Gastronomic Judaism

Our family sailed through the 1950s and 1960s on the wave of convenience foods and fads, but my mother insisted on tradition when the holidays rolled around. Saturday through Thursday we dined on meat loaf, skirt steaks, chicken, and occasional TV dinners. Vegetables came from the can--usually peas and carrots--and we had a slice of melon before the meal in the summertime.

Fridays, in some bizarre reflection of old world culture, mom celebrated "dairy day". I thought only Catholics celebrated that. For us, it meant frozen fishsticks from the box, tuna casserole, or the occasional fillet. I hated Fridays. Sundays, however, we went out to eat somewhere to give mom a break, usually Chinese or Italian food.

Some nights, when the Dodgers were in San Francisco and the game was on the tube, we had pizza or hamburgers or TV dinners in the den and watched the battle in black and white. I tasted my first beer then, when dad offered a sip off of his can of Busch. My parents drank so infrequently it was a treat. Later, it made me confused to think that alcoholism was considered predetermined by your genes since I could count on one hand the number of times I witnessed my parents drunk.

Whatever we ate, my favorite portion was the largest piece of anything. I was a preemie, a scrawny kid that the nurse held in one hand, and so my mother made sure I never went wanting. I usually ended up with whatever she hadn't finished slid over from her plate.

Into her 80s, my mother still cooks spreads for the holidays, getting down the fancy plates and silverware, the goblets and glassware, and the crystal salt and pepper shakers. She opens up the dining room table, adding the extra boards that lengthen it for family, putting down the pads and white linen.

The Jewish holidays are spaced throughout the year, matching up with the seasonal holidays celebrated by gnostic tribal traditions before the formalized Judaic-Christian feasts of spring, fall, and winter. And each arrives with its special symbolic foods and wine. On Passover, the table opened out to seat uncles and aunts and cousins, sometimes a distant relative who strayed to the West Coast. By turns we had Sol and Fay, Shirley and Mort and Naomi, Bobbie and Les, and Jerry and Beth, and when it was a large crowd, my brother and sister and I were banished to a folding bridge table reserved for kids.

My father issued the faith wear, yarmulkes for all who would take them, then he'd sit at the head of the table and work his way through the seder book, taking as long as possible to march through the prayers until my mother scowled and went into the kitchen to bring out bowls of chicken matzoh-ball soup, announcing that the prayers were over.

We ate chopped chicken livers on matzoh, gefilte fish with horseradish, soup with matzoh dumplings, beef brisket, potato latkes with sour cream, asparagus, pickles, olives, and more matzoh, followed by coffee and kosher pastries and cookies that, frankly, tasted like cardboard.

On holidays where we could eat leavened flour, Mom and I would usually drive over to the bakery by Dales to pick up a challah or rye bread. We ate chopped liver on rye with mustard or ketchup. I am decidedly a ketchup guy. And I never refer to it by its gentile spelling, catsup. (Oddly enough, the word originates as ke-tsiap, a Chinese word for fish sauce.) On rare occasions, a relative would mail out a sleeve of Nathan's hot dogs from Coney Island and I'd slather it with ketchup, much to the dismay of my mother, who is a mustard gal.

Whenever I go home, even if it's between holidays, my mother always has some frozen brisket for me to take back on the airplane. When I was in college, I'd go home for holiday meals and drive back with a care package of kosher food and freshly folded laundry. One thanksgiving, I stopped along the long, lonely stretch of Interstate 5 to pick up a hitcher, a scraggly fellow who hadn't eaten in a while. When he got out near San Jose, I gave him a box of matzoh, a glass jar of gefilte fish, and a bottle of borscht (red Russian juice with slivers of beets). I wonder if he left it on the side of the road.

In the mid 1980s, when I was teaching at the University of Illinois, I was invited to a Thanksgiving pot luck and decided to try my hand at baking a challah. It's a braided loaf of egg bread with raisins, onions, and seeds, coated with yolk and baked until the outside has a golden, crispy crust. It's easy to make and it confers great honor on you since it looks like a labor of love. And it should be.

After the first success, it became my dish of choice for pot lucks. For one thing, it was always larger than the turkey, and therefore drew great and astonished praise. And, best of all, there was always enough for everyone. For days, I'd make french toast from the leftovers. I borrowed the recipe from an Eastern European cookbook, sometimes using poppy seeds instead of sesame.

Here's how you do it:

Ingredients

• 2 teaspoons (or packets) of instant yeast
• 3 1/2 cups of pre-sifted, unbleached all-purpose flour (or substitute one cup of whole wheat)
  
• 1/4 cup very warm water
• 4 large eggs, plus 3 for the batter, one for coating the risen loaf before baking
  
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup softened honey
• one onion, chopped, two cups of raisins (optional)
• sesame or poppy seeds
  

Mix the yeast, honey, and warm water in a bowl and let it rise for 15 minutes.

In a separate bowl, add oil, beaten eggs, yeast mixture, salt, and flour...in that order. Mix thoroughly, adding onions and raisins (optional). Form a large ball of dough (if too dry, add a little water); coat the ball with oil and let it rise under a warm cloth for half an hour.

Punch it down, and let it rise again, with a freshly warmed cloth for another hour and a half in a warm place.

Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper and coat it with oil. Divide the dough into one long strip and two shorter strips and let each rise for another 15 minutes.

Lay the long strip in the center, attach the two shorter strips at one end and knead the end into a single piece. Braid the shorter strips around the large center piece and knead the opposite end when done. Paint the top with beaten egg yolk and dot with seeds of your choice.

Put the loaf into a preheated 325°F oven and bake for 25-30 minutes. It's done when a toothpick pressed into the center of the loaf comes out clean. Let it cool on a rack before slicing. You can easily cover it in plastic wrap to schlep it elsewhere. Smile when people worship you. Tear off pieces and butter liberally.

Repeat as necessary.

Shipping Out

In our garage on Gaviota Street you could find a fabulous miscellany of keepsakes to fuel the imagination. Of particular delight was the huge steamer trunk into which my mother had packed for safekeeping trinkets from her marriage. There were salt and pepper shakers from her honeymoon to Niagara Falls, and doilies and tablecloths from an era when she'd decorate the Passover table, photo albums of aunts, uncles, and cousins from a bygone life of comfort in Brooklyn: pictures of sun-kissed relatives frolicking on Brighton Beach or necking in Prospect Park.

I was always drawn to the quartered storage section of the steamer trunk that held my father's war memorabilia. There was an officer's samurai sword and seppuku blade he had collected in Tokyo, Japanese coins in odd shapes formed around a cut-out center, paper money from ports of call in Brazil and the Pacific Islands.

He had assembled a photobook of snapshots of Rio's Sugar Loaf, rising like a dream of happiness from Buenos Aires, pictures of himself--a chief petty officer in a white liberty uniform with jaunty sailor's hat--mugging with his buddies outside a bar on shore leave, a snapshot of him towering over a geisha in her kimono in a Tokyo street, the rubble of the bombed-out city behind them.

My father, to whom I owe my debt of gratitude for the wicked magic of puns and wisecracking humor, wrote a delicious line of parody beneath each photo. Today it's a wondrous keepsake of oxymoronical history told in a montage of wartime snaps tempered by an irony that life would one day in an imaginary future be filled with peace, prosperity, and funny-bones for all.

My favorite: a photo of my father in an outrageously over-sized helmet sitting behind the anti-aircraft guns on the USS Patoka, the tanker on which he served through both Atlantic and Pacific campaigns. He wears a steadfast grimace as he aims the "double barrels-of-trouble" skyward at imaginary formations of Mitsubishi Zeros and suicide planes.

His appended caption: "If the Japs had ever seen this picture, they never would have surrendered."

While I attribute my ever-sustaining love of music to my mother (who played the violin as a child and spun countless records of crooners on our turntable), it's my dad who infused a happy admixture of irony and wanderlust in my veins. The trinkets and lore in the steamer trunk fuelled my lifelong fascination with Japan, with world travel, and with the absolute necessity to carve a wicked pun in the face of mortal combat--real or imagined.

I grew up with my share of plastic machine guns and war toys, marched soldiers across parade grounds I had scraped in the mud outside our garage, played frogman in the Doughboy swimming pool that my folks had erected in the backyard.

