High Holidays 5780: How Terribly Strange To be Seventy

"How terribly strange to be seventy" is a lyric from Paul Simon, who turned seventy-eight last week. I wonder what he thinks about that now. I can tell you, it's not strange at all. It's just what happens when you just get up every morning, as I did this morning, on your seventieth birthday. I didn't just sit on a park bench, with nothing left but my memories. I ran/walked (ran downhill, walked uphill) through my neighborhood in beautiful, slightly-warmer-than-average fall weather.

The past month of Jewish holidays has taken a toll on both me and Joe. I chanted haftarah (prophets) the first day of Rosh Hashana, and Torah the second day, and Torah the morning and afternoon of Yom Kippur. In the Reform movement, today is Atzeret-Simchat Torah, the last day of the holiday period. In between everything else, Joe and I are teaching classes at Osher Life-Long Learning through West Virginia University. He is teaching "Old Testament Rituals-Don't Try These At Home," and I'm teaching "The Great Hits and Albums of 1967," fun for me, but a lot of work. We attended a wedding on the Saturday between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in Alpine Lake, 40 miles east of here, near the Maryland line, and a bat mitzvah in Pittsburgh two days ago. Yesterday, we combined Simchat Torah with the Sunday school, then Joe had an unveiling near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and spoke on a  panel later in the afternoon, followed by a dinner, through Greater Morgantown Interfaith Association. I spoke on a panel at WVU for counseling students Thursday morning, with a priest, a Dakota elder and our local Imam, then grabbed lunch before my own class. We attended a mourning prayer service Thursday night, for the mother and grandmother of congregants. This is in addition to Joe's regular services and my City Council responsibilities. I didn't expect to be so busy in retirement, and I'm sure it's not what Paul Simon envisioned oldness would be.

The kids at WVU asked about my history, and how I came to be religious and believe in God. I told them my story of coincidences in my favor piling up over time, and how I thought Someone had a plan for me of which I was not aware. I got kind of emotional about it all. At the evening service for Rosh Hashana, my attention wandered, and I saw myself as a child with my parents and at Passover seders with my grandparents, aunts and uncles, in Hebrew School and at high school dances, with my first boyfriend in New Orleans, and that time there was snow on the palm trees. I thought about how my grandmother loved me and worried about me when I lived in Miami, and the times I was sick there, about how I came to Los Angeles, my job issues and many career changes. I remembered again all the friends I helped bury during the worst years of the AIDS crisis: Fred and Art, Hal and the others whose names I can't bring up now, all these years later. I remembered how I wanted to meet someone and leave Los Angeles after I suffered a heart attack and my mother died a few weeks later. And then I saw Joe on the bimah leading services and said a quiet "Thank you, God." No one could have predicted fifty years ago that my life would be what it is now.

I still worry plenty about the climate, refugees, Israel, the United States, Morgantown, how long I'm going to live. I don't have any big, immediate worries. Physically, I'm as healthy as can be expected. I've started running, slowly and not far, after thirty-five years of not running. It's  a testament to the heart and asthma medication I'm on every day. Still, there are times when I am just exhausted, and no matter the time of day, I need to stop and go to bed. That happened Saturday, when we came back from the bat mitzvah in Pittsburgh, with a stop at Apple Butter Day at friends' farm in Mt. Morris, near here in Pennsylvania. 

When the kids asked me Thursday about my spiritual practice I told them the main thing is to say "Thank you, God." I do that when I wake up and when I start a meal, and at random times during the day. I extend that practice to being kind and compassionate to people around me (still working on that), charitable and generous in spirit. 

Joe bought me two t-shirts with funny things about cats for my birthday, and we'll have dinner out tonight. I'm speaking to another panel Thursday morning and my class continues in the afternoon.  At seventy, having lived longer than my father, grandfather and great-grandfather in my paternal line, I give thanks for my life today.

This is what 70 looks like

My Turn

In January of 1967, when I was seventeen and a senior in high school, I went with my parents and younger sister to visit my mother’s parents, my Nanny and Poppy, in Queens, in New York City. We lived in suburb of Baltimore, so it was about five hours of driving to get to their house. We were on semester break, a Friday and Monday off from school, and I had an interview set up at Columbia University for Monday. We were going to stop there on the way out of New York.

