Spam!

Spam, spam, spam used to be an all-purpose food or a great skit and song by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Now, it’s also a boatload of crap that filters into an email folder.

Occasionally some worthy, important emails are sent to our spam folders, but mostly it is just plain junk. I don’t ever open the real spam, for fear of unleashing an incurable virus that will shut down the entire company’s computer network. But just by reading the subjects and senders I get a healthy dose of humor.

Sex is a big spam topic. I’ve received an endless supply of spam emails about erectile dysfunction, and even though I am in my mid-50s, I am not sure I can ever go the Viagra route. Not that I am judging anyone else. One spam advertised, “Enlarge with sample…larger is stronger is better.” Shouldn’t one see a real doctor  for problems south of the proverbial border? But just in case, there is a Canadian pharmacy that offers a bulk discount on Cialis. Let’s hear it for socialized medicine.

Today spam emails popped up from Female Seduction Services about a video that would make women want me and another about techniques to “bed chicks”. Not to sound too much like Andy Rooney, but I am not sure I would be attracted to those kinds of women. OK, correction: I would definitely not be attracted to those women. And not to sound too confident, but I think the women I want to want me already do. Cue Cheap Trick—I Want You To Want Me.

Companies are not just selling sex. There are Disney vacations, low-cost loans, luxury jewelry, as in replica Rolex watches (I don’t even wear a cheap watch), and pain medication (that probably doubles as a penile enhancer).

And my spam folder, which I don't empty regularly, only has twenty-four emails as of right now. It usually grows (no pun intended) to a couple hundred or more before I get around to deleting everything. I am sure I inadvertently erase an email from someone I know or a company I’ve used, but that’s just how it goes in this Internet age. I can only keep track of so many emails, for larger is stronger is better is not always true unless…

Never mind.

My Mother's Daze

I told a friend recently that my mother was neurotic and emotionally needy. A true statement, but I realized those three words don’t begin to capture the woman who birthed me more than fifty-four years ago three days shy of her 22^nd birthday. Especially now that she is confined to a skilled nursing facility in Connecticut, beset with Lewy Body Disease—a brutal combination of Parkinson’s and dementia—and struggles to feed herself or remember the names of her five grandchildren or where I work, a place she has visited many times. So it is easy to see her in one or two dimensions, as a product of her neurosis and needs and disease, but that is only a sliver of the woman.

Beverly Bernstein loved to dance. My father did not. So she bopped and boogied at home with her oldest son (me) to American Bandstand while she ironed clothes. She always danced with one of her first cousins at family functions while my father sat on the sidelines. She loved music, mainly rock and roll. She took me to my first concert when I was four, a rock and roll show hosted by Dick Clark. We had front row seats at Hartford’s Bushnell Auditorium. Dick Clark singled me out during the show, thrust a microphone in my face, and asked me about myself. When he learned I had a younger brother, he asked if we fought and could I scream for him? I curled into the seat to hide.

My mom took us regularly to the library, the town pool, weekend outings to the amusement park. She played word and number games with me before bed. She was one who always got up in the middle of the night if I was sick. She signed my brother and me up for extracurricular classes. I took tap and music at the University of Hartford and recreation classes across Bloomfield in the summers.

OK, her neurotic side was frustrating at times. We lived on a dead-end road—four houses—that backed up to the woods. One trail, maybe a couple of hundred yards at most, led to Blue Hills Avenue, a major thoroughfare through town. I was not allowed to cross Blue Hills Avenue alone until I was 12. I went to Treasure City to buy 45s. Or I biked to Rockwell Pharmacy for comic books and candy.

She got me my first job when I was 16. She walked into the Cow’s Barn (or Farm?) and asked if they were hiring. The next day I was hired as a cashier and stocker. I worked there that summer, after school during my junior year of high school, and all the way up until June 1976, right before I went on a six-week trip to Israel with other teenagers from Hartford and Baltimore.

When it came time to apply for colleges and money was an issue for our family, my mother spent several hours a day, preparing the financial aid forms for the various colleges I was eyeing. Her hard work earned me enough to supplement the scholarships I’d also won.

