PLAY WRITING; HISTORY OF AN INTERESTING ENDEAVOR. YES, I AM WRITING PLAYS AGAIN.

I wrote my first play in the 1980s, sometime during the second half of the decade. I had moved to Washington DC in 1978 from Maine to join a corporation in the space business, specifically satellite communications, called Comsat, and soon tried to get involved with the poetry scene in that area. Eventually I grew disenchanted with my progress as a poet in Washington DC and began wondering if I might have more success—anyway with what I envisioned as success—with another genre.

I saw myself as having failed as a novelist in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is what I did with my so-called spare time when I lived in the New York City Metropolitan area, first in Brooklyn and then in central New Jersey. Hence I eliminated fiction as a possibility. What else was left for a failed novelist and a failed poet, but writing plays? That’s how I reasoned out my situation in the mid 1980s.

Eliminated Screen Writing

By the way, I also eliminated screen writing from consideration because I was not living in California and had no relationships with anyone in the movie business. From what I had read in writers magazines and been told by people who struck me as authoritative on the subject, no one made it as screen writer without Southern California contacts, and I didn’t have any.

And so in the mid 1980s I began writing a play. It was about the big tragedy in my life when I was growing up, namely the failure of a family business. Appropriately I named it “The Business.” “The Business” might never have found its way to the stage had it not been for a sympathetic director named Benny Blumenthal who agreed to work with me to get it stage ready and to direct the production. I had been introduced to Benny by a co-worker of mine at Comsat, the satellite communications company, named Anne Armentrout who was using her spare time to run the theatre program at the church.

Arlington County Becomes Sponsor

And so my spotty career in the theatre was launched. The next big event in my theatre history occurred in 1990 when I was able to team up with the Arlington County Parks and Recreation Department to launch a theatre devoted to putting on new works. This seeming act of altruism—creating a means of launching new plays from, for the most part, new playwrights—was, like almost all acts of altruism, full of self interest. My main intention was to create opportunities for myself as a playwright.

As the sponsor of New Works Theatre, Arlington County provided the venue for the production of plays, and it provided important items like chairs, curtains and lights. Even more important, the department was a source of funding for such things as advertising, set construction and props for each production.

Playwright Submissions

To tap into sources for new plays, New Works had only to announce that it was in business with its address for submissions, and the scripts started coming in. I soon found that the greater Washington DC area had more fellow playwrights in it than I ever imagined. To review the submissions, we set up what we called our Artistic Committee consisting of a team of readers, drawn mainly from a community where we once had lived called Holmes Run Acres in Fairfax County.

Wife Harriet assumed leadership of the committee in the beginning, and soon after she would play an important role in our productions by working backstage.

Play Introduction Methods

New Works Theatre employed a variety of production methods to bring its new plays to the attention of the public. In public readings, the actors sat in chairs on the stage and read the parts out loud to the audience. No attempt to act out the parts was made. The main beneficiary of this technique was supposed to be the playwright. He or she could hear how the dialogue sounded and get inspired to make the appropriate changes to improve the work for production.

The next step in the new plays world was called the staged reading. This approach was supposed to help not just the playwright but the production team—director and lighting, sound, sound and props designer, and stage manager. In the staged reading, the actors have more familiarity with their parts than in the public reading, and go through the motions of their character presentation at least in a limited way. Finally, of course, is the full production.

Hold Discussions With Audience

One of the interesting things we did at New Works Theatre was to hold discussions with the audience after a production, whether a simple reading, staged reading or full production. Usually I led these discussions, and we would talk about the central theme of the work as well as whether the audience felt the playwright had been successful and whether the production was effective or not in getting these ideas across.

As I recall, the second full production of New Works Theatre was a play called “The Hot Rocks Rebellion” by this writer. This full length work was about a father and son who end up working in the same fast food restaurant during an economic downturn not unlike the one we are going through today. I had a lot of pleasure writing “Hot Rocks” and being involved with its production, but I was not to have the pleasure of another full length production of my own work during the lifetime of New Works, which came to an end in 1995.

