Imagining John Lennon - December 9, 2010

I’ve never quite known why, year after year, the anniversary of John Lennon’s death carried emotional weight for me. I mean, I like the Beatles, but the whole Ed Sullivan Beatle-Mania craze was before my time. As a solo musician, he sang about peace and love. But he wasn’t alone in doing that. Other great artists and humanitarians have come and gone since. Why John?

Evidently, I needed about thirty years to stop and reflect in a way that I can finally distill. And, surprise, surprise… it’s not just about John. It’s largely about me.

When John died, I was a nineteen year-old college sophomore living in New York City. I’d moved there a couple of years earlier to follow my first serious girlfriend to NYC after dropping out of high school. We’d started a life together, full of innocence and idealism. Putting myself through college, I’d walk from our small apartment in Sunnyside (Queens) up to Queens Boulevard, hop on the 7 line, change in Astoria to the RR, and then in the City, I’d transfer to the #6 Lexington train one stop north to Hunter College on 68th Street. It was, for me, an uncomplicated time. At least for a while.

By the fall of my sophomore year, things got complicated and that idealism faded. On the horizon, I saw my relationship’s demise. And I saw it coming in a way that, thanks to my own immaturity, would not be pretty. My own sense of myself, of my basic goodness, was coming unraveled.

This was not, I should point out, the first blow to youth’s innocence for me. I’d escaped serious childhood trauma--the stuff that, in my work, I see robbing children of their innocence early on. But my parents’ divorce when I was twelve had indelibly rewritten what “forever” meant in terms of love for me. Love is never permanent, I concluded. Deep inside, however, I didn’t want to believe that. I convinced myself I’d do it differently. But I didn’t. I would leave my first girlfriend as my father had, for another. This would be my first loss of innocence as an adult: the realization that I'm not always the good guy.

With that backdrop, I heard the news on December 8, 1980, that John Lennon had been shot where he lived, just off Central Park West. This wasn’t some distant place for me. John and Yoko lived eighteen blocks from my mother’s apartment, just across the park from where I took classes every day. It happened in my hometown. It felt personal.

As for John himself, I had no illusions that he was a perfect man. But there was something innocent and idealistic in him and in his music, no where more evident than in “Imagine” and in “Give Peace a Chance.” That kind of idealism, that desire to imagine, to be a dreamer and to believe has always resonated for me.

John's being so young and his leaving behind a wife he loved madly and a five-year-old son he adored, his death came to feel more and more to me like a reminder of my own loss of innocence, of love's impermanence and life's unfairness. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination is often described as doing that for a generation of Americans. It happens when a symbol of hope is cut down, an extraordinary life interrupted. But I was seven when Bobby was shot.

So for me, it was John.

I’m happy to say that a part of me hasn’t given up. And won’t ever give up, on myself or the world. I’ll always keep alive within me that will … to imagine.

Peace, John.

Ecco la Roma... A father kvells.

There are junctures in life that signal a turning point, when one knows something has shifted in a meaningful way. I’m not talking here about life’s normal milestones or disruptions: a birth or death, marriage or divorce, any of life’s big joys or traumas. Sometimes major shifts transpire in a context free of any precipitating events, when big things happen in small moments (if not in small places).

Such was this trip to Rome for me.

I went to visit my daughter Nora, spending her second semester of her junior year studying in Rome. I’d found a hostel in central Rome, a couple blocks from Termini, the main train station. The Beehive Hostel was an experience unto itself, particularly sleeping in a dorm room with seven strangers. I met many interesting folks: a teacher headed to a Harvard doctoral program in cross-cultural education, a biomedical engineer who studied at Johns Hopkins, a German student from Berlin who offered to house Nora when she passes through Berlin next month. The hostel experience, if privacy isn’t a necessity, is pretty cool that way (I’d actually last done the hostel thing with Nora on her 8th grade graduation trip to Alaska).

Every morning started with one of the hostel’s incredible breakfasts, crepes with strawberries and ricotta, French toast with kiwi fruit and homemade orange syrup, café lattes, all exquisite. Then I’d take a Metro and a bus from Termini to Nora’s campus in Monte Mario, a hilly neighborhood in the northwest corner of the city; and Nora would lead me around town. We covered a lot of ground.