I had emergency surgery on a perforated ulcer in 1988, less than a year after I’d moved to San Francisco for graduate school and a change of pace in life. She came out and stayed at my home in the city and visited me every day with the daily paper. I couldn’t eat food, but she befriended my twenty-something hospital roommate, who was donating a kidney to his brother, and they ate frozen yogurt every evening and bragged about the other great meals they were enjoying.

My mother has always tried to be physically fit. She started jogging in the 1980s, and my brother and I were there when she finished her first three-mile race. Later, she became an avid walker. Up until two years ago, she was walking 5-7 miles a day at least four times a week.

Now she can barely move without a walker and rarely gets out of bed. Her hair has grayed considerably and she looks older than her seventy-six years. We used to have long phone conversations, ones I feared might never end, but now it is hard for her to talk more than a few minutes.

My brother and I cannot believe how far she has deteriorated in such a short period of time. Some of her nurses don’t think she will ever leave the skilled nursing facility. Her husband, my step-father, Fred, is dutiful and kind and would walk across the world’s oceans for her. They used to go dancing, to the movies, out to dinner, visit family. Now he is reduced to being a bachelor of sorts, though he has two sons in the area.

My mother always made us feel loved as we were growing up. There may have been some impossible or unreasonable emotional expectations from her, but the love was (and is) real. She is needy, and now she needs us more than ever.

Dear God

Dear God-

It’s more or less been a while. I am sorry I haven’t been a better communicator, which I know is surprising since so many of my co-workers (and friends) often wish I would shut up. I know I used to communicate with you more regularly. I attended synagogue regularly as a kid and prayed and led services for many years. And we used to talk every night before I fell asleep when I was in grade school. I think our relationship worked pretty well back then. I prayed for Marcy G. to become my girlfriend for three years and you somehow found the time to make a miracle of epic proportions (for me) when she agreed while she and I were in the fifth grade. OK, the relationship only lasted five days, but they were mostly magical days.

Anyway, I am writing to you now about something more serious than my love life. It’s about cancer. I don’t feel as if I’ve asked you for much lately—I probably didn’t pray enough when Verna was sick—but I do need your help.

Cancer.

We need to eradicate it right now. Today. And you’re the one to do it. I know it’s too late for Verna and Gayla and Deb and millions and millions of others whose lives were cut short or cruelly terminated by this wretched disease. I need you to end the suffering of those afflicted with cancer and their families and friends so anxious about what cancer means.

What do you think? Can you do it?

I had tea last night with a man whose wife died this past Valentine’s Day (really?!?). She had non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but died of septicemia while undergoing treatments for a recurrence of the disease. He has two kids, 11 and 5, and they, like Miguel and Maya, have to live a long time (God willing) without their mommy. He understandably still can’t get over losing his best friend, but he knows he can’t slow down because he has two daughters to parent. What’s up with that?

Over the past few months, I have encountered more and more people either with cancer, a relative with cancer, a friend with cancer, or someone who knows someone who knows someone who has cancer. Last summer, while the kids and I were vacationing back East, my father’s first cousin told me about a cousin of hers on her mother’s side who is 32 or 33, has a toddler (under three), and an adoring husband, and she has stage IV cancer. What’s up with that?

About three weeks ago I learned that one of the dads whose two kids go to Maya’s school has some kind of salivary or throat cancer. It’s rare and treatable, but the radiation alone is wreaking havoc with his life. Just walking a few hundred yards outside with his wife and dog taxes him for an entire day or more.

And there is my first cousin, Arlene, a sweet, sweet woman who has raised two kids basically by herself after her husband died during lung transplant surgery more than 15 years ago. She is undergoing treatments in Boston for a very rare nasal cancer. The prognosis is very good, but she has suffered enough. And so have her two boys, who are now young men.

So I don’t get it. I am not saying you owe me anything, and there are plenty of crises on this planet that deserve your attention. But, if you have any extra time for a little Earthly intervention, I would like you to consider eliminating cancer or, at the very least, helping us find a cure by the end of the month.

I don’t have much to offer, but I feel it is major in a spiritual development kind of way that I went from being a 34-year agnostic to a believer again. The world and the people in my immediate circles of life could certainly use a pick me up, a little joy and happiness, given what has been happening here and abroad. So why shouldn’t I be selfish and lobby you to end (or help us end) cancer?

Now.

Forever.

Thank you very much.

