Iris Ruth Pastor's Blog, page 41
May 25, 2017
Three Stories That Will Change Your View on Memorial Day Forever
I feel like I’m back in fifth grade writing a report in Mrs. Norcross’s class. After school, I would lug my orange ceramic bowl full of Oreos and my plastic cup of apple juice into the living room to snuggle/struggle with the daunting set of Encyclopedia Britannica. I knew my mom would now let me wear my new white patent leather Mary Janes to school instead of my black ones and that we were having a picnic with cousin Sarah and her brood on Monday instead of dad going to work and me to school. And I knew my dad’s mad because he’s supplying steak for the grill and Uncle Bernie got away – once again – with just bringing hot dogs. But somewhere in my childish brain, it did register that this holiday probably meant more than grilling out, baseball games, going to the park and the official start of summer.
I’m older now. I “daringly” wear white jeans in April. I grill all year round and don’t wait for an extended holiday weekend to fill my days with fun and frolic. I’m also more appreciative of the thousands of men and women who have died in military service for the United States. And the many men and women who served in military service and were lucky enough to come home – my father and father-in-law among them. And I find that, though visiting their graves is not always an option on Memorial Day weekend, carving out the time to learn about feats of courage and war’s ravages is always an option.
Memorial Day is a day to discover an untold story: I learn about the story of the Ritchie Boys – boys who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930’s, came of age in America and returned to Europe as members of the U.S. Army. According to author Bruce Henderson, in 1942, 2000 German-born Jewish young men joined every major combat unit in Europe. They interrogated German POW’s and gathered crucial intelligence on enemy strength, movement and defensive positions – supplying more than sixty percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe and thus playing a key role in the Allied victory.
Memorial Day is a day to celebrate the uncelebrated soldier: I learn about a white soldier during World War 11 who was put in charge of an all African- American platoon in the segregated South – an experience that left him embittered and withdrawn and his family relationships laced with shadows and trauma. I learn how he spent his life seeking acknowledgement for his engineering feats – feats that saved the lives of those soliders test-piloting fighter planes. No medal was ever forthcoming – during or after he died – and his family was left baffled and scarred until a stranger at the solder’s funeral delivers the family an odd gift and an apology.
Memorial Day is a day to learn something new: I learn that soldiers at the front aren’t the only ones who can alter history and combat threats to democracy. Laura Rosenzweig brings to light a long hidden story of American Jewish resistance to Nazism during the 1930’s. Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner and other Hollywood Jewish moguls paid private investigators to infiltrate the German-American Bund and its allies, reporting on seditious plots and collusion with the German government.
Along with the “beach” books spilling out of my canvas swim bag this summer, I’ll be toting the following too – all based on the above teasers:
Sons and Soldiers by Bruce Henderson
In the Shadow of Alabama by Judy Reene Singer
Hollywood’s Spies by Laura B. Rosenzweig
May 17, 2017
Amidst an Ending, Starting Anew
All around the country, words of wisdom have been spewing forth from high school and college podiums by an eclectic group of speakers. These bold-face dignitaries share nuggets of thoughts and observations designed to provoke and prod the graduate towards new levels of awareness as he makes the transition onto a new life path – without the breadbasket of community, neighborhood and family to cradle him.
Here’s some examples:
You will never see a U-haul behind a hearse, you can’t take it with you.
Denzel Washington
For the most important decisions in your life, trust your intuition, and then work with everything you have, to prove it right.
Tim Cook
I could tell you that when you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you’ll settle it by flipping a coin. But don’t go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails?
David Books
Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face – and there will be barriers – be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold, and I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try.
Sheryl Sandburg
Life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along.
Stephen Colbert
If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.
Bêtte Reese
You will never have more energy or enthusiasm, hair, or brain calls than you have today.
Tom & Ray Magliozzi
There’s few things that get you over your own crap more than working hard.
Adam Savage
No one’s clamored for MY worlds or wisdom on graduation day, but here’s what I would have imparted to those eager, beaming young people had I been asked:
On November 18, 1995 Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Lincoln Center in New York City. Getting on stage is no small achievement for him. Stricken with polio as a child, he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. The audience sits quietly as he painfully and slowly walks across the stage, sits down, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, bends down, picks up the violin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.
Just as he finishes the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin breaks. Anyone knows that it is impossible to play symphonic work with just three strings. But that night, Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.
You could see him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in his head – to get new sounds from the strings that they had never made before.
When he finished, he smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, and then said in a quiet tone, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”
For all those moms whose back seats will soon be empty, embrace life’s lessons and go out and conquer the world too.
May 11, 2017
A Mundane Day With My Mom, Or Is It?
It’s nice to be someone’s daughter – at age fifty-five.
While my friends may be turning to friends for advice on their middle-schooler who has just pierced her navel or a teen-age son who is hell bent on touring the volatile Middle East this summer, I’ve got my mom as my compass and anchor.
