Giving Up Some Wisdom

Had the third of my four wisdom teeth extracted today. I'm fine, thanks for asking, but I really wish the blood would stop oozing out of the hole now in my upper right jaw bone.

All in all, the procedure was pretty painless and done quite professionally by the specialist my dentist referred me to. The oral surgeon reassured me he would not do a cartoon-like extraction. That is, he would not press a knee on my chest for greater leverage to yank out my tooth. After numbing me up with several Novocain shots, he rocked the tooth back and forth to loosen it up before pulling it out.

Last time I had a wisdom tooth removed my former dentist did it himself. It was a lower left side tooth. It might have gone easily if one of the roots had not broken off and remained locked in my jaw. The dentist tried and tried to get it out to no avail other than my discomfort. He finally gave up, saying it didn't really matter. He wished me good luck and cautioned that if I experienced any pain I should call the dentist who would be covering for him during his vacation which would begin as soon as he closed his office that day.

That night while sleeping the blot clot over the vacant tooth area dripped out onto my pillow. That morning I started to feel a throbbing pain. I thought it was the aftereffects of the dentist trying to root out the recalcitrant part of my tooth. For the next two days I alternated Tylenol and ibuprofen to ease the pain. Finally I couldn't take it any longer and contacted the on-call dentist. He knew right away I had developed a dry socket, a sensitivity to air on the extraction spot. As soon as he put a slight amount of cement on the site the pain subsided.

My first wisdom tooth was removed when I was in college and followed a script eerily similar to what today’s oral surgeon said he would not do. Our family dentist, a man of about 5’ 8”,  couldn’t get the right leverage to easily pull out the tooth from the upper left side of the jaw. While he didn’t get on top of me, he did bring over a stepstool to get a better angle. I get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.

At one time in my life I toyed with the idea of becoming a dentist. It made my parents happy. But my heart really wasn’t into it. Nor were my grades. D’s in organic chemistry and biology quickly disabused me of the idea of a life of putting my fingers into people’s mouths. I can’t say I regretted that decision.

Lag Ba'Omer: A Time To Be Outdoors

How fitting that today would be a beautiful spring day when lots of families are outside reveling in the sunshine and cool air. Today is the day Jewish children are encouraged to play outdoors. It is Lag Ba’Omer, the 33rd of the 50 days between the festivals of Passover and Shavuot (Lag, in Hebrew letters, is the equivalent of the number 33.) 

As a child I was taught the significance of this day harkens back to the time when Jews were once again rebelling against Roman rule some 60 years after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70 CE and the desert fortress Masada fell in 73. The remnants of the Jews, under the leadership of Rabbi Akiba and the general Bar Kochba, challenged Rome between 132-136. On this day it is believed Bar Kochba’s army achieved a significant, though temporary, victory. To commemorate this triumph children were encouraged to go out into the fields with bows and arrows and to play games.

As youngsters in Brooklyn my brother, sister and I were a little too urbanized to go around shooting arrows on Lag Ba’Omer. Instead, on the Sunday closest to the actual day our Hebrew school, Yeshiva Rambam, organized a family outing to Cunningham Park in Queens. It meant not only a day of fun but also freedom from 9-12 Sunday school.

We'd assemble at the school on Kings Highway and East 31 Street to pile into yellow school buses with our fathers and mothers for the ride to the park. It was one of the few times kids would see their parents dressed informally in public. No ties, no white shirts and, this being the 1950s, hardly any jeans or sneakers. But in their open collar short sleeve sports shirts the fathers looked less formal or fearsome. Mothers wore skirts with bright blouses. No pants. They might have adored Katherine Hepburn, but they were not movie stars with the confidence to challenge societal sensibilities.

Once at the park it was like a scene from an Oklahoma land rush in an old western movie. We'd race across the lush grass to stake out a spot for a blanket, hopefully a small plot of land shaded by the leaves of a tall tree. Then the games would begin. Baseball for mostly the kids from the older grades and their fathers. Organized races for others: Wheelbarrow races. Three legged races. Eggs on spoon races. Potato sack races.

When it was time for lunch we would retreat to our respective blankets. My mother would unwrap cold hamburger sandwiches. Maybe they were meatloaf, though I never recall her ever baking a meatloaf for dinner. Active in her youth, even a horseback rider, mom kind of lost the feel for the outdoors as we grew older, though she did claim to have taught her three children to play ball. Dad surely didn’t. He had no concept of any sport.

