Day: December 11, 2016

Maria and I are forever coming to terms with the holidays, a time of enormous stress and anxiety for us and for so many other people. Today, she wrote about her struggles to come to terms with the holidays on her blog.   I have written about mine for years. Last year, I deeply upset some (former) friends with my writing about Christmas and the great difficulty so many people had with finding the true meaning of the holidays.

So often, I hear people speak of the holidays with dread. We don’t know any of those perfect families who have joyous and happy holidays, I hope there are many. One friend horrified me by posting a photo online of her extended family –  scores of them – all dressed up as green elves for Christmas morning.

Bless them, I would rather plunge naked into a freezing stream in January. Maybe they are the perfect family Disney and all those ad agencies have been talking about.

No wonder we spend so much time shopping and trawling for discounts.

Every year, Maria and I seek to reinvent our experience of the holidays, and slowly but sure we are making progress. We both gave up spending holidays with our families, and they, in turn, have given up spending the holidays with us. Life goes on.

It is an unfortunate thing, this breaking way from our traditions, but it seems to work.

People like us live in fear of obligation and unyielding tradition, we find it threatening and suffocating. We find it traumatic to submit to things we are supposed to submit to. We could, like normal people, just go and pretend. We can’t.

If we can’t be accepted for who we are, then we can’t participate. Too often for me, the holidays are about subsuming identity and struggling to please people who can never be pleased. And those family rituals just didn’t feel good for us.

The holidays are not about compassion or generosity, they are not about not being known. Rather, they are about being pressured to worry too much about presents and money and what other people want. I greatly appreciate the true Jesus and his passion for forgiving and protecting and comforting the poor, I rarely see his true spirit and teachings in the Christmas we practice.

I understand and respect the fact that Christmas has different and happier meanings for many people. I wish them the greatest and most meaningful of holidays. I can handle being a freak.

My heart also goes out, as usual, to the people for whom the “perfect” Disney idea of Christmas is a myth, an unreachable mountain peak and a depressing symbol of the reality of many lives. A true holiday should not be so depressing. Perhaps there are just too many gifts no one can afford to buy, too many families pretending to be whole.

So many people suffer greatly during the holidays. Christmas is as fraught as it is joyous, and I happen to love the holiday, although it was always bittersweet for me.

My family, first generation Jewish immigrants from Russia celebrated Christmas – or at least part of Christmas – secretly and excessively. We had big trees, scores of presents and spent manic days before the holiday shopping, wrapping, anticipating. There was always a dreadful crash after Christmas, almost nothing can live up to its over-hyped expectations.

In retrospect, I see my family’s Christmas as an almost desperate act of assimilation into American life,  as poignant as it was impossible. We were not fooling anyone but my grandmother, from whom we hid our holiday celebration with Smiley-like spy craft. She would not have liked it, I think she always understood that the real act of assimilation for Jewish immigrants was to celebrate their own holidays, not those of other faiths.

My own Christmas is an evolution. I do like to mark the birthday of Christ, I wish he were still around, he would burn some temples of ours in a big hurry. He would remind us to listen to our better angels.

I have learned to love Jesus without worshiping him, and his values are what I choose to embrace and celebrate at Christmas. Maria hates to get presents on Christmas, and I hate not to give her some, we are working out various compromises. We will not have a tree, but will string some lights around the porch and the farmhouse.

This year, I proposed that we rent a motel room just a few miles away for one night during the holidays and go there to read, make love, talk and find some funky diner to eat on. I know it is a crazy idea, but it won’t go away. Perhaps it will fade.

It seems ridiculous to rent a motel room 20 minutes a way, but it is also appealing to both of us. Fortunately, we are strange in similar ways.

Fate shows little or no interest in herding sheep, but she loves to hide around corners and rocks so she can spring out and pounce when Red comes running by on his outruns or pursuit of the sheep. Fate thinks herself quite clever, even though Red has never once been rattled or unnerved by Fate’s sudden appearances, or even appeared to notice them.

And Fate works hard at it, she is always finding new and ingenious places to hide, and as Red roars past, she springs out in front of him. Without skipping a beat, he jumps right over her or runs right around her, he doesn’t get that he’s supposed to be startled and thrown off strike.

It would be nice if Fate applied this energy and craftiness to herding sheep, but we must all play the hands we are dealt, and Fate would rather spring out and pounce on Red than do almost anything in the world. I keep telling her she is lucky to be living with a dog like Red, I know some border collies – Rose comes to my mind – that would not be so gracious about being pounced on.