We hit the Coliseum (I’d forgotten it was Jewish slaves that built that big puppy), the Roman Forum (dating back to the 6th century B.C.), the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and numerous other piazzas and chiesas (churches) including that really big one at the Vatican. Though I’d been to Rome briefly before, Nora had already been there for months and clearly had learned her way around. She was an amazing tour guide.

Though most days offered sunny, mild weather, we had a memorable day walking around in the rain in the shadow of the Coliseum. From there, we headed up to Capitoline Hill, the highest of Rome’s seven hills where Michelangelo designed the Piazza di Campidoglio surrounded by government palazzis (palaces). To stay dry, Nora wore one of those high-fashion pocket ponchos, essentially a red garbage bag with a hood. Given that Rome is one of the most fashion-conscious places I’ve ever been, her comical look was all the more comical. Everyone—seriously everyone—was dressed with a sense of style, seemingly unselfconscious yet sophisticated. And so many of them are nothing short of beautiful: men, women, young, old. I mean really beautiful. As a straight guy, for example, I have no problem recognizing a good-looking man. But doing a double-take as a man walks by is not the norm for me. It happened more than once. Same with women and children. From toddlers to senior citizens, just stunning. Add to that, it’s as if pasta, olive oil, ricotta, prosciutto, and lots of red wine are antidotes to obesity. It’s rare to see someone look even slightly chubby, much less seriously overweight. Why can’t we get this right in the U.S.?





In addition to ruins in the rain, a few highlights stand out. We spent one night strolling around Piazza Navonna till after midnight, sipping Limoncello, a lemon liqueur from southern Itay. We cruised from fountain to fountain, piazza to piazza, just exploring side streets, little cafes, and new views. Nora had done little of that, instead often hunkering down with friends in various clubs or bars where, in many cases, you might as well be in a pub anywhere. Limoncello will forever be something I now associate with Piazza Navonna and Nora.

On another night, we were accompanied by two of her friends, Lauren and Nick. The four of us bar-hopped in Trastevere, a charming and quieter neighborhood across the Tiber River, lots of winding streets and alleyways. It was great fun with Nora and her friends, three college kids and me. Empassioned talks spilled forth about their futures, about relationships, about being gay and having kids (Nick’s gay), about all that life holds. I’ve always felt incredibly lucky for the ways Nora has included me in her friendships, and for how most of those friends are inclusive and open as well. This night was no exception.

One Trastevere bar, Café Artu, had a phenomenal swing jazz trio, rocking the house. Nora and I danced for the first time as adults together. Last time I danced with her, she was maybe eight. I got back to my hostel at 5:30 a.m. that night. It was probably back in my college days that I last stumbled in that late. Admittedly, I got lost. But getting lost in Rome is not too bad: Stumbling into a piazza and, hey, there’s the Pantheon. OK, turn right here. Now where am I again? Hey, there’s the Tiber River. I must be going the wrong way… turn around and head towards Trevi Fountain…Yup. All good.

Nora’s college had cancelled classes that week for a several-day conference on Italian feminism and how it intersects (or sometimes clashes) with the priorities of Third World women’s migrant and ethnic groups. We attended one afternoon of the conference which was held in the American Cultural Institute, a stunning old building in Rome’s Jewish ghetto (where Jews were confined in 70 A.D. after Titus decided Jews, like the new Christians, were unworthy to live amongst true Romans). After the panel discussion on feminism, they served wine and aperitivos, some of the most amazing finger food I’ve ever eaten, smoked salmon and fresh mozzarella, bruschetta, caviar, proscuitto and fresh fruit. We ate well.

On our last day, she and I took a train to the Umbria hillside town of Orvieto, an hour outside of Rome, a charming medieval town of winding alleyways and cobblestone streets, sitting majestically on a chunk of volcanic rock looking over a valley. It is also home to one of the best known Italian gothic cathedrals. Legend has it that this Duomo was built when a 13th century priest (skeptical that communion bread was, y'know, truly the body of Christ) was passing near Orvieto. During Mass that day, the bread bled--like blood--staining a linen cloth. The pope was in Orvieto and, upon seeing the bread/blood/body-of-Christ stained cloth, he decided a magnificent church should be built to house the miraculous relic. And Orvieto’s Duomo was born. By the way, the town of L’Aquila, devastated by the earthquake, was a larger version of Orvieto, a hillside medieval town. Tragic, the loss of life there, over 250 dead last I heard.

