A cure for just about everything

I just returned from visiting my grand-dog. We spent a glorious 10 days together, playing, walking, chatting, going in, going out, rolling on the floor, and just hanging out. If you want to calm your jangled nerves, pet a dog. If you want to feel needed, get down on the rug, and let him curl up next to you with his head on your leg. If you think you’re not important, walk out of the room and watch him follow you. Nothing like it, I swear.

The thing is I don’t own a dog. I am just in love with my daughter’s little guy. He looks like a puppy, but in truth, he is anything but. Still, to watch him prance on his hind legs when he wants a treat or gallop across the lawn to be let in or set too fast a pace when I walk him, one would swear he was just a kid.

All of this begs the question: WHY don’t I have a dog? Why don't I go to the rescue shelter and save a little life? (It would have to be little because we have condo association rules about size). Or, if I want something fluffy and cuddly, why don’t I go online and look up fluffy, cuddly breeds or go to Pet Smart and just pick out a puppy?

I have a gazillion reasons, including bad weather, unexpected expenses, and arthritis; but they really don’t hold up. After all, I’ve made an utter fool of myself by creating a website for my favorite furry friend, put his picture on my computer screen, and considered getting Skype so I can see him up close and personal.

I feel a little silly writing this, as if I’m hoping someone will talk me into running out and actually finding the dog of my dreams. The problem is I have already found him, and he lives 900 miles away.

Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!

I’ve been an NPR junkie for years. I thought I was hooked forever on all that “in-depth news and intelligent talk” (my local station’s slogan). Then, one day I realized how sick and tired I was of the same repetitive news all day long and the incessant babbling on the topic de jour hour after hour.

How can they stand it? I wondered. Don’t Carl Kassel and Korva Coleman get tired of rearranging the words of the same headlines 50 times a day? Don’t Diane Rehm and Neal Conan and Robert Siegel get bored with  the endless interviewees and callers after a while? And, most of all, don’t they wonder if the only things worth talking about are bleak, depressing, and enough to make one think the world is going to hell in a hand basket?

Suddenly, I thought, if I have to listen to one more commentary on the things people have been commenting since five o’clock this morning, I will lose my mind. And if I never again hear the words, “critics say,” it will be fine with me. Why do these people feel duty bound to tell us what critics say on every subject? Why must there be an equal and opposite side to every single issue? Why can’t they just report on one side for once and talk about the other side some other time? Perhaps this is their stab at balanced reporting, but, if so, it isn’t working. Most of the time I would be just as happy not knowing what critics are saying. Let the critics have their own stories. Why do they have to hitch a ride on someone else’s?

Why do we have to hear polarized opinions in every debate and why, for that matter, does it have to be a debate at all? This is not an original question. Author and sociolinguist Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., posed it in her 1998 book The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue.

“The argument culture urges us to approach the world—and the people in it—in an adversarial frame of mind,” Tannen wrote. “Our determination to pursue truth by setting up a fight between two sides leads us to believe that every issue has two sides—no more, no less … But opposition does not lead to truth when an issue is not composed of two opposing sides but is a crystal of many sides. Often the truth is in the complex middle, not the   extremes.”

In other words, life is not a tidy, black-and-white photograph. It is many shades and textures of gray. I would love to buy several copies of The Argument Culture and send them to every newscaster and commentator on NPR with instructions to absorb its wisdom. Would it revolutionize talk radio if they actually put these principles in action? Or would they all simply be out of a job for not being fair and impartial?

If NPR did dramatically change its program strategy and begin to provide real in-depth news and intelligent talk; if every issue didn’t devolve into a war of words; and if the purpose was to promote full understanding of issues, rather than crowning the winner in each discussion, how much more knowledgeable and tolerant might we all become?

I can’t answer that question, but I know one thing for sure: I would turn my radio on and once again become a devoted NPR listener.

 

Minding Our Moments

I do a lot of reading about the Buddhist philosophy, the heart of which is the concept of mindfulness. It’s all about paying attention to what’s going on right this minute. This is hard from me since I tend to romanticize the past, which I remember as perfect (it wasn’t) or stressing out over the future, which seems scary (it probably won’t be).

This is not a new concept of course, though it is back in fashion with a vengeance. Way back in 1970, a guy named Richard Alpert, or Baba Ram Das, as he preferred to be called, wrote a book called Be Here Now. He was high on LSD when he wrote it, but the title and the idea had staying power.

