Today I might have cut a Willy Lomanesque figure as I rolled a big suitcase up Shattuck Ave. during a steamy Berkeley afternoon.  But in my own fevered imagination I was a latter-day Franklin, as the suitcase was carrying boxes of my Red Diaper Baby DVD from a storage unit to my downtown office for (that lovely word!) fulfillment of various orders.  As the grandson of a successful store-to-store hardware salesman who also happened to be a communist, I feel a special pride in “moving units” of my communist coming-of-age story (directed by the great documentarian Doug Pray).  And as a guy who looks like Ben, I feel proud to be a small-businessowner.

Progressive entrepreneurs of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your bootstraps.

The Moon Flew Over the Scoreboard

Had the great pleasure of attending last night’s San Francisco Giants game with Bert Steinberg, whose license plate says something like “I [Heart] Bsebal.”  Everyone who works at PacBell Park (weird to type out that corporate name — what strange times we live in) seemed to know him.  Bert has filled out a scorecard for every baseball game he has ever attended — starting in the bleachers in Yankee Stadium in 1927 (the year my mom was born, nearby in Brooklyn).  He recently had neck surgery (the stitches will come out next week), so he apologized for wanting to eschew the stairs for the elevator; aside from perhaps a bit of stiffness in his bearing, he moved like a 60-year-old.  Often he goes with his son to the games, and sometimes he goes with his wife — but not too often with her, as she tends to get overly nervous in the ninth innings of close games, especially given the propensity of Giants closer Brian Wilson (not the Beach Boy, although that one seems pretty intense, too) to make things interesting with a baserunner or two before finally shutting the door.

This game wasn’t close: the Giants jumped on the Cincinnati Reds’ poor starter for umpteen runs in the bottom of the first inning, knocking him out before he could record a third out.  The crowd thus was merry and relaxed for the rest of the game, even working repeatedly to pull off a decent stadium-wide “wave.”  The “Kiss Cam” caught couples, who then — being observed on the giant scoreboard by all 32,000+ of us (at least, that was the announced attendance) — felt obliged to kiss.  Some did this with gusto, though one young woman demurely presented her cheek to her male companion; to this the crowd started booing good-naturedly (yes, that’s possible), and so, visibly blushing, she let her friend give her a smootch on the lips.

Giants pitcher Matt Cain — who, like his genius teammate Tim Lincecum, has been struggling recently — returned two runs to the Reds, but then the Giants got umpteen more runs and all of us pretty much unclenched.  Cain ended up retiring the last 12 batters he faced, which was confirmed by Bert upon a quick examination of his scorecard.

I’d asked Bert to teach me how he fills out a scorecard, and he did his best to do so, but in truth it was a bit complex for me to follow.  I wasn’t the only one fascinated by his scorecarding: a  young woman sitting behind us repeatedly asked Bert to explain his various scribbles to her.  After one of these conversations, I caught him smiling.  We were between innings, so it wasn’t about what was happening on the field.  Finally, he said, “Oh, to lose 40 years!”

Those 40 years would get him back to about my age — and he’d still have a couple of decades to go to reach that woman.  But that wasn’t the point.  The point was that we were having fun.  In a baseball game, long periods of apparent emptiness are punctuated by brief moments of stunning action: the ball arcs beautifully over the outfield wall; the Giants’ panda-shaped third baseman darts with incongruous grace to his left, spears the ball, and, his momentum still carrying him to the left, makes a perfect throw to first for the out; the scoreboard welcomes home a serviceman just back from duty in Iraq, and the crowd responds with genuine warmth.  Two men — one in his middle innings (he hopes) and one somewhat further along in the game — smile because things aren’t always, always, always, so terrible.  Sometimes things are nice.

“It would be more than foolish to expect that we can live here in comfort and in peace and not do everything for the Arab minority,” she remarked.  “We have no desire to be a master race and have people of a much lower standard among us.  Look, we shall have to show the world how we are making up for our 2,000 years of suffering as a minority not by emulating what was done to us but by isolating every single method of making people suffer and doing away with each of these methods, one after the other.”

[From Golda, by Elinor Burkett, p. 140.]

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First-Lunchers (Photo by Steve Rhodes)

We didn’t solve the problems of the Middle East at lunch today, but we had a good talk about our feelings regarding Israel, being Jewish, not being Jewish, and several other things — none of them being my possible upcoming oboe piece.  I brought my oboe to the Contemporary Jewish Museum today, and even a music stand, but my thoughts and emotions centered on Israel — so, to a large extent, that’s what we talked about.

We agreed that we don’t like being yelled at.  We talked about the possibility of there being many “centers” for the world’s Jewry — in Israel, and also throughout the rest of the world.  (Someone mentioned that there is now a thriving group of Israeli Jewish emigré artists in Berlin — which reaches such a rarefied level of irony, I can barely begin to think of it.)  I asked people what they thought of Israel, and how they were raised to think about Israel.  There was a lovely range of ages, from (I’m guessing) about 13 up to (perhaps) 80-something.  I felt nervous about bringing up this subject, especially as people came there (I think) expecting a lot of “riffing” and light banter on my part.  There were at least three families there, including the parents of my rabbi (the father is a rabbi as well).