When we got to my grandparents’ house, we were surprised that my grandfather wasn’t there. He was a teacher in New York City public schools, retired at sixty, and then continued to substitute. The school board told him he could no longer sub when he turned seventy in February. He was furious. A neighbor had been to Florida and suggested to my grandfather that he check out a whitewashed, lakefront condo development, a new thing, north of Miami, and that’s where my grandfather was.

A snowstorm was coming Monday and my parents decided to go back to Baltimore Sunday to beat the weather. My grandmother, who was sixty-nine, not quite five feet tall and didn’t drive, assured my parents that she would get me to the interview at Columbia, and to Penn Station to get a train back to Baltimore.

Monday morning, Nanny and I bundled up. I was sick, but didn’t want to say anything. There were spots of blood in my underwear. We walked up 69th Avenue to Main Street in blowing snow and cold, caught a bus to Flushing, where we took the elevated train to Manhattan, and then a subway north to Columbia. Nanny waited for me while I had the interview.

The interviewer was a skinny guy with glasses and a bad attitude. He showed me the list of “Great Books” everyone had to read, and I said that  it looked interesting. My cousin Eric had gone to Western Reserve in Cleveland the year before, and told me the neighborhood where the school was located was rough, and they didn’t go off campus, leaving him bored at college. When the interviewer asked if I had questions, I asked if there activities on campus. He blinked at me, incredulous, and said “Well, we are in New York City.” The interview was finally over, thankfully. Snow was still coming down when we left Columbia’s all-concrete campus. In my memory, the snow was coming down black, but that was probably just how I felt. We went back to Grand Central, walked the tunnel to Penn Station, and Nanny got me on a train to Baltimore.I slept most of the way.

I stayed home the day after I got back. My Mom told my father about the blood in my underwear. He said “ I bet you thought you had a venereal disease, didn’t you? “ Actually, I was a virgin, still, and did not think that. I figured I had some weird cancer and I was going to die soon. Dad explained that it was my pilonidal cyst, a vestigial tail, common to men in his family. From wiping too hard, it probably got infected. We took a trip to Dr. Checket, the surgeon in Woodmoor Shopping Center near our house, and he lanced it. He suggested that my father shave my butt for me to reduce the possibility of infection. Dad did that twice, but it was too icky for both of us. Even though I went back to school, I felt sick for at least a month after that.

I didn’t get in to Columbia, but I was accepted at Johns Hopkins, an oasis in central Baltimore, where my interview on a warm December day had gone better. The interviewer asked me where I had bought my double-breasted blazer and polka dot tie, and not much else.

Nanny was sick for a month after she got home from Columbia. My grandfather bought the condo, and they sold their house and moved that fall. My mother was glad. She said it had been hard for them to deal with winter in New York the last few years.

I had terrible allergy problems in Baltimore, and they seemed to get worse every year. I would have an asthma attack if I walked from a heated building out into cold weather. At twenty-eight, I moved to Miami, where I became close with Nanny. Poppy had died a few years before I arrived there. I stayed in Miami more than six years. Nanny moved to Baltimore to stay with my mother the last year I was there, and a few months later, I took a job in Los Angeles. After twenty-one years there, I met Joe Hample, a second-career rabbinical student. When we legally married in 2008, I said I would go with him wherever he got a job. After a stint at a prison in far northern California, he was hired at Tree of Life in Morgantown, West Virginia, just over two hundred miles from where I grew up. Luckily, I have better asthma and hay fever medicine than I had in Baltimore forty years ago.

I’m sixty-eight now, and just as my grandmother couldn’t handle the cold weather in New York, I find myself much more fragile than I used to be.This year, it’s often been cold and sometimes snowy. I was elected to Morgantown’s City Council in 2017, and I go to an exhausting number of long meetings in the evenings. I haven’t been well for a month, but I’ve kept going, first with just sniffles, then coughing, which went away, then  came back. Last week, I drove to a City Council meeting in a snowstorm where the highway people had told everyone to stay home, and Thursday, I went to a commission meeting in 11 degree weather.. The cough came back, although I attended services Friday night and a political event before hand. I didn’t sleep Friday night, wracked with coughing. I saw a doctor Saturday morning, who gave me an antibiotic and cough medicine and told me not to go out for four days. People think I am young. I keep going no matter what, and, as a teacher myself in Los Angeles, I sometimes use kid ghetto slang from the 1990s, picked up from my students. I’m not young. I’m just a year younger than my grandmother was on our trip to Columbia. Like her, I want to keep going, but i need to take better care of myself.