I have a complete shelf filled with books on this and many other Buddhist teachings; but, as one of those teachings famously observes, “a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” Similarly, reading about living in the moment is not actually doing it; it’s just reading about it.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the modern day mindfulness guru, keeps pointing out that this moment is the only moment we have, and, if we don’t live it, it’s gone. Then one day we wake up and find that we are out of moments.

Believe it or not, I just got that. I was talking to my oldest friend, who was telling me a story about a father and daughter who had not spoken for 15 years. The daughter wasn’t ready to break the silence … yet. She may never be. "So sad,” my friend said. “She’ll never get those years back. They’re gone. Wasted. Life not lived.”

After all those years of reading, all those books, all those words — just like that, I understood. Fifteen years doesn’t sound like a big number; 473,040,000 does. That’s how many moments of her life that girl lost. How many have I not lived, ignored, wasted? How many do I have left? I don’t know. Nobody knows.

I guess that’s the point.

Tower of Babel

Sometimes, when I overhear people speaking in a language other than English, I am struck with the desire to understand what they are saying. It’s as if they are in another place, and I want to enter their world, even if only for a moment. Language separates us, it seems, and I find it frustrating.

I have two clients who immigrated to the U.S. many years ago. They speak English very well and, in fact, have both written books in English. Yet, behind the words are other cultures, other ways of looking at the world. I learned this lesson back in college a lifetime ago when I dated a student from South America. His worldview was Brazilian, and though we were using English words in our conversations, often we didn’t seem to be getting through to each other. He spoke from his culture, and I listened from mine.

I’ve been pondering this lately because I realize that the same miscommunication occurs between people who speak the same language — people who are related, who have grown up together, or who know each other well. In families, sometimes, it seems that like one person is speaking Greek and another Chinese. Consider two siblings who are engaged in a heated discussion. They report the argument to their mother. Ironically, both recall exactly the same words. “She said this; I said that.” But the interpretation of those words is wildly different. Whom does mom believe? Both children are reporting the conversation the way they heard it, but apparently, what they heard is poles apart.

It wasn’t always that way according to the Old Testament. Once upon a time, everyone spoke the same language. After the great flood (the one where Noah built the ark), supposedly, they all moved east and ended up in the city of Babel There, they built a huge tower that would reach all the way to heaven. They dedicated their tower not to God, but to the glory of man. As the story goes, God was not happy about that and expressed His displeasure by scattering the people all over the earth and making them speak different languages. That was the biblical origin of miscommunication and misunderstanding.

However it began, we’ve had thousands of years and about as many books to help us fix the problem. I’ve actually written one or two of those books. Yet, frankly, I don’t think my communication skills are any better than anyone else’s. My books and most of the others I’ve read are about communication skills: how to ask questions, summarize what you’ve heard, keep the conversation on track, etc. But I’m not at all sure that skills alone will do the trick. If I say “Why are you doing that?” and you hear, “Don’t do that!” we’re off the bad start.

We hear and interpret words based on our individual perception, which filters what comes in through our senses (what we hear and see and touch) and all of our life experience (what we recognize from our store of memory). No two people hear or see things the same way; no two people have the same life experience. Thus, no two people interpret a spoken message the same way.

So, what we still have in our sophisticated, educated, enlightened society is a modern version of the Tower of Babel. 

Family Matters

What better way is there to spend a gloomy weekend than by cleaning out a storage closet? I do this often, and one would think mine would be nearly empty by now. But, alas, the file boxes seem to be breeding and having new, little file boxes between purgings. As I moved things around, this time, I came upon a bright, red cardboard carton labeled “Family.” I knew it had file folders in it because my entire life is in file folders, but I didn’t remember what I had filed or why. So, I hauled it out and began to revisit the past.

There was a folder for each member of my immediate family: my mother, my father, my sister, and each of my daughters. We were all great letter writers before the advent of hastily tossed-off e-mails. There were letters to and from all of us — some hand written, others, typed. The letters conveyed apologies, confidences, congratulations, condolences, explanations, and the latest news from camp. Nothing went on in our family that did not make its way into a letter.