In my last day with Nora, I overlapped with her mother, sister, and mutual friends of ours from Barcelona who were just arriving for their stint visiting Nora in Italy. We spent most of my last 24 hours in Rome all together, like one big extended family. We ended the day with a stroll from Piazza San Pietro to the Spanish Steps, and one last meal together with a few Peroni beers. I said goodbye to the larger group at the Spanish steps after which Nora walked me to the Spagna Metro stop where I could hop the train to Termini to catch the airport’s Leonardo Express.

Hugging Nora goodbye was wrenching. It’s as if all our goodbyes were distilled into this single hug: twelve years of goodbyes twice a month starting when Nora turned six. I felt near tears as I descended into the bowels of the Metro tunnel system. A lump in my throat stayed with me all the way to the airport. On the previous day as Nora and I were en route to Orvieto, I told her about how her little brother Ezra was on the threshold of turning six so I’m increasingly face to face with the consciousness of a six year old. It’s given me a renewed awareness of what it must have been like for Nora at six, when I moved from Minnesota to Michigan. What we established as father and daughter in the next twelve years was remarkable. But it also means--and we figured it out, at least two flights a month for twelve years for nearly 300 flights that she or I took back and forth to see each other--that’s a lot of goodbyes to start logging at age six. It’s almost unbearable to think about now.

She later told me that when we parted at the Metro Station, she got emotional too, our farewell having tapped all those goodbyes she experienced through the eyes of a child. And she cried because we'd had such a wonderful time together.
I realized in that instant as we hugged goodbye that something had changed in all of these little moments with Nora in Rome: talking about her life, our past, her future, her relationships; walking through piazzas, sitting and sipping Limoncello; talking with her friends about their unfolding lives, their scripts unwritten; dancing to a jazz trio; strolling through the streets of medieval Orvieto. I was struck with the realization that at no time ever since I’d become a father 21 years ago had I felt so strongly that I was now parent to an ADULT daughter. She’s still my baby girl. Always will be. And, sure, we subsidize her college costs. But good God, she has become so grown up, smart, compassionate, and independent in many, many ways.

I’m profoundly grateful for the relationship I have been able to build and sustain over these 21 years with Nora. This new chapter of the father-daughter relationship was the defining feature of the trip for me. Not Rome’s sweeping arc of history, art, and architecture, not the columns or the frescoes, nor the gellati and the café lattes. But the intelligence, maturity, and beauty of this person, this adult who I once carried in my arms, minutes old, hours old, years old. This beautiful little girl/young woman who I’m lucky to call my daughter.

When classes are done at the end of April, Nora will join her friend Carrie and hit Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Croatia, and Greece. She’ll be back in the U.S. by the end of May and will rent an apartment in Chicago for her senior year. Her adventure continues…

I love you, Nora.

EPILOGUE: Amsterdam

My plane from Rome got to Amsterdam at midnight, leaving me with an 8 hour layover before my flight to Detroit. I could have taken sleep meds and passed out in the airport, but I was in AMSTERDAM. I hadn’t been there in 23 years. So I took a train into town to go explore. Having never been to the Red Light District, it seemed one of those things I should at least see if I was there. And what else was open between midnight and 6 a.m.? The Van Gogh Museum was closed. I checked. Seriously. It was closed.

So, first of all: a note about language. In Italy, my years of Spanish helped little if at all. And very few Italians spoke English. It was a struggle. In Amsterdam, I’d ask someone a question and they’d answer in perfect English. It was so good, my reflex was to say, oh, you’re American too. And then I’d hear the subtle, the VERY subtle accent. But their English was impeccable. Not just desk clerks in nice hotels. Bus drivers, students, random people on the train. Very different from Rome.

The Red Light District then… Wow. For about the first 15 minutes, I found it anthropologically interesting. Rows of windows or glass doors, like small storefronts in narrow alleyways or facing the canals, each of them with a bar of red neon light above the glass. Some of them had a drawn curtain in the window, letting folks know that a customer was being served inside. But when the curtains were open, you’d see window after window, with women in lingerie and spiked heels, sitting on a bar stool, dancing or leaning flirtatiously into the door, knocking on the glass to get the attention of passers-by, sometimes opening the door a crack to summon a prospective customer.



