A Father's Day Tribute to My Mom

Having just read Timothy Egan’s tribute to his father in The New York Times (http://nyti.ms/SRE4HZ), I considered writing one for my dad. But it occurred to me that when I write about my parents it is mostly about my patrimony. So, with the comment my mother used to make, that without her Kopel Forseter would not have been a father, here's a posting about my maternal heritage.

The second of four sisters and an older brother, Sylvia Gerson came to New York from Lodg, Poland, in 1921 when she was four. Her father, Louis, was a jeweler, successful enough to move his family to an apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx that cost her a boyfriend. With an air of upward social mobility she enjoyed conveying, my mother would relate that the boyfriend stopped calling on her because, he explained to her years later, she had attained an address status beyond his station.

A mutual friend set up my parents. Perhaps the story's apocryphal, but the way she told it, my father fell off a ladder in his store when he first saw her. It wasn't from her good looks. Rather, it was her wild and frizzy hair. They agreed, nevertheless, to go out that Friday night to a performance of Die Fledermaus, a comic opera. When Kopel came to her family apartment he didn't recognize her. She was all dolled up and beautiful. They were married six weeks later, Labor Day weekend 1942.

If six weeks seems like a whirlwind courtship, consider this. For several weeks they were apart because Sylvia went on vacation. During one of their times together my mother garnered one of her favorite stories.

Kopel took her back to an apartment he shared. Speaking Yiddish, his roommate asked if they would like to be alone, to which my father replied, also in Yiddish, “No, this one I am going to marry.” Unbeknownst to my father, Sylvia was fluent in Yiddish.

Their union was also a work partnership. As a full charge bookkeeper Sylvia ran the one-person office while Kopel ran the factory where they produced half-slips and panties sold mostly to chain stores across the country. For a little more than four years Sylvia stayed home to raise their three children. I propelled her back to work with my poor eating and an exasperating habit of flinging peas off of my high chair tray. Funny. Today peas are among my favorite vegetable.

Sylvia taught my brother and me to play ball. She made sure we went to Broadway shows and the opera. She took us to the Catskills. She enrolled us in private Hebrew schools and eight week sleepaway Jewish summer camps. She made our house the center of activity. Friday night poker games with my brother’s friends. Passover seders with as many as 40 participants. Overnight guests that prompted her to call our home Malon Forseter, malon being the Hebrew word for hotel. Her dinette table was never too full. Unexpected guests were met with the standard retort, “I'll just add another cup of water to the soup.”

Though I wrote earlier that my poor eating sent her back to work, truth is Sylvia was a woman ahead of her time. Not just a homemaker and club woman—head of the PTA and active in temple and social groups—she also was an accomplished businesswoman not content or fulfilled in a stay-at-home mother role. Because of their business my parents could not always vacation together. My mother was confident and independent enough to travel to Israel and Europe by herself in the mid 1950s when she was just 40.

These are memories from my youth. As she aged my mother's joie de vivre deteriorated. She chain smoked. She was diabetic. She suffered bouts of congestive heart failure. A little dementia. She had one leg amputated below the knee because of her diabetes. A few years later on the eve of an amputation of her second leg she died of cardiac arrest.

My brother sister and I don't dwell on the last decade or so of her life when she no longer was the vibrant source of our family life. It is enough to know that together with our father she molded us into the people we are today. And we are happy with the results.

Oy, Have I Got Tsuris

Cheerios Are for the Birds: My blood sugar levels have been trending up so it’s time to eliminate as many sweet items as possible from my diet. That means the Multi-Grain Cheerios with 6 grams of sugar are out, regular Cheerios with just 1 gram are back in the cupboard. Only problem is, what do I do with an almost full Costco-sized box of Multi-Grain Cheerios?