There were cards for every occasion and no occasion that eloquently said happy birthday, happy Mothers’ Day, I’m sorry, thank you, and I love you. There were report cards, college grades, and papers written for school. There were resumes and detailed applications for jobs. There was specially designed stationery with logos. (Who but my daughters would have their first resumes printed on designer letterhead?) There were photographs, though not many, because I filed them in different folders.

There were two-line notes my father used to send with money and many renderings of the “Good Ship Lollipop,” which I think was the only thing he ever drew. There were articles I wrote that I didn’t remember writing, my sister’s very funny “saga” about her daughter’s first year away at college, and the eulogies she and I wrote when our parents died.

We think we’ll never forget these things, but we are wrong. That’s why we keep scrapbooks and photo albums — so we will remember the moments of our lives. Maybe it’s my age that caused me look through that box to see what others might find someday. My younger daughter recalls when we were cleaning out my mother’s apartment and she came across a fancy gift ribbon. “Why would grandma have kept this? she asked. No one knew. Since then, she has been busy putting everything she owns in cute little containers with labels on them so there will be no such mysteries in her life.

Maybe that’s why I’m reexamining the contents of all my file boxes. I want people to know what mattered most to me and why.

Unconditional Love

In 1987 a new Stephen Sondheim play opened on Broadway, and I wanted to see it. This was not an idle whim; it was an obsession. It was also highly unlikely that it would ever happen. I couldn’t really afford to go or to stay in a hotel. I had used all my vacation time. My company wouldn’t pay for me to join a professional association let alone to send me to New York. Talk about dreaming the impossible dream. Yet, in October of that year, I watched the curtain rise on Into the Woods from what was surely the best seat in the house. What followed was magical.

Into the Woods is a morality play about fairy tale characters who all inhabit the same story. Their lives intersect as they seek the one thing they think will make them happy — a handsome prince, boundless treasure, adventure, freedom, lost beauty, and a baby. And when they get what they yearn for, they live happily ever after. And that’s the end of Act I.

How could a 50-year-old woman be obsessed with seeing a bunch of make-believe characters, including a frustrated witch, two womanizing princes, and a cowardly baker, sing and dance their hearts out for hours? And what does this have to do with my father? Well, that’s the real story.

Stephen Sondheim didn’t know my father, but he captured his essence when it came to make believe. My father was a gentle man with a beautiful, deep voice and a vivid imagination. He thought it quite natural to have characters show up in each other’s stories, where some of my friends insisted they didn’t belong. The original versions paled in comparison to his.

Into the Woods opened the same year my father died. The play was, in my mind, a kind of memorial. They say people we love hang around a while after they die just to be sure we are OK. He surely did, at least until I saw that play. In a theater full of people, I watched it alone, except for the very real presence of my father, who stayed just long enough to watch it with me.
My father never considered himself a successful man, and I was always puzzled by that.

Perhaps he felt he should have made more money, but I can't imagine what he could have provided that we didn't already have. He always had a generosity of spirit and of self that I have found in no other human being. His whole life gave testimony to the philosophy that the more love you give away, the more you have to give. And give it he did — consistently, constantly, endlessly.

Most of all, he gave it to my mother, for fifty years, in small ways and, occasionally, with extravagant gestures. No woman, I think, has ever been more loved by a man than she. He gave it to my sister and me and then to our daughters, three more additions to what we always called "Frank's harem.” But, he gave it, as well, to everyone he met on his journey through life — to his parents and brothers and sisters to those he worked with on the Long Island Railroad; to friends and to total strangers; and to every child he ever met who wanted to sit on his lap and hear his wonderful, slightly rearranged fairy tales.

I could list the things he did, his accomplishments, the specific acts of kindness I remember or others told me about. But, in truth, I would prefer to gather and share my own special memories of this man, who held my hand as we walked through the park and swept me into a magic world of make-believe with his wondrous stories and fanciful pipe dreams.

The things I remember may seem inconsequential — not the stuff of which a man's life can be defined. But, they are significant to me and help, somehow, to explain what made my father so special.

He could fix anything with his wonderful hands, no matter how mangled or hopeless the damage might seem. He could take himself and any child who wanted to accompany him into a world of fairies and princesses and wonder. He was a marvelous dancer, effortless and smooth, somehow trapping the music in his every movement and transmitting it to his partner. He was a helper, always rushing to do something for my mother or for us. He woke me in the morning with a hot cup of coffee; he was always first to do the unpleasant chores he wanted to spare us; but he is best remembered, I think, for removing the saucers from beneath our cups so he could beat all of us to cleaning off the dinner table.