After 15 minutes, 10 minutes actually, the novelty wore off. Call me crazy but I don’t give a damn how sexy or seductive a woman is, if you have to PAY her to have sex, it has all the erotic appeal of toothpaste. I confess I did indulge, however, in the Red Light District. Yes, my big indulgence was a rather expensive falafel sandwich purchased in a little Lebanese shop just off one of the canals. Delicious. It was strange to see such lovely canals with old buildings along the waterfront—I even saw a dozen white swans on one of the canals—symbols of purity and fidelity, right? Aren’t swans the bird that couple for life? And juxtaposed against all that beauty, were reflections of red light in the water, groups of mostly drunken men walking back and forth “window-shopping.”



The libertarian in me applauds the Dutch for their openness to legalized prostitution and legalized marijuana (which wafted out of the hash bars in pungent clouds). I haven’t done research but I presume that both prostitution and pot in Holland are devoid of the violence and corruption associated with their American counterparts.

Ultimately, however, the whole damn thing felt sad to me. I felt sad for the women, most of whom I have to believe would chose other career paths if better opportunities were available. I wondered what they told their families, their parents, their kids, about what they did for a living. Having just had this incredible time with my daughter, after all, I couldn't help but be aware that each of these women was somebody's daughter. What kind of relationships did they have or could they have?

And the men… Jesus, sometimes I’m embarrassed by my BITs (Brothers in Testosterone). Clowning around like 6th graders who’ve found their first Playboy magazine. Except in this case, they get to chose which centerfold they want, walk into her little room, and have the curtain drawn. So they're even more giddy. In moments like these, I try to detach from my obviously critical voice here, to acknowledge that these judgments are, no doubt, rooted in my own hang-ups. They are also rooted in abstractions: academic, political, and philosophical belief systems that abhor a global market that’s commodified everything on Earth including women. Of course, the commodification of women long predates the global marketplace. It’s the world’s oldest profession, or so the saying goes.

But for me, I’ll pass. And I did pass. Except for the falafel.

And Now It Starts...

Being at home with pneumonia, functioning at 50% if that, writing has been one of the casualties. But sometimes brevity is all that's needed and there will be so much writing about this day, this inauguration. I watched and alternated between tears and awe.

Ezra, my five year old, with whom I was at home as he recovered from chicken pox, summed it up nicely as we watched the inauguration: "Barack Obama's kids must be really proud of him."

Young and old, it's as if we are all children to this moment in history that embodies countless hopes and dreams for peace and healing and new beginnings, for an America that lives up to its promise and rights its wrongs.

We're all proud children of this moment.

That's all I got right now, coughing madly after every few words I type. And for this moment, that's enough. More's to come.

Fifty Years Together: A Riposte to Election Day's Dark Side & Inaugural Myopia...

Several winters ago, my wife and I took our year old son for a long weekend, and escaped the Midwest to New York City, my old home town. A highlight of the visit was reconnecting with old family friends, Frank and Pat, an elderly couple who’ve known me since birth. They were, at that time, 85 and 78 years old respectively, and had been together nearly 50 years, most of which they lived in a Greenwich Village high-rise apartment overlooking NYU and Washington Square, with a stunning Manhattan skyline all around them (the photo above is from their window looking north; photos below from the same NY trip). After visiting for a while in their apartment, they drove us down to Ground Zero to view the progress on the site since my wife and I had last been there as Red Cross volunteers after 9/11. Sitting in the back seat of their old Cadillac as we headed downtown, they picked on each other as older couples often do over who drives better and about what was the best route to their destination.

“Hurry up and make that light!!! Geez, Frank, you drive so slooowly!”

“And if you were driving on these lousy pot-holed streets,” Pat would respond, “We’d have four flat tires and a broken axle.” With good-hearted smiles, they’d both roll their eyes. Underlying the bickering, their affection was clear.

Frank and Pat are both men.

Frank is a World War II veteran. He joined the army in 1942 and served his country with distinction. After the war, he attended the Sorbonne in Paris on the GI bill and returned to the U.S. to become a teacher. In those days, teachers in his home state of Maine earned $2,000 a year so he went to California where teachers made double that. After a year, however, the death of his father brought him back East where he stayed to help his widowed mother. Following her death, he moved to New York where he worked as a manager in the same company, a loyal employee for forty years.

