More Alike than Different...

We are all more alike than different. 

Don’t we all want to raise our families in a safe environment with enough to eat and a decent place to live? Isn’t the opportunity to work hard and improve our situation the basis of hope?

Are the words on our most famous statue still relevant? Do we still mean it?
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

In this country, we are all immigrants. Only the indigenous people have the right to say: “Enough. No more!”

Does the dream end for others because we got ours? Who are we to decide that?

I’ve lived in a beach town for 30 years, an immigrant here. The complaints of “too much growth, too many people” have been a constant. Others want the sand, surf and warm weather too. Who can blame them? Do we now blockade the roads? Build walls? Call them animals?

We are all more alike than different.

When we reach out with an offer of help and understanding, when we see ourselves in the eyes of others, when we work together, we are all stronger for it. I benefit when you benefit.

But what of the others? they asked.

The answer came back: There are no others

PKS Reunion

I’m guessing 1988 or so. Judy, Sue, Kenny, and me. Mom and Dad were still alive then, although Dad seemed uncharacteristically frail and quiet at this reunion. All of us had been visiting them in Pine Knoll Shores, NC, a small town on the outer banks, where they lived. That whole area was land that Dad had managed to get the Roosevelt family to donate while he completed the legal work to get it incorporated into a town and then serve two terms as its first Mayor.

He hired the first police and fire personnel who all knew him well.

On that visit though, I realized how poor his health had become. A Harvard scholar and career attorney with his own successful Manhattan law firm, dad was a walking encyclopedia, and a limerick boss, but I had never seen any chinks in his armor before. Always a gentleman, strong, self-assured, we knew he had our backs and those of his friends and partners. Dad had never showed personal weakness, compassion, yes, but never weakness. I know he must have been mortified by the uncontrollable shaking in his hands. A good sport through it all, he posed for pictures as Mom directed him and stood up as long as he could.

Mother was his everything, the absolute love of his life. He would do whatever she asked, including having four children which he was a bit on the fence about until we were old enough for him to speak with us as adults. Then it was great.

Soon after this picture was taken, Dad started to sink into a nightmare of dementia and Alzheimer’s, passing away six years later. A cruel ending for a man who was all about the mind. To my knowledge, he had never thrown a ball or watched a football game, much preferring a NY Times crossword puzzle, a history book, or maybe a little Lawrence Welk bubble music with Mom, his little dog snoring in his lap.

All of that was lost to the disease.

Mother continued on after his death, a smart, healthy, artistic lady who had lived, and continued to live, a privileged life, for another 17 years. Much like June Cleaver, she wore dresses and a string of pearls, even when she worked in the garden.

I don’t think about my father very often. He and I mostly had a handshake relationship, unless we were trading bad limericks or agreeing that The Dick Van Dyke Show was worth watching because Mary Tyler Moore was on it. We both appreciated the fact that nobody did justice to Capri pants better than Laura Petrie.

These days, I often see my father in the mirror. When I can’t remember names, it worries me more than it probably should. I occasionally hold my hand straight out in front of me to assure myself that there is no sign of a quiver.

Carla and I frequently sit on the couch together and watch a show, my little dog snoring in my lap.

We record some of our favorites, but no Lawrence Welk reruns though, some things are best left in the past.

School Days...

Ruth isn’t among the students at top of her college classes, she is the top of her class. This from a girl who never even graduated High School.

Carla home-schooled our daughters, loosely following a state approved curriculum. Actually what they did is called “unschooling”. Ruth did go to public school occasionally though, in and out as she pleased. She even joined the Winter Guard team in High school to be with other girls, twirling flags at football games. But when that ended, she decided that she couldn’t take one more boy dressed in camo gear, driving a flatbed truck with monster tires and a dog cage for hounds in the back. Too much Bubbaville going on, and way too much “sit down and shut up” time in public schools.

She did get her GED though, one of the highest scores in Florida on the reading and writing parts. That was all I wanted Carla to concentrate on with both girls. I figured they could learn anything they wanted from that point on. 

We lived in the woods of Virginia with no TV until Ruth was around 9, so the library was a much used resource.