By junior high school I had mixed feelings about it all. I hated the Vietnam war, collected my own scrapbook of photos torn from the pages of Newsweek, shots of helicopters ferrying out the wounded after a pointless battle in the Mekong Delta, writing my own wry and cynical remarks about the lies of the Johnson Administration--all remarkable for a 12-year-old. But I still loved military hardware, having been raised in the mid-1950s mythology of peace through might. I loved to pause during the day when then heavy pop and roar of the propellers of a vintage DC3 or Neptune submarine-chaser flew over the playground. I loved the B-36 bomber most of all, with its six rear-facing engines and obscenely long fuselage that accommodated hydrogen bombs.

But in my second year at Granada Hills High School, the U.S. Navy (doubtlessly faced with grim press in the middle of the War) had launched its own public relations campaign, enticing adolescents to join the ranks for a weekend as Navy journalists. The notice came to my high school journalism class and said I could come, armed with notebook, camera, and a best friend, down to the barracks in San Pedro for a weekend tour of duty. How could I refuse?

My chum Matt Garbutt and I took a Navy bus from the Valley to the Depot, racing each other to capture the top bunk in the barracks when we arrived that evening. In the morning, we woke at reveille, attended classes on Navy operations, ate a huge breakfast of eggs and potatoes, and then were shuttled out to the harbor where a mine sweeper waited to take us to sea. Navy photographers took photos of us posing in the open doors of Marine helicopters, walking across the gangplank to our ship, standing with the smiling crew in their blue utility uniforms.

It was a mistake. The sweeper had a wooden hull, to protect it from the magnetic detonation of harbor mines, and so bobbed like a cork on the mild Pacific waves outside San Pedro harbor. Worse, it ran on diesel fuel, belching out fumes that would make even the most hearty soul lean over the rail and puke. In less than a half hour out to sea, I was green and spinning, having chucked my eggs and potatoes overboard, and spent the balance of the "Day in the Navy" rolling in agony in the First Officer's bunk, trying to keep down the saltine crackers he fed me before abandoning me to hours of a steady pitch and roll.

A few weeks later, a manila envelope from the Navy came to my home. It contained a certificate attesting that I had completed my Day, along with a glossy 8x10 photo. Before we left the dock--I had neatly forgotten-- they had taken a picture of me where I sat behind the double barrels of an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the deck. I had pasted my father's ruthless determination across my mug.

At that moment the shutter had clicked, I had been too excited to recall the photos of flag-draped coffins stacked neatly on a pier from Newsweek, the infamous picture of young Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked through the streets outside Trang Bang, the clothes burned off her body by American napalm.

It was one hell of a photograph that the Navy sent in an effort to recruit me.

If the Commies had ever seen that picture, they never would have won the war.

The High Register

If there is anything potentially more embarrassing than, say, the admission of a amorous proclivity for farm animals, it's the confession that I play the clarinet. In the early 1960s, it seems, the clarinet, easily portable and more abundant than tympani or sousaphone, was the instrument of choice for families who had children in Los Angeles County schools. There were three sections of clarinets in band--adding up to more than 20 musicians--compared with the random bassoonist or trio of euphonium players. For a boy who measured his entire life on being mentally and bodily different from his fellows, the clarinet promised little more than anonymity and an opportunity to create screeching sounds that would scare off all sentient creatures with ears.

To wit: in my last year of elementary school, I was issued an silvery clarinet--save for its wooden mouthpiece--that was forged from a single piece of metal. It went whole into its carrying case. I'm sure it was crafted from surplus World War II aircraft parts, soldered and shaped, then had nine holes punched into it for the keys. We stored our instruments in lockers in the music room where other students had a chance to blow into them during the day.

By the time I entered Porter Junior High in Granada Hills, I had graduated to a wooden clarinet, which broke apart into two main sections, along with a barrel, bell, and mouthpiece that you sorted into proper slots in the velvet-lined storage case. It took months to learn how to play it without hitting one of those bone-chattering screeches. The instrument was powered by a slender bamboo reed that you soaked in your mouth for five minutes before assembling the clarinet. Once moistened, the reed vibrated evenly and if you built up an embouchure (training the muscles of your face to clench securely about the mouthpiece), you could avoid unwanted notes that diverted highway traffic for miles.

My father used to ask if I took requests, to which he'd add, "Can you play "far, far, away?"

Whenever relatives came for a visit, my mother (who had been a successful child violinist) trundled me out to abuse them with squeaks and screeches. I was proud--and horrified.

Day by day, semester after semester, I rose to the challenge. With 25 clarinetists in Mr. Schackne's band, it always came down to Howard Goldberg and I. We fought like dogs for the first chair of the section. One semester he'd sit at the top, the following semester I wrested the honors away. We played musical leap-frog for several years, rising to Schackne's challenge to play complicated parts from Ralph Vaughan Williams Folk Song Suite or Otto Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor --a death battle of woodwinds while our band-mates looked on.

In our last year of junior high school, I joined the Porter Polka Dots as principal clarinetist. Russ and Bruce played trumpet and Matt played tuba. We wore white dress shirts onto which we carefully pinned red polka dots cut from construction paper--and green-felt tyrolian hats with feathers. Proud then, I can only look back with horror. We sawed our way through "The Beer Barrel Polka" and other delights.

Following graduation, mom and dad took me on a visit to relatives in New York City. It was an astonishing trip for a 12 year old. We visited Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, Radio City Music Hall, Chock Full of Nuts, Coney Island, and the Empire State Building. But the highlight of the trip was a visit to the crowded district in Manhattan where merchants sold musical instruments. In one store, the clerk showed us a new Buffet clarinet. It was made of rich, brown pearwood and the quick action of the silver keys took your breath away. I nearly died when we walked out, the black leather carrying case in my hand.

But the following fall I entered high school and all would change. I improved my playing, but at the same time, it was clear that the clarinet was decidedly not a sexy instrument. We were listening to "Eight Days a Week" and "White Rabbit" on our .45 rpm records. Moving to saxophone was an option, but really, anyone who was "boss", "bitchin'", or "cool" was studying guitar.

I had a brief flirtation with bass clarinet, a horn more than twice the size of a clarinet with low notes that shook your whole body when you played. Since bands and orchestras only had a single bass clarinet, it was my only chance for distinction, and for a while I played for the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic, rumbling out bass clarinet parts written by Shubert, Mahler, and Brahams. But in a world that orbited about the blazing sun of rock and roll, it simply would not do.

In the marching band, I turned to bass drum, since there was only one of those, and I could wear a kilt at half-time shows. Then, when I graduated and went off to college, I became the drum major, leading the band on to fields at Stanford, Cal, and the Rose Bowl. I twirled a five-foot long mace and high stepped in front of more than 50,000 drunken fans, which made more sense than playing that squeaky clarinet. But it still was not the same as mastering the guitar cords to Disraeli Gears.

For the better part of a half-century, the Buffet Crampon languished in its case, toted about the globe through my many professional incarnations. It found a home under my bed in towns like Fairbanks, Norfolk, Champaign-Urbana, and Tuscaloosa. It hid in the closet up in the Olympic Mountains and near the bustling airport in San Jose. I held onto it through times where selling it would have helped pay a month's rent, or when I thought it would finance a road trip.

I held to the notion that someday it would make sense to take it out and play something. And I was plagued by guilt whenever I recalled the day my mother and father walked me out of that store in Manhattan.

Recently I borrowed a guitar with the idea that I would finally learn the cords to Thunder Road. But my fingers hurt and I could barely eke out a note. I boxed up the guitar and reached beneath my bed for the clarinet case. The cork that lined the barrel and bell had curled off in decay and the pads that secured the tone holes were dry and cracked. It cost $150 to have it tuned up to playing condition, and I brought it home, tapping the case on the seat beside me as I drove.

Reeds are made of plastic or bamboo composites now, but you still have to lay them on your tongue and soak them before playing. I fitted the reed into the mouthpiece and tightened the ligature. My fingers knew exactly where to go, and I started in on Rhapsody in Blue, with that long glissando that rolls way up into the high register as if I was born for it.

I played for a good fifteen minutes before my embouchure collapsed. And I'm proud to say that I didn't squeak, even once.

Marching Orders

If there was anything I feared and hated in childhood more than having to climb the metal ladder up to the roof it was the rare, but impressionable sting of my father's belt. Considering how few chores I was asked to perform on a regular basis, it makes any rant about weeding, clearing the table, mowing the lawns, and taking out the trash cans an awfully telling detail about how well I had it.