Pat, meanwhile, is a singer who at 78 still performs regularly in weddings, funerals, and leads the choir in a local church. Now 82, he still does all that. Because it was Easter week and Pat had choir obligations on Thursday, Good Friday, and, of course, Easter Sunday, he had to leave us to rehearse. Frank offered to baby-sit for our son, allowing us a few hours in the city without a stroller, which, as we revisited Times Square at rush hour, was no small gift. Frank offered to baby-sit as much out of his own grandfatherly instincts as out of any generosity towards us. He doted on the baby like the sweetest grandfather one could imagine as he’d doted on me over forty years earlier. I only wish he lived closer so he could be the Great Uncle Frank I know he’d be to all our children.

As the senseless crusade against gay marriage creeps on, like spikes in the Ebola Virus, as abominations like Prop 8 and the Arkansas ban on adoption by unmarried couples erode our American democracy, I think often of Frank and Pat. I don't get how anyone could see people like Frank and Pat as a threat to the institutions of marriage and family. They represent among the best role models I’ve ever known when I think of values like love, commitment, and, yes, marriage. It saddened me then, it saddens and angers me now to contemplate the barriers these two would face if they were young men today, wanting to commit themselves through marriage. Frank and Pat have much to offer many straight couples who may, say, read the bible and have children, but are terrible spouses and awful parents. Marriage, in my book, is about love and commitment, something a lot of us heterosexuals screw up. Marriage is not about exclusion based on whom you love.

Frank and Pat don’t use the word gay to refer to themselves nor can I imagine they ever considered marriage. And though they’ve lived in tolerant communities in Paris and New York, they have always been closeted to the outside world, keeping a low profile when it comes to their relationship. As long as I’ve known them, they’ve kept separate bedrooms and they refer to themselves, at this point, as really good, old friends. Out of respect for their privacy, I include no pictures of them here. And the names are pseudonyms.

I left New York inspired and grateful to have these wonderful human beings in my life who have given so much to their country, their church, their community, each other … and to me personally. To honor all they’ve given, my personal commitment to social justice will always include making this world a place that’s safe, inclusive, and respectful of all people including those who may love differently than I do.

Mumbai Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving for me this year was overshadowed by the attacks in Mumbai, especially being at my father-in-law’s home, where cable TV—absent in our home—meant the coverage on CNN was available to me for days. I couldn’t pull away. It’s taken me some time to distill my thoughts and emotions after the attacks in Mumbai. This reaction takes the form of two stories, separated by decades and continents.

First, there's the story of the Taj Mahal Hotel. It was my first stop in a year spent backpacking across Asia in 1986. Deborah, my girlfriend at the time, and I left from London on New Year's Day 1986, flew overnight and arrived in the pre-morning darkness. We headed straight for the 5-star Taj Mahal Intercontinental Hotel which we'd heard was a landmark from which we could get to a hotel we could afford, one on the other extreme of the luxury scale. On the bus into town from the airport, Deborah became angry with me that I’d discouraged her from bringing her sleeping bag with us on the trip. By the time we reached the hotel, our fighting was full-blown.

We "broke up" under Mumbai’s most famous monument across the street from the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Gateway to India, a grand arch built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary. It’s a huge structure, complete with turrets and intricate latticework carved into the yellow stone. Next to the arch, there are steps leading down to the waterfront of the Arabian Sea.

There, under the arch, she and I began pulling our backpacks apart, separating our gear in anger ... Eventually we stormed off in different directions. I was twenty-four and sleep deprived (or so that’s my excuse in hindsight).

That breakup didn't stick. We’d have a daughter two years later. But the memory of that incredible place did stick.

The streets of Mumbai were just coming to life as the sun rose in a big fiery ball casting the entire neighborhood in hues of orange. Down every nearby alley behind the ultra luxurious Taj Hotel, locals were rising from where they slept on the street on flattened cardboard boxes or on rickety string beds. As dawn broke, the fishing boats that were moored on the waterfront were also starting to teem with movement. Fishermen emerged from under blankets on deck and leaned over the side of their boats to wash their faces in the sea. This was where we experienced our first sunrise in Asia, a stunning opening act to a year spent on that amazing and vast continent.

We would spend nearly four months in the magical, complicated, and diverse country that is India: from Trivandrum at the subcontinent’s southern tip to Kashmir in the north, the territorial objective of the Mumbai attackers; from Jaisalmer in the far west, less than 100 miles from the Pakistani border, to Calcutta in the east. We weren’t in Mumbai long. But notwithstanding our own interpersonal melodrama and in spite of stark contrasts of poverty and wealth, on that particular morning Mumbai’s waterfront by the Gateway to India felt like an incredibly peaceful place. Seeing death, explosions, and gunfire over this past Thanksgiving was jarring and profoundly upsetting in a way that felt personal, like an attack on a friend.