Artist In Search of Home

A short one-act play I wrote called “The Artist in Search of a Home” was produced by New Works as part of a fund raising event, but that was the extent of New Works Theatre’s benefits for the play writing career of Stephen Alan Saft. The duties of running the theatre—the need, for example, of near constant fund raising—became overwhelming. Besides the demands of my real job were starting to become significant. I was then working for George Washington University and was about to undergo a major career shift. My job as manager of marketing for the Division of Continuing Education would soon be terminated, and I would be casting about for something else to do to keep myself on the payroll at the university.

In a future posting to Mind Check, I may get into how I came to start the university’s Interactive Multimedia Program, which is what I did next at George Washington University, but this posting is about how I, a struggling poet, came to get involved with theatre. My purpose in writing it in the first place is to serve as a preamble to an account of why in 2009, many years after my last involvement with theatre and play writing I now find myself writing a play again.

A Sequel to Murdoch

Soon after publishing my first book of 2008, entitled “Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat,” I was struck with the fact that by no means had I said everything I wanted to say and needed to be said about this near buffoon Murdoch McLoon and what he saw as his purpose in life with regard to the environment and the world-wide problems of hunger and poverty. We were then in the midst of the 2008 election campaign and the issue of what the individual person could do about these problems as inspired by the example and powerful rhetoric of Barack Obama weighed on my mind.

The more I thought about these issues the more I felt moved to write a sequel to “Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat.” The new work would pick up from where the existing book left off. Murdoch would realize that a windmill boat could not be an answer to an overdependence on oil, that for one thing whatever solution might be available in technology had to be useful on land.

Huge in Scope

As I worked on it, the concept for the sequel became huge in scope involving seven different parts of the world, each with its own local problems as well as its individual spin on the environmental issue. I selected Homer as the narrator for the story, the father of the epic poetic story in the West—specifically The Iliad and The Odyssey. Soon I became overwhelmed by the grandiosity of my concept. How could I ever write such a thing and finish it in my lifetime? Should I abandon the whole idea as just not doable?

It was then that I remembered the play writing form. The modern play—
and screen play for that matter—has the need for economy of words built into it. If I could transform the new work into a producible work for the theatre, I would have to compress it. Much of my original grand concept would have to be eliminated, and what was dramatic in that original concept would have to be enhanced and brought front and center. At the same time, I would have to do what has to be done with works meant to be performed. I would have to recast the story as a story told by convincing characters through dialogue.

At this writing, the sequel as play is developing nicely, and I hope to find a theatre that will work with me to put it on the stage. That will not be easy. But I will keep at it. At the same time, I would like to publish it in book form for those who got interested in Murdoch in the first book about him and wonder what happened to him and don’t want to wait until the sequel about him gets produced in his or her area. Murdoch has had a lot of exciting adventures since the end of “Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat,” and the reader will find it interesting, even gripping, to find out what became of him.

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website. You can call the publisher directly at 888-795-4274 ext. 7876 or use the publisher’s website Xlibris.com.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

YIDDISH, A SECRET REVEALED; YES, I UNDERSTAND YIDDISH!

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Yiddish, a language I grew up not understanding or, more accurately, a language I grew up understanding a little bit while pretending that I didn’t understand it at all. Growing up in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Logan and later even further out in West Oak Lane, I soon found it an advantage to pretend not to know Yiddish. It was spoken all around me by my mother, father, maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, aunt, and others. Most often it was used as a way for the adults in my life to communicate with each other when they wanted to conceal something from me.

As the first kid in the family, I had no one I wanted to share this hidden knowledge with. Better to keep it to myself. Otherwise the secret would get out, and then no one would use Yiddish around me ever again, anyway not to conceal secrets.

Learning by Osmosis

Funny thing about language. When you hear it long enough, especially when you are very young, words, phrases and whole sentences start to sink in even when the speakers don’t want you to understand what they are saying. Hence one of the earliest Yiddish sentences that I came to understand on my own was “Du vilst nemen dilla spiladicha?” Translation: “Do you want to take him to the movies?” Hearing that sentence I could make certain that my behavior improved and that I did whatever else I thought necessary to ensure that I did in fact get taken to the movies.

A note about writing Yiddish in the Roman alphabet. I am transliterating, that is using the Roman alphabet to come as close as possible to attempt to reproduce the more Germanic pronunciation of the words as I remember them. Yiddish came into being as a dialect of German around the 10th century in an area around East Germany. It is written using the Hebrew alphabet, the letters of which run from right to left. The Jews of this region—in fact, of all of central to western Europe—are known as Ashkenazi Jews. Hence one can say that the language of Ashkenazi Jews was Yiddish. It was also the language of the Chasidic Jews, that is, Jews known for their very conservative dress, where the men dance with each other at celebrations and definitely not with women—with the exceptions of weddings when at least a handkerchief must separate them.