This is what I did last Friday: worked in the morning and knocked-off about 12:30 PM – met my mother for lunch at a neighborhood eatery, where a long time acquaintance stopped by the table and stayed for the duration of our lunch.
“Gee,” she remarked wistfully as we got up to leave, “how nice that you have your mother to do things with.”
While my friends may be turning to friends for advice on hormone replacement, graying hair, arthritic fingers, and the Visa bill that’s too high to show their husband, I’ve got my mom right down the street as my personal guru/trainer/confidant. She still has a wad of maternal currency in her wallet that she spends discriminatively, but generously. She’s bailed me out emotionally, financially, and physically more times than I like to admit.
After lunch, we head to the specialty bra shop my mother has been nagging me to visit. Who else but your mother would have the patience, much less the interest, to help you shop for bras? Then we traipse to the mall for jeans, shoes and a black scoop neck top – all for me. We fight over who should carry the heaviest bag. I prevail.
My mom is a wealth of minutiae – a woman who begins every story with “Do you remember so and so?”
“No, Mom.”
Well he was Henrietta’s brother-in-law’s neighbor, who moved to Boston in 1983, no, it must have been 1986…..”
My eye rolling, by this time, is in full swing, and yet, her meandering tales always have a point and a principle. And my sister and I find ourselves later quoting and re-quoting her endlessly.
At one popular women’s apparel shop, we are greeted with hugs and affection by one of my closest friends, who happens to work there. My mother advises me on which color camisole top to purchase. I petulantly ignore her suggestion and purposely choose the opposite color. Still, as we make our way out to the mall once more, my friend pulls me aside and whispers, “Do you know how envious I am that you’ve got your mother by your side?”
While my friends piece together family history from nameless, dateless, faded black and white photos, I’ve got my almanac of family facts, feuds, and foibles right at hand. And while my friends lack back-up, my mother’s always there to lend a hand. I volunteer her for good deeds that I don’t have time to do and she does them lovingly and with flair and creativity.
While many of my friends are yearning for mothers no longer here, I can pick up the phone and discuss ad nauseam the most recent antics of my five kids with the woman whose attention to this subject never flags – their grandmother.
Will Harry go into politics? Will Frank leave New York?
When will Max get engaged? Will Sam join an impov comedy group? When will Lou finally figure out a major?
Action wise, it wasn’t a blockbuster day. Pretty mundane. Ordinary. Run-of-the-mill. Two women shopping, lunching, chatting and exchanging confidences. And finishing off the afternoon with a visit to their local museum to check-out a traveling exhibit. But to me, it was magical. A day to be savored.
How lucky I am to still have my mother (and father) at age fifty-five? Pretty damn lucky.
I’m now sixty-nine and my mom is ninety. My dad passed away five years ago. And I moved away. Days like those above are few and far between, and savored all the more so.
May 5, 2017
When Someone You Love Leaves
Photo Credit: transplanbuddies.org
Over the years I’ve written many columns on my life with my children.
A soccer mom’s Sunday
Is an awful lot like Monday
It’s prying and vying and sighing and trying
To get everything done
That needs to be done
I’ve written about running a household.
It’s loading the dishes
And containing the wishes
Of husband and children
And your own unfulfilled dreams
Of the importance of just being there.
It’s picking up clutter
As you hear them all mutter
“Ma, you’re blocking the TV
Please move
So that we can see.”
Of the struggle to maintain a home replete with calm and good spirits.
It’s bringing order to chaos
And chaos to order
In a never ending battle
With boredom and fatigue
Of the realization that it’s tempting to place your relationship with your partner on the back-burner when strife and trouble come-a-calling.
I laugh at life’s ironies
While fighting despair
I long for my husband
Even though he’s right there
And I acknowledge that at timers there’s a difference, a very large difference, between what’s printed and what’s felt.
I write to “Keep Coping”
Instead of just moping
When all I’d like to do
Is climb back in bed
With a good book
And a box of vanilla fudge
Over the years I’ve written many columns on the eve of my sons graduating and moving on – from pre-school to kindergarten, from grammar school to middle school, from junior high to high school and from high school to college.
The latter move is always the most wrenching for me. I’m not the one at graduations incessantly snapping pictures or craning to capture the perfect moment on video. I’m the one huddling in the corner, writing furiously on a napkin, in an effort to put in words what I’m experiencing as my youngest child walks down the aisle to the strains of Pomp & Circumstance.
And when the kids are so little
It’s wishing they’d grow up
And when they are older
It’s wishing they’d just show up
To shed some magic glow
On my endless routine
And I’m not the one making scrapbooks. I figure my published thoughts will be my legacy to my five grandchildren and one on the way.
I muse as I cry. And cry as I muse. And I know I’m not alone.
I know there are many mothers out there that can’t believe that beautiful little child they birthed 18 years ago is leaving the nest. And taking their heart. I was in that club too many years ago.
So, in closing, please note my heartfelt wish: May yours venture forth safely and return home often.
