Respecting the House that Slaves Built

FUCK!! FUCK!! FUCK!!

My friend and I had been comparing bad parenting stories, and, that particular time, she won. Her three year old daughter had been tooling around in her toddler car, leaning on the blissfully mute rubber horn and screaming the above noted expletive. My mortified friend apologized to witnesses as she rushed to demonstrate her firm parenting hand and demanded an explanation.

I'm pretending I'm you driving, Mom. 

Years later, when I no longer had to worry that my children would so unwittingly humiliate me in public, one of them -- I can't remember which, but presumably one of my daughters -- announced to me that when she grew up, she wanted to be a mom. A mom. 

I took it as a compliment, though I was not quite sure why. I was still figuring out who I was back then, always with one foot in a downtown office and the other (along with most of my heart) at home with my children. No matter where I was, I feared making a mistake, although I felt far more able to control that at work, and far less fearful, there, of the consequences. Still, I was constantly changing hats, sitting in faculty meetings by day wondering why any of this mattered and sitting in PTO meetings by night wondering why I had abandoned those tiny reflections of myself just so I could weigh in on whether the school should offer chocolate milk for lunch. At home, I comforted myself with thoughts of going to work, where the odds of somebody giving me a pat on the back for a job well done were higher. (My bar was set very low.)

There is nothing more inspiring than a brilliant and accomplished woman who knows that, no matter what, her most important job is raising her children. Much too late for me, I suppose, but it is what I wish for my daughters as they navigate a world where staying at home full time, even if you want to, is not a realistic choice. Where the pressure to excel, to stand out, is so great. Where the temptation to be anything but present is everywhere, and I wonder whether the babies of the future will ever know what it feels like to listen to mom talk -- to them -- as they get wheeled through the neighborhood.

Even without constant access to every thing and everybody else, we in my my generation of mothers set our fair share of bad examples and made more than our fair share of mistakes. Exhibit A, the toddler with the road rage, whose mother was among the most meticulous I had ever encountered. What I like to think about my own experience, and what I hope I have passed on to my daughters, is that I was aware of the pitfalls and I tried my best -- some days more than others.

This year, I have become inexplicably wrapped up in politics. I have never cared all that much, and have always assumed that politicians are even more imperfect than your average human. It goes with the territory. Last night, Michelle Obama, our brilliant and accomplished First Lady and quintessential mother on display, made me realize why I have strayed so far from my apolitical self. Sure, I care about the issues. Most folks do. But what I really care about is the world we are handing over to our children and grandchildren, a world that is confusing and overly filled with horrible examples.

What I realized, as I listened to her, is that what matters most is what we do, not what we say. Don't get me wrong. I love words, I appreciate beautiful prose, and I get moved by inspiring speech. We can talk and write until we are blue in the face, but our legacy gets passed down through our behavior, how we model the values that make up our inner core.

My interest in politics has arisen with the rise of a candidate who is, on an average day, unfit to sit at a dinner table with children. A candidate who behaves in public in a way I would find unacceptable in private, even after a few drinks. A candidate for whom bad behavior is the norm, and for whom good behavior is a rare accident. Bad parenting, on the grandest scale.

My Dad's Better than Your Dad

For years, I have carried around a half of a twenty dollar bill. The other half, presumably, remains in my friend's wallet, its frayed edges an exact match for mine. It was a Solomonic solution to a friendly argument over the lunch check. We promised ourselves -- and each other -- that we would use it one day, for our next lunch.

Every once in a while, the corner of the half twenty catches my eye, giving me that momentary feel good -- like when you find a small wad of cash in the pocket of a long dormant winter coat. I am momentarily deflated when I realize the worthlessness of my find. Worthless, that is, unless my friend and I happen to reconnect one day with the two halves and a role of tape, and are in a place where a reconstituted twenty dollar bill will be buy us the lunch we paid for in advance, so many years ago.

As time goes by, lunch seems less and less likely, but the promise behind the torn bill is somehow reassuring. Promises and good intentions are like that; hope, even false hope -- especially false hope, is comforting.

"Believe me," says Donald Trump, over and over, as he promises to fix all that is broken. No more terrorism. No more police shooting black men, and no more black men killing police, and no more black man killing each other. No more senseless killings of wonderful gay people. No more poverty, lots more jobs. No more helping other countries who take more than they give. No more death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness. "Believe me," he says. He alone will take all the shredded twenty dollar bills and put them together again. One big Humpty Dumpty, sitting on a brand new wall.

