Random Thoughts From Recent Trips, Then Off to My 50th H.S. Reunion

Random thoughts for a May day without rain in the forecast:

Just returned last week from a three day trip to Washington, DC. During a visit to the Capitol, I watched the film about Congress in the visitor center. Imagine my surprise when Dennis Hastert showed up in the film in his role as Speaker of the House. You’d think that a disgraced politician would have been expunged from a film meant to impart the sanctity and importance of our legislative branch of government. Hmmm…..

By the way, the same film showed a cameo of Barak Obama as a senator from Illinois….

Coming back from a visit to our son and his family last weekend, the electronic sign on the Connecticut Turnpike read, “8 miles to next exit, 8 minutes,” which computes out to an average speed of 60 miles per hour. But the posted speed limit was 55 mph. Is the Nutmeg State suggesting drivers violate the law? Hmmm….

Last week I listened to an NPR segment on paid family care leave. The United States is one of but two countries without a paid family care leave program, according to the broadcast. Indeed, many mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth because their jobs demand it or they need the money, it continued. One of the more interesting comments during the discussion was that in 28 states it was said to be illegal to take a puppy away from its mother before eight weeks. What’s that say about our government’s parenting priorities? Hmmm…..

Sometime around my late 20’s or early 30’s my brother Bernie observed that my front hairline was receding. As my father and my maternal grandfather sported shiny scalps, I was not too thrilled with his not-too-subtle tease for which there was no comparable retort as his head was and is to this day a repository of thick hair. 

As traumatized as I was by his observation, I was comforted by my wife’s assurance she would love me with or without hair. Yul Brynner, after all, was her major heartthrob, she said. 

Not to worry, my hairline has not receded these last 30 or 40 years. And, until recently, all of it has remained true to its original brown color. My beard, on the other hand, has plenty of grey and albino strands. A few months ago I noticed greying along my temples. And last week I spotted streaks of grey at the top of my head.

I bring this up because Sunday Gilda and I will attend my 50th high school graduation reunion. Not that I’m in any visual competition with my classmates, but I see no point in ceding any aging effects to any of them. (If you believed that last sentence, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying. Who’s kidding whom? Of course everyone, including moi, will be checking out how our classmates have, um, fared over the years—corporations above and behind the belt, jowls where fresh cheeks used to shine, bald pates where swept back locks once ruled. And why not? we’re 67 or 68, after all.)

I’ve gained some 50 pounds since high school. But on my six-foot frame I’m still gaunt. What of those whose body types were, shall we say, less forgiving than mine? What if they gained 20, 30, 40 pounds or more? I’ll find out in a few hours.

While on the subject of hair, did you see The New York Times article “In Praise of Naturally Curly Hair”? http://nyti.ms/1UVVLDj

It was written from a female perspective but I can tell you that having naturally curly hair generally is not an asset when you’re a man. It works well if you grow an Afro, as I did in the 1970’s. Before then I had a daily bout with unruly hair which I blame on my sister Lee. One of my earliest memories is Lee talking me into letting her do my hair. I must have been around three years old. I remember crying to our mother that Lee ruined my hair and made it curly. Forever. I’ve never forgiven her. 

Time for a new, albeit temporary, feature. During this electoral season, I’ll try to end blogs with a pithy quote about elections, culled from the whowhatwhy.org Web site. Here’s your first witticism: 

The problem with political jokes is they get elected. —Henry Cate, VII

No doubt loyal readers know of whom I would target that quote. 

For those who can’t wait to see all of the quotes, here’s a link: http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/08/15/22-witty-quotes-about-elections/

My Watergate Summer Link

Forty years ago this Friday afternoon before Labor Day, I was sitting in the third floor newsroom of The New Haven Register trying to finish up my Sunday feature story. I don't recall what it was about, but I do remember suburban editor Larry French calling me over to tell me I had been chosen for a special assignment that could only be done later that afternoon.

It was the summer of the Watergate hearings. Gilda watched most of the hearings as she crocheted a quilt we still have (but hardly ever use). I would watch highlights on the evening news. Folksy Sam Ervin (D-NC) chaired the Senate committee. Sam Dash, whose daughter, Judy, I would work with four years later on Nation’s Restaurant News, served as lead majority counsel of the committee. Howard Baker was the ranking minority senator on the panel. The most vocal and righteously aggrieved Republican was Lowell Weicker, the junior senator from Connecticut.

With Congress in recess, Weicker was back home in Greenwich. At the last moment he agreed to sit for an interview, a personality profile.

