Category Archives: What’s a man?

Happy Father’s Day 2012

What's a man?

Alfred J. Stern 1906 -1968

How strong you looked standing in the shower,
with your barrel chest, your solid body, your big purple cock.
How weak and boyish I felt, with my puny body and toy weeny.
How ashamed I was when you laughed at my chicken breasts.
How trivial I felt.

But that was before I knew of your pain. Your isolation. Your failed dreams.
You were like a god. A gladiator. Invincible.
The hair on your arms was like a bear.
When you kissed me, your face rasped like a file.
How I felt I disappointed you. I was only a boy, worse, a mama’s boy.
When you didn’t talk to me, I knew it was my weakness.
But that was before I knew of your isolation. Your failed dreams.

I felt you didn’t protect me, because I wasn’t worth protecting.
Didn’t include me because I wouldn’t ever be a man.

But that was before I knew of your failed dreams.
How hard it must have been. Looking like a man outside.
Being afraid to even see your own fear.

I know. I have tried to hide my fear. I have been afraid to look weak.
Trying to show only strength. Thinking I have none. Thinking I am lying.
How lonely it must have felt. Hoarding those fears. Feeling you are alone.
Knowing only your own self loathing. Rejecting your own pain. Your own imperfection.

I know. I’ve lived in my own nest of self hate.
I’ve lived without accepting myself enough to look inside.
I’ve lived alone. Hiding. Afraid.

How weak you were. How afraid. How hard it must have been to pass on your strength. Your teaching.
I love you, Daddy. For your gifts. Fear, isolation, strength. The insight to know the difference.
I love you for your sacrifices.

We are all heroes

Americana, Psychological Musings, War, What's a man?

in our own minds, except that we are not. When I was about 31 or 32, I read The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. It is one of those book with lots of characters and shows the wind- up to WWII from different view points and if you haven’t read it, I would recommend it – although I may be wrong, as I did read it almost forty years ago and our collective sensibilities may have changed – if you like historical fiction. Anyway, a couple of the characters are Aaron Jastrow and his niece, Natalie. They are Jewish – duh! – and in Europe. From almost the beginning of their part of the story, it became obvious – from my view point of looking back on the war – that they were going to end up at one of the German Death Camps.

When I would get to the Aaron and Natalie sections, I would just skip ahead. I couldn’t read all the bad choices they were making; choices I knew that I would not have made. In my mind – at 31 or 32 – I would have, heroically, made much better choices. Now – forty years later – I know that I would not have made those heroic choices of my fantasies. Now I know that I couldn’t read many of those sections because I saw myself in Jastrow’s mistakes.
These remembrances came up when I read a  blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates today. In it, he writes about how easy it is to think we would do something different than what the slave owners and slaves actually did do, if we had lived in the slave society of the pre-Civil War south. It is a constant theme of Coates and was brought up by an article by some fool white guy saying what he would do if he were a black kid being raised in poverty. Read it, really! It goes directly to the question that people who are raised in poverty tend to stay in poverty and should society try to change that or just say, It’s their fault, with all the ramifications that brings.
By the way, the prison camp photo above is one of the camps we – we being the United Sates of America – built, in one of our racist fits, to intern our Japanese citizens during WWII. I want to say that I would have been against these camps if I had been my parent’s age when they were built, but I doubt it.

 

The power and joy of a book

Americana, General U.S. Grant, Psychological Musings, War, What's a man?

One of the nice things about being in the hospital is having time to read. Several weeks ago, Richard Taylor sent me a list of books – he had run into – on the Civil War and that started me reading A Stillness at Appomattox.

Civil War blog

Reading this book has been painful at times, but – mostly – a joy. It is painful because it is paragraph after paragraph and page after page of General U. S. Grant sending men into the meat grinder of battle and a joy because it shows the slow change – with so many acts of grace and horror – of Grant’s Army transforming into a winner.

But the book is primarily a joy because of the power and beauty of the words. It is almost 400 pages of poetry. Here is a paragraph from page 213:

…There had been that dance for officers of the II Army Corps, in the raw pine pavilion above the Rapidan on Washington’s Birthday, and it had been a fine thing to see; and it had been a long good-by and a dreamy good night for the young men in bright uniforms and the women who tied their lives to them. Most of the men who danced at that ball were dead, now; dead or dragging themselves about hometown streets on crutches, or tapping their way along with a hickery cane to find the way instead of bright youthful eyes, or in hospitals where doctors with imperfect knowledge tried to patch them up enough to enable them to hope to get out of bed some day and sit in a chair by the window. There had been a romance to war once, or atleast some people said there was, and each one of these men had seen it, and they had touched the edge of it while the music played and the stacked flags swayed in the candlelight, and it all came down to this, with the drifting dust of the battlefields blowing from the imperfect mounds of hastily dug graves. 

 

 

 

Two apologies….using the term loosely

Americana, Politics, What's a man?

Last week – maybe two weeks ago – Marty Peretz, who is alleged to be a deep thinker, but is really just a racist jerk, and was honored at Harvard this week said among other racist things – and I am not paraphrasing here – Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. On the eve of Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement, by way of atoning, Peretz said  I allowed emotion to run way ahead of reason, and feelings to trample arguments. For this I am sorry.

That's not apologizing or atoning. That is just a cheap cop out. No, I was wrong. Just a I am sorry I allowed emotion to run way ahead of reason. Shame on you, Peretz, you are a jerk. I was glad to see they protested him when he showed up to accept his prize.



This spring Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell made a proclamation that started out

WHEREAS,  April is the month in which the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse; 

At the time, I went on a rant about it and I still feel the same way.

But, now, McDonnell has made a heartfelt apology that started out My major and unacceptable omission of slavery disappointed and hurt a lot of people–myself included,  he went on to say 

Until the Civil War, the founding principle that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights was dishonored by slavery. Slavery was an evil and inhumane practice which degraded people to property, defied the eternal truth that all people are created in the image and likeness of God, and left a stain on the soul of this state and nation. For this to be truly one nation under God required the abolition of slavery from our soil.

Now that is a proper apology, Way to go Governor.

Happy Father’s Day 2010

Americana, Psychological Musings, What's a man?

 

Daddy-1-0029

Last Thursday, I went to see my daddy’s grave. He died 42  years ago and I have only been to his grave a
couple of times – if that is the right word for a filedrawer in a marble wall – but I was in the neighborhood taking pictures for Michele, had some time, and Father’s Day was coming up.

He is at the Gardens of Eternity, a Jewish cemetery, in the necropolis of Colma. The first time I went to see him, I couldn’t find him. When I got to where I thought he was and looked up at all the 2’ by 2’ niche covers with
people’s names on them, I saw my grandparent’s niches, I saw my aunt Minette’s niche; but  not my daddy’s.  I
must have walked around the area 3 or 4 times, looking at every name on every
niche.

I finally found him around the corner from the family. At the time, I wrote, There, around the corner from the rest of the family, was
Daddy. Alone, in this small little
space. It was so sad. Just standing there, looking at my daddy’s
little niche with

Alfred Joseph

1906-1968

Stern

It felt like he was not there; that he was very,
very, gone. I touched his neatly bifurcated name with my
fingers and I felt so alone.  The letters
were cold and unequivocal. 

Last Thursday, I had the same feeling. I was more prepared for it, but I still had the same feelings of loss. I never
really knew my father. I wish I had. He was what we used to call a proud man meaning he was not a person who talked about his inner life. So his fears, hopes, disappointments, and dreams were all unknown to me – and, I think, everybody else. 

Now, I am more than eight years older than my daddy was when he died.