Humbly,

Steve (you probably already know my Hebrew name means joy or happiness)

 

We Are Boston

I ran my first Boston Marathon in 1981. Before the race began at noon, I sat huddled in the doorway of an elementary school in Hopkinton, the hamlet 26.2 miles away from Boston that has hosted the start of the race for more than 100 years, with a teacher who celebrated Easter the night before by gorging himself on ham and swilling wine and beer.

He basically said what I was thinking, “That meal was not your typical pre-race carbo-loading.”

He also said, on this overcast day in the lows 50s, that I should expect all kinds of weather during the race, which I’d hoped to complete in under four hours. I was 22. And he’d been right: during the three hours and fifty minutes I was pounding the pavement to the finish line outside the Prudential Building, there was sun, rain, wind, and hail.

When I turned down Hereford Street near the finish and heard the roar of the crowd, some of it undoubtedly for me, an unofficial entrant, my body shook and shivered and I started to cry. I was elated that after years of quitting things, I had scaled a massive wall and finished something that had always seemed unimaginable to me ever since I’d been a kid in Hartford, CT, and followed the marathon every year and thought of all its runners as gods.

The marathon has been on my mind a lot since I heard the horrifying news yesterday and watched the surreal news reports on NBC and CNN. My first cousin is in Boston for cancer treatments, and she and her son were outside Fenway Park, at Kenmore Square, watching the runners pass by when my cousin’s son suggested they get closer to the finish, which would’ve put them right near the bombings. My cousin stayed put.

My sister-in-law’s niece, who is about to finish graduate school at Boston University, was a block from the bombings with a group of friends. She heard the explosions, and admitted to me last night that she is still in a state of shock.

My neighbor’s father, who is fifty and had qualified for Boston by running a sub-three-and-a-half hour marathon, was running Boston for the first time. I texted my neighbor moments after I learned of the tragedy, and he responded that his father was fine and he’d finished in 3:24. His father had been hoping to break three hours.

There is a family tonight who went from joyously celebrating the father’s completion of the grueling race to mourning the death of an innocent 8-year old boy.

I finished three other marathons in the 1980s, so I have been to that finish line, which has moved a few times over the years. I have hugged my parents there, and clapped for strangers, and waited 15 minutes for my brother to finish just after me when we ran together in 1987. One year I even saw Erma Bombeck, the late award-winning columnist, walking towards a family member who’d run the race.

The Boston Marathon of my youth was nearly full page coverage in the Hartford Courant sports page, and intense awe just oozing out of me as I contemplated what these seemingly extraordinary men and women had done. I wanted to be one of them, but I never thought it possible. Until 1981. Until a year of piling on 50, 60, 70-mile weeks, double runs on Thursdays, and 16-mile long runs every Saturday. Until I gulped protein shakes and stretched after each run on my dorm room floor on New York City’s Upper West Side. Until I rode the Greyhound Bus back to Columbia University by myself, my legs achy and sore, but my heart overflowing with pride for an accomplishment I never knew was possible. And it finally hit me that I had finished the Granddaddy of Marathons.

And now, in the aftermath of death and destruction and severed limbs and blood and children howling in agony, the marathon and Boston, and maybe all of us, will never be the same. I am scared now because it seems that evil lurks anywhere and everywhere. I don’t want to let Maya or Miguel out of my sight. And I also know my fears will subside, and I know evil will not ultimately triumph over good. But I am still afraid.

Fatherhood

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At The Crossroads: The Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights, and the Fight for Black Dignity

The topic of this 11th grade American history lesson is the role the Harlem Renaissance played in the African-American fight for self-respect, civil rights, and artistic expression, and how certain artists used their media to combat segregation, racism, and overt racist violence.

Learners will demonstrate an understanding of the role the Harlem Renaissance played in Black activism against segregation and more overt forms of racism and violence directed at African-Americans.

By answering one essential question and several secondary questions through an exploration of sites dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance, students will not only learn about the music, art, and literature that exploded in the 1920s, but also connect the Harlem Renaissance to the larger fight for equality and as a precursor in many ways to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.

Students will then compose answers either in essay form or develop a presentation with answers delivered by one historical Harlem Renaissance character.

Subject Matter Content Standard: 11.5 Students analyze the major political, social, economic, technological, and cultural developments of the 1920s.

