for ten summers. I loved camp, notwithstanding my current aversion to the bugs and inconveniences of the natural world. (I need a NICE bathroom.)
So, having loved camp so much, I was game for all of the activities. My son wanted to relax after a hard day of having fun and lied down in the grass. My partner took pictures of him lying down. I got involved in a soccer game (and gracelessly tripped over the ball) and then played parent-child basketball games (even though my child was on the sidelines chilling out). And I ran to get the cherry italian ices for us that the camp gave as a parting snack. I overheard a father asking if there were lemon ices because the cherry kind stained permanently. I saw a woman in white pants (great idea for an evening at a camp) get splashed with cherry ices being eaten by a nearby child. It seemed to happen in slow motion, with love music in the background as the white and the cherry collided in a loving embrace. Ok, the woman and the child who was not her daughter — not so much loving happening there.
Our son wore most of his cherry ices on his clothes and on his face. The neon quality of the coloring made it a handy tracking device as we boarded the buses back to the city.
Today is visiting day at day camp. Ok, it is visiting dinner, really.
I still remember my parents coming for visiting days when I was at sleep away camp. I remember the summer my mother went gray. It was 3-1/2 weeks since I had seen my parents and I wondered who were those odd people waving at me. Maybe it was my mother’s gray, my father’s checked pants and white shoes combo or the red keds (the really wimpy kind — not the now-preppy-cool kind) my mom wore. It was probably the whole picture that made me weak in the knees.
Luckily, my son saw us this morning so the trauma should be muted. More later.
Mitch McConnell is going crazy over the cost of health care, but he didn’t mind the reckless spending by the Bush administration. It was solid accounting not to include the gazillions of dollars for the Iraq war in the budget, but health care reform is too expensive. It is appalling how Republicans destroyed our surpluses; yet, it is galling that they won’t take responsibility for that and are instead pointing the finger at Obama who is trying to FIX THE MESS.
Back to health care. So far, I can afford top of the line health care, so this isn’t about my particular situation. But it is critical that we fix the problem.
Why? Because this is America, damn it, and it is a DISGRACE that, in such a rich and wonderful country, millions are not insured, health care is inadequate when available and illness will backrupt a family. The Bush administration gave over $700 billion to the banks without asking where it was going. But no GOP member wants to put at least that much into the health of the taxpayers? Let me remind you, members of the GOP, that the $700 billion was earned on the backs of those very taxpayers.
Failure is not an option. So, instead of criticizing the president’s plan, come up with a solution that works and not just some pander to big business.
So I am not only becoming my mother, I am becoming my grandmother.
You may remember seeing old Jewish ladies like her. They had heavy accents and would offer you a “gless of tea in a kup” (because in the “old country” tea was served in glasses, but “vee know that here, in Amerrrica, dahlink, vee poot tea in a kup”).
They carried heavy shopping bags full of things. In fact, those shopping bags were so ubiquitous that they were called “Jewish luggage”. Which gets me to my point. This morning, I couldn’t seem to find any of my fancy shmancy bags in which to shove some of the daily detritus of my life. I spied a small Dean & Deluca shopping bag (note to self: remind family that this is not a eatery for recessionary times). So in went my blackberries (yes more than one), gym clothes, bills I need to pay, etc. Off I went to my fancy shmancy job at my fancy shmancy office with my shtetl style bag.
Some things must just be in our genes. From generation to generation. . . .
I hate tattoos. I think they mar an absolutely amazing work of evolution — the human body. It also must hurt. And, ink in the skin can’t be a good thing. But, tattoos are everywhere, even on 60-something people who didn’t get them in the military.
So, now I try to look at them instead of looking away. What do they say about the person? They must be clues to a person’s identity or life story. Or am I giving people too much credit?
I must read up on this because if there is meaning in these tattoos, then there is a whole new level to people watching.
I am not my son’s biological mother. My partner is. There are distinct advantages to being genetically irrelevant: no worries that the less-than-stellar genes I carry (recessive, of course) will transfer to my son. I can say that he is adorable and that he is smart, because I have nothing to do with those. The down side is that I don’t see my mother in him and she was such a positive life force.
I live the nature/nurture debate. I think humans are born hard-wired and nurture doesn’t change that. Nurture can create a safe, loving, encouraging environment so that a child’s better impulses, desires and dreams can flourish. That’s my job. It is hard sometimes because there is something about the biological connection that is primitive and similarly hard-wired.
I worry about my place in my son’s life. I have a piece of paper — court ordered adoption. I am legally and financially as responsible for him as is any biological parent. But that is no bright line upon which to stake my parental claim. Certainly if family were decided based on “blood” relations, I would lose. Court order sounds strong but it is paper and in “rock, paper, scissors,” I would lose to the scissors. So, it can’t be that strong.
I know I love him and he loves me. That’s the tie that binds. The rest shouldn’t matter. But until love is the litmus test for family, I am glad I have the piece of paper.
Dear Mom:
Tomorrow is your grandson’s 7th birthday. You died one day shy of his being six months old. That means today is 6 and 1/2 years since you died. I can’t believe it. There is no “moving on” after your death; there is only “moving with” your memory and wishing you were here. Next to the computer is a picture of you holding him after his bris and I am sitting with you on your left. The person on your right (unseen in the photo) said something tremendously stupid because I can see it in your eyes. But I know that look — you were measuring your response to an inane statement. In fact, I have that same look on my face in the picture. Genes are amazing things, except you would have responded with something perfectly diplomatic but to the point. I would have responded like Larry King did when he interviewed Jean Harris (who killed the Scarsdale diet doctor), “so, you’re a murderer”.
You live in me and as I age I look more and more like you. This comforts me. But I need for your grandson to know you or know about you, so he can appreciate the remarkable person who was his grandmother.
I tell him about you all the time. I use those Yiddish phrases that you used with us when you cupped our punims adoringly. Sometimes, I tell him what Grandma would have said if she were alive because I want him to have a sense of you. So if he does something funny or wonderful or if he needs comforting, I tell him what you would have said to him if you were alive.
A few months ago, we were all in a cab after visiting Dad. I buckled up and put your grandson on my lap and “strapped him in” with my arms forming the “Grandma grip” (which he knows comes from your legendary strong grip on your children’s arms when crossing streets). The cab stopped short and everyone else went flying (though, thank G-d, no one was hurt). Your grandson was safe in the Grandma grip. That is the image of you I want him to carry with him — the strong, protective love that endures even though you are in Heaven.
I wonder if you would like my blog and would send the link to all of your friends. I wonder if you would comment. You would probably send me direct tweets that said, “be nice” in that slightly chastising way you have. You would worry about Sarah Palin’s daughter being so young to have had a child and tell me to be gentle about that. But, you needn’t worry. I, too, feel that the world is too much upon her. It is her mother who makes me crazy(ier).
Mom, this is not getting easier. And I know you would say to me, “my poor little tsatskele, if I could have this sadness for you, I would.” And that’s the catch: so much more to mourn.