The newsroom was mostly depleted by early weekend evacuees. Looking over their options, the top editors chose me, a 24-year-old reporter with barely a year of small town reporting on my résumé.

It was a hot muggy afternoon. I drove my un-airconditioned Chevy Vega down the Merritt Parkway to the Round Hill Road exit, made a few turns, and came to the Weicker estate. An heir to the Squibb pharmaceutical company, Weicker had a stately colonial home which, like my Vega, I soon discovered, lacked air conditioning. No a/c, not even a fan to agitate the dank hot air.

We sat and talked for about an hour in the study. Or maybe it was the living room. I sweat onto the fabric of the couch I sat on. I took pictures of Weicker and his then wife Bunny and one or more of their children walking on the property. 

I remember little about the interview except Weicker’s stern admonishment that no one should seek political gain from service on the Watergate committee. He forcefully asserted he would not run for president.

That was my lead. The front page Sunday story was picked up by the Associated Press. My first national story. Seven years later, reacting to the increasingly conservative tone of his party, Weicker sought the Republican presidential nomination. He did not get it. Ronald Reagan did.

Weicker served in the Senate until 1989, losing his seat to Joseph Lieberman. His liberal leanings led him to leave the GOP.  He was elected governor of Connecticut as an independent in 1990. It was during his first and only term of office that Connecticut enacted a state income tax.

About two years ago one Sunday afternoon, while Gilda and I were enjoying one of the best pizzas anywhere in Sal’s on Wooster Square in New Haven, I noticed Weicker, most probably with his current wife, sitting at one of the tables near the kitchen. I resolved to say hello to him, but didn't want to disturb his meal. As we were sitting near the front door, I decided to wait till he was on his way out. 

The encounter never happened. I didn't realize there was a side door near the kitchen. Weicker had shifted passed me again. 

Can Evil Be Contained?

Can you stop a lone gunman? Can you stop a sole terrorist? After evil has been released, can you put it back into Pandora’s box?

Some people ask, how could anyone kill innocent children? The truth is, such depraved behavior should not surprise us. Brutality, senseless and premeditated, is universal. It’s been with us since Biblical times (read the story of Dinah and the slaughter her brothers wrought on the helpless, infirm males of Sechem—Genesis 34). Or Pharaoh’s dictate to slay the first born of the Hebrews. Think we’re more humane in our “enlightened” age? Not if you’re familiar with our treatment of Native Americans. Or Africans brought here into slavery. Or if you’ve followed the individual and collective torments afflicted by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their legions, by Lon Pol, Slobodan Milošević, Yasser Arafat, by drug cartels, Muslim extremists, African warlords who, terrifyingly, arm children only slightly older than those killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School, to kill others. 

It’s not an exhaustive list, just an exhausting one as we contemplate how in the name of religion or nationalism or some –ism that is meaningless to most everyone else, carnage is condoned and, given technological advances, made more efficient with weaponry available to almost anyone, a “modern convenience” unimaginable just decades ago. 

Adam Lanza, by increasing accounts, was a troubled young man who should not have had access to guns, let alone the firepower his mother stored in their home. Adam was not able to conquer our most basic instinct to harm, to inflict superiority over another. Restrictive gun laws won’t prevent another tragedy, though the frequency of incidents might be diminished. They will happen. Too many guns already are out there. Too many unstable males (have you noticed these shootings are never perpetrated by females?) are not supervised and can easily get their hands on guns. It’s ironic that 17 years ago the State of Connecticut shut down a mental health facility, Fairfield Hills State Hospital, that might have housed Adam Lanza in the very community he has shaken to its core, Newtown. 

Israel has shown that while all terrorist action cannot be eradicated a pro-active approach to security can shield citizens from most danger in public places. Perhaps an answer for our school systems, at least for grades K-12, is to have single-entry facilities monitored by an armed guard. Yes, it would be costly (my guess is $50,000 per school building). But would it be more onerous than having to live through another massacre? Are we saying we are prepared to live by an actuary’s calculations that it’s more cost efficient to endure another mass murder than staff a security guard who most likely will never have to engage his protective skills?

The solution is not foolproof. Several times a week I walk into our local high school on my way to instruct students in the English as Second Language study hall. There’s a security desk outside the administrative offices. Once, maybe twice, I have been stopped by the guards. We’re just too trusting a society; 99.99% of the time, it makes no difference. But all it takes for disaster to strike is for the .01% to sneak through carrying a semi-automatic gun stocked with an oversized ammunition clip. 