Lithuanian Origins

Another point I should make is that I am attempting here to reproduce the Yiddish I heard as a child among Jews where the dominant speaker was originally from Lithuania, that is, my maternal grandfather, named Solomon Bricker. Solomon Bricker was what was known as a Litvak, that is, as someone from Lithuania. The influence of my father may also be present. Though born in the United States, his linguistics origins were Austria and Hungary. There is a long history of teasing between Jews from Lithuania or Litvaks and Jews from other places, and my father. Louis Saft, was not shy in poking fun at the Litvaks around him, in other words his in-laws.

What else do I remember of the Yiddish I heard growing up? My grandfather, Solomon Bricker, was often in the middle of disputes between his two daughters, Helen, my mother, and her sister, Jeanette, the younger of the two. “Don’t drey mine cup,” he was often heard to say using a mixture of Yiddish and English. I took the meaning of this sentence to be: “Stop beating my head [with your arguing or bickering.]”

What Else”?
Gay slofen remains with me as well. This is a command from adults to children, “Go to sleep” is the meaning. Another “gay” sentence I often heard was “Gay gezunta heit” or “go in good health.” Other words and phrases remain as well. Essen is the command from the German “eat.” Shana madel is a pretty girl. Balabusta was a word I heard from the women of the family which always struck me as funny and which I took to be a somewhat derisive epithet for someone who overdid in her cooking or house preparation.

Oy gevalt and oy vay are well known Yiddish expressions that also have stayed with me. Both mean the equivalent of “how awful.” In fact, these two are both so common that they have long been on the verge of being accepted into everyday usage in English. A Yiddish word that in fact is even closer to being accepted is schlepp, which means to carry when that which is carried is heavy and uncomfortable. A New Yorker might say, “I schlepped those two packages all the way from Macy’s on 34th Street to East 72nd Street. I’m exhausted.”

Words for Body Parts

Then there are the Yiddish words for the parts of the body, the most famous of which is tochis and its diminutive tussy, used with children. “Backside” is the part of the body that these words refer to. I usually take both words in a humorous way. However, it is possible to use a word like tochis in a more serious, obscene and even harsh way. For more on words of this type and for more on Yiddish in general, see the books of Leo Rosten, specifically The Joys of Yiddish and The Joys of Yinglish.

What about chutzpah, the word for nerve, daring, gall or risk taking in Yiddish? Like schlep, chutzpah is now so widely used that it is about ready to become part of standard English—or already is. I have heard Protestant ministers use the word without showing any need to translate. Why didn’t I mentioned this heavily used word sooner? Strange to admit, chutzpah was not part of my childhood vocabulary. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard the word until some time after I started working in New York City in 1964.

Do I read any Yiddish publications today? No, but perhaps it can be said that I come close. Among the many publications that I read on a regular basis is The Forward, that is, its English language version. The Forward got started on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the latter part of the 19th Century and initially was published entirely in Yiddish. One of the claims to fame of the all Yiddish Forward is that it introduced the writing of Isaac Basheyev Singer to the world. Singer was to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website. You can call the publisher directly at 888-795-4274 ext. 7876 or use the publisher’s website Xlibris.com.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

REFORMING HEALTH CARE AND THE BERNARD MADOFF SITUATIONS--MY THOUGHTS ON BOTH

The Barack Obama Administration has now turned its attention to health care. This is another trillion dollar burden on the U.S. taxpayer, and given all our other burdens—“zombie bank” bailouts, subprime foreclosure crises, U.S. auto industry bankruptcies—it boggles my mind how the Administration is going to deal with this one.

But it must!!! I agree that the time is now to attempt to deal with this immense problem. There won’t be another opportunity in my lifetime, maybe not in the lifetime of our children and grandchildren to fix this mess, and meanwhile health care will become more and more of a drag on the nation’s economy. All the crises facing the Obama Administration are complicated and don’t lend themselves to easy solutions, but this one is the most complicated thus far. Why?

