Musings & Meanderings

If a sense of humor is one of your coping tools, Jennifer’s post is a must read.

All of it ends up wrapped in so many memories, in timeless moments and confidences and love.

On some days the memories roll backwards, so here’s a little boy story:

My younger son attended church with his grandmother on Sundays.
One day, when he was 5 years old, he and I were in the car on our way somewhere.
Apropos of nothing, he suddenly said,

“You know, Mom, that there are really only 2 important rules in church.”

“Oh? What are they?”

“The first one is that you have to love and honor your mother.”

…sounds pretty good so far…

“What’s the second one?”

“The second one is that you have to go to the basement to smoke.”

She was born in the Soviet Union, under Stalin. Her parents had lived through the Great War and the Revolution, and her father, a Russian Orthodox priest, had refused to renounce his God. So she attended a new school at least twice each year, never knowing when KGB attention would sharpen its focus on her little family and cause them to run in search of another place to live. In the end, the running was for naught, and by the time she was 12 her father was taken away for the last and final time. They were left with only a rumor, never formally confirmed, that her father had finally been executed. By the time war broke out again, she was fully indoctrinated, well trained in fear and suspicion and primal self-preservation.

After the war, she and her mother arrived as refugees in Canada. They worked as indentured servants for one year to pay for their passage, and they were incredibly fortunate. Their fortune was to be taken in together, instead of being separated, by a prominent gentleman and his wife. The gentleman was semi-retired, with duties only as a board member of a large and venerable publicly owned institution, and he mentored his younger ward, giving her the run of his personal library, and arranging for her employment at his firm’s head office in Montreal when her passage had been fully served.

“I remember this moment,” she tells me, “when everything changed. All my life I had lived with my heart clenched tight in total fear and paranoia, like a heavy rock in my chest. One day, as I stood on rue Sainte-Catherine waiting for the light to change, I became aware of everything around me in a different way. It was a perfect day, with blue skies and sunshine and a light breeze. Everyone on the street stood or moved so freely, so lightly. No one was afraid, or tense, or self-conscious. I stopped and stared, and the heavy clenching fear in my heart eased open and fell away.”

60 years later, she looks at me hopelessly and tells me, “It’s back.”, and then she tells me why.

In recent years, she, and her friends and family as well, have had cause to interact with our medical system, and related social services as well, repeatedly. There have been too many incidents where doctors and others engaged in providing medical care cited rules and procedures as their only communication to the patient. They filled out paperwork and routinely turned away anyone whose needs could not be clearly addressed by approved procedures. They offered narcotics and tests and specialist referrals that took months to materialize, were performed, and produced results that were ignored and not followed up on. She has further discovered that she no longer has access to effective representation by elected officials that can do anything to intervene on a citizen’s behalf.

For over 40 adult years, she worked hard, paid her taxes, always voted, and never hesitated to contact her political representatives when government services were delayed or inefficient. This process, she says, has stopped working. It seems to her now, that everyone she can expect to encounter through her old age works for the government, and acts more and more like the citizens of the communist country she grew up in, like chattel. This is why, she says, the fear is back. It is the fear of soulless automatons who thoughtlessly follow their master’s rules and do not see another human being when they look at her.

How much of this, I ask myself, is an echo of her past, and how much based on the current reality? Is there really much difference between advanced socialism and communism? There are some people who’ve received satisfactory medical care here in recent years. I’ve spoken to them. They were all highly successful, well known, and they were all men. I have not heard a happy patient story from an average citizen, or from a woman, in many years. The truly wealthy all leave the country for medical care.

How much does it take, I wonder, for those of us who haven’t been terrorized, to learn to be afraid?

—–

Trackback: Free Does Not Mean Avaliable.

…and on a Weekly Wrap Up (links).

My mother, who is in her 80s, asks me if I think that her attire is inappropriate. She’s referring to her short (just above the elbow) sleeves. The humidity here is 88% and climbing; it feels like the Everglades, not the Great Lakes.

She had a fall almost 2 years ago. As a result of osteoporosis, she did more than break her right arm or wrist; she pulverized bones at either end of her forearm. 5 hours of surgery involving numerous pieces of metal have left the forearm, after 18 months of healing, ever so slightly curved, and scarred on the inside. You wouldn’t notice a thing unless you really looked very carefully at her, or unless she held her arms out and showed you.

In addition to holding traditional notions of propriety, my mother was (is) a beauty. Although she’s never gone on a single date since my father died decades ago, she’s very aware of her attractiveness, especially when it benefits her. She has never ‘looked her age’, and was for many years reverse-carded when claiming senior’s discounts.

“You know that you look much younger than your age.” I say. She smiles; when she was 50 she looked 30, and even now she makes a 15 year younger impression.

“Let’s say that your right forearm, only, now looks older than the rest of you.” I add. Bingo. Mother is delighted with this bit of reasoning and has ceased to be self conscious about her right forearm.

The following vignettes are contributed by my beloved husband, whose favorite stories include ones in what he terms the HOW IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED category.
*****

Brandon Tartikoff was the head of programming for NBC. He held periodic “pitch” meetings with various producers, during which the producers would pitch their ideas for new television series. Tartikoff was famous for having ideas of his own which, most times were quite superior to the ideas of the producers.

During one such pitch meeting with Stephen J. Cannell, Tartikoff reached for a piece of paper and his pen and started scribbling. Cannell, thinking Tartikoff was making notes about the concept he was describing, started to really get into it. When he finally wound it up, Cannell asked Tartikoff what he thought of the idea. Tartikoff handed him the piece of paper.