He was a collector — of everything — especially memories. His dresser drawers and closets bulged with wonderful things he had saved for his children and grandchildren, and his mind was equally full of recalled treasures from the past. He loved history and baseball and things made of wood, but most of all, he loved the railroad. All his life, no matter how far from trains he may have strayed, Frank Levay was a railroad man.

I grew up on the railroad, riding back and forth between New York and Chicago. I slept in upper and lower births, in tiny compartments, and in spacious bedrooms. I ate meals in dining cars with white tablecloths and heavy silver coffee pots. I was watched over by tall, dignified porters who had promised to keep and eye on me during the trip. This was my father’s world and so it was mine.

I was an only child for the first eight-and-a-half years of my life and spent much of that time with him. My memories are like slides flashing on a screen: flying through the air on a swing until all I could see were thick green leaves dotted with patches of blue … watching beautiful ladies, whom my father called debutants, sweeping though fancy hotel lobbies … eating chicken chow mien in New York’s China Town … walking on top of a wall made of rocks and holding tight to his hand … and riding with the engineer in the cab of a brand new diesel engine.

We built a life together during my early years, and we rediscovered each other when I was a grown woman who reached out to my father and found that he was reaching out to me. He went blind, very suddenly, in his 70s, and never really adjusted to the loss of his sight. He was 79 when he died, leaving an unfillable void for the six of us who loved him.

All my life, he gave me one priceless gift — unconditional love. No strings, no living up to expectations, just being me was all I had to do to receive it. Few parents have the wisdom and strength to give that to their children. My father had both.

Doing Things the Hard Way

When one is directionally challenged, as I am, getting places can turn into my worst nightmare. Take today, for example. I wanted to get a printout of my lifetime earnings (Don’t ask why. It’s a long story). Being Internet savvy, I went to socialsecurity.org, filled out the requisite form, and hit submit. Flashing red messages told me I had made a mistake. My address was wrong. I rechecked it; it was right. In a standoff with a website, one never wins. After a frustrating 20 minutes of trying to convince unseen forces that I really do live at this address, I gave up and decided to drive to the nearest Social Security office.

But first, I had to find out where it was. I Googled Social Security in St. Louis and found two offices in the general vicinity of my neighborhood. So, off I went, trying to beat the “heavy rains” that were predicted for St. Louis,

Of course, I forgot my GPS, without which I’m helpless. I finally found the address, but it was not a Social Security office. It was a law firm with one attorney who specialized in Social Security matters. “Try calling Social Security,” the helpful receptionist suggested and offered me her phone. I called the 800 number and was informed that the options had changed and I should listen carefully to the new menu. I’ll spare you the never-ending “if you want this, press one; if you want that, press two” and all the questions that required verbal responses, which the frustrated voice recognition system didn’t recognize. I gave up and hung up.

“How about a phone book?” the receptionist asked, handing me the old, reliable white pages. (Key word here is old.) I looked up Social Security in the government section, found an address, and set off once again. Supposedly, the office was in a bank building not far from my house. For some reason, though, it wasn’t listed on the bank directory. The reason turned out to be that it had moved to another location — this time, far, far away from where I live. The rain had started as I dashed to my car.

Of course, I had no idea where the street was located (despite trying to decipher a street guide printed in two-point type), passed it by miles, and, in desperation, dashed through the rain to a storefront medical clinic to beg for help. With explicit directions, I finally found the street and the building and the office. My purse was searched, I was given a number, and I sat down to wait. When it was my turn, I went to the window and commented on my problems trying to find this particular office.

“Did you Google us?” the women behind the counter asked. I nodded. “Well, honey, that’s your problem,” she said. “The information on Google is wrong.” Wrong? Yes, wrong. I had spent hours trying to find the place, time waiting for my turn, and more time driving back through the rain in rush hour traffic. I was exhausted and had wasted the whole afternoon going somewhere I didn’t need to go, all because a website, Google, automated telephone technology, and the phone book had conspired to complicated my already complicate life.

Later, I mentioned my travails to my daughter, who said, “Mom, I think Social Security automatically sends that printout every year. Are you sure you didn’t get one in the mail?” I don’t even want to look!