Then there is my story triggered by the killings at the Nariman House, the Chabad Jewish community center in Mumbai where the young rabbi and his wife and others were killed ...

Two decades after being in Mumbai, my wife Dawn and I went to visit the Jewish ghetto in Venice, the "original" ghetto, where the word originated. I saw a few Chasidic-looking men walking around, bearded and in black suits and black hats. I thought OK, we've seen the Jewish ghetto. We can go. A young red-bearded and bespectacled guy, one who looked not unlike the rabbi who was killed, invited us through a door off the ghetto’s small piazza into what was evidently Venice's Chabad House. It reminded me of Israel where random religious Jews in Jerusalem on Friday afternoons would ask me, "Are you Jewish?" If I said yes, they'd invite me to their homes for Shabbat dinner. I never went then, secular and resistant 22 year old that I was.

This time, with Dawn’s nudging, we went inside. It was a small study room, lined with books, four or five guys, all reading and studying. One was British, the rest Americans, all in black pants, white shirt, beards and kippas on their heads or black hats. The one guy asked if I'd been bar mitzvah'd. I hadn't, a legacy of my mother's ambivalence about organized religion despite (or perhaps because of) her father the Cantor, my father's gentile background, and their separation right at the age when bar mitzvah training might have begun. Oh, and my mom had open heart surgery around that time. So they kind of had other stuff on their mind.

“Why don't we bar mitzah you now?” the redhead asked me. At forty-five, you can do that, I asked? In effect, he said, we can. So, for the first time in my life, I put on tefillin, that odd set of black boxes, with leather straps that are wrapped around the head and left arm. The young man had me repeat a long torrent of Hebrew prayers which I didn't understand. It went on for a while. But compared to actually learning Hebrew, this was easy. This was Bar Mitzvah Lite.

When I finished, the young man smiled and said "Mazel Tov." He sang and danced with his arm around me. He exuded joy. It was infectious.



As I left the Chabad House, I was no more than a dozen steps outside the door when I broke down in tears. I actually wept. I still don't know why to this day. I hardly became a more observant Jew. Nor do I even feel more identified with that part of my background than I did before. In fact, recently when Obama was asked what kind of dog he'd get his daughters, he said he'd like to get a dog from the pound, "a mutt like me," he said. THAT is what I still identify with, feeling like the perennial mutt, foot in more than one culture, heart and head (in my case) not quite in any.

That European trip ended in Barcelona with my old friend Jacquie, a Southern Baptist raised in Alabama who moved with her husband Jed to raise their children in Spain. She'd become drawn to the Chabad movement in her own spiritual quest and she shared the following with me: "This is related to a Torah passage about the temple, describing in great detail how the temple had to be set up: the measurements of every part, where everything must be, the kinds of material to use, the colors, etc. In the Holy of Holies, where the ark of the covenant lies, there is a fire for the sacrifices. This is the place where the high priest goes to communicate directly with God, to be actually in the presence of God. Then outside in an outer patio, there is also a fire for sacrifices. In the Talmudic interpretation, the Rabbi comments that normally we would imagine that the priest would take fire from the inner Holy of Holies, the place where God is and take this fire outside to light the fire out there. But in fact, it is just the opposite. It is the fire from the outer patio's sacrificial altar which is taken inside to light the fire in the Holy of Holies. What is this telling us? We also think many times that first we have to light our inner fire, work on ourselves, get ourselves together before we can help others in the world, that we are no good to others until we have lit our own inner fire. But the Torah passage is telling us otherwise. It is through our work in the world, through what we do to help others that our inner fire is lit."

I am one who, through my work as a therapist and as a social worker in an urban high school, has spent over fifteen years "lighting fires," so to speak, by helping others in my own small way, in the world of my community. Yet still I have an inner fire that often flickers or dims with doubt. So I'm not sanguine that the Talmudic point of view quite works for me.

Perhaps I need a venue that allows me to light larger fires. Perhaps this blog is a start.

Nonetheless, this spiritual approach of giving to others as among the holiest things one can do is something even my secular self can buy into. It's not limited to Judaism by any means, but it touched me. And I think it likely informed the vision of those Chabad members who place themselves far from home and family, in places where they can light fires outside themselves.

