Father Time advises a brown-eyed girl
The Column: 01.13.22
I had a good conversation Saturday with a college student named Emily, a rare pleasure for an old man like me, most of my social life is spent with geriatrics eager to talk about their most recent hip replacement, but Emily talked about her ambition to go to law school and to devote herself to the issue of prison reform.
A bright articulate idealist from a good family who entertains noble ambitions that nobody in my age group would consider for two minutes; we’re done with nobility — when we were her age we sang that deep in our hearts we believed that we would overcome, but instead we got good jobs and hung out with cool people and were overcome by piles of stuff we couldn’t bear to part with and now we just hope not to fall down in the street and bang our noggin against a curb and lie there gaga and be hauled away by EMTs who’ll never realize what an illustrious person we used to be and not this gibbering mess on the gurney. And we’re hoping to get a decent obit even though our illustriousness ended when most obit writers were in the third grade. The surest way to get a great obit is to be in the arts and die before 40 and it’s too late for that.
Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the hellhole of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens’s England, where men languish who are unable to make bail and life is brutal, and the Democratic hacks of New York won’t touch this issue lest they be thought weak on crime. Emily knew all about this, and she nodded.
And if you take on prison reform, then you need to reform our broken mental health system that was destroyed by my fellow liberals forty years ago as “deinstitutionalization,” the idea that rather than enormous hellholes, you put the inmates in small hellholes where we wouldn’t be so aware of them. Emily knows about this too. And whatever progress you make will be painfully slow: nobody will come up with an algorithm to produce social justice.
When you take on a noble cause that’s a steep uphill climb and that brings you into conflict with bullies and bureaucrats who will make you question your faith in human goodness, you need to protect your own soul and not get ground down by weariness and despair, and what I recommend is that you take up dancing, particularly Latin dancing.
There is a whole subculture of Latin dance, people devoted to the tango, samba, salsa, mambo, meringue, because when they go out on the dance floor and do complicated steps, it makes them happy, no matter what. After a day of beating your head against the world’s indifference, go find a salsa class and work your way up toward the tango, and as you improve, you’ll find that your body in sync with the music can bring you delight.
I once gave a graduation speech at a school for special-needs kids and afterward there was a dance in the gym and I stood and watched the students file in, kids we used to call “handicapped” and now we say “learning challenged,” kids on the spectrum, some with physical oddities, glitches of speech, and I remembered how cruel and callous we were to kids like these in my high school days. It was not considered cool to befriend them — what if one of them wanted to dance with you? — and they sensed this so they never went to school dances.
And now a local rock band made up of geezers my age tuned up and launched into “She’s So Fine” and the kids went crazy for it and “Surfin’ USA” and Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and we elders sang, “Do you remember when we used to sing, Sha la la la la la la la la la de dah, my brown-eyed girl, and in that blessed moment, the kids lost all their self-consciousness, they were running and jumping, dancing, they were all equal in the eyes of the Lord and of each other. It was euphoric. It made me cry.
Emily, God bless your idealism and the hard work required, but there has to be joy too. Nothing good can be accomplished without joy. I think Emerson said that. If not, he should’ve.
FEBRUARY EVENTS
“There must be joy” will carry me through at least today. I am grateful.
The story about the special needs teenagers reminded me of a very intelligent girl I became friends with in the fourth grade. We were both overweight and occasionally ridiculed because of it. She was the only Jewish person in our class, so I imagine she was teased about that as well, but she had a positive attitude and never complained about it. She played the flute and I played the violin, so we were in the orchestra together. In the 6th grade orchestra, she started to have trouble controlling her fingers on the flute keys and after a few months she couldn't play anymore. She was later diagnosed with some kind of progressive neuromuscular disease and her condition slowly deteriorated. She had a beautiful singing voice though, and I always sat next to her in the junior high glee club so I could follow her.
We had different interests and were in different classes for the next few years, but in 10th grade we were both in the same honors chemistry class where she was my lab partner. She couldn't really do any of the necessary manipulations, but I didn't mind because I enjoyed doing everything myself and was happy to help her. After a month so she decided to withdraw from the class. She couldn't control her hands enough to write and take notes, and had to do all her writing on an electric typewriter using a pencil between her teeth. At that point she had some difficulty walking, but she ended up graduating near the top of the class shortly after her 17th birthday and happened to go to the same college as I did, Clark University. She was a geography major and I was a chemistry major, so we didn't have any of the same classes and lived in different dorms, but it was nice to see her now and then. She ended up graduating magna cum laude a semester early at age 20 and got a PhD in Medical Anthropology at the University of Michigan and had postdoctoral positions at Northwestern and UCSF. She has had a notable professional career, including teaching Disability Studies at several universities. She is now a widow living in California. I offered to help her by giving her rides from and to the airport for our 50th high school reunion several years ago, but she decided not to attend. I keep in touch with her on Facebook, but haven't seen her for more than 50 years. She has always been an inspiration to me and I often think of times when I heard people ridicule her. I always told them that she had been my friend since 4th grade and tried to explain her disability to them.