But my father lacked--shall we say--essential communications skills when it came to issuing directions, which made every small deed into a fully evolved emotional trauma. On weeding day, he would march up and down the driveway, pointing at the ivy, indicating which sprouts you missed. He'd supervise as my brother and I would descend into shame. We'd pout and toss weeds and cuttings on the driveway and dad would ensure that we'd rake them into neat piles, stuff the piles into bags, and carry them to the street. No matter how you did it, you did it wrong. And dad, former chief petty officer, would make sure you knew about it. "Move out!" he'd say, as if we were shouldering our packs and rifles and making our way up Mount Suribachi.

But the order I dreaded most was the one to climb up that miserable ladder to tend to the swamp cooler. We had moved into the house on Gaviota Avenue in 1963, and my mother and father never had adequate air conditioning until 2003. Homes in the San Fernando Valley were chilled by central air conditioning or by swamp coolers. The cooler unit was a metal box that sat on the roof. Cold water was pumped in and showered down over bales of straw. A fan drew air over the moistened pads and the cooled air would feed into the house. In theory.

Pads dried out, pumps failed, and the cooler would stop in the middle of a 103 degree day and everyone would share the misery. There was plenty to go around.

That was when dad would ask me to head up the ladder and help him diagnose the problem. I was good on the way up. The last rung of the ladder was well over the eave and you could step down onto the roof. The roof was covered with white rocks. I couldn't look down, so I focused on the metal cooler.

I don't know exactly how I developed a fear of heights. Perhaps from my mother's genetic contribution. Once we vacationed along the northern California coast and while my dad drove along scenic Big Sur with towering cliffs over the Pacific, mom turned green and refused to look out the window. (I even took hang gliding lessons to get over my fear of heights, but quit after the instructor killed himself in a wicked dive. It's not flying that scares me; it's the dying part that rankles.)

When we were done swapping out pads or clearing the pump on the swamp cooler, dad would be the first to the ladder and over the edge. Once safely on the drive, he'd hold the ladder and issue his orders for me to descend. If I looked at the top of the ladder, I managed to make it to the side. But if I looked down, it was impossible to step off to the ladder. And the white rocks would slide around, weakening what little resolve I could muster to make the edge.

"Move it," dad would say. "Let's go!"

For years I'd hike the Sierras, the Olympic Range, volcanoes on three continents, stand in the wind atop the Hancock Towers, the World Trade Center, and the Empire State Building. I'd close my eyes on looping roller coasters. I'd fly in small planes and tolerate rolls and stalls. I've survived near misses in heavy commercial jets. Last year, I took the small cable car up the interior leg of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and peered out the slat of a window at the ground below. But little has changed. It's sad to have been trapped in so much angst when you consider I never fell, or came close to falling. It reflects some discredit today to confess to being an adult roof wuss.

Ask anyone in my life and they'll be delighted to recount the many ways in which I am brave. I can say that with utmost confidence.

How Myoko Sakatani Saved My Life

It was the summer of 1969. On August 15, thousands of the Woodstock nation gathered at Max Yasgur's farm for the greatest music festival of the modern era. A month earlier, on July 16, the Apollo 11 spacecraft carrying astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins blasted off for the moon. That same day, I had visited a friend's house in Granada Hills. We had graduated high school just weeks before and we opened a few cans of Old English 800. I got drunk for the first time.

I went home to sleep, the world swirling at a nauseating clip around the bed. Around three in the morning I woke to a blistering headache, took some aspirin, and went back to sleep. The following morning, the 17th, I felt woozy, and still nursed a powerful headache. It was lawn-mowing day, and I was in the backyard with the push mower, running even rows across the grass in the hot sun while listening to updates of the Apollo flight on my transistor radio.

That night I went to sleep with an unabated headache and an odd twinge in my left arm. No matter how I turned in bed, it wouldn't go away. And around dawn, I woke to a suffocating chest pain. My mother woke and telephoned the doctor, who recommended in customary fashion that I take some aspirin and go back to sleep.

But I couldn't sleep, and the pain grew worse. My peripheral vision was flagging too, and I felt like I was descending down an ever narrowing crevasse. My mother got me up and into the Rambler, then we drove for the emergency room.

The doctors took one look at me, wheeled me into the coronary care wing, fitted anti-embolism stockings on my legs, and injected my stomach with a blood thinning agent that burned like a wasp sting. I spent the rest of the day in a blackout.

In the morning, the Apollo astronauts had begun orbiting the moon, and I was far from Earth as well. I woke as a cloud, floating on the ceiling of my hospital room, washed in a purple cloud, gazing from what seemed miles away at my inert shape in the coronary care bed, wires and tubes running out of my body to a bank of machines. Considering the brutality of the pain of the previous day, I felt wonderful. Peaceful. Joyous.

But moments later my mother walked in, the doctor behind her. She sat on the bed and wept. The doctor was talking to her. And at once, I felt as if I were tumbling, sucked down into a whirlpool of graying light, spinning deep into darkness.

The next time I woke, I was back in bed, listening to the beep of the heart monitor, gazing at the dull morning light streaming through the window. The Eagle had landed, and Neil Armstrong was taking humankind's first steps into moondust. I didn't know about that. What I knew was that my chest ached, my head spun, and that I felt very alone in a small room where nurses watched through a plate glass window.

One of them was Myoko Sakatani. She spent hours at my side over the following week, talking softly, reassuring me that all would be well. I was surely the only 18 year-old to ever have occupied center stage at the coronary care unit.

Edwin Zalis, head of the UCLA heart team, was brought in to diagnose the trouble. He said I had myocarditis, an infection of the heart lining. Usually fatal. Cause uncertain. I would need plenty of undisturbed rest. I was lucky, he said, to have been an athlete on the high school track team my senior year, running the hills above campus and strengthening my heart.

Myoko came in and out of the care unit in her white uniform. She held my hand. And when I asked to see my girlfriend she said that there were orders that only my immediate family could have access. I asked again, and she shook her head. The days and eves were a long blur of intravenous meals, bedpan interventions, and powerful drugs. There were other patients in the room now. I recall a man dying in the bed adjacent to mine and his monitor alarm ringing with sharp insistence until the nurses turned it off.

A week later, I had been wheeled out of the coronary care unit into the regular population. Even so, Myoko came to visit. And one evening, after everyone had gone and the halls were dark, Myoko opened the door to my room and led my girlfriend over to the bed.

* * *

I had been released at the end of the month. My father collected news magazines of the Apollo triumph and brought them to my bed at home. As I learned to walk again and build strength, I toured the neighborhood, hand-in-hand with my sweetheart. We watched the throngs at Woodstock on the television.

That year America sank further yet into the mire of Vietnam and my draft number had been called for the lottery. I was chosen 19 out of 365, destined for active duty. But Dr. Zalis said I was in no condition to serve; he wrote a letter to the draft board, and I was excused from military duty. I would go to college in the fall to study journalism at the end of the summer of 1969 when Myoko Sakatani saved my life.

Years later I contacted the hospital to try and find her. But the personnel department reported that she had left the hospital and there was no way to track her. Since then, the hospital itself has closed. But I found my own way. When I look at the moon and think of men walking there, I think of my longest summer and say a prayer of thanks.

Rocked

It began with a bang and ended in a series of distressing whimpers.

The Russians had finally bombed Los Angeles. It was not so much as a deafening boom, but a long tympani roll that gained power, then curled off to the distance in a series of decrescendos. The official report reads like this:

The 1971 San Fernando earthquake (also known as Sylmar earthquake) struck the San Fernando Valley near Sylmar at 6:00:55 a.m. PST on February 9, 1971, with a magnitude of 6.6.

Six-point-six...hardly worth a bother in the arcana of bad hands dealt humankind by our living planet. There have been stronger earthquakes in the Valley's history. The Northridge Quake in 1994 registered 6.7. It damaged my family's home, weakening walls and destroying joists, and my parents were forced to move into an apartment for months while repairs were completed.

But in the dark on this day, in my first semester of college, two minutes before my alarm clock would have gone off--except that there now would be no electricity or water for two weeks--I was lifted from bed, tossed like yesterday's pair of socks against the opposing wall, and then the bookcase fell down on me, raining a small stack of volumes, then more and more like an argument against illiteracy.

The roar had not abated when I crawled across the darkened room to the closet door, cutting my kneecaps on a mosaic of debris. Isn't that what the atomic disaster drill said: crawl to a small space without windows and sit patiently for your skin to melt.