Financing Not On Firm Footing

One reason is the nonproductive way in which health care is paid for in this country. The system assumes a fully employed population with employers footing the bill. Right now, however, we have unemployment approaching 9% in some areas. Who pays for the 9% out of work? And why should employers have to shoulder the responsibility in the first place? Employers need to be investing in expanding existing businesses to increase employment opportunities, They should be investing in research and new product development. They should be investing in improving existing products and keeping prices competitive. They should not be burdened with having to foot the bill for the nation’s health care system.

And what about the cost of health care in the United States? It changes hourly. Everyone wants to reap the benefits of the nation’s health care research and development efforts, which is a huge complicated endeavor. Nothing is to be accomplished by pointing some finger of blame at the nation’s pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is doing what we want them to do. We want them to save our lives, and that’s what they are attempting to do. Oh yes, they're also making a lot of money in the process.

We have an extremely health care greedy population. No one wants to die. Everyone wants to postpone the inevitable for as a long as possible. Everyone wants to live forever, and we expect to enjoy the benefits of our thriving medical research and development activities forever.

In the laboratory a researcher comes up with a yet another technique that appears promising for curing cancer. Let’s take the case of the technique for growing human cancer attack spores on tobacco plants for attacking cancer, which I have written about previously.

Researchers Need Compensation

The pharmaceutical firms are willing to allow a few researchers to conduct such speculative research, but they expect to be compensated for staff time and benefits. This is a fairly new effort, not long on the books. The research shows promise , and so now it is time to test the technique in the field. The services of several more staff are required. We are leaving out issues like the compensation of patients who allow themselves to be used as guinea pigs.

Now lets add several degrees of further complication by looking at all the specialties in all of medicine. All the researchers working at all the pharmaceutical and medical research facilities in all these fields want what they consider fair access to the research and development dollars available.

Enormous Management Challenge

How do you manage such a huge field with so many competing interests and one that is in a constant state of flux? Part of the challenge is the mere fact that the field since it is requiring taxpayers dollars in the first place needs managing at all. Then there are so many stake holders, not just all the U.S. users of health care. Major stake holders like all the physicians and all the nurses and all those in the medical technical specialties. And how about the medical equipment engineers and all the designers and builders of all the equipment like scanners, etc., and all the medical insurance interests?

What an enormous undertaking!

Infuriating Case of Bernard Madoff

Another topic that has my attention is the infurating story of Bernard Madoff, who bilked many people out of sizable amounts of money using the notorious Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi investment scheme people are lured into placing their money with the expectation that their initial investments will be turned into much more money, the result of the brilliant investment strategies on the part of the operator of the investment enterprise.

In fact, the operator’s so called “brilliant investment strategies” are the result of taking new contributor’s money and turning it back to veteran contributors in the form of so-called dividends. In other words, a Ponzi scheme has no real assets. Only the continued gullibility of new investors keeps it going. When the lack of true assets is revealed, the whole scheme falls apart like a collapsing house of cards, and everyone who placed money with the scheme operator is a loser.

What Makes Him Tick?

I don’t know Bernie Madoff at all, but I can’t help wondering about the man. What makes Bernie Madoff tick? Is he merely a greedy and heartless schemer? At least one person who lost a fortune to Madoff is reported to have committed suicide. If you are Madoff, how do you live with that fact?

I want to believe that he started out with the best of intentions, but perhaps I am cutting him too much slack. Rotten to the core—that may be the Bernard Madoff that we have seen in the media. Still I want to believe otherwise. He starts out with the best of intentions, but then the pressure to appear successful takes over. Bernier Madoff was smarter than everyone else. Right? Bernie Madoff didn’t disappoint other people, especially not if they enjoyed positions of power and leadership in their respective fields. Right? Not if they are someone like Steven Spielberg, famed Hollywood moviemaker. How can you submit a monthly investment report to the likes of Steven Spielberg and not show a continued record of success?

Reputation to Uphold, Right?

Imagine the self-imposed pressures on this man to continue to show a record of brilliance as a manager of other people’s money? He had a reputation to uphold, right?

Such is the mess we get ourselves intro when at core we are not honest with ourselves or with others—when we have no mechanism for dealing honestly with ourselves and others, when honesty is no part of our personal ethos. We are a crook through and through. We squander other people’s fortunes. People, once friends, commit suicide because of us.