The gun lobby believes armed deterrence is an answer. It believes all adults should carry weapons, even concealed guns, even on school grounds. I prefer letting trained professionals handle security. It should be a service we are all prepared to fund. 

Newtown Memories

Have you ever been to Newtown? Gilda and I have, she more than I. As pained as everyone is about the unspeakable tragedy that overwhelmed the nation there Friday, a deeper anguish, I believe, may be felt by those who can personally relate to that beautiful, picturesque Connecticut community.

We lived in Connecticut from 1973 through mid-1977. While Gilda was earning her nursing degree from the University of Bridgeport from 1973 to 1975, she spent a five-month semester in a training rotation at Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown. It was a psychiatric center with some 4,000 patients at its peak use. The state closed the hospital in 1995. The 100-acre site was turned over to the Town of Newtown in 2004. 

From our apartment in Seymour, Gilda would drive up to Fairfield Hills on Route 34 alongside the Housatonic River, past the village of Sandy Hook which is part of the Town of Newtown. Weekends, we would sometimes retrace that route as we explored western Connecticut around Danbury and further north, up to Litchfield. Western Connecticut back then was dreamy in its small town, Americana appearance. White colonial homes surrounded well-groomed village greens, at the side of which usually stood a stately Congregational Church, its spire reaching majestically to a blue sky. Rarely did you pass a traffic light. Of course, Newtown and the whole region have changed in the near 40 years since we traveled those bucolic roadways. The last time we visited Newtown was in 1993. Dan’s traveling all-star soccer team participated in the one-day Memorial Day Kickoff Tournament. Among the trophies still housed in his room, I found the jersey patch he received that day.

Like most parents I wanted to reach out and hug my children when they came home Friday. Alas, they are grown and have homes of their own. I talked with them, but it was not the same. 

Swept into the sadness of the tragedy was the feeling of futility experienced by many first responders, including nurses and doctors on the scene and in area hospitals who eagerly waited to tend to the wounded. But only two frail, soon to be lifeless, bodies emerged from the killing field. The medical professionals were told to go home. Eleven years ago on September 11, Gilda waited with other nurses and doctors for the injured to arrive at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Medical Center. They waited the whole day in vain.

This country is in denial. Margaret Brennan of CBS News, who grew up in nearby Danbury, said on CBS-2 Saturday, “There isn’t a gun culture here. It’s one of those small, New England towns you go to to avoid the city, and things like this don’t happen.” But how do you explain that Nancy Lanza had five guns at home, including two high-powered revolvers and an assault rifle her son used to kill 26 innocents in cold blood at short range? 

Guns permeate our society. They are so readily accessible. Remember, the Columbine shooters used guns from one of the parents. We are a culture that denigrates teachers but upholds and lauds the right to carry arms, openly in public and increasingly on school grounds.

Why do so many begrudge teachers better pay? Why don’t we realize teachers are professionals we entrust to mold the future of America? Why don't we realize that when unimaginable horror confronts our children, it is a teacher who protects them, sometimes with his or her life?

Perhaps the most heart-wrenching visual of the entire massacre was not the line of children running to safety, or individual pictures of the deceased, but rather the wooden sign hanging in front of the Sandy Hook Elementary School that simply and invitingly stated, “Visitors Welcome.” No more can such an earnest sentiment be expressed, not in Newtown or anywhere else in America.

Eleven Eleven

Look at your calendar. It’s the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of the millennium.

For Gilda and me it couldn’t be a more auspicious day for, you see, 11 is our lucky number, and by extension so is 11:11 and 11:11:11. It began our first night of marriage in our first apartment in Seymour, Conn., nearly 39 years ago. As we cuddled in bed, we glanced at one of our wedding presents, a digital alarm clock, the type back then that flipped over numbers in the way airport terminals would display flight information. The clock had been a gift from one of my father’s friends from Israel. The clock read 11:11.

Since then we’ve noticed how elevens have intersected our lives. I am 11 days older than Gilda. In 1984, we moved into our current house, 11 years after we married. The street address number is 11. Dan’s favorite NY Giants football player growing up, Phil Simms, wore number 11 on his uniform. It’s the number Dan has always chosen for his sports activities. Dan and Allison started dating 11 years ago. My mother’s birthday was November 11.

Today’s Veterans’ Day, a time to remember all who selflessly devoted their energies and sometimes their lives in defense of our freedoms and those of many oppressed people. Gilda and I won’t forget them, but we’ll also commemorate the special intersection of elevens with our lives together.