As I sat in the closet, arms braced against the jambs for the inevitable end, you could hear the groaning of the earth as it rolled, the creaking of beams in the ceiling--hundred-pound monsters that could come down on you--glass shattering in the kitchen as cabinet doors opened and dishes cascaded to the floor, and members of my family, in their darkened rooms amidst whatever was truly happening and what their senses led them to believe was going down, screams of "Oh, God, let it stop."

The rolling stopped, along with the loud cry of the earth, and then we made our way in the dark to the front door, stepped out into the morning light that was beginning to rise up over the San Gabriel Mountains. My mother sat on the front step and fished for a cigarette. My father walked to the end of the driveway and, seeing little evidence of why any of this had happened, came back and shrugged. Up and down Gaviota Avenue people came out of their homes in their pajamas and bathrobes, hair disheveled, faces ashen and grim. Dogs, cut loose when the masonry walls of the neighborhood came down, raced up and down the avenue in packs, barking madly, tongues streaming from gritted jowls, their eyes fierce and searching.

The earthquake ruptured a segment of the San Fernando fault zone, a set of north-dipping, high-angled reverse faults along the southeastern margin of the San Gabriel Mountains. It caused more than 10 miles of discontinuous surface ruptures with average displacements of about 3 feet both horizontally and vertically. A strong aftershock sequence followed the main shock and included four quakes in the Magnitude 5 range. The quake claimed 65 lives and caused more than half a billion dollars in damage, including the destruction of two hospitals, two freeway interchanges and the Lower Van Norman Dam. Damage to the dam caused concern that the dam, of the earthen bulwark type, might collapse, in whole or in part. Much confusion ensued as various agencies declared a need for the mandatory evacuation of 40,000 people, or voluntary evacuations of various portions of the San Fernando Valley below the dam. This depended on which agency was consulted, and often the evacuees were not able to be informed of the status of an evacuation in a timely manner, often returning home just as the police arrived to notify them of a new evacuation order, or evacuating at a moment when officials decided not to evacuate. Communication was made difficult by disruption of telephone, water, and electrical service.

Twenty minutes, a half hour after the quake, we had our first aftershock where we stood in the driveway waiting for the sun to warm us up. I was sitting on the hood of my dad's Dodge and it fell beneath me, then bounced back up, and kept bouncing for half a minute. There would be two week's of these, spacing themselves out, diminishing in strength, but their unpredictable intrusions at all hours made sleep nearly impossible. With each, you experienced the trauma of the first blow that morning.

It took a while for the police to send a motorcycle down Gaviota. The officer spoke into his handset as he drove along slowly, advising us to get in our cars and drive south--preferably out of the San Fernando Valley entirely. By now it was fully light and people went back into their shattered homes to gather their belongings. If the quake had lasted two seconds longer, there would have been no motorcycle; there would have been the thunder of waves, then silence.

It was hard to think of leaving in such a hurry, but we were terrified of the consequences of remaining. There was no power in the house; it was strewn with wreckage; and somehow water from the backyard swimming pool ended up in the living room.

There have been stronger earthquakes in the Valley's history. The Northridge Quake in 1994 registered 6.7. It damaged my family's home, weakening walls and destroying joists, and they had to move into an apartment for months while repairs were completed.

But this was our first quake, and as we found flashlights and searched for essentials to pack into the car. The second of the four-successive 5.0 aftershocks rocked us again and as we dropped our lights, we were plunged into darkness again.

I was in my first semester of college, so it was important to me to pack my books, in addition to my toiletries and a few days' change of clothes. My parents and siblings packed their own satchels.

Moments later we walked back into the sunlight and put our belongings in the trunk of the Dodge. As we backed out of the drive, you could see everyone in the neighborhood--up and down Gaviota--lugging their essentials to their cars. Apparently I was the only one taking books. People carried huge televisions, armloads of rifles, cargo boxes the size of pirate's chests, skiis, power tools.... It astonished me how many of my neighbors owned rifles.

Even as rescue and firefighting efforts continued, police arrested three looters in Newhall and reported others stealing form quake-damaged stores in the desert community and sporadic looting at shops along Hollywood Boulevard.

The giant tremor swayed Los Angeles' new forest of high-rise buildings. Jutting Occidental Towers three-building complex has been closed as building crews check for structural damage.

Olvera Street, a picturesque tourist attraction adjacent to the Plaza in the heart of old Los Angeles, is a shambles of collapsed stalls and strewn merchandise.

The quake was so intense it briefly knocked out some voice communications at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, according to a spokesman. The agency said that it lost telephone contact with the Long Beach control tower.

Buildings swayed and cracked from Los Angeles west to Santa Monica, northeast to Hollywood and Burbank, then throughout the San Fernando valley and the Saugus-Newhall area.

Up the street we drove, along the shops on Devonshire where looters had already found the shattered windows on supermarkets and drug stores and were racing out with armloads of food, radios, appliances, whatever they deemed valuable and entitled to steal. People on street corners sold huge jugs of water at insane prices.

That night we tried to sleep without success at my cousin's home at the farthest end of the valley from the damaged reservoir. The morning paper ran a photograph of a small pickup truck that had been crushed when a freeway overpass dropped on it, killing the two occupants. Nine people died in their beds at local hospitals when the walls collapsed. Statues toppled off their bases and three-hundred-year-old adobe walls crumbled at the Mission San Fernando.

Once, during the week, I was allowed back into my home with police escort, to recover my asthma medication, and walked the dim halls strewn with wreckage. In the middle of the afternoon, the house shuddered under the lash of another aftershock and I braced against the walls as they wobbled.

My world had been rocked off its foundation by the power of the earth, the stupidity of its petty residents, and the end of what had been a magical suburban existence just miles from the where they filmed the television shows that portrayed simple, funny, and normal families residing in tidy homes on clean, orderly lanes lined with palm trees and manicured lawns.

Matched Luggage

Hello, I must be going,
I cannot stay, I came to say,
I must be going. -- Groucho Marx

Before all of this happened, I had been a youngster without a heavy burden, without dark sirens of judgment that would lure my heart off course. Why is it that so many of us spend the last third of our lives in search of the first third?

I've heard addicts say that when they took their first puff on a crack pipe, the immediate feeling was so euphoric, then ephemeral, and ultimately elusive that they would spend their waking hours in search of that transcendent 30 seconds. I know for a certainty that I felt that way the first time I took a handful of paper-wrapped sugar cubes from an Italian restaurant and secreted them in my coat for the ride home in my parents blue '54 Chevrolet. The discomfort of riding with unhappy people instantly went away, and I spent the entire drive home along the Ventura Freeway, unwrapping nugget after nugget in search of the first bubble of comforting solitude.

Along the way I became a virtuoso escape artist. Be it ever so humble, there's no place like out of here! Although I added preoccupations with food, drink, sex, drugs, or work as a means of avoiding a world with too many sharp edges, I knew how to disappear without the means of any artificial substance. I could drop through an inner hatch into a fuzzy sanctum where all around me buzzed, but I was secure and protected. In short: I erased myself.

I ran away from home at age 9. I was pissed off and tired of being yelled at, and so I started up Longridge Avenue without a lunch or sweater, headed north on Woodman, and got as far as the hospital when it got dark. Ten miles, maybe. Far enough to know I had created sufficient turmoil, but not far enough to continue without a plan and supplies. There would always have to be supplies. So I let the hospital call my mother.

Years later, after so many wake-up calls, I found that the pain I feared was ancient, tribal, cellular--and that I had already survived it. And here in my latter third of life, it became apparent that the evasions postponed reconciliation, were only preemptive strikes against my own happiness.

But as I said, before all of this, I had lived out in the open. I can almost see it from here. Longridge Avenue. I can see Laurie Finley. We were seven years old, living about four or five houses apart. In between lived the dreaded Mr. Feindish, who would scowl and snag softballs we hit onto his lawn before we could retrieve them. Laurie was a tomboy, although I could make no such distinctions at the time. She was my friend. She evolved from the same soul matrix as I. Loved whatever I seemed to love. And she could hit the crap out of a softball.

I remember four or five friends in my lifetime where the brambles of judgment fell away from the start. I spent every waking hour at home excited about the possibility of heading out to the street to meet Laurie Finley. I spent every moment playing alone in the yard waiting for her mother's station wagon to pull around the corner of Longridge so I could run to meet her.