I have written about this before, especially in my poetry. At heart relations between all of us are based on intangible virtues like trust. No amount of government-imposed regulation frees us from that reality. We can all take advantage of misplaced confidence if we have an inclination to lie, to cheat, to not tell the truth. Trust is the indispensable virtue. Trust is everything.

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

JUST BEING WITH MY WIFE IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME--REFLECTIONS ON MY FEELINGS TOWARD HARRIET ON VALENTINE'S DAY

Harriet and I recently celebrated our 28th Valentine’s Day together. We’ve never done a whole lot to celebrate this tribute to romantic love, but we’ve always done something. We’ve been married 28 years so as the reader can tell we hadn’t known each other very long when we decided to tie the knot in October 1980. In fact, we had met in March of 1980 on St. Patrick’s Day, a whole month after Valentine’s Day of 1980. By the time we celebrated our first Valentine’s Day together in February 1981, we’d already known each 11 months and been married four months.

By the way, our experience of marrying just seven months after we’d first met is just one more example among many that short engagements often do lead to very successful marriages.

Card From Walmart

The card I got Harriet this year came from Walmart. I didn’t spend very much time picking it out. Maybe the most shocking aspect of this confession is not that I didn’t spend very much time picking out the card, but that I, a practicing poet, used a store bought card in the first place. Yes, I do confess that I use store bought cards—and I enjoy doing it. I’ve written original poems to my wife before, and I am sure I will write more, but to this point the inspiration to write something for her has not come at the time of those annual milestones in her life—birthdays, anniversaries, and Valentine’s Day.

On the other, I do enjoy the experience of going to a store, mingling with the crowd, and picking out a card. In some past postings to Mind Check, I’ve confessed to the fact that I am an introvert—one of those people who normally gets a shot of energy from being alone rather than from being with others. Being with others is sometimes exhausting for me—all that talk, talk, talk. There are exceptions, and one of them involves mingling with crowds where we all have a common purpose, for example, sharing the excitement of being involved together in making purchases for a shared event like Valentine’s Day. Exciting!

Weekly Supermarket Shopping

I can remember when I first came to the Washington, DC, area in 1978. I had left my first marriage, and I was trying to reestablish myself in this new area where I knew almost no one. Yes, I was lonely. One of the things I would look forward to during this transitional time in my life was the weekly shopping trip, almost always on Saturdays, to the nearest supermarket. I didn’t have to talk to anyone. Just being with the other people in the busy supermarket where I could share in the energy that came from busy people with the common purpose of weekly food shopping was good enough.

Let me get back to the Valentine’s Day card that I got Harriet this time around. As I said, I didn’t give it that much thought when I picked it out, but I now think that I ended up with the best Valentine’s Day card I’ve ever gotten her. The main reason that it is the best is that the message so perfectly captures what I believe.

Back from Big Island

As I’ve previously indicated, Harriet and I are just back from the Big Island of Hawaii where we had a wonderful time. One of the great things about this vacation was that we were able to work on reconnecting family relationships that had gotten a little frayed after four years of separation. In case, I didn’t mention it before, we have family on the Big Island of Hawaii—son Scott, daughter-in-law Yumiko and grandson Sebastian, known as Sebi. We don’t get to see them nearly enough. Inevitably some bad feelings may get introduced into a relationship when family members don’t see each other for a prolonged period of time, and we wanted to make sure through this trip that negatives like these got smoothed over.

Hence the purpose of the trip was not to do anything for Harriet and my relationship, which was already as good as it could be, in my opinion. That was one of the ideas that I was trying to express with the card. Here is the message on the card, a Hallmark card in the “connections by Hallmark” series.

If someone were to ask me
What a perfect day would be,
I wouldn’t think of places
that have lovely sights to see,
I wouldn’t wish for sunny skies
or special things to do,
For I’d just want to have a day
That I could spend with you…
And if someone were to ask me
What would make a perfect life,
I’d simply say “I have that,”
for I have you for my wife.

To put the matter another way: I don’t need to make a trip to Hawaii or any other beautiful place to give meaning to my life. Just being with my wife is good enough for me.