The solution has been chirping away all day. The birds have previously shown they’ll eat matzoh, dried bagels and challah, even hard Chinese noodles, so I’m guessing they won’t mind bulking up on M-G Cheerios. They really are beggars, and you know the old saying about how choosy beggars can afford to be. I’ve discovered even the cheapest brand of bird food attracts as many aviators as the more expensive seed. So it’s crushed M-G Cheerios for all, and if the General Mills ad campaign is to be believed, my birds will have lower cholesterol in a matter of days. Of course, their sugar levels will soar as high as they can fly, but the birds get more exercise than I do, so that will counteract the effects of all that added sugar in their diet.


Tsuris Along the Souris: I’ll start feeding them the M-G Cheerios as soon as the lake under their bird feeders recedes. Every time we get a drenching downpour, as we did earlier today, our back and side yards become lakes. We’ve added dry wells for better drainage but they just became another item on the money pit of home ownership. Luckily we French-drained our basement and have a very good sump pump system so we stay dry inside. But the lakes keep us on our toes, wondering if it will ever rain long and hard enough for the water to lap against the first floor of the house.

It’s nothing, for sure, like what the residents of Minot, ND, are going through with the flooding of the Souris River. While watching news reports of their plight, I was struck by the similarity of the pronunciation of the river Souris name to a Yiddish word, tsuris, which means troubles, worries, problems. There’s little doubt the people of Minot have lots of tsuris from the Souris.


Case Closed: The federal government wants cigarette companies to include graphic pictures of the dangers of smoking on each pack of killers. The hope is smokers will see the effects of inhaling and stop, or at least reduce, their self-destructive acts.

My mother was a chain smoker. She even smoked in the hospital, even while recuperating from congestive heart failure, with an oxygen hose draped around her neck. It amazed us she could wangle, or bribe, a cigarette from the hospital staff. Smoking contributed to her partial dementia, exacerbated her diabetes (she had one partial leg amputation and was scheduled for another right before she died of heart failure), and was a major cause of her ill health.

Yet, I have no doubt graphic pictures would not have stopped her from lighting up. She was addicted. What’s more, she would never have seen the pictures more than once, for she placed her smokes inside a red leather cigarette case. Out of sight, out of mind.

I predict a boom business for companies that make cigarette cases. It will be like an updated scene from a 1930s movie, with sophisticated metal or leather cases vying with 21st century smart phones for recognition as the coolest pocket accessory.


Spread the Dirt: There’s an old Jewish custom to be buried with a measure of dirt from Israel in the grave. I couldn’t help but think of that when news reports surfaced of plans to scoop up five gallons of dirt from the ball field on which Derek Jeter strokes his 3,000th hit and sell commemorative ounces of the soil to star-crossed fans (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/sports/baseball/jeters-3000th-hit-will-bring-about-as-many-marketing-possibilities.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=steiner&st=cse).

Maybe it’s me (yes, for all you grammarians out there, I know it should be “I”, not “me”), but I find it rather crazy that anyone would pay hard-earned money for dirt Jeter, or any sports figure, politicians or celebrity of any form, walked on. Maybe if it was water he walked on I’d be more inclined to spring for it, but dirt? Really, people. He’s a ballplayer, not a god.


Heil USA: BMW North America is advertising its support of the USA Olympic team with a slogan “Drive for Team USA.” Am I mistaken, but isn’t BMW a German car company? Are they aware of what BMW North America is doing back in Bavaria? Is the company also supporting the German Olympic team?

Whatever. I find it all rather disconcerting and disingenuous.

Rich People Scrimmage

In the labor dispute between millionaires and billionaires, otherwise known as the scrimmage between professional football players and the National Football League over who will win the right to be richer, it’s hard for some to figure out where to place one’s sympathies.

It might help to keep several points in mind:

To my knowledge, no owner has a physical limitation on how many years he or she can possess a team. Nor has any owner ever risked his livelihood every time he steps out onto the playing field. Players, on the other hand, are like Roman gladiators—sooner, more often than later, their careers on the gridiron (and earnings power) come to an ignoble end.

To my knowledge, no owner ever suffered lifelong chronic body pain from their association with football. No owner ever experienced dementia, or became suicidal, because of repeated hits to the head.