But eventually my sister was born and the little house we had on Longridge was too small for us. The Saturday before we moved, Laurie Finley's mom arranged a party in their yard so I could say farewell to the neighborhood gang, but I never went. I woke up that morning and my eyes had slammed shut--an allergy the doctor said--and I was in agony.

Years later, after I had a driver's license, I drove back to Longridge and passed by the old stationwagon in Laurie Finley's yard. I did it many times over the years, but never got out and knocked on the door.

The next time I felt that way, I met Matt Garbutt. An only child, Matt was showered with affection and was the most inventive, creative boy I ever met. He could ride a unicycle and play an upright tuba at the same time. We were inseparable. We spent hours wide awake in his bedroom, making up comedy routines and satires that we recorded on reel-to-reel tape. His mom would shout for us to shut up and go to sleep. I couldn't wait to meet him in the schoolyard, at the band room, to work on our sketches. Matt was the only gentile friend at my Bar Mitzva.

But when we entered high school, Matt found a different circle of friends and had little to do with me. "It's because you're Jewish," my mother said. But that was an explanation I had heard too many times upon my failures in the social world. Most of those things happened because they happen to everyone. I followed Matt's career, after he left college and became a symphonic tuba player and conductor. We've never made contact.

In high school I found Dianne Chassman. She was lovely, delightful, gorgeous, an exceptional flautist, and we shared a friendship without a sexual trajectory. You would hardly know it to see us. I would sneak out of bed at 1 am to phone her. She had her own phone! (Not many kids our age did in those days.) We'd trade intimate secrets, share dirt on other friends, spin our separate dreams). After a while, finally, we had our own sweethearts and drifted apart. By then, I was embarking on my middle third of life.

I sometimes wonder why I no longer feel that insatiable pull toward another person, that unbridled enthusiasm for intimacy despite the rough edges. The attraction wanes. Have I been irreparably numbed, distracted by narcissism, made wary by pain I have already survived? My deepest friends today are just like me, it seems. We have matched luggage. We're here, but we're always leaving. We're loving by turn, distracted by struggles, often disappointed, and yet we're all still here, in each other's corner, a phone call away. Now the phone goes with you and sits in your pocket. So why do you sometimes seem so far?

Here I am in my last third, wondering how to return to that open place without fear, without judgment. Is it you? Is it me?

A Man's World

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days and cry over what is happening. Have you noticed: The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer! -- Robert Bly

"The world needs a man's heart" -- Joseph Jastrab

Men do not yearn for talk about men, for we have heard abundantly on this subject most of our lives from women, and we're quick to wince, quick to blame. While mothers, daughters and wives have a determinate angle on us, they do not know the beast from the inside. We work hard, die much too young, or continue to die slowly inside, unappreciated, banishing ourselves to the sofa or, worse, we suddenly find ourselves out in the yard sharpening our blades for war.

(This is the point in the writing where real dudes or the homophobic log off the website, shred the book, set fire to bad news. But read this entire sentence before you roll your dulled, dry eyes: The reason you won't or can't participate in this discussion is because, up till now, you've never been asked by another man to have a true heart-to-heart, man-to-man. This is a different thing than slamming down your shot glass, turning to the other guy, and blaming "the bitch" for your self-inflicted misery.)

You were raised by a loving mother who supported your earliest campaigns and a father who destroyed his body to lay bread on the sideboard. Perhaps even back then, as it certainly is now, your mother worked, too. Mine built periscopes during World War II. In the fifties and sixties it all looked fine from where you sat quietly at your end of the dinner table. Dad went to the shop or office, your mother attended to the care and feeding of your body and soul and -- under best circumstances -- she tried to listen to your exploits, adventures, triumphs and early sorrows. She knew all about empathy, about love... but she did not know YOU. Dad might have known, but he wasn't saying. What you heard growing up was from women and all about your shortcomings: we're not intuitive, we're violent, we smell funny, we're strange, we're slobs, we live to screw, we're snakes and snails and puppy dog's tails.

Even among those boys who were loved and recognized in youth, there isn't a man I know today who doesn't occasionally act like an asshole. It's our nature. It's theirs, too, by the way. But women have felt our savagery historically and paid dearly, so don't ask them to concede the darker part of themselves--or suffer ours gladly. But when men won't talk to each other about our sudden melancholy, our shadowy fears, our loss of financial, spiritual or emotional security, about how it is to live for the two week golf trip, the ownership of the remote control, the ability to find a quiet place where we don't have to respond on cue to feelings we have yet to identify, we let women do our defining for us--and we end up torching the house.

Today there are thousands of decent, angry men in my life, co-heads of households who have lost the generational means of sustaining themselves and their loved ones. They sold cars or fished deep waters. They invested in training for life in a cubicle that folded up on them as when a circus leaves town forever. When I worked as a Fortune 500 web consultant, my firm hired a man to fire half the staff. A professional butcher. He was a scary fellow of innuendo, deflections, and the ability to smile to your face while he locked you out and took your badge.

There are fathers and sons, too, throughout the country, who have lost their land and found themselves numbed as a conduit in a fast-food assembly line; and there are fatherless, inner-city youths who have never understood a thing about their rage except that it flows in torrents of a steady dance beat, boys and men who have watched the upper class accelerate away from them without notice, let alone justice or compassion, or men who have listened patiently for decades now to female rage and felt themselves grow fearful, ashamed, distant and unheard. A ruthless energy runs through the thoroughfares of our cities and towns. It even appears among the fortunate men for whom life is good, where security and friendships seemingly abound, but where talk is sterile and ideas have withered.

So, let us say here and now that YOU are decidedly invited to the discussion. In fact, it's your turn. I have found men who have opened their hearts, expressed their rage, their shame, their frustrations, speaking of and listening to our relative truth without giving into fear or the need to blunt it with drugs, or gambling, or hookers, or endless food buffets and a routine coma in front of talk shows each night. When we give voice to our secrets, we discover that most of us are alike at the most profound levels. We may be violent by nature, but are loving by opportunity, by good fortune, by magic.

We need not take all too seriously the women criticizing our love of sports, or yukking up our friendships, calling them "male bonding", or "doing the guy thing." They never question communion among themselves, and perhaps some are afraid of their men changing, despite their claims otherwise. For when that happens, women will receive the equality they more than deserve; they'll lose their identity as the sole care-takers of inner life. We've abdicated our half of the responsibility, walled ourselves off of our families, our children, our peers, and our wellspring of hope. Most women I know are sick and tired, anyway, of playing mom to grown men, and men, freed by our new connections to each other, can learn to define ourselves precisely as we are: bright, organized, creative, intuitive, fathering, funny, imperfect, growing, wounded or betrayed, grieving, angry, lonely, unfulfilled, or rudderless in a cold culture we helped create and sustain by our silence.

One place to start talking is with our friends and at home, fathers speaking their truths to sons, to their fathers. Another is in the workplace, and through our music, painting, acting, hiking, being men among men. In the 1990s I attended one of those heralded Days for Men conducted by Robert Bly. I entered a hall and passed down a welcome line of every man who had entered the room before me. The 600th man into the auditorium was greeted by 599 men. There were grandpas and sons, fathers and infant boys, gays, disabled veterans, twins, cousins, great-granddads in military uniforms, drumming young men in warpaint, whooping, thundering, applauding, loving men who met to see what it looks like from the inside.

And when a solitary janitor, a woman, entered the foyer for a split second with her broom and bucket, 600 voices died.

Undaunted, I spent the next few years at Men's Wisdom Councils in Seattle, where we drummed, formed talking circles, met in small groups to talk about relationships, right livelihood, being fathers or sons, how to take care of our minds and bodies, how to find our own native spirituality. I sat in sweat lodges with men of the S'Clallam tribe, pouring water and praying over rocks for the right relationship between men and the earth, our forebears, and with our families. I built a sweat lodge in my yard and invited men to invite their friends. I taught my father to hug me--or at least helped him to remember how its done--and I kiss him every time we meet.