So as images of violence saturated the airwaves over Thanksgiving, I grieved for the dead, wounded and traumatized, for their families, for the locals in Mumbai and for the foreigners (including Alan and Naomi Scherr, the American father and daughter whose photo reminded me of the father-daughter trips Nora and I took together)... and I grieved for these infectiously joyous young Jews whose love of life and community and warmth had touched me deeply. I’m thankful for the people I met in India. I'm thankful for that young man at Venice’s Chabad House.

It doesn't always work for lighting my internal fire, but I'll keep lighting those fires outside me...

Peace.

dani

Spring is here. Winter's coming...

I wrote this the day after the November 4th elections.



On election night, tears flowed. Literally tears. Tears of joy, hope, love. I've been jolted, as most of us have, to radically reexamine the American political landscape and my place in it, historically, today, and for the future.

My earliest political memories are family memories: my mother being "Another Mother for Peace" during the Vietnam War. Or my father conducting a memorial concert at Yale for the students killed at Kent State. And, as my mother cut my hair in the kitchen when I was seven, we heard on the radio about the shooting of Martin Luther King. I remember my mother's gasp. By the time I was in college, I was politically active, then in opposition to Reagan. A political lens has colored my worldview and my actions ever since.

A political worldview shaped the father I became. Nora, barely two, was with me at a 1990 Democratic victory party in Minnesota, as another improbable candidate, Paul Wellstone, rose to national office. Tragically, it was just a dozen years later when Nora and I walked together in a peace march to Wellstone's memorial service when she was fourteen. Now at twenty, Nora watched Obama in Grant Park in a crowd of hundreds of thousands. Her home-made shirt read: "Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Obama could run, Obama ran so our children can fly." Her sense of hope and optimism, her generation's faith is infectious. I'm so goddam proud of her, it brings tears to my eyes.

The 2008 presidential campaign will include my five year old son Ezra's first political memories. Before he could pronounce it correctly, he would hear the name Barack Obama on TV or the radio and would excitedly proclaim, "Dad, they just said 'Barack Obama'!" Ezra heard someone on NPR say "I will vote for John McCain" and Ezra snapped back "What? Why would they vote for McCain?"

Last week, as Ezra and I were making the bed, NPR did a story about the skinhead plot to kill Obama and attack a black high school. "Someone wanted to kill Barack Obama? Why?" He seemed stunned. His best friend across the street is an African-American boy. So then came the discussion of how, sadly, there are some people in this world who want to hurt or even kill people just because of their skin color. Or religion. Or sexual orientation. Who knows how much of this he absorbed at age five and how much he'll remember as an adult? But I'll remember. And more discussions will follow.

Madison and Owen, our ten year old twins, will also come of age under an Obama presidency. At ten, they bravely stood up in their conservative rural school district and voted in their school election for Obama against the McCain majority. Madison was annoyed that it took us so long to get an Obama sign. Owen had developed an antipathy for the Bush presidency long before Obama was even the nominee. Children can be so smart.

And as a father, it's good to feel I'm doing something right.

My personal contribution to this election was small. But a consistent refrain of Obama's message is how this victory isn't about him. It's about us, each one of us. Each and every individual one of us who stood up, donated $10 or $25, made phone calls, went door to door... whatever ... each one of us helped make this happen. So I'm proud of my humble little list: Organizing a Barackstar chapter of high school students for Obama (yes, in Jackson, the birthplace of the Republican Party which went BLUE for the first time since Johnson was elected president, 44 years ago), presenting Obama's platform on education for a policy forum, writing persuasive letters to the editor, and helping get out the vote door-to-door on election day. And, of course, the unrelenting distribution and dissemination of articles, essays, photos, videos, jokes, and musings like this.

It just so happens that on the day I was born, February 2, 1961, Groundhog's Day, Obama's mother, pregnant with Barack, married Barack the father. Six months later, Barack Obama was born. Who knows what the Groundhog saw that morning in 1961? But in these early November days of 2008, I'm filled with the image of spring coming soon, of a new birth of hope and progress and peace.

Winter looms, literally and figuratively. The wars, the economy, poverty, and new challenges to equality and freedom like California's abomination, Prop 8.

But spring is in the air. Time to get to work.

With peace and love, hope and pride,

dani