[2] Analyze the international and domestic events, interests, and philosophies that prompted attacks on civil liberties, including the Palmer Raids, Marcus Garvey’s “back-to-Africa” movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and immigration quotas and the responses of organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Anti-Defamation League to those attacks.

[5] Describe the Harlem Renaissance and new trends in literature, music, and art, with special attention to the work of writers (e.g., Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes).

The Harlem Renaissance--a brief overview and resource repository. 

Biography.com--featured a February documentary on the Harlem Renaissance. 

The Harlem Renaissance--a multimedia exploration from John Carroll. University.

PBS Newshour--special documentary of the Harlem Renaissance.

Essential Question:   How did African-Americans in the early part of the 20^th century use music, art, and literature to deal with and resist the overt and covert segregation and racist violence they encountered in the South and North?

Subsidiary Questions: 

2. Who were some of the main players on the Harlem Renaissance scene?

3. What role did music play in the Harlem Renaissance?

4. How did artists use poetry as a vehicle for protest and social change?

5. How did Harlem Renaissance artists use their media to dispel the notion that Black people were unable to be creative voices?

6. What two major world events caused the power of the Harlem Renaissance to wane?

7. Which American music styles owe their origins literally to African-American communities?

8. How did the Harlem Renaissance affect the politics of the decades leading up to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s?

PBS Newshour--a special documentary of the Harlem Renaissance

WTF?!?

Twenty minutes before the Oakland A’s and the Detroit Tigers tangled in last night’s American League Division Series finale, a bunch of yahoos seated behind us started hurling a torrent of verbal abuse at Justin Verlander, the Tigers’ starter, as he strolled to the bullpen to warm up.


“Pussy, pussy, pussy,” they screamed, fingers pointed as if he were a molester or other serious criminal.

I looked over at my co-worker and friend, Erik, who was seated next to another friend of his, Ed, who’d been a groomsman at Erik’s wedding. “I paid good money for these seats,” which were four rows from the field opposite first base. “OK, they were free,” I added, “but I am not going to listen to these guys talking crap all night.”

Erik had gotten four comp seats from another friend, a season ticket holder, but I told him if these guys yelled “Pussy” one more time, I was getting in their faces. “They’re offensive,” I muttered.

Another guy, three rows behind me to my left, stood in the aisle and shouted, thrusting his finger back and forth, back and forth, “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” as Verlander approached the bullpen mound.

And all night long, guys in sections near us felt compelled to yell obscenities and insults at any Tiger player within sight. Miguel Cabrera, the man who just won the Triple Crown for the first time since 1967? The boos and taunts rained down on him from the moment he stepped into the batter’s box, as they did for Prince Fielder, the Tigers’ five-foot eleven, 300 lb. power hitter.

“Twinkie, twinkie, run after your twinkies,” they yelled at the portly Fielder, or they said, “Cecil, Cecil, Cecil,” the first name of his estranged father, a former major leaguer.

Why do some people, often emboldened by alcohol, feel the compulsion and right to be so idiotic? First, do the players even hear them amid the din of 48,000 fans? But, even if they do, why do some fans seem to take an almost cruel joy in heckling?

Several years ago, after Malcolm Kerr, a leading academic on the Middle East, was killed by terrorists in 1984 while teaching in Lebanon, a group of Arizona State students chanted at his son , Steve Kerr, an Arizona shooting guard, in 1988, “PLO, PLO . . . “and “Your father's history,” and “Why don't you join the Marines and go back to Beirut?”

Kerr said at the time, “When I heard it, I just dropped the ball and started shaking. I sat down for a minute. I'll admit they got to me. I had tears in my eyes. For one thing, it brought back memories of my dad. But, for another thing, it was just sad that people would do something like that.”

Ushers and other stadium officials are instructed to remove anyone from major league ballparks and stadiums if they use inappropriate language. I am not a Puritan, but I do draw the line at offensive comments, obscenities, and other foul remarks. I am there to enjoy the game, socialize with friends, converse with strangers, and there is no excuse for real fans to act so stupidly, drunk or not.

Now that I am about to climb off my soapbox, I did have one way to sort of shield myself from the abuse going on around me. I started reading the book I’d brought. You can only imagine the comments I got.