Maria and I went to the Round House and had a wonderful omelette – salmon cheese this morning and I saw trouble behind the counter – my friend Scott Carrino and his sidekick Dominick. These two have been working together for some years and Dom is a cook in the cafe kitchen.

I asked him how he got the cut under his eye and he explained he got it when he miscalculated and went flying in a mishap at a Trampoline Park in Albany. Both of these men live on the edge sometimes, work all the time, and stretch themselves beyond reason.

These two are trouble.

But it is always sweet to see the two of them together. Dom has trouble getting up in the morning sometimes, but he is a mainstay at the Round House now. It was months before I saw him smile, and he is quick to smile now all the time.

We had the honor of attending a reception for the cartoon artist, photographer and award-winning animator Ray Favata, who was at the center of the animation world in New York City for more than half a century and who moved to my town of Cambridge N.Y., in 1997.

Ray is 94 now, and still sketches every day and takes pictures.

About a dozen people gathered at the Round House Cafe in honor of Ray’s new portrait and sketch show, which went up two weeks ago. His photographs and drawings are amazing. Ray has a remarkable history in the animation world, and also as a photographer.

His photographs are striking and evocative, they capture the lost world of New York City at a particular time and place. They are beautifully composed and shot.

He is an especially warm and gracious man, as well as a genius, one of the many exceptional artists sprinkled in and around the farms that surround our home and town. George Forss, one of the country’s great urban landscape photographers,  came to celebrate Ray as well, and it was humbling for me to see these two geniuses in the same space, they are good and loving friends to one another, as well as to others.

Once in awhile, I am lucky enough to get a cartoon sketch e-mailed to me from Ray, who says in touch. I loved sitting down with him and listening to his stories about taking pictures in New York City a half-century ago. They take my breath away. I’m lucky to know Ray and so happy to celebrate his show.

Ray is one of those rare creatives, he creates something every day of his life,it is not a part of who he is, it is who he is. He is an inspiration to me, and to Maria.

This morning, I began reading a compelling new book by Michael Lewis called The Undoing Project,  and it is about the groundbreaking collaboration of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose studies undid many assumptions about human decision-making and changed the way we think about thinking, from economics to psychology to sports.

One of the passages that already caught my eye was about generosity.

The psychologists defined generosity as a contagion. When people are generous, the people around them often become generous, when people are stingy and mean-spirited, the people around them often become stingy and mean-spirited. Just look at our political system.

Kahneman and Tversky, writes Lewis, are more responsible than anyone for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

I’ll share the ideas in the book as I read it, but I was struck by the ideas I came across about generosity and compassion

If you wish to be generous yourself, say, Kahneman and Tversky, then surround yourself with generous people. If you wish to be compassionate, surround yourself with compassionate people.

Good, like evil, can be transmitted to others. So can anger and fear. I have seen this idea played out again and again through my blog, where viral generosity has raised nearly $200,000 for people in need in the past year or so.

Many people are wringing their hands about the state of things, I believe we are on the verge of a Compassion Revolution. It is already beginning – the massive outpouring of support for the Native-Americans at Standing Work, the forthcoming Women’s March On Washington,  the great circle of compassion and protection forming around refugees suddenly terrified for their own lives and futures in America, the rapidly spreading movement to help people who may lose their health care.

Some see this conflict as a political one, between the “left” and the “right,” but I see it different as a conflict of the spirit, between the angry and the hopeful, the compassionate versus the aggrieved, the generous versus the greedy and the stingy, the pessimistic against the hopeful

Gandhi and King and Mandela showed the world how to fight for compassion, they are good models to follow. There is nothing more powerful than an army of compassionate people willing to stand up for others, and that opportunity will come shortly, and is, perhaps, already here.

I see a compassion contagion sweeping the country and taking hold. When I sought help on the blog in buying 300 Welcome Bags for  arriving refugee children,  hundreds of people sent twice as much money as was originally sought. When I mentioned people writing to the residents of the Mansion Assisted Care facility,  hundreds of people responded instantly with cards, messages, gifts, crafts, caftans and mittens and scarves.

I have signed up as a voluntary to help mentor refugee families arriving shortly in America. The revolution is on. Challenge, even suffering, is what defines us, and gives us the gift of grace. Without suffering, we all will go back to sleep and dream fruitlessly of a perfect world.

If truth is a revolutionary act, so is compassion, just look at the news. For me, this is one of the most powerful, and revolutionary, movements in the world. I’m in.