To my knowledge, no owner has ever been dropped by his team because he didn't produce a winning season.

To my knowledge, no player ever uprooted (or threatened to uproot) a team from one city because another municipality promised him the world.

To be sure, players are not saints (even if they play for New Orleans). They can be abusive. Infantile. Spoiled. Selfish. Demented. Petty. Perverted. Predatory. Stupid. Plus more negative traits than I care to list. But they are the “show.” They are the reason fans pack stadiums, gather at bars and make TV ratings soar every weekend.

Owners treat them like interchangeable parts. In many cases they are (even Tom Brady was competently replaced two years ago after he was injured), so there’s all the more reason for the players to try to squeeze out as large a pay and benefit package as they can during their careers.

In a previous blog I related my outlook is generally pro-union. I see no reason to shift that position when it comes to football.

Days to Remember

In a rare convergence of the Gregorian and Jewish calendars, today marks the 29th birthday of our daughter Ellie and the 12th anniversary of my father’s passing. I don’t expect to be around the next time December 16 coincides with the 9th of Tevet. That will be in 2056, when I would be 107 years old.

After dropping Gilda off at the train station, I went to our temple for the morning service (how interesting that when spoken it could easily be misconstrued to be the “mourning” service). This being a Thursday, a brief segment of Saturday’s upcoming Torah portion was read. It described the pending death of the patriarch Yakov (Jacob) in the land of Egypt where he had traveled from Canaan because of famine. My father’s Hebrew name was Yakov, as well. He, too, left his native land, Poland in his case, because of adversity, Nazi oppression.

Like the biblical Yakov, my father twice moved from his original home and country to prosper in new surroundings. Yakov fled Canaan after deceiving his father Isaac into blessing him. He went to his uncle Laban’s home where he worked and reared a family before life there became unbearable. He returned to Canaan and eventually emigrated to Egypt. My father left Ottynia, a small town in Galicia, now part of Ukraine, when he was 16 to become a businessman in the Free City of Danzig (now called Gdansk) before emigrating in 1939, roughly half a year before Hitler invaded Poland.

The Torah reading begins by stating, “The days of Yakov, the years of his life, were a hundred forty and seven years.” But the Hebrew phrase “the years of his life” (“shenai chayav”) can be read to have another meaning, much the way “the morning/mourning service” could be heard in different contexts. The second interpretation of the sentence could be, “the days of Yakov, his two lives, were a hundred forty and seven years.”

It could be said Yakov lived two lives, one in Canaan, one in other lands; one before his beloved wife Rachel died and her first son Joseph is seemingly lost to him, one after he is reunited with Joseph; one before the famine, one life after, in Egypt.

My father lived two lives, one in Poland, one in the United States; one before his family was killed in the Holocaust, one after he was reunited with the only member of his immediate family to survive, his brother, Willy; one in business and another in social action for charitable and civic associations; one in full embrace of family and life’s graces and benefits, the other mired in the darkness of dementia that dimmed the last few of his near 88 years.

Like so many of his contemporaries, my father did not dwell on the past. He rarely spoke about conditions in Ottynia and Danzig. He focused on the present and future.

I had intended to write more about my father and his granddaughter, Ellie, but in the middle of this exercise stopped to read an email from a friend serendipitously about this week’s Torah reading. It contained the following message from a rabbinic commentary:

“What is the connection between grandchildren and peace? Surely this, that those who think about grandchildren care about the future, and those who think about the future make peace. It is those who constantly think of the past, of slights and humiliations and revenge, (who) make war.”

My father started off as a great grandfather. But age, infirmity and distance stripped him of his inclination and ability to interact meaningfully with his seven grandchildren. For now, Gilda and I have one grandchild. Finley will be visiting this weekend with his parents. Ellie will join us. It will be a most wonderful, cherished time.

What's Bugging Me

I hate bugs.

