Richard Jeffrey Newman

For my mother and every other mother out there. Enjoy!

The video speaks for itself:

On Tues­day of last week, I helped move my mother to her new house in New Jer­sey. This means that I am the last mem­ber of my fam­ily left in New York, and if you had told me fif­teen years ago that I was going to set­tle in an apart­ment in the build­ing next to where my grand­par­ents lived, where my mother and her brother grew up, across the street from where they both went to junior high school, I would have laughed out loud. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with the neigh­bor­hood, or my apart­ment. It’s huge – four bed­rooms, three baths; high ceil­ings, a fire place, pre-war hard­wood floors. If we were look­ing to buy a place today, the price these apart­ments are going for would almost cer­tainly put them out of our range. It’s just strange to live in this co-op, and walk these streets, where there are still peo­ple who remem­ber me when I was a lit­tle boy and we would visit my grand­par­ents every Sun­day, which we did reli­giously from as far back as I can remem­ber until I went away to col­lege; and it’s strange that I say hello to peo­ple even now who knew me when I was a teenager and wanted to be a rabbi. I’m think­ing espe­cially of the chazan (can­tor) of the local syn­a­gogue who, when he found out who my grand­mother was, said sotto voice, “Anne Berner’s grand­son lives just a few blocks away, and he doesn’t come to shul? What an embar­rass­ment!” And I am think­ing as well of the man whose father was the sandek at my bris, who gave me my first job as a bus­boy in his cater­ing hall, and whose son once tried to intro­duce me to hal­lu­cino­genic drugs. That son’s brother still lives here, though I see his wife walk­ing around the neigh­bor­hood these days more often than I see him.

Other mem­o­ries that are crowd­ing in on me this morn­ing: I had sex for the first time when I was six­teen with a girl who lived on the first floor of the build­ing where I am liv­ing now, and, that same year, I set foot for the first time inside a gay bar. I remem­ber play­ing foot­ball in the back­yard with a lit­tle girl who lived in the build­ing across from my grandmother’s, and, while I don’t remem­ber it per se, I have pic­tures of the photo shoot that a local cloth­ing store tried to do with me when I was maybe three or four (or a lit­tle older, I am not sure) to pro­mote the line of children’s jeans that Lee’s had just come out with. (If I’d been able to stand still long enough for the pho­tog­ra­pher to get a cou­ple of shots with the Lee’s label clearly vis­i­ble, who knows where I’d be right now?) This is one of the pic­tures. I have some more that I will per­haps even­tu­ally get around to posting:

I remem­ber also my sort of friend­ship with Rob­bie, from whose par­ents we bought this place, and I remem­ber, of all things, being in Mrs. Dollinger’s third grade class in the local pub­lic school and get­ting scolded in front of all my class­mates because my mother dared to teach me to write in cur­sive before we started learn­ing it in class. For some rea­son, though – per­haps because we are hav­ing some major ren­o­va­tions done in our house, and the one room that needs ren­o­vat­ing, that we haven’t really touched, is the one I am sit­ting in as I type this – I am think­ing most about my great-grandmother. When these apart­ments were built, back in the 1920s, this room would have been the maid’s room. At that time, you had to be white Anglo-Saxon Protes­tant to live in this neigh­bor­hood, and these were the lux­ury apart­ments, pre­cisely the kind where peo­ple who employed “help” would choose to live. (It is one of the very sweet ironies of his­tory, I sup­pose, that this neigh­bor­hood is now among the most diverse in the coun­try, and that – I am sure the orig­i­nal builders are turn­ing in their graves – we have the sec­ond largest LGBTQ pop­u­la­tion in New York City, and that we have our own annual gay pride parade.) When I was a lit­tle boy vis­it­ing my grand­par­ents, whose apart­ment had the same num­ber of rooms as ours, though in a dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tion, this room, which is the one bed­room in the same place in both apart­ments, was my great-grandmother’s bedroom.

Her name was Sophie, and she was, from every­thing I have heard about her, quite a char­ac­ter. She was ninety-eight-years old when she died and that hap­pened when I was six. So she was already quite old by the time I met her. My two most vivid mem­o­ries of her are the soup she used to make, which I liked a lot, and a game we played, where she would give me a quar­ter – which was not a small sum for a kid back then – and I would try to find a way to talk her into giv­ing me four of them. Appar­ently, though, she had lived quite a life. She was mar­ried three times – my grand­mother was the  youngest of her chil­dren, the first one born in the United States – and it’s the third mar­riage that I will tell you about in a minute; but my great-grandmother Sophie also ran a restau­rant, marched for women’s suf­frage, had an abor­tion, if I under­stand it cor­rectly, because she did not want to have a child with her sec­ond hus­band and then promptly divorced him – she was, in other words, a strong, inde­pen­dent woman, and it must have been a hard thing for her to swal­low when, after her third hus­band died, she had lit­tle choice but to move in with her youngest daughter’s fam­ily, into the maid’s room, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Sophie’s third hus­band had money; he owned a string of funeral homes. The prob­lem was that his chil­dren – all sons, I think – resented his mar­riage to Sophie because it was too soon, for their tastes, after their mother had died. They were so angry, in fact, that they set about swin­dling their father out of his money and his busi­ness. He was an illit­er­ate man, and so they would bring him doc­u­ments to sign, that they told him were finan­cial doc­u­ments for his busi­ness, and he would put his X on them – because you could still sign doc­u­ments that way back then – not know­ing that he was, in fact, sign­ing his busi­ness and his money away. He never dreamed that his own chil­dren would cheat him in this way. Eventually, Sophie fig­ured out what they were doing and threat­ened to take them to court. Some­one talked her out of it, though – maybe her hus­band; because who wants to do that to their own children? – and an agree­ment was reached whereby Sophie and her hus­band would get the house where they lived in Brook­lyn and an amount of money per month that, while I don’t remem­ber the exact amount, was suf­fi­cient (and maybe more than suf­fi­cient) for them to live on.

I don’t know how long that sit­u­a­tion lasted, but the next chap­ter in this story that I know about took place when Sophie and her hus­band were vis­it­ing one of her daugh­ters and her fam­ily in their house in the coun­try. Sophie’s hus­band got up in the mid­dle of the night, went into the barn that was on the prop­erty, got an ax and was on the way back to the main house when some­one, thank­fully, dis­cov­ered him. Pre­cisely how they fig­ured it out I am not sure, but it was appar­ently very clear that his inten­tion had been to mur­der every­one who was sleep­ing in the house. Sophie had him insti­tu­tion­al­ized, but the place she could afford – or maybe it was the place the gov­ern­ment had set up for peo­ple who couldn’t afford any­thing else, I am not sure – was a real shit hole. His sit­u­a­tion did not get bet­ter until his chil­dren, who were still cap­i­tal­iz­ing on his name and his rep­u­ta­tion as the owner of the busi­ness they’d swin­dled from him, real­ized that peo­ple might one day want to see him, and how would it look if it got out that they were keep­ing their father in any­thing less than the com­fort­able con­di­tions he deserved?

They put him in a pri­vate facil­ity, where my great-grandmother vis­ited him every day until he died, bring­ing home-cooked food not only for him, but for all the other patients around him. After he died, she did not, or could not (I don’t know), hold onto the house any­more, and, since she had nowhere else to go, my grand­mother and her sis­ters arranged that she would spend a third of the year with each of them. That agree­ment soon fell apart, how­ever, and Sophie – whether by force or by choice, or some com­bi­na­tion of both, I don’t know – moved into the maid’s room in my grandmother’s apart­ment. I can’t imag­ine that it was easy for my grand­mother to live with her mother, and I am sure that my grand­fa­ther did not appre­ci­ate hav­ing to live with his mother-in-law; and I bet it was espe­cially galling since each of my grandmother’s sis­ters had a house with a good deal more room for an extra per­son than the apart­ment where my grand­par­ents were also rais­ing two children. Difficult as it must have been, though, my grand­par­ents took her in; they did what needed to be done for their fam­ily, a les­son I didn’t even know I’d learned, really, until I started think­ing about my own aging mother and what would hap­pen to her if she sud­denly could not live on her own anymore.