A few years before mom  passed away we kidded her that we never barbecued in our back yard in Brooklyn. She disagreed strongly, asserting we would eat tuna fish sandwiches at a table in the yard. That to her was close enough to be called a barbecue.

More games followed after lunch. My father usually napped. On the ride back to the school we would sing “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Or, more than likely for kids my age, we would fall asleep, perhaps dreaming of Bar Kochba smiting the Roman legions.

Reading Some Memories

I don’t remember my parents reading to me, though they must have. Or perhaps as their third child my bedtime ritual no longer commanded their intense attention. I do remember lying in bed with my father as he told and retold stories from the Bible, especially the one about Samson and Delilah. He always made the most exciting parts the times when Samson would trick Delilah and the Philistines into thinking his strength had been sapped. 

Though I can’t recall their reading to me, that’s not to say they didn’t encourage reading on my part. We had a wide collection of Thornton W. Burgess books. With illustrations by Harrison Cady, the stories made animals come to life with all the foibles and strengths of humans. Sadly, my parents did not preserve those books for their grandchildren. Like my comic book and baseball card collections, they disappeared from our home by my late teenage years.

I’m thinking about childhood books with more than a little melancholy because of a beautifully written article in Thursday NY Times by Dwight Garner. “Memories of a Bedtime Book Club” evokes the lifetime pleasure of reading to a child and, if you’re fortunate, passing on your mutual love for a particular book to the next generation (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/books/a-splendid-little-book-club-has-ended-its-run.html?_r=0). 

Garner incorporated 15 recommended books into his article. I can’t say any of his suggestions were part of the Forseter home reading list when Dan and Ellie were young and snuggled next to either Gilda or me as we read, and reread, stories to them each night. We read the same books so often the kids memorized the words. Sometimes, I’d start to drift off while reading. In the stupor before sleep I’d say the wrong words. Quickly I’d be startled back to consciousness by a sharp elbow and Ellie admonishing that those weren’t the right words, that I should read the book the way the author intended. 

Like Garner, we had favorites. Of course, they included Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and other classics like Madeline. But mostly they were books that did not attain cult status, though quite a few, like Wild Things, were Caldecott Medal winners. Here’s a list of 15 Forseter favorites:

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst 

A Special Trade by Sally Wittman 

Boy, Was I Mad by Kathryn Hitte 

Corduroy by Don Freeman 

Could Be Worse by James Stevenson 

Even for a Mouse by Lisl Weil 

Frederick by Leo Lionni 

It Could Always Be Worse by Margot Zemach

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig 

The Horse Who Lived Upstairs by Phyllis McGinley 

The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton 

The Yucky Monster by Arthur Roth

There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon by Jack Kent 

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Who Wants an Old Teddy Bear? By Ginnie Hofmann

Back in 2009 I wrote that our standard gift to newborns and their parents is a collection of our favorite books, some for newborns like Pat the Bunny, but most for when they are toddlers or older. And they’ll come with the following note:

Children outgrow clothing,

They tire of toys,

But the memory of reading 

Books with your parents

Lasts forever.

Boston Memories

I had a hard time sitting down to write this post. I have no desire to trivialize the horror of what happened at the Boston Marathon, the terror that engulfed a great city, the subsequent assassination of an MIT policeman, and the shootout that ultimately led to the death of one of the bombing suspects and the capture of his younger brother. But I am drawn once again by the intersection of events in my life and that of our family with news of the day, so I’ve, reluctantly, pieced together some Beantown memories.

I’ve been to Boston many times, for work and to visit family. My first visit to Boston, to attend the deciding game of the 1975 World Series, predates the ritual singing of Sweet Caroline at Fenway Park. It was not sweet that night for Red Sox fans. They blew a lead to the Cincinnati Reds. The city had to wait another 19 years for its championship rings. 

Our family has walked down Boylston Street where the bombs went off several times. We’ve stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in the Prudential Center that backs up on Boylston. We’ve shopped in the Prudential Center mall. The June before Dan entered Tufts University, we bought him a Columbia Sportswear winter jacket. In truth, it was too big for him (too big for me, as well), but he wanted it and it was on sale. He gave it back to me several years later and I used it from time to time. Last year I gave it to one of Donny’s friends who needed a winter jacket while riding around as a bicycle messenger. 

I think it was during that same June visit that Ellie talked us into taking a horse drawn carriage ride around Copley Square. Her vision—all of our visions—of a carriage ride as a romantic excursion was forever destroyed that night. It’s hard to feel romantic when your olfactory sense is assaulted by the contents of the drop bag behind the horse. We couldn’t wait for the ride to finish.