As much as I enjoy the warmth of spring, I hate that it also means the revival of my lifelong battle with bugs—big bugs, little bugs, multi-legged bugs, bugs that fly, that crawl, that slither.

As they do most years at this time, large, black ants started showing up inside our home. I’ve already blotted out half a dozen of them, but then I got to wondering, if I kill these obvious scouts of the colony, am I undermining the effectiveness of the ant killing systems I’ve laid down in strategic locations throughout our house? After all, the principle behind the Combat Ant Killing System, to quote the promotional copy, is that it is “the better way to kill ants because ants carry the bait back to the colony to destroy queen and other ants.”

You can’t carry the bait back if you’ve been squashed. The queen will continue to send out scouts until at least one returns. So as I await the next confrontation with an ant, should I be faithful to my long-held anti-bug precept, “Out of sight, out of mind, but once in sight, you’re history (to the best of my ability to crush you),” or should I take a more measured approach?


Woody’s Friends: Like clockwork, the rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat noise pierces each morning’s serenity at 8. Short staccato bursts from our local woodpecker population. If I were sleeping, I’d really be upset. With rare exceptions I’ve not been able to sleep past 7-7:30, so the woodpeckers haven’t startled me awake .

I can’t quite make out where they are pecking, on a neighbor’s property or ours. Though it sometimes sounds as if they’re attacking our home, I haven’t seen any signs, that is, holes, from their pursuit of bugs hiding under the wood frame portions of our house.

We are hosting a visitor from Israel this week and next. To Tzipi, the rapid rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat sounded like a machine gun burst, an unnerving reminder of home during a trip intended to provide some relief from the pressure of a job counseling trauma victims in the communities near the Gaza Strip where she lives and works. She quickly realized it was not gunfire, but the reminder of her normal reality was made. Yesterday, a text message reported some small arms fire in the area of her kibbutz.


Walking Away: Today’s NY Times reported on a growing societal problem—elderly people suffering from dementia who wander off (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/us/05search.html).

It’s somewhat comical to her children now, but our mother wandered off during a visit to my sister’s some 20 years ago. We had gathered in Los Angeles to celebrate a family wedding. As dinner the night before was being prepared, our mother went outside to smoke. Twenty minutes later we asked Lee’s daughter to bring her grandmother back inside. Lauren came back alone. Grandma was nowhere to be found.

She was around 70 at the time. She suffered from diabetes and other infirmities. Congestive heart failures were routine, which we believe accentuated and accelerated her creeping dementia, yet she still smoked. She could barely walk a block, more only if she knew she could buy a cigarette at the end of a trek.

Though she was nowhere to be seen in the immediate vicinity of Lee’s home, we didn’t think she’d be too far off. She was, after all, barely ambulatory. A quick drive around the neighborhood failed to find her. Calls to nearby friends proved equally fruitless.

It was now almost an hour since she had vanished. We were getting anxious. She didn’t have any identification with her. She didn’t have a phone. She knew virtually no one else in Los Angeles. The phone rang. It was Lee’s mother-in-law, Esther, calling to say she just received a call from Lee’s mother. She had asked a man standing in front of his house if she could use his phone as she was lost.

We never could understand, nor could Mom explain, why she had called Esther and not Lee, how she had even remembered Esther’s phone number. Nor could we understand, nor could Mom explain, how she had arrived at this good Samaritan’s doorstep. For you see, Mom had walked more than four miles before seeking help. All that time she thought she was just around the corner from Lee’s.

Before they passed away, both of our parents suffered from forms of dementia. It is a painful way to lose a loved one, for the loss happens twice, once mentally, followed who knows how many years later by the physical.


Bug Update: Between the time I began writing this blog and now, several hours later, another “incident” transpired. My first instinct was to crush the intruder. But then I decided to gently direct him (or her) to the deadly ant bait. Only, my idea of “gently” apparently does not mesh with an ant’s. I maimed at least one of its legs. It was obviously in what ants consider pain. Or at the very least trauma. I did the only humanitarian thing left to do—I administered a coup de grâce.