One theme that emerged (and I may be speaking more for myself than for others) is the sense that, in so much of our lives, and in so much of the world, we are engaged in a battle against fundamentalisms, against orthodoxies that seek to be the supreme power.  No orthodoxy speaks for me.  At the same time, I feel the importance — and others as well — of tradition, continuity, narrative.  I found myself longing to do something real — not just talk, but action: something that, even if only in a very incremental, personal way, seeks to assert my own bit of agency.  I recalled that politics is about power, and that democracy is about dialogue and improvisation, and I felt, in advance, the difficulty of sustaining action (especially in the absence of an all-affirming ideology).

I passed around my notepad and people put down their email addresses for a little elist, so we could continue the conversation on the Intertubes.  I had a thought that perhaps we can link our little group with another little group in Israel.

We all enjoyed our food in the beautiful space of the CJM lobby.  I worried that people were not perhaps getting what they wanted out of this event.  But then, this is what the event turned out to be: a conversation on this day, regarding things we cared about.  And could this be very wrong?

Next Monday at noon, I’ll be hanging out at the CJM Café again for lunch and conversation.  Perhaps people will show up again.  Maybe we’ll talk more about this stuff, maybe about other things.  Maybe we’ll talk about other things that turn out to connect to these things.  Going back to Berkeley on BART afterwards, I felt keen to bring the idea of “practice” into the ongoing conversation.  I was talking with my brother Jacob about this recently — how I have a hard time just going forward, one step at a time, without any particular joy or feedback in the interstices; how it is hard sometimes to believe in the goal.  And yet, as we spoke, I felt the joy and the hope.

What right do I have to want to contribute to peace in the Middle East?  I don’t know.  I have some thoughts, but I don’t know.

Lunch, anyone?

Not sure whether the high-school-aged daughter of the owners will home-bake chocolate-chip cookies for concessions, as happened the last time I was there.  That was a few years ago — and the way time has been zipping along lately, she’s probably a postdoc by now.  Also not certain whether to expect tasty candied ginger again in the greenroom.  But I’m pretty confident that the atmosphere will be relaxed and convivial, as it always has been in this place: I’ve never not had a great time there.

You can get tickets and info here.

A few months ago I was changing in the locker room and I got into a conversation with this guy.  He said he works in opera, and we talked a bit about this opera director I know who turned out to be an acquaintance of this guy’s as well.  You know, just a nice, pleasant talk in the locker room.

The next time I saw him — he was using roughly the same locker as before — I smiled and said hi.  He just glared at me.  And since then I’ve seen him around the gym and he’s never said anything to me or smiled at me.

So I started wondering what was up with this guy.  Had I said something that time we’d met that had upset him?  And if so, why didn’t he say something about it at the time?

Alternatively, I started thinking, Maybe this is a different guy — who (a) just happens to look like the previous guy and (b) coincidentally used roughly the same locker.  In which case, that time I thought I was meeting him for the second time and gave him a big “Hi!,” maybe he thought I was some sort of lunatic who goes around the locker room greeting total strangers.

In any case, I keep seeing this guy — or at least, one of those guys — around the gym.  And I’ve gotten kind of self-conscious about this whole thing — I worry that it seems obvious that I’m going out of my way not to interact with him.  So maybe he thinks I have something against him!  Maybe he’s wondering, Why is that weird bald guy who gratuitously said hi to me that other time now going out of his way not to say hi to me?

Though I have to say, my gut feeling is that this has been the same guy all along — and perhaps my musings about “a second locker-room guy” arise from a subconscious inclination to suppress my hurt feelings at being disliked. …

Anyhow, I was returning from the showers this afternoon, thinking about that guy who may or may not hate me and feeling grateful that he (or his doppelgänger) wasn’t there, when I realized that someone else was saying something to me.  It was this older Asian guy I see at the gym a lot.  I’ve been really inspired by the older folks at the gym, who come in every day and seem very fit in body and mind — but this guy has always struck me as extra-cool.  He wears bright blue “croc”-type sandals, and all his movements are very deliberate.  He takes his time, whereas most of us are in something of a hurry to move on to the next thing in our day.  In the showers, he does Tai Chi-type stuff.  Back at his locker, he does extra exercises.  His posture is incredible.  Everything seems to be happening as part of a deep spiritual practice.  And I’ve never seen him talk or smile.

So when I realized he was talking to me today, it came as a surprise.  He had just taken down one of the plastic stools that they keep on top of the lockers, and he was asking me if I wanted it.  I said, Sure!, and thanked him.  Then, as I was leaving (he was still doing his various deliberate locker-room things), I said, “Take care” — and he looked up from what he was doing and gave me a brilliant smile.

This not only made up for my yucky, confused feelings about the opera-guy with a possible mysterious vendetta against me, but also for another encounter I’d had earlier in the day: A loopy fellow on University Ave., walking in front of me, had repeatedly turned around to stare at me.  Finally he said, loudly, “Oh no, you can’t!  You think you can, but you can’t!” and then he ran away.  And the thing is, there are so many things that I wish I could do, and probably can’t; and I try not to think that way, but then that guy kind of threw it in my face.  I couldn’t help but think of him as an aspect of me — perhaps even my essence — come along to disrupt my silly hopes and insupportable dreams.

Walking back home from the gym, I saw six or so guys cross the street on unicycles of wildly varying sizes.  Then, at the corner of University and MLK, I saw an elderly man dressed up as an Egyptian pharoah.  He was waiting for the light to change, and he looked totally comfortable.  I smiled, and kept walking.