There once had been powerful fraternal organizations for men, where they volunteered in service to others, raised money for men's scholarships, or built sanctuaries where they could be equals without relation to their jobs, backgrounds, or income. My dad's group of choice was the Knights of Pythias, an organization founded after the Civil War. Such an odd ring to its name! And when I visited their website recently I was astounded to my core to know that my own father had been a member. The order was founded on theories of Pythagoras. "It was a maxim of Pythagoras that the two most excellent things for man were "to speak the truth and to render benefits to each other." Here is more of what they say about themselves:

"The Fraternal Order of Knights of Pythias and its members are dedicated to the cause of universal peace. Pythians are pledged to the promotion of understanding among men of good will as the surest means of attaining Universal Peace. We believe that men, meeting in a spirit of goodwill, in an honest effort of understanding, can live together on this earth in peace and harmony. We seek those who agree with this belief, and have a belief in a personal Supreme Being, to join our ranks in an effort to reach 'Peace Through Understanding'. "

Many fraternal organizations are dying out today, unable to bring aboard newcomers or reach young males. I volunteered at a Shriners' Hospital for severely burned children and learned that the number of men who join up is shrinking, meaning less funding in the future for such noble endeavors. All along I had been laughing at their silly fez caps to take the time to learn what they were about.

When I had been eight or nine, my father took me to a Russian sweat bath (he called it a schvitz) in the Jewish section of Los Angeles. But I spent the better part of the evening in the company of men, young and old, who sweat in thick clouds of steam, whacked each other's backs with eucalyptus leaves, shared conversations about synagogue, school, work, and wives. I had no idea there was such a place, and I'm sure it's long gone now.

Greening up from our own spiritual ice age won't be easy and the opportunity--the absolute necessity of it--comes at a time when men are surely needed. The ice caps are melting. There's a plan for Iraq. Brothers or butchers, which shall we be?

Our work together is not some new self-help program, for "self" is isolated and isolating, and it needs no help. "Self" rather needs our restraint. Simply, we need men in our lives, to give to ourselves freely without strings. We simply must, because it's up to us.

Strange Fruit

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine." -- James Joyce, Ulysses

As someone who has rarely left food on my plate over an entire lifetime, I was not one to flinch at supper, no matter the shape, color, or texture of food if someone else was eating it. I was a premature birth, housed in one of those little plastic boxes for a while in the nursery, then held in the palm of the delivery nurse, who told my mother I'd always be scrawny. Once I topped 265 pounds.

Consequently, I've eaten most of the odds and ends of living beasts and plants, including blowfish along the Japan Sea, salted herring with onions on stiff bread from a Dutch breakfast cart, blood pudding, kidney pie, and haggis (oatmeal-stuffed sheep stomach) in Scotland, kishke (vegetable-stuffed chicken skin), whale-meat hotdogs in Tokyo (please forgive me), gooey sealfat and nori appetizers (in the Yukon), steamed chicken feet (and other mystery dim-sum), roasted iguana (in the Yucatan), frogs, snails, and an assortment of plants and roots that most people would rather use for compost than shove into their mouth.

Maki-san once fed me kagami mochi, a sticky double-cake of rice that the Japanese eat just after New Year to break open a new experience. My new experience was that the mochi tasted like eating your pillow and chasing it with white paste.

Once, when I was in Athens, I stayed in the Plaka, the oldest section of the city nested in the shadow of the Acropolis. The narrow streets threaded among cozy cafes, jewelry shops, tavernas, and souvlaki joints. Feril cats scampered about or sat begging under the cafe tables. Cats were everywhere. They sat on the steps of the Acropolis, curled for naps in flowerbeds, darted across the tiled walks just ahead of noisy motorscooters. You couldn't take a snapshot that didn't have a cat in it.

Souvlaki is Greek fast food. They serve pork (or lamb) on a skewer or in a pita with vegetables and piquant sauces. I prided myself in finding the cheapest place in the Plaka. Calling it rustic would be a complement. But the souvlaki was most excellent and at nearly half the price in drachmas.

I ate two or three of them at a clip. And continued the practice for several days until a Greek passerby stopped to whisper in my ear that this particular cafe served cat, thereby maintaining its remarkably low price. He said I could wait and see that the meat was delivered fully cooked in a pan to the rear of the joint every hour or so--rather than cooked on the premises. Further, he said, I would never catch an Athenian ordering from their window. After he left I looked to my plate where a scrap of meat lay untouched in the creamy sauce. I didn't wait to see whether the cat was delivered to the rear door. I took the messenger at his word. Yet the souvlaki had been quite tasty.

On a trip to Italy in the late 1980s to attend an international Hemingway conference, I feasted among other academics from around the world at a banquet hosted by the communist government of the town of Lignano Sabbiadoro. We had spent the day touring the Udine reqion, saw the marker on the riverbank where Hemingway had become the first American wounded in World War I, and ended up at long tables set among tubs of iced shrimp, carved melon, and a dazzling spread of cheese and cold cuts. I particularly loved the bright red, thinly sliced beef that had a sweet aftertaste, and went back for more. I asked the server for the Italian name of this savory meat, and she said, "cavallo". Even with my poor Spanish I knew what I was eating. It's tough to say, but dogs have it awfully good.

It's only fitting here to celebrate the rich, Eastern European palate that my mother introduced to our home. Our entrees were so strange, I feared bringing classmates home for supper. We naturally ate organ meats or vegetable soups normally eschewed by my friends. Liver, tongue, borscht, shav (cold spinach soup), matzo-meal pancakes. Mom had a hand-cranked meat grinder into which she fed boiled livers, eggs, chicken fat and onions. Out came a heavenly paste with the faint suggestion of organic chemistry.

Once she put a ground concoction in front of me that vaguely resembled pale, runny chopped liver. It had an unfamiliar smell.

"Spread it on some matzo," she said.

It did not taste good to me. It was something I could not eat.

"Brains," she said.

It might have been the only part of a cow on which I had never dined. Brains.

The Dragons of Rochester

“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

In my family there is a saying that what you don't know won't hurt you.

Here's what I do know: My father was only seventeen when he was called out of school to go upstairs into his father's tailor shop. Grandpa Max was a talented and successful suit-maker; he had cut fabric for New York's renowned actors and politicians; and my father was sent over to identify his body.

At least that's how the story goes, but the story is hardly ever told, and the details change between times and tellers, and I grew up without hearing any of it.

So when I turned 41, I visited my uncle Mort in Eugene and he brought out photos of my grandfather Max and told me who he was and how he died. Until that day, I was told, alternatively, that Max had died when he fell out of a boat crossing out of Russia, that he had disappeared, or that he had lived a long time ago and the details of his life didn't much matter, or my questions about my relatives and their lives were just met with evasions, talk about the Dodgers, the weather, which chores I had failed to do up to snuff, or the grades I should be making.

So here in my uncle's living room I was looking at a photo of a stranger--and yet I knew him indelible intimacy, the curvature of his chin, the odd nobility of his countenance that I had seen in my father's face: the Hyman obstinacy to survive no matter the details, to put your head down and keep charging, the non-acknowledgment of inner agony and suffering that somehow--as water seeks its own course through cracked granite--finds expression in convoluted ways.

I grew up loved and without want of any kind. My parents' home in Los Angeles bears little resemblance to the crowded tenements of New York's Jewish ghettos where my grandparents landed without language and scraped pennies together for sustenance. The home is decorated with photos of my mother's family, of Harry and Tillie, of maternal uncles Manny, Moe and Sol, but none appear of Max, or of Max's wife Libbie.

Today I live in a lovely cottage on a hillside in Northern California. They discovered gold near here. Deer graze in my yard. There's a pond outside my window dotted with geese and the ripples that drift outward in their wake. This morning it is cold and in the still gray before sunrise I can see the bubble of light in the distance where Sacramento is sleeping--where the waxing moon lies in the seat of dark clouds--and I can feel the shadow of my grandfather Max, sullen, the vapor of unspoken grief, the larval fury which gnaws restive on the valley below. If, in Langston Hughes' words, a dream deferred dries up like a raisin in the sun, then a grief deferred grows like a dragon in the earth.

The dragon has consumed some of us. It doesn't always kill you straight off. For some, it chews on us for a while, then backs away and waits patiently in an offshore corner, watching for signs of revival. Some of us have used alcohol and drugs, some prescription medications, some food, some workaholism. The dragon demands homage.

One summer not long ago I was riding in a car with my parents and Dad's niece, named Maxine after my paternal grandfather. Quite out of nowhere, she asked dad how far Max jumped to his death.

"Not far," my father said. "A chair is not that high."

I began to weep in the back seat.

"Were you close to your father," I finally could ask.

"Yes," my father said. "But it's not such a good thing to be so close."