Joe and I will probably be in Morgantown a few more years. Tree of Life is likely to  renew his contract next year, and I may run for Council again in 2019. Sooner or later, we will step down. Joe talks about going to Palm Springs, or maybe even Tel Aviv when he retires.I came to Morgantown as a retiree, not expecting to work. What I have to do now is say “No.” I can’t go to a meeting in a snowstorm or when it is bone-chilling cold. It’s hard for me to think of myself as the same age as my grandparents, but there it is. It’s time to accept my frailties and stop pretending that I’m young and healthy.

Panic and Grief

Things have been tough lately for a lot of people. The parents of a friend in California were evacuated from Santa Rosa because of the fires there, and may have lost their house. Many people in Puerto Rico are still without water, food and power weeks after Hurricane María blew over the island. In Miami, where I used to live, the main streets downtown were under water because of Hurricane Irma. And Hurricane Harvey in Houston flooded the city and poisoned the waters nearby when chemical plants were destroyed. A man in Las Vegas shot into a crowd at a country music festival. The whole nation is in crisis.

Then there is the current national administration. The President is clueless and vindictive. He models himself on Vladimir Putin. His henchmen, Mike Pence, Scott Pruitt and Jeff Sessions, are bent on destroying individual freedom, environmental progress, and the voting rights of many Americans. The President threatens a nuclear war with North Korea. That would likely be the end of all of us.

I was elected to Morgantown's City Council earlier this year. I was helped by people who are appalled at the clumsy stupidity and arrogance of our national government. In addition to approving bond sales for redevelopment, tweaking the city's codes and fixing the streets, we have signed Morgantown to the Paris Climate Accords, and will pass an LGBT rights ordinance next week. We are doing what we can to fight fascism in the United States. It looked like we would be attacked by bused-in anti-gay protestors, but so far that hasn't happened. Two weeks ago, while we were worried about this, the President was going to visit Morgantown, to be interviewed by Sean Hannity. Friends of mine were planning protests, and a motorcycle gang said they would come and protect the President. Meanwhile, the whole city would be shut down. I had visions of what happened in Charlottesville happening here in my town.

The President cancelled. He traveled instead to Las Vegas to meet with people injured in the mass shooting there. His party will block any attempt to stop the proliferation of weapons in this country. We are all just sitting ducks.

On a personal level, my life is good. I have a strong marriage; we own a modest house and two aged cars. We travel, and I will be at my fifty-year high school reunion this weekend. Suncrest, the neighborhood where we live, is suburban and leafy, but in the city of Morgantown, where I am the first openly gay man, the first in a same-gender marriage, to be elected to Council.

It's strange that what has most disturbed me this week is not any of the above. Last week, tree surgeons parked down the street from us, and started hacking off limbs  from a beautiful oak tree, still mostly green, and towering over a modern ranch house. At first, I thought maybe they would just cut a few branches. After a day, I saw five or six blue jays in the street by this house. Their nests must have been destroyed. I noted also, that some tree limbs were over the roof of the house, and that it was planted too close to the house. Actually, the house was likely built too close to the tree, probably fifty years ago. They cut the whole tree down. When I saw the workers there, I wanted to scream "Murderers!" at them, like I want to do with people who have NRA stickers on their car.

Maybe it's just that this tree was more visible to me than fifty-eight people shot to death in Las Vegas, or people without food and water in Puerto Rico, or the current EPA allowing the use of a pesticide known to have a negative effect on children's brains.  There's so much outrage over everything this administration has done in just ten months, that I can't process it. Instead I use the fallen oak tree as a means to process my grief and rage over every senseless thing that is happening in my country. That's what I think, anyway.

23 and me

I've had some interest in genealogy going back a while. I knew that my father's parents came from Belchatow (at least that's how we spell it) in Central Poland, and that their town was under the government of Russia when they came to America, although previously it was under Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and even Napolean for a few years.

I attended a Jewish genealogy convention in Washington in 2003. I met some cousins I had never heard about. A woman I met there with ancestry in Belchatow found her and my greatgrandfather's burial sites next to each other in New York City. I found that my father's family had been traced back to the early eighteenth century, when they first took last names. I also learned that my grandparents were not the first set of cousins to marry in that family, explaining our good looks and intelligence, but also our tendency to have bad hearts and immune system problems like asthma and psoriasis.