Dan and Allison bought a house in Arlington seven years ago. One of the restaurants in town we ate in during our first visit was Jimmy’s Steer House on Massachusetts Avenue. She didn’t work there then, but Krystle Campbell, one of the three fatalities of the marathon day bombing, worked as a manager of Jimmy’s for the last several months. 

Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev was captured in Watertown, in the yard of 67 Franklin Street, less than a mile from the Arsenal Mall. Fifteen years ago I spent time at the Arsenal Mall researching a cover story for my magazine. 

Mostly inconsequential links. But sufficiently strong, to me, to have made me identify a little stronger than most non-Bostonians with the utter senselessness of the last two weeks. I’ve left it to other journalists to be more profound about the meaning behind our latest bout with terror.

Superman Is Missing

Did you look up in the sky yesterday? Did you see a bird, or maybe a plane? Did you know Thursday was Superman’s 75th birthday, or, to be more precise, the 75th anniversary of his appearance in the first Superman comic book? 

For those of us of a certain age, and by that I mean those who were around for the first run of the Adventures of Superman TV show (1952-1958), yesterday was a day to engage in reverie about our youth, of dreaming about milk mixed with Bosco or Ovaltine (ok, the latter was Captain Midnight’s sponsor, but you get the picture), and eating Kellogg’s cereal, Superman’s actual sponsor. 

Superman took flight in 1938 and quickly captured the nation’s fancy at a time when evil seemed to be erupting around the world, especially after the United States entered the second world war. Just how pervasive Superman became was demonstrated to me by two films Turner Classic Movies aired last week. In the first, 1943’s So Proudly We Hail, about nurses tending to soldiers in the Philippines before their surrender to the Japanese, Paulette Goddard tells Filipino children a story about Superman. Ironically, the male lead in the movie was played by George Reeves who a decade later went on to play Superman/Clark Kent in the TV series. 

In the second movie, 1944’s Since You Went Away, the character played by Monty Woolley, noting that his morning newspaper was missing pages 9-12, complained, “Where is Superman?”.

It’s a legitimate question given the actions of U.S. senators Wednesday. Instead of showing the type of profile in courage exalted by John F. Kennedy in his book about politicians who took stands for the country rather than their own political gain, four Democratic senators—Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Max Baucus of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota—chose to kowtow to the National Rifle Association in lieu of voting for the best interests of their constituents and the nation. They rejected the idea of expanding background checks before the sale of firearms at gun shows or through the Internet. By comparison, four Republicans stood out for their courage in supporting the expansion—Susan Collins of Maine, Mark Kirk of Illinois, John McCain of Arizona and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. 

Had the four Democrats voted for the measure, the amendment still would have failed. It would have had support of just 59 senators, one vote shy of the 60 needed to beat a filibuster. How shameful that the Senate turned its back on the victims of multiple shootings and their survivors. The clock is ticking. How long will it be before another unstable person kills and maims innocents?

I’m thinking of going postal. Not really. Just thought I’d get your attention to a flyer that came in the mail from the United States Postal Service seeking city carrier assistants in post offices in Westchester County to collect and deliver mail by foot or by vehicle. Don’t you think it would be fun riding around in a postal truck, steering wheel on the right side, or walking a route dressed in shorts with a pith helmet to keep sunstroke at bay? 

As much as I’m intrigued by the notions, I don’t think I’m cut out anymore for disciplined clockwork. I’m afraid I really might go postal if I had to punch a time clock or take abuse from a nasty supervisor or customer. 

News You Might Have Missed: What with all the important news of the last two weeks, including the Korean crisis, the gun law debate, the bombings at the Boston Marathon and the subsequent dragnet for the perpetrators, the explosion of the fertilizer plant in West, Texas, the death of Margaret Thatcher, some stories of import, depending on your point of view, might have escaped your news net. So here’s a couple of items that, regrettably, show the gender gap is narrowing, at least as far as retaliatory behavior is concerned.

Shades of Lorena Bobbitt, a California woman took matters into her own hands and cut off her estranged husband’s penis with a 10-inch kitchen knife. She outdid Lorena’s revenge by throwing the severed member down the garbage disposal. According to the Associated Press, “Catherine Kieu, 50, is accused of drugging her estranged husband's tofu with sleeping pills and tying him to a bed before the attack, the Orange County Register reported.” During her trial which began earlier this week, “The prosecution alleges that Kieu was motivated by jealousy, and that she was angry about her husband's plans to divorce her because he was seeing his ex-girlfriend.”