What Maxine and my uncle seemed to agree upon in their stories was that my grandmother Libbie was a piece of work, a selfish, voraciously driven soul without center that preyed upon Max and his family. No one could do well enough, in her eyes.

There are facts and fancy. I've quilted this much together.

Let's say it's 1906: Max is himself seventeen--the same age my father will be when Max ends his life. Max lives in a small Romanian village where the summer heat is stifling and the humidly nearly unbearable. The still, evening air fills with the drone of mosquitoes. If you think of current-day Bosnia, you have an idea what it's like being a Jew in this village. Daily life is depressing for most Romanians, who find themselves in a downward economic slump, but for the scapegoat Jews there is only excruciating fear and torment. Their businesses are burned and homes leveled. And one evening, as Max returns from synagogue, he finds his family in the remains of their home. He is alone now.

And then, here is Max, with nothing but the box of jewels his mother has hidden in the sun-scorched garden, and a lifetime of horror to digest, and perhaps (I like to imagine) the drive of the family survival mechanism which, beyond all emotional disaster can operate at a steady thrum. And there is that winking gem of America and all it signifies across the sea. So Max and his box of treasure are smuggled out in a caravan of refugees--like today's refugee of the former Yugoslavia who sew their jewels into their coats with fishing filament as they are driven by bus to the camps outside the war zone.

Let's say Max lands first in Brussels where he buys passage to England and from Liverpool sails in steerage class on a shipload of Irish immigrants to Ellis Island.

There is a joke in my family about the Jewish man who comes to America in such a vessel. His Eastern European name contains so many consonants the Irish shipmates give up on using it. They give him a name--Joe O'Leary --to use when he lands, but now, dockside, at the table where the first line of immigration authorities interrogate him, the man cannot remember the simple, four-syllable name given him by his fellow travelers. In a fit of despair he says over and over that he has forgotten. The authorities shake their heads and ask again, and over and over he wails in Yiddish, "Shayen fergessen." Finally they understand, and on his immigration form in the block marked name they write, Shane Fergusson. And so Max enters the country as an Irishman without a word to share.

I don't know Max's real last name--before it was changed-- although we natty-haired Hymans are not Fergussons. And the name Hyman, with so much irony it seems, comes from the Hebrew "Chaim"--life! And when I walk the hills here in Gold Country and wonder why Max was never able to carry himself forward into so many truths, I acknowledge that survival itself at any cost is not life enough for me. I've come this far, Max. See the hills here? I've been on glaciers in Alaska in the midnight sun, wrote my name in gold foil in the ceiling of the Golden Buddha in Nara, Japan, placed prayers for our family in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, seen the deep blue of Loch Ness, saw the birth of your great granddaughter Emily and cradled her in my arms as we danced to a recording of "What if God Was One of Us?"

I'm sad that you ran out of options. And I'll never go out that way.

On the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side where Max lands in 1906 at age seventeen and already the owner of a lifetime of horrific secrets that he cannot communicate in the common tongue with Americans. I wonder even if he would even speak of such horror among the Romanians or other Jews he encountered in the ghetto who spoke his language, or whether the slaughter of the Jews by now had become so commonplace that it was the baseline of silence: this is where we all come from but it's passed and now we have this life to lead. Don't talk about it, now put your nose to the grindstone. That's certainly my father's message.

And perhaps it worked, for a while. Did Max already know how to tailor suits with such delicate workmanship? What of my great-grandfather and his skills? Gone into the silence. But this was America now of the industrial new century, the streets of Manhattan awash with merchants, the Babel of Immigrants. You have to leap a lot in the story to get to the next part--but it a leap worth taking, for all that ensues in the next few years is silent, steady toil. And Max learns English, finds work, and by all appearances--since appearances have become so important in America--is a huge success. Bully for Max! He does so well that he buys himself a motorcycle. This, I know, is fact. My uncle was certain of it, but I so wish I had that photo--Max in his leather cap and goggles, revving the throttle on that Indian motorcycle.

Work is going well. So swell, in fact, Max has time on his hands. He decides to ride the Indian up to Montreal, or maybe northwest to Toronto. The road from New York City passes through the Adirondacks, the trees blossoming with fall color, birth and death at once. Past the Finger Lakes he rides, flushed with excitement, and he gets as far as Rochester before he finally gets lost.

It is there, so Uncle Mort had told me, that he asks for directions at a house. A white picket fence frames the yard. The woman in the garden is his bride to be. And from there spools out the history of my father, my family, my brother and sister and their children.

I wish I could know more. But one day before my father's 89th birthday this year, Uncle Mort took his own life. There was a note, as unreliable in relation to the truth as any other speculation here. But here are some facts: after his stint in the Navy, Mort visited our home in Brooklyn. I was a toddler. There are home movies of us in the almost-accurate color of the time. Mort is strumming a ukulele and I am dancing. Other stories have Mort asking me to put a tune on the record player. I am too young to read, but I have associated the look of the writing on the record label with the music that comes out when it is played. If you asked me, I could put on The Jones Boys. "The whole town is talking about the Jones Boys," it went. And so went I, beyond the boys to Shostakovitch and Springsteen, Miserlou, and MP3s.

I have Mort to thank for that--and for my love of words. When I graduated junior high, Mort gave me a thesaurus and invited me to explore the "adventure of words". The blue hardback catalog of synonyms sat at the side of my desk, in all the states I traveled, during my years that I worked as a journalist, at my side when I completed graduate school and taught writing in the Big Ten. I kept it until my niece Jessica, my brother's eldest child, graduated school and I sent it to her. I want her to go on this adventure of words, too. I want her to seek the truth.

And all these words, unworthy as the best may be, are for Ted and Linda, for Emily, Jess, Nathan, and Christian. Dragon slayers.

Glory Days

It's almost as if the two words "Bitter Rivalry" are linked by some symbiotic notion of tribal fidelity, as if there can be no bitterness without rivalry. In the photo, San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal is in the business of whacking the unprotected skull of Dodgers' catcher John Roseboro with his ash-wood bat. Famed hurler Sandy Koufax rushes to aid his battery-mate. It is August 22, 1965, just weeks before the Dodgers would go on to beat the Twins to win the World Series. The Giants were in hot pursuit, finishing two games back. It seems that Roseboro aimed throws back to Koufax so that the balls whizzed past Marichal's ear. The two had words, and Marichal went off like the tightly wound Dominican he was. The fight lasted 14 minutes and Roseboro required 14 stitches.

The number 14 in baseball means everything to me. When I was seven years old, my father took me to Ebbetts Field to see the Brooklyn Dodgers. The "Boys of Summer" featured Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campenella, and Pee Wee Reese. The silent heart of the team, to me anyway, was the first baseman Gil Hodges, who wore number 14.

Gil, the son of an Indiana coal miner, had come up as a catcher in 1943, but shipped out to the Pacific, where he earned a Bronze Star for courage in battles on Tinian and Okinawa. When he came home, he was moved to first base, where he was a stalwart up until he was replaced in 1961 by Norm Larker. Consequently, I never much liked Norm Larker, who managed only 22 homers in four years with the Dodgers.

Hodges was strong enough to lug refrigerators without assistance. His physique and numbers were astounding. He was second only to Snider in leading the league in home runs and RBIs during the 50s decade. He won the first three Gold Gloves for fielding after the award was created, was the first player after Lou Gherig to hit four home runs in a game, and in 1950 became the first Dodger to hit 40 home runs in a season. An eight-time allstar who helped lead his team to six pennants, he was dwarfed by the greatness of other players around him (Mantle, Mays, Snider, Aaron) and has not made it to the Hall of Fame despite leading the Miracle Mets of 1969 to their World Series title as manager.

But I had other reasons for loving him. He was soft spoken, and his name was Gil, the same as my father's. Our initials are the same. And we both played first base. He looks as big as Jackie in this photo of the boys standing in front of the batting cage in Ebbetts.

The morning of my first game, dad drove us across Brooklyn in his gray Dodge and we got to Ebbetts Field in time to watch Gil take batting practice. Aside from the brilliant patch of green amidst the city scape around us--as so many writers remark about in their memoirs--I recall the vivid blue of the uniforms which had been black and white in the newspapers. Sure, there was the smell of the grass, but more than that was the overwhelming bank of cigar smoke, the overtones of roasted peanuts, and a sour aroma of beer in the air.

