Valentines Day

It was 1999.  I was working in IT at Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, in Bldg 105, which had been recently renovated on the inside.  We were each in cubicles with partitions about 5-1/2 feet high.  You could easily speak to the person next door over the partition (and also hear most of their phone conversations if you really wanted to.)  To one side of me was Mark; to the other side Cinde.  Each was married and 40-something.

Mid-morning, I heard Mark groan.  I asked what was wrong.  He said he just remembered it was Valentines Day, and he had not gotten his wife a gift.  And he did not have any good ideas.  

I said he better run out and get something.  Mark asked me if I had any suggestions.

Cinde's voice rang out loud and clear: "Jewelry is always good"!

Meditation and Growing Old and Gratitude

I started meditating about four years ago.  My friend Blanche Moss told me about a free 1/2-hour weekly class at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.  It's put on by the Mindful Awareness Research Center, part of the med school at UCLA.  Diana Winston leads most of the classes, but there are others as well.  Besides the class, I meditate at home, about three or four days a week, 1/2 hour at a time.

It's difficult to put into words the impact that this practice has had on me, difficult to describe.  But I believe it is real.  Of course, some or all of these changes might have taken place over these years without the meditation, but I doubt that.

When I was working, it would have been impossible for me to try to set aside a half-hour on any day to meditate.  I was just too busy with what I thought were the things in my life that I either had to do, or wanted to do.  First was work, at least eight hours per day, plus the commute.  Then all the other stuff of life as I lived it.  So, I feel grateful that I have lived into my retirement (almost eight years now) and found this practice, and been able to stay with it as much as I have.

In addition to just paying attention to the present moment (easier said than done), the leaders at the Hammer often emphasize other "qualities of the heart"; one is gratitude.  This has been very helpful for me.   I have witnessed other people expressing gratitude in their life and have felt envy of them, because I rarely felt it.

Now I frequently ask for it in my meditations and I sense it more than ever before (not a very high bar, in my case).  Gratitude for my life, my body, living as long as I have, my senses, my mind, Nadine, our home, our cat Ketsl (now gone), our children and grandchildren, our brothers and their families, cousins, friends (several gone now), my teachers, and the wonder and beauty of the world that we (temporarily) get to inhabit.  Also, gratitude for the many advantages I have been given in life, and the way that turns in my life, that seemed bad at the time, have worked out for the best.  And I feel gratitude that I have found gratitude.

As I think of this, I feel sorrow for friends whose lives have been cut short much too early in their lives.  Especially Peter Hawes, a Dartmouth classmate who I did not know well until later in Pasadena, and Tom Smith, a neighbor and friend in Newport Beach.  I imagine that they felt much joy in their lives, but I wish it could have lasted longer for them.  But I am grateful for having known them.

Pearl Harbor Day

I was almost six years old, my father had just turned 32.  It was mid-afternoon on an early December day, 1941, cool but no snow yet.  An annual fall practice in those days, I was helping my father to rake up the last of the leaves that had fallen for two months into our yard from our neighbor's huge maple trees.  We raked the leaves, all dead and brown now, towards the street curb, then over the curb and into the street, where they lay in a huge pile.  Then he set them on fire, part of the fall ritual; everyone did it, there were a lot of trees on our block in Oakmont (now renamed Havertown), a Philadelphia suburb.

The smell of those burning dead leaves is something I will never forget, though I have not sensed it for at least fifty years now.  An earthy smell.  (Coincidently, somewhat like the air in LA today with the brush fires northwest of us.)

A neighbor ran out of his house and shouted something about "being attacked by the Japanese".   I am sure we must have gone into the house and turned on the radio (no TV yet) to get the news.  It could have been this broadcast by one Robert Eisenbach on NBC.  (His daughter, Barbara Heitz, a distant relative of Nadine, lives in Los Angeles.)

http://www.otr.com/ra/PH/first_bulletin_red.mp3

The next day, FDR went to a rousing ovation by the Congress and declared war on the Empire of Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK8gYGg0dkE

My father's father, Felix Colla, died on New Years Day, 1942.  A few months later, my father finally got one doctor to pass him on a physical so he could enlist as a Navy officer.  (Apparently he had flat feet, and several doctors had said "no".)  He was gone most of the time for the next 3+ years.

Book Review: "Fire and Ashes"

Micheal Ignatieff wrote "Fire and Ashes, Success and Failure in Politics".  It's a short book, 183 smallish pages.

Ignatieff's great-grandfather was an ambassador and later Minister of Interior in Czarist Russian.  His grandfather rose to be the Minister of Education under the last Czar, Nicholas II.  They left Russia at the time of the 1917 revolution, and ended up in Canada.  His father worked for the Canadian government office in London during WWII, and after the war, in the Foreign Service.  One can not help but think that this family history of public service and political background had a great influence on Ignatieff.  He says that it was in his blood.  As a young man, he was an admirer of both Jack Kennedy and Pierre Trudeau.  He went to graduate school at Harvard, was a fellow there, and later joined the faculty in political science.  But he never became a  American citizen.