Okay, that might be an extreme example of a woman behaving badly. But how would you explain this episode? In a confrontation reminiscent of fathers behaving badly at Little League games, two mothers got into it during an Easter egg hunt in Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Once again, we turn to the Associated Press for details: 

According to the Seattle Police Department blotter “one woman reportedly pushed a child aside as her own child was scrambling toward some brightly colored eggs. Police say the two mothers began fighting and had to be separated three or four times. The fisticuffs left one woman with a bloody nose.”

Makes me kinda glad our children never played Little League baseball or went searching for Easter eggs. 

Are New York voters more forgiving or more discriminating than South Carolinians? We’ll learn the answer to that question should disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner choose to throw his hat, and hopefully only his hat, into the mayoral race. 

Will the “junk” tweeter be given another chance, as South Carolina voters have given disgraced former governor Mark Sanford? Sanford won a Republican primary to run for Congress. By the way, in the general election he’s running against Stephen Colbert’s sister. 

Memories From the Mail

Oliver Munday had no way of knowing, no way of knowing his illustration accompanying a NY Times Op-Ed piece Tuesday on the meaning behind Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” would evoke memories of the Nazi extermination of my father’s family in the shtetl of Ottynia, a small town in what is now the Ukraine, but back during World War II was part of occupied Poland.

Munday’s illustration portrays air mail delivery of a letter. It depicts a bird with outstretched wings, wings made to look like jail cell doors, a letter carried in its bill (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/opinion/dr-kings-righteous-fury.html?ref=opinion&_r=0). Among the treasures my father left are four postcards from his family that trace Ottynia’s fate during the war. The first three bear stamps from CCCP, the Soviet Union. The intertwined sickle and hammer symbol of the proletariat  is at the top left corner of each postcard. At the start of the war, Ottynia fell into Stalin’s hands as part of his Polish partition pact with Hitler. 

Soviet stamps and symbol are on the fourth and final postcard. Though the black ink is fading, the postmark is from September 21, 1941. In red ink, just below the middle of the front of the postcard, is the imprint of another official insignia, a bird with outstretched wings, a swastika inside a circle in its talons. Fourteen days later, perhaps even before the postcard arrived at my father’s residence at 148 Van Sicklen Street in Brooklyn, the Nazis killed most of the Jews who lived in Ottynia, trucking them to a mass grave before shooting them. Only his brother, Willy, survived from his immediate family. Their parents, their sisters and brother, and Willy’s first wife and son were killed. The Jewish presence in Ottynia, initially recorded in 1635 but perhaps from many years earlier, ended after more than three centuries.

My father left Ottynia when he was 16 to live and work in Danzig (now Gdansk). He emigrated to the United States in January 1939. As many from his village who came before (and after) him did, he joined the First Ottynier Young Men’s Benevolent Association, eventually becoming its president for many years. Two Sundays ago, the association held its 113th annual gathering. About 30 of us met in Mendy’s delicatessen in Manhattan for a luncheon, less than one-twentieth the number that assembled in the Hotel Commodore in 1950 for the jubilee celebration of the society. 

My father and Uncle Willy (who came to the States after the war) rarely talked about Ottynia. Indeed, nostalgia for Ottynia was not an emotion I would associate with any of the men and women I knew growing up who came from the town. That’s not to say they didn’t have memories of life there. It’s just that, like my father, they preferred to look forward, not backward. They lived in the company of their surviving friends, not the ghosts of the departed.

In Ottynia, my father said he ate potatoes every day. He became so fed up with eating spuds that upon arriving in Danzig he vowed never to eat a potato again. He kept that promise to himself for about a decade until one day a waitress coaxed him into trying some potatoes with his meal. Well, the rest, as they say, is history. He was a meat and potatoes man for the rest of his life. He rarely ate any other vegetable. Just potatoes. Hardly anything green ever graced our dinette table in Brooklyn. 

Though he would return now and then to Ottynia—one of my favorite pictures is of him dressed in peasant pants and shirt, almost like pajamas, lying on the fender of a large car in Ottynia—he'd always go back to the city life of Danzig. 

In my father’s house in the 1950s and early 1960s, the telephone was a necessary evil not to be used for prolonged conversation unless it was being used to communicate with his society brethren.