Written on that paper was:

Mission Impossible
The Dirty Dozen
“And Mr. T Drives The Truck”

From this little note sprung …The A-Team.

At another such meeting, with another producer, Tartikoff handed over a piece of paper that read:

MTV Cops

This became …Miami Vice.

The classic pitch meeting that produced a show was held between Aaron Spelling and his partner at the time, Douglas S. Cramer, and executives from ABC, at Spelling’s luxurious digs. Spelling and Cramer spent over 7 hours pitching one idea after another, only to have the ABC guys shoot them all down.

Finally, in total exasperation, Cramer got to his feet and said, “You know, the only thing that will suit you guys is a show about some island somewhere where a guy can go and get all the booze and broads he wants!”

Almost in unison, the ABC guys said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s it!”

And this developed into …..Fantasy Island.

As an aside, the original Fantasy Island was to star Orson Welles, and his assistant was to be a beautiful young girl. Unfortunately, Welles died before the pilot was ready to be shot. It was then that Ricardo Montalban was brought in to play the lead character.

When Montalban assumed the role of Mr. Roarke, the beautiful assistant was dropped. In her stead, as everyone knows, Roarke’s assistant became the midget Tattoo (Herve Villachez).

ABC was not happy. “What happened to the beautiful girl assistant?” the execs wanted to know.

To which Doug Cramer replied, “Ricardo Montalban is beautiful enough by himself.”

Visionaries and independent thinkers are found in every societal segment, but I’m focusing this post on the business world, which is where I first learned to recognize lone voices.

Most conversation is a lot of noise. The further inside you are, in circles of influence where pundits and the powerful enjoy up to the minute intelligence and sophisticated analysis, the louder the noise. Sure, it can be more ‘interesting’, or at least diverting, noise in those circles, but noise it remains.

Spend a few years in the ivory towers or even just the fast lane and you’ll see the epitome of viral spreading of information. The web version pales, although the mechanics are the same.

The smartest businessmen and their attendant analysts are highly discerning, constantly sorting through the clamor and making many fine distinctions between fact, spin, and rumor, in order to anticipate the consequences. A businessman and a true entrepreneur, however, are two completely different animals.

Businessmen manage money. Their motivation is to both protect it and make it grow. Innovation is not their thing. Of course the biggest returns are found on the leading edge, hence the awkward flirtation between money and ideas. Even more central to that flirtation is the fact that the innovation that hits the bullseye, that becomes the next big thing, will be hands down the sexiest girl at the dance. The guy that gets her will sit at the head table and be feted as brilliant.

True entrepreneurs don’t generally care much for businessmen, not least because their own visions are foreign, outside conventional view, and therefore often hard to convey. The extent of affluence in our time, together with technology, has created a breed of quasi entrepreneur, individuals whose raison d’etre is to plug in on one side to emerging trends and on the other to aggressive investors. This breed exists to sell out. They’re the loudest proponents of the money mantra that everyone is for sale.

The lone voice belongs to the independent thinker, and being one requires a much broader spectrum of motivation than money alone can provide.

My first strong memory of a lone voice dates to 1980. It belonged to local a real estate developer who had built an empire on the absolute best of old fashioned values, and also always made my (and most people’s) top ten in terms of class and integrity. His name is Eph (Ephraim) Diamond.

In the 50s, Eph and 2 partners created a residential development company called Cadillac, developing housing at a time of 3% interest rates and 30 year mortgages. It was also a time when long term bank lending at under prime was the norm rather than the exception. In the 60s, Cadillac merged with Fairview, which had originally been a builder of shopping centers, but was by then focused on urban commercial development. The combination, at that time, was in itself also remarkable. Think Sun merging with eBay. Cadillac Fairview went public around the time of the second oil crisis in ‘79, as markets headed into what would come to be called stagflation (high inflation plus high unemployment), with Eph as chairman.

In 1980, when interest rates hit and passed 20%, the ‘conversation’ or noise in the business world was so loud as to be almost deafening. Real estate development at that time was still dominated by private interests, a reality that would change dramatically over the following decade. A large number of the developers, in various major urban centers, were Jewish and of the builders Italian. (The first came from the history of private lending and the second from a wave of 20th century immigration to North America that settled in the construction business.) So the development industry’s contribution to the raucous noise on the high interest rates was particularly colorful, with Orthodox and Conservative members of the community seeking and transmitting the educated opinions of their rabbis on usury, opinions that even found their way into proposed laws in Ottawa and Washington.

Thousands of voices chattered at hyperspeed in an alarmed quest for revision of all future business planning based on this financial apocalypse. Eph, meanwhile, had come to his own conclusion, which he would state calmly to anyone who asked him. He said that the high interest rates were a temporary and unsustainable phenomenon, and that we would all see 6% (although not 3%) again in our lifetimes. No one agreed with him at the time.

This was the voice of an independent thinker. Large scale real estate developers, by the nature of their business, think in decades not quarters. Are they smarter than everyone else? Do they always get it right? Hell, no. As a matter of fact they are, for the most part, close to extinct today, replaced by an evolved hybrid in response to institutional investment rather than private style lending and the last of merchant banking.

The point of my story is about whether we hear and consider a lone voice amid the noise. Our economic dynamics change, but human nature doesn’t. Not everything said by every lone voice is prophetic or correct, but a much wider perspective can be gained by stepping back from the wave of noise, in order to hear ourselves, and others, think.

Heard a lone voice lately?