Thank you, Hallmark and thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

BACK FROM HAWAII, THOUGHTS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF LOVE AND FAMILY

We are just back from the Big Island of Hawaii where we got a chance to perform the infrequent role of hands-on grandparents to the fourteen-year-old Sebastian. Sebi, as he is called, is a very fine student and a very fine basketball player, and we do not get to see him nearly enough. In fact, since his birth we have only had a chance to spend time with him about six times including a memorable time with him in Saporo, Japan, when his father was teaching at a Japanese university, all told less than 40 days.

The fact is that in the 14 years since Sebi’s birth we have only spent a total of about 40 days with the entire family, son Scott, daughter-in-law Yumiko, and Sebi. Why that has been the case I will leave to subsequent explorations. What this trip has served to demonstrate to me is how important family contact is. We humans are not solitary creatures. We are not meant to be alone even if we have a tendency to introversion, as I do. An introvert I may be, but a hermit I am not.

Highest Form of Feeling

Being with other people is essential, but no other contact is more important than being with family. Love, not romantic love, but what we refer to as agape or divine love, is the highest form of interpersonal feeling we can imagine. Under ideal conditions, that is, when our spiritual practices are manifest in us at the highest level it is what we feel toward everyone. Until we can attain the ideal, however, it is the feeling that comes most naturally to us when we are with family.

Let me express this principle in another, equally crucial way. How can I experience love for others but not experience love for my family? It is true that our family members have the capacity to hurt us more easily and more deeply than others can because of the bonds we feel through the sense of shared inheritance and shared experience. We aren’t expecting hurtful behavior from other family members, and when it happens it can hit us very hard and leave scars that last a lifetime.

Power Translates To Responsibility

It is for these reasons that, I believe, that family members need to work as hard as they can to treat each other with compassion and forgiveness. Because each of us has the power to hurt another family member more easily than anyone else, that is the very reason that each of us has the responsibility to be especially gentle, especially understanding, and especially loving in family situations.

In summary, it was wonderful being with family for the last nine days. I found it very renewing—and the gorgeous Big Island of Hawaii wasn’t bad either.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

KEN WILBER BOOK IS INSPIRATION FOR MY OWN THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH

A friend lent me her copy of Grace And Grit, Spirituality And Healing In The Life And Death of Treya Killam Wilber by Ken Wilber, and reading the book has been a very moving experience for me. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is wrestling with the question of death and dying and especially anyone wrestling with the question of death and dying from cancer.

That said, please be advised that Grace and Grit is not easy reading at all as it deals in considerable detail with the five year struggle of Treya Killam Wilber, wife of the author, with the complications from a diagnosis of breast cancer, very possibly all the complications that are possible from this disease. To put it simply Treya went through hell before her death, and Ken was right there with her, the perfect caregiver, anyway damn close to it.

Diagnosis Within Weeks of Marriage

Treya, born Terry Killam, had the misfortune to be diagnosed with breast cancer within weeks of marrying Ken Wilber, noted philosopher and writer. Wilber writes extensively on the interconnections of the spiritual and physical worlds. Treya and Ken then spent the next five years dealing with Treya’s disease. Demonstrating immense courage, Treya tried a combination of conventional and unconventional medical approaches and spiritual practices, particularly of the Eastern variety. Her attempts to save herself included a prolonged round of treatments in Bonn, Germany. Eventually, however, the tumors infesting her body including her brain proved too much to overcome, and she died at home with her husband and other family members and friends by her side.

In putting the book together, Ken incorporated a number of passages from Treya’s journals and letters. Hence the book is a record of two points of view—of Treya, the victim, and of Ken, the principal caregiver. In this case, the approach serves to underscore just how close this husband and wife were during the entire ordeal, the one exception being a dark period at about the two-year anniversary when the two drew apart and became hostile toward each other. Ken even contemplated suicide during this highly stressful low point in their relationship.

Facing Up To My Own Mortality

For me, the book proved especially useful in helping me hone my view of the difficult subject of death. I have had to face up to my own mortality at different periods in my life—first when I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the age of 27 in 1966. None of us like to think of our own mortality. We prefer to think of ourselves as never dying, of living forever. Death is all around us, but we are adept at ignoring it. We prefer to think that it will never happen to us. We’re going to go on indefinitely forever, right?