I knew from my reading that the rivalry between Giants and Dodgers fans during the era was, in fact, bitter, but I had yet to really feel it. Bobby Thomson's home run in 1951 apparently fueled the hatred. That was before I was born. When Giants fans bring that homer to my attention today, I am quick to point out that immediately afterwords, the Giants were destroyed by the Yankees in the World Series. I point out that since both the Giants and Dodgers moved west in 1957, only one team has won a World Series--in fact five of them--and that team wears blue.

But back to Brooklyn.... What I recall most about my first trip to Ebbetts Field was that we sat just to the left side of home plate, about 30 rows back, and the cast-iron pillars that supported the upper deck rose right between the seats and blocked our view toward first base. I remember the warmth of the crowd, which seems to blot out most of the other recollections. It remains my first memory of Black people, the fans who came to see Jackie. I remember the incredible kindness and joy in their faces, and how several made a point of speaking with me, including an older gentleman who sported a smoldering cigar and tapped me on the shoulder whenever the crowd roared. I remember wild music, played by spectators who had brought instruments with them. And a circus clown, mournful Emmett Kelly from Barnum and Baily, passed among the rows making us laugh.

We moved to Los Angeles--the same year the Dodgers moved--so I never lost my team. Dad would take us to the Coliseum and later, to Dodger Stadium to see the new boys of summer. I always rode in the back seat with my baseball glove in my lap. The place was packed whenever the Giants came to town. I hated to leave before the last out, but my dad often would get us up and out the ramps to beat the post-game traffic that tied up the freeways for hours. I'd listen to games on my transistor radio at the beach, in the car, while mowing the lawns, and in my darkened bedroom at night where I could see the grass and red-dirt infield in my mind's eye as Vin Scully carved out delicious swirls of language. We'd sneak a transistor radio and earpiece into synagogue, where the High Holiday services often conflicted with the World Series.

Mom loved to go to the stadium where they had fabulous hot dogs. Maybe they weren't as good as the Coney Island dogs at Ebbetts, but they were and still are tasty. Mom knew the game, too, and the players. We watched every battle televised from Candlestick when the Dodgers played the Giants--the only games on television aside from a weekly NBC broadcast. Dad would order a pizza and we'd set out the tv trays in the den and camp in front of the set for hours. We were watching the incredible stretch run in '65 that Sunday afternoon when Marichal whacked Roseboro on the head. That moment I finally became a Giants-hater.

When I moved to Northern California to go to college in 1972, the Giant's drew so poorly that I could go to games at Candlestick Park and sit among a crowd of Dodgers fans almost equal in number to the locals. The boys won their share of pennants those days, and it was fun to rub it in. One night sportswriter Gary Rubin finagled a press pass for me at Candlestick and I walked around the batting cage, yakking with Steve Garvey and Ron Cey, snapping a photo of Smokey Alston as he stood with his foot on the top step of the dugout in his last year as skipper.

But by the time the Giants assumed their new home in the city, the crowds were almost entirely made of hardened fans in orange and black with profound hatred of all things blue. I made the mistake of wearing my Dodgers jersey. A surly fan wedged his nacho chip into that so-called cheese sauce and dumped it over me.

Outnumbered, I simply found an usher, reported the incident, and had the fan tossed out of the stadium. Revenge was sweeter than the relish on their substandard hot dogs.

Only once have I rooted against the Dodgers. I am not ashamed of it. It was September 6, 1988 in Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium. That year that the Dodgers would go all the way, riding to the World Series title on the backs of Kirk Gibson and Orel Hershiser. The game Cincinnati's Tom Browning of the Reds started against Tim Belcher began late following an evening shower. Tom Chiarella and I sat under the overhang in the upper deck and drank beers, waiting out the storm. Chiarella was an avid Mets fan, but more than that, he loved the game. We thought nothing of driving half a day to see the Mets play in Atlanta. For this outing, we had driven in the rain nearly four hours to Cincinnati, hoping they'd play the game.

The Reds would only get three hits off of Belcher, tallying a single run. But that is not the story. Gibson was tossed out after arguing strikes after his third futile at bat. Hell, they were all futile at bats. Not a single Dodger reached first base.

Browning took his perfect game into the eighth. Wonder about the odds of seeing a perfect game? There have only been 16 of them since Cy Young tossed the first one in 1904. So as the ninth inning rolled to the top of the scoreboard, I rose to my feet, dropped my blue hat on the seat behind me, and began cheering for Tom Browning until I was nearly hoarse as he retired the side. I watched as he was carried off the field and waited around for his curtain call.

I still reside in Northern California, where I am frequently confronted by Giants fans. I heard it especially during the recent dark era in which they joined in some inexplicable, hallucinatory hubris in their allegiance to Barry Bonds. In the face (an apt metaphor) of all evidence to the contrary, they loved their bloated, naked emperor with his artificially-swelled punkin' head.

It's difficult to reconcile my new-found devotion to Buddhism with historical sibling rivalry, especially when the bile arcs through my veins each spring. It's not as if I have not been a loudmouth thug myself. Once I got a row of fans tossed from Wrigley Field after yelling unkind epithets against an umpire who had crossed a picket line. An usher once asked me to remove a tee shirt I was wearing that suggested that the New York Mets should receive vigorous stimulation while bending. Simply saying that I have never touched another fan or tossed anything through the air, save for a beachball at Dodger Stadium on a hot summer's day, is gross rationalization. But growth takes time.

Crowds of fans have been trampled in sporting events around the world. I recall film clips from England where rival soccer aficionados tossed darts into a crowd, maiming the eyes of opposing fans. This is surely setting loose the precognitive, ancient furies of Irish and the English, Hatfields and McCoys, Arabs and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, the Red states and Blues. I don't see a fundamental distinction between beating up a fan in a parking lot because of the color of his cap as flying an airplane into a large office building. It's just a difference in amperage.

There's yet an odd peace in drifting to naive days where I sit in Ebbetts Field, craning my neck for a glimpse of Gil Hodges, that hulking Rock of Gibraltar, who brings Blacks and Whites, Christians and Jews, and all the odd fellows of the borough together where, for a moment, we are the embodiment of the refrain from the mystic Rumi, in which the poet says,

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."

Music Lessons

Mr. Schackne's beginning band class met during the third period. The way we butchered standards like Sousa's "Liberty Bell" and Mancini's "Pink Panther" would make the deaf wince. When Schackne was sick and they called in a substitute, we swapped instruments. I'd hand my metal clarinet to the drummer, and he'd hand me his tympani sticks. We almost sounded better playing unnatural instruments.

At the time, one of the more sadistic junior high fads involved curling a girl's hairpin, pretzeling it around into a wicked tool that--when pressed against the victim--snapped the skin and raised an angry welt. The trombone players found a way of inserting the modified pin into their spit valve. The valve was strategically located at the end of the slide. On a long glissando, the trombonist ran the slide all the way out, popping the loaded hairpin into the ass of any one of the musicians sitting in the row ahead laboring furiously against the logic of the printed music. The flautists usually sat in that row, punctuating the end of the glissando with a agonized yelp. It was, using the parlance of the time, bitchin'.

I have long since forgotten her name, but in reflection I am delighted that she had been the recipient of choice along that vulnerable row of pre-adolescent fannies. Two years before I joined Mr. Schackne's slaugherhouse, my mother had taken me on an errand of some urgency in our '54, powder-blue Bel Aire. There was a huge crowd in the parking lot at Valley Plaza--one of the first large shopping centers in booming suburban Van Nuys--and when we got out of the car, my mother took my hand and we wedged through the throng to a stage that had been erected in front of the row of shops.

Walking with stiff confidence (no doubt owing to a bad back), candidate John Kennedy was making a point of shaking hands, and he took mine for a moment as my mother beamed. I remember the look on her face with greater clarity than I do the man on the stage. Even so, the event is colored more by what happened in Mr. Schackne's music room two years later.

There was a substitute teacher that day and we were grinding out a medley of Christmas tunes for the coming season, when the loudspeaker in the hall cackled to life. It was the principal. Kennedy, he said, had been shot in Dallas and we were to assemble in the schoolyard for directions to go home early. The room buzzed. Some of us were more excited about the prospect of getting out of school than stunned by the news. We hurried to put our instruments in their cases.

In the center of the hubub, the flautist rose with a flourish. She sorted out her dress around her, then proclaimed how bitchin' it was that Kennedy was killed. Good riddance, she said.