Age and Youth

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

And Both at Once



This is my mom at 80. She'll be 84 in November. I'll be 44 tomorrow. I hope I look this good at 80. My dad of blessed memory designed and produced the necklace my mom's wearing. The words on the necklace are from "The Song of Songs," "Ani l'dodi v'dodi li/I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." I wish he were still alive.

We're with my partner Pat at Bookbinder's Restaurant Philadelphia in this photo; Pat took this picture. Apparently, based on the photos behind my mom, Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Carter ate there, too.

Independence

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

From My Home Curriculum

My Intercultural Communication course is done now and I'm still thinking about Cortes', one of the scholar's, concepts of the "home curriculum." One of the ways we learn about culture is at home, growing up.

In a number of ways, I came from a super-judgmental home and it bred some poison, e.g., perhaps a higher-than-average amount of envy...or a higher-than-average awareness of my envy; a sort of parochialism/provincialism and a protectionist attitude. It also invited being minutely/pettily critical of others.

For example, yesterday, I was taking a ride with a relative and at a stop-light, pointed out: "Look at the decal on that Honda!" (It appeared ahead of the driver's door and featured a side-vent with flames coming out of it.)

My relative responded, "You know what *that* is! Just look at his [big, beefy, white] arm! [The driver's crooked elbow was leaning on his car door.] Pure W.T."

W.T. stood for White Trash.

Was every family this prejudiced? This critical?

I might have wanted to answer yes prior to taking the course on Intercultural Communication; I met a classmate who came from a multiracial background and who said that it was precisely because of the identity-mix of the classmate's background that caused the classmate's home curriculum to focus on not judging others, since that family knew what it was like to be judged.

Parts of my family were less mature than my classmate's. Growing up, even as a kid, a number of times, I wanted to tell my offending relatives: "You should know better. After all, you know how many people have negative things to say about Jews. You shouldn't put others down." But I never did.

Years ago, I formed a theory based on my experience with a number of my family and when the whole Crown Heights thing blew up -- when a Chassid ran over someone Black and terrible tensions were sparked; my theory was that every minority was seeking to be not the lowest among the minorities, e.g., a number of Black people might think, I may be Black, but at least I'm Christian, and a number of Jews might think, I may be Jewish, but at least I'm White.

Asserting My Independence

I don't want to be like the part of my family that is prejudiced. It's like gossip. If I engage in it, it's just a matter of time before someone will be talking against me. And like gossip, it's like slipping into a warm bath, but a bath from which I emerge dirty.

The last thing I want this posting to sound is self-righteous. I'm full of intercultural faux pas, waiting to happen, but it's just that I don't want to relish putting others down intentionally. The members of my family who were most virulently prejudicial and critical were the least successful people in their work and friendships.

If I'm to assert my independence from the legacy of prejudice, first, I need to show some compassion, maybe, to the family that are stuck in the cycle, i.e., they're being proactively prejudicial in their minds; they figure, everyone's an anti-Semite, and so if I'm disdainful first, I'm invulnerable. That *must* be it.

Or they're simply victims of human nature, which can be pretty clannish, i.e., we're the best and everyone else is inferior. Again, it's a defense against vulnerability.

What's the worst that could happen if we were vulnerable? The Holocaust.

Well, the worst has already happened, to Jews and others, unfortunately...and I've been thinking that if the Bernie Madoff scandal hasn't kicked off murmurings of the virtues of Jewish genocide, then the world really has advanced since the '30s and '40s.

That reminds me of more junk from which I need to gain independence: having been taught to avoid producing a "shande fur de goyim," (roughly: a disgrace in front of the gentiles), which is really just a particular shade of self-hatred. To prove that I don't want to come across as overly-self-righteous, as well as to tell on myself, so that I stop doing it, I'll share the most recent example of my own prejudice...against my own people(!):

Last weekend in San Francisco, Pat and I spent time with one of our relatives; growing up, our relative learned the same Yiddish phrases as I learned -- we're six months apart in age. Earlier in the weekend, over dinner, we discussed the concept of a "shande fur de goyim," but just academically.

On Sunday morning, on our way to the Pride Parade, on Market Street, we passed a rail-thin man, wearing a white tank-top, satin shorts, red knee-socks, black dress-shoes, a big Star of David around his neck, a super-hero cape, eye-glasses from the '80s and perhaps a silly hat to top it off, though I may be embellishing about the hat.

I turned to my relative and said, "A shande fur de goyim!"

Family, Mortality, Life...

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

And Other Light Topics for a California Morning

"What's with your family?" asked my cousin -- let's call him Mark -- at dinner last night at a Turkish restaurant in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco.

"My uncle died and we're here on Sunday instead of at the funeral; my dad was estranged from his brother, so we'll just go to the shivah to see his kids when we get back, but we wanted to be here and see you and not cancel this trip," I had just finished saying.

And just prior to that, we had been talking about how my mother and her sister had been estranged until the very end of their lives, too. My mother and my aunt both spent time separately with his mother of blessed memory, but never together.

"Ruthie [my aunt's name] was great --" Mark began.

I really didn't want to hear this; I was jealous that Mark knew my aunt and I didn't. "Was she funny?" I asked competitively, since my mom can be hilarious.

"She was...eccentric --"

Good. Not funny, though.

"I remember being at a wedding of cousins in Ohio [I guess we weren't invited to whatever the wedding] and Mike [her husband] and she were doing yoga on the balcony of their hotel-room. Everyone thought that was just...."

So I'm here the next morning, overlooking Union Square from our 18th-floor hotel-room and can't start the day in earnest before trying to figure out how I'm feeling:

Mark's and my childhood is so gone. Mark is half a year younger than I and his mother was the social-glue that kept our families together, and she's been gone from cancer for several years now.

My mom still calls Mark now and then, and Mark loves her, but when we were kids through college, our families would get together for holidays at their home in northern-New Jersey and spend full days together. Mark and I always were the tall ones among our siblings, and the gay or lesbian ones...though that was not revealed till we were 21; our height was always visible, and probably our sexual orientation, too, but....

"Your mother called my mother when you came out, for advice," Mark mentioned last night, and I'm trying to picture the two of them, puzzling it out. Pat recalled last night that when Mark's mom met Pat, she said simply, "Welcome to the family."

Pat and I loved her. His mom was a sexy version of my mother -- fun and funny and very kind. And he's like her.

Mark lost his leg, from the knee through his foot, to cancer a couple of years ago. And he's HIV+. And still tall and charming and fun and funny. He walks with a cane, but otherwise, he's the same tall cousin I've always enjoyed walking down the street with. I feel especially formidable when we're together.

When will he die? When will my mother die? When will Pat die? When will I die? My uncle's death accentuates my mother's longevity and adds a desperate edge to it for me, meaning, makes me feel more anxious about how much longer we've got together. Any of us, and especially my mom and me....

If the view out my window, of sunny, home-filled mountains in the distance, and Louis Vuitton windows decked out in Pride colors in the foreground isn't God's reminder to live in the present, I don't know what is.

Time for breakfast and more pride.