Now having gone through my second bone marrow transplant about six months ago, the subject has presented itself once again. No, I’m not going to live forever. Yes, I’m going to die. Being able to accept the inevitability of death has a certain liberating effect. Since it’s going to happen to me someday, there’s no sense dwelling on it. No sense worrying about it. And it’s not just going to happen to me. I am not being singled out. It‘s going to happen to everyone.

Rules of the Game of Life

These are the rules of the game called life. The fact of death is a common bond that all human beings share. You can feel remorse about it, and as a lover of life I do, but it makes no sense feeling hurt or spiteful or angry, even though all of us do experience these emotions at some point.

I confess that at times when the reality seems more than a little overwhelming, I take some solace from a game that I play on occasion. It’s a game I play entirely in my own mind so you are not likely to know I am playing it. Sometimes I bring the game into play at a public event or in a social situation, let’s say at a not entirely enjoyable party. The game involves looking at each of the people around me and thinking, “It’s not just my fate, but you’re not going to escape nor are you or you or you or you, etc. None of us are because we’re all mortal.”

Basis for World’s Religions

At this point I could attempt to come forward with some profound statements about how the fact of death is the basis for all of the world’s religions. The common bond of our mortality including the common fear of death has led almost all of us to seek solace and hope in the answers provided by established religion. In my case, long a believer in the power of reason including the scientific method I have of late seen more clearly the limitations of these approaches and conversely have found more answers in spiritual explorations.

I find it ironic that as an undergraduate taking a required History of Religions course I found Hinduism the most difficult of the major religions to understand and appreciate. Now I find this ancient religion the easiest to understand and appreciate—specifically the concept that God is in all of us. The divine lives in all of us, ready to be discovered when we have the inclination. The greatest manifestation of this reality is love.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. They’re both available from the sasaft website and also from the xlibris.com website. And now it’s off to the Big Island of Hawaii with wife Harriet and godson Stephen to see my son Scott, daughter-in-law Yumiko and grandson Sebi. Perhaps I’ll have more to say about this trip in my next posting.

Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft

MOMENTOUS YEAR REACHES ITS HIGH POINT WITH GODCHILD REUNION

This is an appropriate time to be reviewing the events of 2008. The start of a new year is just a week away, and it is normal at a time like this to be looking back and asking, “What kind of year was it anyway?”

One word sums it up for me. “Momentous.” The election of the first African American as President in our history made sure of that. As long as anyone will care about American history, the year 2008 will have its special consideration—as the year Barack Obama got elected. It was also a year that the high flying U.S. economy started unraveling, but let us hope that that end-of-year phenomenon will be short lived under the management of a new Obama Administration.

Second Bone Marrow Transplant

For me, 2008 was a year of special significance for several other reasons. It was a year during which I underwent the second bone marrow transplant of my life. The bone marrow transplant, which I had first gone through in 2002, was again urged on me to fight the reoccurrence of the blood cancer called lymphoma. It was also a year during which I managed to publish two books of poetry (see my website for more details: http://www.sasaftwrites.com), and it was the year that I was reunited with Stephen Johnson, my godson. In fact, the latter proved to be the most dramatic event of all for me.

I was lying in my bed in the bone marrow transplant ward on the ninth floor of the Reynolds Tower of Baptist Hospital, Winston-Salem, North Carolina sometime in mid July when the phone on the stand next to my bed rang. I picked it up, and the caller on the other end introduced himself as someone I had not spoken with in many years. He said his name was Stephen Johnson. He said he was my godson.

Hearing Name Is Enough

As soon as I heard his name, even before the word “godson” registered, I knew who he was. The emotion surged in me. Indeed we hadn’t spoken in many years—over 20 in fact. When we were last in touch Stephen wasn’t quite a teenager, probably 12 years old. And yes indeed he was my godson, my godson who I had abandoned for reasons, however misguided, around 1987.

His mother, a single black woman who had worked for my first wife and me as a cleaning lady in Brooklyn by name of Martha Jean Johnson, had asked me to serve as Stephen’s godfather just before he was born in 1968. He was a baby boy coming into the world in Harlem Hospital without a father, and it seemed to me that the least I could do was say “yes” to Martha Jean’s request. My assumption was that a godfather was expected to serve as a role model, and this was a responsibility that I felt flattered to be asked to fulfill. How could I refuse?