I believe that he believes it, and I would love to be hopeful. Even for a moment, like the moment right before I realize the twenty dollar bill in my wallet is not really what it seems. I would like to think that my children will always be safe, and that, one day, I won't wake up to another breaking news tragedy. But I'm a realist; I know my half of the twenty dollar bill will never be worth anything,  and I know that one narcissistic man, no matter how personally successful and driven he might be, cannot put everything back together again.

Like Don Jr. and Eric and Tiffany and Ivanka, I always believed my father could fix everything that was broken. Even though he's been gone for many years, I still believe that he watches over me, and I even credit him when an occasional wrong becomes righted. That's what dads do. He sat on the floor and built buildings with Lincoln Logs with me, and, years later, with my children. No buildings ever bore his name in lights, no airplanes bore a "Seymour" logo. Yet I still believe he was the greatest man who ever lived, and I wouldn't hesitate to say that, out loud, to anyone who might listen. I would vote for him for President.

When my father died, my mother pulled an old, folded twenty dollar bill out of his wallet. He always kept it there, just in case. He knew, deep down, that no matter how hard he tried, he could not fix everything. And he never promised that he could, never played up fear and despair to give me false hope. He knew bad things could happen, but the best he could do -- and encourage us to do -- was to be careful and be prepared.

Une Bonne Promenade , Gâté

A picture of a father and his young son, both smiling, squinting. The son, alone, gazing up from the water's edge. Pictures just like the ones we all have -- in our minds, in old shoeboxes, on cell phones. Dog-eared or not, all eternal and vivid. We do our best to make the good parts of our histories repeat, the stuff over which we think we have control.

Mere hours after the smiles of the father and son were recorded, they were dead. I review my mental notes. Self, I say, observe. Avoid enclosed places that can easily be turned into killing fields. Remind my daughter, when she heads to Paris this fall, to pay attention. To avoid the likely targets. I fantasize about locking her, and my other two, in closets until it stops.

Concerts. Nightclubs, Cafes. The pebbly shores of the French Riviera. All the world's edges. Every day people doing everyday things. I walked my dog just after I saw the news of mass murder in Nice, thought about how a lone man in a truck could destroy so much in so little time. I took note of the woman watering her front lawn, the boy on his skateboard, the elderly couple taking a walk. Memorable mundane moments, not all that different from the ones we see fit to capture on film -- when we are on a family vacation or simply existing somewhere else. We are neither ecstatically happy nor particularly sad. We just are, and we don't give much thought to our good fortune. The gift that is the ability to wake up every morning and just be, to do little more than repeat the ordinary  stuff that makes up our histories.

My mother texted just now, recalling how she and my father, almost thirty years ago, stood in the square of a small French town on Bastille Day, watching fireworks and listening to the national anthem. It was memorable, she said. Memorable, and, I assume, still as vivid as any picture in a shoe box or on a cell phone. Memorable, and vivid as the pictures of that father and his little boy. Beautiful smiles on a beautiful day on a beautiful beach. So ordinary, the stuff we repeat, if we're lucky.

Night, Redux: Hold the Pierogis

A teacher sent this text response to a group of college students studying abroad:

A teacher. An educator. In Poland. Poland. Where a Jewish community of three million was all but obliterated during the Holocaust. In a world where precious few remain to bear witness, fewer still since the death of Elie Wiesel last week.

The activity that had been prepared was a cooking class. Had my friend told me his niece opted out of a tour of Auschwitz to attend a Polish cooking class, I would have been surprised and, yes, a little sad. It was the other way around though. She and her friends had passed up the once in a lifetime chance to stir up some Polish delicacies and chose, instead, to visit the Nazi death camp, stirring up something a bit less palatable.

Less than a week ago, I quoted Elie Wiesel, a teacher as well. An educator, a scholar, a survivor against all odds, long gone from his homeland, where his mother and sister were killed at Auschwitz, where, as a teenager, he listened, helpless, as his ailing father was beaten at Buchenwald. Like so many survivors of the Holocaust, like so many survivors of humanity's greatest atrocities, Wiesel could not speak of his experience for years. Survival, for many, seemed a fate at least equal to death.

It is because of Elie Wiesel, and countless other survivors, that we have any hope of doing better. It is because of their bravery, their willingness to confront their real life nightmares and break their silence, that we have any sense of what happened there, all those years ago. Night, Wiesel's widely read account of his horror, is an abridged version of the first memoir he wrote. It was called And the World Remained Silent. It's what we humans tend to do.

The thoroughly modern Polish teacher was sad, she said, that a small group of students would choose remembrance over pierogis, the kind that would no doubt forever ruin, for them, American made pierogis.  Don't get me wrong. I'm all about the food when I travel. Real Parisian French bread has ruined, for me, what passes for French bread at home. When in Rome, I happily eat what Romans eat, and you'll rarely find me hunting down a good old fashioned American hamburger when I am somewhere else. But this was a bit of authentic cuisine I could easily pass up.

I suppose I get why she was sad. It wasn't the Polish people who killed the Jews. And, even though lots of them remained silent or looked the other way, many more risked their own safety to protect their Jewish neighbors, or at least not betray them. Certainly, Jews are not massacred in modern day Poland -- in part because few remain, and in part because, at least I hope, evil is the exception, not the rule.

But history repeats itself, and holocausts keep happening -- maybe not on such a grand scale, but that's beside the point. I have two left feet, but I'd much rather dance the polka or bake pierogis than tour the Nazi ovens and imagine the stench from those smokestacks. Like the Polish teacher, I prefer not to be sad.

We all need to hold the pierogis, though, especially these days. Evil may still be the exception, but it is persistent. We need to stop looking the other way, stop being silent, start paying better attention. Modern day Poland, like modern day anywhere, is what it is because of what it once was, and its future depends on the choices people make today. My friend's niece chose Auschwitz (described by her father as "the opposite of Disney World") over sweet smelling Polish delicacies. A hard choice, but not really.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Elie Wiesel, Night. 

Night. There and Here.

He said he belonged to a traumatized generation, and he wondered if the world would ever learn.

Yes, he did belong to a traumatized generation, and the jury is still out on whether the world will ever learn. By his own admission, up until the moment Elie Wiesel and his parents were rounded up like cattle and shipped off to death camps, they had no idea. Nazism and Fascism were certainly not new, nor were the yellow stars sewn to their clothing. But they, like most of us, could never have believed, in their wildest nightmares, how inhuman humans could be. And they, like most of us, could never have believed that it could happen to them. Happen to us. Happen here. 

Even the wisest among us are slow learners. On September 11, 2001, I watched in horror, from my suburban Chicago kitchen, as a familiar landmark from my childhood crumbled. I watched lower Manhattan go up in smoke as I dictated the scene by telephone to my brother, a doctor at St. Vincent's, only blocks away from the scene. They had been herded away from windows, left to bear witness with their noses and ears. My two older children were in middle school; the principal had assured them they were safe. Something bad had happened, but not here. 

Wrong. Even for the kids who did not have relatives in New York, who had not been there only months earlier, 9/11 was here. What happened that day has shaped our world, here, on what we all liked to think was the safe side of various large ponds. Rudely awakened from our fantasy of geographic isolation, we pulled together and we rebuilt and we grew accustomed to long security lines at airports and waited to buy our water bottles at the gate and we gradually returned to our fantasy. Again, we believed. Not here.

Not here, but in offices and restaurants and cafes and, yes, airports, in Paris and Brussels and Istanbul and Bangladesh and the skies over the Mediterranean and even right around the corner from  Disney World. Oh, but that was an LGBT club, so still, not here. Right.

Last night, I fell asleep half listening to a CNN series about the '80's. The decade of AIDs. I was reminded of the early days, when a mysterious strain of contagious cancer appeared to be killing gay men. Them, not us. I vaguely recalled that fantasy of "sexual orientation isolationism," the comfort so many of us took in knowing we were safe as long as we steered clear of seedy bath houses. That is, until Rock Hudson emerged from his well-heeled closet and Ryan White and all the others who didn't do anything "wrong" (or foreign) caught the bug.

We are learning the hard way, Elie Wiesel. Not first hand, maybe, the way he had to learn, but we are definitely learning. There will always be humans who are inhuman, and there will always be atrocities, and they will happen everywhere, including here.

We belong to a traumatized generation, and we are learning, but, like Elie Wiesel, we are left mostly with questions, not answers. At least we are all paying closer attention.