In 2004, he was asked by some members of the Liberal Party in Canada to return home and run for a seat in the Parliament, as a prelude to becoming that party's leader.  He decided to do so.  Much like Obama, his political star rose as a result of an electrifying speech at a Liberal Party convention.  In 2008, he became Liberal party leader.

But his ex-pat background came to be a significant political liability later; he was pounded for it by the Conservatives.  And in 2011, after losing his seat in Parliament in a Conservative landslide, he left Canadian politics for good.  He was only the third leader of the Liberal Party in its entire history to not serve as Prime Minister of Canada.  He is now on the faculty at both Harvard and the University of Toronto.

I found this book full of insights and meditations on what it takes to succeed in politics, and what can (and did) go wrong.  The Canadian political system is different in many ways from the US system, but there are also many similarities.  Ignatieff makes interesting observations about both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  He also offers a look into what happens internally to a person who steps into the political arena, how friends become adversaries, and how compromises are made...or not made.  I recommend this book as an interesting and personal look inside the life of one contemporary thoughtful politician in a vibrant democracy, the one geographically closest to us Americans.

"Dying: a Memoir", by Cory Taylor

I can't say I "loved" this book: "Dying: a Memoir", by Cory Taylor.  It's hard to say that of a book about dying, one with much sadness and sad memories and anger.  But I found it personal, interesting and compelling.  It's a short book of 141 small pages...not a long read.  The author is dying from a ten-year battle with incurable melanoma; her book was first published in Australia in 2016, a couple of months before she died.  It is also filled with gratitude and acceptance. She surveys her life, especially the impact on it from her mother and her father.  She debates suicide, pros and cons, with herself, and makes  preparations for it.  Not long before her death, she gives her answers (on a radio program) to questions such as am I scared? do I have a bucket list? and what will I miss the most?  She describes her life-long passion for writing, starting with the magic of penmanship practice in elementary school.  And some individuals who tried to help her through the last phases of her life.  I am glad to have encountered Cory Taylor, and her personal reflections as her life was coming to its close.

Another Bad Word

After I related my "Three Bad Words" story to my son, Elliott, he recalled this story.  I had no memory of it (a not uncommon event with me), but I trust his version, which follows:

About age six, Elliott was out on the street playing with some friends  his age.  There were some older boys there, and they were taunting another boy, yelling "Georgie, Georgie, King of the Boners! Georgie, Georgie, King of the Boners!"

Elliott came into the house, and asked me what a "boner" was.

Of course, my first response was a demanding: "Who told you that word?"

He said he heard it on the street from some older boys he did not know.

Then, I told him a "boner" was a mental error.  For instance, in baseball, a dumb play might be called a "bonehead play".

However, it soon became clear (not sure how) that this what not the meaning that the older boys on the street were using.

So, I told Elliott that sometimes for a male adult, they can get excited, and then their penis gets very large and very hard, and that is a "boner".

Elliott, age six, said he found this explanation to be totally incomprehensible, as in "I have no idea what my father is talking about?"

Three Bad Words

This is a true story, as true as the memory of this 81-year-old can be.

-----------------------------------------------

In early September, Nadine and I visited Nadine's son Adam and his family. They have recently relocated to Richmond, British Columbia (a suburb of Vancouver).  Adam and Judith have two children, Elior, a seven-year-old boy,  and Na'amah, a three-year-old girl. The kids refer to us as Bubbie and Zayde.

One day Elior and I were walking home alone from a nearby park. We were about a block from Elior's house when the following conversation began:

Elior: Zayde, I know three bad words.
Me: Oh, really! What are they?
Elior: the N-word, the B-word, and the F-word.

Then he continued:

Elior: Zayde, what does the N-word mean?
Me: The N-word is a very bad and very hurtful word. You should never use it. I'm not going to tell you what it means. I think you should discuss it with your father and mother. Would you do that?

Elior shook his head, signifying that he was not willing to do that.
I thought about it some more. I know what the F-word is, and I know what the N-word is, but what's the B-word, I wondered?  I better check.

Me: Elior, is the B-word "bitch"?
Elior:  Yes. What does it mean?
Me: A bitch is a female dog.

We didn't go any further exploring why the B-word is a bad word.
A few moments later.....

Elior: Zayde, tell me some more bad words.
Me: Elior, I am not going to tell you anymore bad words.
Elior:  Then, Zayde, how will I learn more bad words?
Me:  Elior, you'll learn them from your friends.
Elior:  Zayde, how will they learn them?
Me: They'll learn them from their older brothers and sisters.

By this time, we had arrived at Elior's house.  We never got around to the F-word.

-----------------------------------------------

Later, I wondered: if a "bitch" is a female dog, what is word for male dog?  I Googled it and found the word for male dog is just "dog".  After the dog and the bitch have offspring, he is a "sire" and she is a "dam". So, technically, no canine can be a son-of-a-bitch...he is a son-of-a-dam.