On my mother's side, I couldn't find much. I knew that my granfather's family was well-known in Europe, that great-grandpa was not born in Kamenetz in Ukraine, where he came from to New York. It's possible that their family had the rare privilege in Czarist Russia to live in St.Petersburg before the czar's assassination in 1881. I haven't verified that. And my grandmother's mother, the only great-grandparent I knew, although from "Russia," her papers from Ellis Island say "Austria-Hungary."

At Osher Life-Long Learning, or OLLI, where both Joe and I taught last quarter, a geneticist from WVU taught a class about DNA testing at what one might find. I signed up for the class and sent a vial of spit and some money to "23 and me" to find out more.

Jews in Baltimore in the 1950s and '60s had a peculiar status. We were restricted to certain neighborhoods, both wealthy (suburban Stevenson) and poor (Lower Park Heights Avenue in Baltimore City). I  went to junior high with kids from parts of Stevenson, and joined B'nai B'rith Youth at that time, where many of the kids lived in Lower Park Heights. Both were great places to grow up.  We lived in a new neighborhood in the early fifties, one that had excluded Jews until the builder of our house decided to advertise in The Baltimore Jewish Times.

We were clearly not African-Americans, who could not buy new houses in the suburbs or go anyplace outside of their neighborhoods. Still, we were excluded from the private neighborhood swim club near us.

I did have a sense that we were not exactly white people. I thought Pat Boone and Tab Hunter were handsome enough in the movies, but it was not until suave and gorgeous George Chakiris in West Side Story showed up (Greek from Ohio, playing a Puerto Rican) that I saw someone I might grow up to look like, except for the tall with long legs and a full head of hair part. My friends in seventh grade. Michael, Lenny and Alan, were all dark like me.

In Los Angeles and Miami, the two places I lived longest as an adult, I fit in better. I spoke good Spanish and could pass for Cuban. They were a majority in the city. In Los Angeles, I could be Mexican, Filipino, Armenian, or more correctly, Russian Jewish. The neighborhood where I lived with Joe from 2006-2010 was a homeland-in-exile for Russian Jews, many of them elderly and almost all of them of Jewish background. I saw them as different, but they spotted me, and I learned a few words of Russian to engage.

23 and me gives you a wealth of data, much of it just incomprehensible numbers, and lists of possible cousins with whom you share DNA. The first two of these, my closet relatives in this system, are my first cousins' sons, one on my mother's side and one on my father's. After that there is a lot of "Anonymous" and people whose names I don't recognize. A few have contacted me, but I can't find a connection by name.

They also can tell you your likely eye and hair color, which I already know, and if you are a carrier for a certain disease or condition, which might be helpful if is one is planning to reproduce.

They can tell you what ethnic group you are from. In my case, I am 97% Ashkenazic, or Jewish from Germany, Austria, Poland or Russia. Not shocking.

The most interesting thing was the haplogroups, data they can get from your parents' chromosomes. These show the branch of the family tree of our whole species that one is on. My father's haplogroup is most likely from Southern Europe, the Near East and North Africa. These people are typically  Bedouins, Ashkenazic Jews and Algerians. My mother's group is from the Near East, North Africa and Western Eurasia. These people include  Saudi Arabs, Yemeni Jews, and Bedouins.

So maybe we do go back to Bible times in Israel. And maybe the Arabs are not different from some of us at all. Perhaps my affinity to people from Iran is more genetic than I think it is.

Race is still an issue. I am perhaps overly sensitive to how I am treated, even by restaurant servers and hotel managers. I've heard from African- and Asian-Americans and from Middle Eastern people that they are looked at differently and with distrust here. It's happened to me, and I think how fortunate I am to not be African-American, and to be able to speak like an Appalachian person (my native Baltimore is not far from here, linguistically). I can pass for white, straight and local if I want my experiences to be easier.

This has become a longer and more complex rant than I intended. What I've gotten from 23 and me is a better sense of where I am from in the deep past. I am still, of course, American by birth and by choice, and Jewish for the time that that has existed, but I get now why I look as I do, and I guess i find comfort in that.

If you are on 23 and me, look me up. Maybe you are one of the thousands of cousins they listed for me.