Ottynia had a very personal meaning to my brother Bernie, my sister Lee, and me. It meant a tight knit group of eight couples that formed monthly floating poker games, men in one room, women in another. Nickel, dime, quarter stakes. I learned how to mix highballs for them. When I was around ten, they would let me sit in for a few hands whenever my mother or father would take a break from the game. It was a lot rougher playing with the women. They took their poker very seriously.  The men would coddle me. The women were after my nickels.

Poker aside, what Ottynia meant to Kopel Forseter was continuity. It meant commitment to family and friends. Ottynia meant helping those in need. It meant remembering one’s traditions and roots. For all its simple peasant-like charm, if I might use that word to describe Ottynia, Ottynia must have had qualities that imbued in my father and scores of others a set of values that served them well throughout the four corners of the earth. What my father learned in cheder (Hebrew school) and in the public school he attended through sixth grade in Ottynia laid the foundation for a successful business and personal life that has extended into his children and grandchildren and hopefully will continue for generations.

  

A Pair of Classics: Westerns and Drinking

TCM Turns into the NRA Channel: I’d like to think there was nothing political about the programming decision Turner Classic Movies made for Monday, one day before the Senate starts debate on a bi-partisan amendment to expand background checks for purchases of firearms at gun shows and over the Internet. 

After a morning and afternoon of Clint Eastwood-Sergio Leone westerns, TCM got down to business—movies with names that would make even National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre mist over in delight: Winchester ‘73, Colt .45, Springfield Rifle, The Gun That Won The West, The Fastest Gun Alive and The Quick Gun. I’m a big fan of westerns, but really, all these shoot-em-ups on the eve of the Senate debate was a little bit of overkill.

By the way, I’m a little confused or maybe just in the dark about the NRA’s objections to background checks and forms of gun registries. I understand opposition to any lists that could be compiled of people who purchase guns. But I wonder, do purchasers pay cash for their weapons or do they use credit cards? Some of these pistols and assault rifles are expensive, so I presume credit cards are used. If that’s the case, data houses such as Acxiom, probably have in their information warehouses the names and addresses of gun buyers along with all the other bits and bytes collected when a transaction is processed electronically with a credit or debit card. If I’m wrong about this, let me know. 

I Used To Be Able To Run Fast, fast enough to beat out ground balls chopped to the infield in our temple softball league. But that was many seasons ago. The new season began Sunday. Despite not practicing during the pre-season, I pitched five strong innings. But when I hit two ground balls I easily could have beat out in my younger days, I barely made it down the first base line. No explosiveness at all, unless you count the pain in my back. 

For the record, we had one bad inning (not while I was pitching). We lost, 9-3, but it was fun, the guys are a good bunch and some have shown marked improvement over a year ago. 

Hey, Get Yer Cold One Here: My desire for ice cold drinks, especially when traveling abroad, apparently has some ancient pedigree. Reading A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage, I discovered that Romans around the year 70 CE liked to chill their white wine during the summer with snow brought down from the mountains, a taste for cold drinks Pliny the Elder found detestable. No doubt Italians who sneered at my request for ice for my Coca-Cola are soul mates of Pliny the Elder.

Rowdy fraternity parties draw condemnation from most even-keeled modern adults, but Standage pointed out that getting together for wine parties was acceptable behavior for ancient Greeks. Indeed, being a teetotaler was frowned upon, according to Standage. Just as today, drinking parties, called symposia, could get out of hand. 

“As one krater (a large, urn-shaped bowl) succeeded another, some symposia descended into orgies, and others into violence, as drinkers issued challenges to each other to demonstrate loyalty to their drinking group, or hetaireia. The symposion was sometimes followed by the komos, a form of ritual exhibitionism in which members of the hetaireia would course through the streets in nocturnal revelry to emphasize the strength and unity of their group. The komos could be good-natured but could also lead to violence or vandalism, depending on the state of the participants,” Standage reported. Sounds a lot like Animal House, no?

Of course, Greek symposia revolved around wine, not beer. Beer was considered too déclassé for anyone of any stature, though at one time in ancient civilizations beer was the preferred drink of kings; the quality of one’s beer reflected a person’s wealth. Beer often was part of one’s wages. For example, written records show the Egyptians who built the pyramids were state employees whose wages included rations of beer. Sorry, fellow Hebrews, our ancestors did not build the pyramids.

Bertha 2: Gilda’s named her new car Bertha 2. She let me drive it over the weekend. I must say, I was impressed. We’ve put on more than 100 miles since picking up the Ford C-Max Thursday and have used perhaps two gallons of gas. Not bad. Not bad at all.