Now at age 36, Ruth’s experience in sponsoring a wonderful Syrian family over the last two years has prompted her to pursue a degree in Sociology, with an eye on her Masters. She tells me that she sits in the first row, front and center, and waves her hand in the air obnoxiously whenever the professor asks for someone to answer the latest homework question. One professor announced “Will whoever got an A++ on the paper I just returned, please stand up and read it to the rest of the class? Show us how it’s done.” Ruth was the only student above a “C” grade.

She loves it, is excited by the material, and is going to college at the right time in her life and for the right reasons. In my family, education and good grades were everything, but I was a disappointment to my father. Apparently that “good grades” thing skipped a generation.

I wish my Dad was still around so I could sit her down next to him and say: “Tell him, Ruth”.

This is a picture of Ruth with a professor who teaches “Social Problems and Injustice” on a day when the two of them just happened to wear the same style hat.

Continuum

Soaking in the present, each moment a glorious gift,like a lover’s kiss.

 Snapshots in time float on a river of metamorphosis, flowing toward the next waterfall of inevitable change.

A continuum.

Heaven/Hell

Quivering with the exuberant joy of lives only two days old, each one creating mini-ripples on the surface. How does it feel for a duck to float in water for the first time? To discover seemingly endless delights to eat, right beneath their furiously paddling palmate feet? All oblivious to the threats of the large Herons and voracious Wood Storks that would happily swallow the entire crew, 13 of them in a single all-you-can-eat buffet. Each duckling goes down whole with one upturned gulp, the Stork’s neck pulsing slightly with tiny feet pushing outward, mid-swallow.

The pull of my dogs on yesterday’s walk first alerted me to the new mother. She stood defiantly in the weeds next to the water’s edge with her wings outstretched, an umbrella protecting her hatchlings from stumbling alone out into what would be certain death.

Today was different. It was their celebration of life, the best of the best, their excitement almost palatable.

My hope is that they become the rare exception, that most of them live to be fat old Muscovy’s with broods of their own.

And then there were none.

It’s as if she’s almost expecting her brood to come swimming back up to her or to pop joyfully out of the weeds. But she stood in the exact same place yesterday when the dogs and I passed. Somewhat stoic, perhaps stunned from what was most likely a frantic encounter with a predator, probably several.

Yesterday there was still one left, running side to side at the top of the spillway, peeping frantically for mom or sibs. Apparently Mom didn’t hear or maybe had no way to rescue the chick. I told Carla that there would be no sign of that one by this morning, and there wasn’t.

So now she stands alone.

Five days and gone. Life is exhilaration and terror, black and white, with every conceivable shade in between.

This is heaven, this is hell.

Sign Language

I immediately began highlighting items I like to brag about on our “Standards” sheet when I saw them step out of their car in the parking lot, signing to each other as they did so. As soon as they entered the model home where I work, they told me that they were deaf. Of course, I already knew that.

Over the years I’ve met with quite a few hearing impaired clients, many with a close association to the much-acclaimed Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind here in town.

Normally there is a back and forth of awkwardly scrawled questions and answers. Not my favorite way to communicate. My own writing looks like Sanskrit and I can’t even read it myself. Plus, I want to add humor and ask them about themselves. Where do you live now? What kind of work do you do? How many in your household? Why do they want to move and what are they looking for? In a perfect world, what would you want your house to be like, and where?

The questions are routine enough but the answers spawn multiple opportunities to explore common ground and provide me with a peek into their world. Most people love to talk about themselves if they feel relaxed and unhurried. No one wants to be “sold” anything, me included.

But the barrier presented by cryptic notes and my inability to flesh out questions and responses has always been frustrating

Until yesterday.

That’s when they broke out their iPhone and wrote down questions for me to read, and I broke out mine too.

They had to type theirs in, but for the first time in 20 years, I was able to dictate whatever I wanted to convey from my end of things, into my “notes” field and hand it to this couple to read.

It was great. They needed the home buying help, and their laughter told me that they appreciated the humor as well.

Perhaps I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have no idea why I didn’t start communicating this way several years ago, but I’m doing it now, and it feels pretty good.

Will they buy a home from us? I can’t say. But I am sure that when they left, they knew a whole lot more about the entire home buying process than when they came in, and would be much less intimidated, going forward.

Nice people. We had a few sincere laughs along the way. We made a connection.

For me, that’s what it’s all about.

Torches

Ruby flames burn unchallenged. Torches wrapped in translucent green, warn Icarus clouds of the sunshine, sirens at her feet.