It’s not my mother that I’m really think­ing about right now, though. I’m think­ing instead about Sophie’s step­sons (and step­daugh­ters, if there were any), and what it must have done to them to cheat and betray their father the way they did. Because what they did had to take its toll. If you are will­ing to cheat your own father out of his liveli­hood, out of every­thing he spent his life build­ing, then not just whom, but how, can you trust, ever? How can you expect from your own chil­dren, or their spouses, or even your grand­chil­dren, any­thing dif­fer­ent? How do you do what my great-grandmother’s children-in-law did and not carry a cor­ro­sive guilt for the rest of your life? I can­not imag­ine that this did not eat away at their fam­ily from the inside out, though I could, of course, be wrong. Or the ver­sion of this story that I have heard might be my family’s more or less self-serving ver­sion, one that leaves out details that would change the pic­ture entirely. I have no way of know­ing. All I do know is the story I’ve been told and that, even now, all these years later, despite the fact that Sophie was the only one I knew of all those who were involved, the story makes me very sad, more sad than angry in fact.

If my own life has taught me any­thing, it’s that roman­ti­ciz­ing fam­ily bonds is a fool’s path to take, and yet – all else being equal – there is some­thing about main­tain­ing the parent-child rela­tion­ship, how­ever it may change as chil­dren grow into adults, that seems to me a fun­da­men­tal build­ing block of what it means to live at peace with your­self – never mind what it means to live eth­i­cally in the world. I don’t care how angry your mother or father makes you; I don’t care how resent­ful you may be of the life he or she had  led or the life he or she is lead­ing; there are some things you just don’t do to your par­ents.

It is a tra­di­tion in Iran to use the works of the 14^th cen­tury poet Hafez to tell for­tunes. Peo­ple open a copy of his divan, his col­lected works, and take the first line of poetry their eye falls on to be an omen of what is to come. In the spirit of Norooz, here is an ani­ma­tion of some of Hafez’ poetry by Jila Pea­cock. I hope your year is as beau­ti­ful as this work of art:

Tongue of the Hid­den from Jila Pea­cock on Vimeo.

This is too per­fect not to post:

What I find most inter­est­ing about this video is the way the woman does not at all look at the man behind her:

This is absolutely marvelous:

This made me laugh. It’s from the July 1^st edi­tion of “The One-Page Mag­a­zine” in The New York Times Magazine:

Stop­u­late: To inter­rupt an inti­mate moment to declare terms. “June tear­fully stop­u­lated to Alex that, what­ever hap­pened, she could never move back to Cleve­land.” See also: Turn-oaf (the act of falling asleep imme­di­ately after inti­macy; or the per­son who does.)

An inter­est­ing arti­cle. I won­der what peo­ple think. Here’s an excerpt:

[T]he pro­vi­sion of the law…called the med­ical loss ratio…requires health insur­ance com­pa­nies to spend 80% of the con­sumers’ pre­mium dol­lars they col­lect — 85% for large group insur­ers — on actual med­ical care rather than over­head, mar­ket­ing expenses and profit. Fail­ure on the part of insur­ers to meet this require­ment will result in the insur­ers hav­ing to send their cus­tomers a rebate check rep­re­sent­ing the amount in which they under­spend on actual med­ical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ con­tained in Oba­macare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how med­ical care is paid for in this coun­try than any­thing we’ve seen in quite some time. Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that rep­re­sents the true ‘death panel’ found in Oba­macare — but not one that is going to lead to the death of Amer­i­can con­sumers. Rather, the med­ical loss ratio will, ulti­mately, lead to the death of large parts of the pri­vate, for-profit health insur­ance industry.

Why? Because there is absolutely no way for-profit health insur­ers are going to be able to learn how to get by and still make a profit while being forced to spend at least 80 per­cent of their receipts pro­vid­ing their cus­tomers with the cov­er­age for which they paid. If they could, we likely would never have seen the extra­or­di­nary efforts made by these com­pa­nies to avoid pay­ing ben­e­fits to their cus­tomers at the very moment they need it the most.

This is some­thing I hadn’t really thought about at all in any dis­cus­sion I have had about the Afford­able Care Act, but it sure as hell sounds like a wel­come change to me. I won­der what other peo­ple think.

I saw these for the first time this evening and I think they’re great. I looked but I couldn’t find the plaque that said who the artist is. If some­one lets me know, I will put her or his name in the post. Oth­er­wise, it will have to wait till I have time to look it up or go back to the station.