Share Room With Stephen

Even after I moved away from New York City, first to New Jersey, then to Maine, and then to the Washington, D.C., area I had kept in touch with Martha Jean and Stephen—at the very least sending them presents at holiday time. At some point when my first marriage was falling apart I fled Maine for New York City and spent at least one night with Martha Jean and Stephen in their Lower East Side apartment where Stephen let me share his room with him.

Just before wife Harriet and I were married in 1980, the second marriage for both of us, we met in New York where she was taking computer training. By then I had relocated to Washington, and both Harriet and I were working for a Washington, D.C. corporation in the satellite communications business. During that visit, we got together with Stephen and Martha Jean in Brooklyn Heights, and as best I can remember the four of us walked around this old Brooklyn neighborhood together, a neighborhood famous for its Promenade overlooking the Lower West side of Manhattan and New York Harbor. Brooklyn Heights had been the first place in the city where I had lived just after leaving graduate school at Yale in 1963.

Go To The Boat Show

Even earlier Stephen remembers my taking him to the New York Boat Show at what was then called the New York Coliseum up on Columbus Circle when I was still living in Maine and working for a publication called National Fisherman based in the Penobscot Bay town of Camden. National Fisherman would have an exhibit booth at the New York Boat Show every year as a base from which to sell advertising space in the publication and to drum up subscription sales, and those of us on the editorial side of the operation would also have our chance to be present at the show and to take advantage of what the big city had to offer.

The break with Stephen and his mother occurred in the mid 1980s, and it was entirely my fault. I fell on hard times, first losing my job with the satellite communications company, then a little more than a year later losing a new job as director of communications for an association in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had been sending Stephen and Martha Jean presents at Christmas time, as I indicated, but with the loss of the second job I felt devastated. By this time I had taken on the responsibility of trying to put my son through an expensive eastern college, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to manage it now with the loss of the second job.

Low Opinion of Myself

Not only did I stop the presents to Stephen and Martha Jean, but the communication as well—an act of extremism that didn’t have to be. I felt embarrassed that I was in such dire straights financially, and I’m afraid I overreacted. In my mind at the time, presents and caring about another human being were one in the same thing. It didn’t occur to me that Stephen needed the continuing attention of an adult male far more than he needed some extra dollars at Christmas time. Yes, I was suffering from a very low opinion of myself at the time. The loss of jobs will do that to you.

Now we jump ahead to July 2008. It struck me as a miracle that Stephen had gotten in touch with me. It struck me that I was being given a second chance to make amends to this man, now in his early 40s, to make up for my failures as a role model the first time around. I didn’t want to mess it up. I wanted to be the godfather now that I felt I had not been before.

Hyatt Hotel Jersey City

In the course of that fateful telephone conversation from my bed in Baptist Hospital, I learned that Martha Jean had died at least five years before. Stephen was married now, he told me. In fact, he had an 18-year-old daughter, but amazingly he was still living in the same Lower East Side apartment where I had once stayed and shared a room with him. Yes, I was older now with a much stronger idea of the responsibility that we bear each other. I wasn’t going to be so cavalier about my relationship with Stephen Johnson ever again.

Since then we’ve been together twice, first in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we met after one of my follow-up sessions at Baptist Hospital, then in New York during Thanksgiving when Harriet and I stayed at the Hyatt Hotel Jersey City and were treated to the breathtaking views of Lower West Side Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and where Stephen played the role of chauffeur and drove us all around the city. During the first visit we met Stephen’s adopted sister Melissa, and during the second Marsha, his wife, Camille, his daughter, and Cita, Marsha’s mother from Trinidad as well as Melissa, all wonderful people who we thoroughly enjoyed being with. And now we are just about to go to the Big Island of Hawaii with Stephen where we will be getting together with son Scott, his wife Yumiko and our grandson Sebi (Sebastian).

38 Year Reunion

As best I can figure—and I took the photographs that are a record of the event—Scott and Stephen were last together in 1970 when Scott was four and Stephen was two. Now they’ll be getting together again 38 years later.

Thanks entirely to Stephen’s courage and initiative, I’ve been given this second chance to make a whole new relationship with him, and I’m not going to squander the opportunity this time. This time I’m going to be the godfather that fate has meant me to be.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. They would make wonderful holiday presents for people you care about. They’re both available from the sasaft website. Have a healthy and happy 2009.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft